wildlife

Tundra swan (the good)

The tundra swan is Ohio’s only native swan. Large flocks of them migrate through the state late in February and March on their way north to nest in the High Arctic, then come back with their young cygnets the following November and December, especially along the shores of Lake Erie.  If you have an older bird ID book, the tundra swan may be identified as a “whistling swan.” 

For instance, a very early Columbus resident and hunter shot 67 gray squirrels in one day from just one tree in the middle of a cornfield on what today is the Statehouse lawn.

“Buffalo herds in the East were never huge, never teeming, never rivaling the truly vast herds that thundered across the Great Plains until the latter half of the 19th century,” Belue says. “Eastern buffalo herds often numbered 100 head or less, and droves of fewer than 20 were common.”

It was the end of May, the time of year when ospreys return to Ohio from their winter home in Mexico, and a breeding pair had decided that one of the utility poles in the training yard next to the co-op’s office was a good spot to build a nest. The population of ospreys, once nearly wiped out in the Buckeye State, has been steadily growing here since the Ohio Department of Natural Resources reintroduced them in 1996, to the point where the Division of Wildlife no longer even bothers to count them.

If you need a reminder that the world is held together by stone, then consider Ohio’s basement. You cannot see it except in the long strands of bored-out cores that have been extracted from hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface. The basement is composed of sedimentary rock, settled and compressed at the bottom of what was once a deep ocean. That bedrock dates to about 570 million years ago, geologists say. It’s called Cambrian period stone, named after Cambria (which is now called Wales), where the stone type was first described and given a name around 1835.

When Kline and his wife, Kris, members of Lancaster-based South Central Power Company, acquired the land, they weren’t sure exactly what they were going to do with it.

“We could cut for timber, but that didn’t seem fulfilling,” he says. Finally, they decided to fall back on what they know. Christopher has a master’s degree in plant biology from Ohio University and served as education director at the Grange Insurance Audubon Center in Columbus. He also was interpretation specialist at Franklin Park Conservatory, where he was known as “The Butterfly Guy.”

“The Merlin Bird ID app contains identification support and photos, sound recordings, maps, and descriptions for more than 10,000 bird species from around the world, with more species being added constantly,” says Kathi Borgmann, communications manager for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which developed and owns Merlin. “More than 29 million people worldwide have installed Merlin on their phones, with June 2024 seeing the greatest number of Merlin users, more than 5.4 million during that month alone.”  

The family moved to Italy to escape the terrors of the French Revolution. It was there that a self-educated Constantine came of age and took an ardent interest in natural history and languages, which would come to have its consequences in the names of organisms — through the eastern U.S., in Ohio, and even into the American Southwest. 

“The majority of Ohio’s fish populations are sustained through natural reproduction,” says Chris French, fish hatchery program administrator. “However, stocking expands and diversifies fishing opportunities in waters where existing habitats don’t support some fish populations. Stocking is only one of many fish management tools used by the Division of Wildlife to improve angling.”

The original farm contained a few small woodlots, which Graham kept. Also, because much of his ground is made up of water-loving hydric soil, he built a sizable pond and large wetland, paying for their construction through cost-sharing. The wildlife haven now attracts myriad songbirds, waterfowl, pollinators, white-tailed deer, and even a bald eagle or two.