Mosquito goose hunters to have more elbow room

Selected goose hunters will be left to their own devices at the Mosquito Creek Waterfowl Refuge in Trumbull County.

With the exception of maintaining two blinds for disabled hunters the Ohio Division of Wildlife will no longer supply the semi-permanent blinds that have for decades been a waterfowling mainstay at Mosquito.

Instead, successful hunters who put in for the annual lottery drawing to hunt at the reserve will be “encouraged” to provide their own “transportable hunting blinds or to hunt without the use of an artificial blind,” the Wildlife Division says.

One or two blinds will be maintained for those who are selected to hunt, but are physically challenged. Please call ahead if you are physically challenged and would like to reserve one of these blinds.

Up to 20 blinds have been used here but no more than 10 per hunting day, said Lou Oros, manager of the Mosquito Creek Waterfowl Refuge.

“Actually, a lot of guys don’t like using them; they would prefer sitting elsewhere instead of being isolated,” said Oros. “What they’ll get instead is a numbered stake and the hunters will be required to stay within a certain distance of that stake, which hasn’t been established yet.”

In effect, Oros, says, this is a similar waterfowl hunting set-up as performed at Magee Marsh.

“There are so many options to use like layout blinds, portable blinds and the like,” Oros said. “And when the corn isn’t good the blinds had a tendency to stick out and flare the birds anyway. I think this will be good thing for hunters.”

For further information, contact the Wildlife Division’s District Three (Northeast Ohio) office at 330-644-2293.

- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischkorn@News-Herald.com
Twitter: @Fieldkorn