Hunting, Fishing, and Wild Food

Difficulty: trapping and gathering are learnable; hunting well takes years. Prerequisites: cordage, a blade, and local knowledge you do not yet have.

Why it matters

This repository assumes a settled agricultural society almost throughout. But agriculture has a hungry gap in late spring, harvests fail, and a traveller arriving with nothing eats wild food or does not eat. Wild resources are also where the hides in leather and tanning come from, and where much of the protein in a subsistence diet came from even in farming communities.

The honest framing: this is the one page where local knowledge overwhelmingly beats yours. Anyone who grew up in a place knows its plants, seasons, animal movements, and water better than you will after years. The transferable content below is mostly principles — trap mechanics, food safety, preservation, and not destroying the resource — rather than specifics, because the specifics are local and you should learn them from people who have them.

Part 1: Traps beat hunting

The single most useful idea here. A hunter works one place at a time; twenty traps work everywhere at once, including while you sleep. Across most subsistence economies, trapping, fishing, and gathering supplied far more calories than active hunting of large game, which is high-effort and high-variance.

Trap principles that transfer anywhere:

• Set on sign, not on hope. Trails, runs, droppings, tracks, feeding areas, water margins. A perfect trap in the wrong place catches nothing.
• Funnel the animal. Build brush or stone wings that guide it into the set. Modifying the ground is usually more effective than improving the trap.
• Mask disturbance. Fresh-cut wood, soil, and human scent are all warnings to most mammals. Weather your sets, and handle them as little as you can.
• Check them often. An untended trap wastes the animal to rot or scavengers, and leaves a caught animal to suffer. If you cannot check daily, do not set.
• Many small sets beat a few elaborate ones.

Categories: snares (a noose on a run), deadfalls (a weight released by a trigger), pit traps, cage and basket traps, and nets. Fish traps and weirs — a funnel of stakes or stone leading to a holding chamber — are among the most productive food technologies there are, and they need no daily labour once built.

Trapping is legally restricted almost everywhere today, with rules on permitted devices, species, seasons, check intervals, and humane dispatch. This page describes historical practice. Snares and deadfalls are prohibited or tightly controlled in many jurisdictions, and indiscriminate sets injure non-target animals including pets and protected species. Check the law where you are, and treat humane, rapid killing as a requirement rather than a preference.

Part 2: Fishing

Usually the highest return per unit of effort in wild food, where water exists.

• Traps and weirs — passive, high-yield, low labour once built.
• Nets — gill nets, seine nets, cast nets. Needs cordage and netting skill; a net is a serious investment that pays back for years.
• Lines and hooks — hooks from bone, thorn, shell, or bronze. A gorge — a toggle that turns sideways when swallowed — is even simpler and older.
• Spears and leisters, useful in shallow clear water and at spawning runs.
• Fish poisons from saponin-bearing plants stun fish in still pools. Widely used historically, indiscriminate, and illegal in most places now.

Timing beats technique. Spawning runs, tides, and seasonal migrations concentrate fish enormously, and a few days of a run can supply months of preserved food. Learn the local calendar.

Preserve the glut immediately. A large catch is worthless if it rots — see food preservation for salting, drying, and smoking, and note that this is exactly why salt was worth so much.

Building a fish trap or weir

Worth more detail than the mammal traps above, because this is the highest-yield category, it works while you do something else, and the geometry is the whole trick.

The principle is a one-way funnel. A fish following an obstruction looks for a way around it, passes through a gap, and then cannot find that same small gap again from the far side — it swims along the inside of the enclosure instead. Nothing has to spring, trigger, or hold; the trap is just a shape.

A stake-and-wattle weir:

1. Choose a shallow reach with a firm bed, or a tidal flat. Do not obstruct a navigable channel or someone else's water.
2. Drive two lines of stakes into the bed in a broad V or heart shape, with the point facing downstream for fish moving down, or upstream for a run moving up. A wide mouth narrowing over a long distance works far better than a sharp angle; think of it as a wall that persuades rather than a trap that catches.
3. Weave brush, withies, or split wood between the stakes to make the walls effectively solid, or build them of loose stone in tidal areas.
4. At the point of the V, leave a narrow gap leading into a holding chamber — a circular or heart-shaped pen of the same construction.
5. Make the entrance to the chamber a short inward-pointing funnel, so the opening is invisible as a gap from the inside.

Tidal weirs are the least work of all: a low stone or stake wall built in an arc on a tidal flat fills at high water and strands fish inside as the tide falls. Some have been in intermittent use for centuries.

Basket and pot traps are the same funnel logic in portable form: a woven basket with an inward-pointing conical throat, weighted, baited or not, set on the bed and lifted on a line. Eel and crustacean pots are this design. A trap you can move to the fish beats a weir you cannot.

Escape and selectivity are not optional refinements. Fit an opening or a deliberately weak panel that lets undersized fish leave, and open or breach the weir periodically so part of a run gets past. A structure that takes everything ends the fishery it depends on, and modern fisheries law encodes exactly this through minimum mesh sizes, closed seasons, and escape gaps. Fixed engines and weirs are prohibited or licensed in most jurisdictions today — check before building anything permanent in a watercourse.

Making a net

A net is a large investment of cordage and time that pays back for years. See textiles and fiber for making the cordage itself.

• Tools: a netting needle (a flat shuttle holding a long length of twine) and a mesh gauge — a flat stick whose width sets every mesh identically. The gauge is what makes the net uniform, and uniformity is what makes it fish properly.
• Method: work in rows, tying each new loop to the loop above with a sheet-bend-type knot drawn tight against the gauge, then slipping the gauge out and starting the next row. It is repetitive, learnable in an afternoon, and slow.
• Mesh size selects fish size. This is the single most important decision. Too small and you take juveniles and destroy next season's stock; too large and everything swims through. Size the mesh to the mature fish you intend to take.
• Rig it: a headline with floats — cork, light wood, or dried gourds — and a footline with stone or fired clay weights. Not lead; see silver.

Types: a gill net hangs like a curtain, sized so a fish's head passes and its body does not. A seine is drawn through the water or around a shoal and hauled in. A cast net is thrown to fall over fish in shallow water. A fyke is a hoop net with wings that funnel into it — a portable weir.

Maintenance decides a net's life. Untreated plant-fibre nets rot fast when stored damp. Dry them fully after every use, and preserve them with tannin (bark liquor, as in tanning) or pine tar. Repair holes immediately; a small tear becomes a useless net within a season.

Lines and hooks

The lowest-investment method, and the one to start with.

• Hooks from bone, antler, thorn, shell, hardwood, or drawn bronze wire.
• The gorge is older and simpler: a straight toggle of bone or wood, sharp at both ends, tied at its middle and buried in bait. Swallowed lengthwise, it turns crosswise when the line draws tight. No barb, no bend, no metal.
• Set lines — a long line with many baited hooks, anchored and left. Passive, like a trap, and it works overnight. Check it as often as you would a trap.

Part 3: Gathering

Plant foods are predictable, do not run away, and were the dietary foundation in most gathering societies.

Reliable categories: nuts (calorie-dense and storable — acorns, chestnuts, hazelnuts, pine nuts), seeds and wild grains, tubers and roots, fruits and berries, greens, seaweeds, fungi, and inner bark in famine conditions.

Processing is often mandatory, not optional. Several major wild staples are inedible or toxic raw:

• Acorns need their tannins leached out with repeated changes of water (cold-leaching preserves the starch better than hot). Untreated they are bitter and hard on the gut.
• Cassava must be processed — soaked, fermented, grated and pressed, and cooked — to remove cyanogenic compounds. Inadequate processing causes acute poisoning and the paralytic disease konzo.
• Many beans and pulses are toxic raw and require thorough cooking.
• Maize eaten as a staple without lime treatment causes pellagra — see cement and concrete.

Foraging safety, stated plainly. Misidentification kills, and the dangerous cases are the ones that resemble familiar safe species — several deadly fungi look like edible mushrooms, and hemlock resembles wild carrot and parsley. Never eat a wild plant or fungus you have not had identified by someone competent for that region, and note that identification is species-specific, season-specific, and part-specific: a plant can have edible fruit and poisonous leaves. "Universal edibility tests" circulate widely and are not reliable — some lethal toxins produce no warning taste and no symptoms for many hours, by which point treatment is much harder. Prefer a small number of species you can identify with total confidence over a wide repertoire you half-know.

Toxic look-alikes are also why local teachers matter more than any written description, including this one.

Part 4: Handling what you kill

• Bleed and gut promptly, and cool the carcass. Gut contents spoil meat fastest, and a warm carcass spoils from the inside.
• Keep it clean. Wash hands, keep the blade clean, and keep gut contents off the meat. See medicine and public health.
• Cook thoroughly. Wild game carries parasites and pathogens — Trichinella in pigs and bears, tapeworms, toxoplasma, and various bacteria. Undercooked wild meat is a genuine and common route to serious illness.
• Do not handle or eat an animal found dead, or one that behaved abnormally. Anthrax, rabies, and other diseases pass to humans through carcass handling — see animal husbandry and leather and tanning.
• Use all of it. Hide to leather, sinew to thread and cordage, bone to tools, needles, and bone ash, fat to tallow, horn to containers and translucent panels, hooves and trimmings to glue. Waste is the mark of abundance nobody in this situation has.

Part 5: Don't destroy the resource

The failure mode that ends this way of eating.

Wild populations are finite and slow to recover. Trapping out a valley, netting a spawning run to exhaustion, or shooting every large animal within a day's walk produces a good year followed by a permanent decline. The archaeological and historical record has many local extinctions and collapsed fisheries behind it.

The controls are the same ones that work for woodland:

• Take a harvestable surplus, not the breeding stock. Avoid taking breeding females and young where you can.
• Respect seasons. Do not take animals during breeding and rearing.
• Rotate areas and leave refuges untouched.
• Leave part of a run or shoal to spawn. A weir that takes everything is a weir that stops working.
• Take local customary restrictions seriously. Closed seasons, protected areas, and taboos on particular species are frequently functional conservation encoded as custom, and dismissing them as superstition is both rude and usually wrong.

And the strategic point: wild food is a supplement and a buffer, not a base for a growing population. Foraging supports low population densities. The reason this repository is mostly about agriculture is that agriculture is what supports everyone else in it.

Failure modes

Era notes

Hunting, fishing, and gathering are the oldest human subsistence strategies and predate every other technology in this repository. Fish weirs are among the oldest built structures known, with examples dated to the Mesolithic. Netting, snares, and bows are all deep prehistory. Any community you arrive in will have this knowledge in far more local detail than you do.

Your realistic knowledge advantages are narrow: food-safety principles (thorough cooking, carcass hygiene, not handling animals found dead), the processing chemistry behind acorn leaching, cassava detoxification and maize nixtamalization, systematic preservation of a glut, and the conservation arithmetic of leaving breeding stock and refuges. Identification, tracking, seasonal timing, and local water are things to learn rather than to teach.

Sources and limits

Foraging, trapping, and game handling are regulated activities in most modern jurisdictions and carry real risks of poisoning, zoonotic infection, and injury; this guide is historical and ecological orientation, not a field identification key, a permission to harvest, or clinical advice. Plant and fungus identification requires region-specific expertise and current references. Quantitative and historical claims here are not yet individually cited — see the coverage note in SOURCES.md.