Upcoming Interviews and Supreme Immunity

 

 If non-resident turkey hunters quit coming to Missouri, it is a big loss of revenue for the MDC.

 

       I talked to the new director of the Missouri Department of Conservation this week, and he gives me some hope.  He hails from Ozarks country, the small community of Lincoln Missouri, where he and his dad kept coonhounds and hunted coons and sold their pelts. The former director was a lady who I interviewed for hours once and she didn’t know the difference between a coon pelt and a cowhide.  

       We talked about meeting on August 19 so I can learn more about his attitude toward conservation issues in Missouri, and  I will report on that in my column that next week. I also talked with what they call a turkey and grouse biologist for that department.  He is too young to be that, and completely dedicated to the department’s position that the reason we have about one-third of the number of wild turkeys we had twenty years ago is habitat loss.  That is absolutely ridiculous and I told him so, going to the extent of telling him to come join me to look at places in the Ozarks where thousands of acres of land haven’t changed a bit and wild turkeys have declined considerably. 

       I have to admire him for talking to me when I was giving him ‘what-for’ about the department's refusal to change anything that might cost them money from the sale of turkey tags.  Then we got down to brass tacks, me challenging him to come to the Ozarks to meet at a large event center where three or four hundred people could witness and contribute to a debate between me and him and anyone he would like to bring with him.  He kind of indicated that if the director would approve that kind of thing he might just do it.

       When I meet with the director I will urge him to do the same thing.  There is no reason that he and others in the department would not meet with country people, outdoorsmen and landowners in such a situation, where written questions could be submitted for them to answer in a very controlled debate.  The department would not be in control of the situation and that is where the rub is.  When they have meetings, they are in control and you get to hear their presentation first.

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       I am going to tell something here they do not want told.  That urge for money is what drove the spring extention of the turkey season to include all-day hunting. Talking to a source that knows all about it, and to a non-resident hunter, I got a true picture.  Non-resident turkey hunters are getting to where they don’t want to spend the hundreds of dollars on those out-of-state turkey tags. I talked to a turkey-call maker from Tennessee,  by the name of  Eric Crouse.  He said he and a large group of hunters that had been coming to Missouri for 15 or 20 years will never come to hunt here again because the decline in wild turkey numbers that makes it next to impossible to hear gobblers as they once did. He told me that if the director or turkey biologist would agree to that meeting I propose, that he would bring several of his fellow hunters  up to attend the meeting, all the way from Tennessee. 

       That all-day rule change came about because too many non-residents are angry. In Missouri, they have nothing to do after mid-day and are considering going to other states.  In an attempt to keep that non-resident money coming in the MDC decided to extend daily hunting hours to sunset.  It makes sense for keeping non-residents.  If you live in Missouri you just go back home and get some other work done or go fish a pond  somewhere with the half-day season we have always had.  Non-residents too often go back to a motel or camp and just sit there.  Not now… now they can hunt all day!  Maybe now the MDC can make a little more money from non-residents who will come to the state not knowing that in most of the Ozarks at least, wild turkey numbers are a fraction of what was once here.  And hunting late in the day helps hunters to roost gobblers for the next morning, even allowing for a little roost-shooting at dusk.

                     

       Next  week’s column is a follow up to a story I wrote back in December about a man from Sullivan who had a conservation agent with no search warrant sit in his driveway for two hours and steal a wild turkey he had killed.  He made the mistake of taking his turkey out of the freezer and showing it to the agent, one he had legally killed and properly telechecked.   Now he is suing the department for theft of property.  The MDC’s defense is ‘Supreme Immunity’.  What a story this is.

 

       Contact me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or call our office at 417-777-5227.  I think folks will like my new book, “The Buck that Kilt the Widow Jones... Short Stories from the Outdoor Ozarks”.  It is 16 dollars postpaid.  The first 100 are numbered, to be inscribed to the reader and autographed.  You can also order one by mail, by sending 16 dollars to ‘The Buck’, P.O Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.