LITTLE ROCK — In 1997, citing declining numbers of lesser prairie chickens, the Oklahoma Conservation Commission voted to close the hunting season for prairie chickens.
Lesser prairie chicken numbers were not perilously low, and greater prairie chickens were still relatively abundant. However, closing the season was an attempt to demonstrate that the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation was responsive to a deteriorating situation.
Unfortunately, it also sent the message that hunters and hunting caused the decline, and on that basis, anti-hunting groups would make it virtually impossible to ever restore the season. Twelve years later, prairie chicken hunting in Oklahoma is afading memory, and it's not coming back.
On Thursday, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission fell into the same trap by closing the 2009 fall turkey hunting seasons. Next year, we could enter a five- to 10-year boom cycle that boosts our turkey populations to record levels, but I doubt we'll ever see another fall turkey season in this state, even though every state around us except Louisiana still offers that opportunity for its hunters. For us, that's one less reason to enjoy the outdoors in fall, one less chance to enjoy our creator's bounty on the table, and one less reason to take a youngster afield.
Get used to it. The AGFC's decision had nothing to do with science. Proposing in August to close a season theweek before it was to begin was a shock-and-awe gambit by the AGFC's freshman commissioner, Emon Mahony, to establish his influence and intimidate the other commissioners into submission. He succeeded, and in doing so, set a precedent that will allow him to consolidate his power for the next seven years. Depending on whom Gov. Mike Beebe appoints to the commission during the rest of his tenure, Mahony might be invincible.
Right now, the commission is divided into two camps. In one camp you have two strong-willed men who share similar backgrounds and philosophies, Mahony and Craig Campbell. In the other camp are two strong-willed men of diametrically opposite backgrounds and philosophies, Brett Morgan and George Dunklin. In the middle are Rick Watkins, Ron Pierce and Ron Duncan. Watkins and Pierce are as malleable asputty, and they conform to the mold of whoever pressures them hardest. That's usually Campbell and Mahony, so Watkins and Pierce follow their lead. Duncan's problem is a serious lack of confidence. My impression of him so far is a sheet on a clothesline fluttering in the breeze.
Pierce is the biggest disappointment. On two different occasions since late August, he told me he would not vote to close the 2009 fall season. One of those times was in Morgan's presence. At Wednesday's briefing, he gave a speech so impassioned against closing the season that I was convinced he swayed the fence sitters. Danged if he wasn't the swing vote to close the season.
I have enjoyed a closer rapport with Pierce than any other sitting commissioner, so his reversal came as a severe shock.
Amid the discord of the votes for fall turkey huntingand the catch-and-release area on the Norfork tailwater, Mahony rolled another grenade into the tent at Thursday's meeting that almost went unnoticed. From now on, he wants the commission's various committees to craft wildlife and fisheries regulations, independent of staff input. Under his plan, committee recommendations will go out to the public for comment, and then the committees will submit them to the AGFC's staff for endorsement, which will, of course, be mandatory.
That's 180 degrees opposite of how the AGFC has worked since the passage of Amendment 35 in 1944. It effectively removes the AGFC's biologists and the public from crafting regulations and givessole power to the commission chairman, who appoints committee members. In this way, the commission can also squelch public dissent and avert the kind of oppositionit got in response to the lastminute gambit to close the fall turkey seasons.
It's a naked power play, and it violates the intent of Amendment 35, which mandated science-based game and fish management and rescued it from the morass of political whims and cronyism. Mahony's demand essentially returns it to the political realm and reduces the AGFC's biologists and division chiefs into patsies and yes men. The fall turkey fiasco is just a snapshot of what's to come.
That will prove disastrous for our state's game and fish, and demoralizing for our state's hunters and fishermen.
By the way, the public is hammering the AGFC over closing fall turkey season on its Facebook page. To the AGFC's credit, the agency is not censoring comments. Visit online at www.facebook.com/ARGameandFish.
Sports, Pages 38 on 09/27/2009