I met last week with Missouri Department of Conservation Director Sara Pauley for several hours at my Panther Creek Kids retreat. I have some hope and some doubts. But she asked that I send her some proposals as to projects where she can work with me to make needed, positive steps for real conservation. I sent her these today. My main worry is that each of these will cost the MDC money, rather than making them in. Nevertheless, how great it would be if we could make these things happen. More about the meeting in my next column. In the meantime, consider these proposals. Why couldn’t they happen?

Project number 1…. Truman Lake has 118 thousand acres of public land owned by all of us through the Corps of Engineers. The majority of that land is or could be, a wildlife paradise. I saw it 30 years ago when it was, and I can go into great detail about what happened there. But it has been allowed to degrade to a point where coveys of quail once found there have disappeared. My assessment would be a loss of 80 percent of those coveys.

Waterfowl numbers now passing through may be declining worse than that, as the pin oak trees around the lake are gone and smartweed is a fraction of what it was. In the place of the habitat that waterfowl, quail and rabbits need, there are now thousands of acres of cockleburs. There is a 1000-acre tract now being leased to tenant crop farmers to make the MDC money. It is becoming an ecological desert.

I am proposing turning this area into a wildlife conservation area without making a profit form it, and concentrating, for four years, on increading quail and rabbit (and non-game species) numbers.

I would ask you to talk with three men who I believe know more about quail than any of your biologists. I think you will agree when you meet them. This project would have an end result of creating quail hunting for hundreds of ordinary citizens on that tract, because those men are doing that right now on their private lands.

Project number 2… On the Pomme de Terre River above Pomme de Terre Lake, there is a bridge known as McCracken Bridge. Twenty-five years ago, I started fishing this three or four mile section of river above the bridge, where the river meets the lake. I have never seen a more puzzling, or productive stretch of water for smallmouth bass. Twenty years ago, we started finding smallmouth migrating up that stretch of river as early as late February, sometimes mid March. In the summer and fall, those smallmouth are gone, and I am certain they return to the lake, and there they disperse.

Pomme de Terre is not known as a smallmouth lake. In that stretch of time extending to about mid-April or early May, they move like an army of smallmouth all the way up that stretch of water to a shoal that has a steep rate of fall, and seem to go no farther. I think they spawn up the river earlier than smallmouth usually do, and then leave. Over the years I have been able to follow their movement. They often stay in one area for a few days and then move upward to new eddys and shoals.

As I followed them for years, I was amazed at the size of those smallmouth. One day in late March about ten years ago, we caught more than 100 smallmouth in a stretch of deep water below a shoal. Almost all were keeping size (limit on bass there is 13 inches) and about 20 were above 3 pounds – two or three above four pounds. Except for Canada, it was the greatest smallmouth fishing day I have ever experienced.

If you knew how many days I have floated Ozark streams, 15 or 20 since I was 12 years old, that day would amaze you, as it did me. If the MDC would work with us, I have two smallmouth experts who likely have a greater handle on smallmouth biology than anyone you know. One is Dennis Whiteside, who worked with me as a naturalist for the Park System in Arkansas in the 1970’s. In the past 20 years he has worked as a smallmouth guide on more rivers in Missouri and Arkansas than I can name. If you want to see the rivers of our state through the eyes of a true smallmouth biologist… go on a float trip with him and I will go along as well.

In all the years I fished that stretch of river that baffles me as a smallmouth habitat, no one in my boat, or Whiteside’s boat, ever kept a smallmouth. Several years ago, Mennonite fishermen from Dallas County moved into the area, sometimes 12 to15 boats per day, a couple of times per week, with three or four kids and a woman in each boat, and I have watched them keep every smallmouth they catch. Considering that with the family in the boat the legal limit might be 30 or so smallmouth, and that there are a dozen or so boats at a time, it is no stretch of the imagination that 200 or more smallmouth might be taken from those waters in one day.

Last year I witnessed seven of their boats congregated below one shoal for hours. I have not landed one smallmouth from that stretch in three years exceeding a pound and a half in weight and numbers are down considerably. Fishing pressure is devastating them. It has similarly affected white bass. The stretch is full of ten-inch whites, but few are found that are larger.

My proposal is to post the waters from McCracken Bridge to that steep shoal about three miles upstream as a smallmouth protection zone, where no smallmouth can be kept. Tag several dozen or several hundred, and see what happens. I think this will teach your young biologists a great deal about smallmouth growth and the need for protection. In four years, if you reinstall the taking of only three smallmouth a day instead of six, and install a slot limit between 12 and 14 inches, you will see those 2 to 4 pound smallmouth return. So let’s do it.

I will send you a few other proposals soon, the foremost among them is urging you to visit a stretch of river where a landowner, working with the Soil Conservation Service has fenced his cattle from the river, put in a buffer strip of trees and native grasses to stop erosion, and drilled a well to water his cattle from. As for protecting a river, it is nothing short of a miracle. This agriculture department program works… to protect rivers like nothing I have ever seen. but… the landowner must finance all this himself, to receive reimbursement for what he has done from the Soil Conservation Service.

Their representatives are anxious to work with river-bottom owners. I have talked to many of these landowners who want to do this river protection work, but do not have the money. Go with me to talk to one on the Niangua whose cattle are making a mess out of one stretch of the river, and you will see how easy it is to make a difference in a hurry. The MDC could finance the first phase of the SCS program – a well and fencing – and be reimbursed for it. This is real conservation, so I will help you meet and talk about this with landowners who want to help change river degradation, and make it a possibility now.

I want to hear from readers… Write Box 22, Bolivar, MO. 65613 or email lightninridge47@gmail.com.

This is a sample of the smallmouth in the section of the Pomme River 15 years ago.  One project I proposed to Mrs. Pauley involves restoring fish like this.

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