A local game warden got himself a radio show on a Lebanon, Missouri radio station several years ago and he ended it each week with this statement, “Remember, if we (the MDC) don’t say you can, YOU CAN’T!”

I have been doing some things they don’t say I can do. In mid-May I killed a copperhead about 40 yards from my front door and then a week later killed a six-foot black snake on my back deck, trying to get up a big oak tree to eat some baby birds in a nest a few feet away. I shot a half-dozen black vultures down on the river recently and one cottonmouth. Then this past week I killed a pair of brown-headed cowbirds on the ground beneath a bird feeder. They are the ‘parasitic’ birds that actually kick out the eggs of the birds that make open nests and lay their eggs in those nests. In one spring, they may lay as many as 30 to 40 eggs in other birds nests, destroying that many or more songbird eggs. Many species of songbirds raise the young of the cowbirds. That is no joke, they actually do that! Dead cowbirds mean more cardinals, doves, bluebirds, mockingbirds, thrashers, etc.

I guess I am one heck of a violator… the MDC does not say I can kill a cowbird or armadillo or copperhead. But those folks at the MDC live in suburbs mostly and I live in the woods. We think different because we live so much differently.

It wasn’t too many years ago the MDC printed, at the cost of tens of thousands of our dollars, a brochure that said this about copperheads… “They seldom bite, they NEVER kill.” I reckon they have now burned a whole bunch of them because within a year or so, some poor fellow who had likely read that colorful, authoritarian brochure put together by the MDC herpetologist, (the scientific word for snake expert) was in his tent in a Missouri state park when a copperhead came in it with him. He picked it up to release it outside his tent and it bit him and he died within a few hours.

The MDC’s official, written statement on poisonous snakes in the Ozarks is that there has never been a death in Missouri from a copperhead or cottonmouth and that is simply untrue! When I was a naturalist at Buffalo River National Park I went out and talked to old timers in both north Arkansas and southern Missouri, the type of people who sat in homemade rocking chairs on the front porch of homes they built themselves who could relate history of days long before I was born. I learned so much from them. An old-timer that I respected so much worked for the National Park Service there at Buffalo Point, who had actually worked as a young man for the Civilian Conservation Corps in the thirties. His name was Rufus Still and local folks swore that if you wanted warts removed, Rufus could make it happen. I witnessed that, and I listened to him for hours.

He told me about deaths from copperhead bites in the region where he had lived all his life, and told of the many remedies they tried to treat the bites of any poisonous snake. There were deaths and loss of hands or feet all through the early years of the 20th century, which he related to me. Once as a naturalist leading a hike along a trail I had built across the Buffalo River, a copperhead bit my boot as I stepped on a tree root he was laying beside. I hadn’t stepped on him, I just stepped about 8-inches from where he was. Of course, his fangs stuck in my leather boot but didn’t penetrate. If it had been in May, or if the temperature had not been 80 degrees, but 60 degrees, I imagine he never would have struck. If that doesn’t make sense to you, you should read all about venomous snakes, or see next week’s column, in which I will explain all that.

For years in the 1970’s I roamed the Ozark and Ouachita mountains in Arkansas as a paid Naturalist reporting on the wildest parts of the state for an agency known as the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission. Some of those explorations happened in October and I can tell you, timber rattlers, cottonmouths, and copperheads love October in those mountains. I never killed any of them, because they were in a natural habitat where only a very few people would ever be. But my home up here on Lightnin’ Ridge is not a place where I am inclined to co-habitate when it comes to venomous snakes.

There are three venomous snake species I have stories about in my next column, and the five-year old Ozark boy bitten in 1928 and what they did to save him. I will also tell you about a fourth commonly-seen venomous snake in the Ozarks which has never bitten but one person! Only a few Ozarkers can name him!

Go to my website to see one of the most unbelievable photos you will ever see of a copperhead being killed by a salt and pepper king snake not much bigger than he is.

We have some spring magazines left for anyone who wants one… 112 pages, full color, about the Ozarks and the Outdoors for only 8 dollars, postage paid. To get an autographed and inscribed copy, call me at 417-777-5227. My email address is lightninridge47@gmail.com Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.