CENSOR OR NOT???

One of my newspapers refused to print this, calling it a rant.  What do you think!   I believe that no newspaper should censor something that offers solutions to problems.

I cannot understand why we can’t join forces and do the simple and easy things here in the Ozarks to make the natural world better.  Our rivers are in such a declining state, and it doesn’t have to be that way.         We can do this.  Why don’t we?  In fact I can do some of all by myself if the MDC will just agree to put up the money that those landowners must initially spend.  And it amounts to so little to put in water wells or buffer strips of native grass or young trees. You cannot possible spend time on our Ozark rivers and not see the problem as it grows each year. It is time to go out there and participate in turning this problem around now.  In a matter of years it will be too late and on many of our smaller rivers…it already is. 

There is another idea I have that I don’t think has ever been looked at before.  Right now the Missouri Department of Conservation manages about a quarter of a million acres of land we citizens own.  It is our land, but if they wish to remove all the large trees on any tract of it, they just do it. Much of this land being destroyed was given to the Department by people who thought it was the way to preserve it.  The department of conservation only profits from the cutting of these big trees because the logging companies pay them a percentage of the money the trees bring at the sawmill. 

         Why then couldn’t citizens raise the money, with the help of large conservation societies and wealthy people in our state, to match the bids of the logging companies to preserve those trees, many of them between 200 and 300 years old?  That way, the trees stand, and the MDC can still have the money they want.

         Then the den trees which are virtually worthless as lumber, the ones discarded when logging crews think they are just in the way, could remain there, dens for dozens of songbirds and furbearers.

A logged-over forest has very little value for any kind of wildlife in Missouri.  Anyone who tells you different is lying to you.  Those trees will not return in any consequential form as a forest for more than 100 years.

                  So I wonder, if I had enough money to buy those trees and the MDC could make just as much or more from me than the logging companies will give them, WHY COULDN’T WE MAKE THAT WORK FOR THE BENEFIT OF DOZENS AND DOZENS OF BIRDS AND MAMMALS AND PEOPLE WHO LOVE WILD PLACES? 

        

Smallmouth Eaters--- Repent!!

Smallmouth and River Runt

          If you are someone who fishes the rivers for smallmouth bass, I urge you to do this… return the brownies 14 inches or larger, and if you must eat some, eat the ones under 14 inches.

          This comes from someone who ate a million of ‘em as a kid, and guided fishermen all through my teen-age years who seldom returned a fish.  The idea was to string the “keepers” and throw back the little ones.  It was a different time.  Now, if we want to have quality smallmouth fishing, we need to think differently.

         How many times do you think I have lay on some riverbank or bluff or big rock watching river bass spawn?  Do you think twelve-inch bass are fanning out nests in the gravel and producing those fingerlings that will weigh three pounds in about 10 years?  They aren’t.  Smallmouth that are spawning are usually the 15- to 18-inch bass or bigger.

         Two thousand eggs per pound of female bass!  And I would wager that there are many nests in which no fingerling will live past two years.  You wanna make a difference?  Resolve now to never keep a smallmouth above 14 inches, even if you have to eat baloney and cheese for supper.  Or just ignore me and be a part of the reason that there aren’t near as many smallmouth today as there were yesterday.

         I cannot understand why we can’t join forces and do the simple and easy things here in the Ozarks to make the natural world better.  Our rivers are in such a declining state, and it doesn’t have to be that way.  We can’t make them the kind of streams they once were but we can improve them, and we can stop the destruction of declining water pollution from cattle, and small town sewage and manufacturing plants.  We can ease the choking of aquatic life by gobs of slime and algae, and the eroding of banks which fill the holes with gravel and sand.  It can be done… why aren’t we doing it?

         Recently I offered my time--free of charge-- to the state department of conservation to arrange for some work with landowners along rivers like the Niangua, Pomme de Terre, Big Piney and others.  I know that many of them want to help with the preservation of watershed along the rivers where they own land, and it can be done for a minimum amount of money.  They need “up-front” money, which the Missouri Department of Conservation has plenty of, and can quickly recover through Soil Conservation Service programs from the Federal Government.

         We can do this.  Why don’t we?  In fact I can do some of all by myself if the MDC will just agree to put up the money which those landowners must initially spend.  And it amounts to so little to put in water wells or buffer strips of native grass or young trees.  It is easy to do! SO WHY THE HELL AREN’T WE DOING IT?

          Is there no one who cares, anywhere?  We have clubs like the Ozark Paddlers, the Smallmouth Alliance, Stream Teams, the Nature Conservancy and others.  You cannot possible spend time on our Ozark rivers and not see the problem as it grows each year.  Where are all you folks who talk a good game?  It is time to go out there and participate in turning this problem around now.  In a matter of years it will be too late and on many of our smaller rivers…it already is.  Gosh-darn it, come and join me in helping.  You may not believe what you can learn and how a few people can make such a big difference.

     There is another idea I have that I don’t think has ever been looked at before.  Right now the Missouri Department of Conservation manages about a quarter of a million acres of land we citizens own.  It is our land, but if they wish to remove all the large trees on any tract of it, they just do it.  Roaring logging trucks and buzzing chain saws from private logging companies which are getting rich off these mature forests take away the reason it was set aside in the first place.

         Much of this land being destroyed was given to the Department by people who thought it was the way to preserve it.  They were wrong.  Those hardwood trees are worth more than they ever were because of the great demand for hardwood flooring. The department of conservation only profits from the cutting of these big trees and a devastation of our forests because the logging companies pay them a percentage of the money the trees bring at the sawmill. 

         Why then couldn’t citizens raise the money, with the help of large conservation societies and wealthy people in our state, to match the bids of the logging companies to preserve those trees, many of them between 200 and 300 years old?  That way, the trees stand, and the MDC can still have the money they want, the reason they exist nowadays. 

This tree is a den tree, cut because it was in the way. It was likely 240 years old, ----a place where year after year, all kinds of birds and mammals raised young. There may be a way for the MDC to get the money they want and for the trees to be purchased and saved.  I wish more newspapers would consider printing more about this. caption

This tree is a den tree, cut because it was in the way. It was likely 240 years old, ----a place where year after year, all kinds of birds and mammals raised young. There may be a way for the MDC to get the money they want and for the trees to be purchased and saved.  I wish more newspapers would consider printing more about this. caption

         Since they operate on a measly 200 million or so a year, (more than all but three or four state conservation agencies in the country) that should really make them happy.  And then the den trees which are virtually worthless as lumber, the ones discarded when logging crews think they are just in the way, could remain there, dens for dozens of songbirds and furbearers. A logged-over forest has very little value for any kind of wildlife in Missouri.  Anyone who tells you different is lying to you.  Those trees will not return in any consequential form as a forest for more than 100 years.

         Years ago an MDC wildlife biologist whom I went to school with many years ago at Missouri University said this when he and I walked through a state “Conservation Area”… “It is the foresters in the department who have all the say now.  Those of us who are wildlife management people are ignored.  It’s all about the money and the trees are worth a lot more than flying squirrels and wood peckers and nature-lovers.” 

         As we walked along a ridge top he showed me that all the red oaks and white oaks and walnuts had red rings around them, marking them to be cut, hundreds of them.  My old classmate said that in a couple of months that ridge would be one of the ugliest spots you could imagine, with dead slash and stumps and muddy ruts.

         So I wonder, if I had enough money to buy those trees and the MDC could make just as much or more from me than the logging companies will give them, WHY COULDN’T WE MAKE THAT WORK FOR THE BENEFIT OF DOZENS AND DOZENS OF BIRDS AND MAMMALS AND PEOPLE WHO LOVE WILD PLACES? 

         WHY NOT?

SOME NONSENSE

The Man in Mourning



I saw him kneeling there, grasping a tall, thin wooden post with a crooked cross piece, all of it entwined with dead and dying vines.  There were others nearby much like it.  As I watched him, I noticed a tear dripping from his cheek on occasion.  He was an older gentleman, his face wrinkled and brown from the sun.  I walked up to him and asked if I could be of any help.  “No”, he said, “I can do it…it was me who put them here.”  With that he grasped the gnarled, weathered stick and it’s cross bar and flung it angrily to the side. I put my arm across his drooping shoulders and tried to offer my condolences.  As he reached for another shabbily constructed cross, he said.  “I shouldn’t feel this way,” he said, “Next summer I can come out here and reuse these same stakes.  “And there will be more tomatoes next year!  It is just so hard to see them go and know how long I will be without them!!”

L.A.D.

Only Two and a Half Million

         I thought about this letter years ago, to Bass Pro Shop's owner, Johnny Morris.  But knew if I sent it, the letter would be tossed in a waste can in the Bass Pro Shop's office and never read.  I believe by including it in whatever newspapers will print it, there may be a chance that someone will listen, and some things can finally be done in the Ozarks that are badly needed.

         Dear Mr. Morris…   Not long ago it was reported on a local television station that you have become one of the richest men in our country, and I saw the big pyramid version of Bass Pro Shop in Tennessee which some say cost a billion dollars. Quite a place.

         Remember the 2.5 million dollars the Missouri Department of Conservation gave you a few years ago.  It looked a little fishy at the time because right after he helped you get that gift, the MDC director who orchestrated it went to work for your company.  I always wondered how your company kept the news media from writing or broadcasting one word of that!

         I think it is time you return that money to the common folks of Missouri from whom the Missouri Department of Conservation draws tax and license money…  the hunters and fishermen of our state who are not the elite people you hunt and fish with, but folks who live week to week with a paycheck that may not allow them to do as much hunting and fishing and enjoying of the outdoors as they would like. 

         As for how the two and a half million might be best used for all citizens, I have a couple of proposals for you that I hope you will at least consider.  With this letter I am enclosing two of my columns. One talks about the constant decline of our rivers. 

         We can do some repair and preservation, and do so much with landowners along the stream, but no one will do it.  The MDC, operating on 200 million or so each year, doesn’t have the money to work with landowners to get cattle out of the river or repair badly eroded banks. They need to put their money into things that help the little people of our state, like stocking elk and arranging out of state trips on their airplanes for commissioners.

         With your 2.5 million, I can get miles and miles of the Niangua, the Pomme De Terre and other streams, repaired so that the eddies stop filling in, and in turn create new fish habitat and spawning water.

         And with only a small part of that two and a half million bucks we all gave you, I think I could set up some of the greatest quail and pheasant hunting anyone could find, on public ground around Truman Lake, where thousands of acres now sitting in cockleburs, pretty much devoid of the covey’s that once were found there, could likely host thousands of hunters year.

         Please see my recent article about a place called Ozark Wings, owned by an ex-state senator by the name of Chuck Purgason.  His operation on only a thousand acres is actually restocking breeding coveys of quail and providing hunting of game birds which duplicate the hunting of wild birds.  And you know what, it doesn’t take millions of dollars!  It only involves three employees!!  Isn’t that remarkable? And it gives common low-income sportsmen a place to hunt.  Anyone can afford it.  Even those who don’t hunt could enjoy it, for hiking, photography and enjoying nature.  Such a place would increase songbirds and other wild birds by ten times.

         If we could figure out a way for the MDC to make money out of such a place on Truman, by selling some inflated quail and pheasant permits, I think they’d be interested.

         It is hard for them to afford such a thing without your help, what with their important projects like building private waterfowl marshes for a group of lawyers on the Sac River, or working for days and days to remove wild hogs from land you own via helicopter, like they did a year or so back.

         I understand how important it is for you to build the best golf course in the world, and I know that you do not often meet with common folks like me, but how about it, couldn’t you set aside a day to let me show you how much that two and a half million could do for these two projects and other conservation projects in our state. 

         I am sure that two and a half million dollars is a drop in the bucket for you, and the projects could some day bear your name, or maybe the name of that MDC director who helped you get the money and then went to work for you.  I am sure he’d like that.

         Mr. Morris, as satirical as this letter may sound, I am serious as a heart attack.  You and I could make so many good things happen with amounts that pale in comparison to the cost of your Tennessee pyramid or the Ozark golf course.  And I will do it for nothing… I don’t want a cent for my time, from anyone.

          Would you please meet with me and let me show you what conservation really is and some marvelous things we could do.  It will take only one day…just one.

         I envision the time some day when you could buy some of the big timber on our public MDC managed land so they could stop butchering those lands to make more money, contracting private loggers. Wouldn’t it be great if a hundred years from now folks could enjoy some of those big forestlands?           Wouldn’t it be great if we could leave some big timber standing for the people of Missouri to enjoy?  The way things are now, it won’t happen.  The Missouri Department of ‘Conservation’ (notice that word conservation in their name) will take them all in time for the dollars it makes them…  They look at those trees and speak in terms of “billions of board feet of lumber.”

         There are great things you can do with those millions we all gave you for that museum, and I want to show you that.  Isn’t it ironic that so many Missourians who made it possible to give you that two and a half million dollars have to pay the exact same amount to visit your museum as someone from New York or California?

         I appreciate you reading this letter. Please just give me one day to take you out and show you what can be done for common ordinary people in the name of conservation.

Respectfully, Larry Dablemont

Wild Wings

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    He wears an old straw hat and a white T-shirt that probably is only clean for a short time every morning.  He has a full white beard and tanned skin and you wouldn’t believe what he has done.  I think the man is a miracle worker!

       Chuck Purgason raises game birds by the thousands near Caulfield Missouri, not too far north of  Norfork Lake.  On his eleven hundred acres of crops and prime wildlife habitat, twenty-five hundred hunting parties killed 18,000  quail, 8,000 pheasants and 5,000 chukars last fall and winter.

       Everywhere you look around his home, there are quail and pheasants.  The air is constantly pierced by the sharp clear whistle of bobwhite roosters. It looks like an operation that would take twenty workers.

       “No,” Purgason says, “I have my son and one other employee here, and my wife who takes care of the books and accounting records.  But in the hunting season there are four or five guides who I hire on a contract basis to take hunters out.”

       If you think the birds are his only responsibility, think again.  He also owns and trains eighteen or twenty bird dogs, some of the best you can find. Every upland bird biologist in Arkansas and Missouri needs to spend time with Purgason and listen to him.

       “I had a biologist tell me not long ago that he feels wild quail are adversely affected by released, pen-raised birds,” he said.  “I told him the reason people buy them to release and hunt is because there are no wild quail there anymore.”

       In the wild quail eggs are eaten by raccoons and skunks and armadillos and even possums.  Small rodents and snakes get a few eggs too.  Those furbearing scroungers are at high numbers all across the Ozarks.  Purgason says that adult quail are hurt by smaller hawks, particularly sharp-shinned and coopers hawks, and at night by owls. He said that red-tailed hawks, which are deadly on rabbits, likely aren’t a big problem for quail or pheasant on his place.

       Purgason says that cats, mostly feral cats, are the biggest threat to released adult quail after the sharp-shinned hawks.  He also says that fur trapping which controlled raccoon and skunk numbers was much of the reason that quail did so well, decades ago.  No one traps anymore.  Coons and skunks are thick as beer cans in the ditch. In one month this spring, Purgason trapped 28 raccoons around his place as his quail began to lay eggs.

       The main reason I visited him was to inquire about something I have wondered about for many, many years.  Truman Lake in the south-central part of Missouri, is surrounded by more than 100 thousand acres of land acquired by the Corps of Engineers.  The lower part of the lake is mostly timbered, but the upper part consists of thousands of acres of fields and old fencerows, hunting land increasingly taken over by vast expanses of cockleburs.

       It is supposedly “managed” by the Missouri Department of Conservation, but there isn’t any “management” to it.  They just lease chunks of it, with the best soil, to farmers who plant and harvest crops and make good money doing it, of which they give the MDC a percentage.

       When John Hoskins became director, perhaps ten years back, I took him out on Truman Lake in my boat and showed him a spot where we had flushed five coveys of quail before my English setter in one afternoon in the early nineties. 

       I told him that on that day there were no coveys left… not one.  Then I asked him if the MDC would forget the tenant farming of large acreages, which left barren ground in the winter, and start doing what people like Chuck Purgason was doing… SMALL tracts of food plots for quail, with nesting and escape cover in between.

       I also pointed out that with the tons of heavy equipment and farming equipment the MDC owns, some fantastic small marshes for waterfowl and other migrating birds could replace the desert of cockleburs along the lake. Operating at the time on about 180 million dollars, Hoskins said there just “wasn’t enough money” to do things like that.

       There was of course enough to give Bass Pro Shops owner Johnny Morris, perhaps the richest man in Missouri, two and one-half million dollars for his museum.

And there was enough to spend hundreds of thousands on restocking a handful of elk down at the Peck Ranch.

       I asked Chuck Purgason; what if the Corps of Engineers would let him have a thousand acres to manage on Truman Lake like he is managing his own land, as a place to release and hunt upland birds.  It would be a hunting paradise not for elite wealthy hunters, but for common old-fashioned bird hunters living on a weekly paycheck, to bring their youngsters, who have never seen a covey rise, nor heard the cackle of a rooster pheasant.

        Purgason wasted no time answering that his place could be replicated easily on such a large tract of public land. He said game farm like his would need only 20 acres, placed on private land adjacent to that public owned Corps land which is already open to any type of hunting or trapping!

       I ask--- why would the Conservation Department, which has no idea how to bring back quail anywhere, not look at this idea.  Chuck says that one of the reasons is a basic misunderstanding by the department biologists of what has happened with wild quail and a disdain for people like him who do what they do.  They have been told how to think and they follow old lines without looking at anything outside of what they have been trained to believe.

       “At the beginning of spring, we have some wild coveys nesting and reproducing which are descendants of birds I raised,” Purgason said. “And if they don’t believe it they can come here before we start to hunt and see those coveys out there in the field.” 

       The reason for that could be that Purgason’s release of twenty thousand quail insures some survival into spring even if the percentage is small.  In the past, this kind of restocking has been attempted with only small numbers of birds.

       Chuck laughs about an article in a recent the Missouri Conservationist magazine about a place they are calling ‘The Cover Wildlife Management Area’ where they are ‘bringing back’ the bobwhite quail.

       “My son Cory went along and his picture is in the magazine article, with one of our dogs.  He says they found one bunch of quail at this place all afternoon and there were only six or eight birds in it, too wild to hold for a shot,” Purgason says with a smile. 

       “Cory came home and took some of our birds there to release that day so that they could get the pictures wanted,” he says.  “They never said a thing about that in the article.” 

       I cannot for the life of me figure out why this idea of making the upper reaches of Truman an upland bird hunting area like Purgason has is so objectionable to our conservation department.  I know the Corps of Engineers would go along with the idea, so there’s a possibility the MDC could be by-passed if they do not want to help. 

       Why can’t they send a group down to talk with Purgason and study what he is doing, and maybe just try it once as an experiment?  It is not rocket science, even if it is above many modern day quail biologists.  I could do this myself if given the opportunity.  What a great thing it would be for young hunters to see upland-bird hunting as it once was.

       The idea of “habitat means everything” is fine, but it doesn’t work for upland birds in the Midwest without knowing that large scale farming now practiced on our MDC land is not about producing habitat, it is about producing money.  Biologists must accept controlling today’s predation, and know how to create “edge and interspersion”.  That means making the RIGHT HABITAT-- which is the mixing of adequate winter food and escape cover and spring nesting cover.  If you want to see for yourself what could be done, go see Chuck Purgason’s  Ozark Wings project.

       I sent a hunter there last year and he came back praising what he saw there.  “It was like the old days,” he said.  “You would swear you were hunting wild quail.”

Where the Status Quo Won’t Work

 This photo was taken in 1975 on the Big Piney.  The eddy below this senseless raping of the watershed was about 8 feet deep then.  Today it is less than half that.

  

         In Arkansas just the other day I talked to a friend of mine who is a bass-fishing nut, and all around outdoorsman.  Larry Davenport runs the Buffalo Point Restaurant high above the Buffalo River.  He grew up there. We got around to talking about Crooked Creek which flows from the Ozark Mountains south of Harrison into the White River southeast of Yellville.

         I first saw that smallmouth fishing paradise in 1972, after hearing so much about it from Uncle Norten, who began guiding fishermen there in the 1950’s.   It was everything he said it was, eddies deep and clear; the shoals rough and tumble waters where smallmouth fed. 

         Back then, I floated all the Arkansas rivers, the Buffalo, Kings, War Eagle, Illinois, Eleven Point and many more.  Uncle Norten and I guided folks on some of them during from the late seventies until 1990.   But I will tell you right now, as great and as unique as each of them were, Crooked Creek, not spectacular in terms of bluffs or scenic grandeur, beat them all as a ‘big smallmouth’ stream.

         Today it still has smallmouth, but it is a shell of the river I remember, because it has been so badly filled in with sand and gravel, and subject to unchecked pollution in the eighties and nineties.  A chemical spill there from train derailment right above the water devastated the lower portion about 40 years ago.

         Davenport thinks many of the once-deep eddies could be like they once were if the gravel could be removed.  Unrestricted gravel dredging operations back some time ago surely made the filling-in problem a major one, but it isn’t the only reason Crooked Creeks eddies often went from 10 feet deep to 3 feet deep. 

         The clearing of trees and brush along small tributaries and the river itself contributed mightily.  You cannot turn a timbered bottomland watershed into bulldozed and barren flat without having tremendous erosion over the years. That’s exactly what has happened.  Much of the silt and gravel came from places where there were never any gravel operations. 

         And for that reason, Davenport is exactly right, if you could bring in a big dredge line of some sort and take the gravel and sand and silt out of 10 or 12 big holes you would see those eddies support some big bass again and lots more of all kinds of aquatic life… but in time they would fill back in from the massive flooding Crooked Creek sees quite often.

         The Ozark watershed of a hundred years ago was a sponge that soaked up heavy rains, because of the timber. Layers of leaves made a soft forest floor that slowed and held water.  Today the Ozarks, almost all of it, is a brick.  Hard cattle-trod fields sit on slopes, and there is increasing pavement and concrete likely covering ten times what we had in 1970.  And that’s why stopping the gravel companies from reeking havoc along the stream didn’t stop the degradation of that unbelievable river.

         But what Larry Davenport theorizes, ought to be tried, not only on Crooked Creek but many other rivers.  While Tyson’s chicken operations have fouled Arkansas’ Illinois, Kings and War Eagle, there are other rivers where it could be attempted.  The Big Piney and the Niangua in Missouri, the Eleven Point in Arkansas.  The removal of fill-in gravel and silt ought to be tried as an experiment.  What could it hurt now?

         My close friend Dennis Whiteside was floating rivers with me in an old johnboat when we were college kids, only 18 years old. He grew up on the Current River and he knows the streams and smallmouth bass like no man I ever knew except my Uncle Norten.  That’s because he is doing exactly what Norten did, guiding folks year round, who want to fish or otherwise see the rivers before they are ruined forever.  As many streams as I have floated, Dennis has floated twice as many, and he can tell you all about them… dozens and dozens of creeks and rivers from tributaries of the Arkansas River to tributaries of the Missouri.

         “Tell me something the Ozarks has that is of greater value than it’s rivers,” he says.  “Men can make almost anything, but not a river.” 

         When you set somewhere and see a bluff towering up above a stretch of flowing, tumbling water where a big smallmouth and a half dozen rock bass may lurk, when you see and hear kingfishers in a majestic white sycamore, where a mink plays along it’s roots, what can we boast of here in these hills that is better? Why aren’t we doing everything we can do to stop the abuse that is killing them?

         Dennis and another long time friend who floats rivers all over the nation went to a meeting about smallmouth held by Missouri Department of Conservation biologists last year.  They came back very despondent.

         “They have no clue!” Dennis said, “They want to base everything on some study they had on a few miles of one stream.  They just haven’t ‘been there’ and ‘done that’.”

         Dennis points out that in the course of a year, if he and I concentrate on a few good holes of water in a small to medium stream like Crooked Creek, we could catch and keep every smallmouth above 14 inches.  NOT MOST--ALL!

People like us who are dedicated to rivers and smallmouth have the answer biologists won’t even consider…  keep no smallmouth ever, from any stream, that exceed 13 inches, and a limit of two.          

         If you just have to have fish to eat, keep green sunfish, catfish, largemouth and Kentucky bass, but keep no smallmouth above 13-inches and no rock bass at all.

A smallmouth bass from an Ozark river is poor eating.  The flavor doesn’t compare to other fish and most have yellow grubs in the meat.  If you take out someone from the city who hasn’t caught many fish, he might clean and fry a smallmouth filet.  But show him those yellow grubs, which are sometimes a dozen or more per 6-inch filet, and he will likely decide he doesn’t want it.

         Another solution is seeing the Conservation Department work with cattlemen to keep cattle out of the river and to stop the worst of the bank erosion with rip rap and willows, and a buffer strip of native grasses and planted trees.

         A federal program helps landowners along the river practice these conservation measures by paying for the planting, fencing and drilled wells to water stock.  The catch is, the Soil Conservation Service must wait until it is all finished to reimburse the landowner and most landowners can’t afford the initial expense.

         If the Conservation Departments in Missouri and Arkansas paid for it all up front, many landowners would try this, and the Departments would only be out that money for a short time before the SCS reimburses them.  Missouri’s Department of Conservation has nearly 200 million a year to work with and vast amounts of that money which all Missourians pay them in licenses and taxes is wasted, much of it spent for almost nothing. Recently they paid a retiring employee who was a close friend of the director 145,000 dollars to write a book about rivers.  It will never be written.  You could take that wasted money and repair miles of river somewhere where it is most needed.

         A neighbor of mine, Jim Hacker, has used this program to do preserve a mile or so of river along the Pomme de Terre. On that river, cattleman David Cribbs saw a place along his land where the river was eroding barren bank several feet a year, so he used discarded concrete slabs and huge chunks of cement to stop it.  Now you can scarcely see the concrete, as willows and other plants have hidden it, and the riverbank is stable in the worst of floods.

         To see the best of this, go look at the once-terribly eroded banks above the big new bridge at Galena on the James River and see what was done to stop it cold. Oh yes, it can be done! Saving our rivers is possible, but we need to want to do it.

         Whiteside was right, the Ozarks has nothing compared to our rivers, and in a matter of years our over-used, over-fished, much neglected streams will be nothing to boast about.  Changing what is coming to them will take some money… but they are worth it.

         If you want to learn more about Ozark streams, I would encourage you to read my book, “Rivers to Run—Swift water, Sycamores and Smallmouth Bass”.  To find out how to get a copy, call my office, 417-777-5227 or email lightninridge@windstream.net

This photo was taken in 1975 on the Big Piney.  The eddy below this senseless raping of the watershed was about 8 feet deep then.  Today it is less than half that.