W.H. Chip Gross

Detail from an artist’s rendering of the execution of Col. William Crawford.

One of the most infamous incidents in all of early Ohio history occurred 241 years ago this month, on June 11, 1782, when Col. William Crawford of the fledgling U.S. Army was burned at the stake by Native American locals out for revenge.

The story begins several months earlier, in March 1782, when 96 members of the Delaware tribe, who had converted to Christianity, were rounded up, massacred, and burned along with their entire village of Gnadenhutten (meaning huts, or tents, of grace) along the Tuscarawas River by Col. David Williamson and his contingent of frontier militia.

Baltimore orioles, such as the adult male on the left and the juvenile at right, migrate through Ohio beginning in late April and early May each year.

Roman Mast’s backyard looks like a bird-feeding test kitchen.

“I have my oriole feeders out by the last week in April,” Mast says. “Through the years, I’ve tried a lot of different foods to attract orioles, including sliced oranges, but my main food now is simply grape jelly.” Orioles and a few other species, such as rose-breasted grosbeaks, gray catbirds, and some warblers, seem to love the stuff. “A red-bellied woodpecker even comes to my jelly feeders occasionally,” Mast says.

Burrowing crayfish build mud chimneys — or “castles” — several inches high, giving away their location.

Sometime when you feel like getting outdoors and impressing your young kids/grandkids this spring, tell them this story: Say you’re going to visit a king who lives in a castle. Would they like to come along and meet him?

Known variously as crayfish, crawfish, crawdads, mudbugs, or by many other local names, these crustaceans look like mini freshwater lobsters — and taste like it, too. Crawfish boils in the South (especially in Louisiana, where the clawed critters routinely grow much larger than here in Ohio) are highly anticipated party gatherings.     

Karl Maslowski served as a combat cameraman for the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. He filmed aircraft and camp life at an airbase in Corsica under famed director Capt. William Wyler. Some of Maslowski’s footage was later used in the 1947 film Thunderbolt!

Like most wildlife photographers of the early 20th century — though there were only a handful — Karl Maslowski was a hunter before he became a photographer.

The answer to his problem, he believed, was acquiring one of those newfangled 16mm movie cameras he had been hearing so much about. “But they were just too expensive, and our family was dirt poor,” Maslowski remembered. Fate, however, sometimes has a way of intervening in such situations.  

Author and conservationist Louis Bromfield named his famous farm Malabar after the beautiful Malabar Coast of India, where he and his family lived for a short time during the early 20th century.

In 1896, a baby was born in Mansfield — a boy who would one day grow up to travel the world, become a writer, and win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1927, at just 30 years of age.

In his 1945 book titled Pleasant Valley, Bromfield wrote of the area: 

It is a pleasant land all about you, valleys where the bottom land is rich, bordered by hills covered with wild and luxuriant forest, the whole filigreed with the silver of the streams called Switzer’s Run, Possum Run, and the Clear Fork; and far down lies the blue shield of Pleasant Hill Lake bordered by the deep red of sandstone bluffs and the blue black of hemlock trees.

Success was not only converted to a “convict ship,” complete with all her ghastly accoutrements, but was also the “oldest and most historic ship afloat.” 

There has likely never been a more ironic name for a prison ship than Success.

A group of promoters purchased the ship, planning to sail her around the world for the public to board and tour — for a price, of course. But before her debut, they believed Success needed a bit of refurbishing. 

They brought aboard some unusual equipment: handcuffs, leg irons, branding irons, metal straightjackets, a triangle-shaped whipping post, even a medieval torture device known as an iron maiden. 

And they painted on the sides of the hull, in large black letters, the words “Convict Ship.” 

The Hocking Hills State Park Lodge has an inviting air, with its rocking chair-lined porch.

Located in southeastern Ohio in Hocking County, Hocking Hills is the Buckeye State’s most popular state park, visited by some 5 million people annually, and this past October, the brand-new, highly anticipated Hocking Hills State Park Lodge and Conference Center opened its

As expected, the lodge is gorgeous. Especially stunning is the view through the four-story picture windows of the main lobby. The open, timber-frame architecture incorporates the surrounding woods and natural landscape into a rustic yet state-of-the-art modern design. Overnight guests can choose from king beds, double queen beds, king and bunk beds, and queen and bunk beds. Two-room suites are also available. All rooms have a mini-refrigerator and microwave. 

Aldo Leopold, the “Father of Wildlife Management,” described his classic book, A Sand County Almanac, like this: “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot.”  

To conserve and improve fish and wildlife resources and their habitats for sustainable use and appreciation by all. - Mission statement of the Ohio Division of Wildlife

Teddy bears will be purchased in untold numbers this Christmas season as gifts for children, both around the country and around the world. Ever stop and wonder why?

Guiding the president for several days was Holt Collier, the most famous bear hunter in the state. Born a slave, Collier was now a freed man who made much of his living by bear hunting. He and his pack of top-notch hounds were said to have taken more than 3,000 black bears. 

Had it not been for Ohio’s duck hunters, much of Ohio’s marshland, which is so important to both birding and hunting today, may well have been lost to development.

"There’s a singular reason that some of the best Lake Erie marshes in Ohio have been saved from destruction. One reason, two words: duck hunters. It sounds blunt and oversimplified, but from the viewpoint of wildlife, duck hunters saved the marshes.”

During settlement, the Buckeye State lost an estimated 95% of its original wetlands, much of that the Great Black Swamp, which once covered nearly all of northwestern Ohio and northeastern Indiana. That gigantic region was a haven for wildlife of all sorts — not just waterfowl — as the water slowly drained into the vast marshes that ringed the western edge of Lake Erie from Toledo to Sandusky.