The Daily - Eating What You Kill This Thanksgiving

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

Here at “The Daily,” we take our annual Thanksgiving episode very seriously.A few years ago, we rang up an expert from the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line, who told us that yes, in a pinch, you can cook a turkey in the microwave. Last year, we invited ourselves over to Ina Garten’s house to learn the timeless art of holiday entertaining (Ina’s tip: flowers that match your napkins complete a table.).This year, determined to outdo ourselves, we traveled to Montana to hunt our very own food. Our guest, Steven Rinella — perhaps the country’s most famous hunter — is an avid conservationist and a lifelong believer in eating what you kill.What first drew us to Rinella was the provocative argument he put forth in his best-selling book, “Meat Eater.”“To abhor hunting,” he wrote, “is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.”So, a few weeks ago, we spoke with Rinella at his podcast studio in Bozeman, Mont, about the forces that turned him into what he describes as an “environmentalist with a gun”. The next morning, we hunted ducks with him, and then, inspired by Rinella, we ate what we had killed.Photo: Will Warasila for The New York TimesAudio Produced by Tina Antolini. Edited by Wendy Dorr. Engineered by Efim Shapiro and Alyssa Moxley. Fact-checking by Susan Lee. Original music by Daniel Powell and Marion Lozano.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Do you just want me to run through the different sounds? Okay, so yeah, a simple quack is just and then a lot of times this morning to grab those ducks attention, I was doing five to seven quacks in a row. So yeah, it's just like music. You're one with the duck. I try to be. I try my best. When most of us sit down today for Thanksgiving dinner, if we're being honest, we're not really thinking all that hard

about where the food on the table actually came from. It came from the grocery store. And to the degree that we did think about where it came from, maybe we shopped the local free range organic aisle? Still, it came from the supermarket. But for Stephen Ronella, the question of where his food comes from is almost a religion. Ronella is a lifelong hunter, perhaps the country's most famous hunter, who shares his passion for eating what he catches through a growing media empire that includes a Netflix show and a podcast, both called Meat Eater. If you just buy your

And you kill a moose in September. Yeah. How long can one guy live off that moose? You know, if that's all you're eating, you know, probably three months. He's also written more than a dozen books, ranging from a history of the American Buffalo to a series of cookbooks that explain things like how to gut a caribou or make a wild goose pastrami. But what really defines Ronella's work is an argument and an argument that some might find kind of counterintuitive, that killing animals can be part of loving nature,

that reverence for the natural world is intimately bound up in the act of hunting. And so I was curious, as somebody who relies exclusively on the grocery store, what would it be like to visit Ronella and go on a hunt with him? and then eat what we kill. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barro. This is the Daily. Today, my hunt with Stephen Ronella. It's Thursday, November 27th.

Thanksgiving Day. Michael, nice to meet you. Trematous honor. We meet Ronella at the Meat Eater headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. I'll show you around a little bit. He gives us a little tour. We have a kitchen space. We see his test kitchen.

Oh, that's a giant meat grinder. Wow. His industrial-sized meat freezer. This is like Janice's elk bones. On the way, should we go to the studio? And it was podcast studio, which I would describe the decor of as extremely carnivorous.

This is a beaver. behind you. Yeah, this is like what the whole country was built on. I mean, you know, like the beaver skin trade. That's a muscox hide. That's huge. Yeah, it's the sound deadener. These are tan skunks.

Okay, a thing I've always been in, I pay a lot of attention to the fur trade. This right now is the hot ticket item in the fur trade. Skunk. Yeah. You know why? No. The hats that Orthodox Jews wear for, for holidays. Yes.

they're very extravagant they're beautiful the hip thing right now the hip thing is to have those white to have them made from those white skunk hairs i think of the orthodox communities being kind of trend proof but no they're not there's a trend it's hot okay so thank you for the tour thank you for having us of course thank you i appreciate you coming in especially coming all this way to come to me so you have had a really interesting journey in my estimation to become the person that you are now. You're kind of an evangelist for hunting. Champion of hunting as a way.

I'm like an explainer of. Yeah, okay. Yeah, explainer of. Champion of it as a way of connecting with the land, showing reverence for the land. And as you've put it, understanding the connection between human beings and the natural world.

Mm-hmm. You grew up in rural Michigan. That's right. Talk to me a little bit about some of these formative early hunting experiences that you have. To do that right, I got to go back one little generational bit. My dad was born a long time ago. Like, he fought in World War II. Okay.

So my dad was raised by Italian immigrant grandparents. He's born in the south side of Chicago. He grew up in a world very, very removed from rural American life. But then when he got home from World War II, World War II, and this is a thing that he was one of those outdoorsmen that kind of was born of that experience. They had been out, you know, for over a year, you've been out camping, out hanging out with guys, wearing wool clothes, and he was, they just got into it. Then when they came home, that's just what they did. There was even a comment, a guy, an editor of a sporting magazine that made is like, how could you, how could you train an entire generation of men to, to shoot and camp and not expect them to become hunters?

So he became a hunter, like, out of that world. I never thought about that. Yeah, like, and so I got it from him. Like, I never decided. I never thought, oh, I should become a hunter and fisherman. It was just what we did. I did all the, like, I had all the normal stuff. I had friends.

I liked music. Alongside it all was like this, this, like, obsession, a family obsession with hunting and fishing. Do you remember an early experience of hunting that stays with you? Yeah. We would strike out on bikes at 20. 22s and go hunt squirrels, but we had so much woods

around, and we thought it was like public, but it was just it, we just went on everybody's, everybody's land. Why hunt a squirrel? Oh, they're great. There's not that much meat. No, there's a lot. There is? Yeah, there's a lot. And what do you do it? Oh, it's, it's, it's like

it's thinking man's chicken, man. It's like it's the same color. My mom would, there was a real wild game craze back then. It was like the whole era was like the cream of mushroom era so my mom would take a crock pot and fill it full of parted out squirrels so two front legs two back legs and we trimmed the saddle you'd call it the saddle it'd be like the loin pieces you'd like take a scissor and run it up the ribs and so you got like like the french

called a saddle of a hair right and you put it in a crock pot fill it with cream of mushroom soup and then turn that crock pot on and in the minute you could pick all the meat off you'd pick all the meat off. Thinking man's chicken. If you enjoy food and you don't have a set rigid idea of whatever, you kind of like, like meat's supposed to be like this. If you're just kind of like like food and like novel things, most people that do that like squirrels.

They're very good. I had no idea. Yeah. At this stage of your life, are you eating everything you hunt? Yeah, we ate a lot of stuff. We fried a lot of stuff. Yeah. You wouldn't have thrown, that would not be a thing.

Like, not a thing. In our family. To hunt and not consume. I remember. Would it be a sin? Yeah, sin like, you know, I was raised in a Christian household. We wouldn't have talked about waste in terms of sin. But I remember one time in the woods, I remember my old man finding someone had dumped a bunch of wood ducks that they hadn't cleaned properly in this. That they had hunted but not cleaned.

Yep, garbage bag. It was where everybody would haul their yard waste and a mere a mile man finding a garbage bag. that had a bunch of improperly clean wood ducks and it was this dude rent in the house down the lake from us and remember my dad went banged on his door and had words with him it was like well just like he he would have seen that as so problematic why wasteful like that was the thing i was trying to explain these animals lived and died for nothing if no one was yeah it was like you didn't waste stuff man after being immersed in this environment did you just say to yourself i want to grow up and be a hunter oh yeah well no because i just was. I never thought about it. I never stopped for a minute and then restarted. You just were a hundred. It's just like, it was never like, I want to get into this. It was

just, that was just the main thing. Always the main thing. Was it like the most romantic thing a kid could possibly be doing? I mean, you've explained that it's just kind of a default fact of life for you. But it sounds like it, even at a young age, is bringing you tremendous pleasure. Yeah, identity, became like an identity. And then I felt, the thing too is through that, I fell in love with the history of it. And how did you know the history of it?

Like you're reading Daniels? That's what I would just, I would read. That's what I would read. That's the main thing I would read. What was the seminal childhood book of hunting? Traplines North. I would check it out at the library and then I'd recheck it out and then I'd recheck it out. If you went to that book now and found that in the Twin Lake Library, it, dude, if you went, it'd be just my name again and against like on that book just what's what stands out from that book it was like and just to just briefly describe it okay i again all that hunting and stuff what i wanted to do was i wanted like hunt and trap for a living so like you know people know all these names daniel boone for instance like people think of boon as an explorer or pioneer like he wouldn't

have thought of himself that way boon was a market hunter boon hunted for the markets he trapped beaver he trapped otter he hunted bears for the bear grease market bear oil bear bacon market deer skin trade like that's what boon did like boon did that for living all the things he's known for came out of the fact that that's what he did for living so as i got into it i would just read about people that that's what they would do and that would generally force you backward in time so i just read about trappers and i read about hunters commercial hunters professional hunters because that's what i wanted to be. So my understanding is that even as you're aspiring to the hunting life, you see that life early

on as at odds with the whole idea of environmentalism and conservation. At that time, being in high school, I confused in the environmental movement with the animal rights movement. Which upset you because. Well, it upset me because the animal rights. movement was at that time working very aggressively to ban hunting practices. And they were having success at it. You thought they were the enemy. Yeah, 100% because they were going to prevent you. They were going to destroy our lifestyle from the environmentalists. We're going to destroy our

lifestyle as a 17 year old, right? We started a group. You started our group was, hey, hunters against teenage environmentalists. And we even like won the can drive. Hunters against. Teenage Environment. I'll show you the shirt. I still have the shirt. I somehow, because you couldn't Google stuff, I guess, I somehow got it. My buddies and I got it, whatever. We got it that it was, that the environmental movement was the animal rights movement.

We conflated them. But at the same time, remember, there's this big woods we always would hunt. They were going to go in and log this woods. And these guys came in and marked all the wildlife trees with the orange ring. I remember me, my brother, Danny, sitting there matching paint. Like, I'm not kidding you, matching paint to get that color and then putting it in a sprayer and going out and marking shitloads of extra trees. Why?

Because we didn't want them to cut the trees down. But we're like, oh, we're going to save the trees. But we hate environment. It's just like, we didn't know what we were talking about. We were just idiots. You obviously get to a place where you feel that hunting an environment. environmentalism, hunting and conservationism, are actually really wedded. Tell me that story, how it is, how you go from a kid wearing the hate t-shirts to suddenly

seeing that hunting is environmentalism, which is ultimately where you land. So what is it that happens? Probably the most impactful thing that happened. Well, a handful of things. The buddies I grew up around, guys that would have laughed at hate. We kind of didn't know what you could do for a living. So a lot of the people in my circle were like, I'm going to be a wildlife biologist, because then you can be outside, or I'm going to be a game warden. So they start going into wildlife and fisheries management and imagine, like, the awakening, and you all of a sudden start understanding ecology, right? And then, like, conservation history. Out of that, one of my peers that goes into wildlife management, like, introduced me, for instance, to Aldo Leopold's a San County Almanac, which is probably, which is the most.

influential conservation environmental text it's kind of a cornerstone of the movement why it's the most influential is because it was written for rednecks like what we were it was written by a guy

who knew what it was to chop a tree down who knew what it was to raise a crop who knew what it was to hunt deer who knew what it was to kill something and then regret killing it like he was talking to his people and he was saying there's a thing

it's ecology we need to know about it like it's our history no one's going to save this but us no one understands it and loves it like us so it was like so he assigns a special place to the hunter yes this role of stewarding the land yeah for many many people

and this is an old book by this time he introduces this idea of the hunter conservationist and he introduces this idea this like the days of us being conquerors and destroyers had to end right it had to end right like Daniel Boone is known and you've read about this as somebody who may not have meant to but ends up laying waste to entire species he killed what he loved species he killed what he loved and he would have told you the same thing that's why he always had to go more and more west he had to go more and more west to get out of the areas that him and his peers had decimated.

And Leopold is saying, no. We'd always had in this country, like, you have like a preservation mindset, as exemplified by a guy named John Mear. Like, John Meir would look at a beautiful landscape and he'd say, no one should touch this. You can look at it for a minute, but don't touch it. Humans are evil. Preserve it.

Rosa Theta Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, presented a conservation viewpoint that would be that man is going to engage with the natural world we are going to be part of the natural world we have to be are we going to do this in a way that strengthens the integrity of these natural systems where we're going to interact

or are we going to interact in a way that destroys these systems Eldo Leopold was speaking to the people that are going to interact with the systems he introduced people to the idea of ecology that natural systems rely on all of their parts, right? He was like, it's time for us to treat this

as a thing we love, or else we're going to lose it. And so reading that, it was- You identify with it. 100%, man, because he, like, understood people that were out on the land. Like, reading this book hit, like, a... I didn't even appreciate it until way later in life, like how much that hit,

because I understood what he was talking about. And then I read many books of people that were very uneasy with Honey, like Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams, had a huge impact on me. Barry Lopez is very uneasy with hunting. Why? It's obvious because you're taking life.

You're taking life. He's like a Zen Buddhist. You've taken life. That brings me to what you become at this stage of your life. You're in college, right? After college, you get an MFA. Yeah. And you start writing.

Yeah. And I knew I was going to be a writer. Right. you're not just going to be a hunter. You're going to be a hunter who writes about. Yeah, because I was going to be a trapper. But fur prices were so bad that it was untenable. But I had a knack for writing.

I thought I was going to round out my income as a trapper by writing how-to instructional trapping articles. So it's a great plan. Yeah. I was going to write like, you know, late 60s. season muskrat techniques through through the ice right well i want to talk about i want to talk about that's how i got that's how i like began to to write but by the time i was finishing college i wanted to be like a writer-writer well i want to talk about your writing because you do a lot of really interesting writing that very much embodies this lifestyle you have you you write a book about

recreating this famous epic 45 course meal from a famous french chef using ingredients that you have scavenged out in the world, including, of course, wild game. You write a book about Buffalo, and then you write what I consider to be your manifesto, meat eater. And I think it's beautifully written. And you describe

for people like me who aren't of and from the hunting world and the hunting life what is so visceral and romantic. And also at times complicated, difficult about hunting. And there's a passage I want to read.

Let me read it to you. Let me read it. Quote, I was hungry in the wilderness, and here came a few tons worth of caribou, 50 yards out and closing fast. In a moment like that, there's no time for emotional dawdling. It's time for unerring judgment. It is a time for speed, both mental and physical. It is a time for action and precision and discipline.

It is a time to do what millions of years' worth of evolution built us to do. And in the act of doing it, you experience the unconfused purity of being a human predator, stripped of everything that is not essential. In that moment of impending violence and death, you are gifted a beautiful glimpse of life. I want you to explain this idea, because this is the part of the hunting life that I think those of us who don't hunt with any regularity, probably struggled to understand. Yes. Can you just explain that?

Yeah. I have had the good fortune of taking many, many people out on their first hunting trip where they've gotten their first animal, almost to the person. It's cathartic. People cry. It's a thing that happens. If someone kills their first deer as an adult, they cry. No regret.

Never regret. But it's like something is like, clicking with them about cycles of life and death. I never had that because I started so young. I deliberately started my kids very young to where nothing would surprise them. I later thought about that more when I had a chance now and then to hunt out with like indigenous hunters and gatherers and other parts of the world. You know what's absent?

Like in their hunting practices, remorse, absent. and these are people who for generations have hunted and fished for their living there is like it is joy and it is a lack of remorse you feel honor but like no remorse it is taking life to them is life it just is it's like i continue on is that the life you're describing when you say you're gifted a glimpse of life yeah yeah it's like that's how you stay alive Like, that is. That's the difference. And for ancestral humans, for wildlife, there's like, death is you not killing. Death is you not killing. Yeah, because you starve, right? Not me now, but I'm just talking about, like, why do you not see signs of remorse or compassion in wildlife? Why do you not see signs of remorse or regret with indigenous hunter-gatherers?

because they've always seen with incredible clarity that that taking of life, that killing gives life, gives life to them and their families. That relates to something else you write in this book I consider to be your manifesto. Why do you think so many people feel so disconnected from this thing that's so visceral for you? Do you think it's just a simple

as the fact that we now all rely on vast industrial, you know, slaughterhouse operations to get our food because we all go into grocery stores and, you know, buy our food. You write about this. You say people have no problem eating their food, the proxy executioners. I'll never forget that phrase. Hypocrisy. Like, the thing I always think about if I'm weighing the morality of this or if I'm, like, analyzing my world and analyzing my food it's like you ask yourself a simple question

as much as possible put yourself in the shoes of an of an animal that will ultimately be consumed by a human would you rather jump into and live the life of something born on a slab of concrete and like fed every day and optimized yeah and like your your inputs are optimized for your outputs and it's like a done deal when you hit 1100 pounds you're dead right or imagine the life of a thing that is unaware like unaware and then one day just pout lights out in the woods man that wild life for me as a human trying to understand like that wild life is more beautiful, and that wildlife is better. What you're saying is there's virtue in consuming an animal that has lived a rich and full

and varied life on their own terms. I believe so. There is a tremendous beauty in wildlife living in wild places. We culturally honor it. We build vacations around going to look at it. So when you're eating a thing that lived that life, that live that, like, beautiful, wild, free life, it's just better. It's just different. Right.

It's the ultimate free range. Yeah. It's like nothing to regret here, man. It's a beautiful place. It's a beautiful animal. It lived a beautiful life. And now it's supporting us. And we're going to support its environment so it can make more.

It's just, it's tidy. in writing about hunting you you deliver an interesting and pretty stark judgment of those who would judge hunters like you you write to abhor hunting is to hate something about yourself you write to abhor hunting is to hate the place of which you came which is akin to hating yourself in some distant abstract way yeah so human history on our continent goes back somewhere around 20,000 years, those people were all hunters. They hunted for a living. They were hunters. Here on this continent, that only ended a couple hundred years ago.

That's what's always had to have. That's how people in what is now North America survived. They hunted. If they didn't hunt, they died. They were hunters. No matter how you define, like if you brought someone from outer space and they could come down and sort of offer you

like a little bit of an analysis, of hunters and they were to look at the scope of human history and you're saying hey explain humans to me the out of space person would look and be like man they're mostly hunters well not lately right that's what that's like what we did so how is it how could it be that we've like shed all that we haven't shed all that so when I say that someone like abhors

the practice is like dude look at yourself where are your eyes they're centered on your head so you have really good depth perception why do you have canine teeth it's like you're not that far away from this but the abhorring that's real what you're identifying here there's there's a cultural chasm right between the way you grew up and the way so many of us now see ourselves and how we see our relationship to food and why is it the case that this thing that is so essential to you and that is at the heart of how you identify yourself has become so rare. I could, I could answer that in 10 ways. Let me hit you with one. Sure. Just to consider.

If every American tomorrow went out and killed a deer, it'd be a real problem. We'd have a 200 million deer deficit. So it just became, um, besides human will, besides what we want to do, it became impossible. It became impossible. It had to be. Like, if you look at it, like, ecologically, it had to be, as the population exploded and as we destroyed all of our landscape or much of our landscape, it had to be that we quit. That's the whole point of the agricultural revolution that allows people to live close together.

There was a reason why, in, like, in Native America, the land had a carrying capacity. Human populations in, like, historic North America, were the size they were because that's how much you could fit there. that's how much you could extract from wildlife resources and then we discover other ways and so you can't anymore you can't anymore and even like a thing of all I sell is everybody can't do it but I wanted everyone to understand it so like many people in this world you simply want to be understood yeah I want to be understood and also you want people to recognize this is the thing we haven't touched on yet as I learned conservation history and I learned the role the outsized role of hunters in the conservation story I also felt like we deserve more credit than we get right and I was like you should thank me

now that I know what I know and you don't know I know that you owe me a thanks you owe me a debt of gratitude because by buying my hunting licenses and participating in the things I participated in like we saved American wildlife right because and I didn't really know this or understand it very well until I read your book

and read many your writings although I should have known this, that hunting licenses contribute directly to the funding for American conservation. Steve, you've written many, many poetic passages about the act of hunting.

And I want to, as we wrap up our conversation, return to one of those writings. And if you don't mind, I'm going to ask you to read this. Oh, wow. You got a great reading voice. I've learned to see the earth as a thing that breathes and writhes and brings forth life.

I see these revelations as a form of grace and art, as beautiful as the things we humans attempt to capture through music, dance, and poetry. And as I've become aware of this, it has become increasingly difficult for me to see hunting as altogether outside of civilization, maybe stalking the woods, is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else.

It's really beautiful. Oh, thank you. It makes me wanna go hunting with you. Oh, really? Yes. Well, I wanna talk about this. Tomorrow morning, very early, you are taking me and my colleagues out hunting. Mm-hmm.

And just to explain, because this episode's gonna be running Thanksgiving we're not going to be hunting turkeys no you were very clear about that you can hunt turkeys here in the fall but but we hunt them in the spring it's just like almost like culturally in the spring during their breeding season we hunt just the males and you hunt the males when the males are out gobbling and you can call them in and just very selective just get the males in the fall guys will hunt you can hunt them but you you risk killing the females i don't like i've weirdly i've never killed a turkey in the fall i've killed many many turkeys in the spring i don't hunt

them in the fall so uh what's also fun i love this little fact the pilgrims they're probably eating fowl waterfowl migratory waterfoward 100% deer probably seafood most certainly geese if you look at all If you look at all the journals and stuff, they were eating migratory waterfowl. So we're hunting duck? Yeah, you will see ducks for sure. And you will eat ducks. I promise.

We'll leave them together. Mm-hmm. All right. Well, we'll see you at dawn. Until then. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Oh, yeah. You guys got coffee already? In the room. Oh, the room coffee. Yep, there he is. Oh, man, is it nice out? Yes, so nice. Prepare for the worst.

Embrace the 50 degree of 5 a.m. weather. The next morning, Steve picks us up in his very large pickup truck. Wow, you are the picture of promptness to drive us out to the duck hunting spot. Unseasonally warm and windy. The question is, will the ducks notice? They might get down to an area like this, and the weather is suitable, and then they'll just hang. So isn't it seem like duck-hanging weather? Yeah, very duck-hand weather.

Why would you flee this weather? Yeah, you'd be like, dude. You should go back north. It's too hot. Okay, so can you just explain where we're going? You picked us up at our hotel in downtown Bozeman. I have a buddy. There's a property over here owned by a guy named Mark Pearson.

He's a friend of mine. He's a big wetlands duck conservation guy. That's his thing. The way he, like, you know, they run cattle out there. cattle out there, they farm out there, but he is like his land management, his wildlife first, ducks first. Why did you want us to be hunting at this hour? Because it's 5.20 in the morning. So there's the main movement that ducks will make, like all day, the big movement that ducks will make is at daybreak. Sometime in the morning,

in the cold gray light of dawn. It's a cool, rock. Brueen Jr. They like to fly them. So that's why you want to be out there. And the other thing is it's just like there's like a tradition component. Like even if someone said, they're like, man, they're not really going to fly until 9 a.m. Right. You just kind of would feel like a...

Lazy folks? Yeah, you'd feel like a real loser. It's just like, like, I like hunting turkeys almost more than anything. And we kill a lot of turkeys between 10 and noon. but it's a sin to not be out there at daybreak. And I suppose this is an old hat for you, but is this drive and the whole getting there process still filled with a lot of excitement for you every time you hunt?

Oh, yeah. No, it's always. It's, um, yeah, there's always an anticipation of what's going to happen. There's always, like, an element of mystery. it's like asking it's like asking a question you know one time I was writing something about fishing I was saying like every cast

is like you're asking a question you know waiting for the answer so so so we're now off the main road yep and we're kind of out in an agricultural area

and this is ground out here that won't get developed ever so we're just pulling out into the tall grass here yeah and there's crop fields all around But we're kind of down in the channels of water. At this point, we're about 25 minutes outside of Bozeman. And it's so dark, we can honestly be anywhere.

That's quite beautiful just to see this all in the car lights. Yeah, and it's fun when you go somewhere new where you don't know where you're at in the dark. And as it gets light out, you get to be like, oh. I'm completely disorienting. We pull into what looks like a grassy meadow, and we all get out. And then we meet Max Bartow. How's it going?

Good, good. This is Max. Did you meet everybody? works with Steve on his TV show as a videographer. But he's here this morning because he's a very good duck hunter who brought all this gear with him, along with a very important member of our hunting party. His dog, Ruby.

Yeah, this is Ruby. Hey, you're fine? And then, suddenly, it's very busy. Max and Steve are unloading a ton of stuff from their trucks. Are you going to wear a waiter, Steve? Yeah, I'm going to start me. If you want to get real serious, I'll give you a big headline. I mean, wow.

Look at this thing. It's like a brass lamp affixed to a hunting cap. It's called a raccoon light. And of course, they're gathering their guns and their ammo. This is your rifle. Well, it's shotgun. Can't hunt ducks with a rifle. Now, just to be clear, I am here observing.

I'm not going to be shooting a gun today. And even like all this stuff is regulated. So this is called a 12-gauge shotgun. When hunting migratory waterfowl, you have to put a thing in here thing in here called a plug that prevents you from putting more than two shells in the magazine. So this is a pile of plastic decoy ducts. There are a shocking number of duck decoys and goose decoys. Use them to pool real ducks, which is kind of crazy to me.

I always make the joke whenever the ducks don't come in. I always say, well, yeah, we got a pile of plastic out there and four human beings trying to hide themselves, you know. Like, no wonder they're not coming in. That don't look good. Nope. And pretty soon, we're all walking out into the grassy darkness. Do you want one of us to carry this?

Yeah. Yeah, please. You can just grab them by the handles. Yep, that one. Like that. Morning wait a thing? Yeah. So let's settle for the water.

How deep is it? It's like. Just below my knees here. So what we're doing is we're putting decoys here to show that there's ducks congregating here. But then the main pocket you want them to be in is right there, and that puts them more out in front of you. So basically right here in this now, in this vacuum,

is where you hope the duck is going to come down. Yeah, like kind of a good landing area is right. Where you just tossed that rock. Yeah, right off that rock. I got it. It's kind of cool to now see them spread about. suddenly looks like there's a lot of ducks in this pond even though they're fake yeah see can you just describe this uh the structure that we're gonna be going in

new yeah this is a very nice hunting blind um it's a it's like a it's like a very elaborately camouflage shoebox yeah it's got a bench to sit in it's got a little gun rack and then it's picture just like a yeah a shoe box big enough to hold seven people for ideally five people packed very tightly we're challenging the space but it's big mainly it provides a structure that you can affix all this vegetation to yeah I think it's like thoroughly layered with you know hey brush branches it's meant to blend in yeah if you didn't know it's here it wouldn't be here ducks can see color they're they can be very to trick. And so this just allows you to stay concealed.

That's a dog box. Yeah. That's for his dog. That can't... Yeah. She loves it. Like, it's crazy. If I don't bring her, she is so teed off at me.

Just like... So we pile into this duck blind. You mind if I go in? No, no. I'll be down on this guy. I'm right here. Steve plants himself at the far end of the blind. and Max is at the other end.

What's that? So that's loaded now? Mm-hmm. Yeah, this is a safe. Do we have everybody within your shot? Because you're not shooting, there's not a lot to know about, but I really can't think of any way you'd get shot. Don't get shot. Yeah, don't stand up unexpectedly.

You don't have shotguns, so you can't really do any damage. Yeah, never mind. I can't picture a world in which you'd get hurt. Don't jump out of the blind, but you can't because the max is on the end. There's nothing to do. And after all the work of placing the decoys, getting the dog into the dog wine, and all of us humans and our gear into the duck blind, there's nothing to do, but wait.

So it's now about 6.30 a.m., and first light is emerging, and the silhouettes of the mountains now appear with the sun behind them. Oh, and that's our first actual wheel bird sighting. Just flew right over us. I think that was a goose. What was that? Oh, that was me blowing my call. Max has with him a variety of duck calls,

these little wind instruments that are hanging around his neck. Do you see that duck swimming there? Yeah. That's Drake Mall. He blows them occasionally to attract the birds. And he's the one that's making this noise right now. And he's really, really good at it. Hey, Max, what was League of Light?

Oh, we got two minutes. Now that we're settled, Steve and Max become very conscious of the time. You can legally hunt docks 30 minutes before legal sunrise. There's a dock. And Max lets Steve know, officially. You're good to go?

Yeah. That they're good to go. Here comes some ducks right here. And Steve shoots a bird right out of the sky. It all happens so fast. You just shot and killed the very first duck you saw of the morning. No, no, we saw a lot of ducks this morning. No, you just...

That was the first duck at League of Light. And you hit it? Um, yep, we hit one. The dog returns to the blind with the duck in its mouth. That's the most efficient thing I've ever seen. Ruby kennel. Max tucks the duck onto a little shelf in front of us. And right away, Steve starts to spot more and more birds flying overhead.

Look at all those ducks. What do this? And the rest of the morning proceeds just like that. There are these very long periods of silence. some hits and some misses. You know those people that make those rugs and they put it imperfection in there so that it's not insulting to God, you know?

Like Max has this little thing where he'll do a miss now and then. What's that? You're making fun of me because I missed? No, he's calling you godlike. And we're just kind of hanging out together. Well, no. He doesn't want to seem pompous to God in the eyes of.

of God, so he misses nothing. Inside this incredibly tiny duck blind, in the middle of this gorgeous, grassy wetland. As they better understand, bird vision, there's this idea that iridescence is like glowing neon, that this and their vision is like, you know, like very, they're very tuned into that erodescence. And I start to feel this camaraderie.

We're all now in league together. And then every so often, Max and Steve become extremely focused once again on the sky. Everyone gets serious. Right side, right side, right side. And then another duck is down. Good girl. Max returns to the blind with the bird, and he holds it out to me. Yeah, Michael, you can grab it.

He's very pretty. Yeah, you can just grab him like this. Grab him. He's a little wet, but... Wow, I've never held a duck in my hands before living or dead. Wow. He's got so many different colors on him, too. It's still warm.

I'm holding this still warm duck with his beautiful feathers. Dark green, dark blue. It's kind of white fringed at the edges. Steve. I'm feeling the things now What are you feeling? I'm feeling all the things Oh really?

I mean You feel something This creature in my hands That was alive 10 seconds ago It is now Still warm And

I'm feeling I'm feeling all the feelings That you You're worried about It's like It's beautiful It's sad It's

Do you feel Like regret? Do I feel regret? Like, are you like, man, we shouldn't have done that? No, that's not the first... You've got swarming us. That's not the feeling I have. I just feel connected to this thing.

That's what I feel. I feel connected to it in a way that's kind of hard to explain. Like my daughter, she'll want to lay them a certain way. She kind of smooths them out. Wow. I feel like this is changing my relationship to the sky. And I'm just like scanning the sky looking for any sign of wings. Because they come so quickly.

By 9 a.m., there is a row of eight birds lined up inside this duck blind. Can I stand up, Steve? Yeah, we're done. And Steve calls it. We're done. So that's it. We're done. Eight ducks. Two hours. Is that what it was?

Yeah. After the break, our hunting expedition concludes in Steve's kitchen. Okay, so we're on our way to Steve's, where the ducks await us, and we're going to pluck them, butcher them, eat them. Okay. We're here, there's no question this is Steve's house, because there's a beautiful set of antlers hanging over the garage. I think it's actually a full skull. skull. It's a huge, full skull of antlers, just like the meat eater logo. And a lot more antlers as we approach the front door. Oh, the door's open. Literally, open

door, which is very welcoming. The whole family's here. The whole family's here. So we arrive at Steve's house. Okay, I'm Michael. Hi, Michael. I'm Katie. And we meet his wife, his three kids, plus their friends. Say hi. Hi. Hey, well, let's you go introduce yourself. Hi, everybody. We'll go this way to start.

Okay. You want to wear, do you want latex gloves? I think I'm okay just doing it with my bare hands. So we're in your... In the garage. We could do it inside, but we'll do it out here. That makes sense to do it on the ground. So when you butcher, you put your outside here in the ground.

Usually inside, sometimes. Stuff with feathers out here. So here are our four. So here are our four ducks. Yep. Want to see how to do it? Yeah, I would like you to show me. Okay, so.

So you're just grabbing all the feathers on the chest and just pretty gently ripping them off. See, those are, those could be teeth marks from the dog or pellet. Why does it feel like your, my, my plucking is so insufficient? Oh, it's a learned thing. It's like, it's like blowing on a call, like the first time sucks and you get better and better at it. All right, I, uh, I think I'm ready to face your judgment. You're not close yet. Like, keep going, bud.

Yeah, in the end, in the end, you'll get it where you can, you'll just kind of go like this. You don't need to do the back. Okay. Unless you want a whole roaster to bring home. Can you take Duck Interstate? Yeah. Well, you got to decide. Like, well, I would give you this one, because this one's perfect.

So we'll pluck this, leave a fully feathered wing, and you walk right down to playing with it. You don't even need to check it. They might detect an organic mass, as they call it, in TSA land, but you're not, there's no problem. You would just be like, no, I have frozen, I have frozen food, and you're fine if you'd like this to bring home. Because that's a perfect specimen. Look at that thing. It's beautiful. Looks like something out of Christmas Carol, don't it? Yes, it does. Yeah. With just a couple of pellet marks. Mm-hmm. Okay, I think I'm getting that good, my thumb movement. No, you're looking good now.

So that's what you're after. And we can even clean that up more with a blowtorch, but... So that's... Sorry, with a blowtorch? So just take this very from a distance. Burn those little hairs off. Is this the right distance? Just enough where you watch them.

get zapped. All right, let me go get the top. Is this? Yep, just real light. Don't cook it. Yeah, you're doing good. No, when you wash them, they'll look real good. You're not expect to be using a blow torch.

Okay, see this, see this breastbone? Mm-hmm. Come in like that. then you know what when you see chicken tenders on a menu and kids want to order them that's that that's a duck tender oh that's that kind of classic duck fat see that's that's good stuff yeah and then we move from the garage into the kitchen you kind of have an indoor kitchen and an outdoor kitchen yeah and that's nice covered now and the winter is long

where Steve has been preparing this wild game feast using every imaginable cooking method. He is using a smoker. Ooh, dude, that's a little bit. Ah, damn it. Apparently we've overcooked the turkey. The wild turkey, as is Thanksgiving tradition. Yes, yes.

Totally true. He's using an open fire. That's like that sous-beed goo. And then you're putting it on a rack. Just to, like, crisp it up. Put on top of it over. Getting a rack on an open fire. Yep.

He's cooking it on a fire. And one by one, these dishes emerge. There's black bear that he hunted in Alaska. There's wild turkey and Canadian goose from a hunting trip with his kids. And, of course, the duck. The best way to get it the skin crisp... This is the duck skin. Is to put it as soon as you start the burner.

So put them on there now. And don't preheat it. Like, lay them on there. Okay, I'm gonna put this skin down. Skin down. You know what I'm saying? Mm-hmm. Like if you put it on there when it's hot, it doesn't get as crispy,

and it, like, instantly, like, puckers up. When you want to do it, oh, from there, in the oven. Flip it, and then in the oven. In the oven. Offside for a quick second. Is this the time to tell you how anxious I get about whether I'm, over-cooking meats.

Oh, the duck. The duck. Not long. We'll eat that real rare. The Black Bear that I took out that has the bone sticking out of the end, that, and I've had Trichinosis from Black Bear, that... That's good to know. You have to cook.

The same way, like in the old days, you had to cook pork really well. Yeah. That was cooked in the oven for quite such. I saw him with the thermometer check in it. Oh, it's like 20 degrees above what it needs to be. I learned my left. So now the duck is out of the oven. Pretty remarkable that that thing was flying above our heads.

That's all of it. Four or five hours ago. And then we sit down at Steve's dining room table. And all this meat that Steve has been cooking is laid out in front of us. This is a remarkable bounty you've prepared for us. This table is filled with meat. It's light on veggies. But what we have...

I would say it's very light on. What we have, here try one of these. These are good. So we grow carrots and then... And pickle them. Alright, where should we start? I ruined turkey. So we'll start with the worst? Well, we'll start with the ruined turkey.

It's delicious. Neutral? Mm-hmm. Very dry. I think my mother's done worse than this. So this is the bear. This is the bear. I can definitely say I've never eaten bear before.

Yeah. It tastes like... You'd never know it's bear meat. It tastes like lamb or beef. Yeah. It's lamb-like. It's just funny about you'd never flag it as unusual. Now is the sousvied and grilled.

Yeah, that's the can of goose. That's good. And you can dress it up all kinds of ways. It's really tender. Yeah. I'm very excited to try the duck. Mm-hmm. It got cold.

It got cold. It took a long time. Nothing about a cold duck. Looks great. It's fatty, juicy. Cold. I'm just to take it back to our original conversation, it's extremely gratifying to consume food that you yourself have.

Participated in hunting, defeathering, butchering, cooking. It's like 100% start to finish your food. The only person ever touched it. You ever think about that? No one's ever touched that. Except us. Yeah. First person.

Only person. Yeah. I feel a certain level of possessiveness over this food. I don't think I've ever felt before. It's not anonymous. Yeah, you know, then you get into freezer, freezer hoarding and stuff like that. Or you get really weird or weird your family about it and everything? There's a thing that happens.

Just talking my wife about sometimes. Steve, I just wanted to thank you. for the time you spent with us, for the lessons you've taught us, and express my gratitude. Happy Thanksgiving. Oh, happy Thanksgiving to you. Appreciate it. This is a real special day for us. Thank you very much. A really profound experience.

Next time you see a goose flying by, you'd be like, now that is what that tastes like. When you see a goose in a golf course, you're like, now that bird is a worthwhile bird. Today's episode was produced by Tina Antalini. It was edited by Wendy Doer. Our field engineer was Afim Shapiro, and the episode was mixed by Alyssa Jane Moxley. It was fact-checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Daniel Powell,

and additional music by Marion Lazzano. Special thanks to Ben Calhoun, Paige Cowitt, Katie Finch, Malia Woolen, and Phil Taylor. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Muboro. Happy Thanksgiving. And see you tomorrow. Is this sanitary if I asked to try one of these?

I've got a duck call. You can try that. It's sanitary. Yeah. Got it. No, just. Just hoot. Better?

I want one good call. Doctor like not coming. Whatever that is, that's not real.