We are almost to the halfway point of fall 2024, and oh baby, has it been a good one! Fall is my favorite season, largely due to the incredible variety and quantity of opportunities to harvest wonderful food from the land through fishing, hunting, and foraging.
The blog post covers some of my recent highlights fishing, hunting, and foraging, and tries to point you in the right direction if you want to pursue some of these same opportunities.
Let’s get to it!
One of my favorite activities is timing the influx of salmon in our coastal rivers that arrive with the fall rains. As water levels rise, there are often many salmon staging in the saltwater or tidal areas, just waiting for the water to come up so they scoot upriver and spawn.
This is where keeping a journal each year is extremely helpful. You don’t have to fish a river 100x for a decade plus to learn its secrets, but you do need to know how a river fishes at different water levels and how each river responds to those early rains.
One of the lessons I’ve also tried to keep in mind this year is that salmon have a biological clock. The salmon that have been staging and stacking up for that high water are the least interested in biting initially until they’ve gone far enough upstream to need to rest.
It’s like they know that they are behind schedule and have to get x number of miles upriver. Those fish are also the first ones you will encounter if you are timing the rains.
The fish that come in after those fish are the best biters, though. They are not behind on their biological clock and are often fresher and more willing to stop and rest on their way upriver.
I was on the river a few weeks ago with falling high water and several hundred salmon moving through our particular drift over the course of several hours. We could see them coming up through the tail out of our drift and also exiting above our drift a few minutes later.
Finally, they stopped leaving our drift, and the water in front of us erupted with non-stop rolling salmon and the bite flipped on in a big way as well.
I’ve written a lot more on this topic in my page devoted to learning how to fish for salmon in a river.
Foraging for mushrooms has been epic!
As good as the river fishing for salmon has been (and it has been good!), foraging for mushrooms has been even better! The chanterelles present in the mountains and coastal regions have been prolific!
Is it this good because of the early rains we got? I really have no idea, I’m fairly new to this pursuit, but it has quickly become a favorite. I wrote more about foraging for chanterelles and how to get started here.
It’s super helpful to have an app like OnX that allows you to see public land areas, the forest roads that connect them, and even satellite images of the tree tops that can reveal the type of forest you are looking at.
Why do the tree tops matter? Well, we are looking for a particular kind of forest, especially a second-growth forest with some decaying trees and space without significant undergrowth that allows the fungus to really thrive.
You really want to focus on a few easy-to-identify species when you are just getting started. I still pass up 90% of the mushroom specimens I find because I don’t want to try and figure out whether another brown/white-looking gilled mushroom is edible or not.
You still need to be on point to safely forage and harvest for species like chanterelles or my new favorite hedgehogs, but it’s far easier to identify these compared to many other species.
Most of my mushroom harvesting happens while I’m out scouting or hunting for big game or just after a fishing trip. Mushroom foraging is worth its own dedicated trip though and I plan to do more of that this fall!
It’s hunting season!
Lastly, hunting season is in full swing. I struck out in the early muzzleloader season, but my duck opening weekend was fantastic!
Part of my issue with my big game hunting season was due to recovering from knee surgery, but also, my e-bike strategy had a major setback when my motor failed on my new bike. Luckily, the company has been great to work with and replaced the motor under warranty.
I’ve still got the late muzzleloader season for deer and elk, and I cannot wait to get back at it and try to redeem myself and my season.
If you are looking at how to get started on the incredibly daunting task of becoming a big game hunter, check out my blog page on the topic.
In the meantime, though, I’m going to spend some more quality time in a duck/goose blind, trying to add some of my favorite meat to my freezer. Wild duck is simply the best game meat you can acquire. You can cook it as simply as grilling it on your Traeger or what my wife did with ours below.
Pan-fried with a wild mushroom cream sauce!
Hopefully, you can get out and do one of these three amazing activities soon! I’m looking to be more consistent again in making content to help you and inspire you along your own harvest recreation journey.