nature

You’ll likely hear a woodcock long before spotting one, the sound beginning just after sunset. The woodcock’s call has been described as a single loud “peent” or “buzz,” spaced every few seconds. That usually continues for several minutes before the male finally takes wing in a spiral flight skyward, making a twittering sound as he climbs.  

The path to Eagle Scout includes a rigorous set of requirements that must all be completed before the Scout turns 18: positions of troop leadership, a selection of required and optional learning on a wide variety of subjects (merit badges), and, most famously, completion of a project that benefits the community. 

Nancy Gurney remembers going to the Blue Hole on the occasional Sunday day trip to Castalia with her family in the 1950s, when she and her sister were young and her parents were farmers in Seneca County.

“It was so nice, all landscaped and beautiful, and it had flowers,” recalls Gurney, who now lives in Lakeside. “And there was this mystery of a deep hole with no bottom they can detect.”

Gurney, later a scientist, admits that, of course, there is a bottom — though to a child and tourist, the bottomless mystery thing was way neater. 

“I grew up in Cincinnati, where my father owned a pet store and delivered supplies to other pet stores,” Lipps says. “I rode along with him whenever I could and was always fascinated by the animals in the various shops we visited — particularly the reptiles and amphibians.”

22 million carp?!?

For example, the following item appeared nearly a century ago, in the March 1923 issue of the Fisheries Service Bulletin, published monthly by the Federal Bureau of Fisheries, under the heading “Hatching Carp in Lake Erie”: 

“More than 1,600 owl sightings were reported to the project,” says Mathys. “Of those submitted, about half were able to be assigned to species with some certainty, based on a submitted photo, recording, or description.”

He says he received reports from 87 of Ohio’s 88 counties, with only Jefferson County in eastern Ohio lacking. The top five counties for reported submissions were Hamilton (19.4%), Franklin (7.6%), Butler (6.1%), Warren (5.4%), and Clermont (4.8%). 

Clint Walker, a member of Consolidated Cooperative, discovered just such a pair of dead bucks on his farm in Morrow County in north-central Ohio during the autumn of 2017. Interestingly, this is not the first unusual find on the Walker farm. In 2013, a mastodon skeleton was discovered and subsequently excavated by biology professors and students from Ashland University. According to carbon-14 dating techniques, the giant bones were estimated at 13,000 years old.  

Several species of widow spiders exist in North America, and Ohio has two of them: the Northern Black Widow and the Southern Black Widow — and the fear that we hold in our hearts for both of them is rational and deserved.