Browns on the White…

 

                           Frank Saksa with a large brown trout

       There may be no better fishing to be found in the Ozarks in March than the brown trout fishing on the White River, for many miles below Bull Shoals Dam. Brown trout actually spawn in the White in December into February, and there are some fish there in those waters well over 20 pounds. In fact several 30-pound plus browns have been caught in the past 20 years from the White River.

       They feed ravenously after the spawning period, as do the rainbows. Trouble is, it is difficult to catch big rainbow trout from the White, because they are caught quickly on natural bait and therefore not given much chance to grow after they are stocked. They rarely bring off a successful spawn in the White, but it is not unheard of. A 14- or 15-inch rainbow isn’t hard to catch from the White, and on light spinning gear, they are strong fighters.

       It is not unusual for inexperienced fishermen to hook and land brown trout from 5- to 10-pounds. The river has a large number of brown trout much larger than that, a real prize for the White’s early spring anglers. Browns are known to be warier than rainbow trout, but they are particularly susceptible to 5- or 6-inch Suspending Rogue lures.

       A Suspending Rogue is a lure which is easy to cast because it is fairly heavy, and long and slender. And it takes no great talent to make it look like something a brown trout takes a shine to. Usually browns and rainbows both will hit the lure when it has stopped, so be ready to set the hook. Use six- to eight-pound line if you aren’t experienced in this type of fishing. If you are an old hand at it, four-pound line will work even better because it has lower visibility. Just keep that drag set well.

       White Rive Guide Frank Saksa say’s that the best brown’s he sees each year fall to those Rogues, which are jerked several feet and then allowed to drift in the current, then jerked hard again.

       “You’ll see, after you have fished awhile, how many times they hit those Rogues when they are dead in the water.”

 Saksa says, “Jerk ‘em a few feet, but resist the urge to just keep working them. Let the lure stop a few seconds, and hang on.”

       Saksa’s clients land several brown trout between 10 and 15 pounds in March. Most are photographed and released to grow larger. And while there are thought to be a number of 20- to 30-pound browns in the White, the Norfork and the Little Red, few are ever kept. All are released to grown larger. These fish grow very fast; reaching lengths of 18 to 20 inches in only three years, and the females will exceed five pounds in weight in that time. They may live more than 20 years and grow a maximum weight of 40 pounds in the Ozarks.

       Saksa says a dead brown was found on the White in the winter a few years back, which was partially decomposed, but thought to be larger than 25 pounds. Fishermen who fish for brown trout year round tell of seeing or hooking fish they think will exceed 30 pounds, but they seldom have the tackle to land one that size. Saksa says many big browns are also caught in the spring and on crayfish, white jigs or spoons.

       When winter-kill shad are coming through the dam and drifting down the White, you can catch both rainbows and browns on a 1/16 to 1/8 ounce white jig. The smaller the jig and the lighter the line, the better luck you will have.

       But the Rogue is more fun. The brown trout, are a catch-and-release species. If you get a big one, take a picture and release it to let it grow. Keep the rainbows to eat. They do not produce in any appreciable numbers Brown trout do. The limits on the two species change from time to time.

       There are techniques involved on the White River and the Norfork River, which you do not learn overnight. Spend a day with a knowledgeable guide like Saksa and you will learn more in a day than you might learn in a month of fishing on your own. Talk to folks in resorts up and down the river if you do choose to fish without a guide. There are length limits to know about, some areas where you may not use barbed hooks and natural bait. Those catch-and-release areas like the one just below the White River Dam are places where bigger fish can be found, rainbows, even walleye from time to time. In that area below the dam, you may keep walleye or crappie sometimes found there, but not trout.

BE sure of the limits, and stamps and licenses you need. Ask the resorts and docks about the best lures at the time, the best colors, and even line color. Those are things they know, which you need to know.

Short-Eared Oddballs

 

                

      Several years ago in late February a gentleman called me to tell me he had seen around 200 owls the day before in one small area in the western Ozarks.  He said that on one corral fence there were more than thirty in a group!

      When you are a grizzled old outdoor veteran like me, you figure you have seen about everything in the outdoors, and I have never seen more than four or five owls of any species together in the woods ever.  So, you can figure if I haven’t ever seen something, I won’t believe it ‘til I see it.  And folks, ‘I went there and seen it and I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it’.  

       Near Greenfield, Missouri was a huge group of short-eared owls, a species a little bit like the barred owl in size and appearance, but with small ears sticking up. In habit, they are much different than most of the owls we are accustomed to hearing and seeing in the Ozarks.  They have a mean look to them, with ornery-looking bright yellow eyes rather than the brown eyes the barred owl has.  And the face is much different, with a pronounced circle of feathers, contrasting white and dark brown, and two little feather patches referred to as “ears”, which are much like the horns on a horned owl.  Except the ears on a short-eared owl can usually not be seen, they just barely stick up above the forehead most of the time.

      They are a species not so much fond of forests; they do not seem to need a tree.  They stick to a more open country like that prairie land along the Missouri Kansas border, with scrub timber and thickets.  And they nest on the ground!  Now that is something, when you think about how most all owls nest in hollow trees.  The barn owl often nests in old buildings of course, and there is an odd little burrowing owl which nests in holes in the ground.

      It is interesting to note that an owl can’t build a nest because his beak isn’t made for carrying and assembling nest materials.  A burrowing owl doesn’t dig his burrow, and barn owls don’t build a nest at all, they just lay eggs on a barn loft or ledge.  Great horned owls and barred owls find a natural hole in a tree and nest there, or sometime use an old hawk nest.  But short-eared owls actually nest in the grass on the ground, which they trample down and flatten down, and they actually try to arrange a few sticks in a situation which really doesn’t resemble a nest. Knowing that other owls do not carry sticks, that’s something I’d like to see.

      On this little flattened grass “nest” they will lay anywhere from 3 or 4 to 7 or 8 eggs, depending on the whim of the female owl I suppose. They lay their eggs in May or early June, and the eggs aren’t much more than an inch wide, about an inch and half long.  That is a very small egg for a bird that eventually will mature at a size of 14 to 16 inches tall and weigh about a pound. Most owls and predatory birds, known as raptors, are nesting now, sitting on or laying eggs in late February or early March.

 Ornithologists examined the stomach contents of 110 short-eared owls many years back, and found that three-quarters of their diet had been mice or voles of one kind or another, about 10 percent small birds and nearly as many moles and shrews.  About 7 percent of the diet appeared to be insects, with the stomach of one owl containing about 30 big grasshoppers. So that tells you they didn’t do that study in the winter!   Another odd thing about the short-eared owl is that he is a daytime type of owl, actively hunting during the day more than at night, when most other owls are active.

       But why do they bunch up in flocks? Why are so many owls concentrated in such a small area together?  Who can explain that?  Certainly not me, and up to then I though I knew everything!  Obviously these short-eared owls do some kind of a migration, perhaps not very far, but likely from a place where food supplies of small ground mammals had been decimated for some reason or another. It is likely a mass movement of a species looking for food. I don’t see, anywhere in books I have, any naturalists talking about a migration of owls.

      Obviously, as I have said so often, no one can know all there is to know about nature.  Those of us who spend a great deal of time outdoors see unexplainable things.  A modern day outdoorsman or naturalist who tries to learn by the book can know little of the secrets of nature.  You have to be there sometimes to see things which perhaps no one has seen before. 

If you like to read about the outdoors, see my websites, www.larrydablemont.com 

An Excerpt from the Book, “Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid.”

                                                       Lane Davis

An Excerpt from the Book, “Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid.”

       In the 60’s, Houston Missouri had a weekly newspaper called the Houston Herald. The owner and editor was a man I got to know well. His name was Lane Davis.  I started guiding float fishermen at a young age, in an old wooden johnboat, and Lane was one of my clients.  He liked floating the Roubidoux  River  over by  Plato.  It was a small river with much more water back then than it has now, some deep eddies and lots of smallmouth, goggle-eye and black perch (green sunfish).  Lane was a good fishermen and he always caught lots of fish.

        I was 13 in the summer of ‘61, a troubled youngster who hated school, rich people, teachers and most all of the kids I went to school with. I was at a dangerous crossroads in my life.  I took my .22 pistol to school that fall to shoot a 15-year-old bully. I came close to using it, and I still sweat a little at the memory of that.  I wasn’t a mean or cruel kid, but I had been convinced I was worthless and without any ability. My grades were low, and I had no size or athleticism. I only wanted to be in my dad’s pool hall or alone in the woods or on the river.  Everywhere else there was conflict. 

       Lane Davis was one of three men that helped salvage a young life and get me through that awful time.

       Floating the river in the spring of ‘64, Lane convinced me I could write!  Then he said if I would write stuff about the outdoors he would publish it in the Herald.  The first few columns I wrote for the newspaper was entitled, “Summer on the Piney.”  That was the first one or two of nearly 6,000 newspaper columns to come over the next 63 years, outdoor columns published in more than 200 newspapers in five states.

       The week I graduated, at 21 years of age, I was hired as the outdoor editor for the Arkansas Democrat, the states largest newspaper out of Little Rock.  Lane Davis was my lone reference, and the only one I needed. The pay then, in 1970 was 509 dollars per month plus travel expenses.  I thought I was the luckiest man alive. 

       At M.U. when I was only 19, I wrote a manuscript about one of those old johnboats dad had built we called Ol’ Paint.  I had been reading Outdoor Life and Field and Stream magazines in our pool hall since I was 12 years old and I told my friends I was writing that article for Outdoor Life Magazine.   No one believed that that huge magazine would even consider it, including me. I was a kid wanting to be a writer, reaching for the stars.

              There is still an old Underwood typewriter in a storage closet in my office that belonged to my new wife, in 1970 who had been the secretary to the vice president of McDonnell Douglas Aircraft in St.Louis.  At only 18 years old she could type 110 words a minute on that old manual typewriter.  She typed that manuscript and I sent it to the editor of the largest outdoor magazine in the world.  A letter came back in the next couple of weeks from editor William Rae, saying that Outdoor Life was pleased to receive it and with my permission they would publish it and pay me 1500 dollars. I nearly fainted! 

       The ‘Old Paint’ article was published in Outdoor Life in1972 and that year it was chosen to be the only outdoor story published in a NewYork book entitled “The Best Sport Stories of 1972” It was also published years later in a 500 page anthology entitled, “The Best of Outdoor Life.” It had about 75 articles chosen from magazines covering 1890 thru 2000. I could scarcely comprehend mine being one of them.

       What I remember about that latter book was articles in with mine were written by Zane Grey, Archibald Rutledge, Jack O’Connor, Edwin Way Teale, James Oliver Curwood and dozens of other legendary outdoor writers. That first year out of college, as the new outdoor editor of the Arkansas Democrat, I began to sell articles to Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, Sports Afield and several west coast outdoor magazines put out by Petersen’s Publishing company. In the next ten years I sold articles to more than 60 outdoor magazines. One of those magazine articles,  some written in only an hour or so, would pay me 2  to 3 times my monthly salary for the Democrat.

       Today the  Houston Herald still uses my column each week, a self-syndicated outdoor column which is used in about 40 or so newspapers in 3 states.  I hope that somewhere in heaven Lane Davis knows that and how important those fishing trips were on the Roubidoux. On those trips he helped a hapless, confused kid become a successful naturalist and outdoor writer.