Today’s guest post comes from Steve Grooms.

During most of my life, I have been trying to acquire the knowledge that would permit me to function as effectively as I want to. I learned years ago how to cook perfectly done hard-boiled eggs, for example. But that knowledge wasn’t original. I learned from others.

My search for knowledge took a strange turn when the internet became so central to how we live. Now it is usually not important to know much at all, if only you know how to tease answers from the internet with cleverly written Google search strings. It is still nice to know things, for you might not even know enough to do a search if you are totally clueless. And yet if you know just a little, you can get the rest from a computer.

It is obvious that we now live in a brave new world where knowing things isn’t all that important if you just know how to acquire knowledge. Are you a rotten speler? Well, all you really need to know is how to spell words well enough that your spell-checker can figure out what you meant to say. As I remember grade school, a lot of precious time was spent memorizing multiplication tables. Now I use my computer’s calculator to handle the most basic math, such as how old am I? Or how about the arcane calculations needed to divide up a luncheon check, with tips? It used to be that only a few people had that skill, and they might get invited to lunch a lot, but most folks can divide a check and figure the tips with apps on their telephones.

In spite of all of that, I think I’m aware of a few—very few—things I know that I learned all on my own and which might not known by anyone else. Unique knowledge. What a strange concept!

Years ago I worked out a technique for keeping celery in my fridge in great eating condition. Celery used to die a revolting death in the fridge before I got around to eating it. No more. (And I’m in such a generous mood, I’ll share this.) You buy a head of celery. It will come in a plastic bag that is shot through with little holes. Chop off some of the messy top material of the head, but then very carefully carve off a small slice at the base of the head (like you would cut the base of a Christmas tree before putting it up in a bucket of water). Tear off two or three paper towels and soak them in water. Wrap the celery head in the wet towels, then pop the whole mess back in that bag full of holes and store it low in the fridge. Within a day your celery will be in better shape than when you bought it, and you might be able to keep it this crisp and tasty for a week or so.

I made several original discoveries when I spent so much time reflecting on pheasants. Depending on how you count, I have written about pheasants in four books. Much of what I said had been written by someone else somewhere else . . . much, but not all of it.

One of the issues I pondered is the difficulty of getting a good closeup photo of a wild rooster. You might think with telephoto lenses this would be easy, but it is quite the opposite. Pheasants are shy. They live in dense cover that obscures them. It is all but impossible to get their portrait.

And yet some photographers do it, and I finally figured out how. In spring the vegetation isn’t as thick in pheasant country as it is in fall. Roosters gather harems of hens, and part of that process is that they strike showy poses to impress their hens. A springtime rooster might sit in the open trying to look magnificent, even with a human photographer nearby snapping photos of this.

And yet there is a problem. A springtime rooster putting himself on display will be so horny that the naked facial tissue around his eyes be engorged and exaggerated. That is, his face looks nothing at all like it will look in fall when people hunt him. I finally realized that every gorgeous closeup portrait of a rooster I had seen was a photo obviously taken in spring. I made the mistake of noting this and then sassing all those photos of springtime roosters.

I got my just deserts. When I revised my first pheasant book, the publisher was proud to find a great photo of a rooster that could go on the cover. You already know what it looked like. It was a spring rooster with engorged wattles that was on full sexual display. I begged the publisher to not use a photo I had mocked in my last pheasant book, but they were determined to stick with the photo they had picked.

Do you know something that nobody else knows?