Dove Feathers

 

 

 

Before you read this, the dove season will have opened. Dove hunting is fairly easy, and it isn’t high on my list of things to do, but I will do it anyway, because I am a grizzled old veteran outdoor writer and that kind of thing is expected of me.  I know you hear young inexperienced outdoor writers talk about how hard doves are to hit, but not for me.  I got to where I can sneak up on a bunch of them and get four or five before they fly with only one or two shells.

I got to be such a good shot by practicing when I was young.  In the fall I’d go out and throw darts at butterflies.  When you get to where you can hit a butterfly with a dart or a B.B. gun, you won’t have any trouble hitting doves with a twellve-gauge shotgun about half the time.

      I won’t go dove hunting in September though.  I will wait until October and hunt at a waterhole somewhere. I am going dove hunting mostly because intend to take a young Labrador out and see if he will retrieve one.  If my Lab takes to dove hunting, it will likely be a great retriever by the time duck season gets here.  Most all the dove hunters will be out on opening day and within a week there won’t be hardly any of them left… hunters that is.  Many doves won’t migrate in until late September.  Some hunters can’t afford the shells it takes to go on three or four hunts, me included.

You need harvested grain fields for good dove hunting, or a small pond used as a water hole where they come to water in the evening before they go to roost.  I like hunting those water holes because if you have a young retriever and if you can drop a dove or two in the water, it is really good experience for his future as a waterfowl dog.  

Early season dove hunting is sometimes hard on dogs because of the heat and humidity, and dove feathers come off in their mouths and they don’t like that.  A Lab doesn’t mind a duck feather or two, but they hate dove feathers.  You can see why if you ever put a freshly shot dove in your mouth.  You can’t hardly get those feathers out of your throat. 

Teal season will open in a week or so, and they too are hard to hit.  But because I am an old time duck hunter, I look forward to that more than dove hunting.  You’d probably be better off not doing either one because in September, if your time is limited, you will catch a lot more fish on top-water lures than you will in the spring.  Of course you have to know what you are doing there too.  A blue winged teal is small a flying biscuit, fast and erratic in flight.  Many times I have shot more at where one was than where one is!

 When I was young, dad and I use to float the Piney in mid September with a blind on our wooden johnboat, hunting blue winged teal.  One September after a good rain the river was up a few inches and we took along one rod and reel and a wiggle wart lure and began to catch some nice smallmouth, one after another. Dad would catch two or three from the front of the boat while I paddled and then we would switch places and I would catch some, all the while watching for teal.  We killed a few teal that day, but caught more than twenty hard fighting smallmouth in between the flocks we flushed.  What a day that was!

 I   have a picture of dad fighting a fish that day with a shell belt around his waist with shotgun shells in it, causing all who see it to question why he would have those shells on a fishing trip. That was in 1965, and you can see some of those photos on my blogspot page, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

My Big Piney Nature Center and Museum a mile south of Houston, Mo, will be pretty much finished in October and I have an unusual plan to open the finished building, minus the exhibits, sometime during that month to hold a big ‘fishing gear and antique gun’ swap meet.

Anyone who wants to bring guns made before 1965 and fishing gear of any kind is welcome.  I intend to bring several hundred fishing lures, myself, and some are antiques I used when I was young.  That wiggle wart dad and I used back in September of ’65, which we used to catch those smallmouth on, will be there for sale to the highest bidder.  I hope that some folks who have old shotguns or .22 rifles will bring them to sell. To reserve a spot just call me, 417 777 5227. I will announce the date of that event soon.

You   can also contact me via email… lightninridge47@gmail.com or at P.O. Box 22 Bolivar, Mo 65613

            

       

 

Maybe They Ate Sheep - Cruetzfeldt-Jacobs Disease

 

Sick Buck

       Two hunters who were members of a hunting lodge in a western state have died from Cruetzfeldt-Jacobs disease, which they apparently got from eating venison from a CWD prion-infested deer.   But you can’t prove it because the disease, known as TSE, (Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy) is found in cattle, goats, sheep and elk.  Maybe they ate a goat together? Can’t have a panic about this when it can cause hunters to stop buying deer tags.

         A few years ago, Carol Schroeder, from Camdenton, told me that her husband had died from the disease known as Cruetzfeldt-Jacobs disease in a St.Louis hospital in a quarantined room. After his death the Center for Disease Control took control of his body it was taken to the crematory by a highway patrol escort to be sure that if any accident occurred on the way his body would not be handled by unknowing first- responders. Mrs. Schroeder confirmed that he had eaten venison during the months before his death.

              “I never believed in assisted suicide,” she told me, “but I would have given anything if it could have happened for my poor husband.  It took him two months to die and what he went through, what I saw as his brain deteriorated, I cannot even talk about it to this day.”

         She isn’t the only one who has had a relative die of the disease in Missouri. There have been many.  But you will never hear about any of them. None of the deaths has been mentioned by the media, not anywhere!

              Bill Zippro, a resident of Joplin, will tell you that his brother died a young man with prions in his brain because he killed and ate a huge buck which was not acting right. His brother told him the buck didn’t make any attempt to escape and he told Bill he thought the deer had been turned loose from a nearby deer farm across the border in Kansas where they feed deer meat and bone by-products to make bigger antlers. He said his brother was shown to have the prions in his brain and spinal fluid, and the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta Georgia verified it.

         In Italy, two workers studying CWD (chronic wasting disease) in deer died from the Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy disease.  Now the big cover-up is about those two men in that western state where CWD is prevalent in deer and elk, have died from that same disease. Look for their deaths on the Internet. Make no mistake about it, Chronic Wasting disease in deer, Cruetzfeldt-Jacobs disease in humans and ‘Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy’ disease are all the same disease, like rabies and hydrophobia are the same disease with different names.

         Look it up on the Internet and notice that it says humans can get the disease through eating “contaminated foodstuff” which just might include venison, contaminated with prions. You reckon? You won’t be able to find the name of the hunting lodge or the state or the names of the two men but it will never be admitted that they ate elk and deer meat from the same animal.

         When it has the potential to make conservation departments lose a lot of money through the loss of deer tag sales, you keep the facts obscured.  Therefore, the Missouri Department of Conservation will tell you humans can’t get the disease from deer.  After all the people who died could have died from eating sheep or goat meat, right? But you cannot deny humans are getting the disease from handling or eating the meat from deer. In fact it is known that among the seven people who died of Cruetzfeld Jacobs disease in Arkansas, one was a taxidermist who mounted deer heads.

         Now in Oklahoma they have passed a law that CWD-diseased deer in deer-farm structures can be sold or legally released into the wild.  Some of Oklahoma’s wisest people in the legislature agree that exposing them to the disease may create immunity in wild deer.  Would it surprise anyone to know that one of the legislators who has caused the law to be accepted is a man who owns a deer farm?

 

         One  tip for you deer hunters… prions are found in the brain.  ‘Spongiform Encephalopathy refers to the holes in the brain the abnormal proteins cause.  The protein has not been found in the meat but rather brain fluid and spinal fluid and    perhaps bone marrow.  To avoid ingesting prions, first have your deer tested, then do not cut the spine or any bones.  If you put a bullet into the head or spine, you are risking having prions in the meat.  Another piece of advice.. do not eat any venison that you have not taken care of… don’t have anyone else butcher your deer and do not eat venison from the well-advertised “Share the Harvest” program.  That was created so that trophy hunters would not have to utilize the meat, but give it away instead.  None of those trophy bucks get tested.  And where are 75 percent of CWD cases found?… Older bucks!

 

Hot Summer, Cool Stream

 

            A cool, lazy river float during the summer heat

       If you have the ambition to get away from the air conditioning and get your body acclimated to summer, find an isolated section of Ozark river where canoe rental people do not operate, and plan a two- or three-day trip in the middle of the week with a friend who is inclined not to complain much about sleeping in a tent and having wet feet. 

By doing so, you can actually get off away from the world’s problems. Float downstream and find a gravel bar or sand bar to camp on, where there is some shade of course.  In the cool of the evening, find a deep shoal and wade out up to your waist above it or below it and cast a topwater minnow or a little popper of some kind with a spin-casting outfit or maybe even a fly-rod. There will be bass waiting to jump all over that lure, I’ve seen it happen! I have been there and done that, often. 

When it gets dark, push your boat or canoe out into a big eddy fed by that river current, where there’s some deep water and rocks, and fish without lights, letting your eyes become accustom to the night.  Cast a jitterbug toward the bank with a casting reel and a stronger line, and work it steadily across the surface.  If there’s a big bass anywhere close, he will jump all over that jitterbug.  This time of year, the rock bank towards the upper end of the eddy where the current feeds it will hold the smallmouth, but the lower sections of a big deep hole, on the opposite bank where there might be logs and limbs, are where you will find river largemouth, and they can’t pass up a jitterbug either.

       If a nearby eddy is good and deep and has a bluff, chances are there’s a big flathead catfish there, or several, maybe up to 25 or 35 pounds.  I have caught a few catfish from small Ozark rivers that exceeded 40 pounds. Flatheads can be caught on trotlines set deep, across the eddy and baited with LIVE bait, like chubs or sunfish, or even small suckers. There are channel catfish in many streams too, and they will take nightcrawlers or dead bait, minnows or even chicken livers. 

       It takes a lot of work to set and bait a trotline, and it involves some danger, as you can get entangled or hooked and pulled under by a weighted line.  Have two sheathed knives on your belt to cut yourself free if you need to.  If you set trotlines and run them in that deep water, DO NOT DO IT FROM A KAYAK OR SMALL CANOE.  I would never ever trotline from a seventeen-foot double end canoe!  Actually, I wouldn’t even float the river in one.

       I know it is hot, but I am tired of staying inside.  I have fishing to do, and I have missed it. I don’t know that it was as hot when I was a youngster, fishing up and down the Big Piney River in July and August.  There was no reason to hole up in the house, because we didn’t have air conditioning, and maybe everyone could stand the heat better because of that fact. 

Maybe air conditioning has us in a destructive grip as much as anything else.  None of us would choose to live without it, but I know that another generation of men who lived without it stayed outside more and could take the summer much, much better.  Of course our ancestors were tougher… they had to be.  Thank goodness they were when the world war came along.

       I have fished all through July and August with good  results and as a teen-ager guiding float fishermen on the Big Piney and Gasconade, I never let a 95-degree day never stop a daylong fishing trip.  My clients would show up and we would start very early in the morning, when it was cooler.  But we would float the river all day at times, always catching fish, even in the middle of the day.   Of course, the river was more shaded then, because landowners hadn’t started clearing the banks of shade trees as much back then.  There were a lot fewer cattle too.  The river had much more water in those times, and it was much cleaner.  Shady gravel bars offered great places to stop and relax, and swim in a cool river current for a little while. Then it was back to fishing, casting to whatever shaded bank there was, where the water had a little current and a little depth.

       I am dreaming now, as this may be the first summer ever that I have not camped on a gravel bar.  I can’t hardly walk right now, as a surgeon who was suppose to fix a torn meniscus botched the operation and made my knee worse than it was before.  But I have hopes that a new operation soon will get me capable of taking to the river by duck season.

       

       My website is www.larrydablemont.com, and you can e-mail me at lightninridge47@gmail.com.  Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, MO. 65613 and if you want to get a copy of my new book or my summer magazine, just call me at 417 777 5227.

 

North Arkansas Visit

 

       

Still more to do, but we are getting there

       I spent a couple of days last week down in Arkansas White River country, ending up all the way down in Mt. View, restocking some my outdoor books. While at Mt View I stopped in a woodcarvers shop and I haven’t seen anything like it since I first saw Peter  Engler’s carvings at Silver Dollar City in 1968. The woodcarvers name is Randall Head, and all around the grounds where is shop is found, there are huge carvings, many life-sized and spectacular.  Eagles and wildlife carvings are everywhere, from songbirds to mountain lions.  He is one of the most unusual people you will ever talk to and one of the most talented.  

       Many carvers do great work but few do great carvings so quickly and so many of them. It took me an hour to look at all of them.  I am going to display some of his work in my Big Piney nature center-museum but if you get close to Mt View Arkansas, where they have the big state park-folk center and are known as the folk music, blue-grass center of the Ozarks, you have got to see the work he does.  I would have driven down to Mt. view just to see him and his work.  Call him to find out when he is in his shop.  I started to write ‘call ahead’!  Randall Head’s number is 309-413-8025. 

 

On your way to Mt. View stop at a place on the main highway about a mile or so east of Mt. Home called Rivertown gallery, to see the work of one of the most talented wildlife and outdoor artists I have ever met, a long standing friend of mine who is a river guide, stream ecologist and an artist whose work is beyond description. He is Ozark native Duane Hada. On his walls are painting of the Buffalo, the White and Ozark wilderness, plus smallmouth bass, trout and elk that seem to be alive as you look at them.  See his work on his website (Duane Hada) and you will be in awe of what you see.  Fantastic!

What is even more amazing than his work is the kind of man Duane is, a great conservationist!  When I go there and meet with him it is difficult to tear myself away.  I am going to try to get him to paint a river mural on the inside wall of the Big Piney nature center.  I want to get him up there to float the Big Piney this fall, and if he accepts, readers can go along, to meet and talk with a legendary wildlife artist.

 

       There is a third place you ought to see if you visit North Arkansas, a place on the White River that trout fishermen all over the country know about… Gaston’s resort.  Jim Gaston, who made the resort something special, passed away a few years ago and it is now continued as one of the finest Ozark attractions by his grandson, Clint.  I think it began sometime before the Bull Shoals dam was built by Jim’s father and has been there now for several decades.  There are some of the best fishing guides working there that you will ever meet, and a restaurant second to none.  Actually the restaurant is something of a grand museum with old White River and Ozark antiques from bicycles to boat paddles. And though the meals are expensive, they are fantastic, with several different kinds of trout prepared.  You eat from a dining room extending out over the river. You can catch your limit of trout on the river and have them prepared by restaurant chefs.  In that restaurant you can find what is referred to as a salad boat, a big display of many kinds of salads.  And if you are there early you will find a breakfast buffet unequaled in the Ozarks. I knew Jim Gaston well, and I, like all who knew him, respected him tremendously.  In earlier times, when I was the 22 year-old, chief naturalist for the Arkansas State Park System, Jim was a young Commissioner, and I never thought we would have much in common, but I was wrong.  The preservationist and the developer, he opened my eyes to some things and helped me to learn much about Arkansas and the people I was working with.  Jim and I shared a love of nature photography and I used many of his photos in my magazines over the years. If you are in North Arkansas don’t miss visiting Gaston’s resort, just a few miles out of Lakeview Arkansas, below Bull Shoals dam.  If you want to catch trout from the White, where there are monstrous brown trout in those cold waters, go there first.

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

 

      My Big Piney Nature Center and Museum is coming down to painting the walls and putting the floor in.  Hopefully we can open it to the public as a finished project in September.  My family is going to help with the painting on Saturday, August the 17^th. 

       I would love to have readers come by and see what we are doing, so remember that date and come visit with me and my family if you would like. It is located one mile south of Houston, Mo on the east side of Highway 63. The address is 6410 highway 63.  I will likely brew up a batch of sassafras tea (iced or hot) for visitors to try a taste of the old-time Ozarks of my boyhood.  We are already moving in some interesting artifacts and on that day you can see an authentic Ozark johnboat my dad and I built years ago.

My email address is lightninridge47@gmail.com, and my office phone number is 417 777 5227

 

 

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.