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Isn’t it a marvel how a memory can cause a physical reaction, like tears or goosebumps?
I get the latter around this time each year as I start to go through my hunting closet. Something about my duck call lanyard evokes images of the first time I watched a group of mallards sail through the tops of the trees into a hole in flooded timber near the Cache River.
For a guy who grew up on the east side of the Mississippi River, waterfowl hunting, to me, meant waiting in a cold, wet pit blind in the middle of a flat rice field for the birds to find a massive set of decoys. So when I moved to central Arkansas to be a newspaper reporter, I didn’t understand the fuss.
After a few years, I decided I ought to give it a try. Arkansas is the duck hunting capital after all. When in Rome.
One of those first mornings on the Cache River, as those ducks plummeted into the woods in response to a cadence of quacks, I understood. Their wings thundered and the drakes’ green heads shimmered in the sun.
It was stunning, and I forgot all about shooting.
That little timber hole near McCrory forever holds a special place in my heart. Beyond that memory, it’s also the first place I took my wife hunting.
You’d also have a hard time convincing me there’s a more beautiful sight than watching the sun rise through a flooded forest.
Unfortunately, it and a lot of places like it are in real danger. Years of manmade intervention to hold water in those areas throughout the winter hunting season have started to stress and kill the native oak trees that make these areas so special to us and to the ducks.
The Arkansas Game & Fish Commission is now taking steps — drastic ones in some cases — to restore natural balance and health to these public green tree reservoirs.
The biggest obstacle remains selfishness. Too many hunters — always a grumbly bunch — apparently don’t have the foresight to look beyond the upcoming 60-day season. They just want water on the trees in our wildlife management areas all season long, consequences be damned.
It’s not much different from the reason duck season now continues through the end of January, despite mounting evidence of the late season’s negative impact on the bird population.
Thank goodness for the growing number of private duck clubs and landowners practicing more sound management of their flooded timber and in some cases self-imposing smaller daily bird harvest limits. And God bless the AGFC for trying in the face of ridicule.
As duck season opens on Saturday, I hope that more hunters across the state will wake up and look beyond the ends of their own noses.
That way, future generations can experience those goosebumps each November.
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