Filled With Suckers

 

         I know a tributary to Truman Lake that normally is little more than a creek, but when the area gets enough rain and the lake rises it draws a big bunch of white bass.  So I went up there a week ago and traveled up about as far as I could go, crossing several shallow shoals to get to a favorite spot.  Sure enough, that small hole of water was full of white bass and in a couple of hours a friend and I caught our limit of whites in the neighborhood of 14-inch fish.  But the eddy, no more than six feet deep in the middle was very clear and full of golden redhorse suckers, likely a couple hundred of them, along with two or three dozen bigmouth buffalo that would weigh up to ten pounds or so. 

         Fighting the white bass for a few hours was fun but I would have given a good rebel lure for a big treble hook.  Those suckers that we hillbillies have always referred to as ‘yaller suckers’ would have been lots of fun with trebles and a grabbin’ outfit, which is a little stiffer and stronger rod.  They are easier to clean than white bass is to filet and much better eating.  You have to remove the big scales, gut the fish and then remove the tail and fins.  Then you do what they call scoring, which amounts to cutting across the body every quarter inch all the way to the backbone on both sides.  With the scoring you cut up and eliminate the fine bones in the body.  Then you cut the fish into however many pieces you want and drop them into hot grease, coated with whatever coating or batter you choose to use. 

         White bass are good to eat too, but when you filet them, the red meat needs to be skimmed off the white meat.  If you catch a three-pound white bass it will fight like a smallmouth of similar size.  I once caught a dozen whites between three to four pounds from a Tablerock lake tributary in north Arkansas on topwater lures. One of the best days I have ever had fishing. A couple of those weighed a few ounces OVER four pounds.  In the 1980’s I was guiding on Bull Shoals and had a Nebraska client catch a five-pound five-ounce white bass on a live shad.  At the time it was just a few ounces from a state record.

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The first time I went fishing with my dad I was about 5 or 6 years old.  First time he took me hunting I was 8 or 9.  Since those years in the 1950’s I have become a full-time Outdoor writer/naturalist and that has amounted to a tremendous amount of time in the outdoors hunting and fishing, exploring and photographing and boating and floating, etc. photographing, etc.           Those seventy-some years has helped me to accumulate so much stuff that I don’t know what to do with it all, now that I am starting to face the fact that I am mortal. I can no longer use a ton of what I have accumulated over the years and can’t take it with me.  So in the fall---likely late September or early October I am going to have one heck of a yard and garage and storage shed sale selling and giving away a ton of stuff going back to when I was 15 or 16 years old.   There’s too much stuff to list here but it will include all my fishing gear, boats and kayaks and some fantastic wildlife art.  There will be some boat trailers and duck and goose decoys and even a few guns.  I have about a thousand antique magazines too, going back to the twenties and a few earlier.  I have the first outdoor magazines I ever read and then the ones I wrote for. 

         What I have decided to do is take all summer to list everything and send those lists to prospective buyers and visitors.   We are talking about a couple of hundred items that I will likely shed a tear or two over as I watch them leave.   How many experiences and memories go away with my 50 year old 19-foot Grumman canoe that is likely worth more now than it cost new.   Or my old duck gun, a Smith and Wesson that I bought when I got out of college.  It is getting close to a time I fish with dad and my grandfather again, so I know it is best to let old treasures create some memories for younger outdoorsmen.  If you want to get a list of what we will sell   this fall, send me a letter (P.O.Box 22 Bolivar MO 65613) or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com, and I will be in touch to let you know when that all will take place this fall beneath the oaks on this beautiful hardwood ridgetop we call Lightnin’ Ridge, overlooking the  Pomme de Terre River valley about 40 miles north of Springfield.

 

Photo sequence of wild gobbler mating with a decoy

 

Sequence of photos taken of wild gobbler mating with a turkey decoy

wild gobbler with missing tail feathers

Uh oh competition

The Declining Wild Gobbler

Wild Turkey Nest with 8 eggs

       I came across a wild turkey nest with 8 eggs in it in late April. I doubted it would have many more because the hen was sitting on the nest incubating them before I came along in mid-morning. When a hen is laying her eggs she mates with a mature gobbler early in the day and then lays one egg per day as a rule. She may miss a day or so if she doesn’t mate, and she may lay as many as 15 or 16 eggs if there is more than one mature gobbler. Or she may lay as few as 6 or 7. First year jakes do not usually mate with any hens and first year hens do not usually mate or make a nest. But with wildlife, you can never say never. Often, even mature hens do not bring off a clutch of eggs every year. 

        Years back, Arkansas’ turkey biologist, Mike Widner put radio transmitters on twenty-some hens in the Ouachita mountains, then followed them all through the spring season. He was surprised when he found that only about 15 or 20 percent of the mature hens nested that spring. With all ground nesting birds, the number of eggs laid is not indicative of the survival of poults. It is likely that with wild turkeys about half the eggs laid do not even hatch. If they do hatch during a cold rainy period, the young poults will likely die before they are a week old. I have observed that a hen turkey can delay the hatching of poults during adverse weather by controlling the incubation period of the eggs in some fashion. It seldom happens that eggs hatch in rainy weather. But surprisingly, many hens that have their nests destroyed or eggs eaten by predators will nest a second time. In the course of the spring and summer a hen turkey may lay twenty or thirty eggs just to be able to bring forth a few live surviving young. I would venture to guess that for every young turkey you see in the fall there have been perhaps 20 or 30 eggs laid in the spring. In most states in the Midwest, wild turkeys are at their lowest numbers now in a 10-or 15-year period. Biologists in Missouri, often young people just out of college, do not have enough knowledge of the wild turkey nor experience to really know why. But it is not “habitat loss”. It is hunting pressure and the fact that hunters are twice as many today as they were twenty years ago. Adjustments to the seasons and limits are needed, as fall hunting and early youth seasons continue to knock down gobbler numbers. But conservation departments revel in the increased money those high numbers bring in and don’t want to do anything in cutting back seasons or limits because they believe it will hurt revenue. I doubt we will ever see wild turkeys in the numbers I saw in the 80’s and 90’s, but like the quail, the declining gobblers will survive for another season. It is hard to see what there are today and then know what they could be if only decisions were made by the conservation departments that could make such a big difference. We will not know what this spring and summer hatch and survival will be until we begin seeing the late-winter flocks. In my lifetime, I have killed enough gobblers. I shoot them now with a camera and urge other hunters to do the same. We have got to reduce the number of wild gobblers killed now by hunters who have found ways to do it a lot easier than with a camouflage outfit and a turkey call. In a future article I will talk about a new way of hunting that seldom fails. In the meantime I will put the story and photos of a seven-bearded gobbler on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors… and with it photos of a gobbler mating with a decoy for more than an hour.

Lots of Water To Fish

 

                                          Norten Dablemont with a largemouth bass

Last week, I let the waters I normally fish recede, and fished some farm ponds.  And though they were all full, the bass didn’t seem to mind.  If you want to catch a good-sized bass from a pond or small lake in the    present situations, use big spinner bait, something with a 2- or 3-inch blade, a white or yellow skirt.  I used a 3/8ths-ounce spinner bait, with a big gold willow-leaf blade and a white skirt.  Bass were moving into the shallower end of the ponds, away from the deep water, even though they were not actually shallow.  I just let it sink down out of sight and retrieved it slowly enough to feel that blade vibrating, and the bass were nailing it.

You could catch a few on a shallow running crank-bait as well, but in most ponds, there’s so much algae on the bottom you can’t run a crank-bait very deep.  You can use a suspending rogue, and jerk it and catch bass that way. The muddier the pond however, the more I like a spinner bait.  I have fished ponds in April that were as muddy as they can get, and caught bass one after another on a spinner-bait as big as your fist.         One thing about an Ozark farm pond, some of them hold bass up to eight or nine pounds.  If it has the right combination of bluegills and minnows, a farm pond that isn’t large at all, and sometimes very muddy, can be the home of a monster bass or two.  There’s no better time to catch one than April and May.

Of course, the major Ozark reservoirs, has some April fishing that is spectacular as bass move up around submerged bushes and brush in murky water. Sometimes with these conditions, it is best to don some waders and leave your boat, walking the banks and trying to cast around water that is hard to reach otherwise.   Again, big spinner bait, or a suspending rogue is a good way to find big bass in that high and colored water.

For years I watched my late uncle, a lifelong Ozark fishing guide, walk the banks in early spring and catch huge bass.  Most of the bass he caught in the Ozarks over ten pounds, (and there were a total of six of them), were taken when he was out of the boat, wading and fishing high water.  One of those big fish he remembers still came from Greers Ferry Lake, and he talked about it in his book “Ridge-Runner”.

In the spring back in the 1970’s in he had two clients on a fishing trip to a lake in Texas, and it hadn’t been a good trip because of bad stormy weather they didn’t want to endure.  On the way back, he took them by Greers Ferry Lake in north Arkansas, and they checked into a little lakeside resort just as the front came through after the storm.  

It was getting late, and it was too blustery to take a boat out.  It was cold too, even though the lake itself had been warming nicely, and was high and murky. So with his clients looking for a good meal, my uncle grabbed his casting reel and a red Hauser Hell-diver, one of the first spinner-baits made, and headed for the lake in his waders.  He recalled there was a flooded bramble bush of some kind out in the water off point, and he kept casting into it and around it until he felt a hard jolt, the strike of a big, big bass.  

Uncle Norten didn’t fish for bass with light tackle, and he was accustomed to hauling them out of brush with 20-pound line.  But that evening, there must have been a nick in the line, because it broke, and he was left there wondering how big the fish might have been. 

The next morning dawned cold, somewhere in the 30’s.  His fishermen wanted to wait until it warmed up some, so just after daylight, my uncle returned to that same spot with a white Hauser hell-diver and after a few casts he hooked another big, big bass.  This time the line held, and a minute or so later he hefted a nine pound largemouth with two spinner baits in it’s jaw, one of them the red one from the night before.  Uncle Norten says he never saw that happen ever again.

 

 

Wild Turkey Gobblers - Part II

 

Seven bearded gobbler

         About ten years ago I killed a wild gobbler that had seven beards, all of them longer than five inches, and some guy at the check station just went crazy about it.  He said it would be in the top five in the record book, as heavy as it was and as long as the spurs were.  He couldn’t believe I just took it home and ate it.  I tried to explain to him that the bigger a wild turkey is, the more likely it is to have a tame gobbler somewhere in its ancestry.  True genetics in wild gobblers produce smaller, darker birds than we see in the Ozarks. Those pure wild Eastern gobblers seldom weighed more than 18 or 19 pounds.  

         If I ever take my grandson turkey hunting, and I will someday when he is older (he is only five now) he will not learn that a wild creature is a trophy, and he will enjoy everything else about it just as much as the actual killing, or I will be a darn poor teacher and grandfather.  To go along with that, I thought some of you might enjoy something I wrote a few years ago for a magazine, concerning turkey hunting….as follows….

         ….I have decided that turkey hunting and life in general have a great number of similarities.  For instance, sometimes in life, striving for the goal is more enjoyable than reaching it and accomplishing it.  When you have pulled the trigger and the great bird is down, flopping around in his death throes, don’t you feel a little bit of sadness down deep inside?  Don’t you wish he had been a little slower and gobbled a lot more and strutted longer in the direct beams of the early morning sun?

         See, it’s a lot the same way you feel when you’ve finally bought that new pickup you always wanted and you drive it home and you know it’s going to be a mess in a month.  Driving it out of the driveway at home will never be as great as it was driving it off the dealer’s lot.  It’s much the same way you feel when you’ve been married a month and suddenly you see your wife in curlers and you realize she looks a lot like her mother.  If she would have agreed to marry you on the first date, you’d have missed all the enjoyment of being told “no” so often.

         A dead gobbler isn’t the reward of the hunt.  He is the reason for it, but he isn’t the reward.  If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, you might be greenhorn.  But it’ll come to you someday.

         Life is a series of rare successes, great and small, occurring between numerous failures.  That’s what turkey hunting is.  If you hunt turkeys, you can deal with life’s failures, because you know there will be another gobbler, another day.  You know that the wind and the rain and the cold only goes on so long and eventually you are going to have that beautiful spring day when it is calm and sunny and warm, and some gobbler just can’t stop gobbling.  You know that one time or another each season, there’s going to be one that comes like he’s on a string, like he hasn’t seen a hen since the end of last summer.  And that’s when you forget that there have been a dozen or so that got spooked, went the wrong way, found a hen, or put food above romance.

Turkey hunting has taught me to be patient and persevere and be thankful for every minute whether the sun is warm or the rain is cold.  Turkey hunting has taught me that sooner or later, every hog finds an acorn, every novice learns the ropes, every hard-luck-Harry gets a break.  You just don’t quit.  But in time, the reward isn’t just a dead turkey, it’s the trying and the failing and trying again, knowing if you don’t quit, you’ll have your time.

         You can find treasure in the difficulties, and you can have a great life just finding occasional rewards here and there amongst the failure.  Just don’t ever forget, in your day-to-day life, that quite often, the turkeys win.

         I got a good laugh out of an article a friend sent to me on turkey hunting written by a lady in the Ozarks largest newspaper, out of Springfield, Missouri.  She wrote, “…wear hunting clothing in blaze orange, this is not a natural color in the outdoors and hunters will recognize this and not mistake it for wildlife.  Attire yourself in camouflage clothing, head to toe including face mask and gloves, and wear blaze orange over the full camo.”  She says the experts say to shoot at the base of the neck, right where the feathers begin.  

         Let me advise this…do not shoot at the base of the neck of a gobbler, shoot at the head and nothing else.  Shooting at the base of the neck will fill your bird’s breast with shot, and allow some to get away, mortally crippled.  And as for the blaze orange over the camo…I can only say, I don’t recommend it. Gobblers may shy away from you in such garb.  The outdoor page in that paper is occasionally sent to me by a friend who says it is some of the funniest reading you can imagine.         

 

 

Wild Turkey Gobblers-- Part 1

 

       My grandfather got his first breech-loader shotgun in 1911 by guiding turkey hunters in the fall and winter in north Texas County on his father’s land bordering a northern section of the Big Piney River.  He did so by scattering corn to feed them, then scaring turkeys off the roost during the night and waiting for them to come back to the bait and the roost the next morning at first light.  

       He saw big flocks of wild turkeys during his youth but he told me he saw wild turkeys decline in the late twenties and thirties to near extinction in the Ozarks because of three reasons.  First and foremost, diseases brought in by farm families in tame turkeys, primarily something called blackhead disease. Secondly were the free-ranging hogs, which decimated acorn crops before the years end making that food source unobtainable during the cold snowy months.  But the biggest decline wasn’t due to the predators that like to eat wild turkeys and destroy eggs, nor was it due to habitat loss.  It was due to hard times and the coming depression.

       “Country folks were hungry,” he told me. “Gettin’ enough for them big families to eat was hard and turkeys was danged easy to kill, so they got kilt and et more than anything else. In the depression time if’n you had a hog or cow you was rich!  Those who had chickens got ‘em stole or et by hoot owls!”

       “I was a trapper and hunter and fisherman from the time I was a boy,” he said. “You could eat fried muskrats and boiled possum, even a beaver er a bobcat. Wa’n’t no coons to be had after awhile but ever farm boy knew where turkeys roosted.  So they got cleaned out.  I use ta take a turkey er two up to Houston and sell one for a dime or a quarter.  By1930 you couldn’t find one. Nor a deer neither.”

       As I tape-recorded his recollections back in 1966, I understood how those problems eliminated the wild turkey a hundred years ago.  Today, much the same things are coming about.  There are too many predators, but men are the number one predator and there are more now than ever. Gobblers are too easy to kill.
       Like my grandfather, I guided turkey hunters in the 1970’s and 1980’s in Arkansas and Missouri, and one spring, even in Kansas.  I worked at calling turkey gobblers for men who were well off, doctors, surgeons and dentists who could afford to pay a lot of money for the experience the hunt provided. None were interested in just killing a gobbler.  Often a friend and I would set up a camp in the National Forest or on a river in the Ozarks. There were so many wild turkeys back in those times that anyone who could hunt three days had a very good chance to get a gobbler.  Most mornings at daylight we could hear 3 or 4   gobblers if not more. We almost never failed. 

       There were some years I spent more time trying to get a client a gobbler than I spent hunting by myself. In the years I guided hunters, nearly thirty-five clients killed more than sixty turkeys, which I called in.  And that was the key to it… they didn’t want to ambush one, or kill one off the roost or even use a decoy. It was old time turkey hunting at it’s very best.  

       Most of today’s young hunters don’t seem to care about that.  There are things today that were not thought of then.  Decoy’s, calls on smart phones, permanent blinds, and baiting are only a part of it. I’ll talk about some of that next week.

       I learned a lot of what I know about wild turkeys thru my grandfather and then turkey biologists working for the Missouri Conservation Commission back in the 1960’s. The Missouri Department of Conservation didn’t exist then and we’d be better off if it didn’t exist now in my opinion. I believe it is a corrupt agency with millions of dollars and agents who regularly break the law with no consequences, and no desire to bring back turkey numbers if it hurts revenue. 

       The ‘Department of Conservation’, established in 1982 after the1/8 cent conservation tax passed and money became plentiful for them, DID NOT EVER STOCK WILD TURKEY OR DEER. The “Conservation Commission” did that back in the 50’s and 60’s.  The latter agency we refer to today as the MDC, stocked some grouse and prairie chicken that have gone nowhere and the otter, which we watch decimate our streams and private ponds today.

       Wild turkeys now are at the lowest number I can remember since the 1960’s and in next weeks column I will tell you why and how landowners can bring them back.  In the meantime, you can read another story or two about wild turkey and some photos I have taken of them, on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.

       

       

I will mention again that I have finally gotten my spring magazine printed and mailed. If you are a subscriber you should get yours this week.  If you aren’t a subscriber, get to be one by calling our office, 417-777-5227.

TURKEY HUNTING PHOTOS FROM YEARS PAST

TURKEY HUNTING IN ARKANSAS

 

TWO TOMS IN CAMP

GOBBLER

ARKANSAS TURKEY CAMP

 SEVEN BEARDED GOBBLER