I don’t consider myself an avid birder, but I understand enough about Ohio birds to know when something unusual shows up.
American bitterns are not easy to spot, for two reasons. First, there aren’t very many of them — they’re state-endangered. Second, they are masters of camouflage. The bird kept its heavily streaked breast turned toward me at all times, rotating slowly as I moved back and forth for a better camera angle.
Our state’s very name, translated from the language of its original inhabitants, means “Good River.” While Ohio is named specifically for the mighty waterway that forms its eastern and southern borders, that name serves as an apt description of the entire place.
Rivers, to me, are analogies of our humanity: They begin as spindly streams, unglamorous trickles, and, like people, they find their way — carving their character as they go, widening and deepening with distance. If a river can have such an ignominious beginning yet end with a glorious, glowing connection to something larger, then couldn’t that be a template for a life well-lived?
Just about every winter, I receive a frantic email from an Ohio Cooperative Living reader that goes something like this:
“Help! A hawk is attacking the songbirds at my birdfeeder! What should I do?”
It’s not the answer most want to hear, but the only alternative is to not feed birds. By choosing to feed, you congregate songbirds in numbers not normally found in the wild — and that, in turn, makes easy pickings for predators.
The most common hawk seen in the Buckeye State at winter feeders is the Cooper’s hawk. Sleek, fast, and deadly, this member of the accipiter grouping of hawks is one of the stealth fighter jets of Ohio’s bird world.
Stories of huge catfish — channel cats, flatheads, and blues — lurking in the deep, murky, mysterious pools of the Ohio River have been whispered from angler to angler for hundreds of years. For instance, David Zeisberger, a missionary to the Delaware Indians in what would one day become Ohio, recorded in his 1780 book, History of the Northern American Indians, the following fish story:
It was more than 60 years ago, and I was just 6 years old, rubbernecking from the back seat of my parents’ red-and-white 1950s-era Ford Fairlane. As we neared our destination, my father remarked into the rearview mirror, “We should be able to see it soon…”
We crested a hill, and I caught my first glimpse.
Only a few years ago, when Buckeye Lake in central Ohio was being drawn down for dam repair, workers made a historic find: Hidden in those murky depths was a sunken canal boat called the Black Diamond.
“It’s the first archaeological-documented canal boat discovery in Ohio,” says Andy Sewell, historian with Columbus-based Lawhon and Associates, an environmental consulting firm associated with the dam project.
One of the three largest wildlife conservation facilities in North America — The Wilds — is located in the Buckeye State, just south of Cambridge. Now encompassing nearly 10,000 acres, The Wilds was incorporated in 1984 to reclaim surface-mined land, with a mission “to lead and inspire by connecting people and wildlife.”
Whether you enjoy tent camping or drive the largest motorhome on the road, there’s a campsite awaiting you on the Ohio islands of Lake Erie. Accessible by ferry, South Bass, Middle Bass, and Kelleys Island state parks offer a unique camping experience close to home.
No one knows the Lake Erie islands better than Steve Riddle. Raised on Middle Bass, Riddle spent a 30-year career managing the three island parks for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. Today, he is the police chief of Put-In-Bay, the small village on South Bass Island.
Do I believe in the existence of Bigfoot, a hair-covered, 8-foot-tall mysterious monster that smells bad and has been rumored to live in remote Ohio woodlands since the mid-1700s? No. No, I don’t.
But many people do. So many, in fact, that the Buckeye State has no less than three annual conferences dedicated to Bigfoot believers. Much of the activity takes place in and around Ohio’s largest state park, Salt Fork State Park in Guernsey County near Cambridge.
