Kick-off

In this mini movie Paula talks about things you can find in the countryside in Iowa. She mentions three things you may not have heard of:

black caps
morels
shed hunting

What are they? Write down some ideas, then listen and find out if you were right.

My-, since my home is on the edge of the city, and our city isn’t real large, but it’s very wooded and there’s lots of fields and meadows, and so we have lots of wildlife. The other day I was looking out the window and I saw … what I thought was a red fox, but it was too big to be a fox. And so I realized it was a red coyote. So we see lots of baby wildlife throughout the year. Lots of times we’ll see white-tailed deer with their twin … fawns and they’ll have spots all over them. And then in the winter, the big deer – the male bucks – get antlers. And then in the spring of the year they start losing their antlers. And so sometimes a buck will walk a-, around with only one antler un-, until the other one falls off. And then we go shed hunting. And what shed hunting means is we go and look for the antlers that have fallen off the bucks.

And many times we go and we pick wild berries. We like to pick black caps. And black caps are wild raspberries, and we eat them with ice cream and it is delicious. We also go morel hunting, and that’s a very competitive thing because people have their secret spots that they want to go and find their morels, and they won’t ever let anyone know about where that is. Some people are really good at morel hunting and they like to brag a lot. And so morels are very popular and people love them and they pay a lot of money to actually eat them. There’s special ways of making them: frying them in butter, breading them. The best way we enjoy them is to bread them in flour and then we fry them in butter until they’re crispy as potato chips and they are delicious. Sometimes they don’t even make it to the table because everyone likes to pick them out of the pan!

Crossroads

Wild food and wildlife

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