An Owl Before Dawn

There is no more efficient predator than a great horned owl.  Silent and deadly, he can eat whatever he wants, up to and including a roosting wild turkey.  Their flight is completely silent, and they occasionally break the neck of roosting turkeys in the darkness before the dawn.  But that does not happen often if there are plenty of possums, rabbits and small ground mammals to feed upon. And, he will attack and eat a skunk with enthusiasm.

Always, beneath a February or March moon, when there is a little snow on the ground, I watch rabbits playing around my place, in the pre-mating-season antics which include games like jumping over each other and kicking their heels up as if they had never heard of a great horned owl.  Certainly the semi-uncivilized atmosphere around my home, and the presence of my Labradors, eliminated the threat of foxes and coyotes, which stay down in the woods behind the pond.  So this became a sort of haven for cottontails, especially with all the brush piles I have built here.  

       Of course, I would probably opt for not having one house mouse or Norway rat in the whole Ozarks, but I like the idea of some ground mammals like the woodrat and harvest mice and white-foot mice…and rabbits! I’d lot rather have cottontails and quail than hardly anything I can think of.  I would have more if the great horned owl that lives beside us were gone, but I would not want to never hear or see him again.

My grandfather, who always lived out in the woods or on the creek somewhere, sawed the top out of medium-sized trees up about twenty feet from the ground, to create a flat landing place for the great horned owl, and then would set a steel trap there, and bait it with a wood rat or small squirrel.  He was paid a small bounty at the county courthouse for the feet of owls, but he also saw no good in them, and believed in maintaining them only in strong enough numbers so that they survived along the river miles from where he kept a few chickens.  Grandpa liked to eat eggs and the owls liked to eat chickens, and he was much more inclined to believe in the survival of things he liked to eat, like rabbits, quail and ducks, than things he didn’t eat. 

There were so fewer men back then, than there are today. Grandpa wasn’t so far removed from a time when a man’s greatest concern wasn’t so much the economic stimulus, but what he was going to eat and perhaps what might be about to eat him. Who could believe we would ever make a great and drastic impact on the land, and perhaps endanger our own existence in time?

When I was 15 years old, Grandpa and I floated a particular Ozark river in a wooden johnboat he built, and caught some nice fish from it.  Today that stream is nearly dry. If I mention it on occasion when I speak to a live audience somewhere, it quickly comes to me they would rather I didn’t. So more often, I talk about the funny stories, which came from the old men in the pool hall back in that time. 

I figured out long ago that even if you know something, it isn’t always wise to try to explain it to anyone. That’s true of things like the spreading of billions of gallons of chemicals, all over the Ozarks.  Nothing will stop it, and what is going to come from it is going to come from it, and that’s that. 

Maybe God himself knows this, and is just watching and waiting, ready to reclaim, rebirth and regrow this old earth sometime in the future.  I guess it follows then, that the best thing to do is the best we can, to try to get our grandkids someplace where there are songbirds still singing and the water still has some crawdads and kingfishers and there are more trees than there are stumps.

If you wonder how any of this has anything to do with that owl, I can’t explain it.  I just thought about some of those things while I was listening to him, mice and rabbits and water, and that fire in California last year, and the mess the cities of this nation are in. 

 It was awfully quiet and peaceful up here on Lightnin’ Ridge that night, with the moon so bright it was casting shadows on my lawn as it sunk toward the west well before dawn. That old owl is likely sitting in a hollow tree somewhere right now, getting some sleep, and maybe a little bit hungry because there aren’t as many rabbits around my place.  Some of that may be his own darn fault. But at least he has no steel traps in flat-topped cedars to contend with now, and his feet aren’t worth a thing.

 Read other columns of mine on larrydablemontoutdoors.com, and see my books and magazines on larrydablemont.com

Firewood in Abundance

 

         I went to Bull Shoals Lake last week and you can see the effects of the drought there, as it is lower than I have ever seen it.   The Ozarks of both Missouri and Arkansas need inches of rain badly to fill our lakes and rivers to a level they all need to be.  The Buffalo River is so low that only the lower portion is full enough to float.  On upper sections, nearly three quarters of the river, there are shoals so shallow canoes can’t pass through or over without dragging.  That doesn’t bode well for all the canoe companies there.  Spring rains may fix that but my feeling is that we won’t get the kind of rains in the spring to raise lakes like Bull Shoals or Truman or Norfork.   

         Speaking of Norfork, my spring magazine carries a story by Robert Page Lincoln which was published in 1952 in an outdoor magazine. It is all about the new Norfork Lake, in which he expounds on its wonders as a fishing lake and one which is different than any others as it won’t fill in with silt as all others seem to be doing at that time in the Midwest. Lincoln didn’t like reservoirs because of many factors; chief among them is the fact that they destroyed free-flowing streams.

         When I was a boy there was talk of damming the Big Piney River where I grew up, but the problem seemed to be the hundreds of caves along the river, which would drain any impoundments there.  Right now, the up-river sections of the Piney are so low, even in the spring, that where my dad and I once floated in wooden johnboats, you can’t get down the stream in a kayak.  It is little more than a creek now in the area north of Cabool.  I think the Missouri Department of Conservation could use some of its millions to place a dam there on those headwaters, which could create a 2- or 3- hundred acre lake which would not hurt the stream at all and provide some good fishing for the folks in Cabool, Willow Springs and Mountain Grove.  That portion of the Piney is ruined for good, with not enough water for anything but green sunfish and punkinseeds.           

            Landowners have removed most of the trees, and in places where I remember deep holes with rock bass and smallmouth, there is little more than shallow, gravel-filled little eddies where even crayfish are few.  I would give anything to see a conservation-oriented group get behind the idea of a small dam there.  It wouldn’t put much of a dent in the MDC budget to create a dam, which would have no affect on the lower river.  Most of the upper third of the river that I know like the back of my hand is something of a skeleton of what I remember from the fifties and sixties.

         Down in Arkansas on the watershed of the White River, in a stretch of highway between Mountain View and Calico Rock, there is an ugly scar where a fire has destroyed several hundred acres of National Forestland.  Enough standing dead timber there would fill the stoves and fireplaces of thousands of Ozark homes if the National Forest Service would get behind a project to allow woodcutters from all over the Ozarks to come in and cut trailer loads of the dead oak and hickory and pine trees that will soon fall and rot. Right now it is illegal to go into that blighted area and cut firewood.  

         We are a nation of great waste and it tells you a lot about the Forest Service, willing to see so much wood going to waste when it would be so simple to build a road or two into the dead areas and invite woodcutters to have at it.  I believe some would come a long way and there is thousands of truck and trailer loads of good firewood there to be harvested and used.  But we are a wasteful nation, and government agencies like the Forest Service and even the National Park Service, that I once worked for, are bound up in regulations that prevent common sense approaches and solutions inside their boundaries.  But anyway, there is enough wood there in that burned wasteland to make a woodcutter rich. Maybe if someone were to contact the Forest Service there could be a way by filling out the right forms, to go in and cut some of it.

 

Don’t forget that I write columns each week for my websites.  See larrydablemontoutdoors and larrydablemont.com. My email address is lightninridge47@gmail.com.

My magazine, The Lightnin’ Ridge Journal, spring issue, will come out in late March. If you want to get a copy you should email me or call my office at 417 -777-5227 for details in getting a copy. The cost is $8.50.

Eat More Rabbits -- & bear seizure by MDC

 

    By the time you read this, the snow will likely be gone, and I will have eaten the last fried rabbit of the winter. If you don’t eat a fried rabbit or two each winter, you aren’t living right. There were so many of them when I was a kid, and from December until February, rabbits and quail kept many a farm family well fed. Eating rabbits makes you sharp-eyed and hones your reflexes. Rabbit meat makes you more resistant to the cold, and it makes your legs stronger. We were watching a college basketball game the other day and you could tell that those players descended from rabbit hunting families. If you see really short-legged people who can’t take the cold it is because they haven’t hunted rabbits enough. 

    I can’t see as well as I once could, and can’t walk nearly as fast or as far, and my reflexes aren’t as good. I blame that on the fact that each year I hunt and eat fewer rabbits. Correspondingly, I think eating more fish, as I seem to be doing as I get older, gives a person arthritic elbows and sore shoulders. The fish I catch are awfully big! I have noticed something about my fishing buddies… the more they fish, they more they stretch the truth. I think eating fish causes that too but it hasn’t happened to me yet.

    Up here on Lightnin’ Ridge, where I live, there is a little rough-edged road coming up to my house. As I drive up that little rocky hill, I have a garden off to the left of the drive, about the only open place on this whole oak-hickory ridge-top. At night this time of year, especially when there’s some snow, I often see four or five cottontails cavorting and playing around my garden, getting ready for the mating season. In the moonlight, I sometimes watch them running and jumping over one another. That isn’t necessarily because they know they’ll be eating my green beans in a few months. That leap-frogging is a mating ritual, indicating how close spring must be. 

    There are more rabbits here because of my Labrador, keeping coyotes and foxes and bobcats away from my place. A great horned owl is not so leery, and he quite often roosts in a big oak right beside my office. I lose a rabbit or two to that owl and his mate, and they get some flying squirrels too. But it is the way it is. God created all things, great and small, gentle and fierce, and he sees value in all wild things. That gives me hope, as I use to be a little wild. But not anymore… I have quit howling at the coyotes and shooting at house cats and I haven’t been out running and jumping in the snow in quite a few years. I envy those rabbits!

    On a poetic note… Soon the wicked winter will slide from the budding limbs of redbud and wild plum and fall gently into the warm crevices of March, as blooming forsythia and jonquils herald its welcome demise. Sometimes I get to writing stuff like that and feel like Carl Sandburg! I hope I am right about all that. There are things I can’t figure out, and some of them are important. How does the road-runner bird I saw recently survive our winters up here, when he is carnivorous, and never known to eat an acorn, and how do people who sell propane gas in February for those kinds of prices get a good night’s sleep?

    I don’t think about things like that much when spring comes, as I am too busy hunting turkeys and morels and fishing. It is winter that makes you know if you are independent. I don’t need the things city people need. Here on Lightnin’ Ridge I have a crosscut saw and a fireplace and canned goods from the garden and a spring for water. I don’t need electricity or gas or a super market. But I sure as heck do need April! I can’t wait to grow tomatoes and cucumbers and green beans, and fill the freezer with wild turkey and fish. And Carl Sandburg couldn’t do that, even if he was a better poet!

 

I received this letter from a reader, Lyndell Williams. It is a chance for all of us to help a young hunter wrongfully accused…and robbed!

 

            My son Wiley, an 11-year-old who loves the outdoors, shot a massive 421-pound black bear on our family land in Missouri. The Department of Conservation seized Wiley’s bear, accusing us of wrongdoing despite no charges against him. We fought back, but the judge ruled against us. Now, we’re seeking to appeal this decision, but the legal costs are overwhelming. We need your support to help us reclaim what’s rightfully Wiley’s. Any contribution, no matter how small, will bring us one step closer to justice. Thank you for standing with us during this difficult time.  We have set up a gofund me account to help with the thousands of dollars this appeal will cost. If you want to help contact me at …lyndellwilliams49@gmail.com