2021 has seen noteworthy happenings in the Ohio outdoors world
Whether they registered as seismic or not, some tremors on Ohio’s 2021 outdoors landscape might’ve shaken inquiring minds to attention.
The Ohio Division of Wildlife’s decision to reduce the daily limit of yellow perch to 10 along a large stretch of the state’s Lake Erie shoreline was one temblor. The choice to pare the 2022 spring turkey limit to a single bird was another.
Both were mandated out of necessity, hunters and fishermen have been told, and fixes sometimes requires individual sacrifice. Yet the decisions raise questions about the ultimate costs for a long-held way of thinking that values growth and development while offering inadequate interest to conserving the remnants of a natural world.
Not that Gov. Mike DeWine’s stewardship has been without efforts at improvement. An ongoing project dubbed H2Ohio has been spending millions at numerous sites to create wetlands and thereby mitigate lake- and river-polluting nutrient runoff that boosts the growth of toxic algae and feeds the takeover of invasive plants.
This at a time, however, when industrial-scale facilities within the watershed of the Maumee River, the biggest contributor of nutrient runoff into Lake Erie, has become more laden with chickens, pigs and cattle by government blessing. The result has been poopalooza, too much animal waste production to prevent an unhealthy portion of it from flushing downstream.
Likely met more with a sense of inevitability than trauma was the revelation that free-range deer infected with chronic wasting disease had been identified north of Marion in the vicinity of Killdeer Plains Wildlife Area. Additionally, reports emerged in spring from federal agencies that significant numbers of inspected whitetail deer in Ohio and other Midwest states either were infected with COVID-19 or had been.
Among the year’s happenings, highlights and not-so-high stuff:
• Some 300,000 hunters, including many from out of state, checked 197,735 deer during the 2020-21 archery, gun and muzzleloader seasons, the most in eight years.
• The popular Deer and Turkey Expo, rebranded as the Open Season Sportsman’s Expo, was forced to move both its scheduled time slot in March and its location because of COVID-19 precautions. Later, the show was canceled for the second year in a row.
• The statewide spring turkey season surrendered 14,541 bearded birds, a decrease of 3,353, or about 18.7%, from the 17,894 taken in 2020.
• A portal designed to allow sportfishers to locate bodies of water at which the wildlife division concentrates its stockings of specific species was made accessible through the website wildohio.gov.
• The Ohio General Assembly revised the cost of multiyear hunting and fishing licenses in a way likely to increase wildlife division revenue by an additional $14 million over a 10-year span. Capital expenditures included $29 million to advance the purchase of thousands of acres of former AEP property for the purpose of establishing the 35,396-acre Appalachian Hills Wildlife Area.
• A walleye for the first time in ages was taken from the Sandusky River upstream from the site of Ballville Dam, demolished in 2018. The dam removal was consistent with the goal of establishing more spawning habitat for Lake Erie walleye.
• The Lake Erie walleye hatch was rated as the fifth largest during the past 35 years. The yellow perch hatch ranked about average in the west, poor to below average in the central and east.
• The wildlife division launched a program using federal money to pay landowners willing to open acreage to public hunting.
• Piping plovers nested on a stretch of Lake Erie beach for the first time in at least 80 years.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Outdoors: Fishing, hunting world saw noteworthy occurrences in 2021
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