The Low-Down on Doves

 

Did you know that a mourning dove has 2,635 feathers? I found that statistic in a book written by John Madson, entitled “The Mourning Dove”. Madson is gone now, but he was a top-notch outdoor writer, on of the old-timers who actually grew up in the outdoors, unlike the suburban outdoor writers that dominate the pages of our larger newspapers today. Madson worked for Winchester Arms and Ammunition, and he published several books about wild game birds and animals through Winchester Press..

Madson reveals many fascinating things about the dove. As a writer, I have likely written a hundred newspaper columns and perhaps a dozen magazine articles about dove hunting. It is so simple and so uncomplicated, what can you say about dove hunting that hasn’t been said a million times. You can’t tell a shooter how to hit one. Sometimes early in the season when the younger doves are coming to a feeding spot, or to a water hole, they are so easy to hit it is simpler than catching sunfish on worms. Sometimes, after they have figured out that hunting season is open, they can elude a shot pattern with ease, diving, twisting, and turning. At times it is something like hitting a butterfly with a rock. 

If it has been written once, that dove hunting is a good way to get a youngster the chance to hunt and experience a day outdoors, it has been written a million times. If you have seen, at the beginning of September, a story talking about training a young Labrador to retrieve, and how the heat can be hard on him so you need plenty of water, that too has been said again and again in print by some enthusiastic woods and waters journalist. If you haven’t heard that number seven and one-half or eight shot, light loads is best for doves, you’ve never read a doggone thing about hunting. So what is there to say about dove hunting. Not much. Heck, let me rephrase that… not nothing.

I might point out that hunting in a crowd isn’t my thing, but I have often written that. I have often said that I do not like to hunt in the heat, and there is never an opening day that doesn’t seem hotter than an August manhole cover on main street. What I don’t often say is that two or three weeks later, when it cools down and you can hunt in midweek and find the right spot, you can hunt doves in a long-sleeved shirt and all alone with your dog. But I’ll be darned if I am going to tell anyone where the hunting might be in early October.

Early hunting seasons interfere with some good fishing, and one good catfish equals a whole tubful of doves. Be that as it may, if you think you have indeed read everything there is to know about dove hunting and doves, get your hands on John Madson’s book. It was he who pointed out that in the bird family called Columbidae there are 269 doves and pigeons, two thirds of them on the other side of the world. Doves and pigeons, Madson said in his book, are the only birds that can drink water by suction, with their heads down, never lifting their beaks, as other birds must do.

 Mourning doves nest from southeast Alaska all through Canada, and each of the 48 contiguous states in the U.S. Forty years ago, they were not known to nest in such northern climates. Some never migrate. Some stay where they are all winter, and northern doves often lose toes to the cold. Doves and pigeons feed their young with something called pigeon milk, as most folks know, and as most folks don’t know, the most deadly dove disease, known as trichomoniasis, is a growth of cankers in the mouth and throat, caused by the ingestion of a living protozoan usually picked up in water.

You can learn a great deal more about doves if you can find John Madson’s book. Even the hunting tips we have all heard a million times. But as to how that study turned up 2,635 feathers on one dove, I don’t know. Probably some college kid counted them one at a time and got a thirty thousand dollar grant from a state conservation agency to do it. But I wonder, how would anyone know if he really counted them all or just gave up and guessed at it?

 

Contact me if you are interested in reading one of my books or the new magazine coming out in November.  My address is PO Box 22  Bolivar Mo. 65613. Or there is my office phone, 417 777 5227. The email address is lightninridge47@gmail.com

 Other columns I have written and my outdoor photos can be found on the computer at larrydablemontoutdoors. 

 

Wylie's Bear Pelt and the MDC

        

 

 

 

 

       I am willing to bet that some  higher echelon  employee of the  Missouri department of conservation will  soon possesses a bear skin today that was killed legally by a thirteen year old boy. Or maybe Johnny Morris will get it. Perhaps it is the director  or  a friend  of the director or maybe a commissioner or a friend of a commissioner.         Someone  will get the pelt of  a  420 pound black bear that was legally taken by young Wylie Willams and no one will ever find out  where it went. The MDC has falsely charged that kid who killed it and legally owns it.  This isn’t unprecedented.  The judge is likely well acquainted with the MDC.   He works  out of Jefferson City.  Would an investigation show he is obliged to the MDC? 

       That has   happened before.  A judge named Kelso was given a gift of 245  thousand dollars by the MDC because he allowed MDC members to hunt on his hunting preserve.  When I found out  about it, they told   me the money was to improve his   property for wildlife.  However they won’t give me anything to improve my property. I am not a judge.

A judge in Oceola had his 400 acres of land along the Sac River made into a magificent private waterfowl marsh with a  mile long levee.  The work was done by employees and heavy equipment  of the MDC. The right people in the MDC hunts there often. You cannot!

        John Hoskins, a past director of the MDC on  the day of his retirement gave 145 thousand dollars to a friend of his who I am told was a lawyer. That is theft of state funds, taxpayer money.  But Hoskins got away with it.  Kelso got away with it and that St. Cllair  county judge got away  with   it.  Your money helped pay for all that.  I am wondering what that honorable judge in Jefferson City got from the MDC to take 13 year old Wylie Williams bear skin away from him. 

                                                                                           ***********UPDATE ************

       The Chief of Enforcement for the  Missouri  Department of Conservation is Travis Mclain, who tells me that the bear hide the department has confiscated from 13-year-old hunter Wylie Williams is in their Jefferson City freezer.  An MDC employee who  gives me a lot of information about what goes on inside the department says Johnny Morris, owner  of Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s will soon get the hide of that  giant 420 pound  black bear.  

       “He gets a whole lot of what gets confiscated,”  I was told, “who knows how  many deer heads and things, all mounted and ready to put up in his stores.  He got that elk head and hide from the illegally killed elk that was found in Shannon county too!  By now it is hanging in one of  his stores as well.

       A fellow I was talking to not long ago commended Johnny  Morris for giving so much money to the MDC.  It is time for people to know where it comes from. Years ago clerks were told to ask folks to make contributions through Bass Pro Shops to the  Missouri Department of Conservation.  They weren’t getting enough that way so now they ask people to donate to “conservation projects” without  mentioning the MDC.  That’s where Morris gets the money to give to Missouri’s so-called ‘conservation’ department.

       Morris was given two and a half million dollars by the MDC a few years ago…a gift of tax-payer dollars.  This dishonest collection of money by people who have no idea where their bass Pro Shops donation is going is an indication of how Morris and the MDC are tied together.  Each year when the MDC gives out 4 or 5 elk tags by drawing to  people who pay for their privilege to hunt one of the tame elk at and around the Peck Ranch  wildlife management area, where they try to keep the elk they bought for several millions , Morris gets one of the tags free.  

       They hide it by calling it a free  tag for an adjacent landowner.  Morris’ land borders Peck Ranch  and for years MDC employees worked to make that land a haven for elk. Those employees didn’t like being hands for Morris and two called me to ask me to write about it.  They claim Morris doesn’t use the tag but gives it to lucky friends or associates.  It all needed to be investigated but wasn’t.  meanwhile the elk that we all paid for are  plentiful on Morris’ property.

A Petrified Bass

 

       Several years ago, after a fishing trip to Arkansas’ Bull Shoals Lake, my Uncle Norten, the best fisherman I   ever knew, walked into his favorite morning café with a fish story even his buddies at the Lone Pine Restaurant wouldn’t believe.  He had them looking at each other with winks and nods as he declared that on a fishing trip just a couple of nights before, his nephew had caught a “petrified bass” of better than five pounds.  He wasn’t actually lying; it was just a matter of choosing the wrong word!

We had fished most of the night, and by 7:00 a.m. I was bone tired.  It was daylight, but the submerged lights on either side of the pontoon boat were still burning, and threadfin shad were circling by the thousands, their masses making a slight whirring, rustling sound in the water around us.   The shad nets were so full of shad you could barely lift them out of the water.  We had an ice filled cooler stuffed with walleye and crappie.

       I hooked one of the shad on to a quarter ounce jig-head I had just tied on, and cast it out away from the boat toward the steep rock bank about thirty feet away.  Immediately a fish took it. I set the hook, and the fight was so-so, even though I could see in the clear water that it was a pretty good bass.  In fact it weighed a little better than five pounds by my best estimation, even though it fought like a bass half that size.

       Examining the fish, I could see why.  Apparently it had been injured at one time or another, seriously enough that one side of its body was stiff and inflexible, like it was made from a hard Styrofoam.  I called Norten over to look at it, even though he had just landed a nice walleye and was much more interested in it than my rather ordinary bass.

       And then he too was amazed.  “Never seen nothin’ like it,” he told me.  “That bass is stiff as a board.  Wonder how he swum like that?”

And that’s when I said it…”Yeah, he’s been injured and those muscles on one side have ‘atrophied’.  It’s a wonder he has been able to survive.”

       So he was a little miffed at his card-playing friends at the local restaurant.  If he said we caught a petrified bass, they ought to believe him, he figured.  I bailed him out by coming along a day later and putting an end to the snickers and winks.  Uncle Norten hadn’t exactly lied.  The fish was atrophied, not petrified.  And while they accepted what I said, they weren’t real sure what the difference was either.

             ****************

      NEWS FROM  THE  CHIEF

 

The Chief of Enforcement for the Department of Conservation is Travis McLain.  I’ve been talking to him about some of the times that I believe conservation agents have violated laws and the rights of hunters and fishermen.  He sent me a form for people who have a complaint against an MDC agent to fill out and send back to his attention.  So now you can actually be heard. I don’t know what good it will do but it is at least an attempt by Mr. McLain to listen and take some kind of action.  

       If you will get on the Internet and go to larrydablemontoutdoors.com you can see copies of that two-page form.  I encourage those who are being or have been victimized unlawfully by agents to use this form and send it in.  Until now I didn’t know it existed and it may be something new.  If you want my help in getting the form and getting it filled out, contact me… P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.  I have copies of the form I can send or email to you. You can also email me to get it … www.lightninridge47@gmail.com

 

       I encourage you to also read the story on that website of what the MDC is going to do with the bear hide they confiscated from 13–year-old hunter Wylie Williams. There is a photo of the bear Young Wylie killed legally. Guess where it is going and how much it is worth?  It is an unusual situation because Jefferson City Judge wrote in his decision that Williams did not prove he was innocent. I  didn’t know any  judge anywhere could decide a case because someone couldn’t  prove they were innocent.  Also the agents who accuse him of using bait went to the site days after Wylie had hunted there. They went to the place he killed it days later…on a date that the bait would have been legal.  Because of the power of the MDC and their lawyers, newspapers and other media cannot use this story.  I can, and I have… larrydablemontoutdoors.  Please read it..