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.

Canadian Adventure

  

Canadian  Adventure 

 

            What an adventure I had recently in Canada!  I took my daughter Christy Lynn to Tinker Helseth’s place for a week of fishing in Lake of the Woods in mid-October. We drove all day, pulling my boat full of fishing gear, and got there about eleven p.m.  I awakened the following day to a beautiful sunny morning, looking forward to a day of fishing. As I looked from our cabin out across a wind-chopped bay it came to me that something was going to be   different from the way I had planned things. A hard pain hit me to the left of the center of my chest and I knew in a second what it was…a heart attack. 

       With the pain hammering me with each heartbeat, Christy took over, and drove me back to the border, to International Falls, Minnesota. There was no doubt what was happening… the pain was tremendous.

       They waved us through the border gate and in minutes we were at the small International Falls hospital—small but tremendously efficient.  A very obese doctor walking with a cane came in and two nurses gave me tests and some medicine, which instantly took away the pain. In minutes I felt back to normal, and even thought maybe there would be a chance to go back and go fishing.  No such luck.  Wired up for what they called an EKG, the test showed something was wrong and a blood test had enzymes that proved I was indeed having a heart attack.  

       The doctor was great… he kept treating me and told me that he would have a helicopter there soon to fly me to Duluth where a brand new hospital had several heart doctors to take over my treatment.  I think I went to sleep for a while or they had me so relaxed I didn’t know how the time flew past. It was about four in the afternoon when I saw that helicopter land just outside.  I told Christy to find out where the hospital was in Duluth and drive my pickup there, a three-hour drive to the shores of Lake Superior. Surely we could get back to fishing in a day or so.

       The helicopter trip, which I always dreaded the thought of, was something I will never forget.  They bundled me up and slid me in through a large back window and propped me up so I could see out. A very pretty nurse sat next to me all the way and talked to me via earphones that even let me hear the pilot. When that helicopter got started it felt as if it was vibrating to pieces but in short order I watched the hospital fade away and my daughter Christy climbing into my pickup far below.  I was worried about her, Duluth was 3 hours away and Christy does not drive in large cities.   Fortunately for her the city overlooking that huge great lake is not very large. Fortunately for me it has a great hospital only three years old with several top-notch cardiologists.

       But first let me tell       you about the helicopter ride.      My uneasiness due to fear of heights, known as heightrophobia, quickly went away.  For the first 30 minutes, I looked out from 2000 feet in the air at a landscape bathed in the light of the setting sun, then in the coming darkness, which showed hundreds of lights everywhere.

       I hadn’t been told that the new hospital was 17 stories   high.  When it landed that helicopter was on the very top of the building.  They put me on a gurney that was on wheels, and it appeared that the edge of that roof was only about 30 feet away.  I prayed that they would hold onto that cot-on-wheels as my heightrophobia came back strong.  It wasn’t that I dreaded so much what a 17-story fall would do, it was more the apprehension concerning what a long time I would have to think about it.

         They took me to a room and I met with the head cardiologist, a Dr. Shultz, who got me prepared for surgery early the following morning.  Christy got there just afterward, a big relief to me.  They told her that she could sleep in the hospital room on a folding couch, which was another big relief. That operating room the next morning was impressive, but I didn’t get to see much of it.  

       As I talked with a couple of nurses, I fell asleep and woke up just an hour later.  Christy was there, smiling, which told me I hadn’t had to have any kind of bypass.   A nurse explained I had received three stents, something they do when small arteries are blocked up.  I had some blockages amounting to 90 percent but thank the Good Lord in Heaven, no heart damage.

       The nurses and doctors and people there were good folks, it seemed to me.   On October 11, my birthday, a heart doctor spent about an hour in my room with a drawing board showing me everything about my heart, what had went wrong and what they had done to fix it. I learned a great deal from him about what I need to do to keep it working right.  He talked a little about diet, then brought Christy and I, a couple of pieces of birthday cake an hour later.

       A week and a half after we returned home, I went    back to Lake of the Woods to retrieve my boat and gear and to see my old friend, Tinker Helseth and his family. Two years ago I was up there on my birthday fishing some little-known lake by myself and caught a 6-pound smallmouth, my biggest ever.  Thank goodness I didn’t have my heart attack me then.  If I hadn’t had Christy with me, I don’t know what I would have done.  But the poor girl never got to fish.  Her younger sister, Leah Noel and her mother, Gloria Jean got to go back a week later with me, and the weather was great.  We just caught walleye one right after another.  We brought back fish and gear and the boat!            

       Christy says she brought back something of greater importance… ol’ Dad.   Might be that no one else would value this old timer above three days of good fishing.

Attacked in Canada

 

      I took my daughter Christy to Canada on October 7 to fish some wilderness waters near Nestor Falls Ontario. We got there at midnight, got a good night’s sleep and woke up just after sun-up to the dawn of a beautiful day.  Or so I thought!

      I looked out the window of our cabin to the gentle waves on the lake and began to plan the day.  But the Good Lord had other plans, I reckon!  I was suddenly hit with a hard bolt of pain at the left center of my chest and there was no doubt what it was. In minutes my daughter was driving me back to a small hospital in International Falls Minnesota, an hour or so away. 

      A doctor there gave me some medicine to   stop the pain and it was a tremendous relief.  About four hours later he had a helicopter landing just outside and finally they loaded me into it and we headed for Duluth where there was a nearly new hospital with several cardiologists. 

      We landed just after sunset on the seventeenth floor of Duluth’s St.  Mary’s hospital overlooking Lake Superior.  I   was whisked into ICU and met the senior cardiologist who began all kinds of testing and told me they would do surgery the next morning.  Twenty-four hours later they added three stents where there had been two put into small arteries many years ago.  I guess maybe they had rusted out! At any rate I thank the great Creator that there was no damage to my heart.

      My daughter drove down to Duluth in my pickup and stayed there in the hospital to be of help to me and the nurses and doctors there were wonderful. On the third day a heart doctor spent an hour with a black board diagramming what had happened and what they had done to me. When he found out it was my birthday he brought two pieces of cake in for Christy and I.  For four days they made sure there was no lasting affects and then dismissed me. We finally headed home.

      I am feeling great now and will head back to Canada this weekend to get my boat and   camera and fishing gear.  If it doesn’t come a blizzard, the fishing will be great and Christy will finally get a chance to sample it.

Remember that I   had that heart attack a full day before it was fixed   and yet there is no lasting affect.  If you   experience that   heart pain, get it examined quickly   and be confident that   you will recover as I did.

What Sounds Like a Trumpet?

This is a column I wrote years ago that I thought today’s readers might enjoy.

We decided to take a short float trip one November afternoon, down the river bordering some public hunting land.  We have killed several deer in such a manner; just drifting along so slowly and so quietly you are scarcely noticed by wild creatures along the stream.  Often we cover the boat with a blind, but that afternoon, we didn’t.  Not much reason to disguise it when the occupants are wearing blaze orange caps and vests.

An hour into the trip, we passed a harvested cornfield, and I heard an unusual sound, something like a Canada goose honking, but louder, coarser, a longer note.  In a matter of a few seconds, big birds soared up out of the field and turned upriver at treetop level.  One of them continued to uh, well… sound a little like a trumpet.  It was the first time I have ever heard a trumpeter swan, and though I have seen a few at a time on the water in various places in the Ozarks and in Canada over the past twenty years, I have never seen a flock of them that large. 

But there they were, eleven trumpeter swans in a line just over us, big and graceful. Trumpeter swans are rare sights, but they gather in the winter in good numbers at a semi-refuge in Arkansas, south of Greer’s Ferry Lake.  Obviously they are gaining in numbers little by little.  That flock of eleven is something I will not forget seeing.

We didn’t get a deer that afternoon; in fact we never even saw one.  We did see a wild gobbler and a half grown wild pig, coal black, and hard to see in the underbrush.  Had I seen him in time we would have some pork in the freezer tonight.  Squirrels of course were thick.  If you are a squirrel hunter you should have a good year, with all the acorns and nuts and berries we had this fall.  They should be fat and good to eat. It occurred to me that I ought to pass along more wild game recipes with this column, so here’s one I call ‘squirrel pizza’.  The first thing you do is fry a couple of young squirrels and take all the meat off the bones.   Then buy a pizza and remove all those little round pieces of meat that you always see on pizza, about the size of a half dollar.  They are not good for you, and you need to take all of them off.  Then distribute the squirrel meat all over the pizza and warm it up a little.  There you have it.  Next week I will perhaps give you my recipes for duck pizza and rabbit pizza!

      Someone sent me an outdoor page recently, from a large daily newspaper in the Ozarks that showed a photo of a big hornets nest that had fallen to the ground.  Their outdoor writer called it a wasp nest, obviously not having spent enough time outdoors to know what it was.  He dutifully noted that he had left it there because it was a part of nature.  It won’t be part of nature long!

Hornet’s nests are collected in the winter by many, who know that woodpeckers and other birds will tear them to pieces trying to get the larvae inside. No hornet’s nest I ever saw survives the winter.  But if you take one into the warmth inside a building, you need to be sure those larvae aren’t going to mature and create a swarm of hornets in your home next spring.  That has happened on occasion.

      No newspaper would allow glaring errors on their sports page. If a sports writer didn’t have better than average knowledge about basketball, football and baseball, he wouldn’t last long. There was a time when outdoor writers were men who grew up outdoors and had a great deal of experience in their field.  Those days are nearly gone.  Today if an ‘outdoor columnist’ makes glaring errors, who knows?  Newspaper editors in larger cities don’t know a fly-rod from a flatfish, so if mistakes are made they seldom see it.  And I doubt they care much because they figure readers don’t know much about the outdoors either.

      In a couple of weeks I am going to put one of our better photographers in a special camouflaged and covered boat, and drift down one of our rivers with me at the paddle, to see what kind of photos we can get.  I’ll have to leave my gun at home or I would be tempted to shoot some ducks for duck pizza. 

      The Winter/Christmas edition of my Lightnin Ridge  magazine is being printed in a week or so. If you would like to have a copy, call my secretary, Gloria Jean, at 417 777 5227.

 

How to Spend a Fall Day

 

What a banner year it is for walnuts and acorns and hickories.  There are nuts everywhere!  If I can just get my daughters and grandsons out here on Lightnin’ Ridge picking up walnuts I will sell enough of them to pay for my duck stamp.

The best parts of the year come and go so quickly.  Fall is like that, more than any other season.  It is my time of the year.  Half of October is gone and I haven’t yet picked up my .22 or shotgun for a hunting trip.  I realize now that it is time to spend more time in the woods or on the river than ever before, to try to see and experience as much as possible while it is still here.

Tonight I need to put some new line on a couple of reels, because over the next 3 or 4 weeks there will be some great fishing in the Ozarks.  Fish feel that cooling water, and begin to abandon the shallow water, heading to deeper spots.  But they do not yet reach that point where metabolism decreases.  

Fall fish feed in deeper water, but they aren’t on a diet yet, they are fattening up, sometimes eating more than they can hold.  It is primarily in the fall that I have seen white bass, and black bass gorging on shad, to a point where they attack a lure and have more shad or minnows in their gullet than they can get down. 

If you want to catch a big bass on a reservoir, fish deeper points and bluffs with a brown or black jig, with one of those salty rubber crayfish added to the hook.  But if you have some pork rind, up to four or five inches long, that will work too.  Some folks use nothing else but the pork, attached to a jig.  For big bass, I am not talking about small jigs, I like the big heavy ones that will fall quickly down over ledges into deep water, or scrape against the standing timber ten or twelve feet down.

Crappie fishermen love October, but I seldom fish for them after I catch them in Canada in early October.  I like smallmouth, and if I have a day to fish, I’ll probably be floating down a river, fishing a buzz-spin or a spinner-bait.  You would be surprised to see how big the smallmouth are on some of our Ozark rivers if you fish those waters without the bright canoes and kayaks seen there in the summer, banging and bumping by.  

The buzz-baits and topwater lures still catch fish in the deep water below the shoals, but they won’t work much longer.  Smallmouth later in the fall will be deeper, gorging themselves on crayfish, and anything that looks like a ‘crawdad’, as Ozark anglers call them, will attract smallmouth, Kentuckies and largemouth bass on our rivers. 

If a fisherman doesn’t have a knack for those jig and pork-rind combos he can do well with crank-baits that imitate crayfish.  Trouble is, in the fall, you have to fish a crankbait deep, but slow.  It takes a while to master that too.

There are few float trips I take in October when I don’t have a shotgun or .22 rifle along.  One of my favorite hunting guns is an over and under, .22-20 gauge combination my dad owned since I was a boy.  The rifle barrel is on top, and the shotgun on the bottom.  You flip a button on the side to determine which barrel you shoot.  

If you want a mess of squirrels to take home and cook on the grill, or with a pot of dumplings or stew, you use the .22.  If you go quietly down a river, you’ll see plenty of squirrels, and they seldom know you are there.  Close, still shots are common.

You do not use the brightly colored kayaks or canoes along a stream if you want to see wildlife, or catch big fish.  In fact, I would never ever hunt from a flimsy craft of any kind, and that’s what 17-foot canoes are, accidents waiting to happen.  My river boats are 19-foot or 18-foot square-sterned canoes, or 16- to 17-foot johnboats.  

In years past I have used my boat, with a blind attached to the front, to bow-hunt for deer.  And when November gets here, I will hunt ducks from my boat, while I fish a little as well.  But as I get older, the most important thing I have as I slowly and quietly move down an Ozark stream is my camera.  You can see some of the photos I have taken from my boat by visiting my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com You can always contact me by writing to me  at p.o. box 22, bolivar, mo 65613  or emailing lightninrige47@gmail.com.

 

Geese Aplenty

 

 

      What a different creature Canada geese have become, with so many of them becoming non-migrators and just staying where they are, raising goslings on every little farm pond where cattle graze on permanent pasture.  Just think about it…. Not all that long ago, we never saw a goose in the Ozarks in the spring and summer and few in the fall and winter.  You seldom saw them, as they’d pass over in long strings, making beautiful music as the nip in the air and the falling leaves told you that winter wasn’t far away.

      Floating down the river in November and December of the 1960’s as a kid with my dad, hunting mallards and wood ducks from our old johnboat, if we saw a few Canada geese on the river, and actually had a chance to bring one home, it was a never to be forgotten experience.  Now, out hunting turkeys in the spring, it would be so easy to fill the freezer with Canada’s.  And while they aren’t as good to eat as wild gobblers; a smoked goose, or a roasted goose, certainly isn’t to be made light of.  It’s the goose-feather plucking that makes everyone think Colonel Sander’s fried chicken is the best route to take for Sunday dinner. But this fall I am going to get a goose or two for Thanksgiving and smoke it in my store-bought smoker.

      What a difference there is in the Canada goose today and the ones I saw as a boy, only fifty-some years ago.  But then again, what a difference there is in this whole world today.  The creeks so full of water, in which I swam throughout the summer, are dry today by the time July and August come around.  The woodlots along the river bottoms have been bulldozed and are now fields of green grass.  Where there were a dozen old cows there are now great herds.  

      But not long ago I saw a Canada goose with her nest in a hollow sycamore limb jutting out over the river 20 feet above the water. I suppose that is evolution. Geese don’t nest in hollow trees, but she did. It was smart of her. Other geese which nest on the ground each spring often lose their eggs when the river rises with lots of rain.  A strain of Canada geese are only 8- to 10-pounds in weight, but another strain, known as giant Canadas, are found nesting in bluffs in the Ozarks.  They may weigh from 14 to 18 pounds.

      I love to hunt geese; one of my most memorable hunts being the last one, two years ago in a grain field in Ontario.  It was a morning when the overpopulation of geese we have today was evident. They came in by the dozens for three hours.  I was with a friend of mine who is Lake of the Woods guide and we brought in a limit of five apiece.  Thirty years ago we hunted Canadas and snow geese each fall in Manitoba. In all instances of goose hunting we would lie flat on our backs in a field with decoys spread where they wanted to feed.  I spent much of that time using my camera instead of my shotgun.   If you would like to see some of those photos, go to the website www. larrydablemontoutdoors.

 

In about three weeks we will finish the winter/Christmas issue of the Lightning’ Ridge Outdoor Journal, a magazine with great stories about   hunting, fishing, conservation and nature.  To get your copy send a check for 8 dollars to LROJ, P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613. To use your credit card call Gloria Jean at  417 777 5227.

Don’t Hunt Fall Turkeys

 

The bow season has begun, and while I once took part in it, I won’t bow hunt this year. When you are young you can sit in a tree stand and spend hours enjoying yourself even if you don’t see a thing.  At my age, you never have four hours to sit and do nothing.  You realize as you get older that hours are precious, and you have options of catching fish, shooting squirrels, hunting teal and working on things around the house.  Well, skip that last option.

       But really, since I will kill a deer for my freezer when the muzzle-loader season gets here, and that is all I can eat in a year, why hunt deer in September with anything?  Bow hunting should not be very high on any outdoorsman’s list in September unless he doesn’t fish at all or do anything else but deer hunt.  It is a poor time to skin and hang a deer, because it is always too warm. The dead of winter is bow-hunting time.

        I have caught a couple of big bass in late September and early October.  It isn’t something I do in a short time.  I caught another 22-inch largemouth bass this past week, and I fished for three hours with a topwater lure with no results before he hit.  When he did, it was some fight.  

You can’t catch a bass that size in a tree stand, watching for a deer, so that is one reason I won’t bow hunt this year. Another of the reason’s I won’t bow hunt is I also am determined not to give the Missouri Department of Conservation any more money than I have to.  By the time you pay for waterfowl stamps, turkey tags, deer tags and all the other special tags you have to buy, then add on the 1/8 th cent sales tax we ALL pay them, it costs more to hunt and fish in Missouri than any other state in the United States.  This year you are required to spend more to bowhunt if turkeys are involved and next year even more and on and on and on.  They waste millions of dollars each year and ask our Missouri citizens to fund the waste.  Eighteen million is being spent on a waterfowl marsh, and in five years after dishing out the money nothing has been done that amounts to good news for waterfowl hunters.  Bulldozers sit where wildlife species by the dozens once thrived.

I urge hunters to not hunt wild turkeys this fall.  Turkeys are at an all time low right now going back to the 1960’s.  Do like I do and hunt them with a camera.  Then if you want to eat a turkey, buy one at the grocery store. It is cheaper than a fall tag. My camera shoots wild turkeys several times a year and yet it lets them propagate next spring.  We only have a fall turkey season to bring in more money for the MDC.  Don’t help them trade wild turkeys for money in their bank account.

       

       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.  

       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 by regular mail or email to you. You can also email me to get it … lightninridge47@gmail.com

If you want more information about our new Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal magazine coming out in November, you can call my office and find out what it is and how to get it. The number is 417-777-5227