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Outdoors

A good or bad outing … that all depends

By Shirley Grenoble sports@altoonamirror.com How did your spring gobbler season go this Year? My reports from hunters far and wide indicate it was a mixed bag. My friend, Joanie Haidle, and I traveled to Missouri to hunt and ran into the same complaints from hunters there that we have had in Pennsylvania for the last three years. “The birds are hardly gobbling,” many hunters said. “You better get him right at dawn or then wait until 11 a.m. because that is the only time they gobble. That was exactly how it went on our first couple days. A landowner had allowed us to ...

Turkey dishes not just for November

Last year I cooked some wild turkey for a group of friends. Like many, they were wary, expecting to taste something they hoped to tolerate but did not expect to like. I cooked it in a simple way ... turkey breast in a crockpot. Then I sliced it and made home-made gravy for it. Most of those who tried it remarked how similar it tasted to what they called real turkey. They went back for seconds and there were no leftovers. And that is not the way I generally cook wild turkey. From the day most of us got the recipe from The National Wild Turkey Federation back in the 1970s, we’ve ...

PGC paying tribute to Sewickley’s Oliver

If you’ve been to state parks or public lands in Southwestern Pennsylvania, chances are John C. Oliver III had a hand in acquiring some of that acreage. Regional parks that Oliver helped secure additional property for include Ohiopyle, Moraine, McConnell’s Mills and Raccoon state parks. That’s just a small part of his work. Oliver, 82, of Sewickley Heights, was honored by the Pennsylvania Game Commission as the first recipient of a conservation award named for him. He joined the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1970 and became its president in 1978. He held the position ...

Condors make surprise appearance

REDWOOD NATIONAL PARK, Calif. (AP) — The endangered California condor returned to soar the skies over the state’s far northern coast redwood forests this past week for the first time in more than a century. Two captive-bred birds were released from a pen in Redwood National Park, about an hour’s drive south of the Oregon border, under a project aimed at restoring the giant vultures to their historic habitat in the Pacific Northwest. The two male condors were moved into staging area at late morning and a remotely controlled gate was opened. After a few minutes of warily eyeing ...

Area teens capture youth bass state title

By John Hartsock jhartsock@altoonamirror.com A pair of 13-year-old Bedford County fishermen, Alex Fitzpatrick and Ander Cowan, recently won the Bass Nation Youth State Junior Championship and will represent the state of Pennsylvania in the national tournament this fall. Fitzpatrick, who is an eighth-grade student in the Chestnut Ridge School District, and Cowan, a seventh-grade student in the Everett Area School District, caught two largemouth bass weighing a total of 8.1 pounds to win the junior title on Sunday, April 3 on Pinchot Lake near Harrisburg. Fitzpatrick fooled a ...

CWD expands; bird flu breaks out in Pennsylvania

By Walt Young For the Mirror For almost a decade now, my least favorite topic to write about has been the outbreak of chronic wasting disease in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, CWD has been an all too frequent and necessary subject for the past 10 years, and it appears this disease will continue to be a timely topic for the foreseeable future. I first began researching CWD more than 20 years ago when it was largely confined to the western states of Colorado and Wyoming but began moving toward the upper Midwest. Even then, I was doubtful I would see CWD spread east of the Mississippi ...