Smokin’ out the Worms

 

This mess is the result of fall webworms taking over the branch of a tree.

       Every year about this time, fall webworms begin to appear in trees around the Ozarks.  I have a quick solution for the ones I find around my place.  I take a long pole, stuff newspapers all around the end of it, light the newspapers with a match and hold the flame beneath the webs, which are full of worms eating leaves. In an instant they are all dead.

       Or you can cut the limbs off and burn them in a trash barrel. It is quick and efficient, and with that you don’t have to go buy chemicals to do the job.  Those worms are the larvae of a moth about a half-inch long with wings that are pure white or white with black spots.

       If you listen to some of the so-called experts, they want you to buy and use a chemical.  My advice is, stay away from chemicals!  In thirty some years here on this ridge top I have never used chemicals. They are not needed.  Several years ago I advised the burning of those webs, and a week or so later a Missouri Department of Conservation “media specialist” wrote that you should never burn them because that might damage the tree they are in.  That stuff he writes is so often hogwash. He spends his time in an office cubicle behind a computer.  Aspects of the outdoor world are as far away as Alaska.

        I have burned out hundreds of those webs full of moth larvae and there is NEVER any damage to a tree! In this day and time, common sense is forgotten in advice from the MDC. People believe anything they say or write and so much of it is pure baloney. In anything done or written or stated by state or federal government agencies you can bet you are listening to something without any common sense behind it.

       Actually fall webworms, besides being unsightly and leaving small balls of digested leaf droppings beneath the branches, do little damage to the tree either.  But this past week I have put a flame to a half dozen webs full of worms around my home and no trees have shriveled up or burned up or died.  Follow my example, and forsake chemicals, which often kill other creatures, like the small birds that will eat those dead, poisoned larvae.  Chemicals kill humans too, sometimes causing cancer and other diseases later in life by many years than the initial exposure.

 

       When I built my home and office years ago on what we call Lightnin’ Ridge, I added a screened porch which sets about 8 feet off the ground.  Out before it is giant oak, hickory, walnut trees and bird feeders.  You would think nothing new would come to those feeders, but now red-headed woodpeckers are showing up, three of them this morning.  They like to nest near water and I have seen them near my pond before, but never at the feeders.  Maybe they are the most beautiful birds that come there.  Cardinals and grossbills and indigo buntings and goldfinches and hummingbirds are there regularly and perhaps to many one of those would be the most beautiful, but those ‘red-headed peckerwoods’ as my grandfather once called them, are absolutely stunning, bright red, snow white and black.

       For the first time I can recall, two tiny chipmunks scurry back and forth to eat fallen grain beneath the feeders.  They too have been seen often down in the big woods beyond the pond, but never so close to the porch.  Other rarely seen creatures that live here are the grey shrew and a little-but-vicious weasel.  I have photos of both of them.  

There is no doubt this is a rare grey shrew, perhaps one of the only ones ever found north of the Arkansas border.

 

     Some doubt the presence of this silver-colored tiny carnivore, the grey shrew because they are not supposed to exist this far northeast. None have been reported in Missouri, but they are found occasionally in the Ozarks of Arkansas. But the photo leaves little doubt as to what it is.  According to the books, he is really out of his habitat, right here on Lightnin' Ridge. Shrew should never make it through the winter here because they will die if they don’t eat about every four hours. Distinguishing characteristics on the grey shrew include only 28 teeth while other shrews common to the Ozarks have 32. I pried his little mouth open and sure enough, he only had 28 teeth!   You can believe that if you want, and you can see a photo of him on my website, lightninridgeoutdoors47.blogspot.

 

Email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or send mail to us at Lightnin’ Ridge Publishing,  P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613

Upcoming Interviews and Supreme Immunity

 

 If non-resident turkey hunters quit coming to Missouri, it is a big loss of revenue for the MDC.

 

       I talked to the new director of the Missouri Department of Conservation this week, and he gives me some hope.  He hails from Ozarks country, the small community of Lincoln Missouri, where he and his dad kept coonhounds and hunted coons and sold their pelts. The former director was a lady who I interviewed for hours once and she didn’t know the difference between a coon pelt and a cowhide.  

       We talked about meeting on August 19 so I can learn more about his attitude toward conservation issues in Missouri, and  I will report on that in my column that next week. I also talked with what they call a turkey and grouse biologist for that department.  He is too young to be that, and completely dedicated to the department’s position that the reason we have about one-third of the number of wild turkeys we had twenty years ago is habitat loss.  That is absolutely ridiculous and I told him so, going to the extent of telling him to come join me to look at places in the Ozarks where thousands of acres of land haven’t changed a bit and wild turkeys have declined considerably. 

       I have to admire him for talking to me when I was giving him ‘what-for’ about the department's refusal to change anything that might cost them money from the sale of turkey tags.  Then we got down to brass tacks, me challenging him to come to the Ozarks to meet at a large event center where three or four hundred people could witness and contribute to a debate between me and him and anyone he would like to bring with him.  He kind of indicated that if the director would approve that kind of thing he might just do it.

       When I meet with the director I will urge him to do the same thing.  There is no reason that he and others in the department would not meet with country people, outdoorsmen and landowners in such a situation, where written questions could be submitted for them to answer in a very controlled debate.  The department would not be in control of the situation and that is where the rub is.  When they have meetings, they are in control and you get to hear their presentation first.

                           **************************************

       I am going to tell something here they do not want told.  That urge for money is what drove the spring extention of the turkey season to include all-day hunting. Talking to a source that knows all about it, and to a non-resident hunter, I got a true picture.  Non-resident turkey hunters are getting to where they don’t want to spend the hundreds of dollars on those out-of-state turkey tags. I talked to a turkey-call maker from Tennessee,  by the name of  Eric Crouse.  He said he and a large group of hunters that had been coming to Missouri for 15 or 20 years will never come to hunt here again because the decline in wild turkey numbers that makes it next to impossible to hear gobblers as they once did. He told me that if the director or turkey biologist would agree to that meeting I propose, that he would bring several of his fellow hunters  up to attend the meeting, all the way from Tennessee. 

       That all-day rule change came about because too many non-residents are angry. In Missouri, they have nothing to do after mid-day and are considering going to other states.  In an attempt to keep that non-resident money coming in the MDC decided to extend daily hunting hours to sunset.  It makes sense for keeping non-residents.  If you live in Missouri you just go back home and get some other work done or go fish a pond  somewhere with the half-day season we have always had.  Non-residents too often go back to a motel or camp and just sit there.  Not now… now they can hunt all day!  Maybe now the MDC can make a little more money from non-residents who will come to the state not knowing that in most of the Ozarks at least, wild turkey numbers are a fraction of what was once here.  And hunting late in the day helps hunters to roost gobblers for the next morning, even allowing for a little roost-shooting at dusk.

                     

       Next  week’s column is a follow up to a story I wrote back in December about a man from Sullivan who had a conservation agent with no search warrant sit in his driveway for two hours and steal a wild turkey he had killed.  He made the mistake of taking his turkey out of the freezer and showing it to the agent, one he had legally killed and properly telechecked.   Now he is suing the department for theft of property.  The MDC’s defense is ‘Supreme Immunity’.  What a story this is.

 

       Contact me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or call our office at 417-777-5227.  I think folks will like my new book, “The Buck that Kilt the Widow Jones... Short Stories from the Outdoor Ozarks”.  It is 16 dollars postpaid.  The first 100 are numbered, to be inscribed to the reader and autographed.  You can also order one by mail, by sending 16 dollars to ‘The Buck’, P.O Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.

New Book - THE BUCK THAT KILT THE WIDOW JONES

 

My new book is entitled, “The Buck That Kilt the Widow Jones”, a book of 30 short stories with 264  pages of reading about the outdoors and the Ozarks.  The cost is sixteen dollars but if you can get aholt of me on the phone, I will give you a discount and autograph it to you.  The first 100 we send out will be numbered.

Fishing With Otters

 

Fish from the battle of 'wounded knee'

 

      I hate to be laughed at!  But I know a bunch of you folks out there are going to laugh at this… In southern Bangladesh there are native people who live along the rivers that feed the ocean, who train otters and use them to fish in those tributaries. Those otters are bred in captivity and trained to herd fish into the nets of village fishermen.

       They are led to boats on leashes, eight or ten at a time, and they willingly climb into cages on the boat. I saw all of this on a nature show of some sort on Public Television. I hate television except for the nature films, especially those on British Broadcasting, where you can see a new world and the nature of it, so fascinating and revealing that it makes me realize indeed how great the Creator is. I learn a lot from those films, and you could never have convinced me that someone could train an otter as those were trained, as well as any dogs you have ever seen.

       At low tide, the Bangladesh rivers are easy to navigate and the fishermen place nets off the sides of the boat, release the otters into the river and let them drive fish toward and into the nets. It is hard to believe how well it works.  The film showed the fishermen calling in the otters after the nets were full, and feeding them fish that made up a percentage of the total catch, the reward for a job well done.

       It was amazing to me that several of the older otters were not on leashes but roamed free as the others were led on leashes. Still, when they got to the boat they jumped right into their cages. In the water, the otters, easily a dozen of them, seemed to understand how to work as a team.  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

       There are few mammals as smart as otters. They are smarter than raccoons.  But they are what you might consider vicious and bloodthirsty in the wild. While their diet is chiefly fish, crawdads, bullfrogs and water snakes, they can take to land to catch and eat rabbits, young turkeys and anything else they can catch. An acquaintance of mine told me he witnessed an otter with his long body wrapped around the neck of a small fawn trying to drag it into the river, where he could have drowned it, like a raccoon often drowns a coonhound.  My new book is entitled, “The Buck That Kilt the Widow Jones”, a book of 30 short stories with 264   pages of reading about the outdoors and the Ozarks.  The cost is fifteen dollars but if you can get aholt of me on the    phone I will give you a discount and autograph it to you.  The first 100 we send out will be numbered.

       I have been spending lots of time at my desk the last month due to surgery on my knee which is suppose to make it 100    percent well.  But it still hurts and only because I am a toughened, grizzled old outdoor veteran am I able to go fishing.  But my daughter Christy and I went up the Sac River last Saturday and found it too muddy and high to fish the portion of it we wanted to. Fortunately I remembered a creek where I caught lots of big Kentucky bass last spring so we found a nice little deep hole up that creek about four in the evening and caught very little.    Christy got a couple of small bass, lost a good one and then had another  one break her line.  Because of my knee I had trouble    running the trolling motor, but finally tied on big spinner bait and on the first cast it was jolted by a whopper-doc of a fish.  I fought the rascal around for ten minutes or so, expecting a big bass to break water in an attempt to throw the hook, but that didn’t happen. Christy waited with the net, caught a glimpse of the fish and said it looked like a big drum.  That’s when I realized what it was, a fish completely out of place, up the creek in July.

       Hybrids, a cross between a striper male and white bass female, come up the sac in big numbers each fall, and also in early spring, but not in July.  Well I had ahold of a two-foot long hybrid, and I limped around the boat trying to slow its runs in that little bluff hole on a creek where it should never   have been.  It isn’t there now, as my daughter got a net under the battler and we had it for Sunday dinner. Hybrids, like white bass are good to eat if you take off all the red meat found on filets.

       You can see me holding up that big hybrid, almost ten pounds I reckon, but at least better than eight.  Because of my weakened, hurting leg, Christy and I will forever refer to the afternoon tussle with the big fish as the ‘battle of wounded knee’.

 

Contact me in my office at phone 417 777 5227, or email me at lightinridge47@gmail.com.  The place to read past columns and see that big fish is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.

 

The Big Piney Pool-Hall Rules…

 

       I hope to have my Big Piney Museum and Ozark Interpretive Center finished and open by this fall. One of the contents is a pool table that was made in the early 1920’s, dubbed an A.E. Schmidt Victory Table.  It was sent to the main street pool hall in Houston, Missouri about 1922.  My dad and grandfather bought the pool hall in 1957 when I was 10.  From then until 1964, I worked there after school and at various times during the summer.  

       Sometime in the 1970’s I guess the 3 snooker tables and 2 pool tables were sold.  I found one of each of them in a small-town Ozark restaurant about 20 years ago and I bought them both.  They are set up in my home now, waiting for the completion of the museum. It is nearing completion now and we have a big fireplace on one wall. Out in front of that fireplace we will have that 1920 antique pool table. There I will create a 1920’s thru 1950’s pool hall environment, with tables for checkers, cards and dominoes, a coffee pot, old time soda pop machine and peanut machine. There will be no charge for the games or coffee, just a can nearby for donations.

       In Dad and Grandpa McNew’s pool hall, there were lots of signs, telling players not to sit on pool tables, not to sit drinks on them, no gambling, no masse shots, etc.  The only thing different from the pool hall of my boyhood will be the lack of spittoons.  No tobacco of any kind will be allowed in my nature center-museum. 

        I have some memorabilia from that old pool hall where all the men in Houston seemed to gather a few times a week, a big picture of ducks that was there in 1958 will be on my museum wall and an old deer head and the  handles of the front door of that pool hall from the  fifties. If I  can find a straggly looking fish mount that looks 60 years old I might stick it up over the ‘farr-place’. 

       But there were signs there back then, like ‘no gamblin’ ‘no cussin’ and ‘no alcohol’?  I will have to make new ones.  How do these sound?  First of all, we’ll post house-rules about three kinds of normal pool games that can be played… Nine-ball not allowed.

       Then—1.No argurin’ about politics or religion! 2. No gamblin’ without written permission!---  3. No fish stories when owner is here!  (His family is trying to stop him from lyin’)--- 4. Coffee is free… except for first and last cup, which are 25 cents each!... please  clean up any spilt coffee as no one else will do it!...   5. In winter, card players and pool players are expected to keep ‘farr-place’ filled with wood.---  6. Restroom in back corner… but if you just need to pee, go out into woods thru back door!—7. Don’t sit on table and don’t sit nothin’ else on table…8. Do not flirt with or grab ladies up front…(up front in museum that is)… unless you know in advance they don’t mind!---9. For each pool game you play, loser puts a quarter in donation box, or more if you want the Good Lord to smile upon you!--- 10. Treat everyone here like your brother…unless you have had trouble getting along with your brother! 

11. Remember that this is a day the Lord has made.  Rejoice and be glad about it and don’t mess it up by cussin’ ‘til you get outside!---

  12. Keep table covered when not in use and put cue sticks in rack, and put the balls in pockets! (pool table pockets, not YOUR pockets.)

        Last but most important, 13. If you do not want your wife to know you are here should she call… notify us in advance.  When I was working as a kid in the pool hall we owned, Vernon Cantrell’s wife would call and want to know if he was there.  Why she called I don’t know because Vernon always was in there at such times, and he had told me to tell her he wasn’t.  What she called me at such times wasn’t near as bad as what she called Vernon.

       When I get the place finished, come by and  play a game of pool or checkers and help us keep the farr goin’.

 

p.s.  The  Big Piney River Nature Center and Museum will be free to all who stop by.  I could sure use some donations from rich people to pay some of the cost of it.  You can see what we have done so far on the east side of highway 63 a mile south of Houston, Mo. Help would be appreciated.

 

Larry Dablemont –‘proprieter and janitor’

Woe Is Me and My Knee!!

 

         I have had no outdoor adventures lately. It has been three weeks since I came down with something called RSV, which stands for “respiratory something virus”.  It took me two weeks to get over that. Right behind it was a scheduled knee operation, made necessary by the fact that I jumped off the front of my boat last year, as I have done for decades. But that most recent time, I tore something called a meniscus. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a major part of walking found inside your knee…and what you can’t do without it is, you can’t wade in the river where there are big rocks, because it hurts badly when you do and you often fall.  You also can’t bend over to catch a frog, or get on your knees to take a catfish off a trotline.

         Being a grizzled old outdoors veteran, I can take a tremendous amount of pain, but limping around like you have a ten-penny nail drove into your knee gets aggravating. So I get over the RSV problem and go right in to have my meniscus took out or sewed back together or whatever, and all this comes about the time I normally do some night-time bass fishing or trotline fishing in the cooler part of the day, which is the night. 

         The reason I am not writing about that is because I am limping around my place wondering why it hurts as much to fix a meniscus as it does to break it! But I am patient so I wait. Like I have a choice? It has been fixed  for three days and I have no recourse but to sit and complain, and perhaps sharpen my trotline hooks as I watch Gunsmoke on television. My knee is just about like it was on day one and day two. The arthroscopic surgeon says I will be good as new someday; perhaps when duck season gets here, I don’t know. Right now, putting on a pair of waders would be next to impossible.

         But I shall prevail… I hope. I am downright determined, defiantly dedicated and dadblamed disgusted!  Life will be different from now on.  Jumping off anything higher than a brick will no longer be done.  My deer stand will be two feet shorter. And using my imagination and sharp-as-a-razor memory, I leave you with what would be happening this week or next, if this darn knee recuperates to full usability.  Here goes…

       “----The heat of the day is behind me. It is substantially dark and upriver a boss bullfrog is bellowing.  I will go after him soon, quietly paddling my boat toward the bank where his bulky body besits. I will shine a broad beam of light in his eyes and grab him with my free hand.  He will go into the burlap bag with a couple of his bellowing bullfrog buddies, bound for a fine frog fry soon to come.  Families of young crawdads along that eddy will rest easier because of his demise. For baby crawdads a boss bullfrog is a bad bully.

         But first, I pick up my rod and cast my jitterbug lure toward the bank in the coolness of fading evening.  The big lure slides across the still water swirling below the shoal and a smallmouth bass of substantial size slurps it under with a surprisingly quiet splash.  My rod is nearly doubled, and I let him wear down as I wait, never lessening the pressure, holding the jitterbug hooks solid in his jaw.   Then I net the rascal and admire his size before I release him; a battling big brown bass, bold and beautiful in the bright beam of my brow-light there on the bottom of the boat.

         Again the bullfrog bellows upstream.  Should I go after him or try another cast.  It is a difficult decision, one an outdoorsman like me must make on a regular basis.  But I am up to it… such is the ways and the plight of a grizzled old veteran riverman! Right or wrong, I will live by such decisions which must be made… once this darned knee gets back to normal!!!  But I sure as heck won’t ever decide to jump off the boat!

 

         If you like to read, I have a new short story book coming out, and a new magazine too.  You can get copies or information about either by calling my office, 417 777 5227.  Normally you would have to talk with my secretary, Ms. Wiggins, but while this knee heals, you likely will get aholt of me.  I may answer in a somewhat pained voice.

         Read past columns on www.larrydablemont.outdoors and write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613

The Poison Fish.

 

Longnose Gar Fish

A Question from a reader…   Is a garfish good to eat?  Some say they are.  

 

         Answer…   There are four species of gar in the Midwest but only one is the scourge of Ozark streams. That is the long-nose gar, which wasn’t seen in the clear clean Ozark rivers a hundred years ago. Now they are thick in some of our best rivers, something of a leftover from prehistoric times that just outgrew the slow muddy waters along the Mississippi. They eat small fish of all species.  

         Ozark streams are full of long-nosed gar, which often grow to five feet in length and up to 25 or 30 pounds.  Some will tell you that anything you can cook is good to eat.  But I wouldn’t go through the job of skinning a gar to eat one.  I have tasted the meat and it is passable.  But then I ate so much fish as a kid I am not a big fan of any meat from our fine finny fish friends.  The best fish I have ever eaten came from the waters of the small mountain streams of Colorado where you catch 10 to 12-inch brook trout with either very light short rods or fly rods.  Those little fish are so good to eat I could never get enough of them, when fried in a skillet right alongside the small creeks where they are found or anywheres else.  Comparing gar meat to a fried brook trout is like comparing mud pies to chocolate cake.  

         Gar and paddlefish are good eating for many, but to me they are not anything worth bragging on…. just not all that good. Why would anyone eat a gar or paddlefish if they can get any of the other fish that are found in the same waters?  Gar are so numerous they harm the spawning waters of other more desirable species.  Bow fishermen and giggers who kill and dispose of gar and carp are doing fishermen a big favor although you can, if you work at it, make them edible.  To me, eating a gar is like going into a bakery and passing up all the donuts and cake and pie and having them fix you a biscuit!           

         Here’s more advice from my expert experiences eked from an environmental existence and ecological education… ANY fish meat you eat should have ALL red meat removed.  That red meat really does give fish an undesirable taste.  But I have been told that red meat is a source of good fish oil, which is desirable for humans. Yuck!!! My advice is, do not eat gar, throw them up on the bank for the coons or bury them in your garden to make good fertilizer.

         While it might be something I ought not to write about, I guess that gar-eaters need to know that gar are spawning through June and the eggs of a gar are poisonous to mammals, of which humans are one of… mammals that is.  If they are eaten, gar eggs will kill cats and dogs, raccoons and possums, and even people.  My dad loved the fried fish eggs of bass and goggle-eye. I am glad mom never knew that gar eggs were poison!  A little humor there. I can see a problem arising with that knowledge, as cats would easily eat those eggs. I doubt that dogs would, and while I don’t know this, I am sure a while a raccoon would eat most anything; they surely have been endowed with the knowledge that gar eggs are to be left alone.

         Anyway, the local sheriffs in the Ozark should know to look for a gar carcass around any Ozark home where some old boy who is married has died a suspicious death.

 

 B Second reader question… Are you putting out new books this year?

         Answer… Yes.. We have one coming out in a month or so entitled… “The Buck that Kilt the Widow Jones… Short Stories about the Outdoors and the Ozarks.”  We will mail that book out about the beginning of August I think.  The first 100 will be numbered and inscribed to the reader and autographed.  To get on that list contact my office.  Two other books, “The Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid” and “The Justice of St. Clair County” will be ready in December, for Christmas Gifts. There are eleven now, all shown on www.larrydablemont.com

 

 C Third reader question… Would you write about the new tick diseases going around sometime? 

         Answer…. I would, but my daughter Lori, a physician who doctors faculty and staff at Missouri State University, has written a very complete article for my summer magazine, which tells more than I know about tick diseases.  If you get a copy of that magazine you will know as much as she does I suppose.  New tick diseases, like ‘alpha-gal’ disease has been deadly at times and renders healthy people violently allergic to red meat.  If you contact my office you can get that magazine for only postage costs.  But they will be sold out by August.

 

 

         If you need to talk with me, call my office at 417  777 5227 or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com.  Send letters and questions to me at P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, 65613