Season 8, Episode 1 Behind the Scenes: The Mud and The Trees

Season 8, Episode 1 Behind the Scenes: The Mud and The Trees
For episode one, the crew headed south to Missouri for squirrels and catfish with our buddy Park Hall.
We fished the muddy waters of the lower Missouri River.
The fishing technique we used is called bank poling. We would drive long, fiberglass poles into the bank that had live bait rigged on them.
Our target was flathead catfish, but most days we caught a mixed bag of flatheads, blues, and channels.
After each morning of checking lines, we’d take our catch back to Parker’s and clean the fish. Catfish get a bad rap from folks who don’t know how to handle them, but that’s not an issue when Parker has the knife.
Our evenings were spent hunting squirrels in the hardwoods. Parker and Steve used shotguns because of the dense leaf cover.
Parker’s dog Ruby was always with. She’s trained to tree squirrels, which made for an action-packed hunt.
Parker’s hot tip for cleaning squirrels is to use a tin snips for cutting off the legs, tail, and head. This made for a clean cut that didn’t create bone fragments.
We really put that tin snips to work.
Ruby was always awarded a prize for her assistance in the harvest.
Buffalo hot legs is the preferred squirrel recipe here at MeatEater, but Parker also treated us to some of his signature squirrel rollups.

Images and words by Seth Morris.

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