Info about Mentor PerchFest entry fees, rules and payout should be available by mid-summer

A revival of a once-popular Central Basin yellow perch fishing event is slated for August 27th through 29th.

After a nine year absence, the PerchFest perch-fishing derby is back in the game. This time the heralded fishing derby is being sponsored by the city of Mentor and not the Lake County Visitors Bureau.

It will be held at the city’s Mentor Lagoons Marina area, located at 8365 Harbor Drive, just off Lakeshore Blvd. (Route 283). Co-hosts include the Lake County Visitors Bureau and the adjacent Mentor Lagoons Yacht Club.

The derby is expected to again feature perch fishing divisions for adults along with youths.

Full details regarding entry fees, age divisions, payout and the like have not yet been established, however, says Nita Justice, the city of Mentor’s Recreation Superintendent.

“We really wanted to get the word out about the event so people could plan ahead and set aside the dates,” Justice said.

“We’re working with the yacht club members on all of the contest rules and other details, and I expect we’ll have something out there by mid-summer.”

As was the case with previous PerchFests – which were held at Lake Metroparks’ Fairport Harbor Beach and only a few miles east of the Mentor Lagoons – the new Mentor-driven affair will include various other activities besides the fishing.

Among them will be games for children, entertainment, food and craft vendors. Instructional clinics will also share the spotlight with the topics being fly tying, fish identification, how to clean and fillet fish, and how to locate prime fishing locations.

That last item could prove crucial. The Mentor Lagoons is on the cusp of where the Ohio Division of Wildlife has zoned off the Central Basin’s yellow perch quota management scheme for sport fishing daily bag limit. To the west of the nearby Grand River the daily bag limit is 10 perch but immediately to the east of the Grand River the daily bag limit jumps up to 30 yellow perch.

Such a division help determine where anglers fish and whether they’ll have to live cull their catch as potential derby-qualifying perch are reeled in.

Hours and dates for the revamped PerchFest are 5-11 p.m, August 27th; 11 a.m.-11 p.m., August 28th; and 11 a.m.-5 p.m., August 29th.

For updates and further information, periodically visit the PerchFest web site at mentorperchfest.com, Justice recommends.

- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com

 

BREAKING - Ohio slashes Lake Erie yellow perch daily bag limit from Huron to Fairport Harbor

I well remember when some fisheries biologists with the Ohio Division of Wildlife said it was the Lake Erie yellow perch anglers who were fishing in all the wrong places and at all the wrong depths. That the perch were now suspending, feeding on spiny water fleas. Anything and everything but admitting that perch stocks in the Central Basin were crashing.

Oops. How the tune has changed. Here's the official statement from the Wildlife Division on the seriousness of the decline of perch stocks from Huron to Fairport Harbor and what the agency intends to do about it, namely reduce the daily bag limit. 

Just how a Lake Erie law enforcement officer will know that an angler caught 30 year perch from off the Perry Nuclear Power Plant and not off the fabled Hump slightly northwest of the Grand River is anyone's guess.

Anyway, here's the agency's official take on the subject:

A declining population of Lake Erie yellow perch in the central basin has prompted a reduction in the daily limit from 30 to 10 from Huron to Fairport Harbor beginning Saturday, May 1, 2021, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) Division of Wildlife.
 
Lake Erie walleye and yellow perch fisheries are managed through an interagency quota system. Each jurisdiction regulates its catches to comply with annually determined safe harvest levels that ensure sustainability. The most recent quotas were announced on Friday, March 26, 2021.
 
“Low yellow perch hatches in recent years have caused the daily limit to be reduced to 10 from Huron to Fairport Harbor,” said Division of Wildlife Chief Kendra Wecker. “Science-based management shows us that we have to act quickly to ensure that the yellow perch population has time to improve in select areas of the central basin.”
 
Low abundance from Huron to Fairport Harbor led to a very conservative quota for yellow perch fishing from May 1, 2021, to Feb. 28, 2022. Central basin yellow perch hatches have been well below average and strong year classes are needed to rebuild the population to prior abundances. The daily limit is 30 yellow perch until Friday, April 30, 2021.
 
Yellow perch abundance in the western basin provided limit opportunities seasonally in 2020 and remains strong in 2021. Ohio’s daily limits will remain at 30 in the western basin from Toledo to Huron and farther east from Fairport Harbor to Conneaut.

- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com

Great American Outdoors Act results in new job opportunities at Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge

 

Ohio is all ready a beneficiary of the recently enacted Great American Outdoors Act.

The 10,828-acre Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge and its components in Lucas and Ottawa counties has been selected to hire three new full-time maintenance positions, the positions fueled by the Act. This Act was passed by Congress and signed into law last year by then-president Donald Trump.

Its chief ingredients are to fully and permanently fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund at $900 million per year. The second prong is to provide over a five-year period $9.5 billion, earmarked to reduce a maintenance backlog at American national parks and other holdings – including the 562-unit national refuge system.

The Act was heavily supported by sportsmen and conservation groups which all acknowledged the crumbling infrastructural state of affairs within the country’s national parks, refuge and wild areas.

Linda Bilmes, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, even said the Great American Outdoors Act was “..the biggest land conservation legislation in a generation.”

And now the rubber is meeting the road at the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge.

Ottawa’s yet-to-be-hired employees are expected to utilize heavy equipment and various trade skills to perform earthwork activities, as well as basic carpentry, masonry, plumbing and electrical work, said the refuge’s Deputy Refuge Manager, Karl Fleming.

“We’re looking to advertise the positions in early April and hire by June,” Fleming said. “And we’re looking for tradesmen with a wide spectrum of skill sets, though there will be a lot of on-the-job training.”

Fleming said the wages will be $28 per hour with full benefits including health care, though the Act does not make the positions permanent. Rather, the posts will be for a four-year period, based upon the Act’s language, Fleming said.

“After that, we’ll see what happens,” he said.

Once employed, the three new hires will spend 50 percent of their time at Ottawa with the remainder of the time being farmed out to largely work at other refuges within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Region Three (Great Lakes) district, Fleming said.

In all, the refuge has 18 miles of hiking trials and 60 miles of roads and dikes alone that require periodic attention, Fleming says.

“There’s a lot that needs to be done here; dikes that are failing that need repair or even replacement,” Fleming said.

Applications for these new positions will be accepted  through USAJobs, the federal government hiring website. If you have any questions, call Fleming 419-343-6793.

- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com

Empress Molly is why I will always be a dog person

 

It’s called the “beach” only as an identifier in the broader context of the “Oxbow,” a self-described place where seasonally I fish a small creek, itself something of a misnomer.

In truth the beach is a wide spit of land between forest and cliff, filled with cobblestone, some boulders and a patch of gravel here and there. The creek is only a creek during a few months a year or when the rains or snows raise its level. Otherwise it’s barely a brook.

Anyway, the creek and the beach serve duel purposes around this time of year. If the water is up and the trout are in, I fish it. In-between those periods of moderate water flow my wife Bev and I use it as a training ground for our Labrador retriever, Empress Molly, as we did this afternoon.

Molly thinks she is playing with the rubber ball and ball tosser, and that the pencil whistle hanging around my neck is just my way of saying “hello there.” We let her think that way.

In fact, it’s part of the on-going training any bird-dog or retriever owner does (or is supposed to do) during the off-season.

I guess in some respects I envy dedicated deer and turkey hunters. They’ve turned their passions into successful obsessions. And it shows up in their social media posts or in the pages of “Ohio Outdoor News” with their photographs of big bucks and monster toms.

Yet I also pity them. Except for the rare owner who has trained a dog to find shed deer antlers or break up flocks of turkeys in the fall they are missing out on one of the most fundamental beginning elements of human hunting: Man in partnership with a dog.

I could no more go afield to hunt ducks and geese without my Labrador retriever than I could hit the creek for steelhead without a fly rod.

A dog adds so much to the whole that it is sometimes the entirety of the day itself. And that goes for the guy with the coon hound, the bunny buster with his beagle, and the huntress with a kennel of Brittany bird dogs, like my niece in Montana.

Now I’ll never honestly admit that Molly has the same bird sense as did my late Rebel or Jenny Lynn, or the water-fetching compulsion as did Miss Daisy, though she does come close. But she’s still our Empress Molly.

In any event, that’s why you find us a couple of times a week at the beach at the Oxbow along the creek. Or at our friend’s small lake in Ashtabula County.

Molly may be having fun but Bev and I are enjoying the teaching even more. I’ll keep you posted as to how things are going.

- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com

Wounded Ohio Division of Wildlife officer comes home to recover as accused faces court hearing

 

Nearly three months after being seriously injured by a gunshot wound while investigating an alleged deer poaching case in Clinton County, Ohio, Division of Wildlife agent Kevin Behr returned to his Adams County home March 11th.

Behr was said to have been shot about 4 p.m., December 20th – the last day of the state’s two-day so-called bonus firearms deer-hunting season - while using a deer decoy in an operation designed to catch deer poachers.

His life-threatening lower abdominal injuries were serious enough for him to be life-flighted to the University of Cincinnati Hospital. There, Behr underwent several surgeries, participated in countless hours of rehabilitation activities before being discharged.

Behr will continue to receive medical care and undergo a rigorous level of physical therapy.

He is supported by his wife, Kathy Garza-Behr, herself an employee of the Wildlife Division. Garza-Behr has used social media from the beginning to keep family, friends and others updated as to Kevin Behr’s recovery process.

While at the hospital, Behr saw a huge outpouring of support. Among the displays was the assembly in the hospital parking lot of law enforcement vehicles with their patrol lights glaring; all within view of Behr in his room.

On the journey home on Ohio Rt. 32, the vehicle Behr was in passed underneath an American flag that was suspended by the ladders of two snorkel fire trucks.

He was also welcomed home by several groups of people standing at various intersections, among them being the one at the corner of Ohio state routes 32 and 41 near Peebles.

A handicapped walkway has been installed at Behr’s home to allow for easier access to and from the structure.

In a prepared statement, Ohio Department of Natural Resources Director Mary Mertz said “the ODNR family is very thankful that Investigator Behr was able to return home this week.”

“And I can't say enough about his strength, his toughness, and his determination to overcome the injuries he sustained in the line of duty,” Mertz said.

“Kevin has fought hard to reach this point, and we continue to support him, his wife Kathy, and their family in the next phase of his recovery.”

Among the three defendants is Brian R. Liming, 44, of Jamestown. Liming is alleged to have discharged the firearm that led to a projectile striking Behr.

Liming had a court hearing March 12th before the Clinton County Court of Common Pleas. The results of that hearing were not known at the time of this writing. His Clinton County Clerk of Courts docket number is 21500047.

Also charged in the alleged incident was Bryan Achtermann, 36, of Midland and Thomas J. Davis, 35, of Jamestown.

- By Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com

Ohio's 2021 spring wild turkey-hunting season may be "da ja vue all over again"

 

With Ohio’s two-tier spring wild turkey-hunting season only a few weeks away, the Ohio Division of Wildlife’s lead biologist on the subject is saying the 2021 event will more than likely mirror what most hunters encountered in 2020.

Now the fall 2021 wild turkey-hunting season may prove something different. At least possibly for some counties anyway.

Last spring, turkey hunters in Ohio – both in the South Zone along with those in Northeast Zone as well as participants in the youth-only season - killed a combined 17,894 birds. That figure is down from the 19,088 bearded wild turkeys shot during the spring 2019 season.

The most-ever number of birds during any spring season in Ohio were the 26,156 turkeys shot in 2001. Since 2000, spring wild turkey hunters have killed 20,000 or more birds 10 times, the last one being the 22,612 birds taken during the 2018 spring season.

The ten best 2020 spring season wild turkey counties were: Belmont – 533; Monroe – 532; Tuscarawas – 528; Guernsey – 508; Meigs – 503; Muskingum – 499; Washinton – 484; Harrison – 458; Coschocton – 450; and Ashtabula – 449.

Data supplied by the Ohio Division of Wildlife shows that the hunter success rate last year was 20.2 percent for residents (down from the 25.1 percent in 2019); 19.4 percent for non-residents (down from the 26.5 percent in 2019); 22.5 percent for youths (down from the 23.5 percent in 2019); and 17.2 percent (down from the 20.4 percent in 2019) for those persons eligible to purchase reduced cost turkey tags.

This year’s spring wild turkey-hunting season is April 24th to May 23rd in the South Zone, and May 1st to 30th in the North Zone and which consists of the counties of Cuyahoga, Lake, Geauga, Trumbull, and Ashtabula.

The statewide youth-only season will run April; 17th and 18th.

Properly licensed or permitted hunters can shoot up to two bearded-only birds during the spring season but only one per day.

Mark Wiley is the biologist employed by the Division of Wildlife to study and help manage the state’s wild turkey flock. He says that the statewide spring harvest typically mirrors the trends observed in the reproductive index. In other words, the poults per hen ratio of the preceding few years, Wiley says.

“The statewide reproductive index was below the long-term average during the summers of 2017, 2018, and 2019, but rose above the long-term average in 2020,” Wiley says.

“This pattern suggests spring hunters in 2021 should encounter numbers of mature gobblers similar to 2020, but slightly elevated numbers of jakes.”

However and importantly, Wiley says also, that although the statewide reproductive index rose above the long-term average in 2020, “poult numbers were inconsistent across Ohio’s regions.”

Most notably, poult numbers in southeast Ohio were much lower than all other regions last summer, Wiley said, continuing.

“This regional disparity suggests hunters in southeast Ohio are unlikely to see the bump in jake numbers other regions of the state will experience,” Wiley says.

In looking toward the fall 2021 season – which is proposed to run October 9^th through November 28^th – Wiley says “it is worth mentioning the 17-year periodical cicada Brood X will emerge en-masse in portions of southwest and west-central Ohio in summer 2021.”

Wiley says such so-called “emergences” are often associated with excellent wild turkey poult numbers due to an abundance of fat and protein-rich insects the young birds can feast on.

This all comes with something of a caveat, though, says Wiley.

“The Brood X emergence has shown little evidence of substantial impact on wild turkey numbers. This may be because the last emergence of Brood X occurred in 2004, a time when turkey populations were not yet fully established in parts of west-central Ohio,” Wiley said.

“We now consider turkey populations to be well established across the state and it will be interesting to see if Brood X has a more obvious impact.”

By Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com

Coal mining now a bit player in Ohio's multi-billion dollar mineral extraction industry

 

Coal is no longer king in Ohio though oil and natural gas remain economic royalty in the state.

Statistics compiled by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Geological Survey show that 8.2 million tons of coal were extracted from Ohio in 2019, the last year for which figures are available. And though that may seem statistically significant, even more acute is how the number represents a nearly 15 percent decline from 2018 figures.

Put another way, Ohio now employs only 771 coal miners and just 209 non-production employees. In fact, the Natural Resources Department issued one one underground-mine expansion operation permit in 2019 and no surface mining expansion permit. No new permits were issued for either form of coal mining, the Natural Resources Department says.

“You are correct about coal, it has been on a remarkable decline since the recent high sales mark around 2010-2011,” said Christopher Wright, geologist with the Survey Division.

“The recent trend in coal fired power generating plants closing across Ohio is directly the cause of the collapse of the Ohio coal industry. With no other sources of buyers the coal has become uneconomic to mine here in Ohio,” Wright said.

Wright said Ohio’s soft coal is really designed for use in coal-fired power plants; long considered the dirtiest of the dirty energy-producing methods. This is in contrast to other, more expensive, grades of coal that is used in the production of coke, employed in the steel-making industry, Wright said.

“There is also an oversupply of this steam coal in the market due to regional mines trying to stay open and selling their coal at very low levels to the few remaining coal fired power plants, “which then in some cases out-competes Ohio coal producers, forcing them to close their mines,” Wright said.

More broadly, Wright says, that Ohio’s so-called “economic geology” derived income generated in 2019 totaled $8.8 billion, or about $750 per every Ohioan.

More than 10,000 people were employed in Ohio’s mineral extraction industry made up not only of coal mining but also limestone-dolomite, sand and gravel, salt, sandstone, shale, clay, natural gas, and oil.

Indeed, much more limestone (71 million tons), sand and gravel (34,2 million tons) were mined in Ohio in 2019 than was coal, Wright pointed out.

As for natural gas, 2.6 trillion cubic feet were removed as was 27.7 million barrels of oil. The values were $5.8 billion, and $1.5 billion, respectively, the Natural Resources figures indicate.

And as for the salt, the largest extractions occur at two underground mines: The one at Lake County’s Fairport Harbor-Grand River Village started operations in 1956 and the other at Cleveland and which began in 1957. Each of these mines operate at a depth of around 2,000 feet below the level of Lake Erie, Wright said.

“A lot of Ohioans don’t even know those two mines exist,” Wright said.

In all, Ohio’s salt mines operate in five counties and extracted nearly 3.9 million tons of material, used chiefly in road de-icing but also in animal feed, cattle salt blocks, and as a water-softening agent. The total value of salt sold in Ohio in 2019 was nearly $207 million.

Wright did say that 2020’s figures for all of these mineral extractions may prove anomalies once those numbers are “buttoned up” around July, double checked and a report issued around this November.

“I’m curious to see how all of these numbers will appear as a result of the (COVID) pandemic,” Wright said.

- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn

JFrischk@Ameritech.net

JFrischk4@gmail.com