The Sixteen Pound Bass

 

    In my library there is a volume of Field & Stream maga­zine, in a hardbound cover, from April of 1918 to April of 1919. In these old mag­azines there is some very in­teresting reading, much of it by the great outdoorsman, Zane Grey, remembered for his famed western book. Indeed there is a great deal of difference in the way we hunt and fish today, but some things were much the same back then, in the thick of World War I.

    For instance, Field & Stream held a fishing contest, offering a host of outdoor equipment prizes in various categories. One entry drew more space in the magazine than any other topic but the war. It was a 16-pound smallmouth bass caught by George T. Magraw, M.D.Magraw wrote an elaborate account of the hooking and landing of his fish, and in­cluded a photo that nearly any­one would instantly take for a phony today. Apparently they were less skeptical in that day.

    The fish was said to be taken from a small one-acre lake near Avondale, Pa. Ma­graw claimed it took him one hour and 20 minutes to land the fish and that he had 175 yards of line out at one time. Field & Stream was very trusting, but they sent a repre­sentative to talk to Magraw and see the lake. He found the doctor of high repute in the community, and even com­mented that he never passed a dog on the street without a pat on the head.

    The writer talked to several men who signed affidavits naming them as witnesses to a smallmouth 36-inches long and 26 ¾ inches in girth. Before he left, however, the representative took note that the kitchen wall which was a background for the picture had boards four inches in width. Comparing those measurements with the picture, it showed the fish length would be only about 20 inches. Something was fishy, so Field and Stream asked for the photo negatives. Dr. Magraw became indignant, and stated that the negatives had been sent out of town and could not be recovered. He had, of course, eaten the fish, causing another hint of suspicion.

    Field and Stream went to work on the available picture with an architectural expert who examined the shadows and made elaborate calculations placing the size of the bass at less than 24 inches, and most likely less than 20. By then there was a considerable del­uge of mail from readers, nearly 100 percent against the doctor's claim. One reader said it was impossible for a fish to play out 175 feet of line in a pond of one acre size un­less he wound it around his body a few hundred times.

    Magraw replied that he was being made to look like a liar even after affidavits proved him a respected and truthful man. One of Field & Stream's writ­ers was a judge for the contest, and he wrote consistently about catching bass on artifi­cial baits and floating flies. When he questioned the fish fighting for an hour and 20 minutes, Magraw replied that the fish was taken on a minnow and “did not have a lot of cork and feathers rammed down her throat to drown her in 15 or 20 minutes.”

    The examinations of the photo, and explanations concerning the length of the bass which more or less proved it to be a hoax, took up four or five magazine pages in three issues, and became so involved and complex most outdoorsmen would have trouble figuring any of it out. Afterwards, the magazine gave Magraw 30 days to dispute the findings, and he did, with mathematical equations and drawings that were so confusing they could hardly be disproven.

    The good doctor wanted that record badly and he sent another picture. This time is was obviously a smaller bass blown up and laid over the top of a picture of Magraw. Even if you stretched your imagination you could not accept it, a smallmouth hanging from a man's waist, extending past his feet.

    Magraw stated that he had little faith in winning the prize because the judges were in the class of mules, and if you "con­vinced a mule of something against his will, he will likely remain of the same opinion." The editor finally took his gloves off, called the new picture an unspeakable fake. The matter was closed for good in the December issues of 1918, after nine months of study and debate by a half dozen experts.

    If the record had been allowed, and it might have been considering sworn, notarized affidavits from respectable men, then today’s 11-pound record brownie taken from Dale Hollow Lake in Kentucky would seem less of a phenomenon.

    It is hard to figure why a prize of a steel rod and reel would cause a man who was said to be upstanding and honest, to stretch things so far. It goes to show…fishermen have never really changed much.

 

Bobbers!

 

       If I were ever asked to list the ten things I have enjoyed the most in my life as a fisherman, not too far down the line I would list, “watching a bobber”.  It was one of life’s greatest pleasures in my youth. You too have likely done that if you grew up in the country.  If so, you know what I mean.

       Grandma McNew and I watched bobbers on my Uncle Roy’s pond, which he allowed no one else to fish except my cousins and me and Grandma and Grandpa.  

       Back then, summer ponds weren’t all filled with the scum and algae you see today.  The water there in the shade of a big oak tree was dark and deep, full of bluegill and bass and a few small catfish.

       And in the summer, Grandma and I often sat there in the shade watching a bobber sit stone-still on a smooth surface.  The fascination I felt was something I still feel, watching that bobber knowing that any moment it might dance a little, throwing out little ringlets on the water, then dive out of sight in a flash, the braided line cutting through the depths.  It only took a jerk on the cane pole to know what you had.  But no matter, it would be dinner the following day; not filets in a skillet but whole fried fish with the head and fins cut off, just scaled and gutted.

       Usually that disappearing bobber meant only a hand-sized bluegill, but sometimes a bass 12 or 14 inches long would pull it under.  Once or twice in every few hours of fishing, it would be a 15-to 18-inch bass or maybe even a catfish, and if you weren’t careful you might break the end off the old cane pole by jerking too hard. You landed a bigger fish by walking backwards and dragging it up the bank.

       Just out of college at the age of 22, I took a job as the Outdoor Editor for the Arkansas Democrat, the state’s largest newspaper in Little Rock.  Believe it or not, we got a little home out in the country about 30 miles north of the city, and I brought down from the Big Piney a15-foot wooden johnboat Dad had built with a sealed marine plywood bottom, which meant it didn’t have to be kept in the water to be ‘soaked up’ as the older ones did.

       On Dardanelle Lake, about 40 miles west of Little Rock there was a small arm on the north side of the lake known as Spadra Creek, about 200 yards wide at the most. The owner of a local dock told me the crappie were spawning, big ones.  So I loaded that old wooden johnboat and went there.  

       One of the local guides by the name of Yarbrough, told me where there was a hump coming up in the middle of that long tributary, and if I could find it and anchor just off of it I could catch crappie beneath a bobber and a yellow jig.  The hump was only about 15 feet across and about 8-feet under the water and everything around it was 15- or 20-feet deep.  I could find it by lining up three trees on opposite banks as Mr. Yarbrough had showed me.

       To make a long story short and happy, I took some jigs and a bobber, and caught crappie with that bobber setting over that hump, letting the jig settle about halfway up from the bottom.  I got to watching that bobber with such concentration and enjoyment, I scarcely noticed the fishing boats that would pass, staring at the wooden boat I had paddled out there to the hot spot in the middle of the creek.  Every now and then I would reel in a huge crappie and in short order I had a limit.

       A day or so later Mr. Yarbrough took me fishing for bass out at the mouth of Spadra, in a fiberglass bass boat, just becoming popular at that time.  He showed me that crappie could be caught without bobbers, but it wasn’t any more   rewarding than the fishing I had a few days before in Spadra Creek.

       The Democrat had one of the best writers I ever knew working at a desk across from mine.  His name was Bob Lancaster.  Bob laughed at
the idea of doing a story for the Democrat about fishing from a wooden johnboat with a bobber.  “Here you are an outdoor reporter for a newspaper with a million readers,” he said, and you’re out there paddling around in a wooden boat with no motor, fishing with a bobber!”

       We both laughed about that, and in a month or so, the newspaper acquired a Mon-Ark fiberglass fishing boat with a 35-horse motor for me to use.  But I told Bob that day that if there were indeed a million fishermen out there reading the newspaper the majority of them started out watching a bobber.  We all had a common beginning as fishermen.

These are my daughters with crappie they caught using bobbers. The first two are my middle fisherwoman, Christy Lynn. The redhead is my youngest fisherwoman, Leah Noel. And the last is my oldest, Lori Jean. I can't really call her a fisherwoman though. She is the Dr. in the family and doesn't have time to fish anymore.

 

     

An Incident at Clevenger Cove

 

       As a seventeen-year old freshman at School of the Ozarks College in the mid-60s I studied fishing mostly! With Tablerock Lake so close and my having a key to the gate and boat on the School’s property at a place called Clevinger Cove, you knew where I would be on the weekends.  If I couldn’t get home to the Big Piney and didn’t have to work on campus friends and I would often spend Friday and Saturday nights there on Clevinger Cove in an old abandoned house. We’d spend hours paddling around Tablerock  Lake in an old v-bottom boat fishing for anything we could catch.

       That was back when the first Rapala lures were becoming famous and somehow I got one, an old sample from my Uncle Norten.  My uncle had caught an 11-pound 4-ounce bass from Clevinger Cove years before I ever fished it.  It was published in Sports Afield Magazine as the biggest bass caught that year in the whole country.  

       Norten was addicted to big spinner baits, so I got some lures he was given, because of that magazine’s recognition. One was that black and silver Rapala about 6 or 7 inches long. On a Saturday morning when the lake was high from spring rains I tied it on and paddled back up into the end of the cove where a big green bush of some kind stuck up out of the water. 

       I couldn’t cast it a long way with that old Shakespeare reel and braided line but just that once it went back a little farther than intended and the line draped over the end of that bush. I gave it a jerk or two to try to free it and that Rapala lure danced enticingly on the surface just past the bush.

      Sometimes when a bass hits a topwater lure there is just a boil of water on the surface and he slurps it under with a minimum of commotion.  At such times I think the bass is just hungry and wanting a good meal. But after all, bass are predators and I am fairly sure that at times they just want to put on a show because they are mad as well as hungry. 

       That day, at the end of Clevenger Cove, there was a mad bass laying beside a log just beneath that green bush.  He didn’t want to just eat my Rapala he wanted to hurt it. And so my lure disappeared in a spray of water that came up a foot into the air with that big slab-sided bass. He crashed down on top of it carrying it beneath that bush before I could even bend the rod real good. I gave it a good pull and set the hook enough to feel that he was a monster of a fish as far as the fight he put up. But I figure he laughed to himself as he burrowed beneath that greenery and somehow got my line beneath the log.  I just hope those treble hooks hurt his jaw for a long time after he broke my leader.  That’ll learn  him!

       Actually it was more likely a ‘she’ than a ‘he’.  Bigger and fatter and meaner bass are almost always females.  And I am not insinuating anything here; but what the heck, females don’t read outdoor columns anyway do they?

       I have an even better story about Clevenger cove that I published in a book entitled “Prince of Point Lookout…Life and Learning at School of the  Ozarks”.  I worked for the President, Dr. M. Graham Clark back then and he asked me to take him and a very rich lady fishing one fall day there in the old boat in the big cove beside school property.  

       Her name was Nettie Marie Jones, who was a major donor to S of O.  I’ll write about that in another column sometime, how she caught a big bass that day herself.  That afternoon may have played a part in the building of a big structure now known as the Nettie Marie Jones Learning Center, there at the school.

You can find that book and others at website…www.larrydablemont.com

Three Heavenly Lakes

        There are high school graduation ceremonies going on around the country this month, causing me to remember mine, back in Houston High School in the sixties. I was only 17 when I graduated and never even dreamed of going to college.   My grades were not very good, because I never studied anything except outdoor magazines, and seldom completed any homework. I spent all my out-of-school hours working in my dad and grandfathers pool hall or on the Big Piney River in my johnboat.  

       My dad and mom never went to high school and had no relatives who did.  I was the first Dablemont to achieve that high honor. Our family was poor; both my parents were shoe factory workers.  There was a guidance counselor who knew that, a man by the name of Cloyce Gerdes.  He noted that I had made a very high grade on some graduation test they called an Ohio something or another.  I don’t know how that    happened because I just hurried through it so I could go fishing with a cousin that afternoon.  

       Surely something got switched or confused in those test results, but because of it and the financial situation I was in, Mr. Gerdes called me into his office to tell me about a college called School of the Ozarks, near Branson, Missouri, where poor kids were given jobs on campus to pay for room and board and tuition.  I sort of let that go by me because I had obtained a job sanding cars at a local body shop. Each night my fingers would bleed but it was worth it for the dollar and a quarter per hour I was getting and the opportunity to learn a trade.

       But I signed that application to School of the Ozarks and forgot about it.  The guidance counselor filled out the rest and sent it in.  That was in May and before the first of June I got a letter back saying I had been hadn’t been accepted but I had been put on a waiting list.  I figured as much… what college would want a pool hall kid with a 2.5 grade average? Miracles occur in everyone’s life and that next week one definitely took place for me, a miracle that changed my life entirely.  

       I was helping my dad put a new roof on our house that Saturday morning when Mom came out and told me that I had a phone call. When I answered, a Mr. Timmons told me he was the registrar at School of the Ozarks. He said that I had been fifth on their waiting list and five kids had quit. Looking back, I think that was indeed a miracle and that God was that day smiling on one of the poorest and dumbest kids in the Ozarks. I wasn’t very high on myself and I never thought something like that could happen to me. That night I filled an old dilapidated black suitcase with all the clothes I owned, as excited as I have ever been. In two days I had a job at the school and a dorm room and had started summer classes in a genuine college.  

       For a lot of reasons, the place called S of O was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.  A big fountain filled a pond-sized lake there on campus. It was called Lake Honor and no one knew it was full of bass but me. I found out within a few days of the time I got there.  

       The school sat on a bluff overlooking Lake Taneycomo and a student fisherman named Darrel Hamby showed me a path down over the bluff to find it. He taught me how to catch a fish I had never seen before, the rainbow trout. From Darrel I learned about the efficiency of using a spinning reel and rod and all about cooking fish in a dorm room with a hot plate and a skillet.

       I went to work on campus for the school president, Dr. Graham Clark who showed me some   property the school owned on Tablerock Lake called Clevinger Cove, where a V-bottom boat was chained up beside an old abandoned house.  He gave me a key to the gate and the boat and in June of that year I caught the first crappie I had ever seen, plus the  biggest largemouth bass I had ever  caught. On the weekends that I couldn’t go home to the Big Piney, friends and I would spend the night in that old broken-down house and fish most of the time there.

       Indeed it seemed like I had died and gone to heaven. The story of Clevinger Cove continued for two years, so I will finish it in my next column. But my life as a naturalist-outdoor writer got a big boost because of a miracle… five students quitting and making me a place to learn, away from  the Big Piney River…  Lake Honor, Lake Taneycomo and Tablerock.

 

Read the conclusion to this story, and next weeks column on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors.com 

The Second Gobbler

   

                                                         Dr. Fell with his gobbler

       If I write a second book about turkey hunting, one of the stories would be about the spring that I took Dr. David Fell on a hunt in Texas County, in the heart of the Ozarks.  Dr. Fell was a client from Oklahoma, an ophthalmological surgeon well known in the Midwest.  

       He read an article I had written for Field and Stream magazine about hunting wild gobblers and from that he knew I was guiding turkey hunters.  So he set up two days with me in which we would hunt turkeys the first half of the day and then float-fish the Piney River in the afternoon.

       Dawn found us that first morning on a farm I had permission to hunt, and we were only about 200 yards from a gobbler that sounded off on the roost. A few seconds later a second tom gobbled...  I heard them fly down off the roost and move toward us.  About that time I heard another hunter calling to the gobblers.  We were south of the turkeys and he was to the northeast.  He called too much and too loud, so I knew it wasn’t a hen. That was kind of exasperating because the landowner had assured me no one else would be hunting the land.

       Within the next hour the second gobbler completely shut up but the main one, seeming to stay where he was and gobbling quite often.  The other hunter kept at it; not very good at imitating a hen, but sometimes you don’t have to be.   My uncle Norten claimed he once called one up by pulling a rusty farm gate back and forth!

        I am supposing that one gobbler kept expecting a hen to come to him but to our good fortune none came or they departed after mating.  He got quiet for about thirty minutes and then started up again. He sounded off about 30 yards or so closer.  Dr. Fell was well hidden with a tree behind him and some multiflora rose between him and the tom turkey that was beginning to act as if he indeed thought my call was a beautiful young hen that couldn’t wait to meet him.

        About then off to my left I heard the unmistakable sound of a gobbler strutting, with that spitting and drumming sound they make.  I looked over and saw him moving around behind me only a few yards away.  Obviously he was the second gobbler we had heard that morning on the roost, but he hadn’t sounded off since.  

       He was a nice tom but Dr. Fell, who was several yards in front of me, couldn’t see him.  In a matter of five or ten minutes the gobbler moved around behind me and out of sight into the woodlands.   It took another hour but the tom turkey before us moved into sight about 60 yards away.  It was Dr. Fells first turkey hunt and I could see him react.  He began to shake with excitement and I hoped he knew the big bird was still well out of   range.  He did well to wait and when the gobbler was strutting about 35 yards before us I gave a soft call and he straightened high to look. At that moment the shotgun’s roar echoed across the valley and my turkey-hunting client collected his first gobbler.  But the story didn’t end there.

        Dr Fell had already paid me for two days on the river as well as that turkey hunt but he was so excited about his big 22-pound gobbler with an 11-inch beard that he wanted to get it back to Oklahoma to show some of his friends before he cleaned it. He told me to keep the money and he would come back some other time to float the river, and off he went.

Dr. Fell and me with his trophy gobbler

       But while we were taking pictures the other hunter showed up.   He was a timid and apologetic local farm boy about 14 years old, maybe younger.  He looked at that big gobbler with envious eyes and said he hoped to get one like that sometime before the season ended.  Two days later he did, and I was there!  I called up that gobbler too, for the youngster… a few hundred yards from where Dr. Fell bagged his first turkey.  The boy was about as excited as I was when I killed my first one.  I wrote a magazine article in later years about both turkeys.  

       I got paid for one and the other one I just did for another kind of reward, one that didn’t involve pay. It was an act that made me as happy as anything I have done as a turkey guide.  Maybe the greatest part of that season long ago involved that second gobbler and a poor farm kid that didn’t even own a camouflaged shirt.

        You can see a photo of Dr. Fell and his gobbler on my website… larrydablemontoutdoors.com. 

“I Ain’t Never Seen Nothin’ Like It”

 

        What a hail storm the Midwest just had! “ I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it”, I heard one old timer say.  I have said the exact same thing several times the last few years. You have to start getting some age on you to say that effectively.  I never, ever said that when I was 25 or 30 years old.  When I was that age, about everything that happened was a fairly new experience anyway.  But now that I am older I have seen Ozark rivers at their highest ever and in a year or so the same rivers at the lowest they have ever been.  Something about that isn’t quite right.

       I live on a remote timbered country ridge-top not prone to flooding, but subject to high winds and bad winters.  I am scared to death of a tornado with this  ridge in its path. A horrible ice-storm hit pretty hard here, about ten or twelve years ago.  I ain’t never seen nothing like that! Limbs everwhere! But today it seems like it never happened.

       Still, my heart goes out for those in the path of the storms, those who have lost so much because it seems that nature has become our enemy.  It is something many of us may have felt was coming, sooner or later… those of us who feel we live a little closer to nature than those who mass together in a world of concrete and and pavement and glass and computers.  No, I am not one of those global warming nuts…I have no scientific evidence to call upon to help me predict the future course nature might take, and I don’t know for sure what is happening or what is coming.  But I know this, SOMETHING STRANGE is happening, and I am fairly sure that worse is coming.  It is the consequence of huge, ever-increasing numbers of people, and the idea that whatever man does to the earth will have no lasting effect. Chemicals don’t hurt anything, right? It is the problem of man not realizing that the earth is, after all, the boss…and man is not. Will we ever run out of clean air and water, timber, or food. In order to feed twice as many, what will we have to sacrifice.

       I think someday there will be a lot of folks who have been hell-bent for growth and progress and greater technology and more money surprised to see there is a down side to it all in some future day.  People like my grandfathers no longer exist and never will again. In fact if we could see the humans of the future it might make us glad we ain’t amongst ‘em. People aren’t suppose to live like this, turmoil is not happiness or peace! But one thing for sure, there is no turning around; there is no changing the course.  We are going wherever we are going, and good or bad, global warming, global cooling, or global chaos, ….it is coming eventually, and we will be the victims of that AYE_EYE stuff rather than the benefactors.  Men will junk the T.V. and try to remember how to make a garden or wonder where they can catch a fish or how to cook starlings.

I would hate to be living in a huge city, where all of a sudden, there might be no course to take but trying to get out of it, to someplace where there aren’t so many millions of crazy people to compete with and run from.  Some things a man can’t do a thing about.  When a massive black cloud forms on the horizon, you just can’t change the course or the power of the impending storm.  Not even with a computer.

       The impending storm might be huge cities with millions of people living without electricity in July and August.  Think of no refrigeration, no gas pumps, no lights and in little time, no food.  Couldn’t ever happen, right?

       There is one thing that gives me a good feeling.  I know a place or two where the woods are deep and the big trees still exist and there are no people.  There are squirrels there to fry and fish in the river below. And blackberries grow in the summer across the river just like they did when grandpa was a boy.  There’s a cave there to protect someone from rain and wind and ice alike and the spring water in it is still clean.    If times get too hard, I intend to take my window fan and a microwave oven and a good sleeping bag and some matches, and move down there.  In the meantime, I am going fishing this week… a whole lot and close to home.

        If you are still old enough to read on occasion, visit my website, larrydablemont.com or larrydablemontoutdoors.com  Good reading on both.       

Filled With Suckers

 

         I know a tributary to Truman Lake that normally is little more than a creek, but when the area gets enough rain and the lake rises it draws a big bunch of white bass.  So I went up there a week ago and traveled up about as far as I could go, crossing several shallow shoals to get to a favorite spot.  Sure enough, that small hole of water was full of white bass and in a couple of hours a friend and I caught our limit of whites in the neighborhood of 14-inch fish.  But the eddy, no more than six feet deep in the middle was very clear and full of golden redhorse suckers, likely a couple hundred of them, along with two or three dozen bigmouth buffalo that would weigh up to ten pounds or so. 

         Fighting the white bass for a few hours was fun but I would have given a good rebel lure for a big treble hook.  Those suckers that we hillbillies have always referred to as ‘yaller suckers’ would have been lots of fun with trebles and a grabbin’ outfit, which is a little stiffer and stronger rod.  They are easier to clean than white bass is to filet and much better eating.  You have to remove the big scales, gut the fish and then remove the tail and fins.  Then you do what they call scoring, which amounts to cutting across the body every quarter inch all the way to the backbone on both sides.  With the scoring you cut up and eliminate the fine bones in the body.  Then you cut the fish into however many pieces you want and drop them into hot grease, coated with whatever coating or batter you choose to use. 

         White bass are good to eat too, but when you filet them, the red meat needs to be skimmed off the white meat.  If you catch a three-pound white bass it will fight like a smallmouth of similar size.  I once caught a dozen whites between three to four pounds from a Tablerock lake tributary in north Arkansas on topwater lures. One of the best days I have ever had fishing. A couple of those weighed a few ounces OVER four pounds.  In the 1980’s I was guiding on Bull Shoals and had a Nebraska client catch a five-pound five-ounce white bass on a live shad.  At the time it was just a few ounces from a state record.

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

The first time I went fishing with my dad I was about 5 or 6 years old.  First time he took me hunting I was 8 or 9.  Since those years in the 1950’s I have become a full-time Outdoor writer/naturalist and that has amounted to a tremendous amount of time in the outdoors hunting and fishing, exploring and photographing and boating and floating, etc. photographing, etc.           Those seventy-some years has helped me to accumulate so much stuff that I don’t know what to do with it all, now that I am starting to face the fact that I am mortal. I can no longer use a ton of what I have accumulated over the years and can’t take it with me.  So in the fall---likely late September or early October I am going to have one heck of a yard and garage and storage shed sale selling and giving away a ton of stuff going back to when I was 15 or 16 years old.   There’s too much stuff to list here but it will include all my fishing gear, boats and kayaks and some fantastic wildlife art.  There will be some boat trailers and duck and goose decoys and even a few guns.  I have about a thousand antique magazines too, going back to the twenties and a few earlier.  I have the first outdoor magazines I ever read and then the ones I wrote for. 

         What I have decided to do is take all summer to list everything and send those lists to prospective buyers and visitors.   We are talking about a couple of hundred items that I will likely shed a tear or two over as I watch them leave.   How many experiences and memories go away with my 50 year old 19-foot Grumman canoe that is likely worth more now than it cost new.   Or my old duck gun, a Smith and Wesson that I bought when I got out of college.  It is getting close to a time I fish with dad and my grandfather again, so I know it is best to let old treasures create some memories for younger outdoorsmen.  If you want to get a list of what we will sell   this fall, send me a letter (P.O.Box 22 Bolivar MO 65613) or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com, and I will be in touch to let you know when that all will take place this fall beneath the oaks on this beautiful hardwood ridgetop we call Lightnin’ Ridge, overlooking the  Pomme de Terre River valley about 40 miles north of Springfield.

 

Photo sequence of wild gobbler mating with a decoy

 

Sequence of photos taken of wild gobbler mating with a turkey decoy

wild gobbler with missing tail feathers

Uh oh competition

The Declining Wild Gobbler

Wild Turkey Nest with 8 eggs

       I came across a wild turkey nest with 8 eggs in it in late April. I doubted it would have many more because the hen was sitting on the nest incubating them before I came along in mid-morning. When a hen is laying her eggs she mates with a mature gobbler early in the day and then lays one egg per day as a rule. She may miss a day or so if she doesn’t mate, and she may lay as many as 15 or 16 eggs if there is more than one mature gobbler. Or she may lay as few as 6 or 7. First year jakes do not usually mate with any hens and first year hens do not usually mate or make a nest. But with wildlife, you can never say never. Often, even mature hens do not bring off a clutch of eggs every year. 

        Years back, Arkansas’ turkey biologist, Mike Widner put radio transmitters on twenty-some hens in the Ouachita mountains, then followed them all through the spring season. He was surprised when he found that only about 15 or 20 percent of the mature hens nested that spring. With all ground nesting birds, the number of eggs laid is not indicative of the survival of poults. It is likely that with wild turkeys about half the eggs laid do not even hatch. If they do hatch during a cold rainy period, the young poults will likely die before they are a week old. I have observed that a hen turkey can delay the hatching of poults during adverse weather by controlling the incubation period of the eggs in some fashion. It seldom happens that eggs hatch in rainy weather. But surprisingly, many hens that have their nests destroyed or eggs eaten by predators will nest a second time. In the course of the spring and summer a hen turkey may lay twenty or thirty eggs just to be able to bring forth a few live surviving young. I would venture to guess that for every young turkey you see in the fall there have been perhaps 20 or 30 eggs laid in the spring. In most states in the Midwest, wild turkeys are at their lowest numbers now in a 10-or 15-year period. Biologists in Missouri, often young people just out of college, do not have enough knowledge of the wild turkey nor experience to really know why. But it is not “habitat loss”. It is hunting pressure and the fact that hunters are twice as many today as they were twenty years ago. Adjustments to the seasons and limits are needed, as fall hunting and early youth seasons continue to knock down gobbler numbers. But conservation departments revel in the increased money those high numbers bring in and don’t want to do anything in cutting back seasons or limits because they believe it will hurt revenue. I doubt we will ever see wild turkeys in the numbers I saw in the 80’s and 90’s, but like the quail, the declining gobblers will survive for another season. It is hard to see what there are today and then know what they could be if only decisions were made by the conservation departments that could make such a big difference. We will not know what this spring and summer hatch and survival will be until we begin seeing the late-winter flocks. In my lifetime, I have killed enough gobblers. I shoot them now with a camera and urge other hunters to do the same. We have got to reduce the number of wild gobblers killed now by hunters who have found ways to do it a lot easier than with a camouflage outfit and a turkey call. In a future article I will talk about a new way of hunting that seldom fails. In the meantime I will put the story and photos of a seven-bearded gobbler on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors… and with it photos of a gobbler mating with a decoy for more than an hour.

Lots of Water To Fish

 

                                          Norten Dablemont with a largemouth bass

Last week, I let the waters I normally fish recede, and fished some farm ponds.  And though they were all full, the bass didn’t seem to mind.  If you want to catch a good-sized bass from a pond or small lake in the    present situations, use big spinner bait, something with a 2- or 3-inch blade, a white or yellow skirt.  I used a 3/8ths-ounce spinner bait, with a big gold willow-leaf blade and a white skirt.  Bass were moving into the shallower end of the ponds, away from the deep water, even though they were not actually shallow.  I just let it sink down out of sight and retrieved it slowly enough to feel that blade vibrating, and the bass were nailing it.

You could catch a few on a shallow running crank-bait as well, but in most ponds, there’s so much algae on the bottom you can’t run a crank-bait very deep.  You can use a suspending rogue, and jerk it and catch bass that way. The muddier the pond however, the more I like a spinner bait.  I have fished ponds in April that were as muddy as they can get, and caught bass one after another on a spinner-bait as big as your fist.         One thing about an Ozark farm pond, some of them hold bass up to eight or nine pounds.  If it has the right combination of bluegills and minnows, a farm pond that isn’t large at all, and sometimes very muddy, can be the home of a monster bass or two.  There’s no better time to catch one than April and May.

Of course, the major Ozark reservoirs, has some April fishing that is spectacular as bass move up around submerged bushes and brush in murky water. Sometimes with these conditions, it is best to don some waders and leave your boat, walking the banks and trying to cast around water that is hard to reach otherwise.   Again, big spinner bait, or a suspending rogue is a good way to find big bass in that high and colored water.

For years I watched my late uncle, a lifelong Ozark fishing guide, walk the banks in early spring and catch huge bass.  Most of the bass he caught in the Ozarks over ten pounds, (and there were a total of six of them), were taken when he was out of the boat, wading and fishing high water.  One of those big fish he remembers still came from Greers Ferry Lake, and he talked about it in his book “Ridge-Runner”.

In the spring back in the 1970’s in he had two clients on a fishing trip to a lake in Texas, and it hadn’t been a good trip because of bad stormy weather they didn’t want to endure.  On the way back, he took them by Greers Ferry Lake in north Arkansas, and they checked into a little lakeside resort just as the front came through after the storm.  

It was getting late, and it was too blustery to take a boat out.  It was cold too, even though the lake itself had been warming nicely, and was high and murky. So with his clients looking for a good meal, my uncle grabbed his casting reel and a red Hauser Hell-diver, one of the first spinner-baits made, and headed for the lake in his waders.  He recalled there was a flooded bramble bush of some kind out in the water off point, and he kept casting into it and around it until he felt a hard jolt, the strike of a big, big bass.  

Uncle Norten didn’t fish for bass with light tackle, and he was accustomed to hauling them out of brush with 20-pound line.  But that evening, there must have been a nick in the line, because it broke, and he was left there wondering how big the fish might have been. 

The next morning dawned cold, somewhere in the 30’s.  His fishermen wanted to wait until it warmed up some, so just after daylight, my uncle returned to that same spot with a white Hauser hell-diver and after a few casts he hooked another big, big bass.  This time the line held, and a minute or so later he hefted a nine pound largemouth with two spinner baits in it’s jaw, one of them the red one from the night before.  Uncle Norten says he never saw that happen ever again.

 

 

Wild Turkey Gobblers - Part II

 

Seven bearded gobbler

         About ten years ago I killed a wild gobbler that had seven beards, all of them longer than five inches, and some guy at the check station just went crazy about it.  He said it would be in the top five in the record book, as heavy as it was and as long as the spurs were.  He couldn’t believe I just took it home and ate it.  I tried to explain to him that the bigger a wild turkey is, the more likely it is to have a tame gobbler somewhere in its ancestry.  True genetics in wild gobblers produce smaller, darker birds than we see in the Ozarks. Those pure wild Eastern gobblers seldom weighed more than 18 or 19 pounds.  

         If I ever take my grandson turkey hunting, and I will someday when he is older (he is only five now) he will not learn that a wild creature is a trophy, and he will enjoy everything else about it just as much as the actual killing, or I will be a darn poor teacher and grandfather.  To go along with that, I thought some of you might enjoy something I wrote a few years ago for a magazine, concerning turkey hunting….as follows….

         ….I have decided that turkey hunting and life in general have a great number of similarities.  For instance, sometimes in life, striving for the goal is more enjoyable than reaching it and accomplishing it.  When you have pulled the trigger and the great bird is down, flopping around in his death throes, don’t you feel a little bit of sadness down deep inside?  Don’t you wish he had been a little slower and gobbled a lot more and strutted longer in the direct beams of the early morning sun?

         See, it’s a lot the same way you feel when you’ve finally bought that new pickup you always wanted and you drive it home and you know it’s going to be a mess in a month.  Driving it out of the driveway at home will never be as great as it was driving it off the dealer’s lot.  It’s much the same way you feel when you’ve been married a month and suddenly you see your wife in curlers and you realize she looks a lot like her mother.  If she would have agreed to marry you on the first date, you’d have missed all the enjoyment of being told “no” so often.

         A dead gobbler isn’t the reward of the hunt.  He is the reason for it, but he isn’t the reward.  If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, you might be greenhorn.  But it’ll come to you someday.

         Life is a series of rare successes, great and small, occurring between numerous failures.  That’s what turkey hunting is.  If you hunt turkeys, you can deal with life’s failures, because you know there will be another gobbler, another day.  You know that the wind and the rain and the cold only goes on so long and eventually you are going to have that beautiful spring day when it is calm and sunny and warm, and some gobbler just can’t stop gobbling.  You know that one time or another each season, there’s going to be one that comes like he’s on a string, like he hasn’t seen a hen since the end of last summer.  And that’s when you forget that there have been a dozen or so that got spooked, went the wrong way, found a hen, or put food above romance.

Turkey hunting has taught me to be patient and persevere and be thankful for every minute whether the sun is warm or the rain is cold.  Turkey hunting has taught me that sooner or later, every hog finds an acorn, every novice learns the ropes, every hard-luck-Harry gets a break.  You just don’t quit.  But in time, the reward isn’t just a dead turkey, it’s the trying and the failing and trying again, knowing if you don’t quit, you’ll have your time.

         You can find treasure in the difficulties, and you can have a great life just finding occasional rewards here and there amongst the failure.  Just don’t ever forget, in your day-to-day life, that quite often, the turkeys win.

         I got a good laugh out of an article a friend sent to me on turkey hunting written by a lady in the Ozarks largest newspaper, out of Springfield, Missouri.  She wrote, “…wear hunting clothing in blaze orange, this is not a natural color in the outdoors and hunters will recognize this and not mistake it for wildlife.  Attire yourself in camouflage clothing, head to toe including face mask and gloves, and wear blaze orange over the full camo.”  She says the experts say to shoot at the base of the neck, right where the feathers begin.  

         Let me advise this…do not shoot at the base of the neck of a gobbler, shoot at the head and nothing else.  Shooting at the base of the neck will fill your bird’s breast with shot, and allow some to get away, mortally crippled.  And as for the blaze orange over the camo…I can only say, I don’t recommend it. Gobblers may shy away from you in such garb.  The outdoor page in that paper is occasionally sent to me by a friend who says it is some of the funniest reading you can imagine.         

 

 

Wild Turkey Gobblers-- Part 1

 

       My grandfather got his first breech-loader shotgun in 1911 by guiding turkey hunters in the fall and winter in north Texas County on his father’s land bordering a northern section of the Big Piney River.  He did so by scattering corn to feed them, then scaring turkeys off the roost during the night and waiting for them to come back to the bait and the roost the next morning at first light.  

       He saw big flocks of wild turkeys during his youth but he told me he saw wild turkeys decline in the late twenties and thirties to near extinction in the Ozarks because of three reasons.  First and foremost, diseases brought in by farm families in tame turkeys, primarily something called blackhead disease. Secondly were the free-ranging hogs, which decimated acorn crops before the years end making that food source unobtainable during the cold snowy months.  But the biggest decline wasn’t due to the predators that like to eat wild turkeys and destroy eggs, nor was it due to habitat loss.  It was due to hard times and the coming depression.

       “Country folks were hungry,” he told me. “Gettin’ enough for them big families to eat was hard and turkeys was danged easy to kill, so they got kilt and et more than anything else. In the depression time if’n you had a hog or cow you was rich!  Those who had chickens got ‘em stole or et by hoot owls!”

       “I was a trapper and hunter and fisherman from the time I was a boy,” he said. “You could eat fried muskrats and boiled possum, even a beaver er a bobcat. Wa’n’t no coons to be had after awhile but ever farm boy knew where turkeys roosted.  So they got cleaned out.  I use ta take a turkey er two up to Houston and sell one for a dime or a quarter.  By1930 you couldn’t find one. Nor a deer neither.”

       As I tape-recorded his recollections back in 1966, I understood how those problems eliminated the wild turkey a hundred years ago.  Today, much the same things are coming about.  There are too many predators, but men are the number one predator and there are more now than ever. Gobblers are too easy to kill.
       Like my grandfather, I guided turkey hunters in the 1970’s and 1980’s in Arkansas and Missouri, and one spring, even in Kansas.  I worked at calling turkey gobblers for men who were well off, doctors, surgeons and dentists who could afford to pay a lot of money for the experience the hunt provided. None were interested in just killing a gobbler.  Often a friend and I would set up a camp in the National Forest or on a river in the Ozarks. There were so many wild turkeys back in those times that anyone who could hunt three days had a very good chance to get a gobbler.  Most mornings at daylight we could hear 3 or 4   gobblers if not more. We almost never failed. 

       There were some years I spent more time trying to get a client a gobbler than I spent hunting by myself. In the years I guided hunters, nearly thirty-five clients killed more than sixty turkeys, which I called in.  And that was the key to it… they didn’t want to ambush one, or kill one off the roost or even use a decoy. It was old time turkey hunting at it’s very best.  

       Most of today’s young hunters don’t seem to care about that.  There are things today that were not thought of then.  Decoy’s, calls on smart phones, permanent blinds, and baiting are only a part of it. I’ll talk about some of that next week.

       I learned a lot of what I know about wild turkeys thru my grandfather and then turkey biologists working for the Missouri Conservation Commission back in the 1960’s. The Missouri Department of Conservation didn’t exist then and we’d be better off if it didn’t exist now in my opinion. I believe it is a corrupt agency with millions of dollars and agents who regularly break the law with no consequences, and no desire to bring back turkey numbers if it hurts revenue. 

       The ‘Department of Conservation’, established in 1982 after the1/8 cent conservation tax passed and money became plentiful for them, DID NOT EVER STOCK WILD TURKEY OR DEER. The “Conservation Commission” did that back in the 50’s and 60’s.  The latter agency we refer to today as the MDC, stocked some grouse and prairie chicken that have gone nowhere and the otter, which we watch decimate our streams and private ponds today.

       Wild turkeys now are at the lowest number I can remember since the 1960’s and in next weeks column I will tell you why and how landowners can bring them back.  In the meantime, you can read another story or two about wild turkey and some photos I have taken of them, on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.

       

       

I will mention again that I have finally gotten my spring magazine printed and mailed. If you are a subscriber you should get yours this week.  If you aren’t a subscriber, get to be one by calling our office, 417-777-5227.