More on Survival Hunting and Food Gathering

I spent most of the day last Saturday canoeing with my long-time camping and adventure-travel buddy, Ernest Herndon.  We went to a large national forest lake here in south Mississippi mainly just to get out on the water for a few hours, but also because I wanted to shoot some footage for a video I plan to post here soon, in which Ernest demonstrates a simple paddling technique that makes long-distance travel in a canoe much more feasible and less exhausting.  I'll have that video live here as soon as I have time to edit it.

Out on the lake, as we explored the hidden coves that reach like fingers into the wooded hills of the surrounding national forest, we saw a wide array of waterfowl coming and going, as well as deer and squirrel activity within sight of the water.  Our conversation turned to survival hunting, as Ernest had read my last post here and we talked then about the different methods so many people use to achieve the same end, namely putting meat in the freezer

With over 30 years experience as a newspaper reporter in south Mississippi, including covering the local hunting and fishing reports and writing a weekly outdoor page for the Sunday Edition, Ernest has seen about every technique imaginable and has spend lots of time in the woods, swamps and fields with some incredibly skilled outdoorsmen.   Most of these guys he knows are the kind I mentioned before that probably never read survival books yet have a knack for finding and getting their game when most everyone else comes up empty handed.  They range from some local backwoodsmen who probably don't read any books at all to the highly-educated, like Ernest's own son, who is a doctor but also one of the most avid and skilled hunters I've ever met.  Anyone who has done a lot of hunting and fishing has seen the type.  The conversation reminded me of a hard-drinking surveyor I used to work with who each day after work would walk the banks of a lake near the job with a rod and reel and one specific artificial lure, and come back near dark with a plastic garbage bag full of bass.  This in the same lake where my brother and I rarely got a strike.  The same guy was equally proficient with getting deer during hunting season.

Discussing characters like this, especially the ones Ernest has accompanied and interviewed over the years, led us to more conversation about alternative methods of game and fish gathering that are rarely discussed in a survival context.  Take hand-grabbing for instance:  This involves wading along the shores of a creek or lake and reaching into holes to grab catfish that are laying up there.  People who are good at this can get far more fish than they can eat in a very short time, but again, there's a knack to it that some have while most of us would have to work a lot harder at it.  It's all about knowing how and where to look.  The same goes for setting out drop hooks in the local creek, building fish weirs or rigging snares and traps.  We also talked about frog-gigging, shining beavers, alligator, rabbit and deer at night, and even killing armadillos with a stick, if you were desperate and couldn't find anything else.  

When the conversation turned to the optimum firearms to take in a survival situation, as these discussions always seem to do, Ernest expressed his thoughts on shotguns, which would be his first choice because of versatility with a variety of loads.  He said the weight and bulk issues of the ammunition could be mitigated somewhat by choosing a smaller bore, like a 20 gauge, and that he would prefer the simplicity of a single or double-barrel over a pump or automatic.  Knowing that if Ernest actually had to bug out someday he would do so in a canoe along a local stream, I could find no fault with his choice of weapon because in a canoe he could carry all the ammo he wanted and in the thick cover around here, the shotgun would sure make it easier to harvest squirrels and most other game.  I grew up learning to hunt with a Savage singe-shot 20 gauge myself, and later switched to a .22 for small game before acquiring a variety of rifles in different calibers.

As a result of this conversation, Ernest decided to poll some local experienced hunters regarding their choice of a survival firearm and got a variety of answers, with many favoring 12-gauge shotguns, and few opting for a 20-gauge, a .22 rifle, a .22 revolver with interchangeable .22 Magnum cylinder, and one preferring a .17 HMR rifle. 

Another interesting topic of this conversation we had regarding survival hunting concerned what we have seen in our travels in various parts of the world.  Ernest went on two expeditions into the interior of New Guinea back in the 1980's, including visiting a village in the mountainous jungles there where the people still hunted with bows and arrows and wore bones through their noses. He wrote a book about it called In The Hearts Of Wild Men.  In New Guinea at that time, he also encountered various subsistence hunters that used shotguns, while crocodile hunters were still using spears.  Later, in the 1990's, we traveled together in both the jungle areas and drier mountain areas of Honduras and encountered both Miskito Indians and campesinos who hunted every kind of animal in the region with .22 rifles.  Lucio, our host at a remote ranch near the El Salvador border even used his .22 to shoot fish when we approached a stream and claimed to have killed over 200 deer with his well-worn and rusty Marlin Model 60.

The conclusion we came to is that you use what you have and what you feel comfortable with.  When we stopped for lunch and Ernest broke out his banjo to pick some blues, I decided maybe he won't have to hunt after all in a post-apocalyptic world!  People are still going to need entertainment after the lights go out, and what could be better than some banjo blues by a campfire out in the backwoods?  I recorded one of his tunes for YouTube and thought I would share it here too:  

Other (Unconventional) Seafood Gathering Methods

Dave Sears, a reader who commented recently on my post about bowfishing, has had some interesting experiences in collecting food from the sea.  He sent these seafood gathering tips via email.  These are new to me, and sound fascinating. Here's what he had to say in his own words:

Not being a writer (I am a retired tug captain with 43 years experience all over the world), I really don't know where one would post articles such as: on catching shrimp with a junniper bush and a cement block anchor. The shrimp are attracted to the junniper for some reason and their whiskers get entangled in the dense shrubbery. It's maybe illegal I think, since it's basically a shrimp trap.   You shake the shrimp out of the bush into your boat. Haven't shrimped this way for 50 years. LOL. 

Or how about a trot line for catching crabs. My uncle used to buy "bull"  lips from the slaughter house very cheap. Theyr'e super tuff as cows actually pinch off grass with their lips, not their teeth as does a horse (which needs de-sanding frequently). These "bull" lips are twisted into a 21 thread line 100 fathoms long, every couple feet. The trot line is deployed along a channel side with anchors (cement blocks) both ends. No buoys for others to steal it as they do crab traps on occasion. Cross bearings enable you to relocate and grapple up the line when you want. A spool such as used for keel rollers on boat trailers, mounted on a bolt welded to a C-clamp affixed to the gunwale of your craft is your line lifter/guide. As the line clears the water, the tenacious crab drops off the bait, but you have sufficient time to see if it's a fat Jimmy or a berry crab (female w/egg clusters). We would flip the desirables into the boat with an old tennis racket while the other person paddled. You don't need to run it daily like servicing traps. The crabs are free to come and go. In Florida it's legal to have one 5gal bucket of blue crabs per person with regular fishing licenses. I suspect my uncle took me along more for the xtra bucket of crabs than any other reason. LOL. 

My dad was a Tampa boy and used to make cochina stew from the tiny cochina clams. He'd boil the cochinas, strain the broth, add milk, butter, and oyster crackers. Only seasoning black pepper.  well, not exactly survival food if you already have luxuries like milk and butter. if you want to use these ideas, feel free. I'm sure you'd write em up better than I can.

Dave Sears


Thanks for the useful tips, Dave.  I look forward to trying that juniper bush "shrimp trap" someday.

Now the cochina clams Dave mentions are something I have tried.  On my long kayak trip down the west coast of Florida and through the Caribbean, I boiled up a pot of these tiny clams on more than one occasion.  On parts of the Florida Gulf Coast, you can scoop them up by the bucketful right at the edge of the surf line.  Boil them until they open, then use a toothpick or sharpened stick to eat them right out of the shell.  It takes a lot to make a meal, but they are great source of easily-obtained protein on the seashore.


By the way, I welcome useful reader tips like Dave's, so if you have something related to Bug Out Survival that you want to share and don't have your own blog on which to publish it, send it my way.

Bowfishing: An Effective Means of Food Gathering

Anyone planning to bug out on coastal waters or along rivers or other waterways with reasonably clear water should consider adding a simple bowfishing rig to their gear, as it will take up little room and adds little weight even in the smallest bug-out vessels such as canoes and sea kayaks.

In the photo below (taken a few years back) is a good-sized Sheepshead I shot not far from the beach while camping on a remote barrier island.  These fish tend to congregate around rocks and other structure, and I got into a school of them by wading out an old wreck after setting up my camp ashore. There's nothing like fresh fillets cooked in the skillet on the beach as the sun goes down. The bow is a Hoyt take-down recurve drawing 60 lbs.  This is a versatile hunting weapon, but if you are choosing a bow just for bowfishing, you can get by with something much simpler, and of lower draw weight, since the shooting is done at close range. 

Shooting a bow from a kayak is difficult, if not impossible in most conditions, but it is feasible to bowfish while standing in a canoe, dinghy or John boat.  I've had great success with this method of fishing when cruising on my larger sailboat, especially when anchored in mangrove areas, where I rowed the dinghy up into narrow creeks among the flooded roots and waited for schools of mangrove snapper to swim by. It takes practice to get good at hitting small, often fast-moving targets under the water, but it's well worth the effort if you're in an environment where you can see beneath the surface.

In addition to a suitable bow, you will need at least one fishing arrow and some sort of bowfishing reel.  Modern, manufactured bowfishing arrows are usually made of solid fiberglass so they will be heavy enough to penetrate a few feet of water and still have enough energy to impale a fish.  They are tipped with a barbed point that can be unscrewed from the shaft since the barbs prevent pulling the arrow backwards out of the fish.  Fletching is not even needed at the typical close ranges at which bowfishing is done, but most fishing arrows are fletched with heavy-duty, waterproof plastic vanes for flight stabilization.  For the reel, I prefer the simple, open-faced design that looks like a handreel and screws directly to the front of the bow in the threaded receiver most modern bows come with for adding stabilizers.  Here is an example of one of these I found on Amazon for just $11.85 Bohning Bowfishing Reel With Line  You can get a complete kit with an arrow for less than 30 bucks: Sting-A-Ree II Bowfishing Kit. Tape-on reels are also available that work well for longbows and primitive self-bows lacking threaded inserts:  Beginner Bowfishing Package, Tape On Mount.

Fancier designs are available with reels that are more similar to those used for angling, but for this kind of fishing I like the simplicity of the hand reel.  There's nothing to break or get tangled and it packs away easily when not in use.  I will be posting more on bowfishing, and archery in general in future posts, including details on primitive equipment that can be self-made and can be just as effective.