Monday, February 23, 2015

Guiding Again

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You know what I love about this snow and cold?
 
Not a doggone thing! But remember this, every cold night that passes makes us one day closer to spring peepers and redbuds.

Folks in the cities have really suffered with the weather problems over the past few years, but ‘they ain’t seen nothin’ yet’. If people could see into the future there would be a panic in places like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and New Orleans, and big traffic jams as folks tried to get away. But no one can see what’s coming, and I can’t either.

While those people who talk about global warming may not have the slightest idea what they are talking about, the earth is like a lifeboat. It will only hold so much. Anyone who doesn’t think mankind is altering the conditions of our climate and the earth itself has their head in the sand. 

I think it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that our country in 100 years will have no clean waters and maybe a loss of hundreds of species of birds, fish and mammals, and the only forests and wild places will be found in crowded parks and preserves. Big trees won’t exist anywhere else. But I also think that in 100 years, folks won’t care at all about what is lost. 

There will be enough entertainment in the world that no one will miss what so many of us today cannot live without. I see it today in my own grandkids. They live their life with little boxes in their hands, pushing buttons, and the outdoors has little attraction. Still, they are very happy. I live in one world and they live in another. Well, actually, today almost everyone lives in a different world than I do. I was born much later than I should have been.

But I do love meeting good people, and because of that, a friend and I have decided to do some guiding again this year for beginning turkey hunters. I figure I have killed enough gobblers in my life and would like to enjoy again seeing a beginner learn how to do it, to help them get a turkey and learn about the outdoors, in a day or so of hunting. 

I guided turkey hunters in the seventies and eighties because I needed the money. Living in Arkansas I was a free-lance writer at the time, raising a family. Guiding float fishermen with my uncle, and turkey hunters in the National Forestland in Arkansas gave me a chance to flee the typewriter and spend more time outdoors. There weren’t nearly as many turkey gobblers then as there are in Missouri today. Bagging a gobbler now is fairly easy if you have any idea of what you are doing.

I had nothing in common with the men I guided. They were rich and money meant little. I took Neurosurgeons and Ophthalmic Surgeons, Lawyers… those kinds of people. In the early eighties, I took one of them from Oklahoma on a hunt and called up a gobbler that he killed about two hours after we left camp. It was his first one and he was elated. 

When he got back he packed up his stuff and headed home, handing me 500 dollars and telling me it was the greatest morning he ever had. I told him he didn’t owe me that much, we had only camped one night and hunted two hours. He laughed and told me he made more than that in one hour.

I intend to start guiding again because today I don’t need so much money and I like to teach ordinary people about the outdoors. When I was young, I worked with people for many years in the state parks of Arkansas and on the Buffalo National River as an interpretive naturalist, and I loved it, maybe more than the park visitors who came from all points of the country. It was something I felt I was born to do.

My Uncle Norten was the best guide I have ever seen on the rivers, much because he loved those streams so much, and liked people. He once told me, when we were guiding four fishermen on the Kings River on a three day trip, “You know, I am having more fun with these fellows than they are,” he said, “But if you were to know them in the city, where they live and work, we likely wouldn’t get along at all!”

Uncle Norten, who guided fishermen all over the Ozarks, took his first float trip in 1933 and his last one in 2010. The only two years he didn’t guide fishermen was the two years he spent fighting in World War II with the 101st Airborne in Europe. I got a kick out of him when we guided fishermen together in 2008 and I took care of all the charges. He couldn’t believe that he was going to get 200 dollars for taking two men on a daylong fishing trip on the Niangua.  

He told me that was just too much. “Just get me 75 dollars in the future,” he said, “I feel like I am cheatin’ folks if I get this kind of money.”

Our guided hike coming up in March, in a semi-wilderness area, is something my uncle used to join us with. I can still hear him and see him, telling folks about the woods and the creatures in it, telling jokes and entertaining everyone, then frying the fish at noon. He was one of the best naturalists I ever knew and he didn’t know it. 

This coming trip we will take this year will be a memorial to him. It will be some Saturday in March when we know we have a good day to go. The mushroom hunting trip in April will be something we have never done before, but it should be lots of fun. We are going to split up all the mushrooms we find. If you want to be on the list to go on either trip, let us know soon. We can’t take a lot of people, and we need to figure out how many fish to catch for the fish fry at midday.

As much as I like writing about the outdoors, I spend a lot of time by myself, and I really enjoy taking good people out into the woods for a day, or speaking to groups about the outdoors at churches or wild game dinners or schools, etc.

I found a really amusing description of me on something called Wikipedia on the Internet not long ago. I couldn’t help but laugh. It read…
      Larry Dablemont (born Larry Fitzgerald Dablemont September 22, 1961 in Bolivar, Missouri, U.S.) is a famous author, journalist, cobbler, Civil War reenactor, referee, fisherman, and hunter, He is married to Tonya Harding. Among his many claims to fame as a journalist, Dablemont interviewed OJ Simpson and has bragged in several columns about beating Ted Nugent in a footrace during a hunting expedition in Jackson Hole, WY. Dablemont was the last referee to ever throw Bobby Knight out of a basketball game, leading Knight to throw a chair. Later Knight commented, "Dabs is one tough ****, but God if I don’t respect him." Dablemont is a notoriously peculiar figure who, among other eccentricities is known to wear an unnecessary eye patch, rarely wears socks, and claims to have wore the same pair of jeans for 19 months consecutively.

The writer claims to be University of Arkansas professor William Thomas, and though he meant it to be some kind of insult, you can’t help but laugh at it. There isn’t any truth in it, but I may have worn the same pair of jeans for 19 months when I was eight or nine years old. I only had one pair! My middle name is Arthur and I will bet a dollar I can outrun Ted Nugent, whoever he is.

Email me at lightninridge@windstream.net, or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613. My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

Monday, February 16, 2015

Kayaks and the Eye of the Eagle

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Like most large birds of prey, eagles are likely overpopulated today in relation to the prey they seek. Carrion is what gets them through a harsh winter in areas of the midwest where they nest in good numbers.

I think I am going to build myself a 12- or 14-foot wooden johnboat to use on some of the local rivers, like my dad and grandfather once built to use on the Big Piney. I have several boats for rivers of all sizes, a 19-foot square-stern canoe and a 16-foot Lowe paddle-john amongst them. Last year I acquired a 12-foot kayak just to see what I could do with it. It can be used for quietly drifting down a river sneaking up on ducks or deer or kingfishers or whatever you’d like to sneak up on, especially if you conceal it with some sort of bow blind. And it isn’t a bad little craft for fishing, as long as you want to go fishing by yourself with a minimum of equipment.

The double bladed long paddles the kayakers use are a major problem. Sure you can manipulate the kayaks with one, but they are clumsy, made for novices. You won’t sneak up on anything with those long-shafted kayak paddles. It is like saying to anything downstream, “here I am and here I come”. 

I find that if you sit in the very center of the kayak, you can’t effectively handle it any other way, certainly not with a single bladed short paddle like I prefer to use. But I take along my sassafras paddle and if I sit toward the back of the kayak, or just about anywhere past the center point, I can ease it along without a sound, paddling all the time from one side, without taking the paddle out of the water. To do that, I have to put some weight in the very bow of the little boat. Then when I get out, the front sags into the water. But it is the only way to go down the river as I like to do it, without looking like a windmill.

When I got that little kayak, I bought some green and brown and black paint, and I camouflaged it. If you float down the stream in a red or yellow kayak, you show up like a cardinal on a corn feeder. But I will say this… if you are going to go wind milling around some large body of water in a little kayak where motor boats are whizzing around, it is indeed a good idea to be brightly colored, so you can be seen. I always wonder why anyone would take a kayak out in the middle of a lake like Bull Shoals or Stockton, but if you do that, paint your paddle blades too. Be sure you are seen.

If I use my Kayak much it will be in the winter to hunt ducks or deer or take wildlife photos while alone. I doubt if I fish out of it much because I have my little aluminum johnboat for that, and I usually fish with someone in the bow. I like to sit up a little higher when I fish than I do when I am sneaking down the river not wanting anything to know I am there.

Sometime this summer I will build that wooden johnboat at a special event or location where those who have an interest in such things can come and watch it go together. We had a pretty good crowd down at Bull Shoals State Park a few years ago when we built a 20-foot wooden White River johnboat, and then took folks for a ride in it.

I am trying to encourage folks who have boats, canoes, and kayaks to sell to bring them to our Grizzled Old Outdoorsman’s Swap Meet on March 28. There will be some outboard motors there too. In a later column I will list some of the amazing items that will be there for sale by a host of folks who are now calling me to reserve a free table inside. We have printed some little fliers to send out, so if you want all the information, just call us and we will send you one of them.

This coming April, retired Corps ranger Rich Abdoler and I will take some folks out who would like to find mushrooms and teach them how to find them. We will take them to some backwoods areas on Truman Lake via pontoon boat, have a big fish fry and find mushrooms, guaranteed. This is something we won’t be able to schedule, we will just have to see when the mushrooms erupt, and then contact folks who are on the list wanting to go. Rich and I can sell you a mushroom hunting license!!!

And at least once during the month of March, when we have a nice calm, sunny Saturday, we will take a dozen people to our wilderness area on Truman Lake, have an interpretive nature hike and a fish fry and visit a pair of nesting eagles. On that walk through the woods there are some of the biggest trees of several species that I have ever seen, and the remains of an 1800’s cabin. If you want to learn about the outdoors, this is the way to do it. There is an oak tree on that trip that is the biggest white oak I have ever seen anywhere, way back in the woods. I figure it is so old that it was a sprout somewhere about the time George Washington was president. To find out more about those trips, just contact my executive secretary, Ms. Wiggins and have her send you the information.

You know, if I wrote in this column that bluebirds build nests in sumac bushes, lots of people would believe it. Recently one of my old classmates sent me something that had come from an ornithologist saying that eagles avoid the rain by climbing above the clouds. It also claimed that an eagle can see a rabbit a mile away and survey three whole acres at once with it’s fantastic vision. 

When you read stuff like that, remember that today, most biologists and naturalists have grown up in the city somewhere and use their positions with a conservation organization to come up with some real baloney. There are plenty of birds, which can and do fly above rainclouds, but I have seen eagles sitting and flying in the rain, where they don’t get wet at all because of feathers that shed water like waxed paper. 

And who the heck knows absolutely for sure what an eagle sees? That stuff about seeing a rabbit a mile away is the biggest bunch of hogwash I have ever heard. Eagles do not feed regularly on rabbits; they are too small for them. If you tied a squirming live rabbit at the top of a dead tree, a mile from a perched eagle, you’d find out what nonsense that is. He would never see it! 

While they are majestic, beautiful birds of prey, they like nothing better than to gorge themselves on a dead deer like a group of buzzards or pick up a floating dead fish or zero in on a crippled duck or goose on open water. We don’t have to make them supernatural to enjoy seeing them. An eagle is an eagle, nothing less, nothing more.

Truthfully, I believe that eagles feed as much on carrion as prey they kill. I floated a river a few years ago in December and there were nine eagles ripping away at the carcass of a deer. If I too had grown up in some suburb somewhere I might write that I saw nine eagles feeding on a deer they had killed, and some readers would believe it. Most ranchers think that eagles feeding on dead calves have killed the calf. In a future column, I will tell you some amusing stuff I heard from professors while I was working to get a degree in wildlife management at the University of Missouri. Remember you can never become a real naturalist if you spend more time in books than in the outdoors.

You can call our office at 417 777 5227 or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or emailing me at lightninridge@windstream.net. Find photos and information on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Making Good Browse for Deer


  
As much as we love the idea of warm weather in February, it worries me a little. It could backfire on us if Mother Nature starts thinking spring has come early. Then all of a sudden there are early blooms and buds and all of a sudden an awful cold spell comes along. Uh-oh! The fishing goes to heck!

The white oak acorn crop can be devastated by such a situation and nothing is more important to wildlife in the fall and winter of next year than those acorns. But even if it happens, red oaks won’t be much affected by such cold this year. Their production will be clobbered the next fall. 

It is a difficult thing to explain, but I believe it is nature’s way of ensuring there will be at least some acorns most every fall. When you look at smaller wild creatures that have less biological potential, or survivability (life span), than the larger ones, I think nature ensures their survival in the same way. If a huge rain or spring cold spell limits the spring production of creatures like quail, rabbit, dove or even wild turkey, the late hatches which occur in June, July and August insures the survival of the species. It almost makes you think some great mind was involved in the planning of it all! 

I received a letter from someone last week talking about how the cutting of timber by logging contractors working on our public wildlife management areas and conservation areas through the Missouri Department of Conservation was a good thing. He wrote that my criticism of the moneymaking butchering of our state owned lands failed to take into account the fact that removing the timber could be a good thing for deer because it created more browse.

It left me shaking my head, wondering if there might ever be a time when our citizens can think on their own instead of buying some of the hogwash the MDC feeds them to justify whatever they do. Are there thousands of people out there so ignorant to the ways of the wild, and the situation in natural areas that they think deer in Missouri need more ‘browse’? It is likely the letter-writer can’t even adequately understand what the word means. He is someone who wants to be assured that the MDC is more interested in wildlife than money. They are not! It was that way once, but not now.

We need more browse for deer like we need more cow manure for turkeys. Deer in Missouri need nothing. They are not hard pressed in the worst of the Ozarks winters because browse is plentiful… everywhere. In those forests, being rapidly destroyed on lands we all own, deer and turkeys depend more on the acorns than anything else. 

What else needs the browse we create by destroying a hardwood forest…flying squirrels, screech owls, pileated woodpeckers, woodcock, foxes??? What else? Those species make no money for the MDC and those who feel assured that the destruction of our woodlands is a good thing likely know nothing of those dozens of species of birds and mammals that live there, and decline as the trees are cut. 

Destroying a forest won’t endanger the deer. If it did, the MDC would be worried, because deer make them tens of thousands of dollars. Acorns, squirrels and woodpeckers make them nothing. They will allow outside logging companies to cut every valuable tree in the areas they supposedly ‘manage’, if they can receive a good percentage of the profit, which they do.

For those who doubt me, go around the state and look at their real interest, which is board feet of lumber over wildlife. More and more, the conservation areas we all own are showing the devastation, as one area is stripped and another areas looms in their sights.

For those who have never seen it and do not want to see it, here is a letter from a fellow Missourian, Chuck Banks who describes what has happened in his area…
My family bought our farm near Coldwater back in 1985. We love to hunt, fish, hike, and do just about everything you do in the outdoors. We were excited that our farm adjoined the Coldwater State Forest. The forest offered opportunities for family and friends to interact with Missouri hardwood forest whether they hunted or not. We adjoin about 3/4 miles of the forest. My Boy Scout troop spent many weekends hiking and identifying trees and birds, non-hunters could photo the mature forest and its inhabitants; it was just plain beautiful.
Then the Missouri Department of Conservation changed the forest to a conservation area and began selling the timber. Until then, I had always admired and trusted the MDC. Block by block, some clear cut, some select cut, the forest has been destroyed. None of the original forest remains. The last block was cut last summer, and a new method was used.
This sale allowed for the timber men to cut all unmarked trees. This meant that the Department’s people marked remaining trees by painting a red stripe around the tree about breast high. Some of the perimeter trees have a smiley flower painted on them as well. Now that the cutting is done, EVERY remaining tree has a red painted ring around it. The rest of the block is the usual mess of tops and ruts.
The trails that once meandered through the forest have been destroyed. I now call this it the graffiti forest, because it will take decades for the red spray paint to wear off the bark. The once beautiful forest is now a strange, almost industrial looking disgrace. The trails are gone; the beautiful stands of oak and pine are now defaced. I thought that diversity would include at least some untouched forest, but they left nothing. NO one would want to go there. The Department should be ashamed.

Don’t be so disheartened Chuck… think of all the deer browse you will have in a few years! Mark Twain said that lies can travel around the world in less time than it takes for the truth to get its boots on. If you believe everything the Conservation Department tells you, you are being duped. This state department is nothing like the one we had thirty years ago when we passed that one-eighth cent sales tax that turned them in to an agency filled with corruption. I only want the truth about what they are doing to be heard. Don’t take my word for it. Just go out and look for yourself.

I hope some of you will find our February-March issue of the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Magazine and read the Common Sense Conservation section. If you don’t choose to keep your eyes clamped tightly shut, you may begin to learn what is happening in the Ozarks.
My address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613. The email address is lightninridge@windstream.net and my website, where you may enjoy seeing my outdoor pictures, is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com

Monday, February 2, 2015

An Old Bridge, Old Magazines, and Old Bolt


The owner had these boards added so that he could get a view from the bridge and a better perspective of previous generations.
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I have mentioned here that a couple of years ago I bought a tract of land with a small cabin on a little creek back in the middle of nowhere, mostly for my kids and grandkids to have when I am gone and forgotten. There is an ancient, high, iron bridge on my place, crossing the creek and it stands on rock outcroppings with no road coming or going. It shows no names or numbers anywhere and the flooring is long gone except for a couple of old decaying wood beams.
Downstream a little ways is a standing fireplace and the remains of a 1920’s lodge, which I have been told was a retreat for local politicians and businessmen from Collins and Humansville, Missouri who liked to get together and drink during the time of prohibition. Even the local sheriff and his deputies joined them, according to legend.
Next to it is a huge spring that once provided water to local people during the depression when severe drought caused wells to go dry. I have been told that at times on Sunday afternoon, wagons were lined up there to fill barrels with the cold pure water. Surely the old iron bridge was a means of getting there, but I cannot find any history of it. If any readers know anything about that iron bridge over Brush Creek in St. Clair County, please contact me.
And somewhere out there, someone must know how to handle old, old pages of antique magazines. I have two 1859 magazines, which are more like little newspapers, and the fragile pages, maybe 20 in all, are enclosed in a plastic bag. I am afraid to take the pages out without an expert to advise me on how to do it. But as you can imagine, I would give anything to read some of those pages. The magazine is entitled, “The Leisure Hour, a Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation.” One issue is marked Thursday, April 28, 1859 and the other is Thursday, August 11, 1859. In time, I believe I will donate them to a museum, but I hope I can open them without seeing the pages fall apart. If anyone can help with this, please let me know.
There may be an interest too in a stack of old newspapers I found in a cabin way back in the wilderness of the Ozarks years ago. They are called the Kansas City Drovers Telegram from the 1940’s mostly. I can hardly handle them without damaging the pages. I found one sports story in a 1951 newspaper which declares that Roy Campanella hit two home runs for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Joe Dimaggio hit one for the Yankees. It proclaims that the St. Louis Browns had beaten the Detroit Tigers because of three perfect innings of relief pitching “by the fantastic Satchel Page”. The standings showed eight teams in each league, and the Cardinals were in fourth place in the National League, 18 games behind the Dodgers. The Browns were in last place in the American league, but only 33 games behind the Yankees.
Of course I collect old outdoor magazines and have a whole room filled with hundreds of them dating back to 1908. At a farm auction recently I bought 14 bound volumes of Life Magazine from the mid 1930’s into the early 1950’s. Each volume has about 20 or so magazines inside so there must be nearly 300 Life magazines to look through. Life was published weekly back then. How in the heck did they do that?
While there isn’t an overwhelming amount of nature and outdoor material in them, there is some, and it is fascinating. Old ads with legendary sports figures, and actors are found all through those pages, with full-page movie circulars for movies like Gone With the Wind, and amazing photos from World War II. If I start going through them, I can’t stop and the world I am living in is gone. In those pages I am carried back to a time which our grandfathers lived and revered, as difficult as it was.
I am going to bring some of the oldest of those ‘Life’ volumes to our big outdoor swap meet on March 28, for those who want to just sit down and look through them and marvel at the historic pages. And while I can’t write much in these columns about that swap meet because there isn’t enough room, you can send me a stamp and I will mail you a circular giving a map and all the information. Tables there are free, but if you want one, you need to have us save one for you now. For those who know all about computers, you can find the information on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com
For the first time in a couple of years, I have a litter of tiny Labrador puppies, the progeny of Bolt, my number one companion and the 3rd or 4th greatest Labrador in the world, and his mate, Hallie who surely is in the top 20 or 30. For forty years I raised hunting Labradors because I loved the breed, and hunted upland birds and waterfowl with the enthusiasm of a squirrel on a bird feeder. I only have two Labradors now, but at one time I had a dozen or more, and my dogs were well known, appearing on a dozen outdoor magazine covers and even a Cabelas catalog cover. In those forty years I raised hundreds of puppies, chocolate and yellow mostly. I love little puppies! And in those forty years I never once sold a puppy to a broker, nor allowed one to go to a puppy mill to become brood stock. And many times I just refused to sell one of my puppies to someone because I had a gut feeling it wouldn’t get a good home. A dog is a special treasure in the lives of outdoor people and if you don’t love one when you raise and train it, your soul isn’t in the right place.
I hate puppy mills and I learned that puppy mills operate with American Kennel Club registrations, and so I changed my dog’s registrations to United Kennel Club out of Ann Arbor Michigan. I did that partly because an AKC representative came to my place about 20 years ago and imposed fines on me because I had eight dogs in my spacious kennels and none of them had collars. She was a huge woman, who didn’t know I was a writer. She came in my house and told me the fines would be about 500 dollars and I could pay her. Then she went on to tell me what a terrible organization she worked for, how they had her go to dog sales in Oklahoma and Kansas where she often transferred false registration papers on stolen dogs and sick dogs and animals that had had tortured lives in puppy mills.
When I wrote what she told me, she denied it. She also denied telling me that American Kennel Club had just rented new offices in New York increasing their costs almost a million dollars per year and the fines they were trying to impose, plus increasing registration costs, were needed to help them pay for it.
Knowing what I know about them, I urge everyone who has a dog to transfer registration to the United Kennel Club. More and more, hunters who do not want to breed their dogs are just ignoring registration papers. If old Bolt had no papers at all, I wouldn’t trade him for two goats and a pig and a yard full of chickens! I want to see his little puppies get the very best of homes, with hunters who want old-style hunters and companions, that look and act like the big old hefty duck dogs from a hundred years ago, when there were none of them bred for field trials, nor crossed with other breeds to create pointing Labradors. Before I would own a pointing Labrador, I’d get a pig to hunt mushrooms with, and I’d hunt bullfrogs with a gig!
Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or email me at lightninridge@windstream.net