A Time For Killing

 

Three male cowbirds at the base of bird feeders

       I want to make people aware of what they will never hear anywhere else.  I wrote about killing blacksnakes and black vultures and brown-headed cowbirds and I ran into a self-appointed wanna-be naturalist who gave me heck because I mentioned killing those four species.  Those kind of people arouse my ire. 

        

       The very best of the bird experts had to be John James Audubon, who killed a tubful of birds, so he could look closely at each when he painted them.  Jack Miner, Aldo Leopold, John Burroughs and John Muir, all great naturalists, killed wild things, often.  Today we have all these young tree huggers, fern feelers and bug seekers from some metro-environment who never ever will understand a wilderness ecology.

         Young biologists, who first learned about wild creatures and plants in some college classroom and then go to work for conservation agencies are often the worst of the bunch.  I know, I talk to them often… and grimace.  That fellow I talked to couldn’t tell you much about a wild environment, and he had never seen a group of black vultures peck the eyes out of a newborn deer or calf or lamb while it is still alive.  He didn’t believe that happens, but it does. 

       And he also didn’t believe that brown-headed cowbirds have actually caused some birds to be endangered. Look it up. Ornithologists of age and experience say cowbird eggs have been laid in the nests of two hundred species of birds.  Kirtland’s warblers are becoming endangered for one reason… the brown-headed cowbird. I didn’t waste much time talking with him.  I did ask if he would like for me to bring him a copperhead or two for his town lawn.

Cowbird egg laid in a robin's nest. The robins will be lucky to live. The cowbird will hog all the food and many times kick the host babies out of their nest.

 

      It is the way of the future.  There will never be outdoor writers in the future telling you to kill brown headed cowbirds, but if you like cardinals and robins and doves, and any other of 140 species of birds whose nests have been parasitized, you need to shoot every one you see.  They are what they call brood parasites, and I want you to tell me what parasite in the Ozarks is protected by law except them.  I have an open bore 20 gauge and some light game bird loads,  size 8, which I am using to see to it that they do not hurt other species on Lightnin’ Ridge.  Please heed my warning.  One pair of brown-headed cowbirds can place 40 of their eggs in nests of other birds in one summer.  Give that some thought… 40 eggs means 40 to a 100 bird songbird eggs in your area destroyed.  Get on the Internet and learn all about them. But use common sense.  The Internet says the cowbirds are declining.  That is baloney; they never have for years and years. 

       They are not native to the Ozarks.  Fifteen years ago there were none on my ridgetop. If I have anything to do with it, there soon will be none nevermore.  And every black vulture I see will be left rotting in the field or riverway that I find them.  I would do no less for Norway rats, house mice, brown recluse spiders or armadillos.  Spread the word to your neighbors, folks, before a decline in songbirds comes to your area.

       And treat blacksnakes with common sense.  They are bird and rabbit killers along the same lines as feral cats.  If you have either around dairy barns where they thin the population of mice and rats, I understand leaving them, as my grandmother did where she milked her cows when I was a boy.  But let her find one going after a bird’s nest in the trees around her house and he was a dead snake.

 

     Read many of my columns to come which are not published in some newspapers because of controversial content on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com         The lady who puts my writings and the best of my weekly photos on that site tells me there may be hundreds there to read, going back several years.  I wrote my first outdoor column for the Houston Herald in Houston Missouri 57 years ago this week when I was 17 years old.  It was  entitled, “Summer on the Piney”.  

       I have written many more outdoor and nature columns for nearly a hundred newspapers since then, and I have almost all of those articles and features, from the very first to this one, nearly 9000 all told, and about a thousand magazine articles, 90 of my own magazines and 12 books.  If only I had lived in Mark Twain’s time!

       See my other website too, www.larrydablemont.com, where those books and those past magazines are shown and sold.  And when paper prices begin to go down I have two more books coming out—“The Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid” and “The Judges and Justice of St. Clair County” The best of them all will come later, a book with dozens of color photos of the Ozark’s wild creatures and accounts of my experiences with each.  It won’t be a book of facts and figures, but what I have seen and been a part of through all these years.  And that covers a lot of years and many, many hours outdoors, and thousands of photos.