A Cardinal from Hades

    

     

       I hate to do this but I am going to have to go out there and shoot one of my prettiest male cardinals. He has gone mad!  I haven’t killed a songbird since I was 12, and I protested at the Melba theatre as a teenager when that movie “To Kill a Mockingbird” came out.  I am an avid bird lover. I particularly love pheasant in a crock-pot and grilled mallard.   But not cardinals, for cryin’ out loud.

         Anyhow, he is miserable and deserves to be put out of his misery.  He spends most of the day fighting with the big mirrors on my old pickup.  When you see a male cardinal do that, completely oblivious to a nearby feeder filled with sunflower seeds and uninterested in several pretty little female cardinals, he is obviously demented, perhaps having survived a spring hailstorm wherein he was whacked on the head while huddled on a white oak limb.

       If he just fought with the mirror, I might could overlook it, but he paints both doors beneath the mirrors with droppings which do not match the blue color of the pickup.  I am now the subject of derision when I go to the post office and folks I don’t even know ask what that white stuff is around and below my mirrors.

         By the time you read this the awful thing will already be done, but I ask you to keep it to yourself.  It is against one of the many rules and regulations of the Conservation Department.  In fact, in recent years a game warden has ended his radio program by saying, “Remember, if we don’t say you can, you can’t.”  And they don’t say you can kill a cardinal, even a mad cardinal.”

         Because of his radio program I have stopped killing the field mice that invade my shed, and I do not kill crickets, roaches or spiders because he surely would not approve.  There use to be a copperhead in my back yard that I also was hesitant to kill because the conservation people say I can’t do it lawfully.  But there are a lot of things done unlawfully which never come to light. Something killed him and he now lives in snake heaven with several blacksnakes I have recently blasted because they are after baby rabbits and nestling bird babies.

         I told a possum recently trying to invade my henhouse, “If I don’t say you can, you can’t!”  Of course I gently took him to my neighbors place, refusing to kill him as the game warden would not want me to do.  Should any of you country folks find a possum eating your hen eggs, just remove him gently with a shovel.  If you whack him over the head to render him unconscious then you can take him into town and release him later.   I think that should be legal.

         Someone sitting on my screened porch last month, shot and killed a grey squirrel that was trying to get the lid off my bird feeder.  It was a young one which was very good to eat when fried.

         But a cardinal whose flapping wing-tips scratch up the paint job on my pickup while he fights with nothing more than a reflection in a now-smudged-up mirror certainly should not be allowed to have young ones.  His I.Q. is likely too low.  My pickup means a lot to me.  I bought it new in 2010 and it was beautiful at the time.  Not now. It has 200 thousand miles on it and it has wing marks and white bird manure all over it.

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         Many years ago I built a small pond up here on Lightnin’ Ridge down in the timber behind my office, to provide a water hole for wildlife and provide a place for wood ducks and bullfrogs.  It is round, about 60 or 70 feet across and 60 or 70 feet long, those dimensions making “round” a pretty good description of it.  It is a pretty good haven for green sunfish and bluegill.  My daughter and I have a great big tank and aerator out in the shade beside my boat, and we catch about 60 or so of the small sunfish and keep them in the tank to use for baiting trotlines.

         I had forgotten that ten years or so my Uncle Norten and I had caught some nice bass on the river and released them into my pond, despite the fact that the Conservation Department don’t say you can do that either.

         Good gosh have they grown!  A monster largemouth lives there now.  He came up from the depths to engulf my tiny perch-catching jig and he fought all over that pond before the little hook broke.  I saw him well and my daughter says his mouth was the size of a dinner plate!

 

         Boy was she excited!  Not me so much.  As you can imagine I have caught lots of bass between 8 and 10 pounds, and turned them all loose, some after I landed them, and most before. Now my daughter won’t help me catch bait.  She is after that big bass.  Will take a picture when she gets it.

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         I had a ton of reader letters concerning what I have written about the TSE disease affecting deer, elk, cattle and humans.  I will put some of them in this column soon.  You might want to read more about it in my summer issue of the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor magazine, on many newsstands now.

Call my office to get one if you can’t find it in Walmart, Oerscheln or some other store.  My number is 417-777-5227. Email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613

New MDC Regulations on Landowner Tags....because of CWD

Dead Buck with CWD

Buck Sick with CWD

      Last year during the deer season, an upper level employee of the Missouri Department of Conservation confided in me that it had already been decided that landowner permits were a big problem for the Department’s need for more funds. 

      He wrote, “It has already been decided that the thousands of 20-acre landowner’s could bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars if they had to purchase deer tags.”  He told me exactly what would happen, stating that anyone with 20 acres or less would not be allowed to hunt deer without paying. 

      This fall deer season, you will see that come to fruition, in order to create more money from deer tag sales.  The new rule will be that you must own 21 acres or more, to get free landowner tags.  Much of this stems from the fact that in time, more and more deer hunters will begin to learn all there is to know about the disease called Chronic Wasting, and no longer buy deer tags.  Soon, all the prion-related diseases, which have been called Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy when it has killed humans, will start to be recognized as the same disease.  That is a stone cold fact, and while you can talk about this strain or that strain, the truth is that a mutated protein called a prion is the basis of all those diseases regardless of the name given.

      There has been a great effort to keep that from becoming known to hunters.  The assertion that CWD has not killed humans is not true, but it has been accepted that people cannot get it by eating diseased deer meat. If you believe that, find me one scientist or MDC employee who will eat the meat from a CWD infected deer?  Makes you think doesn’t it? When all the research is known, there will be many, like me, who do not hunt deer again. 

      It is a fact that during the deer season, all the citations written for deer-hunting violations are by and large given to those hunters who have called in deer kills through the MDC ‘telecheck’ system.  If you haven’t read the letter sent to me by a retired enforcement official which outlines all that, you should read it on my website now.  Find it on the computer at larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. 

      Now that landowners who own small tracts can no longer get free permits to hunt deer, there will be a backlash the MDC has not counted on.  Many who own 15 to 20 acres will simply kill a deer when they want, with no tags whatsoever, clean it where it falls, keep the loins and hams and tell no one.  Since it will not be called in, it will never be known to agents who by and large, work from that phone check system and seldom walk back into privately owned woods unless their vehicle can take them there. 

I own a 20-acre tract and if I wanted to eat venison, I would do the same thing.  And in doing it, there would be no evidence of it that anyone would see unless they looked in my freezer.  That is hypothetical of course, because I have never willingly violated game laws anywhere and do not intend to.  Because of the studies and research I have looked into gives me knowledge of this TSE disease, I will never hunt deer again.        Why should anyone miss time in the outdoors because they no longer hunt deer?  During that time there is great hunting for prairie grouse, pheasant and waterfowl in neighboring states, great waterfowl hunting in Missouri and excellent fishing during November as well.  I enjoy all of it so much more than hunting deer.

      In controlling the media to the extent they do, the MDC has kept the truth about CWD from being known, but they cannot do that forever.  I have talked to at least six landowners recently who have found terribly emaciated deer on their land, and each has called MDC personnel to report it.  Each of the six say know one ever came to investigate the sick deer!  I have photographs of two of those deer, which you can see on that computer site given above.

       I don’t know what a mess we will face in the future when all the facts come out and deer-hunters begin to know the truth about this disease, but I know what the truth is and you can’t hide it forever.  I say again that when you hear someone saying that CWD is of no danger to humans, you are hearing it from someone who will not, for any amount of money, eat venison from a CWD deer. 

      Many of the newspapers I write for will not publish this column because of the clamp down the Department of Conservation has on opinions they do not want heard. The power of that agency is tremendous. The real shame of all this is that printed facts from research done by the best scientific people and doctors in the Midwest concerning TSE or CWD or whatever you want to call it, also is restricted in most all news media outlets throughout the Midwest.

      This much is certain… hundreds and perhaps thousands of people have died from prions in the brain, a disease called TSE.  I have not talked to one doctor out of a dozen or so that have not told me that the disease, whether you call it CWD or TSE or mad-cow disease or whatever, has likely killed many people who were misdiagnosed.  You will likely never see this in print, but when brain tissue of 230 elderly men who were said to have died of Alzheimer’s disease was examined after death, those TSE prions were found in 30 of them.  Why can’t this be printed?

      Anyway, this year if you own 20 acres or less-- no more landowner permits for you.  In a few years it will be extended to 40 acres or less.

If you find sick deer on your land, please call the MDC and report it, and let me know if no one comes.  Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com

If you would like to get a copy of my magazine, or tell me of sick deer you have found, call my office phone, 417 777 5227

Telecheck MDC.... original letter

Crappie in Bunches

        

        It might be the most unnatural and ugliest water I have ever fished for crappie, but it is no doubt as good a place to catch crappie as I have ever seen.  The lower part of Lake of the Ozarks is packed with million dollar structures and perhaps enough boat docks for everyone who lives within ten miles of the water, and that is a lot of structures on the shore and over the water.  But I think that the water between and around those docks has as many crappie as you’ll find anywhere in the state.

         It is a mystery perhaps, and perhaps not.  I will guarantee you this… there are more lures cast in these waters by crappie fishermen than anywhere you will ever fish for crappie.  The cables which hold those docks in place hold as many crappie jigs, underwater and above, as some tackle stores.  If you go around looking for lost jigs you will have enough to fish with for who knows how long.

         I was there fishing with Mike Dyer, who lives out in the woods twenty miles away from the crowd.  He fishes for crappie a lot, right there in the shadow of the most development you will ever find on a lake.  It wasn’t a great day for fishing, a cold front was passing through, and the temperature was about 50 degrees with a heavy layer of gray clouds, and more wind than you would want when casting 1/8 ounce jigs.  The water was pretty murky, downright muddy in some areas.

        Crappie were not yet spawning, but they were thinking about it, and feeding voraciously. We caught dozens of them, most only nine-or ten-inches long, but legal.  Every now and then we would hook a twelve- to thirteen-inch crappie, and that amazes me.  How in the world, with the fishing pressure that place receives, does a crappie reach twelve inches?

         About half the time we would catch and release both black and white crappie that were from five- to eight-inches long.  That variety in size bodes well for the future of crappie fishing there, meaning that two- to four-year old fish are plentiful and in the next couple of years there will be plenty of nine- to ten-inchers that most fishermen keep and eat.

         I think crappie fishing would be more enjoyable there if the length limit was moved from nine to ten inches, but if that were to happen, the thousands of dock owners and home-owners that are there might revolt.

         Mike doesn’t fish in the weekend crowds, but that day in mid-week, possibly because of the weather, there weren’t many fishermen out there.  We went from dock to dock, fishing around them and between them, and hauled in our limits of crappie between 10 and 4 o’clock.  If you counted the ones we kept and those we threw back we likely caught a hundred between us, and Mike doesn’t keep one if it isn’t well above that nine-inch mark.  He knows what he is doing, often bending his rod tip nearly double and holding the jig in his right hand, then releasing it so that it flips well into a dock slip or well past and beneath the cables that are everywhere.

 

         The crappie were found almost everywhere from three feet of water to ten feet of water, bunches of them.  Occasionally we would hook a big bluegill too.

         With all that development, there has always been the question of water quality, especially with coli form bacteria.  But polluted water doesn’t always hurt crappie meat unless it is a type of chemical pollution.  Water you wouldn’t want your kids to swim in isn’t necessarily going to taint crappie and bass.

         There is no doubt that hundreds and hundreds of boat docks have helped the crappie on lake of the Ozarks because most of them have some cedar tree structure put there around and beneath the docks by owners who like the idea of catching fish beneath their docks. Just the docks themselves are attractions for fish.  When the sun gets high and hot in July and August, the shady water beneath a dock, if it is deep enough, attracts fish-food and crappie.

         Mike says that he will fish for crappie there for the next couple of weeks, but he won’t be found there after the Memorial Day weekend.  The giant boats and on the water parties found from Memorial Day through the summer create giant waves and danger for small boat fishermen.  But it is likely that next fall the crappie fishing there will be great.

         A caution to all fishermen.  If you are coming in off the water, or even hauling your boat home and have fish in a cooler or live well, you must have the fish you have caught marked.  You can easily do it with a small pair of scissors.  Three fishermen? One fisherman does nothing to his fish, another marks his fish by clipping the top of the tail fin, while the third marks his by clipping the corner off the bottom of the tail fin.  Do this as the fish are caught.  The agents of the Missouri Department of Conservation, waiting in MDC vehicles at boat ramps have found this to be an easy way to write citations with very little work in the field or on the water.  Don’t be a victim of such a senseless rule.  Even if you only have four or five fish in a live well, and there are two or three fishermen, they can and do write tickets that will cost all of you a hundred dollars or more if each fish is the same and YOU CANNOT PROVE WHICH IS YOURS!

         Write to me at box 22, bolivar, mo 65613 or email lightninridge47@gmail.com. You can call our office at 417-777-5227.

How to Score a Sucker and Where to Grab One

Spring suckers provide fine sport and good eating.

          Usually the yellow suckers run up the streams of the Ozarks earlier than this, but there is no strict timetable. Depending on water conditions, weather, and other factors you can find suckers shoaling in April and May if you look for them. Some friends of mine make a trip each year to the tributaries of Norfork Lake to grab suckers, and they have it down to a fine art, with perfect gear for grabbing, and grab hooks that are built with one large hook and a weight beneath it that makes the single hook sit up on the bottom.  That type of grabbing is sort of blind grabbing, like the paddlefish grabbers do.

          But when I was young, we found the suckers on clear shoals in the spring, preparing to spawn, and we simply used a big treble hook with a white rag tied to the line about eighteen inches in front of the hook.  When a sucker swam up to that white rag you gave a mighty jerk and if you were lucky, the fight was on.  Because you had to use a fairly stiff rod to jerk those hooks, the fight might not be the kind you expected from hooking a bass on a spinning rod.

In the old days, sucker grabbing in the spring allowed for a church or community fish fry.

         But the idea was to get a string of suckers to eat, and I am here to tell you, those spring ‘yaller suckers’ were delicious.  Of course you had to know about suckers to be able to eat them.  You removed the scales with a spoon, removed the head, entrails and tail, and then you had a big chunk of fish full of fine bones.  Fry it that way and you couldn’t eat it for the bones.  But Ozark sucker grabbers knew that you could eliminate the bone problem by ‘scoring’ the fish.  That meant you took a sharp thin-bladed knife and sliced through the meat on each side of the fish all the way to the backbone, making cuts from top to bottom every quarter inch or so.  That way, the bones were indiscernible.

there are lots of ways to grab yellow suckers in the spring    

         A few years back I was floating a stream in north Arkansas the first week in May and I came across a couple of fellows who had sucker grabbing fever.  They were sitting up over a shallow eddy below a shoal perched on sycamore limbs, grabbing suckers swimming below them.  The strung the fish they grabbed on a long stringer hanging into the water behind them.  I was catching smallmouth and releasing them, but I couldn’t help but want to join them.  They loaned me a treble-hook and I sat in my johnboat just below them and grabbed a half-dozen suckers to eat for super.

not many modern fishermen grab buffalo, or know how to prepare them to eat.

         A couple of springs back, I was floating another tributary to an Ozark lake trying to catch a walleye or two and some white bass, when I came onto a flowing tail waters below a shallow shoal that was teeming with spawning black buffalo.  I found the biggest lure in my tackle box and removed the treble hook and started whipping it through that water in an attempt to grab one of those fish, some as large as ten or twelve pounds.  It took awhile to get those small trebles to hook and hold, but when I finally hooked a six or seven pound buffalo I had a fight on that medium casting rod that was a real tussle.  It took an hour or so, but I had three in the boat before I laid into one of those 12 pounders and it broke my line.  While few fishermen know enough about the black buffalo to know how good they are to eat, I have learned a thing or two from old-time rivermen. When they use to talk about a feast on buffalo ribs in the springtime, they weren’t talking about the plains animals the mountain men ate.

What an odd spring it has been for us mushroom hunters who always eat too many of them and then wonder why they spent so much time hunting them.  I usually find a hundred or so morels in April and sometimes many more… enough to where I give away quite a few to some elderly folks who can’t get out and hunt them.  This year on two three-hour jaunts I found only about 60 or so in my area.  While in past years I have found morels in many habitats, including thickets, gravel bars and even cedar glades, this year I found not one morel that was more than a few feet from fairly large ash trees.

          The fascinating thing about nature is, nothing is ever the same, from one year to another.  I will find some more morels I think, this week up on Truman Lake, which, it seems, always has a good crop in late April or early May.  In northwest Ontario, which I will visit about the end of May, there will be some morels to be found as late as early June.  Those in Canada are twice the size of the average morel found in the Ozarks, but they taste the same.

         To contact me, write to P.O. Box 22 Bolivar, Mo 65613 or email lightninridge47@gmail.com  If I am not somewhere else, I am usually here in my office and can talk with you via phone, 417 777 5227.  That is the number to use to order one of my magazines or one of my books.

A Bad Time for Outdoor Decisions

         I have trouble this time of year!!  It drives me nuts trying to make a good decision about what to do tomorrow.

         My daughter Christy and I found about 50 nice morel mushrooms yesterday and she and Gloria Jean cooked them for supper with about two-dozen white bass filets. Two days ago I caught the white bass while hunting turkeys. That is, I boated up the river to a spot where wild turkeys rake the leaves along a pair of long wooded ridge tops. I had an old gobbler thundering his passion (what one outdoor writer referred to in place of the term ‘gobbling’) and coming to me slowly.  But it was all ruint when a stupid jake flew across the river and came up the hill behind me perkin’ and puttin’ and carrying on.

         I have seldom seen a jake gobbler (yearling) as big and pretty as he was, long legs, a four or five inch beard and a head of turquoise, white and blood red. I look at him and I calculate 18 pounds, which should amount to about eight or nine pounds of smoked turkey breast and wings. Let me say here that I get downright aggravated at these hunters who throw away turkey drumsticks just because they are full of ligaments. Boil the meat off the legs and throw away the bones and ligaments and you have some great dark meat to make a stroganoff dish or wild turkey and noodle soup.

         I see it this way… any hunter who throws away turkey legs cause his wife won’t boil the meat of turkey drumsticks, ought to get a new wife, learn to cook it himself or quit hunting wild turkey altogether.

         Anyway, I shot a nice six or seven inch diameter tree just this side of that beautiful jake’s head and he ran off.  So I went a couple miles up the river and caught some white bass, which some of you folks think aren’t much good to eat just because you don’t trim the red meat off the filets. I know there are a lot of daytime crappie fishermen who would rather catch crappie in the spring but I would rather fish for spawning white bass because one of them that weighs a pound and a half will outfight a six-pound crappie. If you want to enjoy a bent-rod, line-straining tussle, fish for white bass.

        Daytime crappie don’t get me too excited and I will tell you why… even though you probably wasn’t going to ask. I catch plenty of crappie, a whole year’s supply, in April and May, at night. At night with a pair of bright, submerged lights, we haul in the crappie and a few walleye with them, from lakes with clear water like Stockton, Bull Shoals and Norfork.

         If you have a pontoon boat on which you can spread out a sleeping bag and sleep late at night, you surely can get yourself a limit of crappie, and big ones too… 11 to 13 inches on Stockton, up to 15 or 16 inches in Bull Shoals and Norfork.

         Sometimes on my pontoon boat, I get out there about sunset and fix up some supper, set up a soft chair and fish straight down beside my lights with minnows or threadfin shad until one or two in the morning, feeling guilt at times because fishing shouldn’t be that easy.

         And in the dark, you can’t hardly tell my old ragged pontoon boat from a brand new one that I couldn’t begin to afford. And the crappie don’t seem to look down on old fashioned, somewhat poorer fishermen like me when they are assembling beneath those lights.

         But in late Aril and early May, when I was 12 or 13 years old, I hadn’t never seen a crappie or white bass, and didn’t care to. ‘Cause that’s when my dad would load up our old wooden johnboat and we would head for the upper half of the Big Piney River to fish for goggle-eye. Back then there was no wild turkey hunting to distract us, and though bass season was closed on the river, we’d hook some big old slab-sided smallmouth on regular occasions and turn ‘em loose figuring we get ‘em again in the summer and fall.

         The goggle-eye, which city folks call rock bass, were usually 9- to 11- inch fish back then and they would spawn in reasonably swift, flowing water at the end of shoals, usually no more than three or four feet deep. We used only one lure for them in the spring, hairy black or brown little jigs with bumble-bee bodies and a small spinner. The were called “shimmy-flies,” a fore-runner of the little plastic lures known as beetle spins, which began to appear in the 80’s.

         Back then goggle-eye were plentiful. Below one shoal you might catch 12 or 15 of them in a spot the size of a bathtub.  On down the Piney a ways, we would set trotlines for flathead catfish that would regularly weigh 20 or 30 pounds and every now and then, bigger.  And that is why I am so gosh-awful disgusted about spring… decisions, decisions, decisions.  And you might not believe this but I haven’t even mentioned the most Ozarkian method of spring fishing of all.  I will talk about that in next week’s column.  If you haven’t done all these things in the past few springs then it is likely easier for you to get through April than it is for me. I am looking forward to mid-summer when it gets up into the nineties so I can sleep awhile during the day and go bull-froggin’ and jitterbuggin’ in the cool of the night.

The Time of Wild Gobblers

     

     

     I killed my first gobbler in 1970 or ’71, I think; an 18½-pound jake that gobbled for an hour just like an old ground-raker. That was also a first and last, because that was a BIG jake. I haven’t killed a juvenile gobbler since that would tip 18 pounds on the scales.

      A week or so later I got my first mature tom, and I can remember it like it was yesterday. I figured there wasn’t much to this turkey hunting business, and expected to get one every time I heard a gobble. In the years that followed, I learned about all the things that keep turkey hunters humble. Indeed, it is sometimes the easiest thing in the world to call in and kill a wild gobbler.  And then sometimes it seems next to impossible, no matter how much you know, or the amount of experience you have.

      A lack of patience was always my ruination; it still is today. A hunter who can sit still for two or three house and envision his gobbler only 70 or 80 yards away even after the gobbling has stopped is the hunter who will enjoy a great deal of success.  But me, I give up on one too quickly and figure there might be another old tom sounding off in another valley, just over the ridge.

      Positioning was another problem I had. It didn’t take long to learn that you didn’t sit in the sunlight, or hide behind a tree you had to peer around.

Somehow, a hunter has to hide where he can get the best opportunity to see the gobbler and shoot it. As simple as that sounds, it may be the most complicated part of turkey hunting.  If I hear one gobble close, I too often just plop down anywhere that offers some cover.

      After learning all these things, and overcoming the worst of my shortcomings to some degree, I found other mistakes to make.  For instance novice hunters hear a gobbler and very often try to get within 50 yards. It seems like a good idea because then you only have to call the tom 15 yards or so. But it seldom works, unless the wind is blowing very hard and there’s a large rock wall between hunter and turkey. They can spot a movement in the woods at unbelievable distances.  And they can tell whether or not it’s a hen turkey. If it is something else, they have no curiosity at all.  It is best to try to call the gobbler a bit farther and not risk making him suspicious by getting in too close.

      I am not going to tell you how many gobblers I have killed in the spring, but I will tell you that in those many years I worked as a turkey hunting guide I called in a lot of gobblers for clients, and quite a few for non-paying friends. I also called in a few that got spooked or got missed. I will never forget the time I saw an 8-inch hickory tree take a full load of number 6 shot as a gobbler stepped behind it, only 20 yards away. There are a hundred or so stories like that. I wrote a book entitled, “The Greatest Wild Gobblers, Lessons Learned from Old Timers and Old Toms.”  If you would like to find out where to find one, call my office and have Ms. Wiggins, the secretary, give you the information.

      In that book there is a chapter telling how you can make a little cedar box call that I have used all these many years, a call that you can make in 10 minutes or so. I’ve probably made a few hundred in the last several years, new ones each year for new gobblers.  It is a soft call you can’t hear a long way off, but gobblers can. Hunters who complain that they can call a gobbler from a half mile away but can’t get him to come the final 70 or 80 yards are almost always too loud, most using mouth calls.

      Other problems that new turkey hunters face include using 20-gauge or open-bore shotguns; a smoker’s cough; and the tendency to doze off when it gets warm and still on a beautiful spring morning.

       Many hunters who fail are hunters who like to sneak up on turkeys, or come in for breakfast at 9:30 in the morning. this time of year, plenty turkey hunting stories begin with, "I should've..." or 

    "If only..."

      They end with “next time…”

In the Ozarks this year there’s the problem of declining numbers of gobblers.  It has been happening now for six or seven years and it is serious.  Next week I will write about why I think it is happening.  In feeding and photographing winter turkeys all over for the past ten years, I have seen a real decline, in some areas where there were winter flocks holding ten or twelve mature gobblers, the number has dropped to three or four.  That is a tremendous drop in numbers.  But in this day and time, few turkey hunters, and few wildlife biologists, spend enough time outdoors to know it.  I hope it changes but I don’t think it will be any time soon.  Why?? More about that and what I think we should do about it, in next week’s column.

     Contact me via email, lightninridge47@gmail.com or call my office, 417 777 5227.  The mail address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.  Read more material I write about conservation matters at larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com