ARKANSAS SPORTSMAN

Event’s aim: Clean up dirty habit

— For a second consecutive year, George Cochran and Roger Milligan will host a Bayou Meto WMA cleanup Aug. 25 at the Mulberry Access.

The cleanup will take place from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., followed by a fish fry.

Cochran, a three-time world champion professional bass fisherman, is an ardent hunter who spends most of his free time at Bayou Meto Wildlife Management Area. Milligan, who retired from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, was the wildlife management supervisor over the area for many years.

They organized the first event, held Aug. 29, 2011, and it was very successful despite the heat. Cochran said he hoped for 100 volunteers for the first event, but only 50 showed up. Still, they collected enough trash to fill one dump truck, one 16-foot trailer and a pickup truck bed. You can tell they made a difference, too. Last year, the ditches and roadsides were filthy with beer cans and food containers, but the WMA also had repositories of large items like rusted out washing machines, dryers and refrigerators.

The volunteers removed the big stuff, but one year later the roadsides and bar ditches are a lot cleaner, too. Cochran said he believes people are less likely to litter on the WMA knowing that ordinary citizens are volunteering to donate their most precious asset — time — to maintaining an area that they all love.

“The important thing is to change that culture, a mindset that exists in which people think it’s acceptable to abuse a public resource,” Milligan said. “We want to change the culture to one where that’s not OK.”

It starts small and builds, Cochran said. One person dumps an appliance in a ditch or tosses a beer can out the window. Other people see that and dump something there, too. When people gather to remove trash, a certain amount of peer pressure builds against that behavior, as well.

A similar ethic has taken root in other public areas, Cochran said. As a touring bass fishing pro, he visits the most popular lakes and rivers in the nation. Places like Lake Lanier near Atlanta, the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., Lake Erie and all the big Tennessee Valley Authority lakes attract millions of visitors each year. They had litter problems in the past, but not anymore.

“People just got to where they didn’t want to put up with that anymore,” Cochran said. “Most of those places have organized cleanups now. That’s what we’re trying to do at Bayou Meto.”

When Cochran started hunting Bayou Meto as a child, he said the grounds were pristine. That all changed in the 1990s, when hunters started pouring in by the thousands from all over the country. The slide was gradual, so Cochran didn’t notice it until the day his son David asked, “Dad, was it always so dirty down here?”

“I kind of had to stop and think about that for a minute,” Cochran said. “I was like, ‘No, it wasn’t.’ And there’s no reason it should be, either.”

Cochran recalled a duck hunt in the rain when eerie tones pinged through the woods, like someone tapping the keys of a little Fisher-Price toy piano.

“It was raindrops hitting beer and soda cans,” Cochran said.

Granted, a lot of stuff washes into the area from private property upstream, but hunters leave their share, too.

“Hunters will go in the woods and spread out their lunch on the logs, and a lot of times they’ll just leave their stuff behind — paper plates, wrappers, cans, napkins, plastic utensils, everything,” Cochran said. “I’ve walked every inch of those woods. I find stuff like that all the time.”

Cochran and Milligan hold the event on the last Saturday in August because it’s the last free weekend most sportsmen will have until dove season, which opens the following weekend. People are thinking about hunting, and many are in the area sprucing up their duck camps and doing other chores. The downside is that it’s almost always hot in late August, which might discourage potential volunteers.

The fish fry is worth all the sweat. Milligan says he’s the best crappie fisherman in Arkansas. He’s also one of the best crappie fryers in Arkansas, and he makes the best french fries I’ve ever tasted.

More information on the cleanup is available by calling Milligan at (870) 377-2160 or David Cochran at (501) 844-7974.

Sports, Pages 20 on 08/09/2012

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