WHY UPLAND HUNTERS USE BLAZE ORANGE

Perhaps the main reason we upland bird hunters wear blaze orange is due to the laws in many areas we hunt. Another reason is that we have been told over and over that it is safer than not wearing the color. What really is the reason?

Mammals have eyes that contain a retina on the back of the eye ball. There are about a quarter billion photo receptors in the retina. They are called rods and cones. The rods and cones absorb different wavelengths of light.

We use the rods for dim-light and vision to the peripheral areas surrounding us. Although they are more sensitive to light, they do not provide either sharp images or color vision. That is what makes low light images appear fuzzy as does the images to the sides of our field of vision. Rods are very sensitive and respond best to dim light. They absorb all wavelengths of visible light but their input is perceived only in gray tones.

The cones work in bright light to give us great color vision. Cones need bright light for activation but have pigments that furnish a vivid color view of the world.

The addition or lack of light as when we move from darkness into bright light is adapted to automatically as the retina adjusts to the amount of light present.

With humans bright colors such as blaze orange look bright. The human eye is protected by a filter that blocks about 99 percent of UV light from entering the eye. It is like sunglasses.

Blaze orange absorbs UV rays that humans cannot see and turn them into longer wavelengths they can see. The orange reflects less UV that animals see well and more of the rays they do not.

This color correction perceived by game becomes a neutral gray. It is still highly visible to other hunters and has resulted in blaze orange being required of hunters to be worn in the field.

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Too Many Turkeys

They stepped out of the timber into the little grassy patch before me, and began chasing grasshoppers like grade school kids chasing candy scattered along a parade route. There were a dozen of them, all poults which looked to be the same age, and probably hatched as late as mid-summer. A young wild turkey looks goofy, and acts goofy. This bunch appeared to be ecstatic about those grasshoppers. One young jake spread his wings and ran around in a circle with his neck stretched out, chasing another brood mate. In the excitement, a couple of them ran around and jumped high in the air and it looked as if they were all about half drunk. I couldn’t help but smile, but I couldn’t shoot. If I had, I would have killed three or four of them.

That happens when you are hunting fall turkeys.If you aren’t careful you very easily can put shot into young brood mates, killing or crippling one you don’t see as you zero in on a moving target. I have had that happen before. One of those occasions has stayed with me for 20 years.

I had received on consignment, which is basically a one-year loan, a Mossberg 835 Ulti-Mag pump shotgun which was one of their better quality pump guns, using 2-3/4, 3 or 3-1/2 inch shells. It was a long-barreled waterfowl and turkey gun with screw in chokes, nicely checkered walnut and an engraved receiver. I hadn’t used those 3-1/2 inch shells, and they are a devastating load for long distance shooting. You can hardly practice with them, because they clobber your shoulder and give you a powerful headache. Too many hunters stretch the range of that shell, but I can truthfully say I have killed geese and ducks with steel 3-1/2 inch loads at fifty yards on a regular basis.

I made the mistake of taking that powerful shotgun and three of those long shells on a fall turkey hunt. To make matters worse, I used a modified choke, which spread the pattern more than I should have wanted. I was hunting on a landowner I didn’t know very well, and in an area I was unfamiliar with. About mid afternoon, I stepped out of the timber to the edge of a field with hip-high grass, and saw a young jake stick his head up out of the growth about 40 yards away.

I quickly leveled off on him and at the roar of that twelve gauge cannon, a dozen turkeys I hadn’t seen came up out of that grass. One of them was the young gobbler, or so I thought. How could I have missed him? On the second shot, he folded in flight and came down hard. And I was very happy for a second or two. When I walked toward him I heard the gobbler I had first shot at flopping around in that high grass. I had goofed up! But after all, I was allowed two turkeys. I wasn’t allowed a third though. And as I waded into the grass, a third turkey jumped up from a distance, struggling to fly. It was badly hurt, and couldn’t gain any altitude, and then couldn’t really run away.

I can’t stand to cripple anything, but I had, unintentionally, so I chased the young hen a ways and used the third shell to dispatch of her. I had calculated she couldn’t survive anyway.

Now I have three turkeys, and I am a violator. I believe in following the laws, and I do not violate game and fish laws intentionally, but I also don’t waste anything I kill, so I tagged two of them and cleaned the third. I took one of the young jakes to the landowner and told him what had happened, then took the young hen to a widow lady with some children who lived a couple of miles away adjacent to him. I kept the first young gobbler and ate it.

But that is not the end of the story. The landowner's son, noting that I was an outdoor writer writing for several newspapers, told folks around the area what a greedy lawbreaker I was, in killing three fall turkeys. He took the story to the local newspaper publisher, who must have wondered if he wanted my column in his newspaper after hearing what I had done. No one, of course ever heard what really happened until now. Oh, I told the newspaper publisher what had taken place and where two of those three turkeys had gone, but who knows if he believed it.

I don’t use that shotgun anymore, except for waterfowl. The shells are too expensive anyhow! I use a regular 3-inch magnum shell for turkeys…and I am very careful in hunting young fall turkeys which hang together so tightly. But even so, I have accidentally killed two young turkeys with one shot on three different occasions in the past 25 years of fall hunting.

Not this week however. I watched that flock take off at a trot, in a beeline for the timber across the little opening, and then a few minutes later, 10 or 12 more came out, a little out of range, and followed them. The good news is, I will get one before the season ends this weekend…probably. Some more good news is, there were at least 20 poults there that hatched this summer. I hope the hatch was as successful in many other areas of the Ozarks. The bad news is, October goes by too quickly and fall never lasts long enough.

If you like turkey hunting, you will want to get the new book we just published for nationally known writer Jim Spencer, entitled, “Bad Birds”. Spencer is a friend of mine, and great turkey hunter who is nuts about the pastime of turkey hunting. He hunts each spring all across the country, and he has compiled a collection of stories about the hard-to-get wild gobblers he remembers most. The first books off the press have been numbered and will be signed by the author and inscribed to you if you want to order one. These are limited in number, so don’t waste time ordering one. Send twenty dollars to Jim Spencer at P.O. Box 758, Calico Rock, Arkansas, 72519. First orders will get the lowest numbers. Tell Jim to whom you want the book signed, and how you want it inscribed, especially if it is a gift. I guess it would make a good Christmas gift if you have someone on your list who loves turkey hunting.

I hope you will vote next week. I am sick of the TV. ads, sick of politics, sick of the kind of people we have to vote for, on either side. But I will vote, because so many great men died before I was born to see to it we have a free nation with the values we have, and we aren’t worth much if we let them sacrifice as they did and we won’t even go out to vote. Just hold your nose and go do it. Vote for whomever you might hope will do the right thing when it comes down to it.

There is a photo of an October wildflower on my website I can’t identify. It was growing alongside an Ozark stream in large gravel, and I can’t figure out what it is. Maybe you know it. If so, tell me. It is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com.

My address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 and my e-mail is lightninridge@windstream.net.

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Naked Ladies Cavorting

I saw several groups of naked ladies on the Buffalo River just last week, down at Gilbert, Arkansas. It seems awfully late in the year for naked ladies to be out, but there they were, only a little ways from the river. Most of the naked ladies I see around my area are pink, but these were bright crimson, maybe due to the cooler nights.

Oh, in case you have the wrong picture, ‘naked ladies’ are a type of flower, sometimes called ‘naked lilies’, blooms growing on a long stalk, which has no green chlorophyll, and no leaves.  I have never seen them in October, and I have never seen red ones. Mother Nature gets all confused at times, with mild fall temperatures. There are some white lilacs blooming up here on Lightnin’ Ridge this morning, and one big bright red rose.

If you have never seen the Buffalo River and the country around it, you have missed something. Now might be the best time to go, because the fall colors will be at their best over the next three weeks. The river is spectacular, and it isn’t crowded at all in October, because the chaos-and-capsize-canoers, which like to drink beer and get wet, are gone.  People who see the river in October are a bit different, a quieter and more reverent type. There is some fairly good fishing now, because the river has lots of smallmouth bass.

To the southeast of the Buffalo River is a large tract of National Forestland, spectacular in beauty and wildness. Thirty years ago I explored much of it for the state’s Natural Heritage Commission and it is rough and wild. Right now, it is difficult country for hikers to navigate because of the ice storm that hit the area two years ago.


In 1971, a year before the Buffalo River was turned over to the National Park Service; I was just out of college, and a very young Chief Naturalist for Arkansas State Parks. Their best park was on the Buffalo River just 14 miles south of Yellville, a place known today as Buffalo Point. That spring, I had about a dozen newly-hired college student-seasonal naturalists meeting at Buffalo River and we got an invitation to go visit a big cave over to the east of the park.  It was northwest of Mt. View, Arkansas in a Forest Service recreation area. They were just starting to develop it, known as Blanchard Springs Caverns. 


We toured it with headlamps, seeing the very beginning of developed trails through huge rooms of spectacular formations. A year or so later they found a skeleton of a prehistoric man determined to have fallen and died there 800 years before, only a few yards from where we were. But that day we experienced what is now the Blanchard Springs Caverns, and if you haven’t seen the caverns and surrounding area, spend a day there when you visit Buffalo River Country. There are a couple of tours through the caverns, they aren’t expensive, and you won’t believe your eyes when you see the inside of that huge cave with all the different formations. Only a few miles away there are Forest Service campgrounds, Barkshead and Gunner Pool, and miles and miles of hiking trails, bike trails, and horseback riding. Sylamore Creek flows through it, (yes, Sylamore) and below the cave there are campgrounds available as well.  The huge roaring cold springs which flow from the caverns from beneath a high rock bluff have been an attraction for decades, and the Civilian Conservation Corps did some fantastic work there on walls, walkways and bridges back in the 1930’s. A dam they built below the springs backs up a small lake just above an old mill, and Val Davenport Matty tells me her parents go there often and catch trout which are stocked there. They say the fishing is great.   

Val was there that day in 1971 when all those state park naturalists met for breakfast before taking a bus to Blanchard Springs. She was a 16-year-old waitress for her mother, who operated the park restaurant.  I spent a couple of hours talking to her the other evening, at her home just outside the park. Val loves the area, and knows it all as well as anyone, since she grew up there. We talked about one of the old timers who worked at the park back then, by the name of Rufus Still.   Rufus had a gift Ozark hill people talked about often back then. He could make warts go away. Val might have doubted it if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.

“I was in college and came home for the summer, and had developed warts on my hands and forehead,” she said.  Daddy told me to go see Rufus, and if he couldn’t make them go away he would take me to see a dermatologist in the city.  I didn’t believe for a minute it would work, but he touched each wart with a needle and told me to go home and forget about them.  He said that in a couple of weeks I would be putting on my socks some morning and I would think about them and they would be gone.  And that’s exactly what happened.

Rufus was one of many of the old hill people or river people whom I talked to and got to know and respected so much. Modern society looks at them as backwards and uneducated people, but they were not. They had something special, and they had a different kind of education that comes from being so close to the land, so in tune with a spiritual existence modern culture knows so little of. They are all gone now, and I miss them. They were special people, and I can’t be there without feeling a bond with them, driving back roads and seeing old cabins and places on the river which are still like it was back then, fifty years ago, or a hundred and fifty years ago.

If you go to see the Buffalo, or Blanchard Springs, go see Val. She owns and rents log cabins with fireplaces there only a short distance from the Buffalo River, a great place to spend the night and feel like you are a part of the river the way it was a hundred years or more ago.  She can also help you get a canoe to float the river, and have someone pick you up at the end of the day. And she can tell you special places to see that you might otherwise miss. Her phone number is 870-404-4987. Tell her an old naturalist sent you.
   
Our Swap Meet held on October 9, was a huge success, and we raised a great deal of money to use this winter to buy coats and shoes for needy grade school children. Thirty-eight people donated $670 that day, and I sold $430 worth of books and magazines. Folks at the Arcola, Missouri Christian Church donated $383 more last Sunday, so we have just short of $1500 in that fund. I’ll continue to let readers know where the money is going and how many children will benefit from it, between now and Christmas. I want to thank the Brighton Assembly of God congregation for making their gymnasium available to us at no cost, and pitching in to help in so many ways.

See my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com or write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.  The e-mail address is lightninridge@windstream.net.

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JIGGING SPOONS FOR COLD BASS

As the air temperatures cool each fall, the jigging spoon becomes a popular lure. As lakes in the north approach ice over, the southern third of Illinois becomes more popular to ground pounders.

Die hard bass fishermen look for open water and more comfortable temperatures. Although not warm, the waters of a power plant lake can be warmer due to the warm water discharge.

Although a number of baits work on such lakes. In winter, the jigging spoon comes into it own to catch bass on the weed beds and off the points. A few bass are picked up along the drop offs. During the day, ground pounders chase schooling bass around the lake as they in turn are pursuing shad. Toward evening, the action seems to drop off.

Jigging spoons fished straight up and down allow one to work structure and schools of shad with pinpoint accuracy. In cold water, a slow lift drop fluttering pattern with a long pause is best. Using a slip bobber rig one can mooch the bait along. The idea is to mimic a troubled baitfish. Predator fish see it as an easy meal. Adding a minnow or some other form of live bait improves the odds. The flash of the spoon draws fish in and the scent of the bait is just too much for the fish to resist.

For bass, a 1/4 to one ounce spoon is best. Crappie and bluegill require a 1/8 ounce or less. Most of the time bright colors such as silver or gold are desirable. Most spoons are long and narrow, resulting in a straight, fast drop and tight wobble. They can be cast into specific structure more accurately.

Anglers using jigging spoons must be able to identify the structure in which they are jigging. Fish tend to hold in and around creek channels. The best locations include shoals on the inside curve of a creek channel, the ends of bluffs associated with the channel, and points dropping into the channel.

Never tie a line directly to a spoon. Use a swivel or split ring. Tying directly to the spoon affects its action. Swivels reduce the line twist. Heavy line also affects the action of a spoon. It tends to inhibit the fluttering action on the fall. Probably the best line is 10 to 14 pound test.

As good as jigging spoons are for vertical jigging they also cast well. They can be used to cast to locations not otherwise accessible. If fish are feeding on the surface, a fast pumping retrieve is recommended as soon as the lure hits the water. It keeps the spoon skipping across the surface or just under it. If the fish are suspended deeper, one can count down the lure before beginning the retrieve. The fast sinking rate of the spoon allows it to get down in swifter current, whereas other lures would be swept off target. By varying the count down, one can fish the lure at various depths until fish are located.

Jigging spoons are an excellent off season lure for the colder months. Why not give them a try?

                                                                Don Gasaway - The Ground Pounder

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Hard Decisions for the Outdoorsman

Fall turkey season… not such a good thing early in October when there are still a few copperheads in the woods, and spider webs across the trails. Early October is such a good time to catch bass on topwater lures, and it is hard to forget that and go packing the shotgun out into the woods in pursuit of a half grown turkey poult. But then again, I have eaten a lot of fish lately, and nothing is much better eating than a young jake that has grown to 12 or 14 pounds. The solution to this is something Dennis

Whiteside and I came up with years ago… you float the river with the shotgun on one side of you and your rod and reel on the other side.

If the bass are tearing up the topwater lures, you put the turkey hunting on the back burner, but if they aren’t, you get out and scan the likely-looking places and do some calling, early and late in the day. Every now and then you have one of those days when you catch lots of bass and call in a few turkeys as well.

Whiteside recalls his younger days, when he spent lots of hours in a tree stand bow-hunting.  “You know,” he recalls, “bowhunting involves a lot of patience, and hours spent watching and waiting and doing nothing but anticipating. As I get older I’m getting to where I am not so patient. Bass and turkeys provide action in October.”

He is right, you can’t do everything. I use to try, when I was younger. That’s why I am shorter now, I wore myself down so much. I hunted prairie chicken and ducks in Nebraska, geese in Manitoba, ruffed grouse in Ontario… and fished hard in Canada and the Ozarks. And I bow-hunted for deer. I did all of that during one October, many years back. Those days are the reason I’m not quite six feet tall anymore. Gloria Jean says I never was, but I think I had to be closer then than I am now.

Do we have a good wild turkey hatch this year? It is hard to say now.  You’ll be able to see in December and January what kind of hatch we had, but right now, when some expert tries to tell you what the hatch was, he is guessing, unless he is following several hens with radio transmitters as biologists often do. The success of the hatch is different each year as you go from one area to another. There might be a field where you see a hen with fifteen poults in October, but you don’t know if she hatched them all, some may be from other hens. Then in the next field edge, you may see a hen with only one or two poults. 

Where I live, we have, over the past few years, had much better production of young turkeys than in the Big Piney region where I grew up, and on to the south and east down toward the bootheel.  I can tell you in the dead of winter what the hatch was like this spring.  But it will be different from one region of the Ozarks to another.

Sometime in October, maybe a bit later when the leaves are brightly colored and the sunset comes earlier, I’ll call up some young turkeys that have lost their mama. But I will be there hoping for that rare occasion when I might position myself between a field and a roost area and call in a big old gobbler. During most of the Octobers past I have noticed how much dumber those five-month-old jakes are, the gawky ones with long skinny legs and cocklebur-sized beards. And I have noticed they are very good to eat when you smoke one whole. 

But to tell you the truth, I don’t think you will ever find me sitting in a tree-stand with a bow again in October. I once did a lot of that, and loved it, but there are things I find so much more attractive now, like seeing a big bass exploding the surface beneath a buzz-spin, rooster pheasants exploding to flight from corn stubble, or kicking a sharptail grouse out of a shortgrass thicket in the sandhills. The memories I have of ruffed grouse and geese in Canada make me wonder if I shouldn’t forget these turkeys as well. There is nothing like Canada in October, where fall is giving way to winter. It all makes me wonder why we couldn’t have a much much longer October. Surely there’s a place in heaven where it is October all the time.

In my October-November issue of the Lightnin’ Ridge outdoor magazine, you will find stories on fall turkey hunting and bow-hunting for deer and fishing in the Ozarks. But Colonel Calhoun Hedgerow has us all in trouble with his column questioning whether women are as smart as men when it comes to outdoor subjects. If you get the magazine, please don’t read his column! 

And you can get the magazine just by calling my executive secretary, Ms. Wiggins at 417-777- 5227. Or you can get a free copy by coming to our swap meet this coming Saturday, October 9th. We are going to have a bunch of antique guns and fishing lures, and outboard motors for sale. There will be an abundance of new and used hunting and fishing stuff there as well, but it is the old stuff that attracts me. That and the outdoor art and old magazines. We now have about forty tables spoken for, still a few left if you want to join us and sell your stuff. It is all free to the public. There will be a small fee for dinner if you eat with us.

We have some ladies coming with canned goods like pickles and relish, and baked goods, which may all be gone before noon, and one vendor is bringing assorted packets of seasonings and spices you can use to make your own venison summer sausage and jerky this fall.  If you have a canoe, or boat and motor you may bring it and display it outside. 

We will be there from 9 to 3, with the deer de-boning exhibition at 2 p.m.  This all takes place at the Brighton Assembly of God Church gymnasium, just off Highway 13 about 17 miles north of Springfield, about 7 miles south of Bolivar. Watch for the Highway 215 turn-off going to Brighton and Pleasant Hope, and we will have signs up directing you to the gymnasium, less than a quarter mile off the highway. I will be there, with all Lightnin’ Ridge help, Dorothy Loges and Sondra Gray and Gloria Jean. We have asked Colonel Hedgerow to not come, but my executive secretary, Ms. Wiggins, might make it because she would like to sell her 1986 Datsun pick-up if it is still running. And she wants to sell her manual typewriter and her coon-hound. 

I will be there to sign my books, and the proceeds from that will go toward buying coats and shoes this winter for needy grade school children in the Ozarks.

See the details to all this on my website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com, or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.com.  The address is Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 and Ms. Wiggins sometimes can be reached in our executive offices by calling 417-777-5227.

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