Micropteruses and Meleagrises

        

         

Panther Creek
           wild turkey











         Someone told me that I asked the same master naturalist question in two different columns.  That is what happens when you get hit over the head with a few falling tree limbs out in the woods and sleep too often on gravel bars with a rock for a pillow when you are young.

         But this week I have a question any master naturalist ought to know without going to the computer.  And I should point out that anyone who really is a naturalist should know this without batting an eye or breaking open a book.  In nature, everything that exists in the Ozarks has a genus name.  That is because common names often get folks confused.  For instance when I was a kid on the Big Piney, some rivermen called blue herons ‘cranes’.  And some called a green sunfish a perch.  If you really want to know what something is-- beyond argument,-- you use genus names.  For instance a great blue heron actually is an entirely different bird than a sandhill crane and a perch in hillbilly country is actually just a sunfish, not a perch at all.  A perch doesn’t even look like a sunfish.

         But let’s get to this question of genus names. If you were floating the river and spending the night on a gravel bar, your frying pan at suppertime would be a suitable place for which; a mephitis or a micropterus?  Which would be unwelcome in your boat?

         I learned all about scientific names in classes at School of the Ozarks College, and then at University of Missouri.  At MU I learned that some of those instructors who could tell you all about scientific names knew very little about the creatures in the world where they lived.  And those old timers who fished, hunted and trapped all their lives thought I was crazy when I told them the scientific name of a raccoon. 

 

         Old Bill said he had never trapped a procyon lotor in his whole life, and didn’t reckon he had ever seen one.  One of the mammology professors on the other hand said raccoons never raised young in the river bluff caves, they only bore young in hollow trees, which was a ridiculous assumption based on what the books said and nothing more.  He was dead wrong.

         Would you wonder where I learned the most…in the classroom or in a johnboat?

Truthfully, I am not sure, but I am glad I got a good dose of both.  Certainly though if I had to survive in the woods all by myself, what I learned at Mizzou would be of little use.  What always hurt me was hearing some professors talk about those hill people, who included both my grandfathers and the old timers I idolized, as ignorant!

     

   

         Had a great time at last Saturday’s Grizzled Old Outdoorsman’s swap meet, and hundreds of people attended in the rain, from at least three states.  We filled a room with a lot of junk and antique items left from the passing of the old man who once owned it all. We made a sign saying that anyone could take what they want and leave a donation in a can for what they thought it might be worth.  Truthfully, if that can had held a hundred dollars at the end of the day I would have been terribly happy, but it didn’t.  It held a little more than six hundred dollars!! 

 

         The youth of the Brighton Assembly of God Church, making food for visitors, had some of the best biscuits and gravy for breakfast that you have ever tasted, and pork sandwiches that were big enough for two meals.  They too were blessed with generous donations.  It was a great day though, not because of the money, but because I got to meet and talk with so many folks who read this column.  I seldom get to do that.

      And I ought to say something here about what a great time we had on March 18 when about 30 kids and counselors came to stay overnight with us at Panther Creek.  They were from two churches, one in Seneca and one in Carl Junction.  They learned to use kayaks and canoes on the creek, and to shoot shotguns at clay pigeons and to play pool and they not only hiked the trails we have ready, but

helped to open and clean about 300 yards of new trail.  I really enjoyed those kids and the young counselors. What great people.  Made me feel young again and I know we gave some kids a brand new experience they had never had before in an environment they had never seen.  A new group will be coming soon from Sullivan, Mo.  If you are someone

working with underprivileged kids, boys without fathers, church youth groups etc.,  this outdoor environment is free and it might make a significant impact on a young life or two.

    

  

      This week I am going to go down to Arkansas and fish at Bull Shoals and Dardanelle lakes and grab yellow suckers in a little creek down there not far from the Norfork river.  Friends tell me the morels have just popped up on Bull Shoals. And I am going to go out and call in a big old gobbler (genus name—meleagris) or two sometime soon and shoot every one I see, before the hunting season is even close!  I intend to shoot them with my camera, a kind of catch-and-release type of hunting. 

         It is really easy to do that now with the backdrop of some green pasture, but what I want to get is photos of wild gobblers in the forest setting which is their natural habitat, maybe with a budding redbud somewhere beneath a giant white oak or two the loggers haven’t got to yet.  Gobblers are beautiful in those green pastures, even with a cow patty or two nearby, but that isn’t where they were first placed by the Creator.  They are a woodland creature.  Taking a picture of one of them in a pasture is like going froggin’ in a sewer pond.  The ambience ain’t what it oughta be.

         

         I made a dozen of my little turkey calls the other evening. I have hunted with nothing else since I first found them about forty-five years ago, made by an old-timer at Licking Missouri.  Have you ever run into someone who kept track of how many gobblers he had killed?  Well, I know about how many I have killed, within a dozen or so at least, and I am not about to tell anyone because it sounds as if I am lying, and I do not want readers to think killing a gobbler is my main reason to hunt turkeys. 

         As an outdoor writer I have been able to hunt them in 6 states. I remember when I could legally kill three gobblers in the Ouachita and Ozark mountains of Arkansas before the Missouri season began.  Then a hunter could kill two in Missouri and two more in Kansas.  Add up how many gobblers a devoted turkey hunter with more energy and enthusiasm than brains could collect over a long period of that. 

 

          I could kick myself for getting so wrapped up in turkey hunting that my fishing and river floating suffered as a result. Now I fish more in April because turkey hunting is too darned easy today.  It wasn’t like that 40 years ago when a man could hike back into the hills and be all alone, and gobblers were scarce as honest politicians.

         You can read my book on turkey hunting if you can find it. It is entitled, “The Greatest Wild Gobblers… lessons learned from old timers and old toms.”  To find out how to get one, call Ms. Wiggins, my executive secretary here in my executive offices at 417 777 5227, and tell her I said anyone who orders one can get one of my handmade, autographed turkey calls free of charge, mailed with it.  Or you can make your own from the instructions in one of the chapters.

And as to the quiz, mephitis is a skunk and micropterus is a bass.  Actually you could fry either one for supper if worse came to worse!

         E-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.  

        

All About Management

       About fifty years ago, while I was a student at School of the Ozarks, I met a true conservationist who had worked for many years for the old Missouri Conservation Commission in the forties and fifties. In the 1960’s he retired and became a teacher at the college. His name was A.R. Mottesheard. I took every course he taught, and one of them was a wildlife management course where he had students take 80 acres of land and draw up a management plan for the imaginary plot, which could be whatever we wanted it to be. 

 

       Mine was about two thirds timber and one-third bottomland along a creek that I was planting for small game, deer and turkey.  I thought to myself at the time that it was a real dream, because no kid as poor as I was would ever own any land whatsoever.

       I remember the wisdom of Mr. Mottesheard, who often said that conservation departments never really manage wildlife; their job was just to make the needs of the various species available, for breeding and raising young, for escape from predators and for an available diversity of plant life needed for food. He said that Conservation Departments were more responsible for ‘managing’ hunters, and managing the harvests of game, and making sure that hunters and fishermen took available excess without cutting into brood stock.

 

       I never thought I would be involved in the ‘managing’ of a tract of land to feed protect and propagate wildlife, but it is what I am doing now to make the Panther Creek youth project near Collins, Mo. an outdoor education center, a haven for birds and furbearers, turkey and deer, where there is a good balance as close to nature’s way as possible.  I am particularly interested in the propagation of quail and rabbits, and it seems as if those things I learned from Mr. Mottesheard are paying dividends.

       A quail flock of about 18 bobwhites from last February seems to be much larger this winter, and on this tract of 50 or 60 acres, there is a plan now to have plots of late winter food for them, good winter cover and escape areas.  I am beginning to turn my attention to the control of predators, as we have far too many of three species… skunks, possums and raccoons, all of them known to eat all the eggs of any ground-nesting birds they find. 

 

       The armadillo, a no-account illegal immigrant from way south of us, has established a foothold in the Ozarks, and I will completely wipe them out if I can.  I will pray that feral hogs don’t invade the place.  Right now, hawks are not as serious a problem along Panther Creek as in other parts of the Ozarks, but there are way too many otters, and I will eliminate at least three fourths of them if I can. Any of those predators in the above paragraph are a problem for rabbits or quail or both.

       As for deer and turkey, they are abundant on the Panther Creek tract I ‘manage’ but not much will hurt the numbers of either, unless the place has a year or two of no acorns.  There will be no logging here, so that shouldn’t be a problem.  I wish I had saved that big spread-out plan I fixed up for Mr. Mottesheard way back then.  I would like to see if I had any ideas as a 17-year-old kid that I could use now.

       But when you push through a small patch of milo and millet, and a dove or two takes to flight, and then you watch a cottontail feeding on clover at the edge of a big patch of sericea lespedeza, and hear bobwhites calling from a thicket between the timber and the creek at dusk, you feel good about working the land. I’m not looking toward a harvest of grain, as farmers must do, but toward creating something lasting for wild creatures, and young people who may see something when they visit that they will never have an opportunity to see in the pavement and concrete world where they have to grow up.

 

Did you know that bobwhite quail roosters often take over a hatching brood and stay with them for weeks until they mature, while the hen who laid the eggs goes off and mates with a new cock and brings off another clutch.  Biologists learned that by putting little transmitters around the body smaller than a dime, and following adult birds. If a nest of eggs is destroyed, the hen usually will lay another nest full, and some hatching occurs as late as mid-August. But… young quail hatched after August begins will have a very poor survival rate in the late fall if the weather is bad. They do not develop enough body weight and fat to survive if cold persists in October and early November.

If you see my old pick-up sitting in front of a flea market or antique store with my old Labrador in the passenger seat waiting patiently, I am not in there looking for dishes. Some of those places have mounted deer heads and antique guns and duck decoys… and fishing lures made in the 1920’s. It wasn’t too long ago that I bought three Outdoor Life magazines published in the ‘40’s for only ten bucks!

       I suppose if I had more money at one time in that billfold of mine I might actually go to Cabela’s or Bass Pro Shops and look around, but honest to goodness, those high-priced sporting goods stores are boring after you’ve wandered the aisles of a flea market and spied a pocket knife just like grandpa used, and a genuine complete set of 1950 Ford hubcaps. 

       I’m just saying, if you are a grizzled old outdoorsman and you can’t go fishing, you might go look through some flea markets and antique shops. Call me if you find any good old wooden decoys!

      

Rain and Swap Meets

Caption… some of the kids who visited our Panther Creek getaway this past weekend.  The creek is very low, and water is becoming stale and dirty.  Rain is badly needed

      As I have been doing for a while, I will start things off with the master naturalist quiz.  Of the several species of hawks found in the Ozarks, which one is known to nest the earliest in the spring?

 

      By the way, any master naturalists who bring their master naturalist certificate from the MDC to our swap meet this coming Saturday at Brighton can get a free spring issue of my outdoor magazine!

      And another piece of good news… for anyone who might have outdoor stuff to sell, we still have three tables available free of charge.  Even if you have only one or two items to sell, maybe an old shotgun, a tackle box full of old lures, a minnow bucket, a hunting knife, whatever… bring them and find me and I will put those items out and sell them for you.  If you have a boat or canoe for sale you can set those up in the parking lot.  We already have a 50 hp Evinrude and a 22 foot antique river johnboat to sell.

      I am often asked if I have any of my late Uncle Norten’s handmade sassafras paddles for sale, and I am going to bring one this Saturday to put on a silent auction.  It is one he made and signed about ten years ago.  I am going to use the money for our Panther Creek Kid’s place, and I know he would like that.  I have told vendors who are coming from a good distance that they can stay overnight at our Panther Creek place at no charge.  Anyone who needs a room needs to call me so I can save one for them.

      I am tickled that Chuck Duren is coming.  He is a great woodcarver from Stockton, but he has quite a past.  He played basketball at the University of Missouri in the fifties. One of his teammates was Norm Stewart, and Chuck was the starting center there for two years.  Chuck played four games against another center for Kansas by the name of Wilt Chamberlain, then went on to sign a baseball contract with the Milwaukee Braves, playing on a minor league team with Tommy Aaron, Hank Aaron’s brother.

      I am hoping it rains Saturday, to ensure a greater turnout.  The rain makes it so that folks aren’t out fishing or tending to their garden and they are more apt to spend the day with us.  But of course the main reason I am hoping for rain is because we have a terribly bad short-term drought going on in much of the Ozarks. Our creeks and rivers are drastically low and fish need a good rise to give flowing shoals enough water for a successful spawn.

      It is ironic that a lot of rain at the right time can really hurt the spawn of crappie and bass in our lakes if they rise too quickly and too much.  But our streams are in bad shape, becoming choked with algae and slime that was never seen in Ozark waters fifty years ago. 
 

      Spring floods often clean out our streams for a while, so we need them now worse than ever.  But you know the slime and pollution is going to be a problem in the dead of summer.  With the low water we have, it is worse than I have ever seen it in early spring.

      There is little use talking about changing things.  Populations and progress take the forests and the waters away in great chunks now, and the fact that we are going to increase our numbers by the hundreds of thousands in coming years seals the fate of our wild places. For a billion people to survive here, forty or fifty years in the future, you cannot preserve big trees and clear waters filled with fish. And certainly, kayakers and canoeists don’t really need clean water, they just need fast water. Seems like we are heading toward a time when droughts or floods are all you can have.  That has been the story in past years.  I have seen our Ozarks rivers at the lowest point they have ever been and then at the highest level they have ever been, IN THE SAME YEAR, several times since the late ‘90’s.

      The Ozarks, once a sponge for the heavy rain, now has become a brick.  The hills hold far less storm water as forestland shrinks, and we increase pavement and concrete and make heavily-grazed hard pasture on once-timbered slopes that soaked up rain.

      With modern technology that makes

entertainment so diverse and easy to obtain, people that treasure wild things and wild places will be scarce in future years.  What those few of us find so wonderful in the unmarred creation of God will not be necessary at all to people who come after us.  Find a youngster today who would give up their little technology boxes for the chance to hunt squirrels or learn to fly-fish.  See what I mean?!

      I look at the world today and realize that indeed there is a steep cliff ahead of our racing civilization that no one can see. Men have grown into something different that they were created to be, casting aside things like common sense, faith in God and a belief in honesty and integrity. Find that stuff in Los Angeles or New York or Chicago. 

 

      If indeed there is a God, some say, why would watch the evil that is taking over and just let it pass. Wouldn’t it bother Him to see the wonder of his creation destroyed so easily and so quickly?  The future will tell, and none of us will see the awfulness of it unless that little fat moron that runs North Korea gets impatient with his bombs.  Then who will worry about clean rivers or forests, unless we can find caves in them?

      I guess what you have to do is enjoy one day at a time, try to get as far as you can away from it all by retreating to the wildest corners of the earth where it still seems like God is watching, and there is still some of that in the Ozarks. We need to be thankful for what is there, and the fact that the concrete and the pavement and the worship of money, and most of the problems it creates are a good distance away.

      It is a good way to find happiness and peace and contentment.  If only there weren’t any ticks!

   To find out more about our swap meet on Saturday you can call me at 417 777 5227.  Or you can send an email to my executive secretary, Ms. Wiggins, at lightninridge@windstream.net and have her send you a map on how to get there.  Remember, it is free to the public.  Biscuits and gravy from 8 to 9 and then lunch at 11.  Come and visit with me there and you will find some bargains, I am sure.

Answer to the quiz… the earliest nesting hawk in the Ozarks, as a rule, is the red-shouldered hawk.  They are similar to the red-tailed hawk, but they have a scream that has two distinct notes, while a red-tails scream is just one long note.

A Good Reason for Change

 

           

               This week’s master naturalist question, for the hundreds of ‘master naturalists’ out there in the suburbs of who have their master naturalist certificates…  In actual weight, which one is larger, the adult gray squirrel or the adult red squirrel?  All of us who hunt squirrels and skin them and eat them, and send their tails to the Mepps spinner-bait company to trade for fishing lures, will know this one easily.

        In late January we cut a dead white-oak tree at Panther Creek because we were worried it might fall on one of the cabins, and a hollow limb had a litter of baby gray squirrels in it.  The mother squirrel came out of it like a streak of gray lightning, but we strapped the limb up high on a nearby live tree and left it.  Sure enough, she came back and moved the four babies to another hollow tree nearby.

 

         When you consider the fact that squirrel season does not end until the middle of February, you see what might happen anytime you bag a squirrel in February.  It is exactly why no one should hunt squirrels after mid January!  The rule-makers in Jefferson City seldom have ever been around squirrel hunters or woodcutters.  The reason most of us country people have had so many pet squirrels when we were youngsters is the fact that so often when our folks were cutting trees for firewood in late January or early February, there were squirrels with young ones inside those trees.

         Since it is a time when so many squirrels are bearing young, why in the world allow squirrel hunting then?  And yes, you can make the argument that it makes no difference if a small number of baby squirrels starve to death in a hollow tree during that time, but why permit it to happen at all.  Squirrel seasons should not ever run into February and I do not know of one competent or knowledgeable outdoorsman who would hunt them at that time of the year.  Only a greenhorn would do that.

        The same thing could be said about the ‘first of September’ opening of dove season.  Few dove hunters today know that there are still fledging doves in scattered nesting in early September who will die in the nests because the adults are killed.  I have seen young doves being fed in a nest on the first day of September here on Lightnin’ Ridge.

         I know… there aren’t many times you will see that, but still, it would be eliminated completely if the season were set back to September the 20^th.  It makes common sense, but common sense hasn’t been prevalent in our conservation departments for many, many years.  The people in those agencies who grew up in the outdoors are no longer a majority.

         The truth of the matter is, young doves dying in a nest doesn’t make any significant change in the overall surviving numbers the next spring.  But who can feel good about such a thing.  Can anyone be so indifferent that they do not feel bad when they see a young fawn dead along the highway, or a baby rabbit being eaten by a housecat.

         I was taught a ‘reverence for life’ as a boy-- introduced to hunting at a very young age.  I see no reason why anything in the wild must die without a purpose to it.  Squirrel seasons and dove seasons cannot be changed to make dead babies less likely.  The one thing about dove hunting is, it is always too green and hot and dry in early September for hunting.  I am not going to be out there with a retriever that I think so much of, putting him through the misery of those early September days.  Early September is the best time of year to be fishing for bass with topwater lures anyway, and the best of the dove migrations will likely be at the coming of October.

         The crops which I put out in the Panther Creek bottoms are paying dividends now, and during the months of January and February when food gets the scarcest for wildlife.  I saw 14 deer in one of them just last night about an hour before dark.  And you will remember I wrote about the 51 turkeys I saw parade out of one back in January.  But what tickles me the most is rabbits and quail and varieties of songbirds that feed and take cover in those plots of varied crops.

 

         Not far from me is the most barren, lifeless tract of ground you will ever see.  It is the Missouri Department of Conservation’s Birdsong Conservation Area, which is planted and harvested each year by a tenant farmer who rents the ground and leaves it bare.  Such an arrangement is meant to leave a percentage of crops for wildlife. It is the place where five beagles couldn’t come across a rabbit trail a year ago.  Come by sometime and see what is left for wildlife there, under that idea of ‘wildlife management’ and what we do with a much smaller acreage at Panther Creek.  See the tremendous difference in both places.

        

         I hope that you have read or heard about the St. Louis Post Dispatch story about huge amount of money being paid to the MDC ex-director who resigned to go to work for Johnny Morris with the Bass Pro Shop dynasty.  If you can find that news story about how much money he is receiving from the MDC months after leaving there, you will be amazed.  It is hard to believe that a director who directs free labor and equipment for a ‘for-profit’organization, at no cost to anyone except Missouri taxpayers, can then go to work for that organization, making a huge salary, and still be paid a great deal of thousands of dollars by all of us through the MDC.

 

         But that has happened, and there isn’t a thing anyone can do about it. If Al Capone had been so invincible and untouchable, he would have become President! I urge everyone to read the letter I sent to Johnny Morris in my spring magazine asking him to show all of us what he is doing in the field of conservation for common working class outdoorsmen of this state, so I can put pictures of that work in my magazine.

         I will put the news story and that letter on my website this week.  If you care about conservation, and if corruption in a state agency concerns you at all, please read it on your computer, or someone else’s, at larrydablemontoutdoors. Every Missourian needs to know what has happened.  It is the second time an MDC director has been hired by Morris, after securing a large sum of money for Bass Pro Shop.  Last time it was 2.5 million dollars.  And after leaving the position of MDC director and going to work for Bass Pro Shop, that man received a one hundred thousand dollar gift from all of us through the MDC as a consultant fee.

         When I wrote about that, the ex-director, in a fit of rage, called me on the phone and made physical threats.  Keep in mind that in many of the newspapers I write for in major cities, this cannot be printed.  That is the kind of power these folks possess.

The answer to the quiz is a tricky one.  Red squirrels are tiny little rascals found way up north, much smaller than grays.  Our Ozark fox squirrels are commonly referred to as red squirrels, but they are not.  Fooled you on that one didn’t I?

  

         There will be about 30 underprivileged kids spend the weekend at the Panther Creek retreat this coming weekend, free of charge. What an experiment it is going to be.  If you’d like to join us and actually spend next Saturday helping us make it a great day for them, just call me, at 417-777-5227.  My email is lightninridge@windstream.net.

        

An open letter to Johnny Morris… In response to News Release

This week from the St. Louis Post Dispatch:

JEFFERSON CITY • Robert Ziehmer left his job as director of the Missouri Department of Conservation more than seven months ago, but his paychecks from the state haven’t stopped coming.

        According to state payroll records, Ziehmer already has received more than $87,000 from the state for doing no work. And every two weeks, he gets $5,800 more. And, despite working for a foundation connected to outdoor retailing giant Bass Pro Shops, the former chief of an agency that oversees fish and wildlife qualifies for state health insurance coverage. Lawmakers who are reviewing the proposed state budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 have begun raising red flags about the payouts to Ziehmer, which were not disclosed when he departed last year after nearly three decades at the department.

         “I don’t approve of it,” said Rep. Scott Fitzpatrick, R-Shell Knob, who chairs the House Budget Committee. “It seems like something that should not have happened.”

         The payouts to Ziehmer come as the Legislature and Gov. Eric Greitens are crafting a budget that could reduce services to thousands of low-income seniors and disabled people and will not offer raises to state workers, who are the worst paid in the nation.

According to documents obtained by the Post-Dispatch, the money is the result of a separation and release agreement between the former director and the Missouri Conservation Commission, which oversees the Missouri Department of Conservation.

         The agreement appears to address concerns by the commission that Ziehmer might take legal action if they tried to push him out of the top job after six years at the helm. It remains unclear why that may have occurred.

         “To ensure an amicable parting, the parties wish to compromise, resolve and settle, finally and forever, any claims and causes of action that were or could have been asserted by the employee against MDC,” the agreement notes.

The agreement allows Ziehmer to be paid for his accrued leave and receive health insurance from the state until his paid leave time runs out. Fitzpatrick estimated that could come in May, which would give Ziehmer almost an entire year of his salary. It wasn’t immediately clear from the documents how the deal might affect Ziehmer’s pension.

         In the agreement, both sides said the pact should not be construed as an admission of liability or wrongdoing.

“MDC expressly denies any such liability, wrongdoing or responsibility,” the agreement notes.

         Marilyn Bradford, chairwoman of the commission, signed off on the agreement. She did not immediately return messages Friday.

Unlike other state agencies facing funding cuts this year, the Department of Conservation budget is not being reduced, largely because it receives its funding from a special tax approved by voters in 1976. The one-eighth of one percent sales tax collected by the state is dedicated to conservation efforts. The agency’s budget is expected to top $154 million next year.

         The department is not controlled directly by the governor. Rather, the governor appoints four commissioners to six-year terms. The current board, which approved Ziehmer’s separation agreement, was appointed by former Gov. Jay Nixon.

         Ziehmer, who signed the agreement on June 1, 2016, now works for the Johnny Morris Foundation, an organization with $63.8 million in assets connected to the Springfield, Mo.-based Bass Pro Shops.

         Ziehmer, who could not be reached for comment, was the eighth director of the conservation agency since its founding in 1937. In that role, he was paid $140,000 annually to oversee a staff of 1,450 full-time and 500 hourly employees.

         During his tenure, he led restoration activities for elk, prairie chickens and other species, and oversaw the renovation of fish hatcheries and shooting ranges.

         Soon after Ziehmer’s departure, the Conservation Commission selected former Department of Natural Resources Director Sara Parker Pauley as the first female director of the Department of Conservation.

Editor's note: this story has been updated to correct the year voters approved a tax for the Missouri Department of Conservation. 

​Kurt Erickson • 573-556-6181

@KurtEricksonPD on Twitter

kerickson@post-dispatch.com

This article originally ran on stltoday.com.

Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/he-left-missouri-state-government-last-year-but-he-s/article_b346a97a-8bc5-50d8-bf2d-8b740e776fbc.html#ixzz4abNXxk00

Windmillers

My daughter Christy on the Buffalo River in one of my Kayaks

       Two good questions for master naturalist out there this week.  How many species of cedar trees are growing in the tri-state region of eastern Kansas, northern Arkansas and southern Missouri?  If that is too easy, how about this multiple choice question…  Of the hawks found in our area, which one is generally known to nest earliest in the spring--- the Cooper’s hawk, the red-shouldered hawk, the sharp-shinned hawk or the woodland gossett?

       I believe that a kayak is best considered a water-toy, as you might consider a plastic air mattress found in swimming pools. My Uncle Norten, upon seeing one years ago, commented that he would rather fish from an inner-tube in a farm pond. 

 

       I have often used one of the best kayaks you can buy. I own seven different kinds of fishing and hunting boats and three kayaks. I have two different-length kayaks made specifically for sportsmen, one twelve footer, and one ten. I camouflaged them with brown, black and green paint, and the ten-footer makes a heck of a good lay-out boat for duck hunting.  

       I don’t get out in that thing in the dead of winter and paddle it to a remote spot where I wish to hunt ducks. I put it in my 18-foot War-Eagle boat and take off across lakes or waters like Stockton, Truman or Bull Shoals, to duck hunt out of it. In the big boat I carry my shells, shotgun, camo-material, Labrador and decoys. The little kayak won’t hold half of that, but when I get decoys set, and my Lab comfortably in place and hidden along the shore, I can set the kayak out against a log or tree and cover it, set down flat in the bottom of it and be fairly low and comfortable and hidden.
                                           

       Yes, I have hunted ducks on small streams with the longer one

because it can easily be made into a floating blind, but I do not use it on bigger streams because I much prefer a 16-foot metal johnboat

called a Lowe Paddle-Jon, made on the order of my grandfather’s wooden johnboats. 

       Remembering back several decades, those wooden johnboats he made were better than anything I have ever used on a stream because they floated high, they were quiet and they were so stable you could walk along the top of the sideboards without tipping them much at all. The square-sterned canoes above 18-feet in length are fairly stable too. I have a 19-foot square-sterned Grumman canoe and if you float rivers in it, you have to be a real greenhorn to tip it. 

       If you fill any of the river floating craft I use with water, they won’t sink. Those aluminum canoes and johnboats have Styrofoam floatation in the ends and under any enclosed seats. 

       Kayaks won’t sink either. If they fill with water, you just get wet, but you can still windmill them to the bank. I do not call it paddling… it is ‘windmilling’ using great long shafts with a blade on each end and I am sure you have seen the way they are maneuvered.

         That’s what is so objectionable to me. The young people who get them to fish from are windmillers. They cannot quietly and unobtrusively go along any waterway because of that. And when I am floating along some small stream and a caravan of them come by in red and yellow kayaks, I just paddle to the side and let them pass until they can’t be heard and the river is peaceful again.

Christy on Pomm de Terre Lake

       A kayak isn’t made for big waters and should never be used on the larger Ozark lakes. My daughter Christy, with all the different types of fishing boats I have, still goes out in that larger kayak and fishes a local lake in the summer. I tell her that it is not made for that kind of use, that larger motor-powered lake boats do not and should not have to watch for her, it is her responsibility to not put that thing where they operate. 

 

       She stays in a small area along the bank and seems to enjoy fishing from it, but I instruct her to not give her last name when she talks to someone out there, as it would cast a shadow on the whole Dablemont clan if someone knew we have a kayaker amongst us.

       I am progressive enough to use those kayaks of mine where they make sense, and give me a good option, but I DO NOT use those windmill paddles and never will. I have made myself a seat at the back of mine and ballast in the bow, and I use my sassafras paddle to slip along quietly in small waters. I can hunt squirrels, ducks, deer and turkey from it, but only on little streams, never from a large one like the Niangua or Gasconade or lower reaches of any main river. Why do I never fish from one?  Because I have never seen the time that a kayak gives me a better advantage as a fisherman.

       I didn’t buy my kayaks, I obtained them years ago by trading advertising in my magazine, and made sure that they were the best available.  But I must admit they are tremendously expensive. Right now, all kayaks, canoes and aluminum johnboats are expensive. But my river johnboat and square-sterned Grumman, when I first began as an outdoor writer, were only a small percentage of the cost they are today.

       You know what is a wise thing to do--- buy used boats. My Grumman canoe has been used hard and often, but still it would last a new owner a lifetime. If you are looking for a kayak, get a used one, and camouflage it so you don’t look like part of a carnival coming down the river. Keep the thing off of big waters, because if you are in a lake, large boats are not going to slow down to a no-wake situation just because of you and your kayak. They shouldn’t be expected to. And always know that you are going to be observed wind-milling that thing along by every living creature in your watery path when you are on a river, way before you get there. 

 

       I grew up slipping along the Big Piney in my dark gray or green wooden johnboat trying to just blend in and be a part of the river. I have seen times when I would float past wood-ducks or deer or mink that didn’t know I was there.  Many times, kingfishers would alight on the blind attached to the bow when I was hunting. Rivermen paddled a boat from one side, and could float for the whole day without taking the blade from the water. You don’t see that anymore, it has become the day of bright colors, banging aluminum and windmill paddlers hurrying down the river as if they were fleeing from something.

       It would be great if they could all have been taught how to do it right, and to have reverence for that stream instead of seeing it as some sort of natural waterslide where yelling and hollering is part of the ride, and banging paddles are just made to make you go faster.

       The answers to the master naturalist questions… there are no cedars here; our red cedars are actually junipers. Cedars are found in the Holy Land and countries nearby. The ‘woodland gossett’?  I just made that up.  It sounds good though. 

       Once when I was just a kid, and took two ladies from Chicago on a float trip, I told one that a goggle-eye she caught was a spotted river-flounder and she never questioned it. Old Bill Stalder, down at the pool hall, put me up to that and the front bench regulars really enjoyed it when I told them about it that night. The earliest nesting hawk, generally speaking, is the red-shouldered hawk.

     My spring magazine is here… best one we have ever put out.. all color and 96 pages. To get info on obtaining a copy a copy or too ask about our upcoming free swap meet, call Ms. Wiggins at 417-777-5227 or email lightninridge@windstream.net