M you're riding a boat together, or you're 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 Beargrease 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 on Arkansas duck hunting. We've explored the ancient Mississippi Flyway and the unique culture of the water fowlers 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 biologists Luke Naylor. Will 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 bottom land hardwoods. I really doubt you're gonna want to miss this one. Do we want to to tell our green kids what it was like to hunt by me to or do we want to listen to them? Tell us what it's like. My name is Clay Nukelem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Presented by f HF 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 sixty four 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 he realized, sixty four 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 win Arkansas, and so all of my life I've hunted. Uh, well, if there was a puddle of water in Arkansas with a duck on it. I 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, uh, you know, by the time I was thirteen, myself in another hunting buddy, and you know, we were just really kind of eating up with it. After Christmas week, we're out of school. So my dad would take us down and we'd hunt on a Sunday morning and that he'd leave in the afternoon and leave us there. We camped in a pup tent and walked in hunting uh into an area that's called Government Cyprus. Principally anybody around Arkansas by media, 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 Wabasek, Arkansas to the laundromat so we could dry out whatever was wet, and there was always something wet. But literally, of course, that was the time when the things were a little bit different. But you know, my parents had a lot of trust and responsibility to have us out there with twelve gay shotguns and theres 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 and I'm thinking, wow, okay, but a lot of trust they were, but they loved me enough to know how good it was for me. And yeah, that's where it really got my love and my passion going. Mr Bobby is seventy three 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 travel 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 a hundred years of conservation replete with some failures but also massive victories. The score keeping isn't done by man end but by the ducks. We're peering into the world of water fowlers. By Man's calculation system, water fowlers have directly protected over fifteen 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 nineteen fifty five, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has kept track of duck numbers on the continent. In the nineteen seventies, waterfowl numbers were in decline, but today our numbers are trending towards fifty year highs. There is no doubt it's a hundred percent 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 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 river's mountains and hollis 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 frontiersman. 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 river bottoms, so used to buy me to basin, the Cash River, basin, the White River bation. And then when we had the advent of rice on the ground, which become a surrogate wetland. Once they started planting rice and there are the nineteen hundreds and ducks started finding it. This area started getting well known where farmers would say, come go shoot these ducks. I'll buy you shells. Just keep ducks out of my rice. You know that literally happened for some time. The combination of all the hardwood bottoms in h and all of our river systems is that all comes together and flows towards the Mississippi. It just kept tightening up, tightened 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 milow. Whatever people are playing on food plug. I love it when natural systems do what natural systems do. And just like this morning, you and me or 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. They're gonna 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 corn bread of duck hunting. But we need to establish why. Here's Sean Weaver, me eaters 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 and 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 wise, 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 your 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 thirty yards and give it a real good look, but not be back pedaling 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 and 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 gonna 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 just get a little tongue tied when they talk about it. And it's the it's how they really explain it. But it's the kind of a funky word to use for it. But it's the intimacy of it. It's it's it's your inclose. You're standing against a tree. But I've had it for ducks, like you can just almost grabble and you're calling and and there, you know, you know, today, lots of times I'm ducks, the ones that we've finished, they'd come right on top of that because looking for that call, you know, and then you have to get him 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 no than like it. There's absolutely nothing like it. I was raised in Lonoke County, went to college out of state, and basically left the state four or fifteen 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, and you're just supposed to know that that's really, really special. And no, they wouldn't believe me that I know. They don't. Yeah, they do. They say, you mean you're standing in the woods and 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. Watched timber hunting for the first time, and there's nothing else like it. When those ducks can see your decoys from eight hundred a thousand feet in the air and they come down at a sixties seventy eight degree angle, wings cup through the limbs, and when they're inside the canopy from you, you're you're just so close to him 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 where a cred are so hot up in the sky, there's just nothing like it. Inside. As hunters, we cherish the very fleeting moments before we take game. If you, 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 miniscule 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 as a predator, in all the work that's gone into that moment, being ready and knowing that the moment of truth is 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 what I wouldn't have known, is that these ducks actually coming through the limbs of these trees and the way that the aeronautics of what they do. That's what gets the 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 that you've established why it's called green tree because it's living trees, primarily oaks, is what we're interested if we're talking about ducks, but it's a res of ore. It's it's holding water at different times of the year naturally in the flood stages of these rivers. Correct green tree reservoirs GTRs or what makes this place special. It's important to understand that there are two reasons timbered areas would flood. The first would be an active nature or just natural flooding, the second being man induced flooding by the building of levies. So, after the turn of the twentieth century, rice production in the Arkansas Delta took off. Farmers cleared large amounts of bottom land timber and planet agg 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 Commissions lead waterfowl biologist. He's gonna tell us about the first intentional flooding of hardwood timber in Arkansas, which took place in nineteen They talked about the first one being a guy in the name of Tindal in Arkansas County, and he ring levied a bunch of trees to hold water to to irrigate rice. We know that irrigation reservoirs are critically important and being added to the landscape even today to to irrigate rice during the summer using surface water, and so these folks were experimenting with that way back ninety years ago. Let's just let's just levy 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 the period of time, a short period of time, maybe not every year, almost certainly not every year, depending on the elevation, And so then you get people early hunters and and see that Okay, wait a minute. With these woods flood, the ducks get in it, and that's really off them because we get to go we get to go hunt the ducks in the woods, and that's really cool. So then they start seeing, Okay, we're gonna build a reservoir here to flood our rise in the summer. And wow. Uh so we've kept this thing flooded for a couple of 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. Keep doing this. Yeah, let's keep doing this, Let's keep providing. 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 to where we are now with this whole notion of consistency in well and that and that. Over the course of decades and generations of people, it builds in a idea of what's normal it is in human nature, and 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 demand, people began to find ways to get around nature's inconsistency, and building water holding infrastructure that allows large tracts 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 fifty thousand acres of it on forty different GTRs. All this was great, but about twenty years ago we started to notice a problem. We wanted to hold water. We wanted to hold water to make the sixty days of duck season more predictable. We wanted to have water on the trees well enough before the duck season started, when 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 or stands on on trees, that's generally a bad thing. Now they can take it when the trees are dormant. I tell people treats don't have a calendar. They don't say, all right, it's November fifteenth, time for us to go dormant. It's based a lot of soil temperature, air temperature, individual climate of that 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 for years and years and years and years, and then about you know, ten twenty years ago, we started seeing some pretty troubling signs and it was declining timber el and it happened predominantly trees. Trees were dying, and it was predominantly for two reasons. One because we were we were putting water on them artificially too. It was because of increased rainfall. We had a rain event this year two one the first week of June and uh D Shay County in southeastern Arkansas got nineteen inches of rain in thirty six hours. That same rain event, when it hit by met a wildlife inchment 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 twenty five highest recorded crests, ten have happened in the last eleven 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 we've been managing these systems in a in an artificial way for about fifty years, let's say, on average. And what I mean by that is that these areas when we talked about, you know, a hundred fifty 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 different issues we have. These forests are made up of a bunch of different species, which is mainly talking about trees now, and different species of trees that have different water tolerances. Even in these swamps. Even in these swamps, trees have different 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 So they usually would have flooded in the wintertime and 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 a 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 in late February after spring migration to ducks, and then you're gonna get inevitable big spring thunderstorms right the broad water in the things that pulse up, but they'd fall out 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 long 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 while 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 are not gone dormant. They've still got green leaves down here exactly. Temperatures are warm, and we end up with stagnant water. So for fifty years we've added at least an extra month or month and a half about that of water on these trees. It's and it's killing them, and it really it just all boils down to variability and the lack of it. We we managed for a lack of hydrologic variability for a lot of years. So what what I heard to say earlier is that natural systems, they all seem to be very unpredictable, 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 trees be his need. 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 two thousand and fourteen, we did a forced health assessment at Hurricane Lake Wald Life Management Area, and forty two percent of our red oaks were either dead or irreversibly dying fort and then we had a precipitous die off in two thousand eighteen. So I think it's safe to say that our our red oak health at Hurricane Lake compared to what it was is well over half, well over half. And 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 flyway and they were making a living off off the acorns natural flooded timber and the acorns that were they on the ground. That's right. They can get calories from the acrons, they can get calories from the invertebrate that that live in the leaf litter, and they can get covered from the trees. Red oaks are are the best anchor for all of that kind of habitat in the g trs. So red oak timber is essential to green timber reservoirs and ducks. You know, during duck season, most of leaves are off the trees anyways. For folks to really understand what this mortality looks like, they really need to get that in the spring. And so yeah, duck hunters are seeing these trees when they're all dormants, so they all would appear dead. They wouldn't be coming back alarm in the bell and all the trees are dead. And I don't want you or any of your listeners to think that I'm a trained forest biologists, because I'm not. I'm a knuckle dragon marine. I've been learning this stuff too. And we went out there a Hurricane Lake Wildlife management area in the southern GTR where it is like ground zero of Denver mortality and it will make you six years stomach. The only thing that is taller than the buckbrush that ducks really don't care about from a food perspective are sofest trees and dead red oaks. Then we took what we learned at Hurricane and we started a forest health assessment at by Me to 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 forced health assessment, we think that some of the things we're seeing on the ground right now at buy Me to look a whole lot like what Hurricane would it looked like, you know, two thousand and eleven, two thousand twelve. So we made the difficult decision to implement changes for this water fall season on how we're managing our water levels at Hurricane and Buy Meat. Here 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 are in despite this erosion of trust. Here's Luke, So tell me what's happening, Like, what what are we now seeing. We're seeing these species that are less water tolerant. Most of them are red oaks, and most of the red oaks are produced acorns that are of the right size to be consumed by ducks. Were mainly talking about mallards. I guess it's unfortunate. It would have been nice if the water tolerant species produced small acorns that ducks like. But it's not that way. We've got willow oaks, which a lot of people around here called pin oak, but it's it's not a true pin oak, real slender leaf tree that's extremely common, which is produces a nice small acorn that mallards and wood duck just love. Uh. Not. 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're probably talking about. Cherry bark oak and water oak are kind of the higher species within these bottom and hardwood systems. Maybe a month of flooding is what they can tolerate, and you step down a little bit. We think willow oak can take maybe a month or two. We're talking thirty to sixty days of dormant season flooding. You go down the gradient a little bit more, you find not all oak that can tolerate maybe a couple of months of flooding, and then you move down to over cup oak, which is highly a water tolerant, and we can take about probably even we see it surviving with six months plus the flooding. Now, all those time periods all also assume variability, right, so even sixty days every year for forty years for not all oaks is not good, 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. Uh that have been fairly sudden, and we've had a bunch of other areas that have been just kind of a kind of a slow bleed, lots of just showing signs of stress, fallen 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 than 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 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 that 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 with these willow oaks and nuttle oaks are the two predominant species on w May, so that this is happening to the artificial flooding is selecting for water tolerant oaks species, and unfortunately those types of oaks produced acorns that are too big for ducks to utilize. Literally, they can't swallow them. Waterfowl needs small acorns produced by nuttall 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 a g f C has been tracking for over a decade. The answer is pretty simple, and it's both biological and social. Here's jimbo ron Quest given us a little history. Heck, even Tim fifteen years ago. You know, people like Looking Later and Buck Jackson, Mickey Hoytmeyer, different ones. We're talking about something's gonna have to be done. Are we gonna lose this whole ecosystem? Finally, here a few years ago, we had a big timberdal if at one of our w a mazed. Everybody talked about it, and we scratched at a little bit and try to educate folks, and there's folks still thinking, wow, you know, it's it's fine, it's good. We gotta keep flooding. Well, finally Game of 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. So now here's what we're gonna 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 of government agency goes, it's gonna take some criticism. Couple that with the passion around Arkansas waterfowl 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 their 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 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 so that there was some there was some noticing of this is maybe hurting the trees, right, people noticed it. Tendall's reservoir was quickly treeless. It was a dead stick reservoir. So folks notice pretty quickly that wow, okay, that's flooding year around. Is not good, and so check that off the list. But then it transition 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 notice that there were issues. There were some early studies that 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 if that happens just for a couple of years, maybe it would spike production exactly, So it spikes, but then it's kind of a short lived benefit. It's just a really slow burn. And 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 in 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 gotta treetle in against the hunt. So what's the problem. And we've just done a better job here recently to actually scientifically document these changes and the decline and for is held. Here's Austin, and he's gonna tell us what the plan is. So Austin, it's it's clear that there's a big problem that's gonna affect the flyway in a significant way and and really has the potential to change duck hunting here in a significant way. So it's it's like, really, 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 to to undertake some aggressive forest management on the wildlife management areas. At biometer, we normally manage that water to a hundred and eighty feet means sea level on average. Well, we're gonna lower that to a hundred and seventy nine 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 one seventy eight point five in the three season. And that's a big deal, Like one that doesn't sound significant to me necessarily, So tell tell me how significant that is. Yeah, And there's a key caveat here, all right. If we lower the water level to one seventy nine down from one eight, that's a reduction in public access in the in the amount of water covering the ground that is duck hountible ground. Yes, so by lowering the water one ft, you're reducing the amount of flooded timber by as a baseline, and that's the caveat. In the twenty three season, if we lower another six inches like we planted two down to one seventy eight point five, that's another from one eighty down to one seventy eight point five, a total fifty percent reduction. However, that's a fifty percent reduction as a baseline, Austin, what do mean by that? It means that we are not saying, you know, we're going to drain these suckers dry and we're gonna leave them draw. Our goal on this is to replicate a more natural flooding model. So byo MET is a thirty three thousand acre wildlife management area seventeen thousand acre GTR, but it's watershed clays seven hundred and fifty thousand acres. As that watershed naturally fills up with rain events, it's all going to drain down. To buy me that this happens every single year, and if we're flund to one seventy nine and we get a big rain event, it'll pulse up over one seventy nine. As it drains out, it will come back down to one seventy nine. So we're not saying we are reducing the public opportunity by well, that's not true, because that's only true if we get zero inches of That makes sense. Ad how certain are we that this is gonna save the timber that's still alive? Were very common? Really? Yeah, We've we started our renovation at Hurricane Lake Wildlife Management Area in July, but for that we did a year's worth of force health assessments, a year's worth of a lot are 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 honest with you, claim the timber health at some of these places it's so bad that we're not going to get in a shot. That's wild. Yeah, when you look at wildlife management areas like this that hold so much caloric benefit and provides so so many duck energy days to the duck resource. If we lose Hurricane and we lose bio meta and we lose Black River, that will 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 it's 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 twenty three. 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. You know, 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 to tell our grand kids what it was like to hunt by me to 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 water fowler here. Why are 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 acorns on the ground. The problem is we've been on the downward trend for the habitat values of of these GT yards 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. You can't get back. You can't get back eighty year old red oak stand in in any less than another eighty years. 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 be as we've 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 the 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 can go on and on, but a lot of people want to point to these other problems. One of the challenging aspects that we've had with this message is that we're not saying those things aren't problems. What we're saying is that this is about accountability. At the end of the day, our Kansans 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 you know, river discharges, 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 enforced us without any conflict with because there are people that are upset, am I right? And saying that 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 of this puzzle that could make people say that, 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 everybody. That's right, most people people really truly get that. As do you think you've got support for this? Yeah? Okay, that's good. Here. Now a different question is do of arkansans like it? The answers no, I don't like this. Our agency staff don't like this. We're not asking folks to like this. We're asking folks to understand that 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 beat 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 Act says, 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 uh, 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 pool. You have to do something. It's just how long will you wait to do that? Will you wait till it's too 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 for anybody to have to have to make a decision between hunter opportunity and hunter access versus hunter opportunity and hunter access fifty years from now. There's always this. There's always a group of people, and sometimes I might be in that group that 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 it's public land. I mean that 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 save their timber and manage their timber twenty years ago. I don't think people create ideas of like malintent when times are good. Necessarily, when when the hunting is 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 and ducks not coming so far south and a long term slide and hunter success in the Deep South. I think whenever you have people kind of pointing fingers that that this is a way to help the few 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 the car and about that tenth hour of that road trip in the system is stressed and you see the worst in everyone that that can happen. But the good news is 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, even public land hunters that are losing some opportunity, are saying, heck you out, that's what we gotta do. You know, a hundred 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 Canada 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 our grandkids would someday be able to shoot a mallard mount duck in the Arkansas Timber yes, and said in the first time that we've had to make tough decisions. Can you imagine those guys back in those days going bring back the market honey man, I love hunting mallards over bait. What echoes throughout all wildlife management is that it has to be managed by humans. The competing interest 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. I was just the question I really wanted to ask you, was should wildlife management be that with 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 ten years. Just print the regulations. I mean, but it's not that it's not that clear cut as a modern wildlife science was driven by people, by hunters and other early conservationists. So it's always been 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 it's wildlife management is both science and art, and the art part, I think is where a ton of the human elopment comes in. And we're getting better these days with bringing the science side of it in to the human element, with with social science research and the and the whole scientific field of 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 under rate the contribution of private landowners who also have these similar habitat types and have preserved those habitat types for the same amount of time, and that we as agencies have You can't under undersell that at all. Is a lot more in private landownership than public ownership, way more the the public lands generally we like to think of them, not enough, 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. But private lands play a huge rolling 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 fifties. 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 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 what we have today. So Rex Hancock, you know, these goes back into the nineteen seventies, early seventies, and he's well known as uh, probably one of the strongest fighters, if you will, for conservation, particularly here in Arkansas. He was a dentist out of stut Guard, Arkansas during a time when the core of engineers embarked on channelizing the Cache River. UH, 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 fly Away. In fact, the Cache River has always been viewed to be about as critical as the Everglades is or Chesapeake Bay or Okeechobee Swamp too. From the environmental side, you know what it did and what it adds to the critical college and everything of this part of the country and particularly the Mississippi fly Away. So when that channelization began, obviously it began to destroy then the bottom land heart. Tell me describe that for me what that means channelization, Why it was 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 talked about our hardwoods in particular. Uh now today what we have that's left was really spared the saw on the plow. Channelizing the Cache 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 of the Cache River was just literally a ditch. As a young guy remember at the bottom, so that sarges and exactly, and so it's just a straight line ditch. And so again obviously very disruptive to bottom land hardwoods and all that that meant, not just because it didn't flood wooden flood, and of course it destroyed a lot of that habitat. And Rex Hancock was an avid water fowler, but it was broader than just waterfowl, but definitely critical to a duck hunting in Arkansas. In fact, it's it's hard to imagine today where we would be if in fact, he had not fought that hard, and uh it was six essil 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 stopped. And uh, you know, he's very uh 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 olive 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 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 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 twenty one 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 twenties and thirties, because what we're having to undertake here means that we're gonna 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 and see people, young people in particularly engage and understand what has to be given up, the willingness and the approach and the attitude is inspiring to me because they know, and you can see it, that it's a thirty year kind of challenge or even a forty year challenge to see you know, a new four worst generation or see a forty year old tree now that you know produces a kind of acorns that ducks like to get in there and enjoy in our bottom land, 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 will paulse will sacrifice for a while because we wanted in twenty years or we want our children, our children's children to have it fifty years from now, sixty 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 sixty day period hunting Mallard ducks. Where that? Where did that come from? I think duck hunting is unique and it's a much more social activity some than some of those other hunting pastimes. You think about Western big game hunters. You know what, you're gonna go in and maybe maybe gonna have a camp with a couple of people I'm backpacking in. You're gonna couldn't have fourteen people in your elk camp. You don't and and and you don't have a There's time for conversation and a lot of just camaraderie there. But it's but it's much different in a smaller scale when you get with duck hunting. You don't have to be you know, 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 your ride in a boat together, or you're you're walking out to a place together, you're sitting in a blind together, and and the conversations can just continue while you're duck hunting and you know you're sneaking through the woods trying to squirrel hunt. You you know you're trying to be quiet, and 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 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 twenty, you know, fifteen yards apart, probably from trees. At different times, the guys would come over to me and just talk with me by my tree, and then we called ducks and we'd see one, we 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. 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 hunt until about ten o'clock. And then if this were a three day hunt, what are we gonna do the rest of the day. We're gonna be together, we're gonna be talking, we're gonna be cooking, we're gonna 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 gonna have multiple, you know, attempts at at Harvey seen game for example, you think a big game hunt you're there for one shot. Most big game hunts you're there for for one shot. But duck hunting is kind of well, if you don't get them on this group, all right, well we'll get him and that next time, maybe just a couple of minutes away. Of all my exposure 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 there come ottery. You know, these guys come down here and hunt forty days a year, and by that they're not hunting all day. They're 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 gonna go see Bill and Jim and we're gonna meet up. And man, big game hunting pretty much just doesn't have that at that big of a scalt. And I'm 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 those those connections just go way back and just are 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 and habitat conservation, and in the world of increasing urbanization and 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 gonna 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 and hunting access and our hunting culture. There will always be disagreements and 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 the future that is uncertain for wildlife, we're all going to have to make hard decisions that mean will sacrifice in the short term for long term benefit, and that will be our legacy. Thanks for listening to Bear Grease. I hope you've enjoyed the series on duck hunting, and hey, check out the new Bear Grease merchandise on the meat eator dot com. We got some cool shirts, gonna have some hats in soon. But before we go, I wanted to include this section. Here's Luke Naylor 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 you can go buy some really cheap decoys and a cheap duck call and a cheap pair of waiters, and and you can. It's a little bit more gear than than squirrel honey, but it's really not as as prohibitive as what it's kind of portrayed sometimes, and there's always almost always somebody willing to help you out with part of it, Like, what would happen to be a good experiment 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 have yet to me it meat a duck hunter that doesn't have a spare set of waiters, that everything you have to