Bird oasis
Arkansas County family making big effort for bobwhites
In the winter, Hampton’s Reservoir is packed with ducks, but in the summer it’s packed with thousands of other aquatic birds.
Rick Hampton, a former member of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, farms about 4,500 acres in Arkansas County between Stuttgart and DeWitt. His reservoirs are centerpiece, and they are internationally famous for the vast flocks of waterfowl that spend the winter there.
Sloan Hampton, Rick’s son, said that when his grandfather first built the reservoir many decades ago, neighbors scorned the folly of inundating so many acres of productive cropland.
“There wasn’t enough water on the prairie for him to farm the way he wanted to farm,” Hampton said, “and it didn’t take long to prove how wise he was.”
The reservoir is home to a good number of alligators, but it is also a giant rookery for a wide range of wading birds, including multiple species of egrets and herons that nest in the buckbrush thickets that dot the lake. Bald eagles are also plentiful.
Rick Hampton invited me to view this avian wonderland by airboat, which glides over vast mats of water hyacinth. In the winter, when the hyacinth goes dormant, you can navigate with a surface drive motor, but doing so in warm weather would be very difficult.
As we walked to the airboat, I asked, “Do I need earmuffs?”
“What, you don’t want to be like every other Arkansas County farmer that can’t hear?” Sloan quipped.
Fortunately I brought a pair.
Upon boarding, Rick Hampton used a thick bamboo cane to turn the boat seaward.
“It doesn’t have a reverse,” Hampton said. “It goes wherever you point it.”
With a push of a button, the motor sputtered and then roared to life as the big propeller hummed.
“Keep your eyes open for alligators,” Rick shouted over the din. “We’ll probably see several. Just follow the bubbles.”
We were upon a gator in seconds. It was surprisingly fast, and it left a trail of bubbles as it parted the hyacinth.
“That’s a big one!” Hampton shouted. “About 12 feet long!”
Eventually that gator went to the bottom, but we ran past several smaller ones before we reached open water.
Within minutes we were in the heart of the rookery. Thousands of birds, including many species of egrets, herons and anhingas sprang from their nests and perches. The nests were full of downy chicks, but none of the watchful parents went far. They flew a lazy circle to give us time to pass, and they settled right back down.
The highlight was a pair of roseate spoonbills, a South American wading bird that typically nests in Central and South America, and the United States Gulf Coast. William Johnston of Hamburg said they are plentiful on the Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge in south Arkansas. These were the first I’ve seen in the wild.
“We’ve had as many as five, but so far we only have these two this year,” Hampton said.
After the airboat tour, Sloan Hampton showed me the upland habitat restoration work they’ve done on the farm. This project is intended to benefit bobwhite quail, and it totals about 450 acres of interlocking parcels that recreate some of the the Grand Prairie’s original biota.
The project started more or less by trial and error, Sloan said. They planted a type of grass called Pensacola bahia. It is an effective ground cover, but he said it forms such a thick thatch that young quail cannot move through it.
With the assistance of Ryan Diener, a Quail Forever biologist working in partnership with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, they started from scratch by discing and applying a herbicide called Arsenal. Then they restored native grasses like bluestem. It grows in clumps and forms a thick overstory, but there’s a lot of bare dirt between the clumps. This is crucial for nesting and brood rearing habitat because young quail can run on the bare ground while the thick overhead blades shield them from the eyes of predators.
Even that was trial and error because Hampton said he planted the bluestem too dense.
“We’re farmers,” Sloan said. “We grow things. We like them to be dense and orderly. Ryan Diener told us we were doing too good a job growing grass and that we needed to back off and let nature take its course.”
Hampton palmed several bluestem heads and said, “This little bit here can produce a lot of grass in the concentration that works best. It’s hard for us to accept that sometimes because that’s inefficient from a farming standpoint, but eventually you see it take shape the way it should.”
There are also a great many quail-friendly forbs and legumes, as well as ragweed and other seed-bearing weeds.
Also, many of these fields had been graded and leveled to facilitate growing row crops. The Hamptons restored texture to the landscape by moving a lot of earth.
It involves a lot of work, time and expense, but mostly it involves commitment and desire. Sloan Hampton said he was skeptical when the Game and Fish Commission made its push to restore upland habitat, but when he saw the effort gain momentum, his family bought into it.
“How many times over the years have you heard them (the Game and Fish Commission) say that, but it never amounted to anything?” Hampton said. “But when (former commissioner) Fred Brown spoke up and said it was his priority, he sounded like he meant it, and the commission got behind him.
“If they are committed to see it through, then so are we.”
Landowners don’t bear the entire responsibility, Hampton said. There are a lot of programs that provide cost-share and technical assistance, but Sloan Hampton said restoring upland habitat is a way of giving back to the land that has given his family so much.
Just as building Hampton’s Reservoir proved visionary all those years ago, the Hampton’s are betting long term in restoring a bit of the Grand Prairie’s former splendor.