Glade Run Lake as it looked before being drained. It will re-open to fishing for the first time in years on April 15.
Bob Frye/Everybody Adventures
There will be more fishing than harvesting at Glade Run Lake in Butler County this spring.
The 52-acre lake, drained in 2011 because of leaks in its dam, is being allowed to refill now. Plans are to stock it with catchable-sized trout in time for opening day in mid-April.
Anglers will be allowed to keep those fish, as at any other stocked trout water.
What they won’t be able to creel are any of the largemouth bass, white crappies, bluegills and channel catfish also being stocked.
There’s a reason for that, said Jason Detar, chief of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission’s division of fish management.
Those other species – along with golden and spotted shiners and white suckers being released into the lake as forage – need time to grow, individually and on a population level, he said.
The commission will monitor how those fish do over time, though, he added. When those fisheries are ready, the no-harvest rules will be lifted, Detar said.
Possible record
A Georgia man has killed what might be the new world’s record desert bighorn sheep taken with a bow.
Tony Loop was hunting in Arizona this past fall when he arrowed the animal at 30 yards.
Is this a new record desert bighorn?
Photo from Pope & Young Club
“As we knelt beside the big ram and admired this great warrior, I was overcome with both joy and sadness.” Loop said in a press release put out by the Pope & Young Club, which maintains archery world records. “He was majestic in every sense of the word.
Loop’s ram scored 186 ½. A review panel still has to verify that.
But the existing world record scored 175 ¾, so Loop’s ram has some room to play with.
Deer complaints
Doty McDowell, for one, thinks the worst is over.
He serves as the information and education supervisor in the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s northcentral region office. That area, of course, has been the hotbed for most of the dissatisfaction over deer populations over the last 20 years.
Things are changing, though, asserts McDowell. He’s worked in the region for 19 years and believes the commission has “weathered the storm” in terms of public perception.
“It was ugly there for years,” he admitted.
But the promise all along was that, if the area would hold fewer deer, it would hold better ones, he said. That’s come to pass, he added.
The state’s new top-ranked non-typical archery buck was killed in the region this past fall. Seven of the top 20 rifle season bucks chosen in as winners in a commission-sponsored photo contest, and two of the top 20 archery bucks, were killed in the northcentral, he added.
That’s prompted a change in attitudes, McDowell said.
“I spent most of deer season riding around with conservation officers, and I did not see the disdain toward the agency and deer hunting that we used to,” McDowell said.
Scholarships
The Scholastic Shooting Sports Foundation offering scholarships to graduating seniors for college.
Applications are due by April 17. To be eligible, students must be registered for college before the scholarship is awarded, have a GPA of at least 3.0, have shot in the Foundation’s trap or sporting clays program in the past year, and fill out an application form.
Details can be found here.
State vehicles
The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission is cutting back on the size of its vehicle fleet.
The agency began the year with 420 vehicles; by year’s end it will have 324.
The biggest area of reduction is in the area of fish hatcheries. It’s eliminating 44 of the 159 trucks it has there, said Bernie Matscavage, director of the commission’s bureau of administration.
Twenty other vehicles are being culled from the bureau of engineering, 14 from the bureau of law enforcement and 11 from the bureau of fisheries.
“I would say the challenge does not stop here,” added executive director John Arway. “We’re going to continue to scrutinize our fleet.”
It may, he noted, find that it’s able to reduce the number of vehicles assigned to its central Pennsylvania office,
The hope is that cutting back on vehicles will reduce costs and improve the ratio of vehicles to full-time employees, Matscavage said.
The cutback is not coming in a vacuum, he admitted.
The state’s auditor general is scheduled to audit the Pennsylvania Game Commission fleet this year. At the same time, the state treasurer’s office has gone from assigning state-owned vehicles to specific employees to maintaining a vehicle pool to cut back on the cars needed, he added.
Drones
For a long while now, people have been talking about the potential harm done to wildlife by people using drones irresponsibly.
Now, there’s talking of putting them to good use, too.
Drones may be used to monitor wildlife in the future.
Photofrom Pixabay
According to a research paper published in “The Auk: Ornithological Advances,” drones have potential as a tool for monitoring wildlife populations.
Researchers at Gettysburg College tested the feasibility of counting and identifying birds via drone by using fishing line to suspend an audio recorder from a drone. They tried it first on college athletic fields and then in real bird surveys on Pennsylvania state Game lands.
The results collected were compared with those gotten using traditional ground-based surveys in the same places. The drone’s audio recorder failed to pick up a few species, like mourning doves, and couldn’t identify bird numbers when populatiosn were too dense.
But otherwise the method showed promise, researchers said.
The complete report can be found here.
