Retiring chairman recalls challenges

Every chairman of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission in recent years, it seems, has had to deal with some major, unexpected situation.

For Ken Reeves, his year leading the commission was affected by a worldwide crisis that arrived this spring as covid-19 affected every aspect of Arkansans’ lives. It saw the agency headquarters and other offices such as nature centers around the state temporarily shuttered.

“Unfortunately, I will remember this situation very vividly in my last year on the commission,” Reeves said recently, a few days before he passed the chairman’s gavel to Andrew Parker.

“I never dreamed when we had our February meeting that it would be the last meeting I would attend in Little Rock. The sad part of it is, so many people on the staff that I have worked with over the years, I won’t have the opportunity to thank them and say goodbye in person.

“We took steps to get our work done,” Reeves said, “but it’s not been as effective as having committee meetings with everyone together. We also had to cancel our public town hall meetings that former commission Chairman Ford Overton had started last year. Those have been priceless, to go out to other areas of state with our leadership and have the public come in and ask us anything they wanted. We’d had big turnouts at those meetings.”

Reeves, a 72-year-old retired lawyer from Harrison, said the agency met the challenges well.

“I want to tip my cap to the education and communications divisions that put out a myriad of offerings during the past three months, like our Virtual Nature Center, when everything shut down,” he said.

Reeves, appointed to the commission by Gov. Mike Beebe in 2013, said his priorities have been restoration of quail and turkey, with an emphasis on habitat changes to bring those birds back in bigger numbers.

He pushed for the establishment of a turkey stamp to help generate money for the species’ restoration. Reeves also sought to relax the regulations on hunting predators for better control.

The quail initiative “is very near and dear to my heart,” Reeves said, noting his first hunt with his father 62 years ago.

“I guess I’m the only commissioner who still owns a bird dog and remembers when we had great numbers of quail. A lot of people may think it’s a long haul and a waste of money, but I assure you it’s not. It’s now or never for quail.

“The decline is primarily due to the loss of habitat. When I was a young man, fescue was unheard of and Bermuda wasn’t a farm grass. The places I used to hunt are now full of Black Angus cows, and full of fescue and Bermuda one inch high.”

While nearly 90% of Arkansas is privately owned, he noted, “cattle farmers don’t have to have all fescue and Bermuda on their land. In drought conditions around here last year, all that burned up. Just down the way from me, though, Baker Prairie was lush and butterflies were everywhere. It’s full of native warm-season grasses. It shows the contrast. That’s where the cows need to be, and quail and turkeys thrive in native grasses. It’s a matter of educating the people.”