The Cedar Tree and Me

 

How strong is the cedar tree? This one is growing from the fork of a giant  maple, 5 feet above the ground

The most perfect Christmas trees I have ever seen are found along the highway between Springfield Missouri and Branson. They are perfectly formed, many not much wider than a lampshade and five or six feet tall.  There they are there for the taking, small, medium and large; all perfectly formed due to their environment, which gives them no plant competition and full sunlight, plenty of rain and ideal soil.  

The Highway Department apparently has no idea what they are worth.  If they would put ordinary entrepreneurs in charge of harvesting and selling them, I think they could make a hundred thousand dollars from those cedars each December.  But, they aren’t so interested in ‘making’ money as they are in increasing taxes! 

Common sense often is rare outside the Ozarks.  City folks buy bottled water that tastes awful! However, if you see one of those perfect Christmas trees along the highway, mark it. Then at night you can have pickup trouble right where it is.  It don’t take no time to cut a cedar tree off a hillside where you had to stop for whatever legitimate reason. I might try that! If I get caught, I suspect I will have to pay a fine nearly equal to that which city suburbanites pay for their Christmas trees legally.

The cedar trees we put to such good use for Christmas trees in my youth are not really cedars, they are junipers …technically speaking of course. ‘Eastern Red Cedar’ is a common name for those trees, and that sounds a lot better than ‘juniper’.  This week as I rambled through the woods, exploring a place I had never seen before, I found a 15-foot cedar tree that had two big scrapes under it’s outer branches where a buck had been leaving his scent, and checking for doe scent.  These ‘scrapes’ are just places underneath overhanging tree branches where bucks prepare scent posts, and scrape away leaves and vegetation on each visit before peeing in the spot.  

They bite at the overhanging branches, and break the tips of them, and rub glands just below the eye against those branches.  I have watched them do it, and it is a fascinating thing.  They make scrapes underneath large cedars, and hardwoods alike, and any novice hunter can find them in November and December, by looking along trails and field borders. 

But this big cedar tree I found was about eight inches in diameter, and a buck had been using the trunk of the cedar as a ‘rub’… a place of a mock fight, skinning up the bark. Bucks love cedars and pines for such fighting and rubbing posts, and it is true that in general, bigger sets of antlers are used on bigger trunks, up to five or six inches in diameter.  And the bucks with smaller antlers usually pick out a smaller sapling only an inch or two thick.  

        It is hard for me to accept that a whole generation of people now go onto city lots and buy Christmas trees, a large number of them spruce or pine instead of cedar. And they pay for them!   They will spend enough on some trucked-in, bound-up tree to buy two or three boxes of shotgun shells, and then throw it away in less than a month.  What the heck has this world come to?!!         Dad and I always went out to neighboring farms in early December, hunting rabbits and quail and farm-pond ducks and at the end of the day, we’d find a perfect cedar Christmas tree which we brought home to set up in the corner in a bucket and decorate.  In doing so, the whole house smelled like Christmas.  That’s because cedar trees smell like Christmas more than anything else, and if it isn’t that way at your place, you are not keeping up with tradition.  Cedar trees, baked cookies and a wet beagle … those are the smells of Christmas.

       So my advice…take an axe and go get a cedar tree with your kids or grandkids, somewhere where you have permission to be, and keep the tradition growing.  And just remember, that old Ozark adage…“shoot a buck, save a tree!” I made that one up. Come muzzle-loader season… that may be my aim, saving cedar trees from some old scraggly-horned buck.

 

       Don’t forget folks, I will be at my Big Piney Nature Center, 6410 Hwy 63 to the south of Houston Missouri from 1 to 4  this coming Friday afternoon and 1 to 4 on Saturday, the 14^th.  The purpose will be giving away a special book I have written for youngsters who like to read and the selling of books and magazines for Christmas gifts and.  But on the 14^th I will be in Houston at the Health Food Center doing the same thing from 10 a.m. to noon.  If you know a kid who needs a good book of short stories for Christmas, come by and see me.

 

       More info at www.larrydablemont.com or on www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com or E-mail me at lightninridge47@gmail.com

 

Chest Waders and Quackers

 

       I would rather hunt ducks than do anything else pertaining to the outdoors.  I remember when I was laughed at for doing so.  It was in the early 70’s in December when I lived on a mountaintop out west of Harrison Arkansas.  I had been hunting on Bull Shoals Lake for much of the day and stopped into a little country store and filling station just outside of town.  I still had my chest waders on and my duck calls around my neck.  An old-timer sitting by the stove couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of me. 

       He said, “Dablemont, is that yore quacker tied around yore neck or are you fixin’ to strangle yoreself?” I told them I had sure enough been duck hunting.

        I let my Labrador get out to pee and when I did, 3 or 4 of the men came out to look at him. When I explained what his job was, one of them said that if his dog ever got his jaws around a whole duck he’d not be inclined to come back for a day or so…  Then they saw the four mallards and a gadwall lying across my boat seat and they could hardly believe they came from Bull Shoals.

       There was no one back in that day hunting ducks on Bull Shoals.  It was a great year because the lake was up fifteen feet or so and the ducks were finding lots of food in the back end of coves and creeks that few fishermen ever went into in the winter. I had it all to myself and it was a duck hunter’s haven.   The water had backed up into the vegetation and there was a lot of food floating in the water.  My dog Rambunctious and I motored into the end of a long cove and ducks went everywhere in flight, maybe a couple hundred of them.  I covered the boat with camouflage beneath a flooded tree and threw out a dozen decoys.   Of course they would come back… all that food amongst the floating debris.  

       As they returned over the next hour in small flocks I picked out the drakes and downed a limit in short order. Some of those hunts, where I had the whole lake to myself, were the best days I have ever spent out with my dog and quacker, chest waders and shotgun, and I have done the same thing on other Ozark lakes. The water conditions have to be right, but when the water rises into the vegetation you can bet the ducks will come, especially in December and January.

       I will never forget something that happened that winter on Bull Shoals.  My Lab brought me a mallard drake that had earthworms crawling out of its beak. I got to looking and all I killed had earthworms in their beaks, throats and crops. Back in one of those coves I guess worms had been floating to the surface too, and the mallards had been eating them. Never seen anything like that before or since.   That would make those particular ducks omnivorous!  To see photos from that day 50-some years ago, including one with old Rambunctious, the chocolate Labrador, find www.larrydablemontoutdoors.com on the Internet. 

       Even though there's such low water conditions on lakes like Bull Shoals and Stockton and Truman, all of which can provide great waterfowling in good years, when ducks come through ahead of a front, fleeing a blizzard up north or an intense ice-up in the prairie wetlands, the hunting can be good for awhile.  It just doesn't stay that way, because to hold ducks, you need water in the vegetation.  Without it, they just won't stay long.

       A few inches of rain could do the trick this winter, because late in the summer, smartweed, nut-sedge and sesbania and other green growth which attract ducks were growing along tributaries and flats on area lakes.  You hope to see the lakes rise into that green growth before the waterfowl migration is in full swing. If our lakes get enough rain to come up just four or five feet, we are going to have some great habitat for ducks.

       

       

       I wrote a book about duck hunting entitled “Memories from a Misty Morning Marsh” which might make a good Christmas gift for a duck hunter.  You can see it on www.larrydablemont.com or come visit me at my nature center on December 14.

 

       This sort of goes along with the way the world is becoming.  A few years ago I went to the county library in Houston Missouri just before Christmas and gave away a book of short stories I wrote for young people entitled, Dogs, Ducks and Bucks. Quite a few parents brought kids to get a book inscribed and autographed. Some just came to get a book for Christmas gifts for kids and didn’t bring the kids with them.   I gave away about 30 or so that day and it made me happier than anyone else. I wanted to do that again but the new librarian there said they were too busy for such an event.  

       So I will do it again, this time at my Big Piney nature center-project a mile south of Houston on Saturday, December 14 from noon to 3 p.m.  If you know a child who likes to read and isn’t getting a lot of presents, come by and get a book for him or her. My other books will be available too and if you already have one bring it by and I will sign and inscribe if for you.  The address of the place is 1640 South Hwy 63.