I have 340 acres that comes out to about 7000 trees.
I will actually buy the bullets for friends if they promise to shoot squirrels and crows!
Unless your trees are really sparse, you should have a heck of a lot more than 7000 trees. If you assume trees on a 10-foot spacing, that gives you over 400 trees per acres -- and that is on the low end for many unmanaged forests. So, further assuming that 300 of your 340 acres is wooded, that still gives you well over 100,000 trees. Then, let's assume you have 1 squirrel for every 100 trees, which is again probably very low. That is 1000 squirrels! That is a lot of squirrel dinners if you just take 10% per year.
When it comes to cooking Coons and Opossum I started losing interest pretty quickly after doing some research, so I think I'll leave those in the "things I've wondered about, but not for very long" column.
And for what you said about the possum, nuff said!
I'm kind of like Andrew Zimmern, and there isn't much I haven't eaten in my life. For about 35 years, my career took me to a lot of very off-beat places where I always sampled the local foods. I hit a million air miles way back in 1978. The only places I ever got food poisoning while traveling was in Dayton, Ohio, and at the USN Acey-Duecy Club in Sasebo Japan -- both times on American food.
I've had possum and coon. I wouldn't try possum again, at least not if I had to clean it. I've never cleaned anything worse than a possum (I've never cleaned a vulture, but it couldn't be much worse). Because rabies in coons has become so prevalent, I no longer touch coons. I still "take out" a number of them each year, but I don't touch them. I leave them for the scavengers. If I have to move them, it is with the tractor front-end loader, or a pole and pulley I have, much like what the professionals use to grab wild animals from a distance.
But squirrels -- I'm trying hard to propagate a lot more fox squirrels. We still have a lot of small grey squirrels, which are hardly worth the effort of cleaning. The fox squirrels are a lot bigger, and they sure are tasty.
I apparently don't clean squirrels or rabbits like most people. I don't care about the hide/fur. I use wire cutters to clip off the tail and the legs at the knees. I take out the scent glands. Using a sharp knife I start in the middle of the belly, and cut the skin perpendicular to the belly/spine, and go all the way around. So, I've basically cut the skin in half, from head to tail. I then just grab it and pull the skin apart towards the head and tail. I cut off the head with a hatchet. I rinse the carcass under a hose, and then gut it. I'd say it takes me longer to find the tools to do it, that it does to do it.
Squirrel and rabbit are both extremely sweet meat. Sometimes I cook the whole cleaned carcass in a pressure cooker and pick the meat from the bones for stew or soup.
Other times I will quarter them, but throw away the ribs since they are so small. In this case, the quarters get battered and fried like chicken.
Good eatn'
