Welcome to the Arkansas Wildlife Podcast, the official podcast of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

We are talking hunting, fishing and conservation with engaging guests and in-depth discussions with game and fish staff.

It's Arkansas Wildlife, the podcast for all things outdoors in the natural state.

Welcome to the Arkansas Wildlife Podcast.

I'm Trey Reed from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission.

This is the official podcast of the Game and Fish Commission.

Thanks for listening in.

And if you're dropping in today, you are in for a treat because we have a very special guest.

It is not every day that we get to have a member of the United States House of Representatives and in our podcast studio here, so we're very happy about that.

He is the representative of the fourth District of Arkansas and chair of the Natural Resources Committee.

Congressman Bruce Westerman, welcome, Ari.

Great to be with you and a great subject to talk about.

You didn't have they didn't have to twist my arm too hard to get me to come over and talk about hunting and fishing in Arkansas and outdoor activities.

I mean, obviously, I mean, you have the natural resources chair background in forestry.

The the the outdoors has obviously been important to you professionally and I'm sure personally as well.

Oh yeah, I grew up in the outdoors.

I tell people all the time that when I was a kid, you know, growing up in very rural Garland County, at the time, it was it was five miles to the nearest piece of pavement from from my mom and dad's property, which I don't think I realized how blessed I was to live there.

I realize that more and more all the time, even though the main roads have been paved now.

When we wanted to go, my brothers, when we wanted to go hunting, we walked over and took the appropriate firearm out of the gun case and walked outside.

And we were there.

Just when you didn't have to travel anywhere, you traveled by foot by foot, right?

And you could hunt all day.

What were some of those things that you were hunting back then?

Everything that was legal, this was legal.

Squirrels, rabbits.

Quail.

Dove.

Turkeys, deer.

We coon hunt at night.

My brother and I. Are we traps?

Oh.

So we.

If you could do it in the outdoors and in Arkansas.

Now, the duck hunting was pretty sparse there in the in the hills.

Not the best duck hunting country.

Oh, we did have a creek with a beaver dam on it, which we try out some beavers.

And, you get a few wood ducks that will come into the, to the beaver pond.

I didn't really get a chance to duck hunt a lot until I, you know, got out of the home, went to college.

My first job was for Rosslyn Foods down in Stuttgart.

Oh, well, you had to find a lot of great contacts there.

I got introduced to duck hunting and, Very appropriate way down there.

And I've loved duck hunting ever since.

But I would say if I could only hunt one thing, I would.

Turkey is the thing that I love to hunt the most.

I find it the most enjoyable.

But it's all great.

It all has it's good stuff.

Yeah, I was a kid, like most people.

I grew up with that.

And we had a very short deer season when I was a kid.

You couldn't sleep the night before.

Deer season it like that.

It was the thing that you were going to be able to get up and go deer hunting.

The like Christmas morning almost.

Yeah.

Yeah, Well, is it that rural upbringing that, you know, from, from Garland County, that hunting and fishing, is that what got you into natural resources?

I mean, you got a degree in forestry from Yale, and so, so conservation and, resource management is obviously very a big part of your life.

Is that where it came from?

Yeah, obviously had a huge impact on it.

And I remember as a kid, if you saw a deer track, you would tell people, I saw deer track over here.

I mean, there weren't a lot of deer here in the 1970s.

And, my, my dad's property, which he still owns, it was one of the first.

It was near one of the first tracks that Weyerhaeuser had had bought and, and did a clearcut on it.

And, you know, people were upset when they saw this clearcutting happening.

And all of a sudden there were deer everywhere.

And when you look at the science behind that, what they did was they opened up the the canopy.

You had all this native vegetation that spring up, and all of a sudden you have the early successional habitat and you start seeing way more deer.

The turkeys like it.

You have covey the quail in it because the quail population, you know, kind of started dwindling.

But they love these these new cut overs.

And that really got me, me interested in the dynamics of what happens when you when you do something in the forest.

Yeah.

How all that works.

Right?

I mean, yeah.

And it still fascinates me, me, me today.

And some people see an old forest that has no greenery on the, in the understory.

And they think, oh, that's beautiful.

Well, Wow wow game.

Look at that.

And say, we need to go to the next county because we can't we can't do that here.

I want to circle back to something you said, because talking about the misperceptions of the public with with forest management, I've heard you speak a lot about it over the years, your years in Congress.

But it's something we talk a lot about here at Arkansas.

Game and fish.

I think it's our, our, timber harvest and timber management.

Our wildlife management was I think is, I would say probably one of the most misunderstood things that we do.

I just answered a question about it on a radio show yesterday.

Like, what do y'all do with all that money?

And, you know, we don't really make very much money, you know, and it goes right back in.

But why do you think, as somebody who's been in that field, why do you think it there is so much misunderstanding about the benefits of, of of selective harvest, of opening that canopy.

Why don't people get that?

So I deal with this on a national basis, and people in Arkansas get it way more than people.

That's good to know.

You go to Calif, Northern California, Washington, Oregon.

I know there's still a lot of people there that get it now, the Intermountain West.

And it really you look at the places where we see the worst forest fires and people don't get it.

And I don't I don't really fault people for not getting it.

I the more I look at it, I use the terminology that we love our trees to death.

Yeah, people love forests so much they understand that forest play a huge benefit.

So when they see somebody cutting a tree, they think, well, this is detrimental.

But you know, nature has managed has its own management tools, wind and fire.

Us and what we all forestry is, is figuring out how to an a control method, mimic what nature does.

And you talk about selective thinning.

That was really happening a long time before Europeans got to the United States.

There's some writings of the the early European explorers who went through Arkansas, who went through the Washington Mountains, and they described it is like a pine savanna that you could ride your horse at full gate.

Now, if you've hocked or hunted in the Washington Mountains, think about good luck with that.

Riding a horse at full gate, you know where the horse would survive.

But the Native Americans were using fire because it created better hunting grounds.

And they were, you know, a lot of most fire still, begin naturally with a lightning strike.

But they would set fire.

They knew the benefits, you know, over time, you know, there's more game where this fire went through a few years ago.

And the Forest Service knows this.

They've done a tremendous amount of research.

Great demonstration project over.

It's a little community called Needmore in the over close to Waldron where they they went in and did a short leaf Tom bluestem grass.

Says that restoration.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I did that because the the red cockaded woodpecker was endangered.

And, you know, the only way you can help an endangered species is to give it better habitat, you know, protect it from if, from hunting or whatever, maybe carving it, illegal hunting or whatever.

But, if you really want to recover a species, which is what the Endangered Species Act was put in place for, it says in the enabling language to recover species, you have to focus on the habitat.

So, you know, all the scientists at the Forest Service, they looked at what makes great red cockaded woodpecker habitat.

It's, open.

Can it be, early successional vegetation on the forest floor?

And they did this great project that I want to see mimicked more and more.

They went in and harvested timber, sold the timber and used the money to do the management.

So they they made the forest healthier and paid for it at the same time.

What a novel idea that you could actually use the resource to pay for the management of it.

Of course they had not just foresters, they had all kinds of biologists involved.

There's been papers published about this.

They saw an amazing increase in plant and animal biodiversity.

It's some of this.

The seeds had been in the soil for for probably 100 years.

Just covered relief dove.

They opened up the canopy, use controlled burns and all of this vegetation spring up.

Now you can do that with clearcutting.

You don't have to clearcut.

All you have to do is open it up enough so that you can get the sunlight, get the sunlight on it, and it's also moisture.

You know, plants need three things, lot moisture and nutrients.

They're always competing for those three things.

And if you're if you have an overgrown forest, the strongest survive is how that works.

So the little plants that need to grow in the understory, if they can't get light there, they're not going to grow.

If you got too many trees and we categorize that with something called basal area, we know how much basal area per acre of forest can support.

If you got too much basal area, there's not going to be enough moisture and nutrients.

And what eventually happens?

You have this competition.

The trees, get weakened and you get insects and disease, and eventually you have fire that comes in to correct everything and it starts over.

But we can control that and create phenomenal habitat in the process.

If I say Arkansas has the opportunity not just to provide the greatest outdoor recreation opportunities in the country with our hunting and fishing and beautiful, forest lands, plus all the the bottomland stuff we got for waterfowl.

We could be a, it could be a huge economic driver for people would see it as a destination to come here and pay whatever.

For now, the state license to hunt deer and turkeys and quail.

You know, we we've lost so many quail.

You could you could quail hunt.

When I was a kid, they were there.

There were a lot of them there.

But now if I'm out in the outdoors and I hear quail, I'm like, that's that's a beautiful sound for a wild quail.

Again, Congressman.

How do we seize the momentum and do some of these things that we're doing in Arkansas in granite?

We're different type of forest in the southeast as there is in the Intermountain West.

And, you know, but, you know, I look back and you talked about we've, you know, Native Americans knew some of these things.

Gifford Pinchot, the father of the Forest Service, knew some of these things, do these things, you know, a hundred years ago.

But it seemed like there's still a big hill to climb in the, area of public perception and and the will of, you know, states and other entities to do that.

How do, how do we how do we scale this up, I guess is what I'm asking.

Well, that's right, that's my job in Congress.

And, I've been working on this since I got there.

I'm continuing to work on it.

I have a bill called the Fix Our Forest Act that, is passed the House with huge bipartisan support.

It's over in the Senate.

We hope to see that get passed and sent to the president's desk to get signed into law.

And we've it's an education process.

When I first got to Congress, you know, everybody, you didn't meet anybody that really didn't like forest, which met a lot of people that really didn't have an understanding of forestry and forest dynamics.

And, you know, why are the forest in the West burning up?

Why to the projects that the Forest Service say needs to happen on these forests to get stopped?

And it really I think the turning point was when we lost 20% of the giant sequoias in two years.

So the giant sequoia, one of the largest trees on Earth, the technical answer to that is a quaking aspen, which is you could see a whole hillside of quaking aspen.

It'd be one tree, but, the giant sequoia, iconic massive trees, some of them are over 3000 years old, and they only grow on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Nevadas, about 40 500ft in elevation.

It's almost like God said, these trees can grow here, but they can't.

They can't grow right across this land.

They don't spread out.

They stay very confined.

There's about 70 groves of them.

And, you know, these are the named trees, the General Sherman and all of them.

Well, in two years we lost 20% of them due to catastrophic wildfire.

And when I was in forestry school, which wasn't that long ago, the thought was fire can't kill one of these trees because some, some of their bark two feet thick, it just acts like an insulating buffer.

And plus they've been around for over 3000 years.

And in fires never I think the the Forest Service has a record because trees are living history books because of the rings.

And you can go back and count fire scars.

The last giant sequoia that had been killed.

The fire until 2018 was 1267.

Whole.

Wow.

So you can see why people thought, well, fire just doesn't it doesn't kill a giant sequoia.

And then of the the 20 or so named trees, the most all of them have been greatly they've been killed or greatly deteriorating due to the catastrophic fire.

And this got people's attention.

And there's a there's a lot of university research.

I got this paper, out of Humboldt State University and some, some other folks, Washington State, they had studied these giant sequoias.

And these researchers had actually told me in the spring before we had these big fires, they said, we're going to have we're going to lose sequoias.

We're going to have catastrophic fires.

And it's because up until the gold rush, the Native Americans had had burned these forests about every and if on average of three years these are lightning or with Native Americans every three years they did a controlled burn.

They quit doing that around in the mid 1800s around the gold rush.

Then the federal government comes along and had the idea that we should put out all the fires that happen.

So you had over well over 100 years of fire suppression in these giant sequoias.

And there's a tree called the white fir that it's shade tolerant.

It grows very slowly in the shade.

Well, those trees would sprout in a fire, would come through every three years, and it would kill them off.

Well, another one would sprout.

And you just had this cycle of the forest for being cleaned up by these regular fires.

And they were low intensity fires because not that much fuel have built up.

So you give it, give it over a hundred years and these little white fir trees have gotten up to 110, 120ft tall.

And the tips of the fir trees were in the lower crown of the giant sequoias.

That's what if you hear the term ladder fuel, that is classic ladder fuel.

So the lightning still strikes, you still get fires.

But once it got into these these white fir trees with dry conditions and there were some different pine trees that created lighter fuel to it, carried the fire up into the crowns.

Now a fire around the base of a giant sequoia.

It's a bring it on up in the crown.

It's a whole different story.

So we did it.

It was in Kevin McCarthy's district, and we did a field hearing, bipartisan or field trip, bipartisan field trip, where it was Republicans and Democrats and all of us were just standing there shocked, looking at a dead grove of giant sequoias and thinking, there's got to be a better way.

You know, these are some of these trees are 3000 years old.

And and this has happened on our watch.

So with the research, you know, to be able to touch and see, I've got a friend named Scott Peters who's a Democrat in San Diego.

He really started working with me in good faith.

And we came up with a bill called the Save Our Sequoias Act.

It recently passed the house unanimously.

We had the Fix our Forest act that, we would have gotten two thirds of the votes had it required two thirds of the votes.

But it only required, a, a majority in the House.

And it's over in the Senate.

Went to Senator Bowman's committee.

They've passed it.

It's got enough Democrats that have voted for it in the Senate that if it gets put on the floor, it'll go to the president's desk.

It's, I think, by far the most substantial forest, management regulations that that Congress has ever passed.

We just need to get it across the finish line right now, a lot of other extenuating certain circumstances there.

But it all came back to education and people willing to stop and look at the facts.

And the neat thing is, we had a lot of environmental groups, write letters of support for the fix our for show because it's based on scientific management of the forest.

And, and there's this idea that, you know, we're raping and pillaging the forest.

And a lot of that happened is our country was being developed and people thought the forest was, was never ending an infinite resource or started on the East Coast and started cutting to the west as I came through Arkansas and had a huge industry here, pretty much cut everything down and kept on going.

Well, in all of that that grew back.

And we still have beautiful forest here in the state.

We know how to manage them better.

And if we would use the resource that we've got in a wise way, it would be an economic driver and it would be an environmental driver.

You know, you talk about Pinchot having foresight with Teddy Roosevelt.

Sure.

He he made comments about if we ever want to develop the West, we have to be good stewards of the forest in the headwaters of the of the rivers.

And Roosevelt called trees the lungs of the earth because they breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen.

I call them also the kidneys of the Earth, because they're the better water purifiers.

They give us clean water in our streams.

They help fish populations.

And if you have a catastrophic wildfire where you remove the vegetation, then you not only are you washing all the ash into the streams, you're also washing the topsoil into the streams, which makes the streams less, less healthy for fish.

Affects all the downstream water supply.

Plus it's taking topsoil away that you need to grow the new forest back.

So keeping our forests healthy gives us clean air, gives us clean water, gives us better wildlife and recreation, wildlife habitat and recreation opportunities.

There's no downside to having a healthy forest, and we should all be pulling the wagon in the same way to make sure that we have healthy forest and we have all different varieties of forest.

There's really no such thing as old growth because there's different trees have different lifespans.

And when you talk about what I think some people think is old growth, you're talking about a tree getting to the end of its lifespan, and they're beautiful to look at.

But you better be making sure you got young ends coming up.

Yeah.

What happens next?

Yeah.

What happens after this?

You know, this this short life.

Pine trees, 300 years old.

It's it's somewhere around, it's last expectancy.

Yeah.

And when it dies, what's going to be left?

Left behind?

So that's all part of forest management.

You have, you have, seedlings, you have saplings, you have mid story, an overstory.

And you can have all of that and, and do it in a way that benefits wildlife habitat at the same time and protects our air and our water.

before we before we get out of here, let you let you go and wrap things up.

You don't have to give away any secrets spots, okay?

Or GPS coordinates, but where are some of your your your places that you like to enjoy in Arkansas for hunting and fishing?

You mentioned like wash all, but what are some of your spots you like to go?

So where I grew up and is still very remote area, my dad's been able to buy land over the years.

We lease land around that.

So we have have a deer lease.

Okay.

You know, that's that's where I go hunting.

If somebody mentions going hunting and I think about the best spot to go hunting, it's for, I've grown up hunting.

I get, where I live now.

I've got, property around me that, have good turkey hunting on it.

Right.

As a typical turkey hunter, you're getting you're getting real tight all the sudden you're getting getting closer from what?

Evil info here.

But, go ahead.

I'm sorry.

You know, when I was a kid, a big vacation was to go to Branson, the Silver Dollar City.

What we did, we would.

We had an old boat that we would put a tent and camp stove in, and we would go to Lake Washington.

We would go out on the bank on an island.

Yeah.

And, if there's nothing like it, I was able to do that with my kids some growing up.

I know during during Covid, I went by myself one time, just so it was it was good, good to do that.

And we did, you know, everything from, you know, broom fishing, bass fishing, crappie fishing, trot lines and yo yos.

And it was just nothing like it.

How special is it?

And I don't think it's a unique situation, but it is special that you still get to make, boot prints in the mud where you did when you were 5 or 6 years old, running out there with your brother, like you said.

Oh, yeah.

That's, it's always just a lot of memories when you're when you're out there and, you know, in my job, I travel all, all around and meet people.

Just other members of Congress are constantly inviting me to come go hunting with them or go fishing with them.

That my committee has jurisdiction over offshore or all of all of the Fish and Wildlife and NOAA on offshore fishing, commercial, recreational and, subsistence fishing, like in Alaska.

So I, I get exposed to a lot of that.

And there's just so many opportunities out there to, to experience the great outdoors.

And, you know, the things that I do.

In the big picture, a lot of people, from other places wouldn't think that was that exciting, but it's what I grew up doing.

And, you know, to me, I probably, I know I'd rather turkey hunt by myself in Arkansas, then go in the best Elkton or whatever, somewhere out west.

It's funny how those things that are so close to us, we often take for granted.

But like duck hunting, you know, Arkansas is got the best duck hunting anywhere in the world.

But it seems it's it's just what we do here, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

I've had the opportunity to duck hunt and other places to turkey hunt and other places, but.

Yeah, you'll take it here, I remember the first time.

Are you talking about not very good gear?

Had the kind of, the rubberized vinyl waders.

Hunting on public land in Arkansas in the timber and wondering was yeah I don't I'm not sure what the attraction of this is to be standing in water where I've got a hold my elbows up so they're not in the water.

But man, when those mallards came down through that timber, there's, there's nothing like that.

It's something we have that very, very few places have.

Congressman, before we wrap things up, anything you want to add before, anything we haven't covered that you would like to.

I just hope, everybody in Arkansas realizes how blessed we are, to have the, the landscape, the resources that we've got to have the opportunities, to, to do public hunting, whether it's on, federal land or on the state wildlife management agencies.

You know, one of the things that I, I've done recently, and you probably know who my God was, was I got invited to go woodcock hunting, and, it was on the, Wildlife management area.

And, you know, I'd always, you know, when you fill out your harvest information program and it's like nobody ever check woodcock or snipe.

There's at least two of us.

Meet our three.

I'm one of them.

Two?

Yeah.

And, you know, that was.

That was a lot of fun.

It I I've been bitten by that.

But what?

Because it's like you talked about not having as many quail, and we're doing a lot to try to bring them back as well as, you know, for service on some of the things we've already mentioned, but that that's an upland bird that we can still we still find pretty regularly.

And this particular person told me they, they taste better than in quail and dove, but I've had several people, people dispute, I don't, I don't I don't know about that.

I mean, they're not bad, but I quails pretty pretty good.

Yeah.

But even, you know, just the opportunity you can hunt woodcock in Arkansas if you, and on a a state wildlife management area.

And, yes, it's just fun to work on this stuff.

A lot of the, a lot of the things I work on are, are challenging.

And, you know, the work needs to be done.

Last week we were in D.C.

and had a markup on the surface transportation bill that went all day and passed two a Am in the morning.

But we passed the bill out.

Good bipartisan bill.

That's interesting to me, but and when I get to work on stuff that's dealing with wildlife, have wildlife habitat or making our forest healthy, that, it puts an extra pay for my stay up.

I bet it does.

Well, thank you for representing, not only the citizens of Arkansas, especially those from the fourth district, but our fish and wildlife and our natural resources that that depend on them.

Congressman Westerman, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.

Terry, that's all we got for this episode of the Arkansas Wildlife Podcast.

We'll talk to you next time.