Off the Radar

by Te Radar

  For a moment, I think Shawn might be pulling my leg, but he explains that collecting the long, coarse, hair-like feathers that grow from the males’ chests is akin to trying to shoot a stag with big antlers. The older the bird, the longer the beard, and the more prestige there is for the hunter.

  ‘You know’, says Shawn, ‘you can just sneak up to them at night when they’re roosting on a fence, then just grab them by the legs, chuck them in a sack, and take them home to fatten them up.’

  I tell him that to be honest, the thought of wrestling a turkey off a fence in the middle of the night may be just a little too adventurous for me at this juncture, and that I might just stick with shooting them.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he replies.

  The turkeys prove very obliging, warily staying some distance from us as they scuttle off in the general direction of where we want them to go. It is a peculiar sensation to herd a flock of wild birds that I will soon be merrily blazing away at with a shotgun. Knowing what is in store for some of them, I feel oddly callous. Then again, is it any different from rounding up a mob of cattle to send them off to the meatworks, or to bring in a sheep so that it can be butchered for the freezer?

  Although I was brought up with hunting, I was never what could be described as exceptionally proficient at it. I have stalked rabbits, eradicated possums, and attempted to shoot various waterfowl, predominantly to no avail.

  The last time I went hunting any kind of bird, it was the Canada goose, a bird that was introduced to our country as a gift from US president Theodore Roosevelt. While he probably thought it would make an excellent game bird, many people now consider them a plague, due to their ravenous appetites.

  It is said that one bird can eat as much each day as a large lamb, and what goes in must come out. Their faeces leaves paddocks so soiled that cattle are loathe to eat the grass.

  While a few geese may not be too bad, having mobs of hundreds of them descend on paddocks is more than a little problematic.

  So one night several years ago, my brother and I set out to thwart the birds from settling on the paddocks at the back of our parents’ farm. Squatting in the dark, nestled behind a low line of manuka growing out of a drain, we waited for the distinctive flying V of the birds to pass over us.

  In the quiet of the night, their honking could be heard in the distance, gradually growing in intensity as they flapped in over the manuka. Standing, we unleashed a barrage of shots at the flock.

  Suddenly my brother shouted, ‘Run!’, and began to gallop away.

  I stood where I was, as I’m often a little indecisive in situations like this.

  The cause of his consternation soon became clear, as one of the birds he had shot crashed heavily onto the very spot where he had been standing. It plummeted to the ground with enough force to indicate that had my brother still been standing there, he could well have been seriously injured in a most embarrassing manner.

  It probably wouldn’t have been as embarrassing as the goose-based injury that was inflicted on man-model Fabio, who was once struck in the face by one of the birds when riding on a rollercoaster, but it would still have been very painful.

  As it was, I was the one who was nearly injured—I was laughing so much I very nearly gave myself a hernia.

  My brother finally allowed me to go shooting with him again, only it wasn’t birds we were after this time, it was fish.

  As the Waikato River floods and the water pours over the spillway at Rangiriri, it causes Lake Waikare to flood the rear of our parents’ farm. Here the low-lying peat flats are at best only half a metre above lake level, so as the waters rise and the pasture becomes flooded, koi carp swim in to take advantage of the pasture.

  My brother and I responded to these trespassers by donning waders, arming ourselves with shotguns, and going fish shooting.

  Fish shooting requires a special set of shooting skills, as you not only have to stalk the fish, wading slowly through the murky waters without falling into a hole and scaring them off, but once they are located you need to carefully judge the angle of deflection through the water to actually hit the fish.

  Described by environmentalists as the possum of the waterways, these colossal goldfish have reached epidemic numbers in the Waikato, and cause so much damage to waterways and native species that an annual tournament, the New Zealand Bowhunters Society’s World Koi Carp Classic, is held to keep numbers down.

  In 2006 the hunters bagged over 3500 fish, weighing in at a staggering 8.5 tonnes, in just two days.

  The evening my brother and I hunted them, a single blast from a shotgun would cause several to float to the surface. There were so many of them that it was literally like shooting fish in a barrel.

  It was just a shame that, unlike the turkeys, they were virtually inedible.

  By now, the turkeys are safely away from the cows and about to disappear into a row of scrub. Cradling the shotgun in the crook of my arm, I withdraw two shells from the cartridge belt buckled around my waist.

  I have always loved donning cartridge belts. Filled with shells, they have a definite weight to them, and when strapping on the heavy bandolier of birdshot I’ve always felt a little like some kind of pseudo-revolutionary. Juvenile, I know.

  The shells slide into the breech of the twin barrels with a reassuring thunk-thunk. I snap the barrel closed, take a slightly too-wide stance, and bring the gun up so that I am looking along the barrel at the mob of birds, which is about 30 metres away.

  As this is the first bit of hunting we are engaged in for the show, I feel a certain amount of pressure not to miss. One doesn’t want to be seen on national television missing what many would call a relatively easy target.

  Despite this pressure, I aim to shoot the most succulent-looking bird in the head. Due to the tiny size of their heads in relation to their hefty bodies, this is a little ambitious. I’ve made the decision as much for humane reasons—a clean kill is something a hunter morally owes his prey—as for practical ones. I want to avoid peppering its body with shot, as there is little so dispiriting while eating game as breaking a tooth on a small piece of lead or steel.

  With a grim sense of resignation, I thumb the safety catch off, line up the head with the steel nubbin of the sight, caress the trigger with my finger, and squeeze. The gun kicks, the noise deafens, the turkey flaps, the acrid smell of gunpowder fills the air as I swing the barrel around to follow the rapidly departing flock, select another, aim for its head, and squeeze the second trigger.

  This time though, something unexpected happens. It appears that I have somehow managed to line two of them up and have shot them both. The only hitch is that as we walk towards them, one is still flapping a little, and I’m not sure that it’s entirely dead.

  This is not a good thing.

  I don’t really want to shoot it again, but if it isn’t dead, I don’t want it to suffer.

  ‘Break its neck,’ Shawn says.

  ‘Righto,’ I say, before scratching my head and looking confused. While it is no doubt a good idea in principle, I’m not entirely sure how to go about it.

  ‘Pick it up by the neck and give it a good swing around,’ Shawn says.

  The turkey is a hugely unattractive bird. It has tiny, beady little eyes. And then there is the snood, a fleshy protuberance that hangs from the top of the bill, like a fleshy flaccid finger, and which they can extend or contract seemingly at will. Their long neck culminates in a featherless head that appears to be made of leftover scrotal skin, and it is this clammy-looking skin that I will have to grasp in order to put it out of its misery.

  It’s warm, and a bit squidgy, and as the bird is surprisingly weighty, I struggle slightly to swing it around. Grasping it firmly with both hands, I whirl it around, feel a cracking somewhere in the neck, and the bird stops flapping.

  The whole process has taken less than 30 seconds.

  I turn to Jane and say, ‘I suspect we won’t see that bit on the telly.’

  ‘No’, she agrees
. ‘We most certainly will not.’

  By the end of the first day of television hunting, I have bagged three birds for two shots. While I’m chuffed with myself, I’m also a little remorseful for the birds, who hadn’t really chosen to give up their lives for my dinner.

  Of course, there is a lot to do before I can gobble these gobblers. Shooting them is really only the beginning of what is quite a lengthy process in transforming them from a bird wandering around a paddock to a tasty treat on a dinner plate.

  Struggling to carry the weighty birds back to the ute, I wonder why we couldn’t have shooed them closer to the vehicle in the first place. As I throw them on the back of the ute, their eyes gleam dimly in the sunlight.

  They continue to stare accusingly at me when I get them home, and also as I lug them across the paddock to a handy tree stump a suitable distance away from my tent. The stump will make a useful field table.

  I’ve never plucked anything before, and I am not entirely sure where to start, as the turkey requires a serious amount of feather shedding to strip it of the 3000 plumes protecting its pale white carcass from the elements.

  There seems only one way to do it, and that is to grab handfuls of the feathers and start pulling them off. This is easier said than done, so in the end I resort to skinning the birds.

  For a short period a few years ago, I largely refrained from the guilty pleasure of eating chicken skin, as medical experts cautioned that it was a major cause of heart disease. A study was then published that said that by abstaining from consuming the skin of the fowl, I might have increased my chances of contracting cancer of the bladder. Is there no justice? It was most confusing.

  The same study declared that people who ate bacon five or more times a week were 60 per cent more likely to develop bladder cancer than non-bacon eaters. I suspect this wouldn’t unduly worry people who ate that much bacon, as they would most likely die from obesity before the bladder cancer killed them.

  I put the article down and made the decision that in the interests of my health I would stop reading articles about researchers who claim that they have discovered new ways to prevent me from catching cancer, heart disease, or fatness.

  The reason for this was simple: the stress these articles caused me by constantly contradicting one another exponentially increased my chances of death by either a heart attack or a brain implosion.

  The biggest health danger I currently face, however, is slicing myself open while skinning the turkey. With the programme designed to be screened when children are watching, there is very little of the process that we can show. A great deal of animated conversation ensues about the correct level of graphicness that will be allowed. The answer is as little as needed, but enough to show that living off the land isn’t all strawberries and apple cider.

  I consider this a great shame, as it is a glorious part of the process, but then I’ve always been fascinated by taking things apart to see what makes them tick, although I’m not such a great putting-it-back-together-afterwardser.

  As a child I used to engage in a small amount of amateur dissection of dead animals, predominantly rabbits and cows. I would open them up for a rummage—strictly in the interests of science, of course.

  There is such a range of colour inside an animal—the green sheen of the intestines, the dark, almost purpley red of spleens and kidneys, the pink of the lungs. Every organ has its own particular beauty.

  In the turkeys’ case, the great revelation is their gizzards, where all the things they eat are packed in then ground down with little stones. I can see exactly what the birds have been eating, which seems to be mostly grass seeds, snails and clover. I get the feeling that these birds are going to taste sensational.

  After a considerable period of time, I have the birds mostly prepared. At one stage I lose my knife, only to discover I have left it in a turkey.

  Once the skin and fur or feathers have been removed, it’s always startling how little of an animal is left. The turkeys, which had looked so large, are now a third of their original size, yet there appears to be enough meat on each bird to last several meals. Their thighs, though not as plump as those of a store-bought bird, whose legs fatten with unlimited supplies of food and little to no walking, are lean but meaty.

  The real shock is the breasts. Two large, lean fillets cover each bird’s chest. With the price of turkey breast meat in the supermarket at well over $20 a kilogram, I am wiping feathers and assorted bits of bird gunk off a small fortune of bird flesh, harvested in a single morning for the princely sum of two shotgun shells and a little time.

  The only question that remains is: how will they taste?

  On top of a concrete slab in front of my tent I have reconstructed the potbelly stove that was lying in the barn. It proves to be the ideal heat source over which to simmer two meaty thighs in a pot with potatoes, foraged from where they had self-seeded in the compost bin, some rosemary and various other herbs, all mixed in with a good dollop of red wine (after all, a man can’t be expected to rough it without a little plonk).

  The casserole is delicious. If this is to be the quality of food that I will be enjoying during this sustainability experiment, then things are beginning on a mouth-watering note.

  As I sit relaxing in my thinking chair, with the last of the day’s warm spring sun shining down on me, I look around at the expensive lifestyle blocks that surround me and wonder how many of the people who live there will be roughing it tonight under canvas, their bellies full of fresh bush turkey.

  Only one of them. Me.

  As far as lifestyles go, it doesn’t get much better than this.

  4

  The cows come home

  When the first cows to arrive on our fair shores were being landed in the Bay of Islands in 1814, one onlooker noted that the excitement of the local Maori, who had obviously never seen cows before, soon turned to fear and confusion as the cows became unruly. The Maori, convinced a supernatural monster had been released upon them to kill them all, fled in terror. I know how they felt, for on a number of occasions I too have been traumatised by cows.

  The cow can be a belligerent animal. If they do not wish to do something, it can take much cajoling to change their minds. This fact is foremost in my mind as I find myself standing behind a small Jersey cow, attempting vainly to physically propel her up the ramp of a truck.

  Despite my best efforts, the cow in question, a plump, doe-eyed Jersey called Harriet who appears to be of middle age, is happily refusing to move.

  This is somewhat annoying as I am paying by the hour for the truck I am attempting to load her into, in order to transport her back to my estate.

  She is one of two cows I have purchased from the owners of a neighbouring lifestyle block. The other, a young wild-eyed heifer named Coco, appears to be some kind of Angus cross, and is what could politely be described as frisky. Harriet is Coco’s stepmother, and both are supposed to be charmingly docile, and pregnant, which means that in short order I should be provided with both milk and an increased herd.

  One of the many problems facing the hobby farmer is what to do with surplus stock which, due to the small size of their herds, they have no doubt formed a bond with. Putting them into their freezer is usually not an option, as the animals are often akin to family pets, and few people want to eat their pet.

  Likewise, the thought of condemning their surplus animals to ‘the works’ is equally abhorrent. Fortunately, their overstocking problem is the solution to my lack of stock.

  There is only one hurdle between myself and agrarian perfection. The lifestyle-blockers do not have a loading race, let alone any cattle yards, that are accessible to the truck. With a light drizzle falling, the paddocks are too greasy to risk the very real possibility of a fun-filled and expensive afternoon extricating a stuck stock truck. Thus I find myself attempting to load the cows onto the truck parked on a dry mound near the gate.

  However, as is often the case with cows, I have reached that point where what
they wish to do, and what I wish them to do, is at an irreconcilable impasse.

  So far we have managed to corral them, place halters on them, and lead them across several paddocks to where the truck is parked, but getting them up the ramp is proving impossible.

  We try to tempt them with a little hay. While they are willing to nibble the hay when it is dangled enticingly beneath their noses, they aren’t interested in allowing it to act as a scrumptious lure to entice them up the ramp.

  At this point, the lifestylers reveal a secret weapon: a bucket of cow nuts. The cow nuts look like molasses-coated popcorn, and are a little like cow candy. Judging by their effect though, they seem to be more like the crack cocaine of the bovine world. The cows fight to force their heads into the bucket, their long tongues scooping out the nuts.

  As I move the bucket towards the ramp and attempt to seduce them forward, they remain where they are and try to get the nuts by reaching out with their long tongues.

  Being licked by a cow is one of the most agreeable experiences one can have with a bovine. They have deliciously rough tongues, so the sensation is akin to being licked by warm, fleshy sandpaper. If you have never been licked by a cow, I strongly suggest that you sally forth and be licked forthwith. If you don’t have your own cow, it’s best to ask the owner first. Believe me—it’s easy for these things to be misinterpreted.

  The nuts do their trick, and within moments I am able to entice Harriet up the ramp and into the truck. Coco, though, will have none of it, and steadfastedly refuses to even consider heading up the ramp.

  At one stage she appears to change her mind (it is, after all, a woman’s prerogative), so, thinking I could administer a little incentive to hustle her along, I deliver a sharp slap to her hairy flank. This certainly causes a little hustling, albeit of the reversing variety, followed by a spirited attempt to bolt from the scene, which is halted only by the firm hand of the truck driver, who manages to hold on to the rope to which she is tethered as she dances a merry high-hoofed jig.