FROG LEGS DELIGHT

By Mike Collin
Recently, I and my older brother Tim went out to get some bull frog legs for dinner. We haven’t had to eat frog legs since we were kids but, Michigan is in some tough times right now. It’s like our dad is in charge of the entire economy and just like when we were kids, everyone is starving.

Don’t get me wrong. Just because poor people eat frog legs does not mean they don’t taste good. In fact, they are excellent. They really do taste like chicken. There just is not a lot of meat on each leg. It’s like eating buffalo wings. You need a mess of frog legs to get a meal.

My brother picked me up from under the bridge where I am currently living and we went to our secret frog leg pond way back in the woods. We parked near the “Exploit Chemicals” chemical dumping site at Quagmire Lake. There we found an old two track road that we walked down until we got to the old frog pond about a mile from Quagmire Lake. There were lots of bullfrogs and my brother and I each got six frogs which amounts to twelve legs for each of us. They were feisty little fighters. We caught each one with a homemade butterfly net then stuck them in a burlap sack.

We started back but took a wrong turn and got lost. Finally, we ended up on the other side of Quagmire Lake. We went up to the trail that went around the lake figuring that the trail would lead us out to the road. When we got to the lake shore we noticed that there were nothing but dead animals all around the shoreline and dead fish floating all over. There were deer and foxes and rabbits and birds all over.

My brother Tim started to panic. He insisted there must be some monster in the lake that is so horrible that it is scarring everything to death. Neither of us wanted to stand around there so we got going down the path until we could see the road and the chemical dump. We noticed that there was a line of trucks at the dump waiting to poor their stuff down a drain in the parking lot. As they poured some green and orange stuff into the drain it immediately came out the end of a pipe and fell like a waterfall into the lake. Tim said they were trying to dye the color of the lake so that they could better see the monster that was scarring all the wildlife to death. The trucks had a lot of foreign writing on them. There were trucks with writing in Italian, Chinese, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese and a couple of trucks with writing neither of us could recognize. We figured they must be from Canada.

Just as we were getting up to the road a DNR (Department of Natural Resources Officer) stepped out of the bushes and asked us “what do you have in the bag?” We told him we had some frogs and opened the bag to show him. The officer then asked us if we had fishing licenses. Tim and I pulled our bill folds out and showed him our licensees. The officer then counted the frogs in our bag and said we had too many. He said we could only have five frogs each in your possession. He then said we were in violation of the law. He then wrote us out a citation for $100 each. He then said if he caught us poaching animals again we were going to be in big trouble.

I asked the officer if he was there to investigate all the dead animals around the lake and if the chemicals being poured into the lake by the trucks might be the problem. He said the chemical company called him and said there were two scruffy guys out poaching frogs in the woods. He also said the chemical company was licensed to dump chemicals from foreign countries in the lake and that the company was a good partner with the DNR. We then received our citations and the DNR officer confiscated our frogs. He then dumped all twelve of the frogs into Quagmire Lake. Within a few seconds the frogs were all floating motionless on top of the lake.

Well, this was not such a good frogging trip. Now I’ve got to pick up a thousand cans and bottles to get enough deposit money to pay my $100.00 fine. My brother still wants to go and pick up crayfish (crawdads) next week but, I think I’m going to cancel.

HUNTING MUSHROOMS IN MICHIGAN OR, CALL A PARAMEDIC PLEASE!!!

By Tim Colin
You can't be a true outdoors person in Michigan unless you hunt for mushrooms. Mushrooms are common especially during the wet, sloppy season we call Spring. I have gone hunting for the elusive morel (yummy) mushroom since I was a kid. I have been well trained to identify morel mushrooms from the many species of mushrooms in Michigan that are poisonous even, deadly poisonous. So be warned, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO PICK MUSHROOMS UNLESS YOU HAVE BEEN TRAINED TO IDENTIFY THE EDIBLE FROM THE POISONOUS TYPES!!!

With the above in mind, I decided to take my brother Mike with me into the mushroom woods to teach him how to find and identify morel mushrooms. My brother is not stupid but, he has a very short attention span and a real problem with logical and coherent thinking. He wasn't too interested in looking for mushrooms so, I told him that you can meet some really nice babes in the deep woods. I meant to say "bears" but, the mention of "babes" seemed to get him interested in hunting mushrooms so, I didn't correct my misspoken word.

After about an hour thrashing around in the bush, I found zero mushrooms. My brother on the other hand, found a whole bag full of mushrooms. Unfortunately, they were not morel mushrooms. I had no idea what the mushrooms were and I said that it would be unwise to eat the mushrooms unless they were identified by someone more experienced in mushroom identification. My brother disagreed.

After a trip to the emergency room, a stomach pumping and two blood transfusions, my brother is now in stable condition. My brother did not farewell after eating mushrooms that he knew nothing about however, he claims he saw a lot of "babes" after chowing down on the little knobby fungi. I told him I think he was probably seeing angels. He responded "you're right, they were gorgeous".

"Whatever!", I replied.
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