North zone waterfowl dates not optimal for hunters

The reg­u­lar water­fowl sea­son is finally upon us. The Par­rott boys did have a decent open­ing week­end har­vest­ing a lot of wood ducks with some mal­lards and gad­wall thrown in.

Now that the local wood ducks have been har­vested or bugged out for safer waters, we are now twid­dling our thumbs star­ing at empty skies until the weather gets nasty enough to bring us a migra­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, if you live and hunt in the Ohio water­fowl north zone, you will have to wait until after Thanks­giv­ing for that to hap­pen as we won’t be in sea­son again until then.

This year, the Divi­sion of Wildlife chose to open up the north zone water­fowl sea­son a week ear­lier in Octo­ber and keep it in through late Octo­ber. The sec­ond split then opens at the end Novem­ber and runs into early Jan­u­ary. Course, that means we will prob­a­bly miss most of the diver migra­tion this year as that usu­ally hap­pens in mid-November.

As you can prob­a­bly tell, I am not a big fan of Divi­sion of Wildlife’s choice in north zone water­fowl sea­son dates this year. I love that we are open all of Decem­ber and into early Jan­u­ary, as I love those late sea­son mal­lards, but being open for so much of Octo­ber is a waste of many of the sixty days that we are allowed to be in season.

I under­stand that Divi­sion of Wildlife has a tough job try­ing to appease so many areas of Ohio with only sixty days. I just sorely wish they would do to the sea­son in the north zone like they do in the south zone and only open the first split for eight days and then close it.

That would give water­fowlers a chance to har­vest the local wood ducks and take advan­tage of the small migra­tion of teal that can hap­pen dur­ing then and then open the sec­ond split up two weeks ear­lier in mid-November to allow us to take advan­tage of the diver migration.

It is going to be a strange year not hunt­ing ducks in most of Novem­ber around here that is for sure. My fin­gers will be crossed that win­ter ice up doesn’t arrive too early this year and keep some of those divers around.

• Thanks to the new report­ing sys­tem of har­vested tagged deer, access to total statewide har­vest num­bers is avail­able to the pub­lic much quicker and eas­ier now. Deer hunters can keep up with Ohio’s deer har­vest num­bers through­out the sea­son at wildohio.com.

The deer har­vest report will be posted each Wednes­day by noon through­out the hunt­ing sea­son. Each report will com­pare the total har­vest for the same num­ber of hunt­ing days for each year. The report will include deer killed by long­bow, cross­bow, shot­gun, hand­gun and muzzleloader.

The value of the new reports will be real­ized most dur­ing the early archery sea­son. The early archery har­vest tends to be a very good pre­dic­tor of how the rest of the sea­sons will fare, assum­ing weather con­di­tions are aver­age. The direct link to the web­site is http://bit.ly/ohiodeerharvest.

Locally, all the area coun­ties are way up in har­vest totals for the first eigh­teen days of the sea­son and statewide, har­vest num­bers are up over forty per­cent com­pared to last year.

• The ODNR Wildlife Coun­cil recently passed some new rules that will take into effect on Jan­u­ary 1st. One of them affects anglers par­tic­u­larly those that travel to Lake Erie and are bring­ing back cleaned fish.

Fil­lets must now be kept whole until an angler reaches his or her per­ma­nent res­i­dence or until the fish are pre­pared for imme­di­ate con­sump­tion. There will be no require­ment to keep skin on the fil­lets. This rule will not apply to anglers with a receipt from a fish clean­ing house or char­ter cap­tain, which states the date, num­ber and species of fish.

It was also pro­posed to adjust the rule to allow for the sale of squir­rel skins as well as the tail. Squir­rel tails have been sold for many years, hunters often leave them attached to the entire hide, so this will allow a com­mon prac­tice to con­tinue and be a simplification.

It was also pro­posed to make changes to the tag­ging process to reflect new tem­plates in the License and Game Check sys­tem. One change is that hunters will no longer be required to use a Divi­sion issued tem­po­rary tag; they will pro­vide their own just as landown­ers do now. The same was pro­posed for deer hunt­ing as well.

Until next time, Good Hunt­ing and Good Fishing!

Posted by Rob Hamilton on Oct 24 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.