The Cedar Tree and Me

 

How strong is the cedar tree? This one is growing from the fork of a giant  maple, 5 feet above the ground

The most perfect Christmas trees I have ever seen are found along the highway between Springfield Missouri and Branson. They are perfectly formed, many not much wider than a lampshade and five or six feet tall.  There they are there for the taking, small, medium and large; all perfectly formed due to their environment, which gives them no plant competition and full sunlight, plenty of rain and ideal soil.  

The Highway Department apparently has no idea what they are worth.  If they would put ordinary entrepreneurs in charge of harvesting and selling them, I think they could make a hundred thousand dollars from those cedars each December.  But, they aren’t so interested in ‘making’ money as they are in increasing taxes! 

Common sense often is rare outside the Ozarks.  City folks buy bottled water that tastes awful! However, if you see one of those perfect Christmas trees along the highway, mark it. Then at night you can have pickup trouble right where it is.  It don’t take no time to cut a cedar tree off a hillside where you had to stop for whatever legitimate reason. I might try that! If I get caught, I suspect I will have to pay a fine nearly equal to that which city suburbanites pay for their Christmas trees legally.

The cedar trees we put to such good use for Christmas trees in my youth are not really cedars, they are junipers …technically speaking of course. ‘Eastern Red Cedar’ is a common name for those trees, and that sounds a lot better than ‘juniper’.  This week as I rambled through the woods, exploring a place I had never seen before, I found a 15-foot cedar tree that had two big scrapes under it’s outer branches where a buck had been leaving his scent, and checking for doe scent.  These ‘scrapes’ are just places underneath overhanging tree branches where bucks prepare scent posts, and scrape away leaves and vegetation on each visit before peeing in the spot.  

They bite at the overhanging branches, and break the tips of them, and rub glands just below the eye against those branches.  I have watched them do it, and it is a fascinating thing.  They make scrapes underneath large cedars, and hardwoods alike, and any novice hunter can find them in November and December, by looking along trails and field borders. 

But this big cedar tree I found was about eight inches in diameter, and a buck had been using the trunk of the cedar as a ‘rub’… a place of a mock fight, skinning up the bark. Bucks love cedars and pines for such fighting and rubbing posts, and it is true that in general, bigger sets of antlers are used on bigger trunks, up to five or six inches in diameter.  And the bucks with smaller antlers usually pick out a smaller sapling only an inch or two thick.  

        It is hard for me to accept that a whole generation of people now go onto city lots and buy Christmas trees, a large number of them spruce or pine instead of cedar. And they pay for them!   They will spend enough on some trucked-in, bound-up tree to buy two or three boxes of shotgun shells, and then throw it away in less than a month.  What the heck has this world come to?!!         Dad and I always went out to neighboring farms in early December, hunting rabbits and quail and farm-pond ducks and at the end of the day, we’d find a perfect cedar Christmas tree which we brought home to set up in the corner in a bucket and decorate.  In doing so, the whole house smelled like Christmas.  That’s because cedar trees smell like Christmas more than anything else, and if it isn’t that way at your place, you are not keeping up with tradition.  Cedar trees, baked cookies and a wet beagle … those are the smells of Christmas.

       So my advice…take an axe and go get a cedar tree with your kids or grandkids, somewhere where you have permission to be, and keep the tradition growing.  And just remember, that old Ozark adage…“shoot a buck, save a tree!” I made that one up. Come muzzle-loader season… that may be my aim, saving cedar trees from some old scraggly-horned buck.

 

       Don’t forget folks, I will be at my Big Piney Nature Center, 6410 Hwy 63 to the south of Houston Missouri from 1 to 4  this coming Friday afternoon and 1 to 4 on Saturday, the 14^th.  The purpose will be giving away a special book I have written for youngsters who like to read and the selling of books and magazines for Christmas gifts and.  But on the 14^th I will be in Houston at the Health Food Center doing the same thing from 10 a.m. to noon.  If you know a kid who needs a good book of short stories for Christmas, come by and see me.

 

       More info at www.larrydablemont.com or on www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com or E-mail me at lightninridge47@gmail.com

 

Chest Waders and Quackers

 

       I would rather hunt ducks than do anything else pertaining to the outdoors.  I remember when I was laughed at for doing so.  It was in the early 70’s in December when I lived on a mountaintop out west of Harrison Arkansas.  I had been hunting on Bull Shoals Lake for much of the day and stopped into a little country store and filling station just outside of town.  I still had my chest waders on and my duck calls around my neck.  An old-timer sitting by the stove couldn’t help but laugh at the sight of me. 

       He said, “Dablemont, is that yore quacker tied around yore neck or are you fixin’ to strangle yoreself?” I told them I had sure enough been duck hunting.

        I let my Labrador get out to pee and when I did, 3 or 4 of the men came out to look at him. When I explained what his job was, one of them said that if his dog ever got his jaws around a whole duck he’d not be inclined to come back for a day or so…  Then they saw the four mallards and a gadwall lying across my boat seat and they could hardly believe they came from Bull Shoals.

       There was no one back in that day hunting ducks on Bull Shoals.  It was a great year because the lake was up fifteen feet or so and the ducks were finding lots of food in the back end of coves and creeks that few fishermen ever went into in the winter. I had it all to myself and it was a duck hunter’s haven.   The water had backed up into the vegetation and there was a lot of food floating in the water.  My dog Rambunctious and I motored into the end of a long cove and ducks went everywhere in flight, maybe a couple hundred of them.  I covered the boat with camouflage beneath a flooded tree and threw out a dozen decoys.   Of course they would come back… all that food amongst the floating debris.  

       As they returned over the next hour in small flocks I picked out the drakes and downed a limit in short order. Some of those hunts, where I had the whole lake to myself, were the best days I have ever spent out with my dog and quacker, chest waders and shotgun, and I have done the same thing on other Ozark lakes. The water conditions have to be right, but when the water rises into the vegetation you can bet the ducks will come, especially in December and January.

       I will never forget something that happened that winter on Bull Shoals.  My Lab brought me a mallard drake that had earthworms crawling out of its beak. I got to looking and all I killed had earthworms in their beaks, throats and crops. Back in one of those coves I guess worms had been floating to the surface too, and the mallards had been eating them. Never seen anything like that before or since.   That would make those particular ducks omnivorous!  To see photos from that day 50-some years ago, including one with old Rambunctious, the chocolate Labrador, find www.larrydablemontoutdoors.com on the Internet. 

       Even though there's such low water conditions on lakes like Bull Shoals and Stockton and Truman, all of which can provide great waterfowling in good years, when ducks come through ahead of a front, fleeing a blizzard up north or an intense ice-up in the prairie wetlands, the hunting can be good for awhile.  It just doesn't stay that way, because to hold ducks, you need water in the vegetation.  Without it, they just won't stay long.

       A few inches of rain could do the trick this winter, because late in the summer, smartweed, nut-sedge and sesbania and other green growth which attract ducks were growing along tributaries and flats on area lakes.  You hope to see the lakes rise into that green growth before the waterfowl migration is in full swing. If our lakes get enough rain to come up just four or five feet, we are going to have some great habitat for ducks.

       

       

       I wrote a book about duck hunting entitled “Memories from a Misty Morning Marsh” which might make a good Christmas gift for a duck hunter.  You can see it on www.larrydablemont.com or come visit me at my nature center on December 14.

 

       This sort of goes along with the way the world is becoming.  A few years ago I went to the county library in Houston Missouri just before Christmas and gave away a book of short stories I wrote for young people entitled, Dogs, Ducks and Bucks. Quite a few parents brought kids to get a book inscribed and autographed. Some just came to get a book for Christmas gifts for kids and didn’t bring the kids with them.   I gave away about 30 or so that day and it made me happier than anyone else. I wanted to do that again but the new librarian there said they were too busy for such an event.  

       So I will do it again, this time at my Big Piney nature center-project a mile south of Houston on Saturday, December 14 from noon to 3 p.m.  If you know a child who likes to read and isn’t getting a lot of presents, come by and get a book for him or her. My other books will be available too and if you already have one bring it by and I will sign and inscribe if for you.  The address of the place is 1640 South Hwy 63.

Squirrels for Thanksgiving? -- MDC

 

I shot this buck several times and left him there

       You can have the traditional thanksgiving dinner.  I guess you likely will.  I never did like store-bought turkey; it is tasteless and dry and if you have a slice of one when you are young you can bet it never is going to get better as many years of Thanksgiving pass.  Maybe it should be prepared as I do wild gobblers.  I slice the breast thin as possible and then fry the razor-thin meat slabs with a good coating of various types of seasoning and flour to give it taste.  I did that back when I use to shoot turkeys with a shotgun.  I roam the woods now with a camera, and as scarce as wild turkey are becoming I would be ashamed of myself if I killed another one.

       In Missouri, the conservation department has figured out a way to make more money out of dwindling numbers of turkeys.  It use to be that if you bought an archery tag you could hunt both deer and turkey with a bow.  Not now.  They got together and figured that they could double the income from bow-hunters by requiring different tags for each, therefore twice as much money.  I don’t know if that will work so good, because if a game warden got real ambitious and left his pickup to walk back into the woods and catch some smart fellow in a tree stand with a bow, the hunter could just claim he was hunting coyotes, or bobcats, or weasels and produce a predator call to prove it.  Or he could say he was hunting squirrels maybe, and then bark like a squirrel.  

       To make more money the MDC will have to make a new law saying that during the bow season for deer or turkey, a hunter may not hunt anything else with a bow.  Of course they could charge fifteen more dollars for permission to bow-hunt anything from squirrels, ducks and groundhogs to coyotes and bobcats.  That would work! And more money!

       The MDC has a lot of additional regulations.  For instance, you cannot shoot a deer or turkey with a firearm within 450 feet of a residence, barn, shed, etc -- in some areas of the state, nor hunt with a bow within 200 feet of those buildings-- in some areas of the state.  It is not clear whether or not you can hunt turkey with a bow in November with a gun turkey tag for October.  In October you can hunt turkey with gun or bow or atlatl or slingshot without a new tag after October. But in November thru January if you use a bow, atlatl or slingshot to hunt turkeys you need a new tag. Understand?   

       Some agents do not know for sure about all this neither. If you want to hunt deer and/or turkey with a bow you have to buy a turkey and deer tag separately.  Figure that what you have to do to hunt anything in the fall with gun or bow now costs more money.  If you buy deer tags for archery, turkey tags for archery, gun tags for turkey, and gun tags for deer, and then new spring tags for turkey you will spend well over 100 dollars.  You will have to spend a little more for getting a youth tag I think, but that enables a hunter who can drag a kid out in the woods to get one more turkey than it is legal for him to kill with his own tag.

       I hope I have not confused anyone here.  It is best that when you go bow hunting you call a game warden to straighten it all out and tape record the conversation so he can’t change anything if he comes after you.  Also, if you hunt coyotes, groundhogs, bobcats, or wolves with a bow, have a predator call with you.  And oh yes, there are some additional requirements for hunting bobcats, which I do not understand.  On the Internet it said there are also additional regulations involved for hunting squirrels, rabbit, rails, snipe, bobcats, coyotes, pheasants, coots, and several more species.  Thankfully that list on the computer does not involve ducks and geese.  That’s all I am concerned with.  If you hunt ducks with a bow, you do not need any special license, you need to have lots and lots of arrows and your head examined!

       I did shoot a nice buck this year with my trusty 35 millimeter Nikon single barrel. I just left him there! Last summer I shot several strutting gobblers! Called them to within a few yards. I never bought deer or turkey tags to do that and I recommend you follow my example! With all the regulations and efforts to make more money the MDC has agents that don’t understand all of it either.  

       I interviewed the Chief of Enforcement a month or so back and was surprised by an attitude I admire.  He said that if any hunter or fisherman receives a citation he feels is unwarranted, or if any agent treats someone disrespectfully or illegally according to that citizens rights, that he should be notified.   His name is Randy Doman and his phone number is 573-751-4115.  You will have to go through a lady at the desk, but just ask for him and then leave a message.  

His email is Randy.Doman@mdc.mo.gov if you need help getting through to him, call me at 417-777-5227 and I will put him in touch with you. He has assured me no one will be ignored. This opportunity has not been available before and I applaud him for making it happen.  Trouble is he gets told what he can do by some very uncaring higher-ups.   I like Doman and I intend to try to work with him.

 

       I have written lots of books and put together more than 100 outdoor and Ozark magazines.  Some might make good Christmas gifts.  See them on your computer at   www.larrydablemont.com.  

There One Went…A Road-Runner

 

       Once a fellow called me to report seeing a hen pheasant down on the Arkansas-Missouri border. I knew exactly what he had seen. I had just seen something similar… a road-runner.

       About twenty years ago I saw a road-runner up here on Lightnin’ Ridge about forty yards from my back door.  The bird, which is  about the  size of a hen pheasant, was running as if the cartoon coyotee was after him, but I  never heard him beep.  Last week I saw him or one like him again.  For this part of the northern Ozarks, he is a rare bird. They are not suppose to be here, and my wooded ridge top is possibly the farthest north they have ever been seen. 

        But he is not a bird of woodlands.  He is a desert bird found in Mexico, Texas, Arizona and western Oklahoma. I guess mine has moved up here from northern Oklahoma  or maybe Arkansas.  If you want to see one, there is a gravel road west of the Big Creek resort on the north side of Bull Shoals where road-runners are thick in the summer.  On one day I have seen three or four crossing that road.  

       There isn’t a lot known about road-runners. They seldom fly and don’t get but a few feet off the ground, seldom going more than 20 yards at a time in flight.  But that is  how they avoid predators that are faster runners.  They can’t outrun a coyote but they can elude him.  The bird usually runs about 15 miles per hour but if necessary they can run 25 miles per hour.  You never see one pecking around in one spot like a dove or quail.

       They almost never get off the ground, except when they nest. They nest a few feet off the ground in bushes or small trees.  Some nests have as few as two or three eggs, and some have up to eight. Some ornithologists say they mate for life, but I think  that is unlikely. I have never seen two together.  

       They  have a cousin, in that same cuckoo family, that we in the Ozarks call a rain-crow, or  ‘yellow-billed cuckoo’.  The two birds seem to have little in common, but their four toes have two pointing forward and two pointing backwards.  Their track makes an X. The rain crow is common here, and is elusive in high branches of tall oaks. They stay off the ground while their cousin, the road-runner seldom leaves it.

       In the desert states, road-runners have been seen killing large rattlesnakes by pecking at the head and avoiding strikes until the snake is dead.  Usually that is seen involving two of the birds.  

       What will he eat up here on Lightnin’ Ridge in the  winter?  Anything he wants.  There are lizards  out on warm days, small mammals like field mice, and they also eat a small percentage of plant and seed matter.  As a photographer, I would give a good portion of my left little toe to get a picture of a road-runner up here on this ridge-top. Wouldn’t it be something to get him running through my woods in a skiff of snow? He  can live through an Ozarks winter because he never has to drink water, and doesn’t, ever.  He gets all the moisture needed from his food, like many other desert small animals.  He  doesn’t have to eat a great deal and his body temperature drops to surprisingly low levels much like a reptile, when it gets real cold. 

       He can thrive if it stays above 40 degrees, but I suspect that he would be in a sort of suspended animation for periods of time under cover somewhere  when freezing temperatures approach. I know darn well he and his kind do not migrate.  I tried walking to Arkansas once and gave up after the first ten miles.

       I  wish I  could help that  road-runner with a feeding station of some kind, or just see him more often.  A more fascinating bird I have never seen anywhere. 

 

       One last thing… deer hunters beware.  If you kill a big-antlered buck, DO NOT take a game warden,  who shows up later, anywhere you hunt. He will suddenly appear at your home, wanting you to take him and  show him where you killed your deer and cleaned it.  He’ll mysteriously find corn there or in the deer’s stomach (which  comes from his pocket) and therefore charge you and confiscate your antlers, which likely are worth a good deal of money.

       Not all conservation officers are crooked enough to do  that, but some are.  Don’t be their victim!  Any time and agent shows up WITHOUT A WARRANT, tell them to leave and close the door. They have no right to your cooperation without a legal warrant, and if they get your antlers you will never see them again.. EVEN IF YOU GET A LAWYER AND ARE FOUND INNOCENT OF THE CHARGE!.

       One agent in Stone County has a shed full of antlers he calls his ‘Retirement Account.’ Almost none were legally obtained! Don’t let them get yours.

Make Thousands With This Example

 

       The Missouri Department of Conservation may not accomplish much, but you have to hand it to them…they know how to make money.  In talking with a retired MDC employee I learned more about that. Take the great black bear and elk fiasco. They inflated the number of bears in Missouri to 1200 or so.  

       “In reality” my friend told me, “there are between 6 and 8 hundred.  But  if you want to make some  big money out of bears through deceiving some really gullible hunters, you tell them that there are oodles of them  out there!”

        Then you tell those gullible hunters that they can apply for a bear tag by sending in 10 dollars that is non-refundable.  When  they first offered this, 7800 of those would-be bear hunters  sent in their ten bucks…  and bingo, the MDC has pocketed 78,000 dollars.   Next came the big drawing for a tag.  They decide to draw,  from those 7800  applicants some of whom might not know a bear from a ground hog, 400 tags.  Each  of those tags would cost 25-dollars. Hose tag -holders consist of hunters who do not  know that you only even see a bear by baiting them… which is made illegal before the hunting  begins.  

       So now the MDC has made another 10 thousand from those tags issued to 400  ‘bear-hunters’.  Now they have pocketed 88 thousand dollars by flim-flamming 7800 people who  think this is all on the level.  That first year, there are eight hunters who know how to bait bears… thus eight bears killed over popcorn or day-old donuts.  So eight black bears bite the dust.  

All of a sudden they  have made  11 thousand dollars per each dead bear.  And they found out that one of those bear killers was a twelve-year-old boy.  They confiscate that big male bear and charge his dad with creating some illegal opportunity. 

        This year hunters wised up some.  The applications drop from 7800 to 6000  and more hunters find out how easy it is to bait bears and get away with it.  Fifteen are killed, but the MDC profit has dropped some but it is still 70 thousand dollars.  That  comes to $4,666 dollars per bear.

 I have shot several black bear in Canada… with my trusty 35 mm Nikon over bait. Shot one in Arkansas the same way I would be ashamed to shoot one with a gun.

       The MDC does the same thing with elk.   They gain about 100 thousand dollars with the  same scheme.  Then they give out five tags.  One of those five is given to an adjacent landowner at the ‘conservation’ area who is always the owner of Bass Pro shops.  He can then sell his tag or give it away to one of his friends.

If  you own a lot of land, say 200 to 1,000 acres, you can get very wealthy by doing the same scheme.  Build a herd of buffalo, maybe 15 or 20!  Do that before the MDC thinks of it! Charge 10 non-refundable dollars to get in the drawing and 100 dollars to get a tag.  Then guide the hunter yourself, so he or she can get a chance to shoot a wild buffalo.  You can even lie all you want here, like the MDC does by telling folks we have 1200 black bear.

          Here is a sample of your public deception…

--- “Come hunt wild buffalo in the Ozarks…  we have determined that there are a few bull bison on our land with the DNA of the original wild ‘woods-bison’ known to have roamed the Ozarks 250 years ago.  Outdoorsman Larry Dablemont will guide you on your  hunt.   Caution… these bull  buffalo are very dangerous.  While only 100 applicants for tags will be accepted,  if you are one of the hunters accepted you  can get a wild buffalo bull to have its head mounted and great-tasting buffalo meat for your freezer!”

       Well it might work.  I know a  lady who has more than a hundred buffalo on 3000 acres.  Heck she could be a millionaire too, kinda like the MDC has done it… by making it the greatest goal of her existence.

       I don’t have  that many acres but you know…I  think I have a white turkey roosting in the back of it with 3-inch spurs and a 15-inch beard! If you’d like to hunt him send me ten dollars…

       Contact me on lightninridge47@gmail.com

A Fall Fishing Excursion

 

                 Canada in early October 2024

A Fall Excursion

         When we pulled into Canada’s Lake of the Woods country in early October, it was 70 degrees under a bright sun. Five days later it was still that way and it hadn’t changed much in the entire week we were there. In all the Octobers I have fished in northwest Ontario, I have never seen that kind of weather. Normally you can count on some temperatures in the 30’s and 40’s, some strong cold winds, and some rain at least part of the week. It is in most areas a wilderness, and beautiful with fall color and migrating waterfowl.

          It has never bothered me to go up to Canada and fish alone because those conditions have never concerned me.  My ancestry is from French Canadian trappers and Canadian Cree Indians so maybe that has something to do with it.  In bad weather, you find a place out of the wind and concentrate on fishing those areas. And, in the fall, you don’t do much lure-casting unless you are fishing for northerns or bass or muskies.  If it is walleye you are after, you fish in 25 to 30 feet of water jigging bait or quarter ounce jigs up and down off the bottom. You catch yellow perch that way and occasionally a bass, crappie or northern as well.  

         This year I didn’t go alone as I usually do.  I took with me an old friend from college days who is a river guide in the Ozarks.  Dennis Whiteside grew up on the Current River, and we began hunting and fishing together when we were 18.  He is a very good fisherman who often contests my assertion that I am a better one, and a better boat paddler as well!  

         We spent the first day or so trying to keep up with who caught the most and the biggest. No doubt Dennis caught the biggest fish, a six- or seven-pound northern, but I got a bigger bass, a close-to four-pound smallmouth whose size my fishing partner questions to this day.  The thing about Canadian smallmouth is, they often have a 15- or 16-inch girth when their length doesn’t reach 20 inches.  But do they fight! On the light gear we were using they made it a tussle in 26 feet of water.  As for the walleye in Lake of the Woods today, they are a fish made for light action gear because most of them are 14- to 15-inch fish, caught deep beneath the boat on sand or small-rock substrates. 

         Every day we fished different areas, most that I found years ago, and caught dozens of walleye, plus some 12- to 13-inch yellow perch and a few 15-inch smallmouth. I also caught a15-inch black crappie.  Dennis caught that northern pike while fishing for walleye and I hooked another big one minutes later that bit off my 6-pound line pretty quickly. It is the perch you would like to catch because you can bring home thirty of them and the filets are just like those of the walleye when it comes to eating. They are usually as large as those of an Ozark crappie.          

         On two different days I caught 17-inch walleyes. This year Ontario biologists, worried about the ever increasing fishing pressure on that giant lake, set a regulation requiring that no walleye above 16.9 inches can be kept. But who cares? We ate a bunch of 15- to 16- inchers at our cabin.  If you should catch a walleye above 29 inches you can keep it according to the new rules.  Twenty or thirty years ago there were no more walleye than there are now, but most were larger. I remember catching some 20- to 25-inch fish on each trip, sometimes 2 or 3 per day.  Those days are over, but I make the most of it.   On my light outfit a 12-inch yellow perch or 15-inch walleye fights like a slab-sided lunker.  

  

       Last year on my birthday in mid-October I landed only two walleye above 17-inches in three days, a 19-incher and a hefty 23- incher.  But I also boated the only genuine 6-pound smallmouth I have ever caught. He weighed two ounces more than that on a Nestor Falls grocery store scale and later swam off to find the underwater haunts he likely still rules.

         Each day the 70-degree temperature with light winds gave us the opportunity to fish in shirt-sleeves and we caught so many fish it was hard to complain about anything.  We headed home one morning at 4:30 and got to Lightnin’ Ridge at 10:00 that night with a cooler full of walleye and perch filets.

         Anyone can go to Canada and fish on a budget if you contact my old friend and bush pilot-guide, Tinker Helseth.  I can put you in touch with him if you’d like, and tell you how to make a trip in the spring, summer or fall affordable.  I have some numbered copies of Tinkers book, “Tinkers Canada… memoirs of a bush pilot”. You can get a copy for $12.99 by contacting me at 417-777-5227.

 

Our address is Box 22, Bolivar, MO 65613…and our email is lightninridge47@gmail.com.  You  can read most everything I write on the computer at larrydablemontoutdoors.

         

A Lure Full of Memories

 

       There are two Little Piney Rivers in Missouri, one flowing into the Gasconade River near Arlington and the other flowing into the Big Piney west of Houston Missouri.  Because of declining water levels and the drying up of Ozark springs you would never believe we once floated and fished the latter.  Today that Little Piney is more of a creek, than a river but once it was quite a float fishing stream, at least the lower half of it, which flows in the Big Piney near the Dogs Bluff bridge on Highway 17.   

       What memories I have of that stream!  I actually guided a few of my float fishing clients on that little river in a 14-foot wooden johnboat when I was a boy.  It was a super smallmouth stream and my dad’s biggest brown bass came from one of its eddies when I was about fourteen or fifteen years old.  But he didn’t land it… it jumped out of water only a few feet from the boat and threw the lure.  

       It is the lure I want to write about today.  That lure was a four inch long ‘Cisco Kid’,  brown and white, jointed and with a metal bill that made it run about three feet deep.  I still have it and can’t catch anything on it today, but you can understand why I keep it in my office.  Of course there are many lures in my office, not kept there because of their value but because of the memories that go with them.  There is that wiggle wart that we used on a teal-hunting  float-trip one September day years ago when we  put  one fishing rod and one lure in the boat not expecting fishing to be much good.  Were we wrong about that.  All day long that little brown and orange wiggle wart caught  bass to the  point we forgot about the teal ducks.   It is worth five times what I paid for it.  

       If you have wiggle warts, I  have seen them selling from ten to fifteen dollars at  lure shows.  I have an old rapala lure that was made in the fifties which has the name “rapala-finland’ across the bottom.  It is worth some money because it is in the box it came  in.  Old lures do have value  but those in the box they were sold in are worth even more.  Also, any of the old 1920’s and 30’s wooden lures with glass eyes that are in good condition will bring some money.   Some of those have four trebles, which was eventually outlawed. I saw one of them sell for 250 dollars.

       This sounds preposterous and I wouldn’t have believed it either, but I have seen  lures sell for hundreds of dollars when lure collectors get together. There are some which bring thousands.  Old friend Dennis Whiteside sold hundreds of old lures to collectors from Japan and made a small fortune doing it. He can tell you about that if you come to my big swapmeet at my newly finished nature center-museum near Houston, Mo.  But there is a bigtime lure collector who will be there too… Jerry McCoy of Bull Shoals, Arkansas.  I have fished with him on occasion and I have never known a man who has his knowledge of antique fishing and hunting gear.  One of the most knowledgeable and colorful of fishermen, Jerry will be selling antique items and lures and also buying some.         

        If you have old lures or outdoor items, bring them by and tempt Jerry with them.  He purchases a lot of antique outdoor gear for a shop he has a mile west of Bull Shoals dam. That Opening Day precedes the bringing in of exhibits. We have antique johnboats in place already and a 1920 pool table.  It is this Saturday, Oct 26 from 9 to 3.  In addition to Jerry, there will be Duane Hada, on of the best wildlife artists in the nation.  He will paint a picture of the Big Piney and we will raffle it off.  Some of  his original paintings sell  for  thousands so if you go home with it you  will have some valuable art.  I  will be there  selling off some of my office collections and my books and magazines, and  I think I will have 200 old lures for sale.  If you want to bring your own outdoor gear to sell, just bring it.  I think it is going to be a good day and I am anxious to show off our new building.  There is no charge for admission.

     For  more information call me at 417 777 5227  or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com     See Duane Hada’s website too.