Al Agnew

My dad was not a sports fan, but my aunt, who was a widow and childless and who raised me almost as much as my mom did, was a big sports fan. She would take me to St. Louis sporting events, which was a big deal in the early 1960s when we lived 60 miles away. The first one I remember seeing was the NBA St. Louis Hawks against the Cincinnati Royals...Bob Pettit and Clyde Lovellet for the Hawks against Oscar Robertson and Jack Twyman for the Royals. We were in the nosebleed section and I could barely see the players, partly because back then I was already near-sighted but had never been to an eye doctor, but I remember that game. Twyman was a specialist from deep, and had a very high-arcing shot, and I remember him hitting several long bombs. Pettit was a beast with a deadly short jump shot. I think the Royals won. Aunt Evelyn also took me to several Cardinals games, but she was more of a basketball fan than a baseball one. My most (almost) memorable Cardinal game, though, was one where I went with one of my childhood friends and his family. Stan Musial was sitting on 2,999 hits, and we had the chance of seeing him hit his 3,000th...but he went hitless. She was probably the main person that turned me on to basketball. An athletic woman herself, she had a deadly set shot, and would play with me on the goal my dad set up in the driveway, teaching me to dribble and shoot. She never missed one of my Little League games (my mom and dad seldom watched me play). I remember one life lesson she taught me...we had a good team and usually won, and one game we won because the pitcher on the opposing team walked in the winning run. The kid was crying as he walked off the field, and I told Aunt Evelyn, "Look at that sissy crying." She said, "Don't be like that. You haven't ever failed at anything yet." I thought, well, I'm not a pitcher so that'll never happen to me, but I said, "well, if I ever fail I won't bawl like that kid." A few games later, I came up to the plate, bottom of the last inning, two outs, bases loaded, we're one run behind. I worked the count to 3 and 2...and struck out swinging at a ball that was about eye level. The other guys on the team were screaming, "Why did you swing? It was too high!" I walked off the field and toward my aunt, crying my eyes out. All she said was, "See?"

That's not what I've seen in the medical literature. New England Journal of Medicine reported Remdesivir being effective, HCQ no better results than a placebo. This was back in October, maybe there is different data now.

Well, heck, the OK governor is still trying to sell off the $2 million worth of hydroxychloroquine he ordered back in April. Probably doesn't have the money to buy enough vaccine doses.

Wow, you guys are a whole lot better than the average run of people on the Missouri Nature Lovers group on Facepuke. By now there would have been about a hundred completely wrong guesses on there. One time when somebody there posted a picture of a kestrel and asked what kind of bird it was, two people said it was a dove! When I was a kid, Dad found a fledgling kestrel that had fallen out of a nest into Wappapello Lake, and brought it home. I would feed it hamburger, grasshoppers, and sparrows I shot with my BB gun...after all, it was a sparrow hawk, wasn't it? One time I brought it a sparrow that was still very much alive, and found out that kestrels instinctively know how to kill things...it pounced upon that sparrow, mantling over it and holding it down with one foot, and proceeded to peck the crap out of the bird's skull until it died. By that time it could fly, so we agreed, Dad and I, to let it go. Never saw it again.

Jesus almost certainly existed. Everything else is faith.

Bigfoot possible? What if the critter had nearly human intelligence? Do you think a smallish band of humans could live in a fairly remote area of the Pacific Northwest and not be found if they didn't want to be found? I don't know. What would their ecology be? What do they eat? How do they live through the winters? How many of them would there need to be to keep from being inbred and eventually becoming too unhealthy to keep reproducing? It's seductive to think about a large hominid living in the wilderness...a romantic notion. Almost certainly not true, but it would be cool if it WAS true.

Mary and I got our first shot yesterday...the Pfizer version. Booster is scheduled for three weeks from yesterday. Mary had a bit of discomfort this morning, some nausea and when the nausea went away she had a headache for a while, and her shoulder is sore. I feel fine, though I think I had a bit of joint soreness--I hacked down a bunch of saplings and tree limbs this afternoon with a machete, and got a bit sore.

I can't remember whether I talked about it on here, but there is a book that treats the Sasquatch phenomenon seriously, "Sasquatch, Legend Meets Science". It discusses that famous video at length. The book is out at our place in Montana and I ain't, or I'd go back and see what it says about the possible tracks of the critter in the video, but I seem to remember it discussing them. It examines the video minutely, and ends up taking the position that the video has a pretty good probability of being authentic.

I didn't know somebody else came up with the idea of weird critters actually passing back and forth between dimensions...I had that idea years ago, and even started writing a novel based upon it. Momo, Sasquatch, and Yeti are surviving members of what was thought to be an extinct pre-human hominid, like Homo erectus. They've survived by being able to pass back and forth between dimensions...and are intelligent enough to avoid humans as much as possible. All sightings are mistakes they made in keeping hidden. (There are also large, human-like creatures found in African folklore as well, so add them to the list.) Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels had Tarzan being raised by an unknown species of great ape. The books have at least a grain of truth; there really was a Tarzan, he really was English nobility, but he was raised by these African hominids, not apes. Tarzan is still alive and well, by the way. In two of the books, he discovered elixirs that stop aging (two separate ones, kinda like taking two different Covid vaccines). So though he was born in the late 1800s, he still appears to be a middle-aged man. He has had to change his name and supposed history several times. The British government knows his secret, but nobody wants an elixir of youth to become known...can you imagine everybody rich and influential enough to obtain it living on indefinitely? He is extremely rich, having taken more than a ton of gold from the lost city of Opar before it was buried in a huge landslide that covered part of the city and impounded a deep lake that buried the rest. He now travels the world, seeking out surviving members of the Mangani, the hominids who raised him, and protecting them from being discovered and exploited by humans. He also knows the secret of traveling inter-dimensionally. Some of the lost cities found in the old Tarzan novels really existed, but in other dimensions, as was Pellucidar, which ERB thought was inner Earth. (The earth being hollow, with gravity being centered in the crust, so that you can walk around in the inside of the crust just as you do the outside, with a nuclear core suspended by gravity in the center, furnishing a "sun" for the inner Earth. Of course, we know gravity doesn't work that way, so the earth isn't hollow, but Pellucidar does exist in a different dimension, complete with dinosaurs and tailed humans!) Tarzan has estates in England, America, and Canada. He sometimes does missions for MI6, the British secret service, in return for the British government keeping his existence and longevity a secret. At least that was my original novel idea. I've since decided to dump Tarzan as the protagonist, and have my hero, whose name is Shakespeare (Speare for short, haven't decided on a last name), raised by Sasquatch in a remote region of British Columbia, where his mother, who was a woman pilot transporting war planes to Alaska during WWII (which did happen) crashed and was found by Sasquatch (she was in the early stages of pregnancy at the time). There was an old man living with the Sasquatch, who helped raise him, and who was a rich man who had retreated from society into the wilderness to die after his wife passed away. Eventually the old man got Speare back to American civilization. Speare, like Tarzan, ages extremely slowly, thanks to a fungus that grows in caves in the volcanic mountains of British Columbia, which the Sasquatch had him eat. They are extremely long-lived because of this, but nearly sterile, raising very few offspring. And of course they know the secret of traveling between dimensions. My idea for the conflict in my story is an uber-rich industrialist who is also extremely religious, and rejects the idea of evolution. When he finds out that not only are Sasquatch real, but that they are a sort of missing link that will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt to be the direct ancestors of humans, he sets out to eradicate them from the face of the earth because he believes their existence to be either Satanic or a test by God of faith. Speare, of course, finds out about his plot, and seeks to stop him. Heck, I might even get some black panthers into the story as Speare's childhood enemies and enemies of the Sasquatch--they move between dimensions as well.

Thanks...I read it. What I got from the history part of it was that there were no reported bear sightings from 1890? to 1950, and then two sightings just before AR started their restoration program. They mentioned that maybe bears were never completely eradicated from the Ozarks, but the genetic studies showed all bears coming from the AR populations. I would venture to guess that the two prior to AR's program started were just as likely, if not more so, to be wanderers from somewhere else. I just find it hard to believe that if there was a tiny population somewhere in the Ozarks, they would have never been seen during that long period of time. But it would be cool if there were some original Ozark genetics in our bears.

How do they know it was a Missouri strain, and not a strain from somewhere else besides Arkansas? If the occasional wolf or cougar can roam from a long way off into MO, why not a bear from Minnesota or South Dakota? As for your old timer on the Current...to have seen bears his whole life, there would have to have been a breeding population his whole life. If there was a breeding population, why did it never expand in numbers until recently? How few animals can there be in a breeding population before it dies out, gets completely inbred and unhealthy, etc.? You just about need enough animals in a breeding population to make it possible for them to be seen fairly regularly (and shot once in a while). Bears aren't known for being shy and secretive like cougars. "Old timers" have always said there were wolves around, and mountain lions, and black panthers, too. Sorry, but I don't put a lot of credence into stories like that.

The problem with talking about this stuff is that people very often use the wrong names for critters, and it gets confusing. And people get mad when you dispute what they think they saw. We like to think there is still mystery creatures and big, charismatic predators around, even though the evidence of them is sparse or lacking. Join the Missouri Nature Lovers group on Facebook if you want to get excited, or frustrated, with people supposedly seeing all kinds of creatures that simply aren't in Missouri--wrong identifications, unreliable eye witness accounts, etc. Let's just talk about large predators in the Ozarks; bears, wolves, mountain lions, and the mythical black panther. Black bears never went entirely extinct in Arkansas, but they did disappear completely in Missouri. Heck, nobody even SAID they saw a bear for many years in MO. And then the Arkansas population began to increase and spread, and eventually spread into Missouri. People started saying they were seeing bears. MDC at first didn't agree...no hard evidence. Then there got to be enough bears that people were not only saying they saw them, but taking photos of them and their tracks, and MDC had enough hard evidence to say that there really were bears back in MO. Nobody disputes it anymore because it's a fact of life. Mountain lions were a bit different story. Cougars disappeared from the state back around 1900. But once in a while somebody would still say they saw one here and there. In recent decades, sightings, game cam photos, kills, and finally run-over and shot cougars have shown up. But we still don't have an idea whether or not there is a breeding population. DNA studies on a couple dead ones say they came from the Dakotas. They were young males. That makes sense, because a young male can't compete in a mature male's territory, and begins to roam until he finds his own territory, and his own mate for the season. If he happens to take a wrong turn and head too far south, he ends up in a place where there aren't any females, and if he keeps going on in the same direction, he might cover a whole lot of miles seeking love...and maybe ending up in Missouri. Females, on the other hand, don't have to roam like that. The males come to them. So it's far less likely that a roaming female will make it to Missouri. So far, unless it has changed recently, there is no hard evidence of females or kittens here, so no hard evidence of a breeding population. But there are definitely a few cats in the Ozarks, both in Missouri and Arkansas. Maybe there's a breeding population in Arkansas. Maybe it's spreading into southern Missouri. Maybe. Problem is, cougars are secretive and mostly nocturnal. People live their whole lives roaming around in country that has a LOT of them without ever seeing one; you don't see many run over, and very few are shot except by purposely hunting them with dogs. And there is a lot of rugged, wooded country in the Ozarks that gives them good hiding places. So it's simply difficult to know for sure what the situation is. And then we come to wolves. Seems that more people say they see wolves than cougars, but based upon the ecology of wolves, this makes very little sense. I've spent a LOT of time learning all I can about wolves, because I have painted a lot of them, and I always strive to make my paintings as realistic as possible, both in the appearance of the animal and its behavior and habitat. I've watched wolves in Yellowstone Park and Alaska. And I am pretty sure that there simply can't be any wolves in the Ozarks these days, except for the once in a decade or so lone wolf that gets kicked out of a pack up in northern Minnesota or Wisconsin, and starts roaming much like male coungars, ending up in Missouri if it is lucky enough not to get shot or run over on the way. And Missouri, even the wildest part of the Ozarks, is NOT viable wolf habitat. Wolves are pack animals. They need 25-50 square miles per pack. Out in wolf country in northern Minnesota or Montana, there are still tracts of land that big that are not cut up by multiple roads and dotted with houses. Not so in Missouri. I did a little investigation a while back, and found that there is nowhere in Missouri (and probably not in Arkansas) that has a spot that is more than two miles from a public road or house. And there are a lot of people roaming around in the wilder portions of the Ozarks, hiking, deer hunting, etc. Wolves are not nearly as secretive animals as cougars. They run in packs, they howl a lot, and they like to spend the day lazing around out in the open where they can see what's happening around them. If there were packs of wolves in the Ozarks, it wouldn't be hard to find them. And most of the sightings of "wolves" are in areas that aren't even very far out into the woods, in farmer's fields and just outside the suburbs. It just ain't happening. The wild canids can be confusing, and their genetics are somewhat flexible. Wolves, red wolves, coyotes, and dogs can all interbreed. Coyotes were once rare in the Ozarks, their ecological niche was occupied by red wolves as well as a population of timber wolves that was probably always low. But the timber wolves were killed off quickly, and the prolific and adaptable coyotes spread into the region, interbreeding with the dwindling population of red wolves. Wolves are big animals, 75-140 pounds. Red wolves were smaller, 45-70 pounds, and coyotes smaller yet, 30-45 pounds max. But the coyotes in Missouri might produce a bigger one now and then, a throwback to a red wolf ancestor perhaps. And as coyotes spread into the eastern half of the country, they appeared to get bigger. There are theories that they interbred with wolves on the northern edge of the United States and Canada to gain some of that size, and a few genetic studies show some southern Canadian wolf genes in coyotes in the northeastern U.S. But I think it's more likely that bigger coyotes in Missouri and most points farther east is a case of rapid evolution...bigger ones are more able to take advantage of the abundant deer, so they thrive better than smaller coyotes. So when people say they've seen a wolf in Missouri, I think it's most likely that it's either a big coyote, or the other hybrid possibility, a dog/coyote hybrid. It won't be a red wolf, which are basically extinct in the wild, and it sure won't be a wild wolf. But you'll see lots of people swearing they saw a wolf-like creature "bigger than a German shepherd" (that seems to be the usual measuring stick). Well, people, unless they are trained and experienced observers, are not very reliable of judging the size of some animal they are excited and surprised to see. A nice looking coyote out in a field a hundred yards away might look pretty big to an observer. And the key is, there aren't any good photos, let alone dead bodies, of all these "wolves". Now we come to the ultimate mystery critter, the elusive black panther. I'll bet if you counted, you could find thousands of people who say that they, or their friend or grandpa, have seen black panthers. But what IS this big cat? Some say it's a melanistic cougar (melanistic means it has an excess of black pigment in its fur). But there has never been a documented instance of a melanistic cougar...they simply lack the gene that can produce melanism. So that's out. The only other North American cat that CAN be black is the jaguar. Jaguars haven't roamed the Ozarks since the warm period between the last two ice ages, at least 50,000 years ago. In recorded history, jaguars have never been found in North America anywhere north of the tier of states that border Mexico. There may still be a few in northern Mexico, and once in a long, long while one may roam up into southern Arizona. But that's a long way from the Ozarks, so forget a wild roamer. Could it be escaped or released pets? Either jaguars or leopards CAN be black, and there are a few idiots who like to keep exotic and dangerous "pets". So it's possible, I suppose...but how many pet jaguars are there? How many of THEM are black instead of spotted (or rosetted, to be exact--and by the way, black jaguars and leopards ARE still rosetted; get them in strong light and you can see the spots)? And then how many of THOSE end up escaping or being turned loose? It has happened...once that I know of near Kansas City. But to establish a breeding population, you'd have to have at least one male and one female, both released in an area close enough to each other than they can find each other. What are the chances? Maybe it could happen once, but enough times to have all these black panthers being sighted all over the Ozarks over many years? There are NO photos. No other evidence. Never a dead body. It doesn't make sense. How could so many people think they've seen a black panther when it is basically impossible? Well, again we have that unreliability of eye witnesses. I watched a video that purported to be a black panther on the internet, somewhere in Arkansas if I remember correctly. It was a cat. It was definitely black. But it was also definitely a house cat. While all the cats are shaped similarly, their proportions vary considerably. A house cat has a bigger head and its body simply isn't shaped like a leopard or jaguar or mountain lion. I've painted enough of them, I should know. In the video, you could even gauge the animal's size by the size of the tree trunks it was walking next to, and if that cat was as big as a panther, the trees were the size of redwoods. Yet the guy that took the video was sure it was a panther. Now let's talk about Sasquatch!

Ah, yes, the otter argument... First of all, I knew both the biologist in charge of the otter reintroduction and the guy (Glen Chambers) from MDC who went around the state for years with "tame" otters drumming up support for reintroducing them. Back then people loved otters. There had been books written about how cool otters were. By the time MDC started the reintroduction, I doubt if you could have found a hundred people in the whole state that WEREN'T all for otter reintroduction. (Glen, however, grew to hate the ones he carried around all the time, because they were like some male cats...just as friendly as could be until something tripped a trigger with them and then they'd gnaw your arm off. He had scars everywhere from his otters.) The biologist in charge told me, a few years after it was apparent that the otter population was exploding, that otters in Missouri were reproducing at a rate 9 times faster than all the studies and all the literature had said they would. Missouri was probably the first state to reintroduce them, and so they found out too late that when you reintroduce a critter that has no natural enemies and a prey base that has had many years to unlearn how to deal with that critter, the critter will REALLY do well. And...they also didn't take into account that the Ozark creeks of 1990 were far different than the creeks had been 150 years earlier, with fewer big, deep pools for fish to have room to escape otters. Plus, 150 years ago there weren't any farm ponds, which turned out to be ready-made otter buffets. The otters found an unlimited supply of easy food, and so they thrived. My own experience with otters...I know of stream sections that have plenty of otters and plenty of fish. I also know of a few small streams where I've encountered otters, where SOMETHING really did a number on the fish population, and otters are probably the culprit. I floated a somewhat remote, little floated creek one time, and the fishing was simply awful; I maybe caught a half dozen little smallmouth all day long in really good habitat. There were, however, crawdads everywhere, crawling on the bottom out in the open in the middle of the day. I also saw one otter. If the otters were eating all the fish, why were there so many crawdads, since otters love them? When I got to the take-out, I ran into a family of local people minnow fishing, had a couple little sub-legal smallmouth and some goggle-eye on a stringer. They asked me about how the fishing was, and I told them it was really slow. "It's them danged otters. They eat all the smallmouth. Heck, used to be we'd come here a couple times a week and take home a limit of smallmouth for everybody in the family every time, before the otters showed up." Point is, I think otters get blamed for poor fishing in some places where they aren't really a problem, while in other places, especially small streams with poor habitat, they really do nearly wipe out the population of larger fish. But I don't think things are as bad as they were for a while. I doubt if trapping does much to control the population of otters; there just aren't enough people doing it. But I think that the surviving fish have "evolved", for lack of a better word because it's not really classic evolution, a bit and aren't quite as susceptible to otter predation as they were 15-20 years ago. Eventually, the otters will get into some kind of equilibrium with their prey base. Might be permanently fewer fish in some streams because of them, though.

All this angling history is interesting, so I did a little research on more general history. Instead of putting it all here, I'm starting another thread in the general angling board.

We often think of sport fishing as a rather modern endeavor; that prior to the 1900s everybody fished for food and used whatever methods were available that worked the easiest to get as many fish as possible. But sport fishing in America has a history that starts as soon as there were people who didn't have to worry about Indians and growing and killing their food all the time. Fact is that there were plenty of people who were fishing mainly for fun using tackle at least a bit like what we use today back well before America gained independence, but it was a sport of the wealthy, or at least those who didn't have to work hard six or seven days a week. Cotton Mather, the well-known colonial Puritan minister and author, once wrote, "Alas! the Ministers of the Gospel now fish, not with Nets, but with Rods; and after long angling, and baiting, and waiting, how few are taken!" In fact, that was a prevailing attitude, especially among the clergy, back in colonial days; that it was immoral to inflict pain upon one of the Lord's creatures if there was no useful purpose to it. But it wasn't the only attitude back then--in 1743, a pamphlet was produced in New Hampshire with the cumbersome title, "Business and Diversion Inoffensive to God and Necessary for the Comfort and Support of Human Society: A Discourse utter'd in Part at Amauskeeg-Falls, in the Fishing Season". The first (that we know of) fishing "club", the Schuylkill Fishing Company, was founded in 1732. A biographer described Patrick Henry as a frivolous type who could be found "over the brook with his angle-rod". Probably the vast majority of people who fished for fun in the 1800s used a fly rod. The native brook trout in the East were easy to catch on just about any fly that somewhat resembled an insect, and back then all flies were fished wet, never dry, until around 1850, when dry fly fishing came onto the scene. By the time of the Civil War, the trout were beginning to get warier and tougher to catch. Thaddeus Norris, reputed at the time to be the greatest fly fisherman in America, wrote one of the first real books on angling in 1864, the "American Angler's Book", where he went on at length about matching common insects and upstream wading, and Mary Orvis Marbury, one of the first American notable fly tiers, was writing by the Civil War period that flies that more closely imitated insects were becoming more effective on the highly pressured eastern streams than the bright, gaudy flies that had been so popular. Carp were first introduced in the 1840s, and even back then there was a lot of debate on whether that was a good thing or not. A Captain Robinson brought carp from Holland and stocked them in his ponds alongside the Hudson River, where the river promptly flooded and released them. The state legislature passed a bill protecting them for five years so they could become established as a food fish, and the great sporting writer "Frank Forester" (actual name Henry Herbert) wrote in 1849, "I cannot here...control myself, but must invoke the contempt and indignation of every gentle sportsman, every reasonable thinking man, upon the heads of that ignorant, motley, and destructive assemblage, which is entitled the Senate and Assembly of New York...that it was found impossible to induce those learned Thebans to do anything to prevent American Woodcock from being shot before they were fledged, and American Brook Trout from being caught on their spawning beds; but that no sooner is a coarse, watery, foreign fish accidentally thrown into American waters, than it is vigorously and effectively protected." Non-fly fishing appears to have started with pike anglers, who were using crude reels and 16-18 foot long wooden rods by the 1800s. But the baitcasting reel was invented sometime around 1810 and quickly became popular for bass fishing. George Snyder, a Pennsylvania watchmaker, is credited with the first geared, quadruple-multiplying reel. Called the Kentucky reel because by the time he developed it, he had moved to Kentucky, it really didn't get popular outside that state until after the Civil War, when production increased as several other watchmakers from Kentucky perfected the design. The first artificial lure for bass was the Buel Spoon, around 1850, the first commercially produced topwater lure was the Dowagiac, invented by James Heddon in the 1890s. Legend has it that he was whiling away time while waiting for a fishing partner on the banks of Michigan's Dowagiac River, and by the time his buddy got there he had whittled a piece of wood down to a cigar shape. He tossed it in the river and a big bass came up and exploded on it. He first produced it commercially in 1898, with a white body, red collar, and blue nose. The spinning reel as we know it was invented by Alfred Illingworth, an Englishman, in 1905. But spinning and then spincasting didn't really start to get popular until nylon monofilament was invented after WWII, because the gut line that worked well with spinning tackle (instead of the coarse, heavy braid used in baitcasting) had to be soaked before it could be used, and you couldn't let it dry out if you stopped fishing for an hour or so to eat lunch. As for the Ozarks, sport fishing first became popular among the gentry in the early 1900s, with the advent of float fishing. By the 1920s, float fishing was becoming the cool thing to do with "wealthy sportsmen" from the big cities, especially Chicago and St. Louis, in part because the railroad network gave them a convenient way to get back into the hills. There were float trip businesses operating on the Meramec, Current, and White rivers by the mid-1920s and advertising in national hunting and fishing magazines of the time. The Great Depression slowed things down some, but what many people don't realize is that there were still some well-off people during the 1930s who had the time and money to make trips to fish for fun. However, that time period probably saw the WORST fishing ever for Ozark streams, because the logging boom of the early 1900s just about totally wrecked the rivers. It's when the erosion of the denuded hillsides put huge amounts of gravel in the streams, and just as destructively, the massive log rafts regularly going down the streams to market wrecked banks and scoured river bottoms. It also didn't help that whole generations of Ozarkers were killing fish to eat by any method available. So the real hey-day of float fishing didn't happen until after the war, when the streams had had some time to recover, and it lasted until the 1960s, when the rivers first began to be overrun by the canoe renter crowd. The dams on the White River, first Bull Shoals and then Table Rock, killed the float fishing business on the White and James, but the float operators on the other streams turned to the easier and more lucrative business of renting canoes.

Well, no pictures, but I got out this past week and started the year with smallmouth, largemouth, and northern rock bass.

Conventional wisdom is that you CAN'T harvest too many bluegill. That if you don't take out enough of them, they will overpopulate and stunt, resulting in more but smaller fish. Maybe that conventional wisdom is changing. But I suspect this is something that is very different from one water body to another. In my own experience, the forage base is the biggest influence on bluegill size. I have (or had) a number of different ponds I fished for bluegill, including my own, my brother-in-law's, my father-in-law's, and a couple ponds owned by friends. In my own pond, about 3/4ths of an acre, the male bluegill have always been 8-9 inches long. I keep track of how many I take out of the pond each year...based upon a recommendation from an MDC biologist, I should take about 75 per year (100 per acre), but I usually take about 50-60, with probably 3/4ths of them males taken off beds. My management strategy has obviously had very little effect on CHANGING the population structure, but seems to be pretty good at keeping it where it is. My male bluegill are fairly thin for their length, but my pond does not have a really good forage base--the bass don't grow fast, either. When I first started fishing my father-in-law's pond, which was less than a half acre in size, it was full of small bluegill, the males being about 6-7 inches long. Nobody fished for them. I started taking every bluegill I could out of the pond, did that for several years, taking at least 75 or so a year out. Didn't make any difference whatsoever in the size structure. My brother-in-law has two ponds. One is about an acre, the other 1.5 acres. Both have crappie, green sunfish, and redear as well as bluegill. His family takes a lot of fish out of them. The bluegill, and both bluegill/green and bluegill/redear hybrids, are all big, with 9 inchers common and some better than 10 inches. But his ponds have a much better forage base, with a lot of crawdads and minnows. He takes few bass out, but a lot of crappie, and the crappie are nice as well, though not huge. Whatever he's doing, it seems to be working. The thing is, I haven't seen any of these pond populations changing in the time I've watched them. I'm not sure whether we really have a big impact on bluegill population size structure.

At normal lake pool there are about 2.5 miles of flowing water below Dawt. If there is a really significant spotted bass population in that short stretch when it is flowing, it would make it seem more likely that spots could do well above the dam. When the dam was intact, it backed water up for about a quarter mile, maybe a half mile, which was probably not enough to really warm the river up a lot more than what it was above the dam pool. But it would have been nice to do water temperature studies above and below the dam, and what water temps did once the dam was first breached and then removed.

I haven't fished the North Fork between Dawt and the lake in a very long time, so I'm curious if there are many spotted bass in that section. I'm not sure whether even water a little too warm for trout to thrive would be warm enough for spots. I agree that if there are any efforts extended toward the trout fishery, they should include some serious tree planting. I would usually agree on the dam and the adverse effects upstream. Just not sure that in this one case, it might possibly be justifiable. There is zero possibility of closing the stream to floaters. But I could certainly get behind a use fee for recreational floaters.

I disagree on the Kentucky fishery. Every stream section in the Ozarks that is heavily enough springfed to support trout has never had a spotted bass fishery. I do not think spots are willing or able to colonize such cold waters. But that brings up something else that I alluded to originally. There have been few, if any spotted bass, either in the trout section or upstream from it. Whether that was because the dam formed a barrier, or whether it was the cold water, it could be possible that the removal of the barrier, allowing an unlimited number of spotted bass to work their way upstream PAST the trout water, could make the smallmouth fishing up there deteriorate. Maybe it wouldn't. Upper North Fork is not typical spotted bass habitat--too fast and too clear. But I hate to take that chance. I'm not in love with Missouri trout, but I DO care deeply about Ozark smallmouth.

No, as I understand it, people were getting killed swept into and under the dam because it was in a state of disrepair.

Guys, I don't really have a dog in this hunt. I have no idea whether the dam replacement is good, bad, or in between. I DO value wild, naturally reproducing trout, but I'm not in love with them. I do think it would be a shame to stock the river and risk the wild trout in any way. Pure conservation is impossible here, because Norfork Lake is an unnatural "reservoir" of various fish species that would be rare or non-existent in the river without the lake sitting downstream. But somewhat pure conservation would be to leave things as they are, with perhaps some tree planting programs to speed the recovery of the banks. From a recreational standpoint, and yes, tjm, I take your point on the conflict between recreation and conservation, the choice would be to do whatever is necessary to preserve the wild population and allow it to grow, or just value a trout fishery and stock it, or heck, just let the trout try to survive and manage for native species, though I have to say that the trout section would probably never be a good smallmouth section. As for putting out the letter, my friend is not active on here, and I have not talked to him about publishing the letter, so I'm not going to do it at this point. If he gets his effort off the ground sending the letter to everybody in his acquaintance and wherever, I'll come back and publish it here if he wants. I simply thought that this is an interesting topic of discussion at this point.

A friend of mine who lives on the trout section of the North Fork just sent me a letter that he wrote that he wishes everybody who is interested in the North Fork trout fishery to consider. I will not post the letter itself, but will somewhat paraphrase it with my own thoughts added. The North Fork is almost unique in the Midwest and the Ozarks, as it is the largest trout stream with wild, naturally reproducing rainbow trout. Keep in mind that the last time the North Fork was stocked with rainbows was in 1964, although MDC still stocks brown trout--brown trout have not proven to be able to reproduce anywhere in the Ozarks. But the rainbows have adapted to streams like the North Fork and a few others. The others, however, are much smaller. The North Fork is the only large, floatable stream with a completely self-sustaining rainbow trout fishery. But the North Fork took a huge hit in 2017, with by far the largest and most destructive flood on record. The flood basically wiped out most of the trouts' food supply, scoured the river channel, and worst in my opinion, scoured the brush and trees along the banks. That tree cover kept the river shaded, and kept it cool enough for trout down to Dawt Mill. I fished the river early in the summer after the flood, and at that time, even before the heat of the summer, the water was warm enough in the last 10 miles or so above Dawt to stress the trout. I have no idea how hot the water got by August. There was also another thing that happened in 2017--the Dawt Mill dam was removed. My friend, and plenty of others, quickly realized that with the removal of the dam, large predatory fish from Norfork Lake now had unimpeded access to the trout section of the river. They began seeing large numbers of striped bass, hybrids, walleye, and gar in that section of the river. Since the top of the dam had been about 3 or 4 feet in elevation below the highest flood control pool of Norfork, there had been times in the past when, for short periods, these predators could make it over the dam, but it was a minor and uncommon thing until the dam was removed. At first, the trout anglers on the North Fork like my friend were concerned that the predators were going to decimate the population of both young and adult trout; they were afraid that big stripers would eat a lot of trout. Now, they are more concerned that the influx of predators is doing more harm in eating lots and lots of crawdads and other food the trout also eat. MDC also recognizes that there is a problem. The trout fishery has yet to recover from 2017--catch rates are still way down. But the proposed solution suggested by the biologist in charge of the North Fork, Nathan Recktenwald, is to supplement the trout population with the stocking of hatchery trout. My friend and many others are very opposed to this, since it is very likely that the hatchery trout will really screw up the genetics of the wild trout that have adapted to the river. They think there is a better solution. They want the Dawt Mill dam rebuilt. The owner of the property is not opposed; in fact, he thinks it's a great idea and would be more of a restoration of the historical site. Apparently, it could be done without running afoul of the Corps of Engineers. They are not sure how many permits it would take to do so, but would like MDC to support the idea. The property owner does not have the money to do it--it would probably cost around $500,000. But my friend thinks that the money could be raised, and perhaps that MDC would kick in part of the funds. Now, as to what my thoughts are...first, I'm not sure that the competition for the forage base from those other predators is as significant as my friend does. I suspect it is having some impact, as is direct predation of trout by stripers and walleye especially. But I still think that the biggest problem may still be the river being warmer in the summer; it will take a while for the tree cover to grow back. The warmer water would also be more hospitable to predator fish, allowing them to thrive at the expense of trout. One thing I would be adamantly opposed to is stocking hatchery trout. Why change what makes the North Fork unique? But as for rebuilding the dam, that's a tough question. It is generally better to remove dams that are barriers to fish migration, not rebuild them. Is this a big exception? I don't know. I certainly have no problem with the idea of rebuilding the dam as an historic structure, and no problem with donations funding it. But I think MDC really needs to seriously study just what impact the predators are having, compared to the changes to riverside vegetation, both on the trout population itself and the forage base. If it shows that the trout population is worse off without the dam, then yeah, I'd have no problem with MDC helping fund the rebuild. There are certainly other examples of the removal of mill dams being both good and bad, or a combination of both. On my home river, Big River, the gradual deterioration of several mill dams on the lower half of the river has had several impacts. The biggest was that these dams had been a significant barrier to spotted bass invasion of the upper river, and once they were torn up in floods over the last few decades, the spots had access to the river above them, and are now having a huge impact on smallmouth populations all the way up to Leadwood. At the same time, however, walleye also can now access the upper half of the river. Having grown up on the river and fished it for 60 years, I'd never seen a walleye anywhere above Morse Mill, the highest mill dam, until it got pretty much destroyed; I've since caught walleye all the way up to Bonne Terre. So I don't have a definitive stance on this. It needs some more study, in my opinion. But I really mean that it NEEDS more study, serious study, not just ignoring the possible problem or putting the bandaid of stocking hatchery trout on it.

I've heard that. Piscifun IS based in China. I don't know how anybody feels about using Chinese products, but the fact is that every reel company either has reels manufactured in China, or at least sources parts from China. Even Abu Garcia, who manufactures in Sweden, gets parts from China. I guess everybody has to decide whether any of it makes any difference.

These days, if you want to work at it long enough and hard enough, you certainly CAN learn anything on your own that you can learn in college. The point of college is the degree. And the point of the degree is to SHOW that you've learned enough to graduate, and therefore hopefully know enough about your chosen field to qualify for a job in it. Learning on your own, it's tough for potential employers to judge whether you know anything or not. The other value to college, though I imagine a lot of people won't agree, is that it broadens your horizons. For somebody like me, grew up in a small town, never lived anywhere else, seldom even visited anywhere else, parents were the same, never got to know people in other parts of the state, let alone the country, I had a very insular view of the world and the people in it. College exposed me to a whole lot of different people from different walks of life and different places. It also exposed me to a lot of different ideas--and NOT so much from the teachers like a lot of people seem to complain about, but from other students with different life experiences. Heck, except for a single black girl in my high school, who I don't think I said more than six words to, I'd never actually talked to a black person until I went to college. My parents had almost never had dealings with black people or any other minority. Practically everybody in town was the same, and the town as a whole was pretty darned racist. College changed my whole outlook on minorities...playing pickup basketball with blacks and Hispanics, having classes with them, getting to know them, hanging out for a while with the black guys on the basketball team while I was doing a work-study deal by sweeping the practice gym, which turned out to be more playing horse with the guys that showed up early to shoot around; well, I came back home with the realization that they were all just people, some good, some bad, some smart, some not so smart.