A few weeks ago, my brother and I hunted turkey Opening Day in the Missouri Ozarks as we have been doing for the past 40 years. Unfortunately, there was a cold rain at daybreak. That meant that the turkeys were probably still at home drinking coffee and deciding whether to venture out or stay in…
If you are a waterfowl hunter, you probably know the history and purpose of the Light Goose Conservation Order of 1999. For those who don’t know, this federal directive was enacted in 1999 to deal with an ongoing ecological disaster in the Arctic Circle. It seems that the snow goose population in North America had…
I run my dogs early every morning. Okay, for the benefit of the fact-checkers, they run and I walk. We always go through some woods that I own, and we have been doing this for years. Over the past four or five years, while running the dogs in the woods, I would often hear a…
When I first saw this headline, I thought it had to be joke. But it is not. Turns out, tests are being conducted throughout the US on free-roaming whitetail deer to determine the extent to which they are infected with the SARS CoV2 virus, and believe it or not, herds of whitetails appear to be…
I assume the readership of the River Hills Traveler includes a fair number of duck hunters. If you are a duck hunter like me hunting in the Midwest, you have probably had one of the worst, if not the absolute worst, duck hunting season you have ever experienced. Obviously, when it is 70 degrees…
Missouri is blessed with more than 5,600 caves, and many of these are in the Missouri Ozarks. Caves can be exciting to explore but there are a few things you need to consider before going into caves. One of those considerations — and this is a relatively recent one — is whether that…
Within the past several weeks, I have found two dead whitetail deer on my farm. They were both pretty young and both were in or near water when I found them. We have a lot of deer here and while I don’t deer hunt, we have plenty of folks from around the country coming…
If you live in Missouri, you have undoubtedly heard of the emerald ash borer (EAB), an insect that kills ash trees. For years, we were warned about bringing in firewood from elsewhere because that helped spread this little green monster even further into the Ozarks and beyond. But as of January of this…
