Woods, Waters & Wildlife

Detail from an artist’s rendering of the execution of Col. William Crawford.

One of the most infamous incidents in all of early Ohio history occurred 241 years ago this month, on June 11, 1782, when Col. William Crawford of the fledgling U.S. Army was burned at the stake by Native American locals out for revenge.

The story begins several months earlier, in March 1782, when 96 members of the Delaware tribe, who had converted to Christianity, were rounded up, massacred, and burned along with their entire village of Gnadenhutten (meaning huts, or tents, of grace) along the Tuscarawas River by Col. David Williamson and his contingent of frontier militia.

Baltimore orioles, such as the adult male on the left and the juvenile at right, migrate through Ohio beginning in late April and early May each year.

Roman Mast’s backyard looks like a bird-feeding test kitchen.

“I have my oriole feeders out by the last week in April,” Mast says. “Through the years, I’ve tried a lot of different foods to attract orioles, including sliced oranges, but my main food now is simply grape jelly.” Orioles and a few other species, such as rose-breasted grosbeaks, gray catbirds, and some warblers, seem to love the stuff. “A red-bellied woodpecker even comes to my jelly feeders occasionally,” Mast says.

Author and conservationist Louis Bromfield named his famous farm Malabar after the beautiful Malabar Coast of India, where he and his family lived for a short time during the early 20th century.

In 1896, a baby was born in Mansfield — a boy who would one day grow up to travel the world, become a writer, and win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1927, at just 30 years of age.

In his 1945 book titled Pleasant Valley, Bromfield wrote of the area: 

It is a pleasant land all about you, valleys where the bottom land is rich, bordered by hills covered with wild and luxuriant forest, the whole filigreed with the silver of the streams called Switzer’s Run, Possum Run, and the Clear Fork; and far down lies the blue shield of Pleasant Hill Lake bordered by the deep red of sandstone bluffs and the blue black of hemlock trees.

Success was not only converted to a “convict ship,” complete with all her ghastly accoutrements, but was also the “oldest and most historic ship afloat.” 

There has likely never been a more ironic name for a prison ship than Success.

A group of promoters purchased the ship, planning to sail her around the world for the public to board and tour — for a price, of course. But before her debut, they believed Success needed a bit of refurbishing. 

They brought aboard some unusual equipment: handcuffs, leg irons, branding irons, metal straightjackets, a triangle-shaped whipping post, even a medieval torture device known as an iron maiden. 

And they painted on the sides of the hull, in large black letters, the words “Convict Ship.” 

Aldo Leopold, the “Father of Wildlife Management,” described his classic book, A Sand County Almanac, like this: “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.”  

To conserve and improve fish and wildlife resources and their habitats for sustainable use and appreciation by all. - Mission statement of the Ohio Division of Wildlife

Teddy bears will be purchased in untold numbers this Christmas season as gifts for children, both around the country and around the world. Ever stop and wonder why?

Guiding the president for several days was Holt Collier, the most famous bear hunter in the state. Born a slave, Collier was now a freed man who made much of his living by bear hunting. He and his pack of top-notch hounds were said to have taken more than 3,000 black bears. 

Had it not been for Ohio’s duck hunters, much of Ohio’s marshland, which is so important to both birding and hunting today, may well have been lost to development.

"There’s a singular reason that some of the best Lake Erie marshes in Ohio have been saved from destruction. One reason, two words: duck hunters. It sounds blunt and oversimplified, but from the viewpoint of wildlife, duck hunters saved the marshes.”

During settlement, the Buckeye State lost an estimated 95% of its original wetlands, much of that the Great Black Swamp, which once covered nearly all of northwestern Ohio and northeastern Indiana. That gigantic region was a haven for wildlife of all sorts — not just waterfowl — as the water slowly drained into the vast marshes that ringed the western edge of Lake Erie from Toledo to Sandusky.

Hellbender

Herpetologist Greg Lipps, standing knee-deep in the Kokosing River in Knox County, lifts the side of a large, flat rock and tilts it up on edge. As the swirling mud below slowly clears, he stares intently into the water.

No one seems to know for sure how or where the name “hellbender” came from. One theory claims that this docile, harmless salamander was named by early American settlers who thought it so ugly, “it was a creature from hell where it’s bent on returning.” Other common names for Cryptobranchus alleganiensis include devil dog, mud dog, water dog, and grampus. My personal favorite — for the disgusted reaction it triggers — is “snot otter,” describing the heavy coating of mucus that covers the creature’s wrinkled, mottled-brown skin.   

Feathers from some birds, such as the great egret, were in such demand by the millinery trade that they were worth twice their weight in gold.

Sometimes, it’s good to remember just how far we’ve come in wildlife conservation.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, bird feathers were the fashion fad in the millinery — hatmaking — trade. Some feathers, especially plumes from great egrets and snowy egrets, were in such demand that they were literally worth twice their weight in gold. During the 1890s alone, it’s estimated that 5 million birds were killed annually for their feathers. To make matters worse, those birds were taken almost exclusively during the breeding season, their eggs left to rot or their hatchlings to starve and die.

A ghost plant found in Ohio

I enjoy reading — always have. One of my favorite books is Wilson Rawls’ 1961 classic, Where the Red Fern Grows. The author reveals the origin of the title of his fiction novel through his young protagonist, Billy Colman, who lived in the Oklahoma Ozarks: 

The plant grows in such deep, dark forests and is so short-lived that I’ve only seen a handful during a lifetime of wandering the woods. One was growing along the Appalachian Trail in Virginia, spotted during a day hike with my wife. Several other plants I’ve stumbled across here in Ohio (not literally, thankfully), but not often. Each serendipitous find is truly a special event to be celebrated and, of course, photographed.