Drones For Deer Hunters

 

       

       I have a friend who grew up in Wisconsin who was a very good deer hunter.   He liked to bow hunt in early October where large unharvested cornfields stood...his name was Al Narveson.  Al had found a good number of big bucks by walking along cornrows into the wind, and coming upon bedding deer deep inside the cornfields.  He said that in midday they would hide in those cornrows and    you could walk right upon them. I got to thinking about that.  Al lives in Arkansas now and it has been many years since he has seen a cornfield. But what a difference today would make on that kind of hunting. Al wouldn’t have to walk through a cornfield, he could just buy a drone and fly it over a field and find the deer in a hurry, pinpointing where he needed to stalk one.

       Would drones work in the Ozarks for deer hunters?  Well right now with all the foliage left on the trees, probably not, but when the muzzle-loading season arrives you are dealing with bedded down deer during the day and the foliage is gone.  Deer would be fairly easy to find with a drone, especially with snow on the ground.  I am not sure how to find Al now, but I wonder if he already has figured this drone thing out.

       It is amazing how our seasons are changing.  Ducks that once lined the Ozark Rivers in early November now come to the Ozarks two to four weeks later than they    once did.  I keep an eye on Ozark ponds because that tells me when the mallards begin to arrive.  Last year they didn’t ‘arrive’ they just pretty well passed us by. This Thanksgiving I will have to watch the situation while I fry a turkey out on the back deck because leaves will be falling in the cooking oil.  In twenty years I predict we’ll see the fall foliage at it’s brightest around the first week in December, hurricanes in November, ducks arriving in the Ozarks with the new year, turkeys mating in June and the first tomatoes becoming ripe in July. For the past several years, wild turkey spring mating and egg laying has been two to three weeks later than it was in the 80’s.  

       I have acquired seventeen bound volumes of the “Ozark Mountaineer” magazine, which I will put to good use.  They begin in the early 1980’s. In my own magazine, “The Lightnin’ Ridge Journal”, I have used some old recipes from a hundred years or so ago that came out of the Mountaineer. In future issues I will reprint material from those old historic issues that tell so much about the Ozarks. My Christmas issue of the “Lightnin’ Ridge Journal” has just been printed and you  can get  your  own  80-page issue by calling my office… 417 777 5227. 

 

An Arkansas reader by the name of Phillip Rice sent me this note….        

 

Be sure and mark November 8th on your calendars for opening day of river-otter season. You are allowed two per day, daytime hunting only. The Game and Fish Commission wants you to tell them your hunting strategy, how many days per year you focus solely on hunting otters, and how many you annually harvest. What a joke. Why does AGFC not recognize that managing otters should be right up there at the top of the list in getting our rivers back.  A river the size of the White should support 2 to 3 otters per river mile. There are sections that easily have 10 times those numbers. They eat 15 to 20 percent of their body weight every day. I’d say the average weight of otters is in the twenty- to twenty-five-pound range. Take 10 twenty-pound otters per mile for the 44 miles between Bull Shoals Dam and the confluence with the Norfork River, and the number of fish they are killing is staggering. 

Since we have had one knee jerk reaction, why not have a 2nd and let us put the hammer down on these predators. And throw blue herons in there as well...

       

       Pond owners in the Ozarks are learning to shoot any otters seen around   their ponds if they want to keep their fish. Stocking otters years back was one of the crowning   achievements of the Missouri Department of Conservation’s way-too-young-to-know-what-they-were-doing biologists.   Seemed like such a good idea!  They didn’t know that the otters would end up in north Arkansas rivers destroying fish numbers as well as they did in the Ozarks of Missouri.

Send me comments or messages via email at lightninridge47@gmail.com, or send me a letter to P.O.  Box 22, Bolivar, MO 65613.