Smokin’ out the Worms

 

This mess is the result of fall webworms taking over the branch of a tree.

       Every year about this time, fall webworms begin to appear in trees around the Ozarks.  I have a quick solution for the ones I find around my place.  I take a long pole, stuff newspapers all around the end of it, light the newspapers with a match and hold the flame beneath the webs, which are full of worms eating leaves. In an instant they are all dead.

       Or you can cut the limbs off and burn them in a trash barrel. It is quick and efficient, and with that you don’t have to go buy chemicals to do the job.  Those worms are the larvae of a moth about a half-inch long with wings that are pure white or white with black spots.

       If you listen to some of the so-called experts, they want you to buy and use a chemical.  My advice is, stay away from chemicals!  In thirty some years here on this ridge top I have never used chemicals. They are not needed.  Several years ago I advised the burning of those webs, and a week or so later a Missouri Department of Conservation “media specialist” wrote that you should never burn them because that might damage the tree they are in.  That stuff he writes is so often hogwash. He spends his time in an office cubicle behind a computer.  Aspects of the outdoor world are as far away as Alaska.

        I have burned out hundreds of those webs full of moth larvae and there is NEVER any damage to a tree! In this day and time, common sense is forgotten in advice from the MDC. People believe anything they say or write and so much of it is pure baloney. In anything done or written or stated by state or federal government agencies you can bet you are listening to something without any common sense behind it.

       Actually fall webworms, besides being unsightly and leaving small balls of digested leaf droppings beneath the branches, do little damage to the tree either.  But this past week I have put a flame to a half dozen webs full of worms around my home and no trees have shriveled up or burned up or died.  Follow my example, and forsake chemicals, which often kill other creatures, like the small birds that will eat those dead, poisoned larvae.  Chemicals kill humans too, sometimes causing cancer and other diseases later in life by many years than the initial exposure.

 

       When I built my home and office years ago on what we call Lightnin’ Ridge, I added a screened porch which sets about 8 feet off the ground.  Out before it is giant oak, hickory, walnut trees and bird feeders.  You would think nothing new would come to those feeders, but now red-headed woodpeckers are showing up, three of them this morning.  They like to nest near water and I have seen them near my pond before, but never at the feeders.  Maybe they are the most beautiful birds that come there.  Cardinals and grossbills and indigo buntings and goldfinches and hummingbirds are there regularly and perhaps to many one of those would be the most beautiful, but those ‘red-headed peckerwoods’ as my grandfather once called them, are absolutely stunning, bright red, snow white and black.

       For the first time I can recall, two tiny chipmunks scurry back and forth to eat fallen grain beneath the feeders.  They too have been seen often down in the big woods beyond the pond, but never so close to the porch.  Other rarely seen creatures that live here are the grey shrew and a little-but-vicious weasel.  I have photos of both of them.  

There is no doubt this is a rare grey shrew, perhaps one of the only ones ever found north of the Arkansas border.

 

     Some doubt the presence of this silver-colored tiny carnivore, the grey shrew because they are not supposed to exist this far northeast. None have been reported in Missouri, but they are found occasionally in the Ozarks of Arkansas. But the photo leaves little doubt as to what it is.  According to the books, he is really out of his habitat, right here on Lightnin' Ridge. Shrew should never make it through the winter here because they will die if they don’t eat about every four hours. Distinguishing characteristics on the grey shrew include only 28 teeth while other shrews common to the Ozarks have 32. I pried his little mouth open and sure enough, he only had 28 teeth!   You can believe that if you want, and you can see a photo of him on my website, lightninridgeoutdoors47.blogspot.

 

Email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or send mail to us at Lightnin’ Ridge Publishing,  P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613

Upcoming Interviews and Supreme Immunity

 

 If non-resident turkey hunters quit coming to Missouri, it is a big loss of revenue for the MDC.

 

       I talked to the new director of the Missouri Department of Conservation this week, and he gives me some hope.  He hails from Ozarks country, the small community of Lincoln Missouri, where he and his dad kept coonhounds and hunted coons and sold their pelts. The former director was a lady who I interviewed for hours once and she didn’t know the difference between a coon pelt and a cowhide.  

       We talked about meeting on August 19 so I can learn more about his attitude toward conservation issues in Missouri, and  I will report on that in my column that next week. I also talked with what they call a turkey and grouse biologist for that department.  He is too young to be that, and completely dedicated to the department’s position that the reason we have about one-third of the number of wild turkeys we had twenty years ago is habitat loss.  That is absolutely ridiculous and I told him so, going to the extent of telling him to come join me to look at places in the Ozarks where thousands of acres of land haven’t changed a bit and wild turkeys have declined considerably. 

       I have to admire him for talking to me when I was giving him ‘what-for’ about the department's refusal to change anything that might cost them money from the sale of turkey tags.  Then we got down to brass tacks, me challenging him to come to the Ozarks to meet at a large event center where three or four hundred people could witness and contribute to a debate between me and him and anyone he would like to bring with him.  He kind of indicated that if the director would approve that kind of thing he might just do it.

       When I meet with the director I will urge him to do the same thing.  There is no reason that he and others in the department would not meet with country people, outdoorsmen and landowners in such a situation, where written questions could be submitted for them to answer in a very controlled debate.  The department would not be in control of the situation and that is where the rub is.  When they have meetings, they are in control and you get to hear their presentation first.

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

       I am going to tell something here they do not want told.  That urge for money is what drove the spring extention of the turkey season to include all-day hunting. Talking to a source that knows all about it, and to a non-resident hunter, I got a true picture.  Non-resident turkey hunters are getting to where they don’t want to spend the hundreds of dollars on those out-of-state turkey tags. I talked to a turkey-call maker from Tennessee,  by the name of  Eric Crouse.  He said he and a large group of hunters that had been coming to Missouri for 15 or 20 years will never come to hunt here again because the decline in wild turkey numbers that makes it next to impossible to hear gobblers as they once did. He told me that if the director or turkey biologist would agree to that meeting I propose, that he would bring several of his fellow hunters  up to attend the meeting, all the way from Tennessee. 

       That all-day rule change came about because too many non-residents are angry. In Missouri, they have nothing to do after mid-day and are considering going to other states.  In an attempt to keep that non-resident money coming in the MDC decided to extend daily hunting hours to sunset.  It makes sense for keeping non-residents.  If you live in Missouri you just go back home and get some other work done or go fish a pond  somewhere with the half-day season we have always had.  Non-residents too often go back to a motel or camp and just sit there.  Not now… now they can hunt all day!  Maybe now the MDC can make a little more money from non-residents who will come to the state not knowing that in most of the Ozarks at least, wild turkey numbers are a fraction of what was once here.  And hunting late in the day helps hunters to roost gobblers for the next morning, even allowing for a little roost-shooting at dusk.

                     

       Next  week’s column is a follow up to a story I wrote back in December about a man from Sullivan who had a conservation agent with no search warrant sit in his driveway for two hours and steal a wild turkey he had killed.  He made the mistake of taking his turkey out of the freezer and showing it to the agent, one he had legally killed and properly telechecked.   Now he is suing the department for theft of property.  The MDC’s defense is ‘Supreme Immunity’.  What a story this is.

 

       Contact me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or call our office at 417-777-5227.  I think folks will like my new book, “The Buck that Kilt the Widow Jones... Short Stories from the Outdoor Ozarks”.  It is 16 dollars postpaid.  The first 100 are numbered, to be inscribed to the reader and autographed.  You can also order one by mail, by sending 16 dollars to ‘The Buck’, P.O Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.

New Book - THE BUCK THAT KILT THE WIDOW JONES

 

My new book is entitled, “The Buck That Kilt the Widow Jones”, a book of 30 short stories with 264  pages of reading about the outdoors and the Ozarks.  The cost is sixteen dollars but if you can get aholt of me on the phone, I will give you a discount and autograph it to you.  The first 100 we send out will be numbered.

Fishing With Otters

 

Fish from the battle of 'wounded knee'

 

      I hate to be laughed at!  But I know a bunch of you folks out there are going to laugh at this… In southern Bangladesh there are native people who live along the rivers that feed the ocean, who train otters and use them to fish in those tributaries. Those otters are bred in captivity and trained to herd fish into the nets of village fishermen.

       They are led to boats on leashes, eight or ten at a time, and they willingly climb into cages on the boat. I saw all of this on a nature show of some sort on Public Television. I hate television except for the nature films, especially those on British Broadcasting, where you can see a new world and the nature of it, so fascinating and revealing that it makes me realize indeed how great the Creator is. I learn a lot from those films, and you could never have convinced me that someone could train an otter as those were trained, as well as any dogs you have ever seen.

       At low tide, the Bangladesh rivers are easy to navigate and the fishermen place nets off the sides of the boat, release the otters into the river and let them drive fish toward and into the nets. It is hard to believe how well it works.  The film showed the fishermen calling in the otters after the nets were full, and feeding them fish that made up a percentage of the total catch, the reward for a job well done.

       It was amazing to me that several of the older otters were not on leashes but roamed free as the others were led on leashes. Still, when they got to the boat they jumped right into their cages. In the water, the otters, easily a dozen of them, seemed to understand how to work as a team.  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

       There are few mammals as smart as otters. They are smarter than raccoons.  But they are what you might consider vicious and bloodthirsty in the wild. While their diet is chiefly fish, crawdads, bullfrogs and water snakes, they can take to land to catch and eat rabbits, young turkeys and anything else they can catch. An acquaintance of mine told me he witnessed an otter with his long body wrapped around the neck of a small fawn trying to drag it into the river, where he could have drowned it, like a raccoon often drowns a coonhound.  My new book is entitled, “The Buck That Kilt the Widow Jones”, a book of 30 short stories with 264   pages of reading about the outdoors and the Ozarks.  The cost is fifteen dollars but if you can get aholt of me on the    phone I will give you a discount and autograph it to you.  The first 100 we send out will be numbered.

       I have been spending lots of time at my desk the last month due to surgery on my knee which is suppose to make it 100    percent well.  But it still hurts and only because I am a toughened, grizzled old outdoor veteran am I able to go fishing.  But my daughter Christy and I went up the Sac River last Saturday and found it too muddy and high to fish the portion of it we wanted to. Fortunately I remembered a creek where I caught lots of big Kentucky bass last spring so we found a nice little deep hole up that creek about four in the evening and caught very little.    Christy got a couple of small bass, lost a good one and then had another  one break her line.  Because of my knee I had trouble    running the trolling motor, but finally tied on big spinner bait and on the first cast it was jolted by a whopper-doc of a fish.  I fought the rascal around for ten minutes or so, expecting a big bass to break water in an attempt to throw the hook, but that didn’t happen. Christy waited with the net, caught a glimpse of the fish and said it looked like a big drum.  That’s when I realized what it was, a fish completely out of place, up the creek in July.

       Hybrids, a cross between a striper male and white bass female, come up the sac in big numbers each fall, and also in early spring, but not in July.  Well I had ahold of a two-foot long hybrid, and I limped around the boat trying to slow its runs in that little bluff hole on a creek where it should never   have been.  It isn’t there now, as my daughter got a net under the battler and we had it for Sunday dinner. Hybrids, like white bass are good to eat if you take off all the red meat found on filets.

       You can see me holding up that big hybrid, almost ten pounds I reckon, but at least better than eight.  Because of my weakened, hurting leg, Christy and I will forever refer to the afternoon tussle with the big fish as the ‘battle of wounded knee’.

 

Contact me in my office at phone 417 777 5227, or email me at lightinridge47@gmail.com.  The place to read past columns and see that big fish is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.

 

The Big Piney Pool-Hall Rules…

 

       I hope to have my Big Piney Museum and Ozark Interpretive Center finished and open by this fall. One of the contents is a pool table that was made in the early 1920’s, dubbed an A.E. Schmidt Victory Table.  It was sent to the main street pool hall in Houston, Missouri about 1922.  My dad and grandfather bought the pool hall in 1957 when I was 10.  From then until 1964, I worked there after school and at various times during the summer.  

       Sometime in the 1970’s I guess the 3 snooker tables and 2 pool tables were sold.  I found one of each of them in a small-town Ozark restaurant about 20 years ago and I bought them both.  They are set up in my home now, waiting for the completion of the museum. It is nearing completion now and we have a big fireplace on one wall. Out in front of that fireplace we will have that 1920 antique pool table. There I will create a 1920’s thru 1950’s pool hall environment, with tables for checkers, cards and dominoes, a coffee pot, old time soda pop machine and peanut machine. There will be no charge for the games or coffee, just a can nearby for donations.

       In Dad and Grandpa McNew’s pool hall, there were lots of signs, telling players not to sit on pool tables, not to sit drinks on them, no gambling, no masse shots, etc.  The only thing different from the pool hall of my boyhood will be the lack of spittoons.  No tobacco of any kind will be allowed in my nature center-museum. 

        I have some memorabilia from that old pool hall where all the men in Houston seemed to gather a few times a week, a big picture of ducks that was there in 1958 will be on my museum wall and an old deer head and the  handles of the front door of that pool hall from the  fifties. If I  can find a straggly looking fish mount that looks 60 years old I might stick it up over the ‘farr-place’. 

       But there were signs there back then, like ‘no gamblin’ ‘no cussin’ and ‘no alcohol’?  I will have to make new ones.  How do these sound?  First of all, we’ll post house-rules about three kinds of normal pool games that can be played… Nine-ball not allowed.

       Then—1.No argurin’ about politics or religion! 2. No gamblin’ without written permission!---  3. No fish stories when owner is here!  (His family is trying to stop him from lyin’)--- 4. Coffee is free… except for first and last cup, which are 25 cents each!... please  clean up any spilt coffee as no one else will do it!...   5. In winter, card players and pool players are expected to keep ‘farr-place’ filled with wood.---  6. Restroom in back corner… but if you just need to pee, go out into woods thru back door!—7. Don’t sit on table and don’t sit nothin’ else on table…8. Do not flirt with or grab ladies up front…(up front in museum that is)… unless you know in advance they don’t mind!---9. For each pool game you play, loser puts a quarter in donation box, or more if you want the Good Lord to smile upon you!--- 10. Treat everyone here like your brother…unless you have had trouble getting along with your brother! 

11. Remember that this is a day the Lord has made.  Rejoice and be glad about it and don’t mess it up by cussin’ ‘til you get outside!---

  12. Keep table covered when not in use and put cue sticks in rack, and put the balls in pockets! (pool table pockets, not YOUR pockets.)

        Last but most important, 13. If you do not want your wife to know you are here should she call… notify us in advance.  When I was working as a kid in the pool hall we owned, Vernon Cantrell’s wife would call and want to know if he was there.  Why she called I don’t know because Vernon always was in there at such times, and he had told me to tell her he wasn’t.  What she called me at such times wasn’t near as bad as what she called Vernon.

       When I get the place finished, come by and  play a game of pool or checkers and help us keep the farr goin’.

 

p.s.  The  Big Piney River Nature Center and Museum will be free to all who stop by.  I could sure use some donations from rich people to pay some of the cost of it.  You can see what we have done so far on the east side of highway 63 a mile south of Houston, Mo. Help would be appreciated.

 

Larry Dablemont –‘proprieter and janitor’

Woe Is Me and My Knee!!

 

         I have had no outdoor adventures lately. It has been three weeks since I came down with something called RSV, which stands for “respiratory something virus”.  It took me two weeks to get over that. Right behind it was a scheduled knee operation, made necessary by the fact that I jumped off the front of my boat last year, as I have done for decades. But that most recent time, I tore something called a meniscus. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a major part of walking found inside your knee…and what you can’t do without it is, you can’t wade in the river where there are big rocks, because it hurts badly when you do and you often fall.  You also can’t bend over to catch a frog, or get on your knees to take a catfish off a trotline.

         Being a grizzled old outdoors veteran, I can take a tremendous amount of pain, but limping around like you have a ten-penny nail drove into your knee gets aggravating. So I get over the RSV problem and go right in to have my meniscus took out or sewed back together or whatever, and all this comes about the time I normally do some night-time bass fishing or trotline fishing in the cooler part of the day, which is the night. 

         The reason I am not writing about that is because I am limping around my place wondering why it hurts as much to fix a meniscus as it does to break it! But I am patient so I wait. Like I have a choice? It has been fixed  for three days and I have no recourse but to sit and complain, and perhaps sharpen my trotline hooks as I watch Gunsmoke on television. My knee is just about like it was on day one and day two. The arthroscopic surgeon says I will be good as new someday; perhaps when duck season gets here, I don’t know. Right now, putting on a pair of waders would be next to impossible.

         But I shall prevail… I hope. I am downright determined, defiantly dedicated and dadblamed disgusted!  Life will be different from now on.  Jumping off anything higher than a brick will no longer be done.  My deer stand will be two feet shorter. And using my imagination and sharp-as-a-razor memory, I leave you with what would be happening this week or next, if this darn knee recuperates to full usability.  Here goes…

       “----The heat of the day is behind me. It is substantially dark and upriver a boss bullfrog is bellowing.  I will go after him soon, quietly paddling my boat toward the bank where his bulky body besits. I will shine a broad beam of light in his eyes and grab him with my free hand.  He will go into the burlap bag with a couple of his bellowing bullfrog buddies, bound for a fine frog fry soon to come.  Families of young crawdads along that eddy will rest easier because of his demise. For baby crawdads a boss bullfrog is a bad bully.

         But first, I pick up my rod and cast my jitterbug lure toward the bank in the coolness of fading evening.  The big lure slides across the still water swirling below the shoal and a smallmouth bass of substantial size slurps it under with a surprisingly quiet splash.  My rod is nearly doubled, and I let him wear down as I wait, never lessening the pressure, holding the jitterbug hooks solid in his jaw.   Then I net the rascal and admire his size before I release him; a battling big brown bass, bold and beautiful in the bright beam of my brow-light there on the bottom of the boat.

         Again the bullfrog bellows upstream.  Should I go after him or try another cast.  It is a difficult decision, one an outdoorsman like me must make on a regular basis.  But I am up to it… such is the ways and the plight of a grizzled old veteran riverman! Right or wrong, I will live by such decisions which must be made… once this darned knee gets back to normal!!!  But I sure as heck won’t ever decide to jump off the boat!

 

         If you like to read, I have a new short story book coming out, and a new magazine too.  You can get copies or information about either by calling my office, 417 777 5227.  Normally you would have to talk with my secretary, Ms. Wiggins, but while this knee heals, you likely will get aholt of me.  I may answer in a somewhat pained voice.

         Read past columns on www.larrydablemont.outdoors and write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613

The Poison Fish.

 

Longnose Gar Fish

A Question from a reader…   Is a garfish good to eat?  Some say they are.  

 

         Answer…   There are four species of gar in the Midwest but only one is the scourge of Ozark streams. That is the long-nose gar, which wasn’t seen in the clear clean Ozark rivers a hundred years ago. Now they are thick in some of our best rivers, something of a leftover from prehistoric times that just outgrew the slow muddy waters along the Mississippi. They eat small fish of all species.  

         Ozark streams are full of long-nosed gar, which often grow to five feet in length and up to 25 or 30 pounds.  Some will tell you that anything you can cook is good to eat.  But I wouldn’t go through the job of skinning a gar to eat one.  I have tasted the meat and it is passable.  But then I ate so much fish as a kid I am not a big fan of any meat from our fine finny fish friends.  The best fish I have ever eaten came from the waters of the small mountain streams of Colorado where you catch 10 to 12-inch brook trout with either very light short rods or fly rods.  Those little fish are so good to eat I could never get enough of them, when fried in a skillet right alongside the small creeks where they are found or anywheres else.  Comparing gar meat to a fried brook trout is like comparing mud pies to chocolate cake.  

         Gar and paddlefish are good eating for many, but to me they are not anything worth bragging on…. just not all that good. Why would anyone eat a gar or paddlefish if they can get any of the other fish that are found in the same waters?  Gar are so numerous they harm the spawning waters of other more desirable species.  Bow fishermen and giggers who kill and dispose of gar and carp are doing fishermen a big favor although you can, if you work at it, make them edible.  To me, eating a gar is like going into a bakery and passing up all the donuts and cake and pie and having them fix you a biscuit!           

         Here’s more advice from my expert experiences eked from an environmental existence and ecological education… ANY fish meat you eat should have ALL red meat removed.  That red meat really does give fish an undesirable taste.  But I have been told that red meat is a source of good fish oil, which is desirable for humans. Yuck!!! My advice is, do not eat gar, throw them up on the bank for the coons or bury them in your garden to make good fertilizer.

         While it might be something I ought not to write about, I guess that gar-eaters need to know that gar are spawning through June and the eggs of a gar are poisonous to mammals, of which humans are one of… mammals that is.  If they are eaten, gar eggs will kill cats and dogs, raccoons and possums, and even people.  My dad loved the fried fish eggs of bass and goggle-eye. I am glad mom never knew that gar eggs were poison!  A little humor there. I can see a problem arising with that knowledge, as cats would easily eat those eggs. I doubt that dogs would, and while I don’t know this, I am sure a while a raccoon would eat most anything; they surely have been endowed with the knowledge that gar eggs are to be left alone.

         Anyway, the local sheriffs in the Ozark should know to look for a gar carcass around any Ozark home where some old boy who is married has died a suspicious death.

 

 B Second reader question… Are you putting out new books this year?

         Answer… Yes.. We have one coming out in a month or so entitled… “The Buck that Kilt the Widow Jones… Short Stories about the Outdoors and the Ozarks.”  We will mail that book out about the beginning of August I think.  The first 100 will be numbered and inscribed to the reader and autographed.  To get on that list contact my office.  Two other books, “The Life and Times of the Pool Hall Kid” and “The Justice of St. Clair County” will be ready in December, for Christmas Gifts. There are eleven now, all shown on www.larrydablemont.com

 

 C Third reader question… Would you write about the new tick diseases going around sometime? 

         Answer…. I would, but my daughter Lori, a physician who doctors faculty and staff at Missouri State University, has written a very complete article for my summer magazine, which tells more than I know about tick diseases.  If you get a copy of that magazine you will know as much as she does I suppose.  New tick diseases, like ‘alpha-gal’ disease has been deadly at times and renders healthy people violently allergic to red meat.  If you contact my office you can get that magazine for only postage costs.  But they will be sold out by August.

 

 

         If you need to talk with me, call my office at 417  777 5227 or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com.  Send letters and questions to me at P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, 65613

 

 

An Odd Duck

 

       I watched as a mother wood-duck crossed an old road high on a ridge top, closely followed by three ducklings which I am sure had hatched that very day.  She was a good quarter-mile from the river, but intent on getting the young ducklings there as quickly as possible.

       Wood-ducks are odd ducks, because they nest in hollow trees rather than in a marshy, reed-covered wetland habitat as other puddle ducks do.  But what is odder still is the fact that very often, that hollow tree is far from the closest water.  Sometimes an old hen will nest close to a pond or river or lake, but often the tree she chooses is on a hillside or ridge, and she has to lead her young ones to water over a good distance of dry land. 

       That hollow in a tree might be 20 feet above the ground, sometimes more.  The ducklings hatch there and spend no time at all inside the cavity where the mother has laid her eggs.  They get dried out, and fluffed up, and then are fixated on the hen, who often is flying in and out, coaxing them to leave the hollow.  They hop up to the entrance and leap out into the great unknown with little hesitation.  I have watched them do that, and they actually appear to be trying to use their tiny little wings, but to no avail.  It seems they just tumble beak over tail feathers to the woodland floor, and it doesn’t hurt them at all.  They have no body weight.  

The hen waits ‘til they all get out, and in the nest cavity above, there may be some unhatched eggs left behind.  That nest may contain the eggs laid by two different hens, perhaps up to 16 or 18 eggs or even more. Once in North Little Rock, Arkansas, I witness a traffic slowdown on a busy thoroughfare while a wood-duck hen hustled at least a dozen little ducklings toward an Arkansas River slough that had to be a half-mile away.

       It was puzzling to see the hen last week being followed by only three ducklings.  That’s about the smallest clutch I have ever seen. It could be that some others were lagging back a ways, but usually they are all right with her.  Those ducklings which lag behind are usually doomed.  When I was a kid on the Big Piney river, I actually saw a wood-duck duckling only a day or so old, and slower than his brood-mates, disappear in a massive swirl on the surface made by what I assumed was a bass.

       We hate to look at it this way, but there is so much waste in nature when you are talking about the young of those creatures that are given the ability to reproduce well, like rabbits and mice. But it really isn’t a waste.  The young of those species cannot survive in huge numbers.  They are meant to be food for the predators, which have to also survive. One group, the eaten, has a high reproductive potential, while the other group, the eaters, have a high biotic (surviving) potential. The creatures which survive well do not produce huge numbers of young, while the creatures which do not survive well produce big numbers of offspring.  It seems as if there was a great scheme to it all, doesn’t it?

In our eyes, a weasel pouncing on a young chipmunk, or a raccoon feasting on the eggs he finds in a quail nest, or a hawk pinning a young rabbit to the earth, represents the ugly side of nature.  But there is no evil there.  All things fight to survive, predator and prey alike.  And in the end, where man hadn’t upset things with overwhelming land change, the whole system worked.  Not so much anymore.  Desirable creatures in the woods or in the water are becoming scarcer, while undesirables, often non-native, seem to be thriving.

       It is likely that those three little ducklings will not all survive.  Some mink will eat one perhaps; maybe some gosh-awful looking snapping turtle will pluck another one from the surface of the river.   But maybe not… maybe they will all three make it and I’ll bag one of them this fall as I hunt the river, grown to a beautiful mature drake.  And if I do, I will enjoy a wood-duck dinner, making me no less evil than a weasel or a turtle or a water snake.

       While heavy rains doom the quail and turkey chicks, the wood-duck ducklings are not at all fazed by a cloudburst like we have been having.  A rivulet filled with a torrent of rainwater will not soak the duckling’s feathers.  They will just be carried more quickly to the awaiting creek or flowing river where they will thrive and grow.   If it had been me doing it, I would have given those same water resistant feathers to the quail and turkey poults!  And I would have the mink and the hawk and bobcat eating grass and acorns and berries.   I wonder why God didn’t think of those things?

 

 

       I once shook Harry Truman’s hand, and I have to admit that I was impressed with him, even though I was only about 6 at the time. He was there dedicating a new hospital and he bent over and told me my pants were unzipped! Now there was a man who cared enough to do something about it, when he saw a problem.  I do quite a bit of public speaking and I always check my zipper beforehand.  I can therefore say in all honesty that I often take Harry Truman’s advice in my daily life. 

       I also liked Ronald Reagan a lot. I can’t remember much about his presidency, as the hunting and fishing was extremely good back then and I was in the woods quite often, somewhat confused about current events.  But I really liked him in those western movies he made after he got out of politics.

 I have read some things about Teddy Roosevelt that makes me think he was a lot like me, since he liked to hunt and fish so much and float rivers, and did some outdoor writing.  I never floated the Amazon like he did, but then he never floated the Piney and the Gasconade and the Roubidoux like I did. He and and I looked very much alike too. But of course my favorite president will always be Abe Lincoln, who had two things no president or even presidential candidate will ever have again… he was poor, and he was honest.  Earlier in my life I too was poor and honest, and as a matter of fact I am still relatively poor, and I am being honest about that! 

       My favorite politician was Davy Crockett.  He and I were so much alike that it is just amazing, except for the fact that he did get into politics, becoming a Tennessee congressman.  My cousins and I watched him on Walt Disney when we were kids, and if you think I wasn’t influenced by him, you should know there is a big sycamore along the Big Piney river with the inscription carved in it.. “L. Dablemont kilt a squarl here.”    There were no bears in the Ozarks when I was a kid, which wound up being an unfortunate thing for squirrels which I came across.

       Crockett was loved by his constituents, just as I am loved by my readers, except for a few ladies who got mad about an article concerning female bass being fatter than male bass.  Crockett was for the downtrodden and forgotten poor country people he grew up amongst.  That is the way I am!  He sacrificed his political career to stand against legislation which would take land away from the Creek Indians. It was land which the government had promised to them through treaties only a few years before.  That makes him a better man, in my mind, than anyone you will find in congress today.  He was honest, and he thought of others before himself, and he would not put money above all else. That too is the way I am. Those traits are not found in people in political office today. I left politics never to return when I ran for eighth grade class president and was beaten by Nolan Don Akins 28 to 1.

       Crockett said, “to heck with politics if it means I have to go back on my word”, and he rode off to Texas and into history where, as I understand it, he went down fighting a bunch of illegal immigrants from Mexico.   I would have loved to have fished and hunted with Davy Crockett, or Abe Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt, and would love to vote for someone today with just a whisker of their character.

       It is true that I have a picture of me and Hillary Clinton, taken back when I lived in Arkansas, but it was her that wanted it took, not me.  She was one of those ladies that read my column and wanted to learn more about hunting and fishing. And for a short time I had a basement office in the capitol building and her husband was the attorney general. There was nothing between us, and all those rumors are just nothing more than idle gossip.  So we fished together on occasion, that don’t mean nothin’! In the picture, I really did look a lot like Teddy Roosevelt, and she looked a little like Eleanor Roosevelt.

       When you look at things today and hear that the presidential election is a dead heat and both fellers are apt to get 50 percent of the vote, then you realize what a bad shape this country is in, if you get my drift.  I wish we still had a ‘Whig’ party in this country as they did once.  I might vote for a Whig if he was for the poor and honest, like I am.

 

If you would like to read my summer magazine, or order one of my eleven books, call my secretary at 417 777- 5227.   Or you can email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com.  You can see a photo of me and Hillary Clinton by getting on my facebook page.  See if I don’t look a little bit like Teddy Roosevelt back then.

 

When the Director Came to Visit

 

photos from the flooded winter backwaters of Truman Lake, 40 years ago.

         John Hoskins and I became acquainted in the 1980’s, when he was a regional supervisor for the Conservation Commission Enforcement division over southern Missouri.

         He came to my home in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains in north Arkansas a couple of times. We sat on my back porch on those occasions, drinking coffee and discussing a poaching problem; in which Arkansas hunters would take two bass boats from the Arkansas side of Bull Shoals up into the Missouri side poaching deer from a management area known as Quincy, where there were also a few elk. 

         In the fall of the early 1970’s I would be out on that section of the lake and hear the bull elk bugling.  It was a wonderful music to me, knowing what it was, thinking about those majestic creatures living in the forests above Bull Shoals. The poachers could spotlight a big grassy bottom and kill nice bucks there late at night, and they also killed all the remaining elk by the early 80’s. Hoskins and his wardens talked a good game but they never apprehended anyone there.

         When I moved back to southern Missouri, in 1990, John Hoskins and had become the director of the Department of Conservation. I contacted him and asked him to go out on Truman Lake with me and look at a couple of places where I thought the MDC, now flush with money, could do some great things for waterfowl.  He agreed and we got together once again in my boat out on that big lake, which has 118 thousand acres of public land on its watershed.  I took him to a place known as Hogle’s Creek, and with my education to become a waterfowl biologist, he knew I knew what I was talking about when I showed him how the land adjacent to the mouth of the creek and meanderings behind it could become a great waterfowl marsh, a refuge for waterfowl and also a duck hunters paradise by simply building small levees and planting food for all kinds of wildlife.

         Hogle’s Creek already was a great duck hunting spot back then in the early 90’s.  Most of Truman was.  The low areas filled with vegetation like smartweed brought waterfowl in by the thousands when only small rises in the lake occurred. Hoskins saw the possibilities, and I showed him a gently sloping bank where lespedeza and some native grasses, with thickets of sumac and persimmon, gave them nesting cover and escape cover. Before we left the lake that day, Hoskins thanked me for showing him what I had, and he agreed that my proposals were sound, but then he lamented that there wasn’t enough money to do it.

         I was stunned… the department had tens of millions, due to that 1/8^th cent sales tax that every Missourian paid then and pays now. They are one of the three richest Conservation states in the nation. Money is often diverted to ex employees and other.  Over the years they have wasted millions.  

         Hoskins was forced to resign years later after the MDC was sued for one million dollars as a result of two agents breaking the law and lost!  On the day he left office, he gave a close friend by the name of Gary Turner one hundred and forty-five thousand dollars as a down payment on a book on rivers to be put forth in years to come. As I have been told, Turner was never an employee of the Department.  Twenty some years later, that book has not been done.  The State Auditors office called me and asked me to look into it, but that was of no value. She criticized the payment as unethical and beyond the law, but that criticism was squelched in the news media. By that time the newspapers using my weekly column were being aided by money from the MDC and most would not use my column if it criticized any part of that agency. As for the rivers book, I had already written one entitled “Rivers to Run…Sycamores, Swift Water and Smallmouth Bass”.  It is a 350-page book that has been called the best book ever written about the natural history and descriptions of Ozark Rivers.  The MDC has never mentioned it and will not sell it in their nature centers.

         I will write much more about Hoskins and directors before and after him, plus a proposal to bring back the greatest quail huntin in the Midwest in a 50,000 acreage on that public ground around Truman lake; in my summer “Lightnin’ Ridge Magazine”.  I also will be writing about that excessive 18 million being paid to a private company to rebuild the Shell Osage waterfowl area and the waterfowl marsh they built free-of-charge for a St. Clair county Judge. 

         That magazine also has a great article on tick diseases written by my daughter, Dr. Lori Dablemont Cohen, working now as a doctor for Missouri State University.  Every person who might get a tick bite this summer should read that article.  If you want a copy of that color 100-page magazine, call me at 417 777 5227.  You can also order my books or back issues of that magazine off the website www.larrydablemont.com.  All my writings and photos can be seen weekly on www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com and you can email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com. 

         

For the Birds

 

             LITTLE GREEN HERON ON THE BIG PINEY RIVER

I spoke to a college ornithology class about birds a few years back.  I think my talk went over really well except for my woodpecker recipes.  I myself have had a great fascination with birds since I was very small.  I wanted to grow up and be a waterfowl biologist as dad and I floated the Big Piney River in the fall, sneaking up on wood ducks and mallards and many other species of wild migrators. John James Audubon and I had that much in common.  He loved to study birds, and he actually killed and skinned and stuffed hundreds and hundreds of birds, so he could study them closely. Modern day bird-watchers don’t like to hear that.      

When I was a kid, I didn’t care much for school.  I couldn’t get outside enough, drawn to that greater classroom. Birds drew me to the woods and the river year round, watching various species come and go according to the season. Once a kingfisher lit on our blind as we floated the river hunting ducks.  He was perched there only for a few seconds, a couple of feet from my face.  I found a book which told all about them, how they nest in tunnels back into the river bank, and the nest is so filled with fish bones it appears they might be using them to shore up the tunnel.

The little green herons that were so numerous along the river in the fall always fascinated me, they didn’t appear to have any green on them whatsoever, but rather a purple, rusty color, a mean look in their eye and more patience than I could imagine.  As we would float along, you’d see one of those ‘shikepokes’, as Grandpa called them, at a shallow spot, intensely staring into the water, as still as a statue.  They might not move a feather for five minutes or more, and then when the time was right they would strike with lightning quickness, and come up with a small fish or minnow.

 I am no less fascinated by birds now, and have developed a bird sanctuary here on Lightnin’ Ridge, in the heart of the Ozarks.  It is a ridge-top of big timber, old growth oak-hickory woodlands, and there is a tremendous variety of birds here.  Right now I have a pair of Baltimore orioles which likely have some eggs in a sock-like nest somewhere close.  They are large, beautifully colored birds, black and orange and white, and they love grape jelly. You can put out what you want, but orioles love that jelly above and beyond anything else. You see them for about a month, and hear them chattering in the trees in the back yard, but then they are gone.  Behind them comes the secretive rain-crows, or yellow-billed cuckoos, which are heard a great deal, but seldom seen in those high white-oak branches where they nest. 

Lightnin' Ridge Rain Crow

    Bluebirds nest in the boxes I put out for them, and a pair of mockingbirds nest each year in a cedar and redbud thicket behind the garden.  Brown thrashers nest in something called an almond bush. Blue grosbeaks feed at the feeders, similar in color to indigo buntings, which we have a lot of also. The grosbeaks are a little larger than the metallic blue buntings, and have rusty wing patches.  There are fly-catchers, wrens, kingbirds, summer tanagers and rose-breasted grosbeaks. In a little wet opening in the back of the woods, I saw a woodcock mother with tiny chicks a couple of years ago. There are several species of woodpeckers and two big pileated woodpeckers can often be seen right out of my office window.

Lightnin' Ridge Blue Grosbeak

We no longer hear the chuck-wills-widows and whippoorwills calling at night. Both are pretty sure bets to flirt with extinction soon.  But there are screech owls, and barred owls on my wooded ridge and all summer long it is easy to call them right up into the oak branches next to the porch.  It is also easy to call in the bobwhite cocks which run around in circles below my screened porch, beside themselves with excitement, whistling their heads off, looking for that hen that isn’t there.

You are welcome to come sit on my porch with me and drink coffee or tea and watch the birds. It might be noted, and often is remarked about by visitors, that Lightnin’ Ridge is sort of an unkempt place at times, with unmowed grass a little too high and raspberry thickets allowed to grow fairly close to the house.  But then again, no one ever complains about hearing the music of so many different kinds of birds. I don’t know how anyone lives without birds, certainly I never have, and will not.  I have been told there’s lots of money in clearing your land, selling the logs and putting in acres of grass to feed herds of cattle.  And I have been told the craziest thing in the world is someone who thinks he is rich because he has a forest full of wild birds all around his house.   There are lots of ways to be rich.

Arm-Chair Fishing

 

       

My daughter, Christy, with a nice crappie

         About an hour before sunset I maneuvered the big pontoon boat across the wide and windy waters of Stockton Lake. I found a good spot of calm water out of the wind, off an eastern-facing bluff. I stretched a rope between two trees sticking up out of forty feet of water.  I have done a similar thing over the past forty years in Bull Shoals, Norfork, Beaver, and Truman lakes.  I could write a whole book about those nighttime trips in which many species of fish have been boated.  

         It is fascinating what happens at night from that pontoon boat with submerged lights radiating a bright glow from beneath the boat.  I had food and coffee and a bed arranged in the back of that covered big camp-style boat.  I would spend the night there.  A big cooler with ice in it most often gets filled with fish by one or two in the morning.

         But there I sat that night on Stockton, watching the little water creatures swarm around my light while darkness settled.  By ten o’clock, there were swarms of tiny gammarus, (fresh-water shrimp) clouding the water around the lights,  with small fish only an inch or two long.  I had my rod setting there beside me, with a live minnow on a hook, 26 feet beneath me.  Nothing had touched it for an hour and a half.  On the bank, a trio of young coons came by and passed, searching for an easy meal. A heron flew by and squawked at me. I thought I heard a whippoorwill across the lake.  They are rare anymore, especially this early.  In the distance, a boat motor roared past.  The Coleman lantern hissed a little, and insects began to swarm around it, so I turned it off, no light now above board.  At 10:30 I still hadn’t had a strike and I was getting sleepy.  The sleeping bag seemed more attractive as each minute passed.  I got up and drank a cup of hot coffee as the night cooled… put on a jacket too.

         I wasn’t going to sit there fishless much longer!  Seemed as if it would be one of those nights.  Maybe I would climb in the sleeping bag, which one of my fishing partners jokingly refers to as a ‘fartsack’, sleep a couple of hours and then sample the waters beneath the light again.  Then about a quarter to eleven, it happened.  The tip of my rod bobbed ever so slightly and the taut line beneath it slacked just a mite.  I grabbed it and set the hook and the resistance below me told me I had a crappie.  He stayed right beneath me, as crappie do, and I lifted him up to admire a 13-inch black crappie which meant that the sleeping bag would wait a good while.  

         Five minutes later, with a fresh minnow dropped into the depths, I was wide awake and holding on to my light action rod, when I felt a slight jolt.  Another crappie, this one a little bigger than the last.  I put him in the ice chest and nailed another, then another.  By midnight, there were seven or eight crappie flopping around on the floor beside me.  I just didn’t have time to quit baiting a hook and bending that rod, as I fought the results of a crappie school beneath me.   Then a fish nailed the minnow hard and headed for the main lake.  White bass do that, and you know what it is when you have hooked one beneath the lights. White bass really outdo a crappie and it took a couple of minutes to tire him.  He was too big to lift aboard.  I netted him and admired a two pound female white bass that was full of eggs in early May.  Weird, but that’s the way it is.

           Often you will catch egg-laden whites that should have spawned up some tributary back in April.  But there are those that stay out in the lake and spawn on rocky points or perhaps not at all, reabsorbing eggs for some reason or another.  We could discuss scientific reasons for that but not tonight.  Tonight by 2.a.m I have my limit of crappie and none are less than 12 inches long.  Two are 15 inches in length and most between 13 and 14 inches.  In that ice chest there are a dozen white bass and none are under two pounds. I threw back smaller ones. A couple of them exceed three pounds.

           There is also a 19-inch walleye.  I realize that if I keep fishing I might land another walleye, maybe two.  But the fart-sack will be warm.  It is easy to drift off to sleep with the slight bobbing of the pontoon boat in gentle waves.  Just after first light, the noise and the waves of a passing motor boat wake me up, but so what, I will sleep longer and wait for sun rays to hit the pontoon through the fog.  There are some cinnamon rolls and warm coffee to heat up on the camp stove.  If there was room here I would tell you about the stripers caught in Beaver Lake beneath the lights, or the big trout we use to hook in Bull Shoals, or where you catch the night-crappie in Truman Lake.  I would love to tell you about the threadfin shad that only exist in Arkansas waters.  What a bait they are when you fish beneath the lights.  I use to catch many species of fish there on those threadfin shad, including a 16-pound walleye a partner landed on night in May of 1975.

         But you can learn about all that in my book “Recollections of an Old-Fashioned angler, a 288-page book about 70 years of fishing experiences. That book or any of my others can be ordered from the Internet, www.larrydablemont.com or you can call my office, 417 777 5227.  E-mail me at lightninridge47@ gmail.com.  I urge readers to read what I have written lately about the Missouri Department of Conservation, which cannot be printed in newspapers.  You can find those columns on www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com.