John K. Flores: Squirrel hunting offers a lot of bang for the buck

Frank Tuller was one of my best friends during high school back in the early ’70s. He and I were known to skip school from time to time to go fishing “up north” as they say in Michigan where we grew up.
Frank was a year older than me and someone who lost his father at a young age. As a result, Frank never played sports, but instead worked after school building kitchen counters. When he was off work, we’d get together and go water skiing, fishing, and, in the fall, hunting.
For a guy in high school, Frank made pretty good money and had a stash he tucked away in various places in his bedroom.
One October afternoon, Frank and I decided to make a squirrel hunt in a woodlot near our subdivision in the country. I had been seeing some big fox squirrels there and thought I’d share the spot with my buddy.
The leaves were in peak fall colors and though we were experiencing a second summer, sitting in the shadows of the woods close to sunset, the air felt cool.
We didn’t see anything that afternoon until we decided to leave. Suddenly, a squirrel leaped from the forest floor and scampered up the trunk of a large maple.
Frank, with lightning reflexes, shouldered his shotgun and fired off a shot. What happened next was nothing short of a tickertape parade as confetti came floating down to the ground everywhere.
“No-no-no,” Frank cried out, as I watched dumbfounded by what I was seeing.
“What Frank?” I replied while picking up a piece of the confetti.
It was pieces of money, or what used to be money and that’s when I began laughing. No, it wasn’t funny, but for some reason I started cracking up. One of the places Frank stashed his money was in the barrel of his 12-gauge shotgun.
“Shut up or I’m going to kick your @#&!” Frank said, “now help me find the pieces!”
We combed every square inch of that patch of woods and picked up every piece of those bills we could find.
Living in a small town where everyone knows each other has its advantages. When we got to Frank’s house, he grabbed the phone book and looked up the local banker’s phone number and called him.
“Sure Frank, come on by and let’s see what you got,” he said to Frank on the phone.
The banker looked over the shredded money, while Frank and I looked on and said, “Frank, if you can tape the pieces of these bills together where we can see the serial numbers, we can make good on them.”
Frank stayed up all night putting what must have been like working a thousand-piece puzzle, because a few days later the banker had exchanged his taped-up money for some new bills.
The Louisiana 2024-25 squirrel season opens Saturday. It’s a pretty big event across the state, where more than 50,000 hunters will take to the woods to hunt bushy tails.
Statistics show that Louisiana’s small game hunters harvest upwards of 700,000 squirrels annually. Essentially, there is no shortage of squirrels in the state and there is no shortage of public land with excellent habitat to hunt them.
Fox and gray squirrels are the two predominant species of squirrels found throughout the state. A third is the Bachman’s fox squirrel that’s found in Southeast Louisiana; however, its numbers have been in decline for several decades due to habitat loss.
In St. Mary Parish, gray squirrels are king, but there are plenty of fox squirrels as well. In the coastal marsh, grays can be found along canal and bayou banks with dense understory cover, where there are nearby myrtle trees and various water and red oaks.
Fox squirrels can be found on oak ridges and woodlots with more open understory surrounded by sugar cane fields, where there is a higher elevation than the coastline.
Squirrels are perfect game animals for introducing young people to hunting. It’s an opportunity to put into practice lessons learned from hunter’s safety class and to get acquainted with real situations in the field that only come from experience.
Every squirrel season, I can’t help but remember that day in the woods over a half century ago, when Frank blasted $20 bills into the trees. I always get a good chuckle from that memory. That said, when I open the breech of my over and under shotgun, I always look down the barrel to make sure there isn’t some stash of money I tucked away and forgot about.
John Flores is the Morgan City Review’s outdoor writer. He can be contacted at gowiththeflo@cox.net.