This is written by the head of the 'Southern Fruit Fellowship of growing up in Mississippi.
Have Gun; Will Travel
My first job that actually paid money was bounty hunting. I was about seven or eight years old, I guess. Ten cents per carcass; cash on the barrelhead. Grandma was my employer.
She paid me to sit under her back porch and shoot birds out of her extensive fig orchard with a .22 rifle. Birds of all sorts kept a close eye on those maturing Brown Turkeys, and when the fruit was ripe, they descended upon the bushes in hordes. Birds can really devastate a fig crop – they’ll take a peck out of one after the other, not consuming a single fruit but ruining them all. This distressed Grandma. Fresh and canned figs were a big part of our family’s diet. She and Mama spent all summer canning fruit and vegetables. Fig and pear preserves, plum and blackberry jelly - those were our sweets to eat all year long. Grandma had the old-time farmer’s attitude toward any varmit that threatened a food crop – eliminate it.
I was a very proud boy on those occasions when I presented her with a pail of slain songbirds. She counted them out and paid on the spot, pleased to be rid of these nuisances. Most were blue jays and blackbirds, with a rare crow - very rare, since crows are usually smarter than your average eight-year-old boy. Grandma asked me not to shoot mockingbirds. She believed they kept snakes out of the yard, and they sang for her. Woodpeckers carried a bounty of 25 cents – they pecked holes in her unpainted wood house, up high in the eaves, where it was difficult to repair. I killed only a few; my stalking skills were still developing. Woodpeckers are smarter than they look.
Grandma bragged on me so much a neighbor offered to pay me to rid her orchard of pests, too. I found contract killing to be quite lucrative – it didn’t pay as well as lawn-mowing, but it was much easier and a whole lot more fun!
The older generations of farming folks were generally pretty hard on any form of wildlife they considered non-edible, dangerous, or predatory. Hawks, owls, raccoons, and foxes were all shot on sight, lest they bother the poultry. And they did indeed all kill chickens with relish; I have seen it myself. Hawks learn to watch for flocks of chickens in the open and will return to kill one every day. Owls will actually alight and crawl through cracks in a henhouse to get at the chickens. Foxes often seem to go into frenzy once inside a coop – they just can’t stop with one hen; they will kill an entire flock in an orgy of bloodletting. That’s not a scene a farmer likes to see when he opens the coop door in the morning.
It goes without saying that all snakes were killed as soon as spotted, except maybe king snakes or corn snakes. King snakes eat other snakes, which was thought to be a very good thing. Many farmers caught corn snakes to release into their corncribs – they ate lots of rats. Of course, hawks, owls, foxes, and many other species of snakes also prey on rats, but that didn’t matter – if a varmit looked too hard at a chicken, he was dead.
I’m not sure if chicken snakes really eat chickens, but they do eat eggs, sometimes several at a time. Many of us have quite vivid memories of groping around for eggs in a nest and grabbing instead a five-foot chicken snake. That’ll wake you up!
Big, aged snapping turtles were thought to eat all the fish out of a pond and were edible themselves, so were easy to catch as they crossed roads.
The list of “good” critters was very short. Bats, purple martins, and toads were spared because they ate mosquitoes – a helpful function in Mississippi. Buzzards were tempting targets but were never shot since their undertaking activities were considered necessary. Mockingbirds were sacrosanct. Legal hunting seasons on game were often respected.
I’m sure many of you are having a fit right now, aghast at the barbaric slaughter of so many innocent beasts and bemoaning the damage it did to the ecology. You’re right, too, in a way, and I agree it’s ignorant to exterminate creatures just because they might someday give trouble. We’re a little more enlightened nowadays. But look, don’t dare judge those olden farmers; you and I have the luxury of hindsight and a lifestyle that is not hand-to-mouth subsistence farming. If an animal dines on our garden, we’re not really going to go hungry, are we? We can afford to be merciful; they couldn’t. You must view it in the proper context – it really was a different time and place.
In this part of the world, sixty or seventy years ago, there wasn’t any industry of which to speak. Nearly everyone farmed; they grew cotton for cash, corn to feed stock, and vegetables, chickens, and hogs to feed themselves. When a varmit ate some of this, farmers saw it as food taken directly from the mouths of their children, and did the best they could to eliminate this competition – they shot, trapped, or poisoned it, ruthlessly. A strict zero-tolerance policy was upheld against all “varmits.”
There’s been quite a turnabout since the old days, hasn’t there? Both in the landscape and in peoples’ attitudes. And for the better, I think. Things are a lot easier on the wild creatures now. Much of the land that was farmland when I was a youth is now wooded, or in that lovely transition state in between the two, which provides SO much cover and food. My father was an avid hunter, but never killed a deer, or a turkey; there just weren’t any around in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, all had been shot out, and poor habitat was left for them. I stopped deer hunting after I killed 100 of them. My dad and uncles hunted POSSUMS at night, all the coons and foxes had been killed out – now, I can see them every day, in my YARD, in TOWN. Panthers and bears have moved back into this area. The OTTERS are back in Mississippi! Apparently, all those pine trees we’ve planted over old cropland have slowed soil erosion, so our creeks and rivers are clearer. When I was a child, the bag limit on ducks was about one a day, and I never saw a Canada goose until I was fifteen years old – now, the sky abounds with waterfowl, and I can literally look up and see geese in the sky at any time. We have coyotes, armadillos, and fire ants now, too, THOSE are recent arrivals; the jury is still out on them, but I’m pretty sure they’d be placed in the “varmit” category by any old-time farmers. People are now planting crops specifically to nurture birds and animals, and for the bees, other pollinators, butterflies, and hummingbirds, too. “Wildlife food plots” are a major industry; it’s keeping some of those old feed stores alive. I consider the fruit trees that I plant now as being as much for the wild animals as myself.
I grow fig trees, but I never get a single fruit from them. Birds take them all. I’ve no complaint – I reckon I owe them.
(This article was printed in POMONA and the Southern Fruit Fellowship Newsletter a few years ago. Odd, but I got more responses from this article than anything else I’ve ever written, way more. It seemed to strike a chord with middle-aged and older men – apparently, this was sort of a Rite of Passage for males of my generation, to be handed a weapon and sent forth to protect the family’s food crops, and we took those responsibilities very seriously. It seemed to stir fond memories of days spent afield stalking the elusive fig-eating jaybird. We live in a strange world.)