An Ohio commission is considering proposals to lease thousands of acres of a remote state-owned wildlife area for fracking. Some people who live near the Egypt Valley Wildlife Area think the leases make sense, while others are concerned about their cultural and ecological impacts.
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Randi Podladnik and her husband moved to the Tappan Lake area of southeastern Ohio in the late 1990s, trading the industrial pollution of their former home for a quiet rural community.
In 2013, she says the fracking industry started changing the landscape.
“If we just stay in our house and don’t leave, we can pretend like it’s not happening,” she said, while driving the hilly, windy roads, dodging truck after truck. “But as soon as you leave, you run into brine trucks and sand trucks, and it’s taking your life in your hands sometimes to travel the back roads.”
Some of the trucks carry sand for the fracking process, and others transport contaminated wastewater from well pads to injection wells. As Podladnik drives, she points out fracking sites and also huge stacks of logs.
“You can always tell when they’re doing in a pipeline or a well pad, because wall-to-wall trees they’ll be trucking in here, where they cut them through the forest,” Podladnik said.
In the past year, a frack pad was built close to her house, and now she says there’s nowhere to hide from the noise and industrialization of their country home.
On the main road leading toward Lake Tappan, long-time resident Sherry Lindon said in recent years, trucks started flying by at all hours.
“It means a lot of nights I can’t sleep. It’s just noise, noise, noise,” Lindon said.
She said the trucks have made it unsafe for kids to play in the neighborhood, and pointed to tire tracks in her yard that she said were from the trucks.
“It’s just not been pleasant. The only thing I can say is hopefully some people are making money from the fracking, and hopefully it’ll go away,” she laughed.
Thirty miles south, the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission has put over 12,000 acres of a remote wildlife area, called Egypt Valley, out to bid for fracking. In addition, there are proposals to lease another 8,000 acres at the state-owned site — meaning the entire wildlife area could be open to fracking.
Podladnik warns that what’s happened near her home portends the future for Egypt Valley.
“I wonder [if] the people who fish or harvest deer or things like that from that area, how is that going to be affected down the road?” she asked.
Egypt Valley Wildlife Area
Unlike Tappan Lake, there’s almost no traffic moving through the Egypt Valley Wildlife Area. On a recent weekday, the only vehicle on the road was a school bus, along with a couple of pickup trucks parked along the side of the road near waterways where people fish.
For decades, this land was cleared for surface coal mining. In the 1990s, as that mining was ending, conservation groups, including the Ruffed Grouse Society, along with the state, acquired what is now more than 18,000 acres here, used mostly for hunting and fishing. But this area is not pristine.
“The history of land use results in a condition that is very heavily departed from a highly intact ecological system,” said Karl Malcolm, vice president of conservation for the Society, which works to promote healthy habitat for grouse and the American woodcock, two game birds that have suffered long-term declines in Ohio from loss of habitat.
Today, the rolling green hillsides at Egypt Valley are covered with brush and young trees. The land is dotted with wetland areas and small ponds, which the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) stocks with bass and other fish. The ODNR reintroduced river otters in the 1990s, and according to its website, there is now a thriving population here.
Malcolm said it costs “tremendous amounts of money” for the state to remove non-native invasive brush species, like buckthorn and honeysuckle, at Egypt Valley and its other properties, while promoting bird-friendly grassland and shrubland habitats.
“Given the history of land use, how do we manage this in a way that’s gonna promote opportunities to hunt and also deliver conservation outcomes for other species of concern?” Malcolm said. “It comes at a high cost.”
He supports fracking in Egypt Valley for the revenue it would bring into Ohio. Malcolm calls it a reasonable solution.
“Where you have oil and gas revenue coming into the state, if there’s a mechanism to have some or all of those revenues invested in conservation outcomes, I see the benefit of being able to capture that value,” he said.
This fiscal year (FY 2026), the state has budgeted $3 million dollars in royalties from fracking in state wildlife areas to support conservation efforts.
Leasing Egypt Valley for fracking makes a lot of sense to Kyle Wood, who owns an outdoor and hunting supply store not far from the wildlife area.
“They’d be crazy to pass that up,” he said. “You’re talking about a lot of money there for that kind of acreage. So I think they would be fools to pass it up.”
Impacts to wildlife
The ODNR has added an addendum to lease agreements at Egypt Valley that well pads be built outside the wildlife area’s boundaries, that fracking companies limit noise pollution and not drill during hunting seasons. Also, it wants water sources to be tested before and after fracking.
Research shows that oil and gas development can impact wildlife, like songbirds.
As a Ph.D. student at West Virginia University, Laura Farwell, an avian and landscape ecologist, studied the impacts of fracking on forest songbird communities in the central Appalachian region, which includes eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
She joined a team of WVU researchers surveying birds deep in the forests, and also right up to the edge of drilling sites and pipeline corridors.
Study: Songbird that Needs Clean Streams Threatened by Fracking
They found that fracking activity changed the bird population.
“So there was this immediate effect of sensitive species moving out, but then over time you’d see generalist species moving in,” Farwell said. “The entire sort of bird community would shift.”
Her research team found that when more sensitive, forest-dependent species like blue-headed vireo and Canada warblers move out, others, like cowbirds, a native species that can take over a habitat, start showing up. Cowbirds are often considered a threat to vulnerable songbird species.
At Tappan Lake, Randi Podladnik started noticing cowbirds about five years ago.
“That was the one thing that we said, ‘Where in the heck did these guys come from?’” she said.
Podladnik doubts that people who live near Egypt Valley, or hunt and fish there, understand that the state lease agreements for fracking could also mean heavy truck traffic, land disturbance, noise and pollution in their quiet wildlife area.
“It’s going to an industrial zone, and is that going to get into the wildlife?” she asked.
The Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission is expected to consider bids and new fracking proposals at Egypt Valley at its meeting this summer.
