Bear Grease - Ep. 38: Ducks - Saving the Legacy of Green Tree (Part 2)

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

Hunting flooded timber in Arkansas for mallard ducks is why this place is known as the Duck Hunting Capital of the World. On this episode, Clay interviews the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission director, Austin Booth, and waterfowl biologist Luke Naylor about why the trees are dying in the Green Tree reservoirs of Arkansas. There are some big decisions to be made about how to save them. Clay also talks with Bobby Martin -- a commissioner of the AGFC -- about the legacy of habitat conservation that waterfowlers have in this country. This is the final episode in our series on duck hunting.Connect with Clay and MeatEaterClay on InstagramMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop Bear Grease Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days in real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. You're riding a boat together or you're walking out to a place together. You're sitting in a blind together. And the conversations can just continue while you're duck hunting. On this episode of the Bear Grease podcast,

we're back in the swamp in pursuit of understanding the Cathedral of the Mallard Duck, green tree reservoirs, or GTRs, as they're called. This is part two in the final episode in our series. series on Arkansas duck hunting. We've explored the ancient Mississippi flyway and the unique culture of the waterfowlers who dedicated their lives to ducks. Get ready for some drama because the trees and the GTRs are dying. We'll talk with Austin Booth, the director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and waterfowl biologist Luke Naylor. We'll look into the

complexity of conservation issues on public lands. which can be slow to navigate. But in the end, we'll hear what the plan is to save these critical flooded bottomland hardwoods. I really doubt you're going to want to miss this one. Do we want to tell our grandkids what it was like to hunt by mehta? Or do we want to listen to them tell us what it's like? My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant.

Search for insight and unleashed. likely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. Started when I was nine, and so this will be my sixth, or is my 64th duck season. When I say that to people, they just sort of look back at me like, wait a minute, what does that really mean? and they realize 64 times you've done this.

This is Mr. Bobby Martin. So you started hunting public land in Arkansas when you were just a kid. Yeah, literally nine years old. First time was, you know, like a lot of kids. My dad took me on the first trip and put me on his back and hauled me across the rice field and went Arkansas. And so all of my life I've hunted, well, if there was a puddle of water in Arkansas with a duck on it, I'd probably have hunted it. You said your dad used to take you and leave you over at Biomedia for a couple of days when you were just a kid. Yeah, actually, you know, by the time I was 13 myself and another hunting buddy,

and, you know, we were just really kind of eating up with it. After Christmas week, we were out of school, so my dad would take us down, and we'd hunt on a Sunday morning, and then he'd leave in the afternoon, and leave us there. We camped in a pup tent and walked in hunting into an area that's called Government Cyprus, principally. Anybody around Arkansas, by me, do they know exactly where I'm talking about? So we would be there, and then about on Wednesday, each during that week, he would come in, check on us and take us into Wabasika, Arkansas, to the laundromat so we could dry whatever was wet, and there was always

something wet. Yeah. But literally, of course, that was a time when things were a little bit different, but, you know, my parents had a lot of trust and responsibility to have us out there with 12-gauge shotguns And there's a lot of wilderness during that time. I can't tell you that we didn't get lost. I know my parents loved me. But I look back on it, I'm thinking, wow, okay. That was a lot of trust. They were.

But they loved me enough to know how good that was for me. And yeah, that's where it really got my love and my passion going. Mr. Bobby is 73 years old and is currently a commissioner of the body which governs Arkansas wildlife and state-owned lands, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. stories like Mr. Bobby's are common in this part of the world, and when it's this personal, understanding the passion is easier. When a father carries his son on his back into a wild place, perhaps that ancient transportation method switches on a gene for excessive focus on the traveled to activity, or perhaps the ability to mine out the nuance of wild places unperceived by others. I'm in pursuit of understanding the sector of American culture that has a cult-like devotion, fist-pounding fervor in 100 years of conservation, replete with some failures, but also massive victories.

The scorekeeping isn't done by man, but by the ducks. We're peering into the world of waterfowlers. By man's calculation system, waterfowlers have directly protected over 15, million acres of critical wetlands in North America. The waterfowl community has been highly successful at protecting where ducks live, which has impacted duck numbers. Since 1955, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has kept track of duck numbers on the continent. In the 1970s, waterfowl numbers were in decline, but today our numbers are trending towards 50-year highs. There is no doubt it's 100% attributed to hunting conservation groups, both state agencies and NGOs.

No other group on planet Earth does more for wildlife than hunters. And where an animal has cultural value through sport hunting, it and its habitat are protected. This isn't a political spin or contrived through tinted lenses. Though we aren't perfect, our message to the wider American community is clear. Give us the space to manage wildlife and what? wild places through hunting. It's working. The science backs us, but perhaps as important as the science, is that hunting runs thicker than blood in the rivers, mountains, and hollows of this country. I continue to be amazed as I look into our American roots. From the rich history of the

Native Americans' connection to the land, to the frontiersmen, we are a nation of hunters. And this is something to be proud of. The story of Arkansas, duck hunters and their desire to protect habitat is just one small piece of a big story. In this last episode, we talked about why Arkansas is known as the duck hunting capital of the world. It was a combination of multiple things, but primarily geography. Here's world champion duck caller Jimbo Ron Quest, recapping a few things for us. You just look at the land, so you start way back, ducks used all the riverbockers. They used the Biomedes basin, the Cache River Basin, the White River Basin.

And then when we had to add vent of rice on the ground, which became a surrogate wetland, once they started planting rice in the early 1900s and ducks started finding it, this area started getting well-known where farmers would say, come go shoot these ducks, I'll buy your shells, just keep ducks out of my rice. You know, that literally happened for some time. The combination of all the hardwood bottoms and all of our river systems is that all comes together and flows towards Mississippi. It just kept tightening it up, tightened it up.

And we had great habitat and great natural food sources. And then we added to that with the advent, again, rice production, now corn, molo, whatever people are planting food. I love it when natural systems do what natural systems do. And just like this morning, you and me are sitting in a duck hole over here watching ducks fly by. And you can't push them too hard to go somewhere they don't want to go. Right. They're going to go where they want to go.

And that is Arkansas. I may be biased about my home state, but mallard ducks have used the Mississippi Flyway, the most used flyway in North America, to come here by the millions since the end of the last ice age. It has to do with the geography of rivers and continental drainage, agriculture, and us having the largest stands of green tree reservoirs in the United States. From the duck hunting side, Arkansas is the capital because of what duck hunters call hunting in the timber. I'm new to duck hunting, but it didn't take me long to learn two things. Mallard ducks are the king, and hunting flooded timber is the Rolls Royce, the flashy mule, the cast iron skillet cornbread of duck hunting.

But we need to establish why. Here's Sean Weaver, meat eater's duck guru, talking about hunting in the timber. Coming from the outside into duck hunting. You just feel like the goal of duck hunting, is to kill as many ducks as you can. Whether you kill those ducks on the edge of a field or whether you kill those ducks on a river or whether you kill those ducks in flooded timber,

you would not intuitively, just from the outside, be able to say which one is more coveted, has more value, and it's cooler. Why is hunting ducks and timber so special? Yeah, you raise a interesting point there. For a lot of people, it's actually not just a numbers thing. It's not just how many ducks you can kill. It's not just shooting.

limit, it's how you kill them. And for example, if you go hunt a pit in a rice field, those ducks don't always finish right. They might kind of hang above the decoys at 25, 30 yards and give it a real good look, but not be backpedaling feet down over the decoys. And yet they're still in shooting range and you get to shoot those ducks. But for a lot of guys, especially guys that really kind of have the game figured out, they would rather take just a few ducks a day, feet down, hovering over the decoys, knowing they've got them fooled. Really fooled. That matters more than just the number.

And to shoot ducks in the timber, it's kind of an all-or-nothing proposition for the ducks. They're either going to stay up above the trees and screw around, spinning around, working, but not fully committing. But once they've come down through that canopy, they're committed. They've made their decision, and you have fooled them at that point. And I think that the fact that when you're shooting ducks in the timber, they're usually fluttering around feet down, is a big value to a lot of people and why it's so coveted to do it. Here's Jimbo on why the timber is special. I've noticed lots of these guys get a little tongue-tied when they talk about it. And it's the, I don't know how to really explain it, but it's kind of a funky word to use for it, but it's the intimate.

of it. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, for, you can just almost grab them, and you're calling, and, and they're, you know, you know, you know, you know, it's the ones that we've finished, they'd come right on top of that, cause, looking for that call, you know, and then you have to get them a look for the decoys, and, and just the fact that that's what they're doing, you know, they're coming looking for you. The last episode, we introduced the new director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, Austin Booth. As a lifelong public land duck hunter, he's just like these other guys. A bit at a loss for words. It is almost impossible to explain it. There's nothing like it. There's absolutely nothing like it. I was raised in Lonew County, went to college out of state, and basically left the state for 15 years. But I always came back during duck season. And I would explain to people that have never hunted timber before.

that ducks land in the trees. And they look at me like... And they're just supposed to know that that's really, really special. No, they wouldn't believe me. They're like, no, they don't. Yeah, they do. They say, you mean you're standing in the woods in a bunch of water and ducks will land down into the trees into the water?

Said, yes. They wouldn't believe me. I had the opportunity to bring people to Arkansas to watch them watch timber hunting for the first time. Yeah. And there's nothing else like it when those ducks can see your decoys from

800,000 feet in the air and they come down at a 60, 70, 80 degree angle wings cut through the limbs and when they're inside the canopy from you, you're just so close to them that you can hear their feet dragging through the wind, you can hear their

feathers cutting through the wind. To be that close and have that close of a connection with a critter so hot up in the sky, there's just nothing like it. Inside it as hunters, we cherish the very fleeting moments before we take game. If you think about deer hunting, like we think about big white-tail bucks, the amount of time

that I have spent in the presence of a big wild white-tail buck is actually a very minuscule amount of time. And that moment is what you remember for so long, this animal, this majestic animal that you're after in his natural environment, unaware of your presence. And you as a predator and all the work that's gone to... into that moment being ready and knowing that the moment of truth is now. That's what it feels like there is something very special about watching these birds and then convincing them to commit to your decoys. But what I wouldn't have known is that these ducks actually coming through

the limbs of these trees and the aeronautics of what they do. That's what gets a duck hunter flipping out. That's right. Because they do all kind of wild. stuff when they come in and it's just it's the culmination of everything we know mallards are the king but mallards in the timber is the king on his throne I want Austin to define that throne for us what is a green tree reservoir a green tree reservoir is a reservoir of bottom one hardwoods so so think a predominance of red oaks that is naturally at a lower point in elevation where it's a natural drainage point. The word, okay, so you've established why it's called green tree because it's living trees.

Primarily oaks is what we're interested in if we're talking about ducks. But it's a reservoir. It's holding water at different times of the year naturally and the flood stages of these rivers. Correct. Green tree reservoirs, GTRs, are what makes this place special. It's important to understand that there are two reasons timbered areas. would flood. The first would be an act of nature or just natural flooding. The second being man-induced flooding by the building of levees. So after the turn of the 20th century, rice

production and the Arkansas Delta took off. Farmers cleared large amounts of bottomland timber and planted ag crops, lots of it in rice. Ducks loved the rice, but it also concentrated ducks into the timber that remained. And duck hunters took notice. of the old Mallard's affinity for acorns in the timber. Here's Luke Naylor, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission's lead waterfowl biologist. He's going to tell us about the first intentional flooding of hardwood timber in Arkansas, which took place in 1926. They talk about the first one being a guy by the name of Tyndall in Arkansas County,

and he ring-leaveed a bunch of trees to hold water to irrigate rice. We know that irrigation reservoirs are critically important and being added to the landscape even today to irrigate rice during the summer using surface water. And so these folks were experimenting with that way back 90 years ago. Yeah, let's just levee up that chunk of woods over there. And the woods historically would have been temporary. And so you would have had these situations where, you know, ducks use those areas when they flooded mostly naturally. Right.

Just for a short period of time, maybe. For a short period of time, maybe not every year. Almost certainly not every year, depending on the elevation. I see. And so then you get people early hunters and see that, okay, wait a minute. With these woods flood, the ducks get in it. And that's really awesome because we get to go hunt the ducks in the woods, and that's really cool. So then they start seeing, okay, we're going to build a reservoir here to flood our rice in the summer.

And wow. So we've kept this thing flooded for a couple years in a row, and the ducks are in it all the time now in the winter. So, okay, let's put two and two together here. Let's keep doing this. Yeah, let's keep doing this. Let's keep flooding these areas on a regular basis, because when they flood, we shoot ducks.

When they're dry, we don't shoot ducks. Let's fix that. Just human nature at work. Then that kind of led us to where we are now with this whole notion of consistency in flooding. And that over the course of decades, and generations of people. It builds in a idea of what's normal.

It is. And human nature, we love consistency. But basically, nothing in nature is consistent. Nothing in nature is consistent. And that's an important phrase to remember. As is common to man, people began to find ways to get around nature's inconsistency. And building water holding infrastructure

that allows large tracks of land to be flooded and drained was the ticket. It's important to know that both private and public land have water holding infrastructure, but the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission manages over 50,000 acres of it on 40 different GTRs. All this was great, but about 20 years ago, we started to notice a problem. We wanted to hold water. We wanted to hold water to make the 60 days of duck season more predictable. We wanted to have water on the trees well enough before the duck season started where the ducks could enjoy it and understand what they could eat there. The problem with that is when we put the infrastructure in place, we just didn't know a whole lot about tree dormancy. When water stands on

trees, that's generally a bad thing. Now, they can take it when the trees are dormant. I tell people, trees don't have a calendar. They don't say, all right, it's November 15th time for us to go dormant. It's based a lot of soil temperature, air temperature. The individual climate of that year. When we put water on the trees artificially and those trees aren't dormant yet, then that's putting a lot of stress on the trees. We kept doing this for years and years and years and years. And then about 10, 20 years ago, we started seeing some pretty troubling signs and it was declining timber health. And it happened predominantly. Trees were dying. Trees were dying. And it was predominantly for two reasons.

One, because we were putting water on them artificially. Two, it was because of increased rainfall. We had a rain event this year, 2021 to the first week of June, and DeShay County in southeastern Arkansas got 19 inches of rain in 36 hours. Wow. That same rain event, when it hit Biomeda wildlife management area, it took us about six weeks to get the water off. not only is our infrastructure outdated,

not only have we been artificially putting water on, but we've just been getting more rainfall than our infrastructure was ever intended to handle. So the issue of standing water on tree roots, which is natural in this part of the world, is compounded by artificial flooding and unprecedented rainfall in recent years. On the White River,

which is a major river in the Arkansas Delta, of its 25 highest recorded crests, 10 have happened in the last 11 years. Think about that for a minute. The current trend is massive amounts of rainfall in short periods of time. This makes things tough. Here's Luke. Yeah, so we've been managing these systems in an artificial way for about 50 years, let's say, on average. And what I mean by that is that these areas,

We talked about 150 years ago would have been periodic flooding, unpredictable flooding, variable flooding. And we've provided fairly consistent flooding in these areas, which has led to several different issues. We have, these forests are made up of a bunch of different species. We're just mainly talking about trees now. And different species of trees that have different water tolerances. Even in these swamps, these trees have different water tolerances. They're highly adapted to it, but they're adapted to. different hydro periods, different durations and timing of flooding. And we've altered that by generally

flooding earlier than Mother Nature would have flooded these areas. So they usually would have flooded in the wintertime? And then through the spring? Winter through spring. Yeah, through March, April. We can think about this landscape, the driest months of the year for us are typically September October and through part of November. Our management has attempted to flood these areas for opening day of duck season, which had been the Saturday before Thanksgiving for years and years and years. So kind of a mismatch with the normal rainfall period in this area. Would it be safe to say from December through April would have been the typical flooding period for this part of the world? Likely, yes. December through April and they would have probably,

these areas would have started to drop in late February. Okay. After spring migration of ducks. And then you're going to get inevitable big spring thunderstorms, right? That brought water in, the things would pulse up, but they'd fall out in a few days. And we look at trees and when some of these bottom and hardwood species break dormancy, a lot of these don't break bud until March or April, which lo and behold, that lines up pretty well when these areas would have been mostly dry, but maybe a few-day flood event that came and went, moving water the entire time. We think that means oxygenated water.

So something that these trees are highly adapted to, unlike early fall flooding, October, November flooding, trees have not gone dormant. They've still got green leaves on them down here. Exactly. Temperatures are warm and we end up with stagnant water. So for 50 years, we've added at least an extra month or month and a half. About that, yeah. Of water on these trees. We have.

And it's killing them. And it really, it just all boils down to variability. And the lack of it, we managed for a lack. of hydrologic variability for a lot of years. Right. So what I heard you say earlier is that natural systems, they all seem to be very unpredictable. Very.

And so that is their system. The system is designed to be unpredictable. So this thing floods this year, but not next year. This year it flooded in the winter, but not in the spring. And that pattern, even though it doesn't, it's not really a pattern, produces what those tree species need. Yeah. So the consistency that man came in.

and put on it is what's hurting them. Yeah, variability is the pattern. Natural systems have mastered the art of finding equilibrium in ways that are impossible for the human mind to comprehend. Unpredictability is nature's pattern, and that has founded an incredibly stable system. Here's Austin with some very disturbing statistics. In 2014, we did a forced health assessment at Hurricane Lake Wildlife Management Area,

And 42% of our red oaks were either dead or irreversibly dying. Wow. 42%. Wow. And then we had a precipitous die-off in 2018. So I think it's safe to say that our red oak health at Hurricane Lake, compared to what it was is well over half. Well over half.

And this is what the ducks are eating. This is why they're going to the timber. This is why before European settlement, ducks were coming down the fall. fly away and they were making a living off of the acres. Natural flooded timber and the acorns that were on the ground. That's right. They can get calories from the acorns. They can get calories from the invertebrate that live in the leaf litter.

Right. And they can get covered from the trees. Red oaks are the best anchor for all of that kind of habitat. Yeah. In the GTRs. So red oak timber is essential to green timber reservoirs and ducks. You know, during duck season, most of the leaves are off the trees anyways. For folks to really understand what this mortality looks like, they really need to get out in the spring.

So, yeah, duck hunters are seeing these trees when they're all dormant, so they all would appear dead. They wouldn't be coming back alarming the bells, saying all the trees are dead. And I don't want you or any of your listeners to think that I'm a trained forest biologist because I'm not. I'm a knuckle dragon marine. I've been learning this stuff too. We went out there to Hurricane Lake Wildlife Management Area in the southern GTR. where it is like ground zero of timber mortality, and it'll make you sick to your stomach.

The only thing that is taller than the buck brush that ducks really don't care about from a food perspective are cypress trees and dead red oaks. Then we took what we learned at Hurricane and we started a forest health assessment at Biomeda last year. This summer, we were about halfway through that forest health assessment. We noticed some really disturbing trends where even though we were not all the way through with the Forest Health Assessment,

we think that some of the things we're seeing on the ground right now at Biomeda look a whole lot like what Hurricane would have looked like, you know, 2011, 2012, 13, 14. So we made the difficult decision to implement changes for this waterfowl season on how we're managing our water levels at Hurricane and Biomita. here's Luke talking more specifically about what is happening to individual tree species in the flooded timber. As a warning, parents, this section may not be appropriate for children because Luke incorrectly pronounces the word spelled A-C-O-R-N. Despite this erosion of trust, here's Luke. So tell me what's happening.

What are we now seeing? We're seeing these species that are less water tolerant. Most of them are red oaks, and most the red oaks produce acorns that are of the right size to be consumed by ducks. We're mainly talking about mallards. I guess it's unfortunate. It would have been nice if the water tolerant species produced the small acorns that ducks like. But it's not that way. We've got willow oaks, which a lot of people around here call pin oak, but it's not a true pin oak, real slender leaf tree that's extremely common, which is he produces a nice small acorn that,

mallards and wood ducks just love uh nut all oak is another species and though and that willow oak is water tolerant it is not water tolerant and that's the catch so we've got willow oak you've kind of you've got this whole these different tiers of water tolerance that we we think these trees have and we think willow i'm a big oak guy man tell me tell me the stratification of water tolerance yeah so i'll start at the high ground the least water tolerant we'd probably talking about cherry bark oak and water oak are kind of a higher species within these bottle of wood systems, maybe a month of flooding is what they can tolerate.

You step down a little bit, we think Willow Oak can take maybe a month or two. We're talking 30 to 60 days of dormant season flooding. You go down the gradient a little bit more, you find Nudal Oak that can tolerate maybe a couple months of flooding. And then you move down to Overcup Oak, which is highly water tolerant.

And we think it can take about probably even, we see it surviving with six months plus of flooding. Really? Now, all those times, time periods also assume variability, right? So even 60 days every year for 40 years for not all oaks is not good. I see. Even though they're a little bit more water tolerant than a cherry bark oak. And so what we're seeing now is those red oak species are showing major signs of mortality, tree stress and mortality. And so we've had massive die-offs in some locations that have been fairly

sudden and we've had a bunch of other areas that have been just kind of a slow bleed lots of just showing signs of stress falling out of the forest on maybe in little maybe in little fits and starts you know maybe I have a year where you lose a bunch of them and maybe they hang on for a few more years and you lose a bunch so a really kind of a slower process in some places which is interesting because it makes it a whole lot harder to detect yes when you don't see a massive die-off that happens in two or three years. A lot of folks can simply go into these areas year after year after year and the change is so subtle that it's almost imperceptible. Let's really, really stop and look at it. And it's generally happening with these willow oaks and nut all oaks are the two predominant species

on WMAs that this is happening to. The artificial flooding is selecting for water-tolerant oak species and unfortunately those types of oaks produce acres that are too big for ducks to utilize. Literally, they can't swallow them. Waterfowl needs small acorns produced by nutall and willow oaks and some other red oak varieties. But the water is killing those kinds of trees and not allowing the young trees of those species to survive. Trying to understand how all this could sneak up on us is a complex question, but it's something that the AGFC has been tracking for over a decade. The answer is pretty simple, and it's both biological and social. Here's Jimbo Ron Quest, giving us a little history. Heck, even 10, 15 years ago, you know, people like Luke

Lather and Buck Jackson and Mickey Hightmeyer, different ones we're talking about, something's going to have to be done, or we're going to lose this whole ecosystem. Finally here a few years ago, we had a big timber die off at one of our WMAs. Everybody talked about it, and we scratched at it a little bit, tried to educate. There's folks still thinking, wow, you know, it's fine. It's good. We've got to keep flooding it. Well, finally, Gaming Fish stepped up and said, it's time to do something. And in some ways, they may be a little late. But they took the bull by the horns and are making something happen. They said, no, here's what we're going to do.

You heard him mention that for a long time, Luke and many others have been crying wolf. And it's worth bringing up that the amount of research-driven data, the assessment of public opinion, and all the other factors that come into implementing long-term plans isn't always a fast process. We all know that whatever direction a government agency goes, it's going to take some criticism. Couple that with the passion around Arkansas waterfow hunting, and it's easy to see the difficulty with getting the timing right on this. Here's Luke talking about the challenges of managing trees. It is.

They were early, because they're trees, and they live so long. It's a tough system to study and identify these changes. And you start to see in the scientific literature and in, you know, just general writings of within agency documents and such, you see mention of tree stress fairly early on in the growth of GTRs as a management tool. You start to see quickly. Okay. So there was some noticing of this is maybe hurting the trees. Right.

People noticed it. Tendell's reservoir was quickly treeless. It was a dead stick reservoir. So folks noticed pretty quickly that, wow, okay, that's flooding year-round is not good. And so check that off the list. But then it transitioned to, well, we can dormant season flood. Well, then that kind of gets pushed earlier because we like to shoot ducks earlier. And, you know, I have duck season earlier.

And people noticed that there were issues. There were some early studies that suggested a boom in acorn production and tree vigor when GTRs were implemented, like the first few years, which could make some sense. you're all of a sudden irrigating this tree. Just like a high water year. Yeah. If that happens for a couple years, maybe it would spike reduction. Exactly. So it spikes, but then it's kind of a short-lived benefit.

It's just a really slow burn. And as hunters, as we go out there in the winter, no leaves on the trees, except those early, you know, during November when there'd be water on it. But in December and January, you go out and look at these places, and it's kind of like, well, I mean, there's oaks here. There's trees. I got a tree to land against to hunt. So what's the problem? Yeah. And we've just done a better job here recently to actually scientifically document these changes and the decline in Forest Health.

Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get this. the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt

with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Phelps game calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Here's Austin, and he's going to tell us what the plan is.

So Austin, it's clear that there's a big problem that's going to affect the flyway in a significant way and really has a potential to change duck hunting here in a significant way. So it's like real, the problem is very clear. Talk to me about what you guys are doing. We are temporarily managing water levels to a lower level to let two things happen. First, for us to get the infrastructure in place that we need to manage this water consistent with the level of rainfall that we're getting.

And two, to undertake some aggressive forest management on the wildlife management areas. At Biomita, we normally manage that water to 180 feet mean sea level on average. But we're going to lower that to 179 feet this year. And then next year, after we make some improvements to some of the boat launches, we're going to manage that down to 178.5 in the 2223 season. And that's a big deal. Like one foot of water. That doesn't sound significant to me necessarily.

So tell me how significant that is. Yeah. And there's a key caveat here. All right. If we lower the water level to 179 down from 180, that's a 25% reduction in public access. In the amount of water covering the ground that is duck-huntable ground. Yes.

So by lowering the water, one foot, you're reducing the amount of flooded timber by 25% as a baseline. And that's the caveat. In the 22-23 season, if we lower it another six inches like we plan to down to 178.5, that's another 25%. From 180 down to 178.5, a total of 50% reduction. However, that's a 50% reduction as a baseline. Austin, what do you mean by that? It means that we are not saying, you know, we're going to drain these suckers dry and we're going to leave them dry. Our goal on this is to replicate a more natural flooding model.

So Biomeda is a 33,000-acre wildlife management area, 17,000 acre GTR, but its watershed clays 750,000 acres. As that watershed naturally fills up with rain events, it's all going to drain down to Biometa. this happens every single year. And if we're flung to 179 and we get a big rain event, it'll pulse up over 179. As it drains out, it'll come back down to 179. I see.

So we're not saying we are reducing the public opportunity by 50%. Well, that's not true because that's only true if we get zero inches of rain add by a medium. How certain are we that this is going to save the timber that's still alive? We're very common. Really? Yeah. We've started our renovation at our. Hurricane Lake Wildlife Management Area in July.

But for that, we did a year's worth of forest health assessment, a year's worth of Loddard-driven hydrology studies, and a year's worth of design and engineering. We put a lot of work into ensuring that whatever solution we come up with is the right one. We're not interested in rushing to failure here. We're not interested in a Band-Aid because, to be honestly, the claim, the timber health at some of these places, it's so bad that we're not going to get a shot. That's wild. Yeah.

When you look at wildlife management areas like this that hold so much caloric benefit and provide so many duck energy days to the duck resource, if we lose Hurricane and we lose Biomeda and we lose Black River, that will 100% change the flyway. Those are stark and serious words, especially when you consider the ancientness of this flyway. In summary, the plan is simply to replicate a more natural flooding model. That's the answer. Here's Austin addressing some of the bigger social implications, because as straightforward of a solution as this is, there are still naysayers.

It's more than about a few seasons. We believe the average age of our public land duck hunter is about 23 to 25. I've told people that it's an opportunity for us as a generation of waterfowl hunters to ask ourselves the hard question of what we want our legacy to be. Do we want to be known as the consumers or do we want to be known as a sportsman that made the difficult choice for the resource? Do we want to tell our grandkids what it was like to hunt by mehta or do we want to listen to them tell us what it's like? I hunted this publicly and growing up. there's a lot at stake to a whole lot of people in the state, but really to the future waterfowler here. Why aren't people just like, yeah, of course, let's do this?

I think there's a few reasons for that. I think the first reason is that they want to keep enjoying the resource, and they're uncertain of what the future looks like. So, I mean, this could be milked along for some period of time before we saw, like, catastrophic change. Yes. We could probably hunt another five to ten years, depending on. on the location and still see lots of acres on the ground. The problem is we've been on the downward trend for the habitat values of these GTRs for a long time. So do we want to ride it all the way down or do we want to try to arrest this decline?

And you can't get back a 80-year-old red oak stand in any less than another 80 years. Yeah. Another reason why people are skeptical is they say, Mother Nature has always flooded this stuff. These trees are meant to survive in water. That's the way the good Lord made them. And it's just not true because we interfered with it. I think the last reason is there's a lot of variables at play here. It's easy for folks, and I sympathize with a lot of it.

It says, a real problem is this. We can fill in the blanks. One of those is fluctuating river. levels with the Army Corps of Engineers or the fact that we stopped we stopped dredging some of the rivers some people have declared war on the beavers I certainly don't like beavers and we spend a lot of dollars and manpower trying to eradicate beavers I could go on and on but a lot of you want to point to these other problems one of the the challenging aspects that we've had with this

message is that we're not saying those things aren't problems right what we're saying is that this is about accountability At the end of the day, Arkansases expect us to control the things that we can control. And that's what we're trying to do here. That means managing it at a lower level. So we have something that's still around on the other side of all those other longer-term challenges. Right. So we can work better with the core?

Yes. We can do more with river discharges. Sure. And we can keep fighting those hard, long-term fights. But if we don't do something now, we're not going to have a resource left to save on the other side. Yeah. It just, it seems to me like that this is a no-brainer decision, but, and if you're not comfortable talking about this, we don't have to. People are in general, I mean, this is a people issue really, why we can't just 100% enforce this without any conflict with, because there are people

that are upset. Am I right? And saying that, yes. There are people that are upset. There are people that are saying the government is coming in and trying to shut down our public land and all the guys on private get to keep all their ducks and have all there's a lot of pieces to this puzzle that could make people say that yeah i mean what do you what do you say to that so let me say two things so first is that we are not taking away anything it's if we do nothing that's what's going to take taking away everything from everybody that's right most people 90% of people really truly get that as so you think you've got 90% support for this yeah okay that's good to hear no Now, a different question is, do 90% of Arkansases like it?

The answer is no. I don't like this. Our agency's staff don't like this. We're not asking folks to like this. We're asking folks to understand this is the right thing to do for the resource. Sean Weaver isn't from here, and he ain't got a dog in this fight. So I wanted to hear his thoughts on the implications of this decision. I'm trying to get a bead on how big of a deal this is.

I don't even know how Sean pronounces Acorns. I don't really want to know. Here's Sean. I think it's hard to ignore that it was an unpopular decision that they had to make. Of course, people are going to be frustrated when they lose a little bit of hunting access and lose some hunting opportunity, especially for the guys that have spent their whole lives running an outboard in these flooded timber, green timber reservoirs, that now all of a sudden the thing they've done their whole lives,

is changing. Sometimes unpopular decisions have to be made. And this is a dilemma we deal with in politics and national issues anyway is do you make the unpopular decision now or do you make someone suffer down the line? You can't deny that down the line someone's going to suffer from these green timber reservoirs being held at too high a pool. You have to do something. It's just how long will you wait to do that? Will you wait till it's to late. A lot of the timber tracks were lost a long time ago. And you'd hate to see us lose more of it in the long run, knowing what we know and knowing that we could have made a decision to stop it, but we didn't. It's not fun for anybody to have to have to make a decision between Hunter

Opportunity and Hunter Access versus Hunter Opportunity and Hunter Access 50 years from now. There's always this, there's always a group of people. And sometimes, I might be in that group that would look at decisions that the government makes and assume that that decision is designed to help some other group of people aside from the ones that it's affecting. Do you think that is something that people could say? Yeah. Because it's public land. I mean, that's what's interesting. Do you think people think that? I'm sure some do. Yeah. There's always going to be the detractors, right? But I guess a counter argument, counterpoint to that is quite a few of the private land duck clubs with green timber started making their unpopular decision and doing what they

could to save their timber and manage their timber 20 years ago. I don't think people create ideas of malintent when times are good necessarily. When the hunting's real good and the mallards are thick and everyone's having a ball of a time, no one's pointing fingers. Everyone's just enjoying it. There's no doubt that there's a lot of duck hunters in the south that are just frustrated with shifting weather patterns and ducks not coming so far south and a long-term slide in hunter success in the deep south. I think whenever you have people kind of pointing fingers that this is a way to help the few at the expense of the many, it would be because they're just frustrated. but ultimately to get rid of that frustration and to bring back this legacy that is the Arkansas green timber,

you have to save the green timber. You know, it's just like everything, when the system is stressed, it brings out the worst in people. I mean, you go on a vacation with your kids and get them all in the car and about that 10th hour of that road trip, man, the system is stressed. And you see the worst in everyone? That can't happen. But the good news is what I see is that there's so many people, the vast majority of people are in support of this. Even the people that it's affecting. Of course.

And even public land hunters that are losing some opportunity are saying, heck yeah, this is what we got to do. You know, 100 years ago, people had to make, outdoorsmen had to make a hard decision then with the migratory bird treaty. and all the new rules and regulations that surrounded waterfowl that really are the epicenter of the North American wildlife model. To save the canvas back, to save the wood duck, to save the can of the goose, all of it, there was tough decisions that had to be made. But they made those decisions to stop things like market hunting and punt guns and baiting, all those things. They stopped them so that their grandkids would someday be able to shoot. mallard duck in the Arkansas timber.

Yeah, so it's sitting the first time that we've had to make tough decisions. No. Can you imagine those guys back in those days going, bring back the market hunting? Oh, man, I love hunting mallards over bait. What echoes throughout all wildlife management is that it has to be managed by humans. The competing interests that impact decisions made about wildlife and habitat are vast. and I'm always interested in the human element. You just can't get away from the necessity for anything to move on planet Earth without human cooperation.

The question I really wanted to ask you was, should wildlife management be that human-focused? I mean, couldn't we just be like, hey, we all want more ducks, we all want more habitat for ducks, here's a billion dollars, don't talk to us for the next 10 years. Just print the regulations. I mean, but it's not that clear-cut, is it? Modern wildlife science was driven by people, by hunters and other early conservationists. So it's always been driven by people. And we've learned more and more and more about the science of wildlife management.

But again, I was taught early on. Wildlife management is both science and art. And the art part, I think, is where a ton of the human element comes in. And we're getting better. these days with bringing the science side of it in to the human element, with social science research and the whole scientific field of social science. Some people talk about human dimensions research, that kind of stuff. Human dimensions research studies how and why humans value natural resources. I had no idea this even existed. It covers a wide range of stuff from cultural, social, and

economic values to individual and social behavior. Basically, there's research dedicated to understanding how people might respond to something like the GTR issue. And to go back to my hypothetical question to Luke, it's a good thing that human values play into wildlife management. Because it's possible that the powers that be might place no value on wild places, nor value on giving people access to hunt, like most of the world. man, sometimes I think we don't realize what an incredible place we live. While we're talking about humans, we can't have this discussion about public land duck hunting without mentioning something vitally and literally connected to it, private land. We're talking about public because it's the only place most of us have any right to give input.

And you guys know that there are those who dog on those who have access to private land. We've all done it. However, in my experience, a lot of people that have access to private land, they have it because they've sacrificed big parts of their life to get it. And I have the right to say that because I hunt a lot of public land, but also a lot of private. And I love them both for different reasons. We're all on the same team. Here's Luke on the importance of private land. We can never underrate the contribution of private landowners who will always.

also have these similar habitat types and have preserved those habitat types for the same amount of time that we as agencies have. Yeah. You can't undersell that at all. This flyaway is a lot more in private land ownership than a public ownership. Way more. The public lands generally, we like to think of them, not in an arrogant sense, but just because, like we talked about, the way they're, where they are located, They really do provide the overall anchors of these bigger habitat complexes for waterfowl. I see.

But private lands play a huge role in this. At the beginning of this episode, Mr. Bobby Martin told us that he grew up hunting public land in Arkansas. What he didn't mention is that most of his life, he's exclusively hunted public land. He wasn't a member of a private duck club until he was in his mid-50s. Point being, he's a duck hunter. I've heard about a man by the name of Rex Hancock, and I wanted Mr. Bobby to tell me his story and how it relates to us today. You know, when the name Rex Hancock comes up, you know, particularly for somebody of my age, it's a reminder how people come along that are so critical to conservation and really have ensured that we're able to see and enjoy what we have today. So Rex Hancock, you know, these goes back into the 1970s, early 70s.

and he's well known as probably one of the strongest fighters, if you will, for conservation, and particularly here in Arkansas. He was a dentist out of Stuttgart, Arkansas, during a time when the Corps of Engineers embarked on channelizing the Cache River. And the Cache River and the Cache River Basin is really the second largest kind of, you know, sector, if you will, of bottomland hardwood resource and particularly how critical that's been to waterfowl in all of the Mississippi Flyway all the Mississippi Flyway in fact the Cache River has always been viewed to be about as critical as the Everglades is or

Chesapeake Bay or Okeechobee swamp to from the environmental side you know what it did and what it adds to the critical ecology and everything of this part of the country and particularly the Mississippi Flyway so when that channelization began obviously it began to destroy then the bottomland hard ways tell me describe that for me what that means channelization why it was negative yeah they literally and of course it was motivated by trying to improve agricultural drainage and and so forth and this was during a time when you know again as we talk about our hardwoods in particular now today what we have that's left was really spared the saw and the plow channelizing the cash river meant literally just turning it into a ditch

and in fact during all that era of time the core went about a four and a half mile stretch before they were finally stopped. But that part of the Cache River was just literally a ditch. Yeah. As a young guy, I remember. So evened out the bottom so that barges and stuff could go down it? Exactly. And so it's just a straight line ditch.

And so, again, obviously very disruptive to bottomland hardwoods and all that that meant, not just for... Because it didn't flood. Wooden flood. And of course, it destroyed a lot of that habitat. And Rex Hancock was an avid waterfowler, but it was a lot of, broader than just waterfowl, but definitely critical to duck hunting in Arkansas. In fact, it's hard to imagine today where we would be if, in fact, he had not fought that hard and was

successful because he fought it for a number of years. And I mean, it became his full life mission. And so he was, you know, going to Washington, D.C. He was fighting every angle. And he was almost a one-man war against the Corps of Engineers during that time to try and get that stop. And, you know, he's a very stubborn, obviously, as a guy that would never give up. But, you know, he won the fight. When you look at it back now, that victory was really all of ours. It's this generation and the generations yet unborn that now are able to still, you know, have this, you know, natural resource that is so critical and remains critical to us today. So, you know, he was facing a man-made challenge. And I find today when, you know, all that we're hearing and we're talking about here now that we know, we've

lost so much of our forest where we've been flooding at our own discretion to, you know, enjoy water fowling and so forth in our green tree reservoirs and so forth. And of course, now we've learned that doing that over an extended period of time, doing it wrong, we've now have, you know, lost a lot of timber. And now we're in a fight. I find it hard to not not visualizing ourselves a little bit as 21st century Rex Hancock's. And, you know, for me, I'm real, I'm really excited and motivated as I see the reaction and the response, particularly from young people in their 20s and 30s, because what we're having to undertake here means that we're going to have to give up something for a while in order to have it for the future for the long haul.

If we continue to do what we're doing and just kick the can down the road, there won't be anything to recover. So as I watch as we've gone around and see people, young people, particularly engage and understand what has to be given up. The willingness and the approach and the attitude is inspiring to me. Yeah. Because they know, and you can see it, that it's a 30-year kind of challenge or even a 40-year challenge to see, you know, a new forest generation or see a 40-year-old tree now that, you know, produces the kind of acorns that ducks like to get in there and enjoy in our bottomland hardwoods. And it ties me back to three things that Rick, Rex Hancock was

also known for saying during that period of time. And his His approach was that he said good conservation requires ordinary people with an extraordinary desire. Just hang on to that for a minute, an extraordinary desire, because it will take and is taking an extraordinary desire for people today to be willing to give up. Some of what we have today to not just hunt next year, but to know that we'll pause, we'll sacrifice for a while because we want it in 20 years, or we want our children, our children's children, to have it 50 years from now, 60 years from now. I want to conclude by exploring my original question of why guys are so wound up about duck hunting. I think it has to do with more than ducks.

Here's Luke and I. I have never been to a hunting camp like the one that we're at right now where there has been this much energy, finances, life, decades and decades of history. stacked into basically being able to hunt a 60-day period, hunting mallard ducks. Where did that come from?

I think duck hunting is unique, and it's a much more social activity than some of those other hunting pastimes. You think about Western big game hunters. You know, what, you're going to go in and maybe you're maybe going to have a camp with a couple people. Right. If you're backpacking in, you're going to...

You couldn't have 14 people in your elk camp. You don't. And you don't have a... There's time for conversation. and a lot of just camaraderie there, but it's much different in a smaller scale. When you get with duck hunting, you don't have to be stone still and dead quiet the entire time.

So I think it's perpetuated this opportunity for folks to have clubs like this or folks to experience public land hunting and build a cultural around it and kind of build a social network around it because there's a lot of just, you're riding a boat together, or you're walking out to a place together, you're sitting in a blind together. And the conversations can just,

continue while you're duck hunting and yeah you know you're sneaking through the woods trying to squirrel hunt you're trying to be quiet right you just solved you just told me what i've been trying to get somebody to tell me for forever and it's not rocket science at all it's just social it's social and it's and i have not duck hunted a lot in my life but this morning we're out there were five of us that were together in this one hole and we were talking in normal voices right yep 20 you know 15 yards apart probably from trees at different times the guy would come over to me and just talk with me by my tree and then we'd call ducks and we'd see one we'd all kind of hunker down and I'd walk over to them and it was any other style of hunting that would

have not happened it doesn't work and then the other thing that makes duck hunting different is that you don't do it all day long like we went out this morning and we only hunted until about 10 o'clock and then if this were a three-day hunt what are we going to do the rest of the day we're going to be together we're going to be talking we're going to be cooking we're going to be be doing whatever. And then you repeat the cycle the next day and it fosters an environment for relationship between people. It sure does. And I think you've got ideally most of the time, right, that you're going to have multiple, you know, attempts at harvesting game, for example. You think a big game hunt. You're there for one shot. Most big game hunts, you're there for one shot.

But duck hunting is kind of, well, if you don't get them on this group, all right, we'll get them next time. And that next time may be just a couple minutes away. Of all my experience, in the hunting world. There's not a ton of things that I'm envious of when it comes to looking into other groups of hunters. I am envious of waterfowl hunters, their camps, their camaraderie. You know, these guys come down here and hunt 40 days a year. And by that, they're not hunting all day. They're hunting the mornings and then going to work or doing whatever they need to do. Coming back here at night with their buddies, hunting again in the morning. I mean, everybody has a different pattern. But just that predictable camaraderie.

And here I'm seeing these guys that for decades have been coming to this camp. And they just know, well, it's duck season. I'm going to go see Bill and Jim. And we're going to meet up and do that. Man, big game hunting pretty much just doesn't have that big of a scale. Now, sure, we have deer camps and we have different kind of camps. But it doesn't really rival duck hunting. It doesn't match what you get with duck hunting.

And I think it's, yeah, those connections just go way, back and just are deep in a lot of cases. It's just a fascinating cultural experience. I've been inspired by peering into the duck hunting world. I've seen a level of singular focus that challenges me. I love the traditions of waterfowl hunting and that it lends itself to building human relationships so naturally. It's these things that have made it strong and enabled the waterfowl community to be such powerful players in habitat conservation. And in a world of increasing urbanization, in every possible scenario for habitat to be fragmented and lost, protecting wild places is the heartbeat of the modern hunting community and our pathway to a relevant future.

Broad-scale habitat protection for the wild places that remain is the thing that we offer society that no one else can. We have this power, because our model gives incentive for people to protect wild places by offering hunting privileges. We've got to make sure this doesn't change. It's a beautiful system. It's brilliant. It's working. And it has worked.

I want to continue our conscious scripting of the conservation narrative we're leaving as North American hunters. We're going to have to walk and talk big to make this work. And I'm not just talking about duck hunting. The way that will survive the test of time is by intentional unification. And as Rex Hancock said, by not just giving lip service to conservation. In some ways, the American hunting lifestyle is a cultural artifact of times past. And often artifacts are considered irrelevant unless they're interpreted by and their relevance is proven by those who know their value. In conclusion, I believe that most of our state wildlife,

agencies are doing the best they can with the resources they have to preserve wild places in hunting access and our hunting culture, there will always be disagreements in ways that things can be done better. So we'll keep using the appropriate channels to communicate our values to those in leadership. That's fantastic. In a future that is uncertain for wildlife, we're all going to have to make hard decisions that mean will sacrifice in the show. short term for long-term benefit. And that will be our legacy. Thanks for listening to Bear Grease.

I hope you've enjoyed this series on duck hunting. And hey, check out the new Bear Grease merchandise on the meat eater.com. We got some cool shirts. We're going to have some hats in soon. But before we go, I wanted to include this section. Here's Luke Nailer telling us that duck hunting isn't as hard to get into as you might think. it actually doesn't take all the gear that you think it might.

You know, you can go buy some really cheap decoys and a cheap duck call and a cheap pair of waiters. And you can, it's a little bit more gear than squirrel honey. But it's really not as prohibitive as what it's kind of portrayed sometimes. Yeah. And there's always, almost always, somebody willing to help you out with part of it, like what would happen to you to do. It would be a good experience.

to see how long you could go in your life without actually buying duck hunting gear, just borrowing it. There's so many people out there that have it. You could go a long time. I've yet to meet a duck hunter that doesn't have a spare set of waiters. He'll spare everything. He'll lend you. Yeah, you have to.

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