Last week
or the week before I asked if anyone could guess what bright red bird is commonly
seen in the Ozarks during the summer besides the cardinal. The answer is the summer tanager. And if you occasionally see a bright
blue bird that is smaller than a bluebird, with almost a metallic blue sheen,
what is it commonly called? Answer
at the end of this column.
I am proud
to be publishing a new book on bobwhite quail which will be out this fall,
written by one of the most knowledgeable outdoorsmen I have ever met. His name is Michael Widner, and he was
born and raised on an Ozark farm near Long Creek, north of Alpena, Arkansas. He hunted quail as youngster, back in a
time when quail were plentiful, and never could give it up, even as they became
scarce.
Lots of
quail hunters just gave it up in the past 30 years, but there are some who love
to work with dogs, who hunt declining coveys not to bring home a limit, but
enjoy the satisfaction of bagging perhaps two or three birds and the
opportunity to see a rare covey rise before a setter or pointer frozen on a
beautiful point.
I met the
author when he was about seventeen years old, a junior at Arkansas Tech at
Russellville, Arkansas. I
was only 22 at the time, just out of college and hired by the Arkansas State
Park System to begin a new ‘naturalist division’ in four of the states largest
and most visited parks. I hired
six young men that spring, and one of them was Mike Widner. None had any more knowledge of the
outdoors than he, and his grade point was about twice what mine had been,
majoring in wildlife management as I had.
Mike
had the purest Ozark accent I had ever heard, and he attracted park visitors
like bees to honey. They loved to
hear him talk, and no one went on hikes with him, or attended an evening
program he gave, that wasn’t impressed with what he knew, and what he taught
them. He was a true naturalist, an
interpreter of the Ozarks natural world as good as any I have ever seen.
A few years
later, we worked together as naturalists on the Buffalo River for the National
Park Service. After a few years of
that Mike applied to be a conservation agent for the Missouri Department of
Conservation, and was accepted.
There after weeks of training, Mike graduated at the head of that class.
He worked
as an agent for a few months, but for some reason Mike resigned and came back
to Arkansas. He won’t discuss the
reason why, but I have a hunch he found out the job was not what he thought it
would be.
Back in
Arkansas he went to work to achieve a master’s degree in wildlife management
and became the state’s wild turkey biologist shortly afterward. Funny thing about that, when Mike and I
were young, there were lots more quail than turkeys. One spring when we were working for the state park system,
he and I floated the Big Piney River, where I grew up, and camped for several
days on a gravel bar, fishing and hunting. Mike killed his first wild gobbler during that trip. There were many, many more to follow.
I know that
Mike learned an awful lot about wild turkeys in Arkansas, through a dedicated
study of the birds in the wildest parts of the state. He used small radio transmitters attached to wild turkeys
captured with cannon nets, and tracked them all through the year. Turkey hunters in the Ozarks of
Arkansas say the numbers of wild gobblers have steadily increased over the
years.
I think
Mike had more to do with that than anything else. He retired a few years ago and has turned his attention to
bird-dogs and quail hunting, and thus, this book, which covers fifty years of
learning and experience in the field.
I can’t wait to get it out to all those who are so disappointed in the
demise and steady decline of the greatest of all game birds. You are going to learn a lot about the
bobwhite quail.
Widner
won’t pull any punches. Like me,
he is disappointed that the quail means so little to state conservation
agencies. We both have seen young
biologists come into their jobs with no experience in the field, just the basic
knowledge of the outdoors and wildlife gained from books and classrooms. Trouble is, almost no one educated in
natural sciences now are country people from any kind of rural background. Today’s biologists and conservation leaders,
born and raised in a suburban setting, may have never hunted, or spent even
minimal time in the outdoors.
Mike Widner
knows where to find the best of it, in parts of Kansas and Oklahoma, but he
says that eastern Arkansas seems to be as close to old-time quail hunting as he
has found anywhere. But there is a
way to bring the quail hunting experience back. It will take money to do it, and the MDC has that money, if
they will just use it for something to make better hunting for the common,
ordinary people they have ignored in the past, the people who pay a tax on
everything they buy to provide millions for the MDC to waste.
This state’s
Conservation Department has become as corrupt as any state agency I have ever
heard of. They rape our public
areas and get away with it because the large scale media is in the hip pocket
of the agency. They will not print
the truth about what is going on. They help hide it!
Each year,
contract loggers take millions of board feet of lumber from the big trees on
public owned land managed by the MDC , and fence rows and thickets and small
game habitat are bulldozed so that the department can turn larger acreages over
to tenant farmers, who give back thousands of dollars for the harvest of crops.
Enforcement
agents are becoming thugs, concerned with making targets of innocent people,
and incompetent biologists flail away with something of a trial and error
attitude. I will have more about
this in the next column and I hope you will look for that.
The
answer to the first paragraph question is the indigo bunting.
Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo.
65612 or email me at lightninridge@windstream.net Call our office to acquire our summer magazine or any
of my books… 417-777-5227.
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