Small-game hunting a fond boyhood memory Happy campers

Back in the day, schools didn’t shut down on the opening day of the rabbit, pheasant and quail season, but a mysterious eight-hour epidemic of some sort kept a group of boys away from their desks.

The malady, whatever it was, often was accompanied by a kind of euphoria, probably felt most acutely by avid readers of Sports Afield and Boys’ Life magazines.

At the time, almost nobody looked down on hunting. Many people were no more than a generation or two removed from the farm, where animals were grown to be killed for food and profit on a smaller, more personal scale than happens today.

Hunting then seemed to be more about the pride of providing and less about antler size and appearances.

That men did the hunting was— let’s be honest — part of the appeal. Teenage boys grew up arguably less sophisticated than today’s teens and certainly less jaded. Licensed and freed to hunt without moral dilemmas and societal sidetracks, they felt they were tackling another stage of life as they combed a field holding a loaded gun while walking a line with other men holding loaded guns.

True, getting a driver’s license was a shift in gears on the road to adulthood, as was graduating from high school. But anybody could do those things. The ritual of hunting spoke of a distinct calling to manhood not widely recognized today.

Any attempt at explanation would be inadequate, but those who lived it might be able to trace the threads of meaning.

During the mid1960s and before, Ohio held plenty of ring-necked pheasants, rabbits and bobwhites, along with plenty of hunters and places to hunt.

Deer at the time were ghosts on the landscape. A few roamed, seldom seen but leaving tracks in the mud or snow that provoked curiosity if not excitement. Exotic wild turkeys were in the earliest stages of a comeback, confined to a few southeastern counties. The Ohio Division of Wildlife scrupulously restricted hunting for either.

Change, however, was on its way — as it always is. The greatest time for pheasant, quail and rabbit hunting lies in the memory of a dwindling cadre of hunters, whose early recollections became a casualty of time, modern farming, suburban sprawl and changing attitudes among property owners and hunters. Change, however, doesn’t preclude the possibility of revival, however remote.

For those whose joy and camaraderie of small-game hunting endures, Friday’s opening of the season brings yet another quiet hurrah to woods and fields.

Parting shots

About 800 pheasants were released at Delaware Wildlife Area for the youth smallgame hunt last weekend and this. An additional 350 birds are scheduled to be released this week, followed by 200 more birds during the week leading up to Nov. 9 and 250 more before Thanksgiving Day. … After much effort, money spent and a listing under the Endangered Species Act, the Kirtland’s warbler, a species of bird that nests in a small area of Michigan, migrates through Ohio and seemed headed toward extinction a few decades ago, is no longer considered endangered.

outdoors@ dispatch.com