Outdoors with Larry Dablemont: What sounds like a trumpet?

We decided to take a short float trip one November afternoon,

down the river bordering some public hunting land. We have killed

several deer in such a manner—just drifting along so slowly and so

quietly you are scarcely noticed by wild creatures along the stream.

Often we cover the boat with a blind, but that afternoon, we didn’t.

Not much reason to disguise it when the occupants are wearing blaze

orange caps and vests.

An hour into the trip, we passed a harvested cornfield, and I

heard an unusual sound, something like a Canada goose honking,

but louder, coarser, a longer note. In a matter of a few seconds, big

birds soared up out of the field and turned upriver at treetop level.

One of them continued to uh, well… sound a little like a trumpet. It

was the first time I have ever heard a trumpeter swan, and though I

have seen a few at a time on the water in various places in the

Ozarks and in Canada over the past twenty years, I have never seen

a flock of them that large.

But there they were, eleven trumpeter swans in a line just over

us, big and graceful. Trumpeter swans are rare sights, but they

gather in the winter in good numbers at a semi-refuge in Arkansas,

south of Greer’s Ferry Lake. Obviously, they are gaining in numbers

little by little. That flock of eleven is something I will not forget seeing.

We didn’t get a deer that afternoon; in fact, we never even saw

one. We did see a wild gobbler and a half-grown wild pig, coal black,

and hard to see in the underbrush. Had I seen him in time we would

have some pork in the freezer tonight. Squirrels, of course, were thick.

If you are a squirrel hunter you should have a good year, with all the

acorns and nuts and berries we had this fall. They should be fat and

good to eat. It occurred to me that I ought to pass along more wild

game recipes with this column, so here’s one I call ‘squirrel pizza.’

The first thing you do is fry a couple of young squirrels and take all

the meat off the bones. Then buy a pizza and remove all those little

round pieces of meat that you always see on pizza, about the size of

a half dollar. They are not good for you, and you need to take all of

them off. Then distribute the squirrel meat all over the pizza and

warm it up a little. There you have it. Next week I will perhaps give

you my recipes for duck pizza and rabbit pizza!

Someone sent me an outdoor page recently, from a large daily

newspaper in the Ozarks that showed a photo of a big hornet’s nest

that had fallen to the ground. Their outdoor writer called it a wasp

nest, obviously not having spent enough time outdoors to know what

it was. He dutifully noted that he had left it there because it was a

part of nature. It won’t be part of nature long!

Hornets’ nests are collected in the winter by many, who know

that woodpeckers and other birds will tear them to pieces trying to get

the larvae inside. No hornet’s nest I ever saw survives the winter. But

if you take one into the warmth inside a building, you need to be sure

those larvae aren’t going to mature and create a swarm of hornets in

your home next spring. That has happened on occasion.

No newspaper would allow glaring errors on their sports page.

If a sports writer didn’t have better than average knowledge about

basketball, football and baseball, he wouldn’t last long. There was a

time when outdoor writers were men who grew up outdoors and had

a great deal of experience in their field. Those days are nearly gone.

Today if an ‘outdoor columnist’ makes glaring errors, who knows?

Newspaper editors in larger cities don’t know a fly-rod from a flatfish,

so if mistakes are made they seldom see it. And I doubt they care

much because they figure readers don’t know much about the

outdoors either.

In a couple of weeks, I am going to put one of our better

photographers in a special camouflaged and covered boat, and drift

down one of our rivers with me at the paddle, to see what kind of

photos we can get. I’ll have to leave my gun at home or I would be

tempted to shoot some ducks for duck pizza.

The Winter/Christmas edition of my Lightnin Ridge magazine is

being printed in a week or so. If you would like to have a copy, call

my secretary, Gloria Jean, at 417-777-5227.