Kentucky Elk and Ozark Cocklebur

I was informed last week by a Missouri Department of Conservation Department employee who asked that I keep his name confidential, that the elk, which the MDC will stock in the Peck Ranch area of south-central Missouri, will come from Kentucky. The department will get 400 to 500 animals, and the total cost of the whole program will cost more than a half million dollars.I have no idea where the figure comes from or what it encompasses, but that is a heck of a lot of money for 500 elk.

Now it seems that everyone who has a hunting and fishing license is receiving in the mail something referred to as the “Missouri Elk Drawing” from a group calling themselves the Appalachian Wildlife Foundation. It looks as if the MDC has either given or sold to this group a mailing list of Missouri hunting and fishing license holders.I would like to know more about this, and hope to contact some officials in Jefferson City and get some answers this week. This “AWF” group is asking Missourians to buy raffle tickets for 25 dollars, which will be entered in a series of drawings. The grand prize is touted to be worth over 30,000 dollars, and includes a 2011 Kentucky Bull Elk tag. What a coincidence! That’s where Missouri’s new elk herd will come from. I want to know how that Appalachian Wildlife Foundation got my address, and apparently the addresses of so many of us.

I was also informed that the Missouri Department of Conservation, due to financial difficulties, will cut the amount of wildlife management spending on Truman Lake’s 110,000 acres of public land by 50 percent. If there isn’t enough money to work on habitat there for small game and waterfowl which all of us can hunt, why are we seeing so many hundreds of thousands being spent on the introduction of elk, which will allow hunting for only a privileged few?

Truman Lake, which sets in the west central part of the southern half of the state, provides one of the largest tracts of public land available to Missouri hunters that is not part of a National Forest. Unlike National Forest lands in Missouri, those thousands of acres include upland habitat perfect for quail and rabbits and waterfowl. Twenty-five years ago, we could find several coveys of quail each day hunting those fields of natural cover and crops. There were rabbits everywhere, and in the fall, when water backed up into the vegetation a little and flooded the pin-oaks, the duck-hunting was spectacular. It is Corp of Engineers land which the state conservation department could have managed almost in its entirety. You could see that mix of upland habitat and mature forest being a hunter’s paradise. But over the years the quality of that habitat as steadily declined.

The deer and turkey are still there, and furbearers are thick. But waterfowl grow fewer in number each year, and the coveys of quail are down at least 80 percent. Much of that is because in those lowland fields around the lake, cockleburs have taken over, and there are expanses of those worthless weeds where nothing lives but small ground mammals. You can hardly walk through those acres of cockleburs. Last year I saw areas where the MDC, in the name of wildlife management, had mowed and bulldozed huge areas of cover that still remained without the cockleburs, burned off the vegetation and brush piles and eliminated great tracts of wildlife food and cover completely. If there is an explanation for it, no one seems to have it. In one of those areas a few years ago, we hunted rabbits an entire day with beagles, and found an abundance of cottontails. Last year our dogs couldn’t break a trail; the rabbits seemed to be non-existent. In some places where there had been briar and bramble and broam-sedge, the ground was bare enough to leave a boot print in the mud.

One of the Corps biologists I was hunting with shook his head and told me…”Their biologists destroy brush piles because they now call them ‘predator piles’. And while they do provide a place for a fox to raise a spring litter,” he said, “those are also brush piles rabbits use for escape. It is a new way of looking at things most of us old timers do not understand.”

I look at those huge tracts of cockleburs along the lake and realize that if, in the spring of the year, an effort was made to eliminate them and replace such tracts of ground with some natural vegetation and a few rows of crops like milo or soybeans or corn, quail and rabbits could come back. In 2011, the MDC will put no wildlife management effort into any Truman land below the 720-foot level. That is absolutely unacceptable. Most of the time, the lake level on Truman is at 705 to 708 feet above sea level. If you pushed up some low berms, or small dams only a few feet high at the level of about 710 or so, then pumped water from the lake above them, to create only small areas of marsh perhaps only a foot or two deep, where there could be a few rows of crops and selected replantings of vegetation, you could bring in and hold large numbers of wild ducks. It wouldn’t cost much, nor would it involve much equipment or personnel.

I wonder if a group of outdoorsmen approached the Corps and asked permission to do that on some selected spots around the lake, if it might be used as an experiment to show what could be done on a much larger level? I doubt that we could get permission to do anything like that because of government red tape. But any state conservation department certainly could. The MDC says they cannot. They are so strapped for money, and have to cut their management personnel, and practices there by 50 percent. No state agency in the world has more expensive equipment setting idle in sheds around the state than the MDC. They may have to sell some of it in order to pay for those 500 head of elk. Meanwhile, many of us wish they would buy a few hundred head of wild quail and work on establishing them somewhere. Maybe they could set up a new quail-hunting permit to make some extra money, something like the trophy elk permits they hope to sell soon.

For those of you living close enough to Joplin, Aurora or Springfield, I will be at all of these places in coming days. Most of you know I have written seven outdoor books, and I will be selling and signing them and giving away copies of my magazine, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Friday December 17 at Richard’s Hawgwild Barbecue restaurant in Aurora, and on Saturday, December 18, I will be at Southtown Sporting Goods in Joplin from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Then I’ll be at Christian Publishers Outlet bookstore on that same afternoon from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. I hope to see you at one of those places. I have seven of my books I will be selling at a discount, and signing, for Christmas gifts.

To get more information on acquiring one of my outdoor books or a Lightnin’ Ridge outdoor magazine subscription, you can call my executive secretary, Ms. Wiggins at 417 777 5227. They can be ordered on my website, via credit card… www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com.

Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, MO. 65613, or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net.