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Steve Pollick

Steve Pollick: Bald eagle fledglings ready to take flight

Blogs, Featured, Nature Page & Night Sky, Ohio, Opinion /

Watching young bald eagles fledge is like being a father overseeing his kid’s first attempt to ride a bicycle, tottering training wheels and all.
I have been a volunteer eagle-nest watcher weekly since early February for a handful of nests monitored by the Sandusky County Park District in Ohio. Now at the end of May is when five eaglets in three of my nests have grown, precociously, to adult size. They still have four years of growing pains and perils to navigate before mating and raising young themselves, but it all starts with the first flight off the nest.

Steve Pollick: Bald eagle fledglings ready to take flight Read More »

Steve Pollick: H2Ohio in danger of being flushed down drain

1 Comment / Discussions, Featured, Home Page News, Nature Page & Night Sky, Ohio, Opinion /

For a week in early April, Ohio’s Sandusky River had hardly lived up to its designation as “state scenic,” boiling brown and angry and flooding bankside lowlands.
Four and a quarter inches of rain or more had turned a lovely winding stream into a raging torrent. Much the same could be said for the Sandusky’s big cousin, the Maumee River, about 35 miles to the west and the largest river and watershed by far on the entire Great Lakes.

Steve Pollick: H2Ohio in danger of being flushed down drain Read More »

Steve Pollick: A rookie’s first prairie burn is a learning experience that impresses

Featured, Features, Home Page News, Hunting, National Hunting, Nature Page & Night Sky, Ohio /

Prairie fires are serious business.
All you have to do to understand that statement is volunteer to tote and deploy a drip-torch – a heavy metal canister with a thick handle and curly-Q spout, filled with a 60/40 mix of diesel fuel and gasoline. But first be sure to don a Nomex protective suit, a fire-resistant balaclava, a cumbersome, but necessary, helmet with Plexiglas face-shield, and heavy leather boots and gloves. Then you also may shoulder a Fire-Pump – a five-gallon metal canister with shoulder and chest straps and a brass hand-pump on a red hose, all weighing about 42 pounds when topped off with water.

Steve Pollick: A rookie’s first prairie burn is a learning experience that impresses Read More »

Steve Pollick: Turkeys are great, but there’s more reasons to be in the woods right now

Blogs, Featured, Hunting, Nature Page & Night Sky, Ohio, Opinion /

Ah, April! The perfect time to get ready for…fall deer hunting.
What, no wild turkey? Of course wild turkey. But that hunting season still is a couple-three weeks away, at this writing, for Ohio’s large southern zone. My point is, you can get a lot done right now on a work weekend to improve and maintain your autumn deer hunting grounds.

Steve Pollick: Turkeys are great, but there’s more reasons to be in the woods right now Read More »

Steve Pollick: Fed layoffs pose a lot of questions for Ohio’s outdoors

Featured, Home Page News, Nature Page & Night Sky, Ohio, Opinion /

The sweeping cuts to federal natural resource employees has succeeded in sewing chaos and confusion, fear, anxiety, and uncertainty among federal public lands and outdoors-related agencies, offices, programs, and more with their stream of staffing and other cuts and edicts in recent weeks.
Ohio outdoors folks will see the results here as the weeks and months unfold. But trying to swallow it all in one gulp is like trying to drink from a fire hose.

Steve Pollick: Fed layoffs pose a lot of questions for Ohio’s outdoors Read More »

Steve Pollick: Ohioans mark buzzards ‘return’ as a sign of spring, but what if they never left?

Blogs, Featured, Ohio, Opinion /

The 68th annual Buzzard Day celebrations in and around Hinckley, Ohio, are set for the weekend of March 15 and 16, and they are as much a sign of the end of winter and start of spring as the annual walleye runs of the Sandusky and Maumee rivers and the emergence of skunk cabbage and other early wildflowers.

Steve Pollick: Ohioans mark buzzards ‘return’ as a sign of spring, but what if they never left? Read More »

Steve Pollick: Being an Ohio eagle watcher is its own reward

Featured, Home Page News, Nature Page & Night Sky, Ohio /

Being a volunteer bald eagle nest-watcher is not as lonely a duty as an old-time forest ranger sitting up in his fire tower, or a solo Arctic fur-taker running his trapline in the dead of winter, but eagle watching is indeed a solitary activity.
I have invested some time this winter as a nest-watch volunteer in Sandusky County, Ohio, after some years’ pause following work in a research program. And as I sit in my SUV, spotting scope mounted in the driver’s window, scanning a nest and its neighborhood for activity, I have some reflection time.

Steve Pollick: Being an Ohio eagle watcher is its own reward Read More »

Steve Pollick: A surprise mink sighting joins a chorus of wildlife on the Ohio homestead this winter

Blogs, Featured, Nature Page & Night Sky, Ohio, Opinion /

As I write this, the coming of the full Moon of February, known to some Native American tribes as the Hunger Moon for this deep-winter season of want, is just a few days away and it has predators afoot and aloft searching for prey meals.
Red fox and coyotes, the latter including a whopper-size male that must go 50 pounds, have been tripping my trail cam shutters in Froggy Bottom with seasonal regularity. Great horned owls sound off about 3 or 4 a.m. nightly, these flying tigers swooping the bottom silently, ready to sink deadly talons into a nocturnally browsing bunny.

Steve Pollick: A surprise mink sighting joins a chorus of wildlife on the Ohio homestead this winter Read More »

Steve Pollick: Baiting issue for deer a hot topic right now in Ohio

12 Comments / Discussions, Featured, Home Page News, Hunting, National Hunting, Ohio, Opinion /

That “baiting thing” in Ohio deer hunting has resurfaced as hot-stove league fare this post-season, and it prompts sharing some perspectives from the past 70-odd years of my association with the noble and ancient pursuit.
It begins when I was a kid, listening to The Old Man’s colorful stories of hunting in the Yoop – Michigan’s fabled, remote and rugged Upper Peninsula, accessible back then from “Down Below” only by car ferry across the storm-tossed Straits of Mackinac.

Steve Pollick: Baiting issue for deer a hot topic right now in Ohio Read More »

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