Like a lot of you I just got my copy of the Missouri Conservationist. This issue touting the tremendous increase in prairie chicken reproduction this year, estimated at 80% normal being 50% or less. The last few years have been dismal due to cold wet springs, this year with normal conditions, the prairie chickens responded with a big hatch. Of course the Conservation Commission takes credit for better management of the prairie chicken areas. I realize that prairie chickens breed and hatch on a slightly different schedule than bobwhite quail, but dosen't it seem likely that quail would have reacted similarly to what is largely a weather issue? Yet we get the doom and gloom prognostication on quail. Nobody can shoot a prairie chicken in Missouri, hasn't been a legal bird in my lifetime, I'm 57. Draw your own conclusions.
Prairie Chicken Population Rebounds
- Thread starter oldandnew
- Start date
only a pointer
Banned
i was working in nevada mo years ago old laying block in the middle of nowhere in the country and i looked up and saw 9 or 10 sailing like they do,now i was in my 20s then so im guessing they were pr chickens ???
Cobblestone
New member
Hunted a PC Restoration place yesterday that used to hold 4 nice covey's of quail. Never seen a chicken there and the quail have disapeared in the last year or two.
M. R. Byrd
Well-known member
Glad for the increase, whatever the reason.
setterbud
New member
Got this from Larry Dablemont Outdoors
don't know how many read him but he is always on the MDC for their spending .
sources within the Jefferson City office of the MDC have reported to me that in recent years nine million dollars has been spent and budgeted for bringing back a token population of prairie
chicken in a tiny percentage of west Missouri land deemed suitable for their survival. One million dollars has been budgeted to determine the number of black bears within the state. Where do these millions end up... In whose pockets? With no independent auditing possible, the answer can never be known.
A million dollars has been budgeted to determine black bear numbers. Can a million dollars tell us how many bears we have? Who gets the money?
A new year is upon us, and if you have heard of small but growing groups of outdoorsmen in different areas of the Ozarks forming what is known as Common Sense Conservationists, you might want to know more and become involved. If so contact me and I will tell you all about it. There are many outdoorsmen in the Ozarks who sincerely try to follow game laws who are charged with silly technical things involving hunting and fishing, who have no recourse but to pay several hundred dollars in fines because they cannot pay the higher cost of going to court to prove their innocence.
Next month I will tell the story of several of these people in this column. The Missouri Department of Conservation is the only state agency which cannot be audited, and there are no controls over what they do. I too once believed strongly in our state conservation agency, but things have changed in recent years, because of the tremendous amounts of money the agency now receives and the tremendous power they have, unprecedented in our state. Some of their agents… and I said SOME… have become little more than thugs. There is one working for them today who was proven to have broken the law in the exercise of his official duties, violating the rights of an innocent man he was trying to convict.
I don’t ask anyone to believe what I tell them about what is going on without looking at the situation and deciding for themselves. But few people ever see what is happening, because it is kept hidden from the public. The MDC has a great deal of control over much of the news media, which refuses to write or broadcast what is being done.
The “management” of our public lands often involves widescale timber cutting for enormous profit, which has nothing to do with conservation; clearing, burning, and converting wildlife cover to leveled land which they rent to farmers in return for a percentage of the cash crop. None of us have any say in that “management”. It is there for anyone to look at if they choose to do so.
There is little way anyone can defend millions upon millions of dollars in spending which involves downright corruption, and that too is there for anyone to look at if they just will. The stories about conservation agents breaking the law, about politically involved people getting their property taxes paid for them, about attempts to take folks land from them… all of that is there for those who will just look at what is happening.
The only way Missourians can have a voice in what the conservation department is doing, the only way we can have a voice saving our streams, our forests, and our wildlife is to form groups whose numbers have to be listened to. If you are tired of seeing innocent people run over, and your tax and license monies wasted, if you want to form such a group in your area, contact me and I will help you do so.
********************************************
Change is inevitable, but I don’t know if it is always good. Sometimes, change just doesn’t make sense. Thirty-five years ago I was a young writer living in north Arkansas close to Bull Shoals Lake, which I still consider the greatest lake ever, with Truman Lake a close second. The Kings River, the War Eagle and Crooked Creek were all close, and they were magnificent streams back then. Today they are only a shell of what they were; progress and change have nearly destroyed what they were then.
In the 1980’s I took my kids to a McDonald's restaurant in Harrison, Arkansas not long after it opened, and a young girl named Robin was the manager there. A few days ago I drove through and stopped, and she is still the manager there. McDonald's probably doesn’t know what a treasure they have in her. They should send young employees to watch her in action.
It use to be, way back then, that old timers came in and drank coffee and talked about hunting and fishing, and sports, which was mostly the Razorbacks. Every day there were copies there, of the state’s two largest newspapers, the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette. Because of the competition, they were exceptional newspapers. I wrote a weekly outdoor column back then for the Gazette, but no one recognized me from the mugshot. I would go in most mornings and have a cup of coffee and read the sports pages, always interested in what was going on with the St. Louis Cardinals… baseball and football teams.
Those two newspapers combined about 15 years ago, and when I was there last week, there were two or three copies of what is now the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and some old timers were sitting there reading them.
When I moved to Bolivar, Missouri 20 years ago, I found a daily Springfield newspaper there to read when I drank coffee in the morning, and I even wrote an outdoor column for them for 10 years or so, when they were locally owned and before a giant company from the east bought them out. In time, even if there was little else, you could read the sports page and find the standings of different teams, who was pitching that day and in the winter, what basketball or football teams were playing and where. Of course back then, McDonald's only had to pay about a quarter for that paper. The local restaurant had a big round table where a group of 7 or 8 local old timers could sit and read the sports page and talk about whatever was going on at the time. Later in the morning that big table was taken over by a group of elderly ladies who basically did the same thing, except for different topics of conversation.
Last month they tore the old McDonald's down and built a new one, not so much bigger but really fancy. They got rid of the big table, and there isn’t much of a place now for the old-timers to gather and talk. They don’t have a newspaper to read any more, and when I called and talked to the owner, he said they were trying to cut costs by eliminating it. The newspaper isn’t as good as it once was and it costs 50 cents or so more now. But what the new McDonald's has with their little bitty cramped together tables and chairs is several big-screen TV’s which no one ever seems to watch. I guess the young crowd they wish to cater to doesn’t read anymore, and doesn’t need a place to talk and gather. Younger folks are in too big a hurry for that.
Actually, I suppose that older folks aren’t of much importance to McDonald's any more, but they forget they got where they are today because so many of us older folks brought our kids there when we were much younger. We gave them a lot of money for lots of years.
Around the Ozarks, you will find McDonald's restaurants like the one in Harrison, Arkansas where there are still newspaper racks near the front counter, where you can read the sports page and see who’s in first place and who is pitching today and that kind of thing, if nothing more. But not here at this new one… They are trying to cut costs, so the newspapers had to go, and those big tables took up too much room. Actually, for the money we spend, I imagine us folks over fifty probably take up too much room too, and stay too long for what we are worth.
Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net. My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com
don't know how many read him but he is always on the MDC for their spending .
sources within the Jefferson City office of the MDC have reported to me that in recent years nine million dollars has been spent and budgeted for bringing back a token population of prairie
chicken in a tiny percentage of west Missouri land deemed suitable for their survival. One million dollars has been budgeted to determine the number of black bears within the state. Where do these millions end up... In whose pockets? With no independent auditing possible, the answer can never be known.
A million dollars has been budgeted to determine black bear numbers. Can a million dollars tell us how many bears we have? Who gets the money?
A new year is upon us, and if you have heard of small but growing groups of outdoorsmen in different areas of the Ozarks forming what is known as Common Sense Conservationists, you might want to know more and become involved. If so contact me and I will tell you all about it. There are many outdoorsmen in the Ozarks who sincerely try to follow game laws who are charged with silly technical things involving hunting and fishing, who have no recourse but to pay several hundred dollars in fines because they cannot pay the higher cost of going to court to prove their innocence.
Next month I will tell the story of several of these people in this column. The Missouri Department of Conservation is the only state agency which cannot be audited, and there are no controls over what they do. I too once believed strongly in our state conservation agency, but things have changed in recent years, because of the tremendous amounts of money the agency now receives and the tremendous power they have, unprecedented in our state. Some of their agents… and I said SOME… have become little more than thugs. There is one working for them today who was proven to have broken the law in the exercise of his official duties, violating the rights of an innocent man he was trying to convict.
I don’t ask anyone to believe what I tell them about what is going on without looking at the situation and deciding for themselves. But few people ever see what is happening, because it is kept hidden from the public. The MDC has a great deal of control over much of the news media, which refuses to write or broadcast what is being done.
The “management” of our public lands often involves widescale timber cutting for enormous profit, which has nothing to do with conservation; clearing, burning, and converting wildlife cover to leveled land which they rent to farmers in return for a percentage of the cash crop. None of us have any say in that “management”. It is there for anyone to look at if they choose to do so.
There is little way anyone can defend millions upon millions of dollars in spending which involves downright corruption, and that too is there for anyone to look at if they just will. The stories about conservation agents breaking the law, about politically involved people getting their property taxes paid for them, about attempts to take folks land from them… all of that is there for those who will just look at what is happening.
The only way Missourians can have a voice in what the conservation department is doing, the only way we can have a voice saving our streams, our forests, and our wildlife is to form groups whose numbers have to be listened to. If you are tired of seeing innocent people run over, and your tax and license monies wasted, if you want to form such a group in your area, contact me and I will help you do so.
********************************************
Change is inevitable, but I don’t know if it is always good. Sometimes, change just doesn’t make sense. Thirty-five years ago I was a young writer living in north Arkansas close to Bull Shoals Lake, which I still consider the greatest lake ever, with Truman Lake a close second. The Kings River, the War Eagle and Crooked Creek were all close, and they were magnificent streams back then. Today they are only a shell of what they were; progress and change have nearly destroyed what they were then.
In the 1980’s I took my kids to a McDonald's restaurant in Harrison, Arkansas not long after it opened, and a young girl named Robin was the manager there. A few days ago I drove through and stopped, and she is still the manager there. McDonald's probably doesn’t know what a treasure they have in her. They should send young employees to watch her in action.
It use to be, way back then, that old timers came in and drank coffee and talked about hunting and fishing, and sports, which was mostly the Razorbacks. Every day there were copies there, of the state’s two largest newspapers, the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette. Because of the competition, they were exceptional newspapers. I wrote a weekly outdoor column back then for the Gazette, but no one recognized me from the mugshot. I would go in most mornings and have a cup of coffee and read the sports pages, always interested in what was going on with the St. Louis Cardinals… baseball and football teams.
Those two newspapers combined about 15 years ago, and when I was there last week, there were two or three copies of what is now the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and some old timers were sitting there reading them.
When I moved to Bolivar, Missouri 20 years ago, I found a daily Springfield newspaper there to read when I drank coffee in the morning, and I even wrote an outdoor column for them for 10 years or so, when they were locally owned and before a giant company from the east bought them out. In time, even if there was little else, you could read the sports page and find the standings of different teams, who was pitching that day and in the winter, what basketball or football teams were playing and where. Of course back then, McDonald's only had to pay about a quarter for that paper. The local restaurant had a big round table where a group of 7 or 8 local old timers could sit and read the sports page and talk about whatever was going on at the time. Later in the morning that big table was taken over by a group of elderly ladies who basically did the same thing, except for different topics of conversation.
Last month they tore the old McDonald's down and built a new one, not so much bigger but really fancy. They got rid of the big table, and there isn’t much of a place now for the old-timers to gather and talk. They don’t have a newspaper to read any more, and when I called and talked to the owner, he said they were trying to cut costs by eliminating it. The newspaper isn’t as good as it once was and it costs 50 cents or so more now. But what the new McDonald's has with their little bitty cramped together tables and chairs is several big-screen TV’s which no one ever seems to watch. I guess the young crowd they wish to cater to doesn’t read anymore, and doesn’t need a place to talk and gather. Younger folks are in too big a hurry for that.
Actually, I suppose that older folks aren’t of much importance to McDonald's any more, but they forget they got where they are today because so many of us older folks brought our kids there when we were much younger. We gave them a lot of money for lots of years.
Around the Ozarks, you will find McDonald's restaurants like the one in Harrison, Arkansas where there are still newspaper racks near the front counter, where you can read the sports page and see who’s in first place and who is pitching today and that kind of thing, if nothing more. But not here at this new one… They are trying to cut costs, so the newspapers had to go, and those big tables took up too much room. Actually, for the money we spend, I imagine us folks over fifty probably take up too much room too, and stay too long for what we are worth.
Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613 or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net. My website is www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com
Cobblestone
New member
Setterbud,
I'd like to hear more.
I'd like to hear more.