Sawtaying the Summer Bounty

Every year at this time, I point out that the ripening berries in the Ozarks should be put to good use, and the same thing with wild poke, from which poke greens, utilizing young leaves, are cooked. If you are someone who enjoys hunting mushrooms, I can tell you about something much easier to find, and yet just as good to eat. The abundant, orange day-lilies are everywhere, and blooming now. Amongst those blooms are the buds, about 3 or 4 inches long, which will open soon. Collect those buds; roll them in eggs, then in flour. Add pepper or light seasoning like garlic or whatever you like, and fry them in bacon grease or olive oil. My gosh they are good.


Some people sautee them, ‘sautee’ being a French word for “frying slowly in butter”. It is pronounced ‘sawtay’ , showing us that French people can’t spell worth a darn. Anyway, try them, as they are found everywhere, and you can gather a hundred buds in a hurry, and invite your whole family over for dinner. A roasted young groundhog would go awful good with fried buds, fresh garden tomatoes and a blackberry cobbler. If you come up with a better way to cook them, let me know. Some folks cook them like you would cook asparagus (another French word) and they say they are similar to asparagus but better.

Black raspberries are ripening up here on Lightnin’ Ridge, and I haven’t had a good cobbler (cobbler is a French word, I think, for square pie) in years. Some lady might take that as a hint, and come out here and gather a bunch of them and make me a cobbler, but I will not be responsible for any problems incurred by thorns, ticks or copperheads. The best thing you can do if you are a berry picker is find an old leaky pair of chest waders discarded by a fisherman or duck hunter and wear them into the thickets, sprayed with tick repellent, reassured by the idea that copperheads can’t bite through the boots…I don’t think.

Because summer is upon us, it is time to start thinking about fishing at night with jig and eel combinations or big spinner baits for bass. Most of the bass spawning is finished in the Ozarks, and when you have high water in June, you can catch some very large bass from our lakes, around flooded greenery with topwater lures early in the morning and late in the evening. But what I look forward to the most is floating the rivers and fishing. I still know stretches of stream in the Ozarks where you can float without seeing anyone, at least during the week. But I stay away from those stretches where weekend caravans of canoes bang down the river, with alcohol and drugs as prevalent as they are. Those people who made a business of putting hundreds of canoes into our river on any given Saturday have been a curse on our streams, with some of the most beautiful lengths of Ozark rivers damaged beyond repair by their presence. If you don’t believe me, paddle down one of those waterways some weekend. Take note of the toilet paper on the gravel bars and see if you can make the trip without running into intoxicated, yelling and insulting people.

I think my Labrador, Bolt, might be the third or fourth greatest Labrador in the world. I have reached the age where I hate to argue, and if you say you have the best Lab in the world, you get a lot of argument from those who think their Labrador is the best in the world. If you say your dog is the third or fourth best, no one argues!

Bolt turned two years old this spring, and he sleeps on his back beside my bed with his feet up in the air, with his own pillow.

Just the other day I came in from working outside and took my shirt off, sitting down in my old recliner to watch an old episode of Gunsmoke. I had cleaned out my closet and had a pile of old but clean T-shirts lying on the bed. Bolt saw me sitting there without a shirt and left his usual spot beside my chair. He came right back with one of my shirts in his mouth, putting it in my lap. Then he sat there before me, urging me put it on. That is smartness my friend!

Then one morning I was sitting on my screened porch watching the birds in the greenery I often refer to as a lawn, when I said to Bolt, “I wonder if that little red bird down there in the fence-row might be a scarlet tanager.” Quick as a wink, he headed back into my office and came back with my bird-book in his mouth. I was really impressed until he opened it up there on the floor and pointed to a cardinal with his big paw. It clearly wasn’t a cardinal. But while he doesn’t do well on songbirds, he knows his ducks really good!

Anyways, about four years ago an old duck hunter bought a yellow Labrador puppy from me, and recently the old man passed away. The dog is now a fine looking, golden-colored retriever. His wife asked if I would find a good duck-hunter who would give the young dog a home. So if you are interested, and you are a good duck-hunter, who can at least drop one duck with every two shots and can tell a drake mallard from a hen at fifty yards, and you don’t have already Labrador, you might get in touch with me. I may have a good hunting partner for you.

Remember the Ozarks Mountaineer magazine, which folded up last December after being published for more than 50 years. Some of us who are writers and history buffs would like to see it revived, and I believe we might be able to do it this fall. I need to know how many readers out there would commit to buying that first issue, which we will call “The Journal of Ozark Mountaineers”. To simply pay for the printing, we need to sell 500 magazines at five dollars each. If you would like to receive one, send a postcard to me and let me know. We don’t want anyone sending money yet, just send a postcard to Lightnin’ Ridge Publishing, Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613, and tell us to reserve a copy for you. Writers and editors who once worked for the old Ozarks Mountaineer magazine will be compiling the new one; similar in content, and it will be the same length, 64 pages. If you don’t want to send a postcard, just e-mail us at lightninridge@windstream.net.

The summer issue of the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal is out, found on many magazine stands throughout the Midwest, and it has 80 pages of great reading. I think many of you might enjoy reading the humorous article I wrote about catching a big but illegal bass back when I was 17 years old, and the problems it created. It is entitled, “The Night We Caught The Big One.” We also printed the sixth installment of a continuing serial story entitled, “Little Home on the Piney”, which folks seem to enjoy. It is a true account of life along an Ozark river in the 1930’s. If you have any trouble finding the magazine, just call our offices at 417-777-5227.

This coming Sunday we will be talking about summer fishing on my hour-long radio program, KWTO 560 AM at 8:06 a.m. It can be received on a computer at radiospringfield.com My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

Ghosts and Birds

The bluebirds didn't seem to mind the large opening, it gave room for both
mother and fledging to admire the scenery.

 

This gray squirrel converted the bluebird house to a squirrel
house so he could get out of the rain and have a safe place to sleep.

 The lightnin’ ridge I mention so often is the ridgetop where I live. It is suppose to be the highest point in this county.  I have my home and office here and twenty acres of big mature trees of all species, which comprises this separate parcel of land since the 1850’s at least, according to the deed.  There are deep ruts here on this ridgetop made by the cannons and wagons of union forces during the Civil War passing through here toward a crossing on the Pomme de Terre River a mile or so below me.  I have about 12 inches of a broken saber blade which was found here, and a few other items I think may have come from that time.

I’ll bet those soldiers ate a few deer and turkeys with poke greens and wild onions and wild raspberries along this ridge when they camped here in 1862 and ’63. And I’ll bet there were a few Yankee soldiers buried here, because far more of them died from disease and malnutrition and exposure than they did from battle. I have seen a few ghosts up here on this ridgetop late at night but I never got a good look at them because they always are adorned in white sheets, as you would know if you ever saw any ghost movies.

            It would be a beautiful place to be buried, because you can see the most beautiful sunsets from my porch, and when it storms I watch the rain and dark clouds roll in from the west, and streaks of lightning stabbing at the earth, knowing soon a bolt or two will clobber something here on this ridgetop with a violent flash of light and a great roar of thunder perhaps much like a blast from one of those cannons a hundred and fifty years ago.  Buried soldiers wouldn’t see that of course, but their ghosts would because they have holes cut in their sheets for eyes! 

           On a quiet morning I like to sit out on my porch and watch the birds.  There are so many species I am fascinated with them, doves, bobwhites, rain crows, orioles, mockingbirds, brown thrashers, warblers and a half dozen varieties of woodpeckers.  You see things you wouldn’t imagine would happen.  The other day I watched a red-bellied woodpecker drink out of hummingbird feeder, by finding a precarious way to perch on it and drink from it nearly upside down.  I have a bluebird house just off the perch where a pair of bluebirds raised some young ones and coaxed them out into the dangerous world.  Squirrels chewed the opening out to twice the size you are suppose to have for bluebirds, and a couple of those squirrels used it for refuge in the winter, but the bluebirds didn’t seem to object to the expanded opening.

             

             Just down the road from my place last week, on a neighbors land, I watched an old gobbler strutting in a field of high grass at the edge of some timber.  You could see nothing of him but that big spread tail fan.   The grass was so high his head was hidden.  It was a reminder that turkeys mate all summer and you can go out and call up a gobbler even in June and July.  I called to that one, and he never moved a muscle for a time.  It looked as if someone might have just stuck the fanned tail out there in the grass.  But I could hear him booming and spitting, and I called several more times.  Finally a big white head stuck up above the grass.  Shortly after, a few yards away, a blue head of a hen stuck up above the grass too. 

         

          The most amazing thing I ever saw here on Lightnin’ Ridge was a rooster roadrunner, in the middle of a cold December day, and I haven’t seen him since.  When you realize that road runners feed mostly on large insects, and lizards and snakes, you wonder how he could survive a winter up here.  Maybe he didn’t.  It wasn’t long afterward that I heard Wiley Coyote out in the field howling for help.

             

          Great horned owls, screech owls and barred owls live on this ridgetop too, as do whippoorwills and their cousins, the chuck-wills-widow.  The latter bird is a couple of inches longer and a couple of ounces heavier than the former.  There are countless numbers of Ozark folks who have heard those two birds but have never seen one.  Their call is similar, but different.  They are the only bird I know named after the calls they make.

 Another interesting bird is the woodcock, which actually nests here on a little marshy open spot in my woods where there are some earthworms.  If you have never seen the spring mating flight of a male woodcock, which spirals high into the air as part of his courting dance, you have missed something.  Here on Lightnin’ Ridge, rain crows fascinate me this time of year.  Known to bird watchers as the yellow-billed cuckoo, the rain crow is in the same family as the roadrunner.  They are long and slender with a curved beak and a white belly, but just try to get a good look at one, let alone a photo.  They nest in trees around my house, and I hear their loud “kalk-kalk-kalk” and soft clucking often, but they are so elusive they hide in thick foliage and behind large branches, as elusive as any creature I have seen in broad daylight.

             

           A couple of days ago a huge swarm of bees concentrated on the branch of a large tree just a ways off my porch, making a loud buzzing and humming sound you could hear a good distance away.  They usually swarm a little earlier than this, hundreds of worker bees in a ball bigger than a bushel basket at times and then they all move to some hollow tree not far away, where they surround the queen bee and produce a hive full of honey. My grandpa used to find those hives by sprinkling white flour on individual bees that would visit his garden, then following them until they led him to their hive.  Then he would cut the tree in the fall and have sometimes gallons of honey.

           

             In the interest of journalist integrity I must report that the night fishing at Bull Shoals beneath the lights was disappointing, although the editor of my magazine, Sondra Gray caught another 17 -inch crappie.  It was the second one of that size she has caught in 3 years! That is amazing.  Seventeen-inch crappie are as rare as honest politicians. Once again she outfished me and her husband, because we had a hard time getting shad for bait and he and I kept giving the good ones to her.  It is something like those times when I open the door at the post office for some lady and then she gets in line in front of me. 

But I can report that early morning and evening fishing for bass with topwater lures around the flooded bushes on Bull Shoals was very good, and Sondra’s granddaughter Maddie caught a bunch of big white bass when they found them schooling one calm, still evening.  If you fish night-crawlers or jigs tipped with minnows during the day, you can catch lots of walleyes, though the majority will be under the 18-inch length limit.

            I would need three columns a week to report on everything going on in the outdoors this summer, but I will get to everything in time.  In the meantime, come by and see us at the Christian Publishers Outlet bookstore in south Springfield this coming Saturday from 11:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. where I will be inscribing and signing any of my seven outdoor books you might like to give to your dad for father’s day.  We are also going to give away a bunch of our Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor magazines, free!

            My website is larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com where you can find out all about my weekly Sunday morning outdoor radio program.  Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net

All Lit Up and Relaxed

When I get finished writing this column I am heading to Bull Shoals Lake to go fishing for walleye.  Actually while fishing for them I expect to catch crappie and bass and white bass, maybe a trout or two, and maybe even a nice catfish or two.  If you envision me out there fishing through the day on some long point or back in a cove, you are wrong.  I will catch them fishing straight down beneath my pontoon boat in the middle of the night, maybe having some coffee and relaxing with my feet up on the railing.

I don’t lose any lures this way, although once I lost my rod and reel when something big pulled it in the lake when I dozed off a little.  I will be fishing with little 3 or 4-inch long threadfin shad, which are found no farther north than the White River lakes here in the Ozarks.  Night fishing like that can be very good in Stockton and Pomme de Terre and Truman too, but those lakes harbor no threadfin shad, and therefore if you fish the same way there, you have to take a healthy supply of nice minnows for bait.

On Bull Shoals, we will start about eight in the evening and use large minnows for two or three hours, but the lights suspended in the water below us a couple of feet deep will eventually attract swarming, circling schools of threadfin shad by the hundreds, and early in the morning they are usually there by the thousands.  Game fish move in beneath them and usually around midnight or a little later, there are thousands of them.  We catch them in bait nets that we lower into the water several feet down.

The darker the night, the better, and the fishing under lights is usually good until some time in mid June, when the threadfin shad spawn starts to end. Bright moonlight wrecks everything and so does a strong wind.  And I must admit, there are nights when for some reason or another the fishing never seems to reach a boiling point.  There have been evenings when gar drives us crazy.  When you hook a big gar about ten or fifteen pounds and think for a few seconds you have a monster walleye, you are inclined to kick the minnow bucket and use bad language. But when things are right, you have a chance to catch giant crappie and walleye on Bull Shoals beneath those lights.  It is one of the most relaxing ways to spend a night I have ever enjoyed.  I secure my boat along a long rope tied between two stick-ups (dead flooded tree trunks) and I like to get over about 45 feet of water with no trees beneath me to get hung up on.  Usually fish are caught between 20 and 35 feet of water beneath you.

I have a small cabinet and stove on my pontoon boat so I can eat supper and breakfast out there on the water if I choose.  I have cots and sleeping bags so that I can sleep a little early in the evening when the fishing is slow, a good long handled dip net and a big cooler of ice to put the fish in.  There have been evenings when two big coolers wouldn’t hold all the fish.

I sit there in a comfy cushioned chair, looking down into that crystal clear water and catching the occasional shape of a big fish below me, listening to whippoorwills and barred owls, and I forget where I am.

Despite the clear water, I never use line lighter than 8 pounds on my spinning reels.  On casting reels I go to 12 pounds.  And I don’t use light gear like I would use when casting jigs for crappie. For one thing, crappie found deep in the clear waters of Bull Shoals are big hefty crappie, normally better than 12 inches, commonly up to 15 inches, and sometimes up to 17 or 18 inches.  White bass there are huge.  One night on Bull Shoals we caught 50 or 60 and none were less than 15 inches long.  That night one of the fishermen with me caught a 5 pound, 4 ounce white bass.  And you are allowed 4 walleye, so don’t keep little ones.  I would say that over the years the walleye I have caught beneath the lights there would average better than 5 pounds.  I have caught many walleye from my pontoon boat deck that would range from 6 to 8 pounds.  One night years ago, a friend of mine hooked and landed a sixteen-pound walleye.

At daylight, the shad just disappear, and out around the boat you can catch largemouth and smallmouth by casting a weighted hook or jig with a dead shad on it.  The fishing may be at its very best just after dawn until about 9 p.m.  By then I am usually sound asleep in the back section of this custom-made pontoon boat of mine, which is covered like an on-the-water camper.

Still and all, you don’t have to have a pontoon boat to try this specialized form of fishing.  I often use my regular War-Eagle fishing boat when I fish Stockton in the spring or Truman later in the summer, and in both cases I catch crappie, walleye and whites.  But in Truman, the murkier the water the less luck you will have.  On those lakes I usually quit fishing in the middle of the morning because by that time you have all the fish you want.  In Bull Shoals, there are fewer crappie than you’ll catch in northern Ozark lakes, they are just much larger.

You can rent a pontoon boat on Bull Shoals, or Norfork and several fishermen together can fish from its spacious deck.  Same thing on many other lakes, but those two are especially good for big walleye.

If you try this, remember to have some extra line on board, lot of hooks and sinkers, some big minnows to start with, some food and drinks, maybe coffee to keep you awake.  And no matter how warm it is at 5 in the evening, it will be much cooler at 5 in the morning, so have enough clothes to fight off the chill.  You’ll need good submergible lights and small nets for baitfish.  And a good net.  You can’t hoist a 6-pound walleye or a three-pound crappie over the side of a pontoon boat.

  

We’ll talk more about this next Sunday on my radio program.  If you have questions about all this, call in and I will answer them then.  The number to call at the station is 417 862-9977.  I will be on from 8:06 a.m. until 9.  That’s on KWTO 560 AM, or you can hear it on the internet at radiospringfield.com

My website is larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com and the e-mail address is lightninridge@windstream.net  Write to me at Box 22 Bolivar, Mo. 65613

Fish are Hard to Figure

If you spend a lot of time studying nature, you find that fish are harder to figure out than birds and mammals.  That stands to reason.  They live in a different world… under water.  I study fish a lot with my rod and reel, and occasionally look into them with my filet knife.  I recently studied crappie for several evenings in mid-May, only to be fascinated by the fact that they were pretty much behaving as they were in mid-February, out in deep water, close to trees and stumps and poles that were sticking up out of the lake. Except now, instead of being close to those stick-ups and twenty feet deep as they were then, they are close to those stick-ups and about six feet down. The banks close by were steep, and the crappie were all full of eggs and still not even interested in spawning.  How can that be, the dogwoods quit blooming long ago, and last year in that same area spawning had been going on for three weeks.

            Fish spawn according to water temperature and lengthening daylight. Since the lake is reasonably murky this year it could be that the crappie can’t see when the sun comes up and when it goes down.  And doubtless, the water is cooler, what with it snowing recently.  The lake is dropping, and that may have something to do with it too. Members of the sunfish family, which includes bass and crappie, do not spawn well under rapidly fluctuating water conditions.  If they do, the eggs they lay might end up out of the water.

            But what the heck, the crappie were uncommonly large and the fishing was good.

It is likely that somewhere in a lake the size of the one I was fishing, crappie living miles away are doing things differently.  It could be that in another lake, they have already spawned.  But there are three things all crappie fishermen hope for each spring… a really good spawn, lots of big hungry crappie, and crappie coming into shallow water which are easy to catch.

            I am just aching to go to Canada, knowing that the ice will be out in a few days and fish will active.  They are so happy to see ice gone that everyone you catch has a smile on his face, and with the warming sun shining down into clear water, they feed voraciously.  There are several lakes I know of in that Lake of the Woods region where huge smallmouth bass begin to spawn right around the first of June, and they just tear up topwater lures.  I particularly like to catch them then on buzz-baits, and there are plenty of four- to five- pound smallmouth to be caught.  

It is the same in Canada lakes with largemouth bass, and you can easily catch a seven-pounder this time of year on topwater lures.  But you’ll seldom see a Canadian largemouth much bigger than that because they just don’t get bigger in Canada.  One thing you have to do if you fish in June for bass with topwater lures, you have to use an 8- to 12-inch steel leader.  There are just too many northern pike there, and sometimes huge muskies.  The teeth of both, and the razor sharp gill covers, can easily cut your line unless you use steel leaders.

            Anyone can go to Canada and fish, even if you have never been there before.  My advice is, take two of your fishing buddies along and split the cost Take your own boat.  Take groceries, and several plastic tanks of gas.  Gas is always twice as high in that country than it is here.  So are groceries.  In fact, so is darn near everything else.  You do not want to have any motor trouble there, as it will cost you dearly to have any kind of work done.  Before you leave, make sure the motor is in tip-top shape and your trailer bearings are greased well and you have two spare tires for the boat trailer.  Use your seat belts, because they love to nail Americans up there, and the fine for a seat belt infraction is 300 dollars to us.

            If you are someone who likes the idea of saving fifteen cents per gallon on gas, go to the computer and find out how many Murphy gas stations there are along your route between here and Canada.  Those stations, which are affiliated with Wal-Mart stores and sit in front of many of them, offer a fifteen-cent discount to those who buy gas with a Wal-Mart credit card.  In fact, if you go into the store and purchase a gift card, that card can be used until at least mid-July to save you ten cents per gallon.  When you combine that with the fact that those Murphy stations are usually already ten cents cheaper than all other gas stations, you might save as much as twenty cents a gallon.

We traveled to Canada to fish last fall, and before I went I had a computer expert who works for me find all the Murphy gas stations on the way, and determine the price per gallon of each one.  There were about a dozen between here and Canada, and by using a pre-paid Wal-Mart gift card, I saved from 20 to 35 cents per gallon each time I needed gas.  By the time I returned home, we had saved 120 dollars by buying gas at no other stations.  In the Ozarks, these stations can be found at Ava, Mt. Grove, Joplin, Ozark, Springfield, Harrisonville, Houston and Flippin, Arkansas, just to name a few.  Find the rest on the computer by just entering Wal-Mart gas or Murphy gas.  I have no affiliation with them and I am not advertising for them, I am just trying to save Ozark folks some money.

            Recently I made a trip where gasoline at a Murphy station in Mtn. Grove Missouri was thirty cents cheaper than it was at other stations in Springfield or here in my area at Bolivar.  That is a heck of a difference.  If you take a few plastic gas tanks to such a place, you can return home and fill your boat motor tank with much more economical gas.  But here is a word to the wise, you need to treat all gas going in ANY outboard motor with an ounce or so of the gas treatment, Sea Foam, to protect your motor.  All outboard mechanics are advising that now, and you can by a bottle of Sea Foam economically about anywhere.  And again, I have no stock in that company either!

             

            It hurts to know that here in the Ozarks; we are now paying the highest gas prices in the entire Nation.   There is one thing I do that others should also do.  I never spend one penny inside these gas stations with those inflated prices.  Buy nothing from them, no sodas, no candy, no food, no nothing.  If they do not sell as much in their stores, maybe it will tell them that selling gas at four dollars a gallon is not as profitable as they think.  We talk about things like that on my Sunday radio program, just in case you would like to call in.  It runs from 8:06 to 9:00 on KWTO, 560 AM.  You can hear it via computer on radiospringfield.com

            You can write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net. My website is under larrydablemontoutdoors.

A Very Uncommon Disorder

             

The sun was gone, and the water was calm.  The ice chest was full of crappie.  But still, Sondra Gray clutched that rod, casting mechanically, landing one fish after another, a wild look in her eyes. 

“She’s addicted to it,” Rich told me.  “I’ve heard of it before, but never saw it until now.  I think if we put her out on the bank she would still be right there at sunrise, casting and talking to the fish!”

Rich Abdoler is one of my regular fishing partners, who writes articles on a regular basis for my magazine.  Sondra works as the editor of Lightnin’ Ridge Publications, normally just as solid and regular acting as anyone else.  But when she starts fishing, something comes over her, and she slips off into another world, snarling at anyone who casts near her spot, laughing uncontrollably at each big fish she lands, talking to them… that wild look in her eye that I already mentioned.  Fishing takes over her normally normal attitude, and converts her into something dangerous. If you get in the way of one cast, she growls at you.  It began a couple of years ago when in that very spot where we fished last week, she hooked and landed a 17-inch lunker crappie.  I saw it again when she landed a dozen or so four-pound smallmouth in Canada that summer, and tried to push her husband David out of the boat so she could fish without competition.

It has only gotten worse, and that afternoon, with crappie feeding voraciously, it became apparent she will need help.  The whole thing started as a mushroom hunting trip.  Rich had been finding a hundred or more mushrooms each day in cedar glades around the lake, big beautiful morels that were still erupting overnight on the 14^th of May, in almost any type of cedar glade.  Sondra came over from her home at Mansfield, wanting to find mushrooms for her brother, whom I think trades her fishing lures for morels.

I never thought I would be writing about mushrooms in the middle of May.  I don’t remember ever finding any morels so late.  Many of us, upon finding so many small gray mushrooms the last week of April, figured we were seeing a situation where the late cold and rain would limit any development of large morels, but big ones began appearing later than normal, and everyone who works at it says they ate more mushrooms this year than ever before.  So Rich and I took Sondra out in my boat and traveled to a previously unchecked cedar glad, where she collected a whole bagful.  We found about forty in an hour or so, a trip highlighted by a frantic search for Rich Abdoler’s keys, which he had lost in the woods, who knows where.  Sondra and I waited in the boat, knowing the futility of such a search.  You’d have to be the luckiest guy in the world to find your car keys in the middle of a cedar glade.  Then we heard him yelling and hollering way up in the woods, and I told Sondra that either he had been bit by a snake, attacked by a wildcat, or he had found his keys.  It proved to be the latter. Rich Abdoler is the luckiest guy I ever met.  If it was me, I couldn’t find my keys if I lost them in my front lawn.

In mid-afternoon, we decided to stop feeding the area ticks and call it a success, in terms of mushroom hunting.  I headed my boat up the creek where we had been catching lots and lots of white bass.  That’s when I first noticed Sondra beginning to change from normal to whatever it is happens to her when she starts to fish.  But the white bass just weren’t there.  The water had dropped, and was so clear you could see the creek bottom at its deepest point.  She grew cranky and bellicose (hard to get along with).

Back to the main lake we headed, to that spot where Sondra had caught that huge crappie a couple of years before.  The crappie should have been on the banks, spawning.  They weren’t.  Why at this late date they would be out in deep water, down 6 or 8 feet around flooded trees, I do not know.  But that’s where we were, and by casting around those stick-ups out in 15 or 20 feet of water, we began to hook some really big crappie.  That’s when Sondra got that wicked smile on her face, catching two fish to my one, bragging about some silly looking little blue and white jig she was using that her brother had given her.  I told her that it was ridiculous to assume that one kind of jig, homemade by one of her brother’s friends, looking like some little wad of deer hair attached to a painted lead head, would outfish my Walmart tube jigs, produced by professionals.  Rich agreed, and then asked her if he could borrow one of hers.  In thirty minutes we were both borrowing those jigs from her, and the fish we were putting in the ice-box were huge.  There were none under eleven inches, and a couple up to fourteen inches.  When you are catching crappie that are 12 to 13 inches about every four or five casts, it can do something to you, but still, seeing Sondra turn into that fishing monster was a disturbing thing. 

As it became dark, she hooked four straight crappie that we had to return to the water because she had already doubled her limit.  Rich finally grabbed her from behind and I wrenched the fishing rod from her hands and hid it.  We duck-taped her to one of the fishing seats and headed for the boat ramp in the dark. She finally came to the realization that it was so late she wouldn’t get home until midnight and calmed a little.   A couple of nights later I took her and her husband David back to the same spot and those crappie, full of eggs, were still there, big and scrappy.  Seeing her like that, David agreed we are going to have to get her some help.  We have to find a fishing disorder therapist of some kind, or maybe a phishycologist.  Either that, or we just need to see to it she gets to fish more often.  Anyway, this months Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor magazine will be a little late.  We should be able to get her back to work when the crappie go deep, the mushrooms are gone, and it gets too hot to fish.

You too can take advantage of the late crappie spawn, by perhaps looking for them in water a bit deeper than normal.  If you could get one of those silly looking little jigs Sondra has, you might catch a limit in a hurry.  But I don’t have any I can give you, and I had to pay too much for the ones she gave me to resell them. 

I would tell you that the mushroom season is over, but you just never know.  You might check some cedar glades in your area.  If you find some, call me Sunday morning when I do my “outdoorsman” radio program, from 8:06 to 9:00 on KWTO 560 AM.  You can hear it on the computer no matter where you are, by going to the website, radiospringfield.com.

If you know a really good fishing therapist, write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, MO 65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net  My website, where you can see pictures from recent fishing trips, is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

A Heartfelt Thanks

I feel guilty at times being unable to answer all the letters and e-mails we get from those of you who read this column. There are just too many to answer properly, and I am not going to send out some pre-arranged universal message to everyone. So I will use this column to thank all of you who sent cards and condolences on the loss of my mother and my uncle Norten and my uncle Roy McNew, all of whom died within just a couple of weeks of each other. It is great to know that so many people read this column, and care that much. From my heart, thanks to you all.

There are also notes and messages about other things, and I can’t answer the bulk of them because I just don’t have the time. Putting out our magazine, The Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal, is a major job, and because of that, I have not been able to finish several books I have started. That should change now, as I have hired another employee, Mrs. Kathy Pirtle, from over around Stockton, Missouri, who will be helping with many things I can’t keep up with. Kathy will mainly be in charge of advertising in our magazine and on my radio program. She will also help me respond to folks who contact us through the mail and via computer.

Most of you know I am not very computer savvy, nor do I want to be. I want to spend my time outdoors if possible, and I hate sitting behind a desk unless I am writing. So I have started but not finished several more books, and I intend, now that I have Kathy working for me, to publish at least two of those books by fall, and possibly three. If I succeed that will give me a total of ten. Kathy will arrange and keep track of the festivals we attend, and speaking engagements. I speak at various places where groups want to hear about the outdoors in a humorous or nostalgic way, and to tell the truth, I have a hard time remembering where I am suppose to be and when.

Kathy will also be helping to set up new websites, one of them for the conservation group which we started years ago called Common Sense Conservation. We have a hard time keeping everyone, scattered across the Ozarks, informed about this organization, and I believe we have to have a website where Missourians can discuss the Missouri Department of Conservation and what they are doing. Almost no news agency will cover the way that the agents of the MDC behave, or how the money is spent or misspent. Mismanagement of our forests and rivers and wildlife areas is never ever shown, and I would like to have a website which shows photographs, and publishes the truth about what this bunch is doing.

People who are being targeted by agents who illegally come into their homes will have a chance to tell their stories on this website, and if the MDC will respond, we will put their side of it on the website. They won’t. As a writer who has long tried to get information from them about what the state agency is doing, I can tell you that as much as they cry about presenting both sides of the story, an agent who abuses his power will not talk at all about what has happened. Never has there been an opportunity for falsely accused, and bullied hunters and fishermen to tell their story. Large newspapers and television stations seem to be owned by the MDC.

Hopefully, now that we have Kathy Pirtle, we can pull together the people out there who want to see changes made, and we can shine some truth on what the Missouri Department of Conservation has become.

Sometime before fall gets here, she will organize another big dinner for all of our Common Sense Conservation members and get started making this a viable and strong organization, working for desirable change in the MDC.

Kathy will also work with people who want to try to write their own book, and have it published through the Lightnin’ Ridge Publishing Company we started a few years ago. Sondra Gray, our company’s editor for the past four years, and Dorothy Loges who does all layout and design for my books and magazines, and has been working with us for ten years, will both continue to do what they do so well.

We now have more than thirty newspapers using this column, and I never realized when we started how much of an enterprise this would become. But what I like most is having the opportunity to show a side of the outdoors to people they have never seen, and communicating with good country people whom I get to meet at swap meets and speaking engagements, and through the mail. I may not get to answer your letters and e-mails, but I read them all.

The crappie are just starting to spawn in many Ozark reservoirs, very late. White bass are running much later than I have ever seen them. Yellow suckers and Black Buffalo are just starting to shoal in waters that I fish, and folks, as hard as this is to believe, mushrooms are still popping up in numbers greater than I have ever seen. My hunting and fishing partner, Rich Abdoler says that up the Osage River last Saturday he found 183 nice big fresh morels, all in cedar glades up high on the hillsides.

I would like to enlist the help of some canoeists who would help me clean up a section of the Pomme de Terre river in a couple of weeks. The stream, when it receives enough rain, is a pretty little river with bluffs and caves and fish and furbearers and birds, something this area thirty miles north of Springfield should be proud of. But it is the most trashed, littered river I have ever seen in the Ozarks, and folks, I have floated them all! None compare to this. It seems to be that a family or families uses the bridges on the upper Pomme to throw their trash in the stream. It is just unbelievable. If a major attempt to catch those folks were made, with just a little effort it could be stopped, but in this region, for some reason, folks do not seem to recognize the value of this stream, and what it could do for the community if it were given the credit it deserves.

Honestly, I find I cannot take a photo of any section of the stream without getting tattered white trash bags in the photo, and it appears that one family may be creating its own land fill right on the banks of the river down below highway 32, complete with bulldozers and roads.

I am hoping that some groups like the Ozark Paddlers Club, and the Missouri Smallmouth Alliance might join me in a day of floating and cleaning up the stream. I have spent my whole life on Ozark rivers, and I’ll bet we can stop at some spots and you can learn a great deal about rivers and the wildlife along it. I can also teach you in very short order, how to paddle a canoe from one side all day long, so you can ease quietly down the river in a straight course without having to switch sides constantly to straighten your canoe. I am going to need help with this project, but I hope it will call attention to this river, and it’s value, and the awful load of trash it gets from some very uncaring people who do not have much of a life, or common values.

You can write me at box 22, Bolívar, mo. 65613 or email me at lightninridge@windstream.net. The website is larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com The radio program airs each Sunday morning at 8:06 on KWTO, 560 AM, or radiospringfield.com

Mushrooms in the Snow

Last year on the first weekend of May, it was so hot you couldn’t stand to hunt turkeys in a long sleeved shirt. Must have been 90 degrees or more. This year on the first weekend of May, it snows almost three inches up here on Lightnin’ Ridge.

It melted quickly, and there’s mud and water everywhere, but before it left us, I got some unusual photos of mushrooms sticking up out of the snow here at my place, and bright orange orioles feeding at a snow-encrusted feeder. I also photographed dogwoods and redbuds with snow on the blossoms. You can see a half dozen or so of those photos on my website, given at the end of this column.

Two days before the snow came, I took Gloria Jean over to Truman Lake to look for mushrooms and fish. But after an hour of searching old dependable places, we only had about ten small morels. Then on the way back to the boat, beneath a huge sycamore across a swollen creek, I saw a big orange morel. We crossed the flowing rivulet to get it, and there were about thirty of those huge orange morels sticking up out of the leaf litter. One of them was unlike anything I have ever seen. The flattened top was sticking out from underneath a rock the size of a small loaf of bread. I picked the rock and the mushroom stalk was back several inches under that rock, so far it could never have seen any light. The tip of the mushroom had grown out from beneath it. It seemed to be a mushroom trying to escape imprisonment.

Later that day, while going up a small creek looking for white bass, I found a dozen or so very small grey mushrooms growing out of a sand bar. There was nothing there but sand, and the mushrooms themselves were so full of sand I couldn’t get them clean. When we fried them, we could feel the grit of the sand in the mushroom. The mushrooms were good, but I don’t much care for sand in my teeth, the first time that ever happened.

My friend Rich Abdoler found about fifty mushrooms that day in a ridge-top cedar glade, without a tree anywhere near but cedars. People ask me for tips on where to find mushrooms, and I can’t give them any about where they grow, because they grow anywhere and everywhere. You just have to get out and walk and walk and walk, and look and look and look. The trouble with our society today is few people can walk that much, or will. People expect to find them close to roads, and easy. Sometimes you do, but I’ll bet I walk twenty miles every spring in order to find mushrooms… and another twenty hunting wild turkeys.

Rich and I found a swarm of white bass up that little creek with no name, and caught a limit one evening in only an hour or so, on top-water Rapala minnows. I would rather fish them than the jigs most people use. You jerk the lure under a couple of feet and then let it float a little. That day whites were clobbering it, but 90 percent were males. I caught a 19-inch female white that day that I thought might be a hybrid at first, it was so big.

Rich and I took our wives back there the next day and Gloria Jean caught a limit of whites again, though not as easily as we had the day before. Behind us was a big sycamore with a pair of nesting eagles, and you could see the head of one fledgling sticking up over the edge of the nest. That day, along the creek I found a perfect three-inch long arrowhead, white on one side and grey on the other. As we eased back down the creek via trolling motor, a beaver swam along beside the boat, for several hundred yards, heading back to the lake with us. There was a muskrat playing along one bank, and the male eagle sat in a nearby tree at sunset, actually singing to us. Eagles do more than scream, they trill and tweet and sing at times, with a really unusual song. Maybe he was happy to see spring come, or maybe he was just happy to see us leave.

The creek was full of black buffalo and yellow suckers, which I will go back and try to catch with grab hooks this week. Unfortunately, there were also carp and gar, which I wish we could get rid of entirely. The suckers were good-sized, bigger than the ones I once grabbed from the Big Piney when I was a kid. Both black buffalo and suckers are great eating if you know how to ‘score’ them, and grabbing suckers is an old sport that goes back two hundred years in the Ozarks.

The snow and cold came the next day, and I am sure that the white bass spawn was put on hold. White bass are running late this year and that run should go on for a while. Crappies are also spawning late, and I would wager that Ozark waters are colder at this date in May than they have been for ages. Because of the wetness and the snow, morel mushrooms which came up a week or more ago, are still going to be there, fairly fresh. I am not figuring there will be more of them coming up in the next week, but there will be old ones to be found, still great to eat. On Sunday afternoon, I found six in the woods behind my house. I’ll bet they hatched in late April!

If you have nothing to do this weekend, come to Cabool, Missouri’s celebration of “Outdoors in the Ozarks”. I will be there with my old wooden johnboat, working on a sassafras paddle, giving away my Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Magazine, and selling and signing my books.

With the johnboat, we set up a display of photos and items used by old rivermen a hundred or more years ago. There’s a lot more there than my displays however, all kinds of outdoor vendors selling things, and an archery range for anyone who wants to try their hand at shooting a bow. I understand that nearby there will be a display of antique tractors. Guess I ought to bring my old tractor lawn mower, which must be one of the first ones ever made. If you have an old antique farm tractor, you should call the Cabool Chamber of Commerce about bringing it.

Remember that this outdoor festival will run from 9 to 6 on Friday and from 9 to 4 on Saturday. I am speaking to whoever is there to listen at noon Saturday, at which time I will tell everything I know about the outdoors. That talk may not last long!

I hope some of you folks listen in to my outdoor radio program on Sunday mornings on KWTO 560 AM from 8:06 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. You can also listen on your computer by going to radiospringfield.com. or newstalk560.com It is a call-in program, and we would like to hear your opinions or comments. If you have caught a big fish or killed a big gobbler, you may call in and brag about it.

You can see my ‘snow in May’ photos on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. My email address is lightninridge@windstream.net and the mailing address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.