Browns on the White…

 

                           Frank Saksa with a large brown trout

       There may be no better fishing to be found in the Ozarks in March than the brown trout fishing on the White River, for many miles below Bull Shoals Dam. Brown trout actually spawn in the White in December into February, and there are some fish there in those waters well over 20 pounds. In fact several 30-pound plus browns have been caught in the past 20 years from the White River.

       They feed ravenously after the spawning period, as do the rainbows. Trouble is, it is difficult to catch big rainbow trout from the White, because they are caught quickly on natural bait and therefore not given much chance to grow after they are stocked. They rarely bring off a successful spawn in the White, but it is not unheard of. A 14- or 15-inch rainbow isn’t hard to catch from the White, and on light spinning gear, they are strong fighters.

       It is not unusual for inexperienced fishermen to hook and land brown trout from 5- to 10-pounds. The river has a large number of brown trout much larger than that, a real prize for the White’s early spring anglers. Browns are known to be warier than rainbow trout, but they are particularly susceptible to 5- or 6-inch Suspending Rogue lures.

       A Suspending Rogue is a lure which is easy to cast because it is fairly heavy, and long and slender. And it takes no great talent to make it look like something a brown trout takes a shine to. Usually browns and rainbows both will hit the lure when it has stopped, so be ready to set the hook. Use six- to eight-pound line if you aren’t experienced in this type of fishing. If you are an old hand at it, four-pound line will work even better because it has lower visibility. Just keep that drag set well.

       White Rive Guide Frank Saksa say’s that the best brown’s he sees each year fall to those Rogues, which are jerked several feet and then allowed to drift in the current, then jerked hard again.

       “You’ll see, after you have fished awhile, how many times they hit those Rogues when they are dead in the water.”

 Saksa says, “Jerk ‘em a few feet, but resist the urge to just keep working them. Let the lure stop a few seconds, and hang on.”

       Saksa’s clients land several brown trout between 10 and 15 pounds in March. Most are photographed and released to grow larger. And while there are thought to be a number of 20- to 30-pound browns in the White, the Norfork and the Little Red, few are ever kept. All are released to grown larger. These fish grow very fast; reaching lengths of 18 to 20 inches in only three years, and the females will exceed five pounds in weight in that time. They may live more than 20 years and grow a maximum weight of 40 pounds in the Ozarks.

       Saksa says a dead brown was found on the White in the winter a few years back, which was partially decomposed, but thought to be larger than 25 pounds. Fishermen who fish for brown trout year round tell of seeing or hooking fish they think will exceed 30 pounds, but they seldom have the tackle to land one that size. Saksa says many big browns are also caught in the spring and on crayfish, white jigs or spoons.

       When winter-kill shad are coming through the dam and drifting down the White, you can catch both rainbows and browns on a 1/16 to 1/8 ounce white jig. The smaller the jig and the lighter the line, the better luck you will have.

       But the Rogue is more fun. The brown trout, are a catch-and-release species. If you get a big one, take a picture and release it to let it grow. Keep the rainbows to eat. They do not produce in any appreciable numbers Brown trout do. The limits on the two species change from time to time.

       There are techniques involved on the White River and the Norfork River, which you do not learn overnight. Spend a day with a knowledgeable guide like Saksa and you will learn more in a day than you might learn in a month of fishing on your own. Talk to folks in resorts up and down the river if you do choose to fish without a guide. There are length limits to know about, some areas where you may not use barbed hooks and natural bait. Those catch-and-release areas like the one just below the White River Dam are places where bigger fish can be found, rainbows, even walleye from time to time. In that area below the dam, you may keep walleye or crappie sometimes found there, but not trout.

BE sure of the limits, and stamps and licenses you need. Ask the resorts and docks about the best lures at the time, the best colors, and even line color. Those are things they know, which you need to know.

Short-Eared Oddballs

 

                

      Several years ago in late February a gentleman called me to tell me he had seen around 200 owls the day before in one small area in the western Ozarks.  He said that on one corral fence there were more than thirty in a group!

      When you are a grizzled old outdoor veteran like me, you figure you have seen about everything in the outdoors, and I have never seen more than four or five owls of any species together in the woods ever.  So, you can figure if I haven’t ever seen something, I won’t believe it ‘til I see it.  And folks, ‘I went there and seen it and I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it’.  

       Near Greenfield, Missouri was a huge group of short-eared owls, a species a little bit like the barred owl in size and appearance, but with small ears sticking up. In habit, they are much different than most of the owls we are accustomed to hearing and seeing in the Ozarks.  They have a mean look to them, with ornery-looking bright yellow eyes rather than the brown eyes the barred owl has.  And the face is much different, with a pronounced circle of feathers, contrasting white and dark brown, and two little feather patches referred to as “ears”, which are much like the horns on a horned owl.  Except the ears on a short-eared owl can usually not be seen, they just barely stick up above the forehead most of the time.

      They are a species not so much fond of forests; they do not seem to need a tree.  They stick to a more open country like that prairie land along the Missouri Kansas border, with scrub timber and thickets.  And they nest on the ground!  Now that is something, when you think about how most all owls nest in hollow trees.  The barn owl often nests in old buildings of course, and there is an odd little burrowing owl which nests in holes in the ground.

      It is interesting to note that an owl can’t build a nest because his beak isn’t made for carrying and assembling nest materials.  A burrowing owl doesn’t dig his burrow, and barn owls don’t build a nest at all, they just lay eggs on a barn loft or ledge.  Great horned owls and barred owls find a natural hole in a tree and nest there, or sometime use an old hawk nest.  But short-eared owls actually nest in the grass on the ground, which they trample down and flatten down, and they actually try to arrange a few sticks in a situation which really doesn’t resemble a nest. Knowing that other owls do not carry sticks, that’s something I’d like to see.

      On this little flattened grass “nest” they will lay anywhere from 3 or 4 to 7 or 8 eggs, depending on the whim of the female owl I suppose. They lay their eggs in May or early June, and the eggs aren’t much more than an inch wide, about an inch and half long.  That is a very small egg for a bird that eventually will mature at a size of 14 to 16 inches tall and weigh about a pound. Most owls and predatory birds, known as raptors, are nesting now, sitting on or laying eggs in late February or early March.

 Ornithologists examined the stomach contents of 110 short-eared owls many years back, and found that three-quarters of their diet had been mice or voles of one kind or another, about 10 percent small birds and nearly as many moles and shrews.  About 7 percent of the diet appeared to be insects, with the stomach of one owl containing about 30 big grasshoppers. So that tells you they didn’t do that study in the winter!   Another odd thing about the short-eared owl is that he is a daytime type of owl, actively hunting during the day more than at night, when most other owls are active.

       But why do they bunch up in flocks? Why are so many owls concentrated in such a small area together?  Who can explain that?  Certainly not me, and up to then I though I knew everything!  Obviously these short-eared owls do some kind of a migration, perhaps not very far, but likely from a place where food supplies of small ground mammals had been decimated for some reason or another. It is likely a mass movement of a species looking for food. I don’t see, anywhere in books I have, any naturalists talking about a migration of owls.

      Obviously, as I have said so often, no one can know all there is to know about nature.  Those of us who spend a great deal of time outdoors see unexplainable things.  A modern day outdoorsman or naturalist who tries to learn by the book can know little of the secrets of nature.  You have to be there sometimes to see things which perhaps no one has seen before. 

If you like to read about the outdoors, see my websites, www.larrydablemont.com 

An Excerpt from the Book, “Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid.”

                                                       Lane Davis

An Excerpt from the Book, “Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid.”

       In the 60’s, Houston Missouri had a weekly newspaper called the Houston Herald. The owner and editor was a man I got to know well. His name was Lane Davis.  I started guiding float fishermen at a young age, in an old wooden johnboat, and Lane was one of my clients.  He liked floating the Roubidoux  River  over by  Plato.  It was a small river with much more water back then than it has now, some deep eddies and lots of smallmouth, goggle-eye and black perch (green sunfish).  Lane was a good fishermen and he always caught lots of fish.

        I was 13 in the summer of ‘61, a troubled youngster who hated school, rich people, teachers and most all of the kids I went to school with. I was at a dangerous crossroads in my life.  I took my .22 pistol to school that fall to shoot a 15-year-old bully. I came close to using it, and I still sweat a little at the memory of that.  I wasn’t a mean or cruel kid, but I had been convinced I was worthless and without any ability. My grades were low, and I had no size or athleticism. I only wanted to be in my dad’s pool hall or alone in the woods or on the river.  Everywhere else there was conflict. 

       Lane Davis was one of three men that helped salvage a young life and get me through that awful time.

       Floating the river in the spring of ‘64, Lane convinced me I could write!  Then he said if I would write stuff about the outdoors he would publish it in the Herald.  The first few columns I wrote for the newspaper was entitled, “Summer on the Piney.”  That was the first one or two of nearly 6,000 newspaper columns to come over the next 63 years, outdoor columns published in more than 200 newspapers in five states.

       The week I graduated, at 21 years of age, I was hired as the outdoor editor for the Arkansas Democrat, the states largest newspaper out of Little Rock.  Lane Davis was my lone reference, and the only one I needed. The pay then, in 1970 was 509 dollars per month plus travel expenses.  I thought I was the luckiest man alive. 

       At M.U. when I was only 19, I wrote a manuscript about one of those old johnboats dad had built we called Ol’ Paint.  I had been reading Outdoor Life and Field and Stream magazines in our pool hall since I was 12 years old and I told my friends I was writing that article for Outdoor Life Magazine.   No one believed that that huge magazine would even consider it, including me. I was a kid wanting to be a writer, reaching for the stars.

              There is still an old Underwood typewriter in a storage closet in my office that belonged to my new wife, in 1970 who had been the secretary to the vice president of McDonnell Douglas Aircraft in St.Louis.  At only 18 years old she could type 110 words a minute on that old manual typewriter.  She typed that manuscript and I sent it to the editor of the largest outdoor magazine in the world.  A letter came back in the next couple of weeks from editor William Rae, saying that Outdoor Life was pleased to receive it and with my permission they would publish it and pay me 1500 dollars. I nearly fainted! 

       The ‘Old Paint’ article was published in Outdoor Life in1972 and that year it was chosen to be the only outdoor story published in a NewYork book entitled “The Best Sport Stories of 1972” It was also published years later in a 500 page anthology entitled, “The Best of Outdoor Life.” It had about 75 articles chosen from magazines covering 1890 thru 2000. I could scarcely comprehend mine being one of them.

       What I remember about that latter book was articles in with mine were written by Zane Grey, Archibald Rutledge, Jack O’Connor, Edwin Way Teale, James Oliver Curwood and dozens of other legendary outdoor writers. That first year out of college, as the new outdoor editor of the Arkansas Democrat, I began to sell articles to Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, Sports Afield and several west coast outdoor magazines put out by Petersen’s Publishing company. In the next ten years I sold articles to more than 60 outdoor magazines. One of those magazine articles,  some written in only an hour or so, would pay me 2  to 3 times my monthly salary for the Democrat.

       Today the  Houston Herald still uses my column each week, a self-syndicated outdoor column which is used in about 40 or so newspapers in 3 states.  I hope that somewhere in heaven Lane Davis knows that and how important those fishing trips were on the Roubidoux. On those trips he helped a hapless, confused kid become a successful naturalist and outdoor writer.

Outlaw

 

Outlaw

         I don’t remember when the old hound wasn’t around. He was that old. Jess called him Outlaw…raised him from a pup. In his day he was a big powerful trailing hound with a voice they talked about all across the county.

         I remember those nights in the Big Piney River valley when old Outlaw struck a hot trail and all the talk around the campfire would stop In the silence, the lonesome bawl of the legendary hound floated over the hills, distinct from the baying of the other dogs, so powerful and strong it sent a shiver down my backbone.

         Maybe you wouldn’t call it music, but Jess and the other men knew it as such. All I know is, the voice of old Outlaw was different than any fox along the river had ever heard before. I remember that year as I grew older and winter came on, how the aging hound became stricken with disease. He didn’t eat much and he lay around most of the time growing thinner and lazier by the day. He was beginning to lose his teeth when Jess brought Outlaw to the vet.

         “How old is this hound, Jess?” the veterinarian asked, shaking his head as he looked him over.

         “Right at fourteen years, I reckon,” the old woodsman answered.

         With sympathetic eyes, the doctor looked into the weathered face of the hunter He knew Jess and he knew his advice wouldn’t be easy to swallow.

         “He’s old and sick, Jess,” the vet told him. “Maybe if he was younger I could help some, but at this age there’s nothing I can do. He’ll just go downhill and sooner or later you’ll need to put him to sleep to keep him from suffering.”

         Jess took it hard but he never let it show. The ring of old-timers who looked forward to those late winter fox hunts with such jubilance now prepared for a hunt with sadness. Jess had announced it would be old Outlaw’s last chase. It was cold that night and some said they could feel snow in the air. Fallen leaves lay along the old logging road that led down the river and they crackled beneath the shuffling feet of the hunters. It was just like always before, with most of the men joking abut someone else’s dog or telling some wild story about the past deer season. Only Jess was quiet.

         Everyone acted like nothing was different, but there was a strained atmosphere that night. Grandpa had instructed me to not ask any questions and that was a tough job for a 13-year-old boy. But I tagged along quietly behind him and Jess, heart saddened and feet heavy.

         Old Outlaw walked beside Jess for a long while, unlike the times in years before when he was the first hound on the trail. The other dogs had headed for the river upon being released. Jess’ other hound, a young pup, kept returning to the group as if urging old Outlaw to join him.

         But the big hound stayed by the side of his lifelong friend and master, his muzzle ever far from the old woodsman’s hand.

         No one seemed to notice when he left us, but as we grouped around the fire on the river’s edge, I noticed that Outlaw was gone. The other hounds had a chase going back to the south and most everyone assumed he had joined them. But as the first chase faded farther away, there came a long deep bawl from the low ridge to the east witch paralleled the river. There was no mistaking that voice.

         Suddenly the talking stopped and most of the men rose to listen one last time to those clear, long, drawn out notes. I stood too with those chills playing up and down my spine again like always before. Jess’s young dog joined Outlaw for awhile, but as the chase left us and crossed the river downstream, the young dog returned to the fire, apparently somehow aware that this trail belonged to Outlaw alone.

         Across the river, the pursuit turned upstream again and Outlaw’s voice became strong as he moved near us. I wondered how that voice could remain so clear and deep and strong while the old hound became weak and fail with age. Most of the men couldn’t believe that those aging legs could carry the big hound as far as the chase had led him, but the voice never wavered and Outlaw forged on, hot on the trail of another fox. Jess moved out away from the fire and stood alone, his hands thrust down into the pockets of his overalls, his mind way up on that ridge with his dog. I was glad that the darkness prevented everyone from seeing his face… and mine.

         But then the chase turned away, high into the hills across the Big Piney, westward into the vast timbered expanses of the National Forest. We listened in the stillness as the old hound’s deep, bellowing voice became harder and harder to hear, eventually silenced by the distance.

         Outlaw never returned that night. He must have sensed it would be his last chase. Oh, I knew that dogs couldn’t think or reason but I liked to imagine the big hound knew it was better that way, better especially for the old man who loved him so much.

         Some of the men figured he had caught up with big old red wolf that they said roamed those river hills and some said maybe he trailed a mountain lion to his doom But I don’t know, I wonder if he didn’t just keep running until those tired old legs would carry hi no farther.

         Age my have stopped those old legs and stilled his strong heart, but nothing could have stilled his voice. On a cold, clear winter night it echoes across the valleys of my memory and I can see old Jess standing there in the edge of the firelight saying good-bye to his old friend.

         Occasionally, hunters along the lower Piney claim they hear an extra voice in with their hounds on a cold winter night… a voice deep and clear, which seems to fade away into the timbered hills to the west. And one old trapper who travels the river in the midst of the winter, swears that on a still night, if you stand quiet and listen hard, you can hear the far away baying of a hound… a hound with a voice of pure gold, beginning and ending deep in the wilderness across the Big Piney where the spirits of old fox hunters are listening still.

The Miracle Fish

 

         There was no underestimating the size of the walleye I hooked. He was a dandy, five or six pounds a least and maybe bigger. You could see him easily as I fought him alongside the boat, with my fishing partner whackin’ at him with the dip net, something like a great blue heron would stab at a sunfish.

         I just didn’t have my drag set properly on my reel. Most generally that is something I do at the beginning of every fishing trip, I check the drag on whatever I am fishing with. And you need to check the last few feet of your line for any nicks or abrasions.  I am just getting too darned old to remember everything I guess, and I forgot to check either. When that walleye saw my fishing partner waving that net around like he was a highway department flagman, he really got wild, and he made a huge lunge for deep water and broke the line.

         The lure was nothing of great importance, it was one of those four- or five-inch black and white minnows that look like the old Rapala lures, one that you can jiggle around on the surface or yank down under maybe three feet or so when you reel it in. I was catching some really hefty white bass on it. I had some good ones and one walleye just a little better than fifteen inches long. Then that big walleye came up from the depths and engulfed it and the fight was on. He won, and I lost my lure.

But I have several similar ones that are even better, lures referred to as ‘Rogues’.  I tied one of them on and kept fishing.  And I didn’t throw my hat on the boat floor and utter an expletive and moan about that lost walleye like my fishing partners have seen me do before. A fisherman with my experience gets use to losing big fish on occasion when using light line and a switch for a fishing rod.

         You don’t become a grizzled old outdoorsman like me without watching big fish disappear in the depths on occasion, leaving you limp-rodded. You just figure God had a better purpose for that fish than a sizzling destination in my frying pan. You have to occasionally blame the Great Creator for your dirty rotten luck as a fisherman, unless you want to blame yourself for not checking the drag on your reel or not replacing old line.

         But now we are coming to the unbelievable part. I tied on that other lure, just like the one I lost except different, and almost an hour later down the river about a half mile, I made a cast and when I reeled the lure back, it had hooked and retrieved the one I lost. I swear folks, that is the truth! When I reeled it back in the boat, the one which broke off and last seen in the toothy jaw of that big walleye, was dangling from the back hook of the new one I tied on to replaced it!!! It sounds like something an outdoor writer might make up? But honest, I swear on the life of  my best coon dog and my camouflaged War-Eagle boat.  If I am lying, may it have a hole in the bottom it, and may my Ugly-Stick break right in the middle!!

         My fishing partners both ‘seen it themselves’, and you can ask them, a couple of the most honest men I ever met! But we hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. Wait ‘til you hear this! I tied that old lure back on, and reset my drag so that it was perfect. And I started catching white bass again. Its a drizzly, dark afternoon and one of my fishing partners caught two walleye that were 16 to 19 inches in length, fish that my previously lost lunker might have sired in his earlier days.

         And nearly two miles down the river from where I lost that big walleye, and a mile and a half from where I miraculously recovered my lost lure, I cast it out into a deep eddy below a shoal and a huge fish engulfed it only four or five feet from the end of my rod. He looked like a monster coming up from the depths. He stripped four or five feet of line against the drag and I told my fishing partners I was about to lose that lure a second time in two hours!

         But this time, one of them got the net under that big walleye and it was mine. I don’t know how much it weighed but it was 25 inches long and hefty. I knew that the Great Creator was trying to let me know how sorry he was that I had lost the first one. Maybe the fact that I am trying so hard not to cuss as much when I lose a fish is paying dividends. Or maybe He just decided it was that second big walleye’s time to finally sizzle in my frying pan, as he would, soon.

         Maybe that second lunker wasn’t as deserving as the first, I can’t say. But that two hours and the course of events in which a lost lure was found, and a second lunker walleye was hooked on it, certainly makes a man think; something I don’t do a lot of.

         I swear this story is the truth, all of it. It happened in February a couple of years back. I can show you that lure. It has big tooth marks all over it!

 

The above story is an excerpted chapter from the   book “Recollections of an Ol-Fashioned Angler”  To get an autographed copy call my office at 417 777 5227   or email us at lightninridge47@gmail.com  See all my books and magazines on the website… larrydablemont.com

Where Common Sense Doesn’t Work…Isn’t Tried

 

CHECKING DEER FOR CWD

       The Missouri Department of Conservation has told a few dozen landowners in Texas county they intend to come into a 25-square-mile tract of land and set up bait and lights to night-shoot 110 deer.  This is part of an attempt to find transmissible spongiform encephalitis, which they commonly call CWD or ‘chronic wasting disease’. It is all the result of finding one buck with the disease last September. And yes there are better ways to do this, but the MDC is accustomed to telling folks what they are going to do whether it makes common sense or not, and whether they like it or not.

       If they were to send their biologists to the area in September and October and require hunters to check the first 110 deer killed they would accomplish the same results.  They won’t! Common sense and the wishes of the landowners be damned!   If they checked road-killed deer over the next year in the county they could accomplish the same result… but they won’t.    Again, that makes too much sense.

       What they have chosen is an ‘in your face’ method that will result in the   taking of probably 80 or so pregnant does with fawns soon to be born, which will make the total of the kill more like 200 to 250    deer, considering what those fawns will amount to, fawns that will die inside the womb of those female deer.  Of course 30 or so of the 110 deer killed by spotlighting over piles of corn at night will be bucks that local landowners who hunt with their families will never see next fall.

       One of the landowners told me…”I don’t want to be a part of that… bucks don’t   set in one place, they travel in the fall and one or two that I might see on my place then might be killed this month by these government shooters. It is going to affect my deer hunting in a bad way, and they just don’t care.”  He is right… they don’t care.  The MDC doesn’t need country people.  As long as St. Louis and Kansas City and Springfield hunters give them thumbs up, they can do without landowners and rural people.

        The science of this is faulty, because this isn’t necessary.  The landowners who permit this will not be scattered.   The 110   deer will come from a concentrated area, and that area will lose a lot of deer over the next three years because of it.  And all because the MDC wants to test these deer NOW rather than next fall.  It seems so senseless.

       I met   with and interviewed the new MDC director a month ago and brought up that very thing.  “You seem to grab onto your own answers and ignore others that make more sense”.  That interview led me to believe nothing is going to get better.   That director has an attitude of being carried away with their power to do whatever they want, and then pass it off as science. The truth is, the people they have hired have been through what is known as DEI and there is rank inefficiency and incompetence.  I see it when I talk to biologists. I have the same degree from Missouri University they have and years of study and experience they do not have. The MDC is a bureaucracy out to make as much money as possible and country people are of little consequence.  They see public-land timber as a money maker, deer as a money maker, wild turkey as a money maker and declines in all three can’t cost them anything.  This killing of 110 deer in that small area by spotlighting over bait, is ridiculous.  But again, it is what happens when you give a state agency ultimate power, as that 1/8^th cent tax did, decades back.  The state legislature can do nothing about any of this. 

This slaughtering of 110 deer in a confined area cannot be stopped, and it has been and will be carried out  in other parts of the state.  But it is fake science.  How I wish common sense could come back.

A Scientific Approach

 

Sick buck couldn't get up when I walked right up to him

       During the archery season in September, a hunter killed a young buck just west of Highway 63 between Houston and Licking Missouri.  It looked healthy but testing showed it to be infected with TSE, (Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy). That is the disease where disfigured proteins riddle the brain.  Thousands of humans have died from those proteins, known as prions, infecting the brain.  In England, years back many humans died from eating cattle infected with those prions.  That was TSE… but called Mad Cow Disease in England.

       In deer and elk TSE is given the common name of ‘Chronic Wasting Disease’.  It is said often that humans cannot get Chronic Wasting Disease or CWD.  Doctors I have talked to and researchers from other states say otherwise.  Relatives of people who have died of TSE from eating deer meat are never allowed to tell their stories in the media, though I have interviewed several whose accounts of their loss of a loved one sounds very credible and horrible.  Two men in a Montana hunting lodge died recently from TSE. They had cleaned and eaten the same deer meat one had killed.  I am certain that people have died from getting prions from deer meat, and I am also certain that there are some people that have eaten deer with the disease who didn’t get it. It may well be like the roll of the dice.

       Whatever you believe, you darn sure aren’t going to eat a diseased deer if you know it.  I hope that bow-hunter who killed the diseased buck didn’t eat any of that one.  The Missouri Department of Conservation will not give his name. Now the MDC wants to create a twenty-five square mile of ground around where that buck was killed and send their ‘shooting teams’ to kill and sample another 110 deer.

       Shooting teams are made up of Conservation Department personnel and some members of the US Dept of Agriculture, according to MDC’s deer biologist Jason Gabriel. He spoke to a gathering of about 75 people, most of them from that 25 square mile area, this past Tuesday night in Houston.  His presentation was very good, but much of the terminology is difficult for the average person to understand.  Gabriel did his best to explain it all.  But the gist of his talk was trying to explain that the MDC feels they have, by using this late winter harvesting tool, held CWD at bay in the Ozarks.   While other states, especially Wisconsin and northern Illinois have found 60 percent of the deer with the disease; in Missouri the percentage is only two percent of those sampled.

       Gabriel felt the ire of audience members who owned land in that square who did not want the sampling to take place because at this time of year, many doe deer carry two or three fawns almost ready to be born.  When looked at in such a manner, the 110 deer killed ends up taking perhaps 300 deer from the 25 square miles because of the unborn fawns.  And then there’s the method used; deer killed by spotlighting over bait.  Big antlered bucks aren’t spared, and hunters who want those antlers will never be able to take them next deer season.  Too many big trophy bucks will be in that total of 110. 

       So while Gabriel’s biological method of controlling CWD in the Ozarks makes scientific sense, that approach does not set well with hunters and landowners.  Of course individual landowners can say no, but deer do not confine themselves to fenced-in boundaries.  If the guy next to you welcomes those shooting teams to his land, the deer killed will likely be part of the deer herd that spends time on your place. Whether you like it or not, big bucks and pregnant does will be killed… a lot of them. The whole thing can be forced upon those landowners, and will be.  No one can stop it from happening short of a court order, and no judge will go against the MDC with their money and power!  

       A good alternative was discussed at that meeting… why not start checking the deer killed along the highway? No dice!  “It isn’t necessary,” was the response from Jason Gabriel, sewing a seed of discourse amongst country landowners and hunters all around Texas County and elsewhere.  That approach may be sound reasoning, but the MDC often rejects sound reasoning.  Gabriel has people above him who control what he does. Even if he thinks having a team to check road-killed deer is a good idea, he can’t say it should be done.   Such a decision would likely get him fired.

        But why not check road-killed deer? If 30 or 40 deer killed along the highway had glands removed and sent in, that would mean Gabriel’s shooting team could kill less live deer.  If you use volunteers like me, who know where the glands are and how to remove them, then think of the money that would be saved.  And after all, money is the greatest motivating factor in everything the MDC does.  Who knows how much money will be spent in having those shooters kill 110 live deer in that 25-mile square acreage.

       I will discuss this more in next week’s column and then promise to move on too more important things, like catching winter crappie or walleye.

       Speaking of walleye, I will be speaking to a walleye fisherman’s club at Clinton Arkansas, at the Fairfield Bay Resort on Greer’s Ferry Lake the evening of January 20.  If you have an interest in attending, there is further information about this event on my BlogSpot, larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. Or you can contact me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or by calling my office at 417-777-5227.