A Slick, Slimy, Seldom-Seen, Salamander Success Story

  

 

Ozark Hellbender

     

      We had a good meeting at Buffalo, Mo on Sunday to kick off our “Common Sense Conservationist” membership drive. We had representatives from Owensville, Ellington, Farmington, Conway, Marshfield-Niangua and Cabool attending.  I will be going to each of those communities to hold future meetings in a quest to establish C.S.C. memberships all across Missouri.  If you want to be a member, contact me.  I will put more information on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors. 

 

      There are several main goals we are tackling, foremost amongst them the restoration of wild turkeys on private land. More about all this in columns to come.

      There are some biologists with the St. Louis Zoo that have done remarkable work trying to re-establish a population of Ozark Hellbenders in rivers across southern Missouri.  It will take awhile, but they have been taking eggs from captive hellbenders and placing them in a couple of Ozark streams, where they have been hatching and surviving.  

      That is all well and good and I applaud them for that, but the survival of the hellbender depends on the survival of Ozark rivers.

      I am not going to go into detail here about what the Ozark hellbender is.  I knew all about them when I was 12 years old, when I caught the first of them on a trotline in the Hog Creek eddy of the Big Piney River.  My grandfather was along.  He said trying to get the hook out of that 18-inch monster would likely kill it, so we cut the line instead.  

      Grandpa told me there was something special about the wicked looking creature.  For one thing if you handled the hellbender its skin was loose and slick and when that slick slimy stuff that covered its body came of on your hands, it would dry them out something awful for the rest of the day.  

      It had a long flat tail and was sort of an orange color with small spots.  In some ways, its shovel-like head was similar to that of a small flathead catfish.  The eyes were little, the four legs stumpy and short with 4 toes.  If you held him up and looked straight at his face, he did look scary to me at that age.  If he were 20 feet long, he would be fearsome.  But the biggest one I ever saw was only 20 inches long.  Over the years, I caught a bunch of them up and down the Piney, most on trotlines. None were colored exactly alike, I never saw identical ones, they were grayish, greenish, brown, orange, spotted and unspotted. 

      With a few I had to cut the nylon line above the hook, but not always.  Grandpa and Dad both told me that there were substances in the hellbender’s body that would allow the hook to be dissolved, or worked free somehow.  We caught lots of them, back then, and several at night fishing for goggle-eye in deep holes with night crawlers.  They had to have deep eddies; I never saw one on a shoal, never seined any when seining for bait.  

      I will never forget the night that my old friend and School of the Ozarks roommate Darrel Hamby caught one at the mouth of Hog Creek as we fished in the dark for goggle-eye.  He was reaching out to grab each goggle-eye he hooked and suddenly it was a hellbender, sort of like grabbing a handful of half-done jello. 

 

     I do hope the experiment with hatching hellbender eggs works, but it will depend on the quality of the water they are placed in.  Some of the rivers they lived in 100 years ago will never be clean enough for hellbenders now.  But some will.  The lower one half of the Big Piney is virtually hellbenderless now, but could provide a good habitat in the future, as the St. Louis Zoo biologists continue to succeed in their efforts.  The upper half, with once-deep holes for that wicked-looking salamander with gills, certainly will not.  It is filling in with sediment and silt and gravel.  Eddies that I knew which once were 8 or 10 feet deep are now shallow enough to wade.

 

      I have a challenge for ornithologists (bird biologists) at the zoo.  Do the same thing for an Ozark bird fast on its way to extinction in our region… the whippoorwill and its cousin, the chuck-wills-widow.

    That will be difficult, because while you can find and hatch the eggs, feeding the young birds will be tough.  They are fed regurgitated insects and cannot fly until about three weeks after hatching.  Eggs are laid in woodlands, no nests… just amongst leaf litter. And it takes a miracle to just happen across them, they are that well camouflaged.   I have never seen more than two eggs.

      They will become extinct in the Ozarks, though they may survive in other ranges.  The factors that have made them decline 70 percent over the past 30 years in the Ozarks are many, and complex.

 

      Before the Covid problems, I spoke all over the Midwest, at churches, wild game dinners, D.U. and other types of conventions. That stopped for a while but I still do that now, and there is no charge.  If your community wants to know about the newly forming Common Sense Conservationist organization, contact me and I will come to tell you all the details and help form a local chapter. My email address is lightninridge47@gmail.com.  Two websites are found under my name. Write to me at P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613, or call my office, 417 777 5227.