Ohio Natural Resources Department gets budget boost from DeWine Administration, state legislature

 

At 2,438 pages and with a combined street value of around $162 billion, Ohio’s 2022-2023 biennium (two-year) Operating Budget will fuel everything from supporting the State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors to helping out public education.

Tucked away in the massive document as well are six pages anchored on behalf of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. Within that handful of ledger notations is the setting aside of a little more than $1 billion over the next two fiscal years for the Department.

In spreadsheet wizardry that accountants thrive on, the breakdown for the individual divisions is peppered throughout the six pages. Among the Divisions covered are Wildlife, along with Parks and Watercraft, and also Natural Areas.

The Ohio General Assembly built and then approved the two-year budget in late June and Governor Mike DeWine signed it July 1st.

Ultimately, the bottom line for the Natural Resources Department is, well, welcome, says the agency’s chief financial officer for the agency's internal Office of Budget and Management, Ryan K. Frazee.

“It’s a fantastic budget for the ODNR,” Frazee said. “Our budget didn’t decrease, but actually went up.”

Frazee has the unenviable task of deciphering the official budgetary hieroglyphics and putting the data into understandable language for the Department’s ultimate users along with the media and the public.

“It’s kind of a nerdy thing for what we do here in our office; the budget,” Frazee said with a chuckle.

Specifically, the rows of numbers and scrolls of separate accounts shows that for Fiscal 2022, the Natural Resources Department is earmarked to receive $526,081,196 while for Fiscal 2023, the Department is slated to receive $493,331,100.

In actuality, the Ohio General Assembly was more generous than was DeWine’s initial request, too. The governor originally had asked that the Natural Resources Department get $483,531,196 for Fiscal 2022 with Fiscal 2023’s gubernatorial request matching the General Assembly’s generosity.

“We love it when the legislature gives the ODNR more money,” DeWine told “Ohio Outdoor News” in a short interview.

DeWine added the legislature “recognizes we have more people fishing and going outdoors” and that a lot of the Department’s infrastructure “needs to be fixed up.”

“We’ve had good feelings from the legislature about the ODNR. It’s one area where we all can work together; the outdoors is not a partisan issue, and we have more that needs to be done.”

Broken down by divisions – not necessarily the easiest of tasks since individual divisional line items appear to pop up when least expected – the document shows where the financial goods are being delivered.

For Fiscal 2022 an assembly of all the various related items for the Wildlife Division totals $114,450,329. For the Natural Areas Division that figure is $12,317,024, and for the Parks and Watercraft Division the figure is $137,960,329.

To be sure there are always accounting asterisks when dealing with a budget with the complexity of the one for Ohio’s state government. Perhaps none more so than when dealing with the Parks and Watercraft Division.

At the beginning of each fiscal year, there is a cash transfer from the State Park Fund to the State Park Maintenance Fund to be used for maintenance, repair and renovation projects at state parks, Frazee said, launching into his budgetary tutorial.

“The amount of the transfer is five percent of the average of the previous five years of deposits. The cash transfer for last fiscal year (FY21) was $1,467,658.69,” Frazee said.

Since this amount exceeded the budget provided by the General Assembly, the department went to the Controlling Board and increased the budget on December 14, 2020, Frazee said.

“So I don’t consider this line to be a ‘cut.’ Rather, (by) providing base funding and any adjustments that are necessary would (then) go to the Controlling Board for review and approval,” Frazee said.

The Department is also handling $3 million in insurance claims money designated for the restoration of the Hocking Hills State Park Lodge, destroyed by a fire in 2016, Frazee said.

Similarly, says Frazee, the Natural Areas-Preserve Division budget will assist in helping that division return to flank speed.

Natural Areas and Preserves was liquidated in 2009 under then Ohio Governor Ted Strickland. During the bargain-basement John Kasich Administration the Natural Areas and Preserves Division suffered under the care of the Parks Division, which proved incapable of handling the job.

When DeWine became governor in 2019 he promised to resurrect the NA&P group, beginning by playing catch-up in his first cycle of the two-year Operating Budget. Consequently, starting with Fiscal 2022 the Natural Areas section is again running on all of its cylinders.

Frazee says too the Natural Resources Department is responsible for various personnel activity and logistical support matters. These figures appear in various locations in the budget’s six pages devoted to the agency.

Meanwhile, the Department has set aside $1.5 million to pay The Ohio State University for fisheries research, Frazee says.

The state’s H2Ohio Fund will see an additional $25 million for each of the two fiscal years, a key environmental protection project of DeWine’s and for which Frazee said is “a great program.”

And what many Ohio outdoors enthusiasts will acknowledge with a hearty nod of approval is a single line entry. That journal mention is devoted to the state’s 35,396-acre Appalachian Hills Wildlife Area and adjacent Jesse Owens State Park, formerly known as the Ohio Power Area.

The Ohio General Assembly set aside $28.6 million for Fiscal Year 2022 for the on-going Appalachian Hills project, Frazee says.

“The Legislature thought a one-time budget line item to the Wildlife Fund was the best way to go,” Frazee said. "It’s a tremendous asset for the state.”

To which DeWine noted the former AEP lands continues to remain a priority for the state.

“There are certain things we want to accomplish there, and finishing up what we started was vital,” DeWine said.

Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com

Lake Erie's annual mayfly hatch a wonder of nature

 

An insect species that outlived the dinosaurs and survived the onslaught of unchecked water pollution is now so numerous as it emerges from the waters of Lake Erie that clouds of mating adults are visible on weather radar.

The annual mayfly “hatch” of perhaps one-quarter trillion individuals in Lake Erie’s Western Basin has largely occurred. It will resume next May and June. That is when another emergence will occur; the nymphs that hatched from fertilized eggs deposited this year or no more than two years ago ascending to the water’s surface to become winged adults.

Thus their life as nymphs is brief enough even while their sexually mature adult versions are measured in an eye blink. Depending upon a specific mayfly species, a male will live for no more than two days. An adult female mayfly will live as little as five minutes and seldom more than an hour or two.

In the process, a female mayfly will deposit an average of 4,000 fertilized eggs into Lake Erie. These eggs sink to the lake’s bottom where they rather quickly morph into nymphs. These nymphs themselves go through a series of molts before their genetic coding kicks in and they eventually rise to the lake’s surface to become adults whose sole function is to procreate, lacking any bodily equipment to feed.

Adult mayflies found in the Western Basin of Lake Erie come ashore – usually around evening - to find a hard surface onto which they can undergo their final molt. These mayflies then form immense swarms again offshore as they mate, said Justin Chaffin, the research coordinator for The Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory at Put-in-Bay.

“Females typical die a couple hours after mating,” Chaffin said.

Indeed, mayflies are credited (or cursed) with the shortest lifespan of any of the Earth’s living creatures. So much so that science has designated the mayfly into the so-called order “ephemeroptera,” a word taken from Greek meaning “things that live for a day.”

Interestingly enough this ever-so-brief life as an adult has been recorded by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Roman Empire historian Pliny the Elder. And Nineteenth Century clergyman and poet George Crabbe in his poem “The Newspaper” used the mayfly as an illustration for the ever-so briefly inspired content of the daily newspaper.

As for what people call them, the species has more than few localized and regional monikers. One that’s not so commonly used today as it was a number of decades ago is “Canadian soldier,” a reference to the fact that clouds of the insects lift from the waters of Lake Erie and move south over land. Other provincial names associated with the mayfly are “June bug,” “shadflies,” “one-day flies,” “burrowing mayflies,” and “fish flies.”

The mayfly is a well distributed freshwater-only creature, too. Science says the world has about 3,000 mayfly species of which around 700 exist in North America. They are comprised of 42 families in some 400 genera. Distant relations include dragonflies.

Chaffin says Lake Erie has two mayfly species, the first being a critter with the unwieldy scientific name of Hexagenia limbata and the other being the tongue-twisting Hexagenia rigida.

“The first one makes up about 90 percent or so of the mayflies you see in the Western Basin and the second about 10 percent, but to the untrained eye you really would not be able to tell the difference,” Chaffin said.

Why Lake Erie’s Western Basin has such an enormous population of mayflies while the Central Basin has far fewer, Chaffin said the former basin has considerably more of the shallow water habitat the insect prefers while the latter only has suitable habitat of less than one mile from shore.

Also, says Chaffin, mayflies demand well-oxygenated water which “is why you don’t find them in the Central Basin’s ‘Dead Zone.’”

And while an individual mayfly life is a candle that burns quickly from both ends, evolutionary scientists say the species as a whole extends back before the age of dinosaurs: more than 350 million years ago to the Carboniferous Period, or the age of amphibians. As such the mayfly is one of the oldest species of flying insects.

Mayflies also made it through the K/T Extinction of 65 million years ago, the event that evolutionary scientists say wiped out 75 percent of all the world’s lifeforms.

However, the Lake Erie mayfly of the mid-Twentieth Century had a tough go of it as well. Environmentalists, conservationists and sportsmen became alarmed in the 1950s and 1960s when the mayfly largely disappeared from Lake Erie, the victim of water pollution and the lack of dissolved oxygen. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the mayfly population rebounded.

“In western Lake Erie, mayfly populations dropped to essentially zero between 1959 and 1961, and remained extremely low until 1993, when scientists found about twelve mayfly larvae per square meter of sediment. Most recently, those numbers have increased dramatically, to 300-400 mayflies per square meter, a testament to environmental protection efforts and improving water quality,” says a March 8, 2018 story by the Ohio Sea Grant agency.

That mayflies contribute to the well-being of the environment where they exist there is no doubt.

“Mayflies are a vital link in the food chain of freshwater ecosystem, making energy stored in algae and other aquatic plants available to higher consumers,” says a Purdue University piece on the subject.

Chaffin added that as nymphs, mayflies take in muck, filtering out any organic matter. In the process they become the low-hanging fruit for virtually all sorts of aquatic predators. Among them are yellow perch.

And as the nymphs begin their ascent to the water’s surface to make their first molt into adulthood (called the subimago stage) they are feasted upon by more fishes, among them being the walleye.

Even as emerged adults molting for the last time on land, mayflies become the target of spiders, birds and the like, Chaffin said.

“Everything that swims in Lake Erie eats mayflies,” Chaffin said.

- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com

Bullfrog-themed Ohio motor vehicle license plate is ribbit-ing idea

 

Unless the Ohio Division of Wildlife can come up with 150 signatures than the idea of the bullfrog being featured on a motor vehicle license plate will croak for a lack of interest.

The latest effort actually was the work of a middle school partially as a civics lesson in how legislation is introduced and becomes law.

Jointly the idea was to assist in raising funds for the Ohio Division of Wildlife’s Wetlands Habitat account. It is centered around a design featuring the likeness of a bullfrog, Ohio’s official state frog.

This concept was a tadpole of the Dublin school’s Grizzell Middle School, which has been trying for several years to get the bullfrog named Ohio’s official amphibian – a role ultimately seized by the spotted salamander.

Instead, the students of the school’s social studies teacher Shawn Kaeser worked with State Representative Stephanie Kunze(R-Hilliard) in marshaling the proposal through the Ohio General Assembly.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine was no toady, either, and happily put his signature to the enabling legislation.

The new bullfrog plate is one of 33 such specialty plates recently approved that benefit organizations in Ohio via the add-on volunteering motor vehicle owners designate in exchange for using the plates. In all, there are more than 140 such designated plates.

To remain in the program, at least 25 bullfrog plates must be sold annually.

“The 150 signatures is set by the Department of Motor Vehicles to ensure there is enough interest to jump start the process of producing the plate while the 25 figure is how many plates are needed to be sold annually to keep the plate going,” said Brian Banbury, the Wildlife Division’s executive administrator for information and education.

Banbury said the plates will cost an additional $25 with $15 of that going into the Wildlife Division’s wetlands protection fund. The remaining $10 will be split between DMV administrative costs as well as helping maintain highway rest stops, Banbury said.

“This is the same fund that the money from the sales of the state duck stamp goes into,” Banbury said of the designated $25 portion.

“That money is used to buy more wetlands, for the Governor’s H2Ohio program and other related matters. Clearly, wetlands are a high priority for the Division of Wildlife, and we are excited about having the opportunity to add anything to that vital program. We applaud the young people for their efforts.”

The deadline for acknowledging as being one of the potential 150 bullfrog license plate buyers is June 22^nd. To participate, send a completed document at  https://publicsafety.ohio.gov/static/bmv4820.pdf to Paula Farrell at Paula.Farrell@dnr.ohio.gov.

By Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com

Ohio's spring turkey season nose dives; Ohio Division of Wildlife mulling possible rule changes

 

With another lackluster spring turkey-hunting season in the books, the Ohio Division of Wildlife appears poised to at least consider touching the third rail of regulations: reducing the season bag limit and possibly lopping off a portion of the fall season as well.

Maintaining the status quo is becoming less and less likely an option.

The just concluded spring season saw a kill of 14,541 birds. That figure is a substantial drop from the 17,894 birds during the 2020 spring season, itself signifying a steady decline over the past several years. For statistical purposes, the kill during the two-day youth-only season is included in the statistics.

The top 10 counties for wild turkey harvest during the 2021 spring hunting season include: Columbiana (454), Belmont (444), Meigs (437), Tuscarawas (417), Jefferson (408), Monroe (408), Ashtabula (401), Washington (398), Guernsey (378), and Muskingum (373).

Only three of Ohio’s counties showed increases in 2021 verses their respective 2020 spring total.

Sliding also are the sale of spring turkey tags. Preliminary figures point to around 61,000-plus spring permits being sold this year. That is a steady erosion from the 76,665 permits sold in 2011. Sales began falling below the 70,000 permit mark in 2014 when 68,960 documents were issued.

Last year’s issuance of 68,148 permits is thought of being a COVID-19 anomaly; suspected of occurring with people either working from home or laid off, thus giving participants an opportunity to hunt who otherwise would not have experienced such a chance.

“We’ve seen two consecutive years of poor turkey poult production and I was a little surprised that we dipped a little below the (low end) of average,” said Mark Wiley, the Ohio Division of Wildlife’s lead turkey biologist. “About 22 percent of permit holders were successful.”

Wiley noted too that not only did more hunters fail to shoot one bird the number of sports taking the allowable two birds dropped also.

“By about 17 percent,” said Wiley who added he was “little surprised” that the number of participating hunters fell as well.

Not at all surprised by the suspected decline in the number of birds nor the fact that the woods also saw fewer participants are several individuals who live and breath turkey hunting.

“I think we are considerably down, and we we cannot blame harsh winters or bad springs, and I think raccoons and possums are big egg eaters, too,” said John Kempf of Ashtbaula County.

And even though Brown County’s Troy Conley said he considers himself very “fortunate to get into birds opening day and the following Saturday,” and thus filled both of his tags, he continued scouting for the rest of the season to help other hunters.

“We just don’t have the number of birds we used to,” Conley said.

Conley continued by stating he believes that “years and years” of allowing two birds in the spring along with a fall season “are showing a collective negative impact.”

“This much is certain: if the (Wildlife) Division thinks our numbers are healthy, their data is in error,” Conley says.

Echoing Conley’s impressions is outdoors writer Tom Cross whose several trips around his Adams County home produced the hearing of just four gobblers.

“Reminds me of the time the bottom dropped out of the grouse population during the mid-80s. Hopefully not, but eerily similar,” Cross said. “There may be pockets of good bird numbers but overall the population is down.”

Like other turkey hunters who have grown discouraged over what they contend is a declining turkey population, Kempf points a finger at two controllable metrics that could help: Delete the two-bird allowance in the spring and-or jettison the fall season.

Wiley says both points are being explored by the Wildlife Division.

“Yes, we are considering (eliminating) the second bird,” Wiley said.

Of somewhat equal discussion material then is modifying the fall season which now begins in early October and then runs to just before the start of the general firearms deer-hunting season.

“I’d like to see the fall season retained in some fashion since there are some hunters who really are into hunting turkeys in the fall,” Wiley said. “We could scale it back and still provide some opportunity.”

Wiley said that unlike the spring turkey-hunting season where the kill is “front-end” heavy when a large percentage of birds are taken, during the fall season “the harvest is pretty consistent week after week.”

Consequently, Wiley says, that should the Wildlife Division seek to alter the fall season in order to bolster the turkey flock the agency could lop off its ending date.

“The Wildlife Council members have all ready talked about it,” Wiley said. “So it’s possible we could carry forward the idea of a shortened (fall) season.”

Here is the county-by-county breakdown with each county’s 2020 spring turkey kill in parentheses: Adams: 358 (421); Allen: 65 (79); Ashland: 149 (170); Ashtabula 401 (449); Athens: 324 (380); Auglaize: 29 (54); Belmont: 444 (533); Brown: 345 (433); Butler: 173 (237); Carroll: 286 (368); Champaign: 56 (106); Clark: 12 (17); Clermont: 249 (367); Clinton: 51 (92); Columbiana: 454 (395); Coshocton: 331 (450); Crawford: 47 (59); Cuyahoga 10 (7); Darke: 48 (68); Defiance: 160 (244); Delaware: 85 (127); Erie: 47 (41); Fairfield: 82 (115); Fayette: 7 (17); Franklin: 17 (21); Fulton: 104 (118); Gallia: 359 (398); Geauga 163 (214); Greene: 17 (22); Guernsey: 378 (508); Hamilton: 83 (147); Hancock: 28 (48); Hardin: 84 (103); Harrison: 351 (458); Henry: 48 (56); Highland: 317 (412); Hocking: 217 (271); Holmes: 167 (241); Huron: 88 (112); Jackson: 293 (351); Jefferson: 408 (413); Knox: 271 (317); Lake 60 (70); Lawrence: 182 (228); Licking: 277 (319); Logan: 88 (116); Lorain: 107 (141); Lucas: 50 (54); Madison: 5 (11); Mahoning: 181 (198); Marion: 30 (46); Medina: 97 (118); Meigs: 437 (503); Mercer: 10 (30); Miami: 18 (29); Monroe: 408 (532); Montgomery: 23 (28); Morgan: 267 (322); Morrow: 107 (146); Muskingum: 373 (499); Noble: 347 (399); Ottawa: 1 (1); Paulding: 70 (75); Perry: 249 (283); Pickaway: 13 (33); Pike: 185 (197); Portage: 185 (248); Preble: 82 (125); Putnam: 40 (61); Richland: 209 (221); Ross: 262 (334); Sandusky: 23 (23); Scioto: 228 (272); Seneca: 123 (108); Shelby: 42 (39); Stark: 240 (270); Summit: 64 (79); Trumbull 307 (378); Tuscarawas: 417 (528); Union: 34 (48); Van Wert: 10 (22); Vinton: 233 (294); Warren: 67 (110); Washington: 398 (484); Wayne: 102 (123); Williams: 183 (192); Wood: 24 (31); Wyandot: 77 (87). 2021 total: 14,541. 2020 total: (17,894).

By Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com

Ohio Governor DeWine signs law allowing use of owls in falconry

 

Not that many people will give a hoot, but on May 11 Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed into law a proposal to allow the use of most owl species in the ancient sport of falconry.

The proposal was introduced and shepherded by Ohio State Senator Senator Frank Hoagland, R-30.

In all, Ohio has fewer than 100 licensed falconers, each of these dedicated practitioners having undergone a rigorous apprenticeship period under the watchful eye of a master sponsor before obtaining a license.

And then only after also passing a tough exam requiring answering correctly at least 80 percent of the questions. Fail this test and one must wait six months before taking the exam again: each exam costing $75.

On top of that, pay another $75 for a three-year license as overseen by the Ohio Division of Wildlife with the eagle-eyed support of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. At the same time, a person may apply for a Raptor Capture Permit to acquire a bird.

Yet while today’s licensed Ohio falconers are using such approved raptor species as Harris hawks and red-tailed hawks they’re now likewise going to be allowed to use various owl species; among them being great-horned owls and barred owls.

The new law exempts the use of barn owls, which is a state-threatened species in Ohio. American bald eagles also are excluded from the list of approved raptor species.

Admittedly, the idea of using a night-time avian predator for falconry is a novelty and likely will appeal only to the most dedicated of Ohio’s tiny falconry community, says Ken Fitz, the Wildlife Division’s law enforcement executive administrator.

In over 25 years of field work Fitz said he could think of only one time when he engaged a falconer, and that was just to conduct an inspection of the licensed holder’s so-called “mew,” or the structure that houses a raptor.

“Falconry is such a small segment of our hunting population in Ohio that very few of our officers even ever encountered a falconer,” Fitz said as well.

Fitz said too that the new law was a collaboration between the Wildlife Division and the Ohio Falconers Association, noting also that several other states which license the sport do allow the use of owls.

“My guess is that any falconer who does obtain an owl will do so for demonstration purposes,” Fitz said as well. “Falconers are very serious about their sport.

- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com

New chronic wasting disease field ID test could be a game changer for deer hunters

 

A promising new way of field testing for chronic wasting disease (CWD) has the potential to become a game changer for hunters in determining whether the deer they shoot are infected with the disease.

Such a development and deployment could help “hunters decide the fate of the carcass before they even gut it,” says Ohio’s deer management administrator Mike Mike Tonkovich with the Ohio Division of Wildlife.

What has happened is that researchers with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Prion Research have developed a “novel approach to field testing chronic wasting disease,” the school said in a release that is enjoying a cascade of positive reviews among wildlife management officials.

Last spring, the Center’s team worked with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources to analyze tissue samples from CWD-positive white-tailed deer using a scientific technique known as “RT-QuIC.”

This collaboration managed to obtain confirmation of protein-misfolding “in just nine hours,” the school says.

“Only a handful of labs currently have access to this top-of-the-line technology for CWD testing,” the school in further comments.

Now, the MNPRO researchers have developed a new assay that generates a color change of red for a positive CWD result and blue for negative. They have named the test “MN-QuIC” to honor the state of Minnesota.

“It is the product of an intense multi-disciplinary research effort that united scientists across the University of Minnesota,” says Peter Larsen, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine and co-director of MNPRO.

The team confirmed their findings in southeast Minnesota the week of March 8, 2021, making them the first-ever scientists to successfully deploy a CWD field test.

The school says also the new test “is a lot cheaper than those using traditional equipment and uses field-deployable equipment to garner preliminary results in just 24 hours.”

“We have performed over one hundred confirmatory tests in our MNPRO lab and this was our first field-deployment. We will continue to validate MN-QuIC over the coming months, and plan additional field deployments this fall,” Larsen said through the university.

Tonkovich is cautiously optimistic that field test kits with a 24-hour results turn-around time and made available to individual hunters will prove an important ally in both mitigating hunters’ fears and also helping contain CWD.

“Testing is a critical first step for managing this disease since if you can’t define its extent, you certainly can’t fight it,” Tonkovich says.

Tonkovich believes the hunters who would/will benefit the most from a CWD field test kit are those sportsmen who process their own deer - and to a lesser degree, those that pay to have a deer processed.

A large part of the reason for this expectation now, says Tonkovich, is that most hunters can’t wait two weeks to process their deer if they likewise have to await the results from the current procedure needed to test an animal’s carcass.

Thus, says Tonkovich, a successful hunter can proceed with processing, with “those hunters who then ultimately learn they’ve harvested a positive animal only having wasted a bit of time, should they then decide to pitch the venison from the deer they put in the freezer.”

Yet the flip side is how a hunter who uses a deer processor will react should his animal be dropped off, found to be infected 24 hours later, and ultimately take a pass on paying to store and process the deer, Tonkovich wonders.

“Since disposal is not free, my guess is that there will be a charge passed on to the hunter, and I’m guessing it will likely come in the form of a deposit,” Tonkovich said.

Even so, once a CWD field test is widely available, “hunters can decide the fate of the carcass,” Tonkovich says.

“This will not only be a time and cost savings for them, but obviously - and more importantly - it will completely eliminate the possibility of that hunter moving the disease around on the landscape. Hats of to Dr. Larsen and his collaborators,” Tonkovich said.

By Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com

CMP advising military Springfield and Garand rifle owners about the kind of ammunition to avoid

 

Since the end of World War I when troops returned from the Great War with a substantial respect for the Springfield rifles many of the Dough-boys used, the “03” was fast to become a favorite base for the making of sporting hunting rifles.

The same became true for the 03’s manufacturing-simplified 03-A3; maybe an even better rifle that often demanded little more than swapping out the original military stock for a factory walnut stock in a sporting configuration.

These became known as “sportized” rifles; like my altered 03 – which is somewhere around 114 to 115 years old.

And when World War II and Korean War veterans returned from their respective conflicts the troops waxed enthusiastically about the M1 Garand rifle; often said to be the benchmark for semi-automatic military rifles.

These rifles – as was the case with the 03 and 03A3 Springfields – soon became widely available in huge numbers as surplus arms. These rifles went on to achieve fame in the deer woods - and in especially the case of the Garand - a platform for a whole genre of named target games such as the Garand Matches.

However, the Civilian Marksmanship Program – with a shooting complex at Camp Perry in Port Clinton – has issued an advisory on the use of certain kinds of ammunition with all of these rifles.

The CMP advises to not use .30/06 ammunition in M1 Garands, 1903s, and 1903A3s that are loaded beyond 50,000 so-called copper unit of pressure or CUP, and has a bullet weight more than 172 to174 grains.

Hodgdon powder defines CUP as “...a measurement used in the ammunition industry to determine the chamber pressure created by a cartridge load.”

Thus, says the CMP, these named rifles are at least 70 years old “and were not designed for max loads and super heavy bullets.”

“Always wear hearing and eye protection when firing an M1 Garand, 1903 and/or 1903A3 rifle,” the CMP also says.

 

“This warning is an update/addition to the Ammunition section in the Read (First section of the) manual enclosed with each rifle shipment (M1 Garand manual-page 6 and M1903 manual-page 10),” the CMP says as well.

By Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JJFrischk4@gmail.com