Showing decline of duck quality

Reading my duck hunting articles from 10 years ago and before are like reading old letters from a love gone sour.

Articles from 2012 pulsed with breathless anticipation during pre-hunt rituals. Ducks were plentiful and we often got limits.

Even then, though, there were troubling signs that we were hesitant to address. An article from December 2012 had this passage about hunting in Bayou Meto Wildlife Management Area:

“… (Hunters are) headed for a distant spot in the timber, a small hole in the hardwoods that serves as a natural landing beacon for the thousands of mallards that have descended on the Grand Prairie in the last two weeks.

“The news of their arrival spread across the Internet quickly, and Bayou Meto has suddenly become very popular, and very crowded. This group is walking farther back in the woods than many are willing to go. They must in order to a have productive, enjoyable hunt.”

That was before the arrival of prevalence of “mud” motors in Bayou Meto that could drive boats into places they couldn’t go before. When mud motors got popular, no longer could you walk farther back into the woods than others were willing to go. Boaters had beaten you there.

In 2012, however, surface drive motors weren’t an issue. Hunters were already noticing that fewer ducks were using the the green timber than in 2002. Ducks were arriving later in the year, and they were so widely dispersed that you seldom saw them in big concentrations except on private property whose owners didn’t allow hunting after about 8 a.m.

It is — ahem — still that way.

Hunters were voiced intense frustration and displeasure during the annual waterfowl meetings that the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission held. The commission responded by banning spinning wing decoys and then lifting the ban a few years later.

In 2007, the commission also toyed with an ill-fated proposal to split the state into two duck hunting zones. Hunters in the south zone were jealous that hunters in the north zone would get an earlier opening day, and hunters in the north zone were jealous of hunters in the south zone getting a later closing date. The commission compromised by making the season structures equal. People were still mad, so the commission tabled the proposal.

That was another early indicator that the quality of duck hunting was in steep decline. Luke Naylor had just been hired as the commission’s new waterfowl biologist. At the meeting where Naylor was introduced to the commission, a commissioner from Southeast Arkansas challenged Naylor on the spot to “do something.”

Naylor came back with the zone idea the next month. Duck hunters freaked!

Naylor survived that incident wiser and a lot more careful. He has advanced into a higher position, and now the agency gets to break in another waterfowl biologist.

We don’t envy that person coming into the job at a time when our most treasured resource is cratering. It’s also at a time when the commission, thank goodness, finally steeled itself to make the hard decisions necessary to rebuild the green tree reservoirs that were on the verge of becoming irrelevant for waterfowl.

That loops us back to what happened to duck hunting on our public green tree reservoirs. The commission kept the forests flooded for too long and at inappropriate times for so many years that the preferred habitat for ducks was dying. Instead of holding water in the woods as statically, the new method moves water through the reservoirs at depths that benefit ducks and facilitate hunting.

At the same time, the commission is re-engineering its green tree reservoirs. For now, they don’t hold as much water for as long as they once did, but eventually the woods will heal. Hopefully then the ducks will return to them in the numbers to which we were once accustomed.

Like Lake Conway, many of us won’t be around to see it. Bob Rogers of Maumelle summed it up this way: “I’m glad I had it when it was great. Maybe the kids following behind us will get to experience what we used to have.”

Amen.