Tuesday, July 29, 2003
A group of skeet shooters from northern Ohio prevailed Saturday over their counterparts from the southern end of the Buckeye State and laid claim to the Ohio State Skeet Association's new Ohio Ruffed Grouse Trophy.
The trophy shoot came at the 2003 Ohio State Skeet Championships at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton. The northern Ohio team will hold the inaugural version of the trophy until the event is repeated in 2004.
Todd Tozer, one of the organizers for the trophy shoot, said there were 21 total matches with four halved or tied matches. The final score tallied into a North-12, South-5 result.
The trophy is currently still being fabricated and will depict a bronze ruffed grouse, representing the bird that graces the National Skeet Shooting Association logo, set on a wooden base.
The friendly, special competition pitted only OSSA classified shooters and was held concurrently with the championship's 12-gauge event. Two lists were compiled -- one for north shooters and one for south shooters -- and each list ranked the participants according to their 12-gauge running averages for the current year prior to this year's state shoot.
According to the trophy shoot rules, the highest ranking participant from each list was to be "paired" to compete head-to-head against one another in a "match" competition, with subsequent participants paired with their closest ranked competitor from the opposite geographic area.
Scoring for the event Saturday was done as follows: final scores from the 12-gauge event for each pairing were compared and the shooter with the highest number of broken targets earned one point for their "team" and the team with the highest total match points earned -- was the winner.
The Ohio Ruffed Grouse Trophy, and bragging rights for the entire year, was presented to the winning team during the Hall of Fame Banquet Saturday evening.
Bad news bears dispatched
The Pennsylvania Game Commission was recently forced to destroy two black bears who had been making a nuisance of themselves. One of the bears was also responsible for an injury to a young boy.
The first incident, in late June, involved a bear in Lackawanna County. The PGC reported the female bear had been roaming several neighborhoods and approached numerous individuals. After the bear was chased from a housing development, PGC officials tranquilized the animal.
The PGC report said the bear had ear tags and was identified as having been captured and moved several times. Reports indicated it had previously forcibly entered five homes in the Pocono Lake Preserve area. It was determined that releasing the bear a sixth time would be futile.
A second report by the PGC on June 27 involved a 12-year-old boy injured by a female bear at the Goose Pond Boy Scout Camp in Wayne County. The report indicated the bear entered the youth's tent and injured him when the sleeping boy startled the animal. The bear swatted the boy with its paw causing a laceration on the youth's head.
The bear also damaged lockers and coolers in other tents, and approached other young campers. The PGC later discovered that the bear had visited the camp over a number of years and was referred to by camp workers as "Louise" but had never been reported to the agency.
PGC officials said that capturing and moving bears that have become habituated to humans is a costly and sometimes ineffective way of addressing the problem and they would rather prevent such incidents through education of campers and others. The PGC felt that the two animals could no longer be trusted near humans. Officials added that the agency had exhausted all non-lethal methods of dealing with the two bears before the decision to destroy the animals was made.
"It truly is unfortunate that these two bears had to be euthanized, but we are very fortunate that no one was seriously injured or killed," Pennsylvania Game Commission Executive Director Vern Ross said. "Once bears become habituated to finding food around humans it is only a matter of time until a nuisance situation occurs."
Mark Ternent, Game Commission black bear biologist, said "The best solution is to prevent bears from finding food at your house or camp in the first place."
Ternent stressed that in the past 25 years fewer than 15 people have been injured by bears in Pennsylvania, and there are no known records of a Pennsylvania black bear killing a human.
State figures estimated Pennsylvania's growing bear population to be near 15,000. Last year, hunters harvested 2,686 bears, and 345 bears were reported killed on highways.
braun@vindy.com