Don’t Hunt Fall Turkeys

 

The bow season has begun, and while I once took part in it, I won’t bow hunt this year. When you are young you can sit in a tree stand and spend hours enjoying yourself even if you don’t see a thing.  At my age, you never have four hours to sit and do nothing.  You realize as you get older that hours are precious, and you have options of catching fish, shooting squirrels, hunting teal and working on things around the house.  Well, skip that last option.

       But really, since I will kill a deer for my freezer when the muzzle-loader season gets here, and that is all I can eat in a year, why hunt deer in September with anything?  Bow hunting should not be very high on any outdoorsman’s list in September unless he doesn’t fish at all or do anything else but deer hunt.  It is a poor time to skin and hang a deer, because it is always too warm. The dead of winter is bow-hunting time.

        I have caught a couple of big bass in late September and early October.  It isn’t something I do in a short time.  I caught another 22-inch largemouth bass this past week, and I fished for three hours with a topwater lure with no results before he hit.  When he did, it was some fight.  

You can’t catch a bass that size in a tree stand, watching for a deer, so that is one reason I won’t bow hunt this year. Another of the reason’s I won’t bow hunt is I also am determined not to give the Missouri Department of Conservation any more money than I have to.  By the time you pay for waterfowl stamps, turkey tags, deer tags and all the other special tags you have to buy, then add on the 1/8 th cent sales tax we ALL pay them, it costs more to hunt and fish in Missouri than any other state in the United States.  This year you are required to spend more to bowhunt if turkeys are involved and next year even more and on and on and on.  They waste millions of dollars each year and ask our Missouri citizens to fund the waste.  Eighteen million is being spent on a waterfowl marsh, and in five years after dishing out the money nothing has been done that amounts to good news for waterfowl hunters.  Bulldozers sit where wildlife species by the dozens once thrived.

I urge hunters to not hunt wild turkeys this fall.  Turkeys are at an all time low right now going back to the 1960’s.  Do like I do and hunt them with a camera.  Then if you want to eat a turkey, buy one at the grocery store. It is cheaper than a fall tag. My camera shoots wild turkeys several times a year and yet it lets them propagate next spring.  We only have a fall turkey season to bring in more money for the MDC.  Don’t help them trade wild turkeys for money in their bank account.

       

       The Chief of Enforcement for the Department of Conservation is Travis McLain.  I’ve been talking to him about some of the times that I believe conservation agents have violated laws and the rights of hunters and fishermen.  He sent me a form for people who have a complaint against an MDC agent to fill out and send back to his attention.  So now you can actually be heard. I don’t know what good it will do but it is at least an attempt by Mr. McLain to listen and take some kind of action.  

       I encourage those who are being or have been victimized unlawfully by agents to use this form and send it in.  Until now I didn’t know it existed and it may be something new.  If you want my help in getting the form and getting it filled out, contact me… P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.  I have copies of the form I can send by regular mail or email to you. You can also email me to get it … lightninridge47@gmail.com

If you want more information about our new Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal magazine coming out in November, you can call my office and find out what it is and how to get it. The number is 417-777-5227

 

The Low-Down on Doves

 

Did you know that a mourning dove has 2,635 feathers? I found that statistic in a book written by John Madson, entitled “The Mourning Dove”. Madson is gone now, but he was a top-notch outdoor writer, on of the old-timers who actually grew up in the outdoors, unlike the suburban outdoor writers that dominate the pages of our larger newspapers today. Madson worked for Winchester Arms and Ammunition, and he published several books about wild game birds and animals through Winchester Press..

Madson reveals many fascinating things about the dove. As a writer, I have likely written a hundred newspaper columns and perhaps a dozen magazine articles about dove hunting. It is so simple and so uncomplicated, what can you say about dove hunting that hasn’t been said a million times. You can’t tell a shooter how to hit one. Sometimes early in the season when the younger doves are coming to a feeding spot, or to a water hole, they are so easy to hit it is simpler than catching sunfish on worms. Sometimes, after they have figured out that hunting season is open, they can elude a shot pattern with ease, diving, twisting, and turning. At times it is something like hitting a butterfly with a rock. 

If it has been written once, that dove hunting is a good way to get a youngster the chance to hunt and experience a day outdoors, it has been written a million times. If you have seen, at the beginning of September, a story talking about training a young Labrador to retrieve, and how the heat can be hard on him so you need plenty of water, that too has been said again and again in print by some enthusiastic woods and waters journalist. If you haven’t heard that number seven and one-half or eight shot, light loads is best for doves, you’ve never read a doggone thing about hunting. So what is there to say about dove hunting. Not much. Heck, let me rephrase that… not nothing.

I might point out that hunting in a crowd isn’t my thing, but I have often written that. I have often said that I do not like to hunt in the heat, and there is never an opening day that doesn’t seem hotter than an August manhole cover on main street. What I don’t often say is that two or three weeks later, when it cools down and you can hunt in midweek and find the right spot, you can hunt doves in a long-sleeved shirt and all alone with your dog. But I’ll be darned if I am going to tell anyone where the hunting might be in early October.

Early hunting seasons interfere with some good fishing, and one good catfish equals a whole tubful of doves. Be that as it may, if you think you have indeed read everything there is to know about dove hunting and doves, get your hands on John Madson’s book. It was he who pointed out that in the bird family called Columbidae there are 269 doves and pigeons, two thirds of them on the other side of the world. Doves and pigeons, Madson said in his book, are the only birds that can drink water by suction, with their heads down, never lifting their beaks, as other birds must do.

 Mourning doves nest from southeast Alaska all through Canada, and each of the 48 contiguous states in the U.S. Forty years ago, they were not known to nest in such northern climates. Some never migrate. Some stay where they are all winter, and northern doves often lose toes to the cold. Doves and pigeons feed their young with something called pigeon milk, as most folks know, and as most folks don’t know, the most deadly dove disease, known as trichomoniasis, is a growth of cankers in the mouth and throat, caused by the ingestion of a living protozoan usually picked up in water.

You can learn a great deal more about doves if you can find John Madson’s book. Even the hunting tips we have all heard a million times. But as to how that study turned up 2,635 feathers on one dove, I don’t know. Probably some college kid counted them one at a time and got a thirty thousand dollar grant from a state conservation agency to do it. But I wonder, how would anyone know if he really counted them all or just gave up and guessed at it?

 

Contact me if you are interested in reading one of my books or the new magazine coming out in November.  My address is PO Box 22  Bolivar Mo. 65613. Or there is my office phone, 417 777 5227. The email address is lightninridge47@gmail.com

 Other columns I have written and my outdoor photos can be found on the computer at larrydablemontoutdoors. 

 

Wylie's Bear Pelt and the MDC

        

 

 

 

 

       I am willing to bet that some  higher echelon  employee of the  Missouri department of conservation will  soon possesses a bear skin today that was killed legally by a thirteen year old boy. Or maybe Johnny Morris will get it. Perhaps it is the director  or  a friend  of the director or maybe a commissioner or a friend of a commissioner.         Someone  will get the pelt of  a  420 pound black bear that was legally taken by young Wylie Willams and no one will ever find out  where it went. The MDC has falsely charged that kid who killed it and legally owns it.  This isn’t unprecedented.  The judge is likely well acquainted with the MDC.   He works  out of Jefferson City.  Would an investigation show he is obliged to the MDC? 

       That has   happened before.  A judge named Kelso was given a gift of 245  thousand dollars by the MDC because he allowed MDC members to hunt on his hunting preserve.  When I found out  about it, they told   me the money was to improve his   property for wildlife.  However they won’t give me anything to improve my property. I am not a judge.

A judge in Oceola had his 400 acres of land along the Sac River made into a magificent private waterfowl marsh with a  mile long levee.  The work was done by employees and heavy equipment  of the MDC. The right people in the MDC hunts there often. You cannot!

        John Hoskins, a past director of the MDC on  the day of his retirement gave 145 thousand dollars to a friend of his who I am told was a lawyer. That is theft of state funds, taxpayer money.  But Hoskins got away with it.  Kelso got away with it and that St. Cllair  county judge got away  with   it.  Your money helped pay for all that.  I am wondering what that honorable judge in Jefferson City got from the MDC to take 13 year old Wylie Williams bear skin away from him. 

                                                                                           ***********UPDATE ************

       The Chief of Enforcement for the  Missouri  Department of Conservation is Travis Mclain, who tells me that the bear hide the department has confiscated from 13-year-old hunter Wylie Williams is in their Jefferson City freezer.  An MDC employee who  gives me a lot of information about what goes on inside the department says Johnny Morris, owner  of Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s will soon get the hide of that  giant 420 pound  black bear.  

       “He gets a whole lot of what gets confiscated,”  I was told, “who knows how  many deer heads and things, all mounted and ready to put up in his stores.  He got that elk head and hide from the illegally killed elk that was found in Shannon county too!  By now it is hanging in one of  his stores as well.

       A fellow I was talking to not long ago commended Johnny  Morris for giving so much money to the MDC.  It is time for people to know where it comes from. Years ago clerks were told to ask folks to make contributions through Bass Pro Shops to the  Missouri Department of Conservation.  They weren’t getting enough that way so now they ask people to donate to “conservation projects” without  mentioning the MDC.  That’s where Morris gets the money to give to Missouri’s so-called ‘conservation’ department.

       Morris was given two and a half million dollars by the MDC a few years ago…a gift of tax-payer dollars.  This dishonest collection of money by people who have no idea where their bass Pro Shops donation is going is an indication of how Morris and the MDC are tied together.  Each year when the MDC gives out 4 or 5 elk tags by drawing to  people who pay for their privilege to hunt one of the tame elk at and around the Peck Ranch  wildlife management area, where they try to keep the elk they bought for several millions , Morris gets one of the tags free.  

       They hide it by calling it a free  tag for an adjacent landowner.  Morris’ land borders Peck Ranch  and for years MDC employees worked to make that land a haven for elk. Those employees didn’t like being hands for Morris and two called me to ask me to write about it.  They claim Morris doesn’t use the tag but gives it to lucky friends or associates.  It all needed to be investigated but wasn’t.  meanwhile the elk that we all paid for are  plentiful on Morris’ property.

A Petrified Bass

 

       Several years ago, after a fishing trip to Arkansas’ Bull Shoals Lake, my Uncle Norten, the best fisherman I   ever knew, walked into his favorite morning café with a fish story even his buddies at the Lone Pine Restaurant wouldn’t believe.  He had them looking at each other with winks and nods as he declared that on a fishing trip just a couple of nights before, his nephew had caught a “petrified bass” of better than five pounds.  He wasn’t actually lying; it was just a matter of choosing the wrong word!

We had fished most of the night, and by 7:00 a.m. I was bone tired.  It was daylight, but the submerged lights on either side of the pontoon boat were still burning, and threadfin shad were circling by the thousands, their masses making a slight whirring, rustling sound in the water around us.   The shad nets were so full of shad you could barely lift them out of the water.  We had an ice filled cooler stuffed with walleye and crappie.

       I hooked one of the shad on to a quarter ounce jig-head I had just tied on, and cast it out away from the boat toward the steep rock bank about thirty feet away.  Immediately a fish took it. I set the hook, and the fight was so-so, even though I could see in the clear water that it was a pretty good bass.  In fact it weighed a little better than five pounds by my best estimation, even though it fought like a bass half that size.

       Examining the fish, I could see why.  Apparently it had been injured at one time or another, seriously enough that one side of its body was stiff and inflexible, like it was made from a hard Styrofoam.  I called Norten over to look at it, even though he had just landed a nice walleye and was much more interested in it than my rather ordinary bass.

       And then he too was amazed.  “Never seen nothin’ like it,” he told me.  “That bass is stiff as a board.  Wonder how he swum like that?”

And that’s when I said it…”Yeah, he’s been injured and those muscles on one side have ‘atrophied’.  It’s a wonder he has been able to survive.”

       So he was a little miffed at his card-playing friends at the local restaurant.  If he said we caught a petrified bass, they ought to believe him, he figured.  I bailed him out by coming along a day later and putting an end to the snickers and winks.  Uncle Norten hadn’t exactly lied.  The fish was atrophied, not petrified.  And while they accepted what I said, they weren’t real sure what the difference was either.

             ****************

      NEWS FROM  THE  CHIEF

 

The Chief of Enforcement for the Department of Conservation is Travis McLain.  I’ve been talking to him about some of the times that I believe conservation agents have violated laws and the rights of hunters and fishermen.  He sent me a form for people who have a complaint against an MDC agent to fill out and send back to his attention.  So now you can actually be heard. I don’t know what good it will do but it is at least an attempt by Mr. McLain to listen and take some kind of action.  

       If you will get on the Internet and go to larrydablemontoutdoors.com you can see copies of that two-page form.  I encourage those who are being or have been victimized unlawfully by agents to use this form and send it in.  Until now I didn’t know it existed and it may be something new.  If you want my help in getting the form and getting it filled out, contact me… P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613.  I have copies of the form I can send or email to you. You can also email me to get it … www.lightninridge47@gmail.com

 

       I encourage you to also read the story on that website of what the MDC is going to do with the bear hide they confiscated from 13–year-old hunter Wylie Williams. There is a photo of the bear Young Wylie killed legally. Guess where it is going and how much it is worth?  It is an unusual situation because Jefferson City Judge wrote in his decision that Williams did not prove he was innocent. I  didn’t know any  judge anywhere could decide a case because someone couldn’t  prove they were innocent.  Also the agents who accuse him of using bait went to the site days after Wylie had hunted there. They went to the place he killed it days later…on a date that the bait would have been legal.  Because of the power of the MDC and their lawyers, newspapers and other media cannot use this story.  I can, and I have… larrydablemontoutdoors.  Please read it..

 

A Dreams End

 

Deer season was a big thing in the Big Piney country of south-central Missouri where I grew up.  When somebody killed a deer, whether it was a doe or a buck, they brought it to that small town main street, on the open tailgate of a pick-up, or tied across the hood of some old car if the hunter didn’t have a pick-up.

Since my dad and grandpa’s pool hall, where I worked, was right at the middle of Main Street, so I got to see a lot of them.  I learned something when I was only 12 that I wonder if anyone pays attention to at all today.  Somebody was pointing out that the antlers had 5 points on each side, and that meant the deer was five years old.   Later, Old Bill hoorahed the whole notion.  “Ain’t nothin’ to that, boy,” he said.  He might be ten years old and have six points, and he might be three years old and have fifteen points.”

Ol’ Bill Stalder and Ol’ Jim Splechter were my heroes because they were rivermen and outdoorsmen like my grandpa, and they knew more about the outdoors than any men I had ever knew.  Ol’ Bill followed it up by telling me that you could figger an old buck by a lot of things, but the only definite way was by looking at his teeth.

“Yep,” Ol’ Jim said with a laugh… “any old buck is gonna have false teeth, like Bill.”

 

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

 

 

       All dreams come to an end and my dream of making a Big Piney River nature center and museum have ended.  The center which I have worked on for four years will soon be sold, as I cannot continue to work on it. When the property is sold all donations will be refunded.  There were few donations, less than 600 dollars total and none above 100 dollars.  Land donated will be paid for too. That land purchase has already been partially refunded. Anyone who donated small amounts not listed by the accountant can just tell me and I will return them.   The main cost... well over 100 thousand dollars, was paid for by me.  I received free flooring from a Mt View flooring company that will be refunded also.  

        I've had two knee surgeries recently which were botched and I am nearly crippled by that, then recently I had an MRI which reveals that I have to have back surgery.  Hoping I am going to recover somewhat, but it will not be soon.  So I have to hope someone will take over and do it for me.  I just can't do the work anymore, and cannot find help. 

       The biggest donation was 100 dollars from the late Don Shelhammer, and Joe Richardson helped us get our water line placed.  Few people under 60 expressed any interest in the project and I was surprised by that. In fact I lost 400 dollars to one local carpenter by the name of Jackson.  I loaned it to him as advanced pay and he abandoned the job.   But the best carpenter in the county, Brent Tucker, took over and finished the building at a rate well less than he should have been paid.   I could never thank him enough; but will give him addition payment as well.         Truthfully I don't think any of the present generation sees the Piney River as the wonderful resource I believed it was.  I loved the river and the people I knew when I was young.  But those days are gone, and a museum can’t bring them back. A difficulty with the local police, the county library, and being banned from the Houston Walmart Store because I wrote about some corruptness I saw there, has made me realize my dream of a nature center at Houston was really a silly notion. And too, the degradation of the Big Piney River is much of a disappointment. My plans too move back to what was once my hometown did not come to fruition because of many things. They say you can never go home again. That is true.  But I make this promise... I have taken advantage of no one, and will not.  Just come to me with any complaints or needed refunds.

       It was reported by an editor that I came to this conclusion on the spur of the minute but I have thought it over for months and it is    one of the most difficult things I have ever done. Certainly something I agonized over for weeks. My heart wants to continue but my body prohibits that.  The realtor handling the sale is Patsy Tackett, VIP realtor from Salem, Missouri.  My email is lightninridge47@gmail.com and the office phone is   417 777  5227.

 

 

Fishing Trip on a Hot Day

 

       People expect us outdoor writers to write about catching fish even when it is hot.  So a week ago I took my boat down to the nearby river above the lake and paddled up to where flowing water was coming in.  A favored spot, it was, where I have hauled in some nice bass over the years.  And I know what you are thinking… you are thinking you are about to hear a story about a big largemouth splattering the surface and inhaling a silver-sided topwater Rapala lure as it jiggled along, dodging a stick here and a leaf there, creating a wake in the gentle current.  

       That lure did exactly that for cast after cast as enticingly perfect as I could make it. A perfect duplicate of an injured minnow. In twenty minutes of that there was nothing.   Patient I am not, so I drifted into a big deep eddy where the current swirled and stilled.  I tied on a deep running wiggle-wart, a big one, orange and brown like a crawdad.  In that deep water, you might imagine me writing about the savage strike I expected, as I knew there were smallmouth lurking there.  But no! Not one!  

       Nor was there a savage jolt from walleye that I knew was there.  There were no strikes from even a little one.  Patient, I ain’t!  This was aggravating me to no acceptable level.  I have fished an hour now… no fish, no strikes no hang-ups even!  I am discouraged but not dissatisfied.  After all, I am all by myself on a beautiful stretch of magnificent water as dusk comes.  A bullfrog bellows and a white-tailed eagle leaves it’s perch with flapping wings as I float by.  There is peace here and I am at peace at least. It is   peaceful, placid and perfect! A great blue heron screeches, a barred owl hoots from a distant sycamore limb upstream. 

       Downstream there is the splash of a nice bass around a jumble of logs… or maybe a big turtle fell off a log. But you can’t think that way. I am sure it was a hefty bass. I put on one of my favorite jitterbugs, colored like a leopard frog.  Bass love leopard frogs!  Slowly I move toward the logs in deep water along the mud bank across from the bluff.  The cast was perfect.  The lure came across the still, dark, perfectly placid, peaceful water, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop.  Then it did it again, ten or twelve more times.  

       You would expect a big slab-sided bass to sweep up from the depths and crash the lure savagely.  I did too.  None did. And so it is getting dark and I have been there two hours.  Patience? I ain’t got none.  It has been a complete failure as a fishing trip… no strikes, no bass, no excuses.  But I am at peace and happy.  Actually I would have been happier with a half dozen bass and just a little less peace.  Maybe more happy.  I reach for my paddle and downstream a coyote howls.  Peace is worth a great deal.  You won’t find that in town.  Patience would be worth a great deal too.  I don’t have any.  Darn heat--darn bass!

 

This outdoor column goes to many different newspapers in three states.  Some of those newspapers only use them on occasion, because some cannot use anything I write that is critical of the Department of Conservation and others don’t always have enough space every week. Everything I write goes on a computer site each week.  You can therefore read every column and see every photo that goes with it on that computer site ---larrydablemontoutdoors. In fact I think maybe a year or more’s worth of columns are on there right now.   If your newspaper does use this column regularly and you enjoy reading it, I like to hear from you, but please let your newspaper know as well.  Another website shows all my books and past magazines. It is www.larrydablemont.com.

 

A Valuable Bear - MDC

 

      Thirteen-year-old Wylie Williams  killed a 420-pound black bear during the 2024 season on his father’s land.  He had paid for all his tags and violated no laws. MDC agents came to the site two weeks after bear season opened and claimed they found bait there. Therefore they confiscated the bear’s pelt. If indeed they did come to the site after the hunting season, then indeed the bait they may have found was legal. 

      BAIT IS ONLY ILLLEGAL DURING THE SEASON AND THE AGENTS WERE NOT THERE DURING THE OPEN SEASON.  THEY DIDN’T FIND ANYTHING DURING THE OPEN SEASON.  THEY WERE    NEVER THERE THEN!

 

      Lyndell Williams, Wylie’s father told me this… “We had baited the area legally in the months before, mostly with old bread and donuts, but very little corn. Two weeks before the season opened we removed all the bait we could as the law says to do. After the bear hunting season was over, agents came and found what one told me was ‘less than 20 grains of corn in the dirt’, even some that had germinated.  We had removed all we could with a rake and shovel.  Just those few kernels were all that were left.”

     An Arkansas bear hunter who has killed 16 black bears over bait, which is legal there, told me this… “We use popcorn and you would need a bulldozer to remove it all before the season.  It is scattered everywhere and buried in the packed ground!”

      If Wylie had killed a 200-pound bear he would be in the clear.  A 200-pound bear’s hide isn’t worth much, but a 420-pound bears hide is.  Therefore Wylie and his dad were in trouble.  The MDC wanted that bear skin!  So after the season ended they came after it.  It was confiscated from a taxidermists shop.

      It cost Mr. Williams 30-thousand dollars to go to court to try to get it back and they made him go to Jefferson City court to contest it,  rather than Christian County where the bear was killed.  There, his lawyer and the prosecuting attorney got together and decide there wasn’t enough evidence for a wildlife conviction.  His lawyer told him that if he would plead guilty to ‘littering’ and pay 300 dollars he could get the bear skin back for his son.  The attorney lied to him-- what’s new about that! I am wondering what that honorable judge in Jefferson City got from the MDC to take 13-year old Wylie Williams bearskin away from him. I have investigated three occasions when judges have received gifts from the MDC. Western Missouri judge name Kelso got a gift of 245- thousand dollars.

        The Jefferson City judge said the MDC could have the bear hide, so they can sell it for whoever wants to pay for it or give it away as they have done often with confiscated products. In his written judgment the judge indicated the boy and his father did not prove they were innocent.  He wrote, (concerning the  bear skin) that the ‘plaintiff did not prove he acquired it (the bear) in conformity with the law”. 

      That is a quote from the written judgment.  The kid didn’t prove he was innocent from the charge that he had killed the bear over bait!  READ THAT AGAIN… HE NEEDED TO PROVE HE WAS INNOCENT!

        There is a good chance that sometime in the future it Wylie's bear will show up in a Bass Pro Shop somewhere or maybe in Cabela’s.  Many confiscated mounts; especially deer heads have showed up in both.

      I will continue this in another column someday after and if I can interview the agents and the MDC director about this.  In the meantime Lyndel and Wylie Williams want to appeal this decision but he is told it will cost another 30 thousand dollars to do so.  Why? If there is an honest lawyer out there who will help him, his number is 417-840-0453. Williams says he has heard of something called ‘gofundme’ on the Internet to help raise money for a good cause but knows nothing about how to do it. Whoever feels they can help with this appeal or set up that ‘gofundme’ site for him, should call him.

 

An add to this column.. the MDC gained more than 8,000 dollars from hunters applying for the 400 tags sold eventually that first year. The eight bears killed (likely all killed over bait) in the weeklong season was a heck of an idea for an agency whose only goal is money.  Add to that a couple thousand the boy’s bearskin will surely bring them.

The Bullfrog

 

 

 

      Froggers don't find many bullfrogs during the daytime; they find them at night, using a good light, which shines their eyes at a distance.  Many things shine in the light at night along our waterways, spiders and insects, sparkling rocks, and other amphibians and reptiles, but when you learn what a set of bullfrog eyes look like, you have little doubt when you see a pair of them.  A big bullfrog's eyes looks a little like the headlights on a Model T Ford. 

      As long as he is blinded, he will set there, stone still, and you can actually reach down and grab him by hand. You have to be quick and decisive...and firm.  A bullfrog can wriggle out of your hands if you don't hold on to him.  Once you have him, the best thing to do is put him in a wet cloth sack or wet burlap bag...and keep it wet and well closed.  

      Froggers get scarcer every year. The men who once caught bullfrogs by hand as they traveled along Ozark rivers either wading or boating, were real capable outdoorsmen.  They come from a different time and training. You had to   put up with the heat, bugs swarming your headlamps, and an occasional watersnake that just might be a cottonmouth.

      Most of today’s froggers gig them, and that's a great deal easier perhaps.  You don't have to get into the weeds or get nearly as close.  But if you gig frogs, you need to know which ones are too small just at a distant glance, because you can't cull them.  A gigged frog will die in time.  The bigger the frog, the better the eating, and that's what most froggers are after.  Frogging may not be the greatest of sport; there are perhaps things to do which are more fun.  But frogs are as good to eat as anything!

      There are few people who do not relish fried frog legs.  A big bullfrog in Ozark waters may reach a length of 15 to 18 inches with their legs stretched out.  A 12-inch frog isn't big enough for most, and if he is less than a foot in length he isn't really a keeper.  But if he is big enough to keep, you will find quite a bit of meat on the back and the front legs as well as the back legs, so skin the whole frog and fry all of it.  Cut off the head, cut off the feet, and then it will skin easily.  Remove the entrails and cut the sheath of nerve fibers in the inside of the small of the back.  If those are not cut, the frog will jump and twitch in the frying pan and it looks as if he is still alive.

      Frog meat is very white and firm and some people say it is a little like the white meat of a chicken. I don’t see any comparison.  It is perhaps closer to the meat of a crab or crawfish.   Frogs are very clean creatures, actually, though the water you find them in may look a little bit bad due to modern day pollution and algae growth.  If it gets too polluted, you won't find the frogs, and that's why so often you hear froggers say, "There aren't any frogs anymore!"  What they should be saying is, "There's not much clean water anymore."

      Bullfrogs eat lots of insects, and they do nail them with a long tongue.  That's why during the day you can dangle a hook in front of one with a little white or red yarn on it and they'll grab it.  Years ago when ponds had lots of bullfrogs and clean water, farm kids caught frogs during the day in such a manner. 

      Bullfrogs eat a lot of things, including smaller frogs, small snakes, worms, small fish and of course their very favorite food, the crawfish. The bullfrog is highly favored by mink and coons and otters and bigger snakes as well, so they have to watch for lots of enemies.  One of his greatest predators is the great blue heron, and they are at incredibly high numbers right now in the Ozark waters.  That has a lot to do with why there are fewer bullfrogs right now in small streams and lakes where there once were so many.  

      But froggers have a lot to do with that as well, as does the degradation of our rivers, increasingly tainted with herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizer and becoming choked with algae.   Some ponds which were clean enough to swim in 40 years ago are now covered with slime.

      You'll find bullfrogs in future summers where you find plenty of big bullfrog tadpoles this summer.  And any place where there are bullfrogs, you are liable to find a few froggers on a summer night.  And that's because you can't find anything much better to eat than a bullfrog!

 

Read more outdoor columns by Larry Dablemont on your computer at larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. Also see www.larrydablemont.com for books and magazines  published by the  author.

      

Groundhog Hunter

 

A would-be big game hunter… reduced to hunting groundhogs

       Myrtle Kelly was a widow lady, a good friend of my grandparents, who owned the Big Piney River bottom fields next to the Sweet Potato Eddy. I have written about her before, how I would ride my bicycle down to her place as a boy and we would fish up and down the river by her farm.  When I was in my first year of college, I was seventeen and we went to summer classes back then.  I would come home from school on weekends and found    out that Mrs. Kelly was having trouble with an over abundance of groundhogs in her field of clover along the river.  I saw my chance to help a damsel in distress so I borrowed a rifle and scope my dad had traded for, and on a Friday and Saturday I would sit on the hillside above the clover patch and shoot groundhogs.   I would take the skins home and tack them up on Dad’s smokehouse wall to dry, and Mrs. Kelly would clean the groundhog and freeze it to be given to one of the front bench regulars at the pool hall.  Several of those old men had wives who knew how to cook them.  As poor as we were, Mom wouldn’t resort to cooking a groundhog or possum or coon.  We ate bullfrogs, quail, ducks, rabbit and squirrel and tried a few exotic things on occasion like soft-shell turtles and coot gizzards, but even with me killing nearly a dozen groundhogs that summer, we never ate one.  The old men at the pool hall let nothing go to waste, claiming a clover-eatin’ ground hog was better eatin’ than a beaver.  I was a good shot and with my rifle propped up for a hundred-and-fifty-yard shot, I aimed for the head of the woodchuck and didn’t often miss.  

       Those hides I kept were used also.   Grandpa took them and cured them with ashes and removed the hair. Then following the traditional use of groundhog hides… long narrow strips were cut for leather boot and shoelaces that were tough and unbreakable.

 

Not long ago, I was reading through one of my old outdoor magazines from the 1930’s and there was an article from a survivalist-hunter and outdoor writer giving several old-days recipes, which included one about groundhogs.  He said that the best wild game he had ever tasted was from big horn sheep.  I am thinking the best furbearer meat from the Ozarks is muskrat, so I am including that recipe from him also.  Here are his recipes…

 

Woodchuck. They are very much worth saving, particularly if after skinning you carefully remove the small glands from under the forelegs. Unless too grizzled and tough, they’re generally best roasted. But if you run into a patriarch, brown the pieces in a small amount of fat. Then cover with water, season, and simmer 2 hours or so until tender. For a stew, add vegetables when the meat is nearly done. If any ‘chuck is left over for serving cold, it’ll be juicy and more flavorful if allowed to cool in the stock.

 

Roast Muskrat. Moist dark roast muskrat tastes like turkey, only better. The thing to remember is to remove the little glands under the hind and forelegs Rub inside and out with an onion, and season all over with salt and pepper, using more pepper than you usually do. If you want, fill loosely with stuffing made in the proportions of 2 parts of soaked dehydrated apples and 1 part pitted and chopped cooked prunes. If you’ve any horseradish, include a teaspoonful of that. Place the meat on a greased rack in a shallow pan, Brush generously with melted margarine or other fat. Lay several strips of bacon over the top Roast in a moderate oven. Muskrat is also excellent both fricasseed and fried. For the former, make a well-seasoned brown gravy and simmer onions and pieces of muskrat in this until tender. Serve with rice. For the latter, disjoint the muskrat, parboil for 20 minutes if not young and tender, dip in flour and fry in deep fat until golden brown.

 

And if you live in the woods like I do, you need this recipe too…

 

Squirrel Stew.  If you only have a couple or so squirrel and some robust appetites to satisfy, the flowing stew may be the solution. Cut up the squirrel. Brown the pieces in the 3 tablespoons of butter or margarine. Then cover with 3 cups water. Season only with 1-teaspoon salt and 1/8-teaspoon pepper so as to maintain the distinctive natural flavor. Simmer 1 hour Add ¼ cup chopped onion, ½ cp diced celery and ½ cup sliced cart. Thicken with a smooth paste made by blending 3 tablespoons flour with ¼ cup water. Cook an additional 15 minutes. If you want to top this one off, roof it with dumplings.

How I Learned to Catch Trout

 

         When I went to School of the Ozarks College in the early summer of  ‘65, I was only 17 years old.  A counselor in high school had applied for me and in late May of that year I was notified that I hadn’t been accepted.

         If you want to talk about miracles, consider this one. In early June the registrar at S of O called and told me that five students had quit the first week. I didn’t understand what he was telling me until he said I was number five on the waiting list. 

           School of the Ozarks then was a college for poor kids. They gave you a job where you went to classes a half day and worked a half-day to pay the tuition and room and board.  Here’s another miracle for you!  The president, Dr. M. Graham Clark called me into his office the second day I was there and declared that on the application where it asked what I had worked at I listed so many jobs he suspected that either no student that ever went to school there had ever had so many jobs or that I was the biggest liar ever on campus up to then.  

         It wasn’t actually lying; I had just listed everything I had done for an hour or so since I was 13 years old.  Like where I said I had done roofing I had really done it because Dad made me help   him put a roof on a shed.  My job as a commercial fisherman came down to selling a half dozen catfish illegally to Churchill Hoyt at the pool hall the year before. But that day I got the most coveted job on campus, Dr. Clark’s right-hand man.  

         When he had to go to the airport I drove his Lincoln        Continental back home.   I watched his grandsons when they swam in his pool, I took them arrowhead hunting and I mowed his lawn with a tractor mower.   On occasion one of the half dozen girls who worked inside for Mrs. Clark would bring out some fresh-baked cookies for me to sample.  I was envied all right and amongst the construction workers and the grounds crew students and the cannery workers, I wasn’t all that popular.  But I still made two or three friends. One of them was so much like me he might have been a brother.  In fact he became one! In the evening of the first month, my roommate took me down to a big gravel bar and showed me how to catch trout on Lake Taneycomo. His name was Darrel Hamby... from Piedmont Mo, where he still lives.

         The best thing about S of O was Lake Taneycomo, full of trout and ducks.  The School sat on a bluff right above it. I knew nothing about fishing anywhere but the Big Piney where I had grown up.  And I had taken my rod and reel to school with me… a Shakespeare casting reel with ten-pound line.  Darrel taught me about trout and how to catch them with a spin-casting outfit and 4 pound line.  It was easy fishing and no backlashes. Plus, you could cast way out there with a light treble hook and salmon eggs or cheese and catch 12- to 14-inch trout like you could catch black perch (green sunfish) back home on the Piney.  Darrel had grown up on the Little Black and St. Francis Rivers and he took me back there on several occasions to fish. A few years ago Darrel made his first fishing trip to Canada with me. And I consider that my third miracle of 1965, meeting a life-long friend and fishing partner.  Before this summer ends, when it cools down some, I am heading over to fish again with my old friend. He says he thinks we might catch a big catfish or two.  Wouldn’t that be miracle?

 

         You can read all about those days at School of the Ozarks in one of my books entitled, “The Prince of Point Lookout…Life and Learning at School of the Ozarks”.  I intended to give the school, now known as College of the Ozarks, 500 free copies of the book to sell. That would give the school about seven thousand dollars in profit to some kid out in the Ozarks like me, an education.  But the school president at the time turned down the offer.  If you want to read about those years I spent there, and all about the times with Darrel and Woody P. Snow, Just call me at 417 777 5227 and I will sell you one at half price.  Or you can send 9 dollars and 2 dollars worth of postage stamps and I will send you a book inscribed to you and signed by Darrel and woody and me!  That address is… Pt. Lookout, Box 22,  Bolivar, Mo 65613.  If you  don’t get a few laughs out of the reading of it, I will return your money.

The Marsh that Used to Be. -- MDC

 

USED TO BE:  flock of ducks dropping into Schell-Osage marsh

         In the 1980’s when I lived in North Arkansas, some friends and I often went to southern Missouri to hunt ducks at a waterfowl conservation area known as Schell Osage.  It was some of the best duck hunting you could find anywhere and back then I hunted ducks each year in several states and two provinces in Canada. There are few hunters who spent the hours I did in the marshes and wetlands hunting ducks.  I loved it then as I do now.  At the University of Missouri I studied to be a waterfowl biologist. 

         At Schell Osage the blinds were spaced well and the pools were full of smartweed.  Ducks of all species loved it. It was built in 1962 on 1400 acres next too the Osage River to the west of El Dorado Springs, MO. It was planned and built by employees and equipment of the MISSOURI CONSERVATION COMMISSION, the effective and efficient  (and honest) state agency that really did work towards the conservation, (wise use) of the state’s wildlife.  That agency was the forerunner of the present day, Missouri Department of Conservation which I believe has become corrupt and inefficient.

         As a full-time outdoor writer in those days when Schell-Osage  was a premier waterfowl area, I wrote about hunting there, with articles in Outdoor Life, Gun Dog and Petersen’s Hunting magazines.  One of the articles was entitled “A Day in Old F-13”.  That blind was bad luck all the way around. It sat way off by itself near the river and over days and days, the records showed there were only a handful of ducks that were bagged in that blind by dozens of hunters.  As luck would have it, we drew it one day in early winter.

           I hunted often with a pair of Arkansas duck callers who were the best I ever heard, and that day a front moved through. New ducks came in by the hundreds. Duck calling is not only knowing how to imitate a mallard, but how to use different types of calls and when to use them. The men who taught me were the very best at doing that.  

          That day in 1978 we killed limits of greenhead mallards and three other species, then sat and watched the show for hours. Our young Labradors learned more in one day than they had learned the rest of the year.

         But that was then.  Today, thanks to the MDC, there is no Schell-Osage waterfowl area.  And my prediction is that in my lifetime, and maybe longer, there will not be.  It is now and it has been for years, a drained and bulldozed, ecological desert. 

         Several years ago, the Missouri Department of Conservation decided to obliterate what could have easily been redone and reconstructed, for very little money.  A waterfowl haven built by employees of the Conservation Commission in two years back in ’62 was destroyed about 5 or 6 years back and has not been worked on since.  Let me tell you why I think that is.  The MDC allotted 18 million dollars for that reconstruction to be paid to several companies.  Apparently one company has received most of the money and they are drawing interest on those millions of dollars.  Does that give you an idea of why nothing is getting done? 

         Investigate it? Not a chance.  Our legislators won’t touch the MDC.  There is no one to investigate.  Years back the state auditor called me and asked me to write about  corrupt spending inside the MDC.  She said her agency had found something the state’s citizens should know but the MDC had political autonomy so she couldn’t do a thing about it.

           So figure up the interest on 18 million bucks.  Just imagine that some higher-up employees or commissioners or ex-employees that guided that money where they wanted it to go, are getting paid well from that 18 million, which  is not being spent, just sitting in several bank accounts.

         Now you have an idea of why the Schell Osage waterfowl area will never be again. I feel sorry for local folks who made their living from thousands of out of state hunters who came there each winter to rent motel rooms and spend their money in local restaurants.  That is a thing of the past, and so is the sound of wings over a spectacular marsh, and the sight of shorebirds along the edges of the pools.  Now there is quiet.  Now there is mud.  Now there is 18 million dollars we all paid the MDC through that 1/8 cent sales tax and our license dollars.   Where did it go?  No one can ever know, no one can ever find out.

         It was duck hunting to remember and I do.  I have records from days I spent there through hundreds of photos.  If only we had the men and dedication of an agency that could build such a place in two years… a group long forgotten men, called the Missouri Conservation Commission.  And truthfully the marsh could be made  to be what it was for less  than a hundred  thousand dollars before the bulldozers were  called in.   An MDC engineer told  me that.

 

If you  want to read more about the duck hunting at Schell-Osage, get my book “Memories From a Misty Morning Marsh”.

Trotlines

 

       The first thing you need to catch a big flathead catfish is a nice farm pond full of “perch”. Well, actually they aren’t perch. They are sunfish, of one kind or another. “Perch” is a term the old timers in the pool hall gave to all types of panfish in the Ozarks, and it has been too difficult for me to stop calling them that. Perch in the Ozarks are most often green sunfish or long-eared sunfish or perhaps small bluegill.

       Sunfish…when you get good big ones, they are very good to eat. In Ozark streams, green sunfish can get very hefty, and so can bluegills in our farm ponds and large Ozark reservoirs. But most of the time, in a farm pond, or along the shallow water of a reservoir, you will catch those species just too small to eat. So you convert them to catfish by using them as bait. The spectacularly colored long-ear sunfish, also known as a ‘punkin-seed’ to many, seldom reaches an edible size, but they are great catfish bait. And sometimes in farm ponds around the Ozarks you will find hybridized sunfish, half of one species and half of another. 

       It doesn’t matter, a flathead catfish wants live bait, if not night crawlers and any of those little sunfish will do. It should be pointed out that we spent hours and hours on the river seining bait that was just as good as sunfish. If we could get suckers that were up to 12 inches long, grandpa was tickled pink. A sucker that is 12 to 15 inches long is a great meal for a 30 or 40 or 50 pound flathead. Just as good were the horny-head chubs, often 12 or 10 inches long and what we call ‘doughgut minnows’, which you could seine below swift shoals.

       So to catch a big flathead, you first have to find a place where you can catch a hundred or so live sunfish, chubs and big minnows and then you head to the river or lake, where you set a trotline in water where the flathead, also known as yellow catfish, would be found. They like a little deeper water this time of year, around big bluffs, where there are huge underwater boulders or submerged logs of substantial size.  You learn in time, what to look for. Flatheads come in all sizes of course, but if you set a trotline, you are hoping for something between 20 and 50 pounds, and aware that on occasion Ozark fishermen catch them up to 70 or 80 pounds. That’s a tremendous fish.

       In lakes throughout the Ozarks, there are also channel catfish, which can reach sizes up to 20 or 25 pounds, but normally are less than10. The blue catfish is more similar to a channel cat than a flathead, but different in many ways, the main ways being the size to which he can grow. Blue catfish too, can be taken up to 70 or 80 pounds, record flathead and blues both exceed 100 pounds. Both blues and channel cat will take the live sunfish, but they are also taken on nightcrawlers, dead shad, chicken livers, and prepared “stinkbaits”. But, for any of the three species I prefer the sunfish. And besides, if you have youngsters or grandchildren, they’ll love helping to catch the bait. There’s nothing wrong with going to a farm pond or creek and doing some “perch-jerking” as it is so often called by old-time Ozarkians like me.

       I have been after catfish a whole lifetime, guided as a youth by my grandfather and those old timers in the pool hall who reckoned that though trotlining was a lot of work it was worth doing.

       It only takes one 30 or 40 pound flathead to feed a lot people, and that’s what I am going after. But I often am happy with a 20-pounder. I set trotlines for flatheads with rock weights about the size of a man’s fish, one every five hooks along that line. You need big hooks for flathead or blues, size 4-0. While the 6-0 is plenty big enough for the channel cat, why use them when you might hook a huge blue or flathead. Stay with the bigger hooks and you won’t be sorry. Be sure the hook-lines, called stagions, off the main lines, are between 15 and 20 inches in length, and don’t use snaps. Loop them on, and be sure there are knots in the main line so hooks and stagions won’t slide.

       But that weighted line is dangerous. Should you become entangled in it, or hooked, it can pull you under, even if you have a life jacket on. Grandpa and Dad taught me when I was very young that it was mandatory to wear a sharp knife in a sheath for that very possibility. You need to be able to cut yourself free in a hurry. Two sheathed knives on your belt won’t hurt.

       Remember if you set trotlines, you are only allowed a limited number of hooks depending on what state you are in and they must be spaced three feet apart to be legal. And remember that on one end, you must have a tag of some kind, (I use a flat piece of wood) with name and address on it, and your fishing license number if you have one.

A Drama in the Woods

         I was just in the right place at the right time to see it, and it didn’t last long.  A hawk came out of the timber and passed across a small opening in the woods with a cluster of oak leaves in his talons, pursued by four or five smaller birds, and about the size of a blackbird.  I watched the hawk so closely I didn’t pay much attention to the birds. He flew across a little opening with those birds all over him, just screeching and diving at him with a vengeance. Then they all disappeared into the brush on the other side of the opening, where the drama continued unobserved.

         One might have wondered what it was all about, a hawk with a fistful of leaves.  But it wasn’t the leaves the smaller birds were so incensed about; it was what was in them.  The hawk obviously had snatched a young bird off of a limb and took the whole perch in his hasty attack.  A tragic story, if you look at it from the standpoint of that mother bird and her troupe.  But if you were the hawk, it wouldn’t seem so awful. The hawk was feeding its own young.

         In this day and age, you’d find the hawk thought of as a villain, with great sympathy for the weaker prey, regardless of what it was.... a rabbit, a young bird or a squirrel. The sight of a two-week-old hawk fledgling being eaten by a fox would reverse everything.  Then the hawk, losing her baby to the wily old fox, would be looked upon with sympathy.

         It is how it is, there is no good or bad in nature, and it never changes unlesss man interferes.  That is a hard thing for many to accept. I remember when my daughters were little; how I tried to explain nature to them, and yet, protect them from the harshness of it. We’d be on a trip somewhere, and one of my girls would notice a dead rabbit in the road.  They’d ask their mother if it was a baby rabbit, or a mama rabbit and she’d tell them ‘no, it was just a bad old daddy rabbit’. That seemed to help. 

         I even learned to help. I would point out that the dead raccoon on the highway had probably just staggered out of the pool hall half drunk and had been chasing a little helpless bullfrog across the highway when a semi nailed him!  That way it sounded like he had it coming and the girls wouldn’t be so sad.  In time, when they grew old enough, I took it upon myself to explain to them that among wild animals, things were far different than with humans.  I told them how the hawk would only have two or three young ones in a year, or perhaps over two years, while a mother rabbit might have as many as 100, and couldn’t even name all of them.  God had it figured out so both would survive as a species.

         Christy, the second of three daughters, and the one who would become a biology teacher and park naturalist, could accept it much easier. In time she would become a hunter, and spend time with me after deer and turkey and ducks when she was just a young girl.  Lori, the oldest daughter, who would one day become a doctor, accepted the way it was, but always thought it should be different, and never lost her tenderhearted ways. She went on only one hunt with me, shot at one rabbit with a pellet gun, and wouldn’t ever go again. 

         But I know in her work, Lori sees human suffering and difficulty on a scale that her father could not deal with, and I hope the understanding I tried to pass on to her that God is in charge, even far from the woods where hawks eat baby rabbits, and evil-looking owls are a   threat to grandma’s chickens, makes it easier for her to accept His plan and His will, and do her best to ease that suffering when and where she can.

         It is beyond understanding, even when you have seen as much, and learned as much as I have in my life of studying and experiencing the outdoors. I cannot fully comprehend it all, really, even after all these years.  I still hate to see a fawn drug down by a bobcat, and hear him bleating a plea for survival, knowing his fate is to feed her and a litter of wild kittens somewhere beneath the root wad of a fallen tree.  I wish to heavens that the old bobcat would just feed them mice and rats.  But shucks, a mother rat does not look at her young as being any less wonderful than a fawn.  Only us humans do that. 

         Many times in the woods, I have felt God beside me while I watched His work go on before me. Whether it is the victory of survival for the hawk or the rabbit, the fox or the quail… I know He still is in control.