Jerry Butler’s excellent story in Monday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about birdwatching on the Vertac Superfund site in Jacksonville brought back some bad memories.
Butler and his friends recorded seeing 74 ducks during their visit to this blighted site, including mallards, northern shovelers, gadwalls and hooded mergansers. They did not report seeing wood ducks. That’s too bad, because wood ducks were central to the Vertac story nearly 30 years ago.
The Vertac plant was in the Bayou Meto watershed, which is the main waterway that flows through Bayou Meto Wildlife Management Area. The dioxin and other carcinogenic byproducts from the plant drained into Bayou Meto and permeated the soil in its floodplain, which included Bayou Meto WMA.
In 1986, a pilot study funded by the federal Environmental Protection Agency tested wood ducks from Bayou Meto. The ducks contained such high levels of dioxin that they were deemed unsafe for human consumption. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission was reluctant to release the information, but Bobbi Ridlehoover, a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat, forced the issue.
Jim Low of Jefferson City, Mo., was the news editor for the AGFC at that time. He is now the news services coordinator for the Missouri Department of Conservation, where we worked together for five years. He recalled the episode.
“Gregg Patterson [Low’s supervisor at the AGFC] had heard some hall talk at Game and Fish that we were testing wood ducks from Bayou Meto,” Low said. “Gregg came into my office and said we might ought to check on that. While I’m doing that, Bobbi called and asked, ‘What do you know about this?’ I told her I’d get back to her.”
That triggered a chain reaction that hit critical mass within hours. Low consulted Scott Yaich, the AGFC’s wetlands biologist at that time. Yaich now works for Ducks Unlimited.
“Scott’s a scientist,” Low said. “Scientists don’t like to make conclusions until all the tests are done and all the data is in. Well, that’s not how news happens. I tried to explain that to him, that Bobbi was working on this story, and we didn’t have a lot of time.”
Steve N. Wilson, the AGFC’s director, directed Low to put out a news release that afternoon. The date was Aug. 11, 1986.
Wood ducks in Bayou Meto continued to be toxic for human consumption well into the 1990s. Steve Bowman wrote about it for this space in 1992, when the issue resurfaced. I covered it for the Morning News in Springdale at the same time.
Most duck hunters who are now in their 20s weren’t born when this happened. Hunters in their 30s were children, and duck hunters in their 40s probably don’t remember.
We had mostly 40- and 30-day duck seasons in that era, and we were still on the point system until 1987. You could kill 100 points worth of ducks per day. Various species and sexes had point values, so you could kill between one and four ducks per day, depending on the species, sex and the order in which you killed them. Telling a mathematically incorrect sequence to a wildlife officer got you a ticket.
Those were dark days for ducks, and many of us wondered if duck hunting would survive.
It’s hard to believe it now. We’ve had 60-day duck seasons since 1997-98, and duck numbers are high. The Vertac plant is under a mountain of rocks, and it’s safe to eat wood ducks from Bayou Meto again.
We can’t afford to forget those days. More important, we can’t afford to repeat them.
TURKEYS AND FIRE
Turkey hunters complain that prescribed fires in early spring burn up turkey nesting habitat. The AGFC disputes this opinion, but the data is scant and inconclusive.
Tyler Pittman, a PhD candidate with the Arkansas Fish and Wildlife Cooperative Research Unit of the University of Arkansas biology department, is filling a little of that void with some research he is conducting in the Ozark National Forest.
In areas where fire is needed, turkey nesting habitat is usually poor. It also does not seem ideal in the time directly after a fire, but it improves as vegetation regenerates and provides the visual concealment that turkeys need.
Pittman said that prescribed burning is usually completed before the average turkey incubation dates, so fire generally isn’t a direct threat to turkey nests.
“We did not observe a clear relationship between prescribed fire and turkey nesting habitat,” Pittman said. “Of all the nests that we were aware of, none were destroyed by fire.”
Sports, Pages 33 on 03/23/2014