Steve Pollick: Forming fishermen one bluegill at a time
If you want something to grow, you first must plant the seeds and then you have to water and cultivate the sprouts. I’m actually talking about turning kids into fishermen here.
That latter “gardening” action, cultivating and watering, is what my sons, Andy and Aaron, and I did about fishing with the youngest generation during a recent family reunion of our widespread clan. We had planted the “fishing seeds” with cane-poles, bobbers, and worms a few years ago at Froggy Bottom Pond during a family reunion at home. Now, in a sense, it was time for Round Two.
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Steve Pollick: Berry picking could help lead to your buck this fall
Picking the first batch of ripened black raspberries from the scattered wild patches in Froggy Bottom, as I did recently, is a reminder to get down my beloved recurve bow and start shooting.
Deer season will be upon us before we know it and for those of us who prefer more traditional archery tackle, it is time to loosen up those bow-drawing muscles and re-establish the muscle-memory so critical to good shooting. And the only way to do that is regular rounds of shooting.
Every year I wonder if it will be the last that I can ethically handle my 54-pound, 60-inch Kodiak Hunter on a deer stand.
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Steve Pollick: H2Ohio doesn’t go far enough in Lake Erie cleanup
Every heavy rain event this spring into mid-summer in the western Lake Erie watershed is contributing to the now-annual, late-summer eruption of the infamously familiar “green goop” – toxic blue-green algae blooms – on the much-beloved big lake.
The forecast is gloomy, just given the rain events thus far. These nasty blooms will continue to expose a major smoke-and-mirrors flaw in a massive program so hailed by Ohio Gov. DeWine and the state legislature as the cure. We all know it as H2Ohio.
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Steve Pollick: Refitting an old air rifle
My latest foray into firearms rehabilitation, an old .177 air rifle, is all my buddy Fred Haubert’s fault.
Fred, who lives in eastern Pennsylvania, called to say he finally had had it with the array of pesky rodents, especially the likes of chipmunks, that were burrowing everywhere, getting up under house siding and pigging out at bird feeders. So, he broke down and bought a scoped .177 air rifle.
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Steve Pollick: Tending to Froggy Bottom Creek a labor of love
Maybe the spirit of George Palmiter is smiling down on me this spring from the Great Stream in the sky. I could use the help.
Palmiter, who died a dozen years ago, was nationally known as the “River Rat” and celebrated for his low-tech, minimalist “green” method of keeping streams free-flowing without the need for bulldozers, backhoes, and other destructive machinery that too often has turned creeks and rivers into channelized, barren ditches devoid of habitat.
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Steve Pollick: Seasonal frog songs a wake-up call for humans
Each of us outdoors folks has a special sign that announces “Spring!” to us like nothing else. It may be the sequential emergence of various ephemeral wildflowers, from skunk cabbages and spring beauties to trout lilies, violets, may apples and many more.
It may be the gobbling of wild tom turkeys, the appearance of morels, or an influx of avian migrants from waterfowl to songbirds. Warming weather, running steelhead, walleye and white bass and more.
For me, however, nothing says “Spring!” like the singing of hosts of American toads.
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Steve Pollick: Get a leg up now on next deer season
For many outdoors folks in Ohio, March and the coming of spring means the running of walleyes, white bass, and steelhead up various Lake Erie tributaries, or walleye jigging on the western Erie reefs. But for others, it’s “deer season.”
It is deer season in the sense that avid hunters, especially those with an eye to improving their property and their odds come fall, can make good use of the still “open” woods.
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Steve Pollick: Wildlife, wild plants and weather — it is all connected
You can know that spring is just around the corner without bothering a glance at a calendar, just by watching signs of change in nature.
Sure, the official beginning of spring, by astronomical calculations, is March 19 at 11:06 p.m., Eastern Time. That is when the sun crosses the “celestial equator,” an imaginary plane that extends into space from the Earth’s Equator. It is called the vernal or “green” Equinox – for roughly equal portions of night and day. But wildlife, fish, and wild plants have their own schedules.
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Get to know Ohio’s Maumee and Sandusky rivers, waters that walleye anglers will soon flock to
This is a tale of two state scenic rivers in northwest Ohio, the Sandusky and the Maumee, both of which will be garnering lots of angler attention in the next three months because of their popular spring spawning runs from western Lake Erie, with the first run of walleyes and then of white bass.
The story revolves around what is happening because of a dam that is no longer there, on the Sandusky, and a “dam” that is there, but “not really there,” on the Maumee.
