At one time, the woods had many more critters

When I was a child growing up out on the farm in Eastern Jackson County, I thought my dear old grandmother was a very wise woman. It seemed to me like she knew the answer to about every question my little mind could come up with.

Before she married my grandfather, she was a school teacher. But in her day, teachers were required to be unmarried women, so when she got hitched, that was the end of her teaching career. I guess that’s the reason she spent so much time trying to make a hard working, decent and honest human being out of me.

One afternoon, she sat me down and was reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears. My mind began to visualize the three bears living down in our woods, eating their porridge. I asked her some silly question, such as how come we don’t see any bears in our woods like that.

She answered with the fact that there were no bears in Jackson County, but the Missouri countryside is full of many wild animals and people love to talk about them. Maybe that’s because they are so scarce to our eyes and sometimes hard to find.

Long ago, in the days of the pioneers, she continued, there were many animals like bears that are no longer found in our neighborhood today. There were not only black bears, but there were wolves, buffalo, cougars, elk and antelope. There were also many birds that we do not have today, such as the beautiful trumpeter swan and the ivory-billed woodpecker.

When I asked her what happened to them, she said there are many reasons these critters have disappeared from the Missouri grasslands and forest. But mainly, they have disappeared because they were killed off too fast by the pioneer hunters for food. There weren’t enough left of each kind to keep their little animal families going.

Another reason was the change in the countryside. When civilizations come into a new region, trees and bushes are cut down, and the soil is plowed up. This disturbs the habitat of those animals and birds that lived there. They cannot feed and build nests like they used to, so many of them die or simply move further away. The Indians who came before us were expert hunters, but they did not kill the animals so rapidly, and they did not disturb the trees and grass as much as the white man did.

Today however, Eastern Jackson County still has many different kinds of wildlife, and most of it is increasing in numbers. This is because the government has designed strict rules for their protection. People are allowed to kill only a certain number of certain kinds of animals, and they are allowed to hunt them only at certain times of the year. The largest wild animal in Missouri today is the deer. You can probably find deer anywhere across the state. On many highways you will see signs that read, “Caution, deer crossing.”

The smaller wild animals are the fox, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, skunks, bobcats, coyotes and a few others. Those that fly are quail, geese, ducks, and many kinds of birds. Missouri’s official state bird is rather hard to find in the cities, because they tend to shy away from people, but the bluebird is very noticeable out in the country. And of course, there are many kinds of fish in the waters and snakes in the grass. We haven’t even mentioned the bees, frogs, spiders, ants, turtles, lizards, and worms, so maybe we’d better stop and get on with our story of the three bears.

In cooperation with The Examiner, Ted W. Stillwell is available to speak before any club, church, civic, senior, or school groups. These informative and entertaining programs have been well received over the past number of years across Jackson, Cass and Clay counties.