Panther Creek
wild turkey
Someone told me that I asked the same master naturalist question in two different columns. That is what happens when you get hit over the head with a few falling tree limbs out in the woods and sleep too often on gravel bars with a rock for a pillow when you are young.
But
this week I have a question any master naturalist ought to know without going
to the computer. And I should
point out that anyone who really is a naturalist should know this without batting
an eye or breaking open a book. In
nature, everything that exists in the Ozarks has a genus name. That is because common names often get
folks confused. For instance when
I was a kid on the Big Piney, some rivermen called blue herons ‘cranes’. And some called a green sunfish a
perch. If you really want to know
what something is-- beyond argument,-- you use genus names. For instance a great blue heron
actually is an entirely different bird than a sandhill crane and a perch in
hillbilly country is actually just a sunfish, not a perch at all. A perch doesn’t even look like a
sunfish.
But
let’s get to this question of genus names. If you were floating the river and
spending the night on a gravel bar, your frying pan at suppertime would be a
suitable place for which; a mephitis or a micropterus? Which would be unwelcome in your boat?
I
learned all about scientific names in classes at School of the Ozarks College,
and then at University of Missouri.
At MU I learned that some of those instructors who could tell you all
about scientific names knew very little about the creatures in the world where
they lived. And those old timers
who fished, hunted and trapped all their lives thought I was crazy when I told
them the scientific name of a raccoon.
Old
Bill said he had never trapped a procyon lotor in his whole life, and didn’t
reckon he had ever seen one. One
of the mammology professors on the other hand said raccoons never raised young
in the river bluff caves, they only bore young in hollow trees, which was a
ridiculous assumption based on what the books said and nothing more. He was dead wrong.
Would
you wonder where I learned the most…in the classroom or in a johnboat?
Truthfully,
I am not sure, but I am glad I got a good dose of both. Certainly though if I had to survive in
the woods all by myself, what I learned at Mizzou would be of little use. What always hurt me was hearing some
professors talk about those hill people, who included both my grandfathers and
the old timers I idolized, as ignorant!
Had
a great time at last Saturday’s Grizzled Old Outdoorsman’s swap meet, and
hundreds of people attended in the rain, from at least three states. We filled a room with a lot of junk and
antique items left from the passing of the old man who once owned it all. We
made a sign saying that anyone could take what they want and leave a donation
in a can for what they thought it might be worth. Truthfully, if that can had held a hundred dollars at the
end of the day I would have been terribly happy, but it didn’t. It held a little more than six hundred
dollars!!
The
youth of the Brighton Assembly of God Church, making food for visitors, had
some of the best biscuits and gravy for breakfast that you have ever tasted,
and pork sandwiches that were big enough for two meals. They too were blessed with generous
donations. It was a great day
though, not because of the money, but because I got to meet and talk with so
many folks who read this column. I
seldom get to do that.
This week I am going to go down to Arkansas and fish at Bull Shoals and Dardanelle lakes and grab yellow suckers in a little creek down there not far from the Norfork river. Friends tell me the morels have just popped up on Bull Shoals. And I am going to go out and call in a big old gobbler (genus name—meleagris) or two sometime soon and shoot every one I see, before the hunting season is even close! I intend to shoot them with my camera, a kind of catch-and-release type of hunting.
It
is really easy to do that now with the backdrop of some green pasture, but what
I want to get is photos of wild gobblers in the forest setting which is their
natural habitat, maybe with a budding redbud somewhere beneath a giant white
oak or two the loggers haven’t got to yet. Gobblers are beautiful in those green pastures, even with a
cow patty or two nearby, but that isn’t where they were first placed by the
Creator. They are a woodland
creature. Taking a picture of one
of them in a pasture is like going froggin’ in a sewer pond. The ambience ain’t what it oughta be.
I
made a dozen of my little turkey calls the other evening. I have hunted with
nothing else since I first found them about forty-five years ago, made by an
old-timer at Licking Missouri.
Have you ever run into someone who kept track of how many gobblers he
had killed? Well, I know about how
many I have killed, within a dozen or so at least, and I am not about to tell
anyone because it sounds as if I am lying, and I do not want readers to think
killing a gobbler is my main reason to hunt turkeys.
As
an outdoor writer I have been able to hunt them in 6 states. I remember when I
could legally kill three gobblers in the Ouachita and Ozark mountains of
Arkansas before the Missouri season began. Then a hunter could kill two in Missouri and two more in
Kansas. Add up how many gobblers a
devoted turkey hunter with more energy and enthusiasm than brains could collect
over a long period of that.
I could kick myself for getting so
wrapped up in turkey hunting that my fishing and river floating suffered as a
result. Now I fish more in April because turkey hunting is too darned easy
today. It wasn’t like that 40
years ago when a man could hike back into the hills and be all alone, and
gobblers were scarce as honest politicians.
And as to the quiz, mephitis is a skunk and micropterus is a bass. Actually you could fry either one for supper if worse came to worse!
E-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.
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