LITTLE ROCK — For about 10 hours from late Thursday to early Friday, Marion “Mack” McCollum said he witnessed one of the greatest waterfowl migrations of his lifetime.
“It started about 6 p.m., solid ducks and geese from horizon to horizon,” McCollum said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many for that long.
“I don’t know where they’ll find water around here,” he added. “They haven’t got many places to stop. They were just headed south.”
Nasty weather in the Dakotas and Canada put the birds on the wing, but as McCollum said, a dry summer and autumn has left the Arkansas Grand Prairie parched. Without water, those ducks will continue southward, toward the Gulf of Mexico, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does not want them to go.
Since the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon explosion sent millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico last spring, the USFWS has worried that oil-tainted marshes could imperil ducks and geese migrating from the north this fall.
To prevent them from reaching the Gulf, the USFWS, in cooperation with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, enacted an emergency program June 28 to provide food and water for migratory birds on nearly 500,000 acres in eight states in the Mississippi Flyway.The initiative encouraged private landowners to create alternative or additional habitat for waterfowl and shorebirds headed toward the Gulf. The original goal was to create 150,000 acres of habitat, but with $40 million in funding, the USFWS tripled that goal.
Oddly, only two farms in Arkansas participated in the program, despite the fact that a large percentage of the ducks and geese migrating down the Mississippi Flyway spend their winters there. One of those farms is Mallard Pointe, a private duck hunting club encompassing 2,800 acres near Brinkley.
I talked to Butch Turner, the club manager, in late summer, shortly after he signed up for the program. He said the club enrolled 2,500 acres in the Wetland Reserve Program in 2005. As part of the program, Ducks Unlimitedplanted about 900 acres of trees, and 300-400 acres are devoted to grasslands to provide food for migratory birds. Turner said that land can’t be developed for any purpose, including farming.
“We can hunt it, but we can’t farm it,” Turner said.
Then came the oil spill, and the federal bird folks fingered Mallard Pointe as a critical waypoint.
“The NRCS came to me last spring,” Turner said. “They’re trying to hold as many ducks in Arkansas as they can to keep them from going to south Louisiana and the coast.”
Turner said the NRCS enrolled the club in a three-year program in which he could plant 541 acres of WRP land in Japanese millet for the ducks.
“That’s ground that hasn’t been touched since 2005. It’s grown up natural,” Turnersaid. “We go in and mow it, bush-hog it, disc it three times and plant it in millet. The grasses that were already there will come back up and produce seeds, too.”
Because of all the levees and ditches that were built to manage the WRP land, Turner said he ended up with only 300 acres of millet. Brinkley got just enough rain at the right time to sprout the seeds, and Turner said he had to pump water to fill his pools. Now the vegetation is in prime shape for the ducks that McCollum saw Thursday night and Friday morning. On Friday evening, the farm was covered with ducks.
McCollum said there’s hardly any water on the ground on the Grand Prairie because there hasn’t been enough rain to pool water. Pumping it from the ground is too expensive, he said. If we don’t get a lot of rain soon,the first part of duck season could be tough.
RELUCTANT HERO
I’ve interviewed a lot of hunters who have killed trophy bucks, but never one like this.
He killed a buck that green-scored about 157 Boone and Crockett. When I asked him if I could interview him for an article, he said, “Look, son, I killed that deer as it was coming to a corn feeder. That ain’t huntin’, and I ain’t proud of it. I’m going down to the White River Refuge with my bow this weekend to see if I can get one the right way, by finding a good trail, working the wind and trying to outwit a buck on his home turf. If I get one, it probably won’t be as big as that other one, but I’ll get him honest. I’ll be happy to talk to you then.”
All the best to you this weekend, sir.
Sports, Pages 40 on 10/31/2010