Outdoor Ironies on the Osage River

After the lessons of hunting, an outdoorsmen pursues trapping to further round out his knowledge of the intricate workings of Mother Nature. The One-Eyed Hillbilly with a late January coyote.

This past week on the Osage River in Webster County while boiling traps for one last bobcat and coyote trap line before season’s end, as I stared into the fire I was mesmerized into a trance while pondering some absolute truths in Mother Nature. As I watched the fire and contemplated, I found myself once again disturbed at how obvious truths in nature have been twisted into philosophical quagmires and great ironies for our modern society. Trapping, for one, seems to be a human interaction within Mother Nature that can stir the emotions of many a diverse group. For me personally, after hunting, trapping was the next level in the hierarchy of outdoor interaction that taught a mountain man the intricate movements and workings of Mother Nature. If you can recognize and read sign of all the different scats, tracks, and wildlife activities, you can better understand the bigger picture of how game animals and furbearers travel through and use the landscape. And, subsequently, you can become a better and more efficient participant in the circle of life. Isn’t it ironic that as outdoorsmen we drift toward the pursuit of trapping as being more intimately involved in the Great Outdoors yet some mistakenly view the pursuit as inhumane? It is simply the difference between making decisions and acting on those decisions based solely on emotion versus making those same decisions armed with the real facts along with a basic understanding of the real Mother Nature.

Above - Smoke and steam is hard on the ol' eyes...especially when you only have one! Greg pulling traps from the boil barrell.

Below left - Jack Fortney playing 'hot potato' with a trap fresh from the barrel.

Below right - Using a wire brush to clean the traps before boiling.

As with understanding the basic realities of the real Mother Nature, an understanding of the basics is the foundation of any successful trap line. Proper functioning mechanisms and scent control are key when preparing traps. Prior to putting the traps in the boiling pot proper adjustment to pan tension and fine tuning of the firing mechanism is crucial. Cleaning all the dirt and crud from your traps with a wire brush is also important. After cleaning and adjusting each trap, the traps should be bound together and dropped in a large pot of boiling water with an adequate amount of trap dye – this process eliminates scent and stains your traps.

Above - Is it cheating to wax inside a warm shop? The One-Eyed Hillbilly and Ellis Floyd waxing traps ‘in the dry.’

Right - Letting the string drip dry before hanging them up - Ellis Floyd pulling traps from the wax pot.

After boiling your traps and hanging them to dry it is important to wax them. Traps are waxed as a means of lubrication so that they operate as efficiently as possible. The wax also provides a barrier between the metal and any corrosive agents, such as salt, used as antifreeze in the trap bed. Great caution should be taken when waxing traps due to wax being flammable – if your wax boils you should reduce heat! After submerging you traps in wax a few at a time it is important to allow the traps to reach the same temperature as the wax to maximize surface area coverage. Once the traps have heated up to the same temperature as the wax (this generally takes a few minutes) you should remove the traps and let the excess wax drip back into the wax pot. Then hang your traps to dry. These are the basics of boiling and waxing traps.

Getting back to the basics - the basics of Nature will tell you that, by any stretch of the imagination, Mother Nature is not humane. She has no tolerance for judgments based solely on emotion - that is a purely human condition. Nature could be accurately described as the most savagely beautiful show on earth. If you have ever been lucky enough to witness an eagle high in a treetop using his beak and talons to rip the skin from a struggling salmon, you understand. If you have seen a coyote disemboweling a week-old white-tail fawn while it is still alive, you know what I mean. If you have ever watched a bobcat pounce on a young turkey, with the great squawking and feather-flying ruckus that follows, it is quite a beautiful and savage natural spectacle, but humane it is not. Finally, if you’ve seen the last hours of agony of a raccoon with distemper or a white-tail deer with blue tongue disease, you quickly come to realize that any harvest of wildlife by human hands is greatly desirable to that which awaits the animal otherwise. Survival of the fittest, and only the fittest, is very real. In the wild there is no such thing as quietly, much less comfortably, passing in the night.

Outdoor Irony for sure – is it me or are we hypocritical in our dealings with our own species as compared to our laws pertaining to wildlife?

At the end of the night as I sat there staring into the fire I humorously considered the 2 ironies of which I had pondered. The first – that Nature somehow understands ‘Humane’, much like a gazelle thrusting an olive branch to a charging lion and asking him to be nice. Then, I recalled my trip to Kodiak, Alaska last fall. I saw a sign that read: Don’t Feed the Bears. It went on to explain how feeding bears creates adverse conditioning for them and ultimately makes them stop looking for food in their natural environment and start looking for food from man, whether it be in the trash or in the dog’s bowl. Hmm, isn’t that ironic. The government says (correctly) that we shouldn’t feed the wildlife because it makes the wildlife depend on sustenance from human society. Is there a lesson here we should be learning ourselves? I’m just asking. So says the One-Eyed Hillbilly.

Greg Stephens is a 35-year veteran & life-time student of the great outdoors. His column appears weekly in print & online publications. You can email him at gregstephens@one-eyedhillbilly.com. For more columns go to www.one-eyedhillbilly.blogspot.com.

Mountain lion in Ray County, MO

This is the 12th confirmed mountain lion sighting in Missouri since 1994.

http://mdc.mo.gov/newsroom/ray-county-cattleman-kills-mountain-lion

‘Smell is in the Nose of the Beholder’

The Great Outdoors stinks…at least according to some folks. I, on the other hand, completely understand the old saying that ‘a pig farmer doesn’t smell pig #!@$%!’. As my outdoor experiences have evolved over the past 35 years it has become apparent to me that critters in the wild and modern humans (especially moms and wives) possess vastly different taste in, and appreciation for, smells. But, after you grow up first fishing, then hunting, and finally trapping, you just don’t smell it anymore. It seems ‘ smell is in the nose of the beholder’.

Every young child in the Ozark hills starts out cat fishing with some old stink bait. At 4 years old, the first time you dig your fingers down into a tub of the smelly stuff it is similar to wet play-dough and it sure does stink! You wonder how in the world anything would ever want to eat such an obnoxious concoction. However, after you drag in that first 5 pound catfish you think, “Wow, maybe this stuff isn’t as bad as it smells!” By the time the fishing trip is over you’re eating a sandwich while you have stink bait from the tips of your fingers to your elbows and it doesn’t even faze you – you don’t smell it any more! However, when your mom gets a whiff of you, believe you, me, it will faze her! To her it’s particularly bad after the cleaning chore when the smell of the stink bait is mixed with the smell of warm fish guts. As she gags you’ll just shrug your shoulders and take another bite of your sandwich.

Soon to have stink bait from her elbow to her fingertips, cousin Lydia Stephens with her dad, Lance, cat fishing at Grandma Sharon’s pond. All she needs now is a sandwich!

Next, as a kid you graduate from fishing to rabbit hunting with beagles. Now beagles are some of the most fun loving dogs in the world. They are exciting and fun to watch while hunting. But when a half dozen of them pour out of the pen and jump and lick all over you, your mom won’t like the smell they leave on your Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes that you just didn’t have time to change before going rabbit hunting. After you’ve sweated and hunted all afternoon and then let the beagles ride back to town with you in the back seat of the car, mom will really appreciate it when you throw your clothes on top of the other laundry. At the top of her lungs she will scream something like… “all the clothes smell like a dirty, wet dog!” Heck, those clothes didn’t smell that bad to me before they were washed. I think she was just being dramatic.

Finally, if you evolve into trapping your mom or wife just won’t appreciate the intoxicating fragrances of the various lures, baits, and urines that appeal to furbearers. By smell alone a trapper can detect the difference between coyote, bobcat, and red fox urines. He immediately recognizes the difference between a strong call lure and a subtle gland lure. He will even find a good bobcat lure with catnip pleasing to the smell. To a trapper even skunk essence becomes a fragrance of interest that is used in many quality call lures as opposed to just a repulsive smell brought home by the overly-curious family dog. However, if you put this stuff in the family car, even in the trunk, your mom will ground you for a month. And, if you have your own vehicle, your wife or girlfriend won’t even get in it during trapping season (or anyone else for that matter).

Yes, smell is definitely in the nose of the beholder. In the late 1980’s marketing of deer estrus and urine was just catching on as a viable means of attracting bucks during the rut. My college roommate and fraternity brother, Jeff Layman, and I had come to enjoy tormenting a certain fraternity pledge and friend of ours named Chris Gatley. Gatley was a great guy who had a great sense of humor (thank goodness). During deer season one fall we had bought some doe estrus while the three of us were out deer hunting in Gatley’s Jeep. Jeff decided it would be a great trick to pour a small amount of the estrus in the drivers-side floorboard while Gatley was inside his grandmother’s house. It was after dark and the old Jeep didn’t have interior lighting so we weren’t able to see what we were doing and Jeff accidently dropped the whole bottle. Just then Gatley walked out the door toward the Jeep. As the whole bottle emptied onto the floorboard we sat up straight and played inconspicuous. Now, the old Jeep didn’t have carpet or matting, just the metal floorboards. To make matters worse Gatley had exhaust headers on the motor that seriously heated up the floorboards. Did you know that fumes from burning deer pee would burn your eyes? Well we didn’t either but we learned the hard way. We drove 30 miles back to Springfield on a cold November night with both doors open, gagging and eyes watering all the way. He took that Jeep to the car wash and sprayed out the interior and he still couldn’t get rid of the baked-on deer pee smell. The smell stayed until summer! I never did learn to appreciate that particular smell. So says the One-Eyed Hillbilly.

Greg Stephens is a 35-year veteran & life-time student of the great outdoors. His column appears weekly in print & online publications. You can email him at gregstephens@one-eyedhillbilly.com. For more columns go to www.one-eyedhillbilly.blogspot.com.