Quill Pigs and Blue Jay Kabobs- A Five Course Meal

     This is a re-posting of a blog from 2009. Sometimes, I like to look back at old work. I hope you do, too. ' Tis the season for nostalgia!

    I love cooking shows.  One of my favorites is the cooking competition “Iron Chef,” in which a challenger competes against a previously chosen champion. The chefs must create a five-course meal in one hour using a ‘secret ingredient.’ At the last minute, the show’s creator, with a dramatic, theatrical flourish, reveals the secret ingredient. The competition points are based on flavor, presentation and creativity in the use of  said secret ingredient. Each course, including desert, must contain the secret ingredient, which can be something obscure like Sea Squirts. Often, the secret ingredient sounds incompatible with all of the necessary courses.
     I just watched an episode where asparagus was served as an ice cream. Asparagus used as an appetizer, deep-fried and adorned with a chip of fried pancetta made me drool, but they lost me on the green ice cream. So now, ladies and gentlemen, I reveal to you the secret ingredient - PORCUPINE!
   One of my favorite dishes made by my mother was “Porcupines.” There wasn’t any porcupine in it, only meat balls made with rice in them. The ends of the rice stuck out of the meat resembling the quills of the porcupine. As a kid, I loved the adventurous idea of eating a porcupine, though to date, I have not.
     Endemic to the Old and New Worlds, porcupines are the third largest rodents on the planet, coming in behind Capybaras and beavers, which are all edible (I’ve eaten Capybara and it’s delicious). Porcupine is generally only eaten in desperation as it’s fatty and mineraly tasting. The wood pulp, bark and leaves they consume are astoundingly high in potassium imparting that flavor to the meat. One of the reasons they are so destructive is that they constantly seek sodium to offset the potassium they consume. In addition to trees, they eat ax handles, gloves, or anything else that has absorbed salt from sweat.
     The word porcupine comes from the French porc d’epine or “thorny pork.”  Consistent with the reputation of the pig, the ‘Quill Pig” has a voracious appetite. Because tree parts have less than 2% crude protien, less than most breakfast cereals, porkies have to eat a lot! The greatest wild predator of the porcupine is the Fisher.  To avoid the quills, they circle the porcupine repeatedly biting its vulnerable face until it succumbs. A Quill Pig can have 30,000 spines, each with a viciously sharp point and barbed end.
     The quills of North American porkies are two to four inches long, but the African Crested Porcupine’s spines are eight to sixteen inches long!    Long ago, the shafts of birds’ feathers were used as pens called ‘quills’ for their resemblance to hollow porcupine quills. The African porky quill could surely be used as a pen. Porcupines do not throw quills, contrary to popular belief. When threatened, they raise the spines up to make themselves look bigger and will run backwards towards an attacker. Easily loosened from the porky the quills quickly lodge into the attacker’s flesh. Working their way inward at the rate of an inch a day, the quills can be fatal.
    There are reports of Great Horned Owls, Ruffed Grouse, deer, bears, pigs, even a trout, and of course, dogs with embedded quills. I have not found reports of any Blue jays with quills, so this one that appeared at my feeders, may be for the record books.
   Omnivorous Blue jays are also hogs of a kind. I have had an enormous flock of 30-45 of them at my feeders this past week. I’ve had to put food out twice a day to keep up with them and they have driven off most of the other feeder birds. To slow them down a little and to amuse myself, I took a whole peanut in the shell and tied dental floss around the middle, securing the end to the feeder. The Jays try repeatedly to take the peanut only to be hauled backward. It doesn’t hurt them, only humiliates them. I wouldn’t hurt them, no matter how much they ate. I wouldn’t hurt a porcupine, either, though they have chewed on my house in the past. However, I do wonder how they would all taste in a savory pie.

  

                                          A Blue jay kabob with quill skewer - yum!

With thanks to Wikipedia and Marty Stouffer's Wild America

1. Woods, Charles (1984). Macdonald, D.. ed. The Encyclopedia of Mammals. New York: Facts on File. pp. 686–689. ISBN 0-87196-871-1. 
2. Macdonald (Ed), Professor David W. (2006). The Encyclopedia of Mammals. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-920608-2.

Seal Of Approval

Harbor seals are common in Maine. I saw this one on our last boating day. It was in the New Meadows River, which isn't a river at all. The New Meadows is a tidal tributary. I have no idea why it was named as a river. There is seaweed all the way to the northern most reaches, seals, horseshoe crabs and jelly fish, to name but a few of the ocean dwellers. So, no one would ever have confused it with a river. For about eighteen years I lived on the northern end, so I would know. I did see a beaver in the water there  one spring. I would not have thought I'd ever see a beaver in salt water, but I did. It was playing with a cat on the bank. The beaver had a bunch of sticks in the water from which it had stripped the bark. The bare wood was pale in the dark water and the beaver was flipping it  around as it worked off the bark. The cat seemed to think it had tied into the biggest rodent it had ever seen. Several times, it crept to the water's edge and batted at the beaver, then jumped back. The game ended when the beaver circled around in the water so that its tail was toward the cat, which was hunkered down in the mud as if about to pounce. The beaver slapped its tail on the water and doused the cat which took off, humiliated, no doubt. I've never seen a cat try to play with a seal. I'm waiting. I haven't kept count, but it seems to me I've seen more seals this year than ever before. I saw a Gray seal in our cove two days ago, which is highly unusual. They come from up north and aren't usually around here, certainly not in our warm cove. Harbor seals are still seen easily at the mouth of the Kennebec at Popham and generally, they are all but gone at this time of year. This seal has wiskers any cat would admire.

BEAVER CLEAVER

“YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT…….”
“But, you get what you need,” so went the Rolling Stones' song. It’s so simple, so true, yet so bogus. It has been my observation for half a century (now there’s a dismal thought!) that often, living creatures do not get what they need. The results can be catastrophically damaging. Take this beaver -it’s obviously dead. It was just beginning to cross the road when a car hit it. I have wanted to take beaver photos for a long time. When my scout called about a dead one on Route 209, I didn’t hesitate. Ideally, I’d prefer live beaver shots, but as a wildlife photographer and writer, I take what I need; I don’t always get what I want. In its death, I can still appreciate the fur, the hand-like feet and geometric scaling of the tail. I’ve never actually seen a beaver in the wild. All the beavers in my life have been dead and many of them in far worse shape than this one.
My father had a dog sled team when I was growing up. He never won any races, nor was he able to successfully breed his Siberian huskies. We had dozens of puppies, but by breed standards, none of them was adequate to sell. My father complained bitterly that he could not get a good dog out of the bunch. We did have a fancy Canary that sang prolifically. My father had traded it for a dog, somewhat appeasing my mother. Though they were “no good,” the dogs were nonetheless, expensive to feed. At the time, there were sixteen dogs and four of us children. Feeding us was business enough for my mother without the dogs. In his travels, my father was continually finagling food for his dogs. A couple of summers, he negotiated with a local summer camp for the dining hall slops. Three times a day, a truck showed up loaded with trash barrels full of macaroni, scrambled eggs, half-eaten hot dogs and other food based garbage. After the campers finished their meals, they slid the tray contents into the cans; it was clean food. The can contents were dumped on the ground for the dogs. After the dogs finished, my sisters and I rounded up the flatware that had been accidentally discarded with the food. It was the only thing the dogs did not eat. We proudly presented it to our mother, who washed and put it away in the kitchen drawer. We quickly collected a couple of sets, too. One winter, my father met a trapper in a bar. The trapper complained that the town wouldn’t let him discard his beaver carcasses at the dump any longer. He had accumulated a mountain of skinned beavers in his yard. They were frozen solid, but spring was coming. He’d have to rent a backhoe to dig a big hole into which he would bury them. “No way I can make any kind a money on them pelts if I got to eat that kind a cost, god damned town,” he groused. He wasn’t getting what he needed at all, other than another guy to complain with. But, my father thought he might be going to get what he needed: dog food. Some arrangement was made for the pile of free, frozen meat, though my father forgot to mention that to us. One Sunday morning, while my parents slept off hangovers, a dump truck arrived. Watching from my bedroom window, I saw a man climb into the back of the truck. With a pitchfork, he began stabbing and flinging out what I was sure were babies - human babies! Little, naked pink bodies were flying through the air and hitting the ground with thuds. Screaming, I ran to my parents’ room and pounded their door, “AAAAaaaaaagh! Get up! Get up! A man’s throwing babies into the yard!” It took eternity for my father to stumble out of the room, smelling like sweat and booze. He looked out of the window and vomited. I think our days of dogs concluded soon after that. I do remember that my sisters and I collected the teeth left behind, the only part the dogs did not eat. My father drilled holes in them and made us each beaver teeth necklaces. My parents were not the June and Ward Cleaver I wanted. But, they may have at least been what I needed; they didn’t just kill me.