Pheasant, rabbit, quail hunts begin this week
Not that long ago, before the suburban tsunami swept them away, farms and meadows and fallow fields laced in rusting barbed wire bumped up against the city.
A person arguing that times were better then might not win the debate, though times were never better for some: steelworkers, milkmen, encyclopedia sellers and, probably, hunters.
Hunters needn't have traveled far, often only down the street and sometimes across it, to get where they were going in those days of the postwar tract housing boom. Written permission seemed less than obligatory with so much vacated farmland around. The few “no hunting” signs were deemed worthy of contempt, although for the most part honored.
Hunting felt mainstream, something a kid – often starting with bread crusts, a shared BB gun and starlings in the back yard – could do. Few today would claim that ambushing and dispatching starlings was much a good thing; back then in some inexplicable way it must have felt necessary.
Starlings weren't native birds anyway, although not many kids knew that. Hordes of dark, squat interlopers looking for handouts on American turf were expendable, at any rate.
Disposable also were common and pesky house sparrows, known to some as spitzies, possibly a corrupt combination of spatz, German for sparrow, and Fritz. To a generation after a devastating world war, targeting spitzies felt vaguely patriotic.
Times have changed, because that's what times and popular tastes do.
Where a few lifetimes before dwelled Native Americans – living large most of the year amid a forested land that sustained abounding populations of red elk, passenger pigeons, beavers, otters, turkeys, bison, bears and deer – not much more than bones and memories remained.
Saved by their reproductive genius and limited habitat needs, squirrels held on in woodlots and rabbits along fencerows and ditches. Former farmland and orchards, recently abandoned in the rush to cities where factory jobs meant decent pay and decent schools, grew bumper crops of bobwhite quail and ring-necked pheasants.
Bunnies and pheasants and quail comprised much of what hunters had in grandpa's day, though where moderately abundant they seemed enough.
Opening day in early November of what was loosely named the upland game season not infrequently called for skipping school or work. Thanksgiving morn also sent fathers, sons and friends afield, perhaps as homey homage to a time when successful hunting and gathering meant more than a fellowship ritual.
In less than a human lifetime the land and its uses again changed, and so did its inhabitants, its accessibility and the attitudes of its overseers. Deer and wild turkeys in Ohio reclaimed the madeover living space. Pheasants, no longer numerous, held on in pockets where they could; quail dwindled toward a vanishing point.
Hunters, these days free to roam a squeezed, privatized and increasingly closed-off landscape, adjusted, having no other recourse save giving up.
Having adjusted, hunters generally won't approach Friday's opening of the pheasant, rabbit and quail hunts with the enthusiasm of their grandfathers. Seasons that begin Nov. 6 follow: • Rabbit, through Feb. 28, 2021, statewide. Daily limit is four.
• Ring-necked pheasant, through Jan. 10, 2021, statewide. Daily limit is two male birds.
• Bobwhite quail, through Nov. 29, 16 southern and southwestern counties. Daily limit is two.
The Ohio Division of Wildlife plans to release no later than Thanksgiving Day almost 14,200 pen-raised pheasants at a number of state wildlife areas.
Sites in central Ohio include Delaware Wildlife Area, which is scheduled to get 1,300 total pheasants across five separate releases, and Pleasant Valley Wildlife Area in Ross County, where 300 birds will be let go across three releases.
outdoors@dispatch.com