Hunting seasons really kick off this month. One our first stories if by Charlies Slovensky about the day he bagged both a deer and a wild turkey.

September is also a prime time for fishing. There's a story by editor Bob Todd about trout fishing with Conservation Department Director John Hoskins when the editor was forced to pick up John's spare fly rod and give it a try.

There's also fishing stories about Clearwater Lake crappie, Current River and Black River smallmouth bass and catfish on the Bourbeuse River.Also, hunting dove and teal, seasons and waterfowl seasons in particular.

Other stories include a run-down on a world class bicycle race that's coming to Missouri and other coming events.

Jim Featherston's historical feature is about when he was sheriff in Ripley County years ago and a rivival preacher filed a complaint about his car getting shot up with him in it. The tale continues as to why this came about and what happened.

John Hoskins has been director of MDC for five years. He reflects on the larger issue of how conservation will be taught/learned in the future. There's a story by Jo Schaper on Bonne Terre Mine, once a leads mine but now a tourist attraction.

The Todds had visitors from south Louisiana and they were amazed at Cave Spring. The complete story is repeated below.

They also had a couple teenage boys for a few days and tried to work in a maximum amount of floating and run on Ozark rivers.

There's also the usual mix of recipes, Indian lore, news and informative ads.

Cave Spring dazzles visitors from Louisiana

By Bob Todd
How many ways can you say “wow”?
Cousins Nick and Brenda Romero from Louisiana tried them all as they paddled their kayaks into Cave Spring on Current River.
It is an outstanding feature of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways - something you have to experience to appreciate.
Louisiana waters have fertility that produce fast growing bass and crappie, and swamp scenes can be gorgeous. Sunrise over a salt marsh will get your heart pumping too.
But what we take for granted - being able to see the bottom - being able to step out of a canoe and not sink into the muck - the bluffs - the smallmouth bass - the cold, cold springwater on an August day - now, that’s as heavenly to them as a hard-charging marsh redfish is to us.
We’d had a successful round of adventures with our grandson and a friend, so we followed the same pattern with Nick and Brenda.
We started with a boat ride at Big Spring. Friend Dale Kipp was available to take them for a jaunt in his outboard jet boat. We’d feared taking our own boat which rides deeper and whose operator doesn’t know the river like Dale does.
The next day we went to Akers Ferry and launched about noon for the float downstream to Pulltite. Nick and Brenda had tried out the kayaks near Big Spring and wanted to take them on this float. Pat and I would take a canoe and could switch off with them if they got tired.
We told them about Cave Spring, but the idea of paddling back into a cave off the river, with clear springwater welling up beneath you - that’s hard to imagine.
It was after we’d stopped for a bite of lunch, swam and tried a little fishing that we came to the cave. You could float by and not see it if you didn’t know it was there, but I told them to paddle back up a branch that was flowing into the river.
Wows!
They hesitated at the mouth of the cave and I encouraged them to paddle on in. More wows, echoing. For the moment at least, it was the most gorgeous thing they’d ever seen in their lives, especially after they turned around toward the entrance and saw the emerald color of the water blending with the sunlight outside.
They came to our canoe and got their camera and began taking pictures. You can tell someone is impressed when they take picture after picture of the same thing. Thank goodness for digital cameras and “free” pictures.
Our sit-upon kayaks are not well suited to fishing, so after the cave, Nick got in the canoe with me and Pat got in his kayak.
We hadn’t got out of the big hole at the cave before Nick scored a first for himself. A chain pickerel chased down his lure and gave a flourishing but short battle. It was a new species for Nick.
And so was a couple goggle-eye. The Ozark variety are really rock bass. What they call a goggle-eye in Louisiana is a warmouth.
Nick already knew about smallmouth bass.
We rested some the next day, but in late afternoon Nick and I floated a section of Black River and found the bass - smallmouth and spotted - willing to pounce on buzz baits.
The Romeros intended to go west from our place, then south to Texas to visit Brenda’s brother. That day, Nick and I met Dale and motored up Current River for a short fishing trip starting at sunrise. It was a foggy trip up the river and I worried about low water.
But Ozark streams tend to carve new, deeper channels when their water levels drop across a wide shoal. And Dale knew where the new channels were.
We had some fast action on smallmouth and goggle-eye - fish up to 16 inches or so - but action slowed as other people arrived at the river and became active.
We took out and met Pat and Brenda while it was still fairly cool. Nick had got in another fishing trip and was off to the west about as early as if he had slept in that morning.
Another “wow”.
Trips to their place have mostly been “wows” for us, except for when a tropical storm named Matthew suddenly took shape a few years ago. But a small party with boiled fresh shrimp right off the boat eased the pain of not being able to go fishing.

Two dozen years ago, September 1983

Al Agnew wrote about urban smallmouth in August, 1983, especially those in the lower Big River. Of them, he said “if boats had hubcaps, they’d probably steal them.”
He found the fishing slow, but the size of the smallmouth above average. He called them slum smallmouth, living amid discarded refrigerators. He suspected they eat rats and have rust-colored teeth.
Meanwhile Bob Todd was fortunate to witness the first flight of three eagles from a hacking box at Mingo National Wildlife Refuge. Orphans, they were raised with minimum human contact in hopes they’d imprint on Mingo and return to this area to nest.
The Conservation Department was proposing rules to protect a handful of small streams where trout were reproducing in Missouri. The bulk of trout fishing in Missouri depends on stocking these non-native fish, but a few streams have self-sustaining populations.
Missouri was divided into two duck hunting zones. The southern zone had a split season with about a two-week closure in the middle, giving two weeks of late season hunting. The northern season was split too, but its final day was Dec. 15.
Two couples caught 240 crawfish in Current River and boiled them up for supper. Almost as much fun as catching them was the lies told to passing canoers about what was going on.
The Conservation Department had raised 20,000 lake sturgeon and among places they intended to stock them was Lake Wappapello. The habitat, apparently, would be suitable for sturgeon and the St. Francis River upstream would provide suitable spawning habitat. Biologists nowadays question if they were ever stocked there, but it they were, they would just now be detected.
Lake sturgeon don’t spawn until about age 20 and it takes five years for them to put on the first pound. Historically, they grew to 300 pounds or so, and a fish 152 years old has been recorded. They’re primarily a big river fish, but are at risk in the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Stocking in small rivers with proper habitat would be a hedge against river disaster.
There was a letter from Vivian Bond of Fredericktown about life in the country after she and her husband retired here. She was scared by snake stories and learned to shoot to protect herself. “I fired at a coiled copperhead one evening and hit it, scaring a pile of cow manure all over the front pasture. New glasses took care of that problem.”
A national canoe race was held on Current River above Doniphan and the annual Black River Challenge was held above Poplar Bluff. One was more serious than the other.
The historical story that month was about Moses Austin, who brought modern mining methods to Missouri shortly before the transfer of the territory to the United States. Austin arrived here after an overland journey in the winter from his home in New England. It was the first part of a series by writer Emma Comfort Dunn.

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