Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Flanders
Oh my! Those are some nice osage orange. A friend here would love to have some pcs of that to make his long bows with.
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Richard, there are, at least used to be back when I was shooting a recurve, several bowyers in Missouri that used Osage for their stick bows. Osage fence posts cost more than treated wooden posts here, and they last longer. I like seeing their twisted forms in fence lines. They have so much more character. You can burn your wood stove up using it, and it is very hard on chainsaw chains.
I asked Elaine to take this photo when we were hunting in Iowa earlier this season. The pile of bulldozed trees and shrubs was a fence row that had held birds the year before. It was an old Osage fence row that had been "harvested" for fence posts many times (the trees sprout back well from cutting) over the course of years. I guess the farmer wanted a tax break this year. Thus the bulldozer. One year we had a covey that would not leave a bulldozed fence line. It was sad to see them running about in the debris.
Ah, thus is progress.
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"Doubtless the good Lord could have made a better game bird than bobwhite, and better country to hunt him in...but equally doubtless, he never did." -- Guy de la Valdene (from A Handful of Feathers )
"'I promise you,' he said, 'on my word of honor, I won't die on the opening of the bird season.'" -- Robert Ruark (from The Old Man and the Boy)
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