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.
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 »
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.
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 »
“Whoa!” I shouted to my spouse as we tooled along U.S. 6 about 50 miles east of Denver on a recent road trip. “Those are pronghorns!”
Old hunters always are excited to see game animals – wherever, whenever – and they always are on the lookout for them. The pronghorn antelope I had just spied were a prime example. So, I turned the truck around at the first opportunity and returned to where a band of about 40 of these handsome, fleet “goats” were lollygagging in a sagebrush and bunched-grass pasture.
Steve Pollick: Big band of pronghorns are a rare treat on a recent road trip out West Read More »
So, here we are, on the doorstep of the Brave New World of 2025. Time for well-meant New Year’s resolutions, including for outdoors folks.
For me, that means things like resolving to involve a young person in the outdoors – initially or more deeply. And I don’t mean more daddies sitting little 7-year-old juniors on their laps over bait in a ground blind or tree stand and doing everything but pulling the trigger on big bucks. Or handing them a bass rod with a 5-pounder on the line so little He or She can mug the camera with a Big One.
Steve Pollick: New Year’s resolutions for the outdoorsman Read More »
A third invasion of big white birds appears on the way to Ohio latitudes this autumn and winter, this time with snowy owls following on the heels of tundra swans and American white Pelicans in the last month or so.
“If you spot a ‘white plastic bag’ on corn stubble, you might want to take a closer look,” said Lori Monska, a spokesman for the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge Association near Oak Harbor. It could be a snowy owl.
Steve Pollick: In a big year for birds, snowy owls the latest to find a home in Ohio Read More »
Some hunters have been prowling Froggy Bottom here at night lately, but they are not jacklighting deer poachers.
A screech owl and a great horned owl are the culprits. The little screech – a tufted-ear, gray-phase version of this robin-sized owl – showed up on the 12th for the third November in a row, renewing winter residence in a 40-year-old wood duck box that prior to his arrival was unused by woodies or anything else.
Steve Pollick: Owls make fine friends at Froggy Bottom in Ohio’s Sandusky County Read More »
The continued eastward expansion into the Great Lakes of the range of the American white pelican, the second largest bird in North America, recently received an exclamation point along western Lake Erie with the spotting of some 500 of the great white birds at Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge in western Ottawa County, Ohio.
White pelicans, with wingspans that can stretch more than nine feet, are second only to the fabled California condor in terms of size. They can weigh anywhere from 8 to 30 pounds, averaging 11 to 20 pounds, and are distinctive for their “scoop-shovel” pouched bills.
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