The black vulture, an emerging menace for Missourians
I want to warn all you readers about something… red
wasps! The whole month of August
and much of September are the days in which they become most aggressive, as
their larvae grow closer to maturity in the paper nests they make around nooks
and crannies in sheds and around porches.
The
same can be said of yellow-jackets, which have nests in the ground. But nature has an answer… in
August and September the country is full of green tomatoes, and nothing soothes
any kind of sting like a green tomato, cut in half and applied to the sting, squeezing
juice onto the area. If you have
multiple stings, use duct tape to hold cut small green tomato halves against
each. I don’t know why they are so
efficient for stings, but they are.
Maybe I have a reader who can explain the chemistry of it.
How
far into north Missouri have armadillos and road-runners actually
advanced? A reader near Lake of
the Ozarks told me recently that this summer he has seen several road-runners
on his place, at least three or more.
Armadillos, which are the scourge of ground nesting birds, are in the show-me
state now by the thousands.
Recently there has been an outbreak of leprosy in Florida and some other
southern states, attributed to the abundance of armadillos.
It
has long been known that the animal is a carrier of leprosy. Just last week the Missouri Department
of Conservation acknowledged that as on of their media specialists said on
television that everyone should avoid handling dead or live armadillos! I second that… it is a brilliant piece
of advice, perhaps the result of their extensive scientific studies!
I
am afraid what is coming next is a plague of black vultures. They are becoming common in the very
southern fringe of Missouri and terribly overpopulated in northern
Arkansas. Last January I saw more
than a hundred of them at a big chicken raising facility along the James River
south of Springfield, I suppose feasting on piles of dead chickens dumped just
above the river.
In
January, they should be long gone from here, as they winter in Mexico and Central
America, but they seem to disdain migration now. They seem well fed because of
changing land use and the question is, how far into Missouri will they go? I’d like to hear from readers on
this. The farthest north I have
seen them is Truman Lake.
Down
in the White River area of north Arkansas many hundreds of them have being
killed through special permits given by the Game and Fish Commission. They are
a real problem for boat docks where they congregate in big numbers. But it
seems you can’t kill enough of them.
These birds will kill young calves… that fact has been documented. I
don’t think turkey vultures have ever been known to do that.
Another
Missouri reader told me he witnessed a single black vulture pecking at and
bloodying the ears and face of a newborn calf before he could drive it away,
and then it came back to continue its assault. He called the MDC and reported it, and he was transferred to
someone who told him no vulture would do such a thing. They will!
Black
vultures even attack things they can’t eat. A dozen or so of them attacked a new pickup parked on
Norfork Lake a couple of years ago and scratched an pecked it so badly they did
several thousand dollars worth of damage to it. There have been several instances of them damaging vehicles
and no one can understand why.
These
birds are devilish. They, along
with the armadillos, should be killed anywhere they are found, but, for some
idiotic reason they are protected by federal law under the migratory bird
act. It would be interesting to
know how far north they have come so if you are sure you have seen one anywhere
north of Stockton Lake, let me know.
You
can easily tell a black vulture from a turkey vulture. They have no red on the head, they are
smaller, with grayish patches beneath the wings. You can see a color photo of one on my website…
larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com
When
it gets this hot, there isn’t much you can do outdoors during the day. A couple
of years ago, I took outdoor writers Jim Spencer and Jill Easton on a July
float trip when the temperature rose to 102. We spent as much time in the water as we did in my johnboat,
and we kept everything wet in that aluminum boat. When I was a kid, and floated in wooden johnboats, you
couldn’t burn yourself by hopping out of the water onto a seat. You CAN burn
yourself on a dry, super-heated aluminum boat seat.
At
the end of the shoals that day, we would wade out chest deep and fish the spots
where the water slowed and deepened, and we actually caught a good number of
bass. I use to float those rivers
at night and use a jitterbug to catch bass, and at the same time catch a
sackful of bullfrogs.
As
you get older bullfrogs aren’t as good to eat, partly because there are more
problems found on a river at night; slick rocky shoals too shallow to float, bugs
attracted to your headlamp, the humidity, the discomfort of gravels in your
shoes, and the fact that good bullfrogs aren’t nearly as plentiful as they once
were. A friend of mine
blames several things for that, primarily the over-population of great blue
herons. There are far too many of
them, but then, there are more otter, more mink, more raccoons, more of
everything that likes to eat bullfrogs.
I
wonder sometimes if when a raccoon gets older if he is content to just to eat
corn and crawdads, and not work as hard as he might have to in catching a
bullfrog. I think sometimes that
it is laziness that makes me hesitate to go frogging in the middle of the
summer. But if it cools down a
little…I’m going to do it again!
I
keep hearing a couple of big bullfrogs bellowing in the pond down in the woods
behind my home. I ought to go practice on them I suppose, just to sharpen up my
reflexes. We never did gig frogs,
we always caught them by hand, freezing them by shining a bright light in their
eyes. That takes a quick hand and
you have to focus. You can’t be
looking around to be sure there are no snakes to deal with.
Once
when I was a kid, I was about to grab a frog when a big water snake slid right
over it. That shook me up, but the
frog didn’t move and I got him.
Come to think of it, I always liked fishing at night with a jitterbug more
than frogging, which was a whole lot like work at times. If it gets a little cooler some summer
night, I might just forget the froggin’ and go jitterbuggin’! Yeah by golly, I think that’s what I’ll
do… some night soon… if it gets cooler…
Readers
can write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or email me at
lightninridge@windstream.net.
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