(upbeat music) Hey, did you realize that Arkansas is considered the duck capital of the entire world?

That's right.

People come from all around the world to hunt ducks right here in the Natural State.

Also, did you realize that duck hunting in Arkansas generates somewhere around $4 million a day during the season, totaling close to $300 million added to the state's economy every year?

Hi, I'm Steve Wildman Wilson, I'm your host here on Naturally Wild.

Thank you for joining me.

Let me introduce you to my co-host for this show.

His name is Trey Reed.

Trey, good to see you, man.

Good to see you.

And there's a reason I introduced him as my co-host.

I've done that many times throughout the years because we go back a long way, don't we, Trey?

We have worked together a number of years, Wildman.

Been on radio and television together.

Get to co-host, or co-emcee I guess, the Arkansas Outdoor Hall of Fame banquet every year.

I don't know how many years running we've been doing it, but always a pleasure to be, put the band back together after we worked together for so many years at game.

In fact, you were my first guest on my first Naturally Wild show back here.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah.

That was, that was a lot of fun.

I'm glad to be back for another episode.

The subject matter today I'm probably more of an expert on than than I was that day.

I like ducks, you were talking about $4 million.

I, I think I personally contributed about $500,000 in a lifetime to to duck hunting in Arkansas.

Well, it's big business, no doubt.

But yeah, one reason I think we worked so well together throughout the years is the fact that I'm kind of specialized in deer and turkey, and you're more of the duck hunter.

So I was a duck guy, you know.

You were our guide on the deer and the turkey.

And when it came to ducks, I, you know, I can operate a duck call fairly well and can shoot straight sometimes.

I didn't grow up duck hunting, though.

I mean, really, you got me into it when I started working doing TV shows for Game and Fish.

Yeah, it was new to me.

I did grow up duck hunting.

I mean, I tell people I've been duck hunting for 50 years in Arkansas and they look at me like I'm crazy, but, but but I have.

My dad started taking me when I was about 4 or 5 years old.

I celebrated 56th birthday back in July, so I have literally half a century of duck hunting under my belt in Arkansas.

So it is something that, it's very special to me.

It's probably the hunting pursuit that I engage in the most and enjoy the most.

You know, when we meet hunters around the state and always say, hey, if you had to choose one thing because a lot of people here in Arkansas, they hunt it all.

You can.

They do it all.

But it's either, they either choose 1 or 2 things.

If they have a choice, they say, I would, I would either turkey hunt or duck hunt because, man, you just can't beat those green hills.

I mean, I think there's something similar about turkeys and ducks in that you're, that you're calling, you're interacting with the with the animal that you're pursuing.

And I think that's what attracts people in particular to those two sports and very vastly different in how that you engage in those.

But it's similar in that the way it works, you know, it's like a call and response and you, you know, you got to call at just the right time or not call this time and, you know, have that patience.

And so I think that interaction that you have with with the game, the quarry is what makes both of those very special.

But Trey, what makes a difference for me is you do one of them in the cold, nasty weather.

The other one you do in the springtime.

This is a fair point.

Yeah.

Hey, for those of you who may not know you or have seen you around, of course you're all over media in Arkansas for the Game and Fish Commission.

Give us a little background.

You said you grew up duck hunting.

You're from Pine Bluff.

I am, born and raised in Pine Bluff.

Lived there for the first 30 years of my life, a couple years up in northwest Arkansas and about the last 25 in Little Rock in the central Arkansas area.

But yeah, as I mentioned, you know, growing up in Pine Bluff, you're on the doorstep of the Delta there.

And so that was what my dad was into.

And so that's kind of what I got into.

I worked in newspapers for a number of years, first Pine Bluf commercial and then the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as a sports writer and editor, and became outdoor editor at the Democrat Gazette in '01.

Went to work for ESPN covering pro bass fishing, doing the TV thing for a couple years.

And then when that show was unceremoniously canceled, I came to work at Game and Fish, and within about six months, I hooked up with you.

We were, of course, were in the same division.

But yeah, you know, kind of helped you produce TV for for about ten years until you retired.

Kind of carried that mantle on doing a lot of the public relations stuff that you did as well.

A lot of the folks here might remember the old show, Talking Outdoors at the Corner Cafe.

We did that for a number of years, but, well, this show is really not going to be about duck hunting as much as it is ducks, because I think a lot of people still don't realize how how big it is here in Arkansas.

I was mentioning the economic impact.

That's huge.

Sure.

I mean, you said there in the open, what are we talking, $4 million a day.

And when it comes out to, you've only got 60 days that duck season is actually open now.

It spans more like 75 days because we have some breaks and some splits.

You have teal season too and some other.

You get to early teal season, right?

But I mean it adds up to about $300 million.

Consider this that we have, we sell over 100,000 state duck stamps in Arkansas every year.

That's not even counting youth under the age of 16.

So we know there's at least 100,000, and there's not as many people that duck hunt as deer hunt.

But, you know, half of those duck stamps, Arkansas duck stamps, are sold to nonresidents most of which are hunting on private land.

But yeah, I mean, it brings a lot of people to Arkansas.

One thing talking about the economic impact, while man is, I like to tell people and it's not just duck hunting, all types of hunting, but this is an example of when money flows from the populated urban areas into those parts of the state that don't really have huge economic engines to drive them throughout the rest of the year.

It's their Christmas time.

It's make or break for a lot of these mom and pop outfits in rural corners of the state, and especially in the Delta, which we know is a highly impoverished region of Arkansas to begin with.

And so anything we can do to, you know, put money in those areas.

And duck hunting certainly does that.

You know, you said roughly half the stamps that we sell people from out of state.

People really do come from all over the world here, mainly to hunt, I guess, the mallard, the green timber.

You're exactly right, Wildman, we sell duck stamps to people from all 50 states, a number of foreign countries.

And you're right, we call ourselves the duck capital of the world.

And it's a well-earned self-proclaimed moniker because this is the bottom of the migratory funnel.

And we're going to get into that a little bit later.

But Arkansas is uniquely positioned, and we have more bottomland hardwood forest remaining in the Delta than really any other place in the Mississippi Delta, Mississippi alluvial valley, with the exception of maybe the Atchafalaya Basin in southern Louisiana.

But, you know, as far as Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, I mean, we're where it's at.

We only have about 20% of those bottomland hardwoods that were historically here before European settlement.

But people come here to stand in flooded forest and watch mallards, especially greenhead drakes, come through that timber.

It's something that we have here that really doesn't exist anywhere else in the world.

It's unique.

And it was hard for me because I started looking at this.

When you guys started teaching me about this, I didn't realize that Eastern Arkansas used to be all forest, and now it's agriculture.

That's why the green timber left.

Most of the eastern third of the state was forested.

Now, the grand prairie around Stuttgart was, it didn't have as many trees.

It was more like a big prairie.

But yeah, it was a vast bottomland hardwood forest.

When the Mississippi River, before we had levees overflowed.

And that's why the ducks started coming here.

You know this, and they've continued to come here even though the landscape has been highly altered.

If you will, take us through a year in the life of a duck, because they don't live here all year long.

And that's something else that makes ducks and waterfowl, geese as well, unique.

I mean, most of the species that were hunting in Arkansas, they're here all the time, but they're migrants, are only here part of the year.

We are their home during the wintering period, basically November, December, January, February.

Where do they start out?

Where are they raised?

Yeah.

Let's start there.

The Canadian and northern U.S.

prairies, North Dakota, South Dakota, parts of western Minnesota, even eastern Montana, but on up into Saskatchewan, Manitoba, what we call the Prairie Pothole Region, also known as the Duck Factory.

Yep, you can guess what that means.

That's where we make the ducks.

So the ducks, they'll get, arrive on the prairies, typically late April, May, every year after they've spent their winter here.

And then they migrate back up there.

That's where they're going to have these, be in pairs.

The drakes and the hens get together.

They do their thing, and the hen will raise a clutch of eggs.

Very hard for a duck to make a living.

I mean, there's a lot of predators that can eat them.

You know, the changes in environmental conditions, rain, snow, things like that.

All of the, 10 to 15% nest success is a win.

We will have stable populations if we have that.

I always ask people, you know, their ground nesting birds.

They are.

Like turkey and quail.

That's right.

What does not eat an egg?

That's right.

Everything.

Everything from humans all the way down to skunks.

And so they start out up there.

Start out up there.

And so they're going to raise their broods on these little isolated, ephemeral wetlands.

They dry up some years in wetter years, you know, so drought and things like that.

It's a dry region of North America to begin with.

And so snowmelt and things like that, the amount of permafrost, all these things go into how much moisture is there.

Here's what we know from from science is that the more potholes and the wetter those potholes are, the more ducks we're going to have.

They need water.

So they'll raise those, they'll raise those broods once they can fly.

And they start to take on that adult plumage as the temperatures drop, they're going to start making their way south.

And, you know, sometimes they don't get as far south as we want them to.

Sometimes they even go on farther south and many species tails, canvas bags, redheads, things like that are going to go down to the Gulf Coast.

And we might want to point they don't all leave the same day.

No, no.

They're staggered.

There's no itinerary or anything like that.

You know, one of the things people don't realize, one of the things that drives migration more so probably initially than cold temperatures and water abundance down here in the southern part, it's the photoperiod.

Length of daylight.

That's something, you know, the amount of water, the temperatures, those those are going to be variable.

There is no variability.

I mean in North America, September, we're going to lose a lot of daylight hours.

That triggers those ducks to get on.

That's true in everything.

You know we talk about deer.

100%.

We talk about fish.

The length of daylight.

That triggers the rut, kicks the rut off.

It's what, whitetail deer and elk.

It's what fish, when they move u to spawn in the spring, yeah, water temperature plays a lot to do with that.

But that photo period, that is the one thing, that is the same every year.

And so that's really a big factor.

You know, I think that affects me too.

I go to bed earlier when the days get shorter.

Well you know, that's right.

After this time change I'll go to bed a little bit earlier too for sure.

All right.

They start there.

And those are what months that they start moving?

They're going to start moving September, October.

I mean, you know, there's still probably lots of ducks in Canada right now.

It has been pretty warm throughout North America this fall.

But yeah, they're making their way.

Places like Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri.

And then eventually they're going to end up down here in Arkansas.

You're making the funnel shape.

You want to talk to Mississippi Flyway a little bit?

Mississippi flyway.

We've got a good slide to show you, there it is, folks.

So if you really look at why Arkansas is duck capital of the world.

I'm not a realtor, but a real estate guy told me one time.

He said it's all about location, location, location.

It is.

And if you look at that map.

Okay, consider like the western reaches of that, you're talking about up north, at least, the Rockies, and then the eastern reaches, you're at least in the US, the Appalachians.

But as we follow the Mississippi River down and that's what birds do.

They follow huge migratory corridors like major rivers and of course, the Mississippi, our largest river in North America.

But then you think about, like the Missouri River and the Arkansas River.

Well, as they make their course, they take a left turn and meet the Mississippi River.

And so a lot of those birds that come down the Central Flyway, which is just to the west of us, take that left turn with it, hit the, you know, the Mississippi Flyway.

And look, we are the neck of the funnel there.

We are the bottom of the funnel.

And so that's where everything comes out.

And that's why the ducks end up here, as you said, location, location, location.

Now when they, in the season, then they go fly back north and do it all over again.

That is 100% correct, Wildman.

They'll typically get out of here in February, maybe even into March.

And again, they're going to go, if they find snow or ice covered water they're going to hang below that and as things start to thaw and warm up, they're going to gradually and again that photo period is going to drive their migration.

One reason I've learned from you guys that our season has to end on January 31st, that's the latest it can go, is because if you go any later than that, they're starting to pair up and you want to give them time to pair up to raise some more.

That's right.

I mean, and essentially regulatory frameworks for waterfowl and ducks and geese are managed both at the federal and the state level.

So the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service tells Arkansas and every other state each year, these are your parameters.

For instance, you can't start a season no matter where you are, Canada or Minnesota or Arkansas, before September 1st, and it can't go past January 31st.

We can kind of do some manipulation inside of that, but if they give us 60 days, we can't hunt 61, we can hunt 51 or 59, we can go less than, but we can't go greater than.

But yeah, that's a great point.

We start to see ducks starting to pair up even in December in Arkansas.

You can see the courtship flights where there's, you know, one hen and there's a dozen drakes following her.

And it's, they're basically they're proving their vigor, you know, that they are somebody that she would want to mate with.

So yeah, once you get past January, February, we know they're, largely paired up.

And if they will they may not form another pair and be able to breed if we shoot the the drake.

Sure.

You know, that late in the season.

You know, when I worked for Game and Fish, I did a lot of public speaking and always tell people, I had one speech pretty much I gave for about 10 or 15 years because if you never get invited back, you don't need but one speech.

But I actually sit down and wrote a new speech one time and I called it, These are the Good Old Days, because if you stop and think of it, these are the good old days of deer, bear, turkey, alligators here in Arkansas.

I mean, all those that make tremendous comebacks, but ducks, not so much.

Well, I think a lot of people, especially your age and my age too, they don't remember how it was.

We can't remember how it was the good old days.

We've heard stories of, you know, ducks blackening the sky.

Sure.

And I know there's a famous news clip.

I want you to kind of introduce this video.

We're going to show you a little bit.

Yeah.

I think you've got a clip from the old NBC show Wild, Wild World.

And George Purvis, our predecessor, George Purvis.

That was our comms chief at Arkansas Game and Fish for a number of years.

That's ducks.

Orchestrated this on Claypool's reservoir up in northeast Arkansas near Wiener Waldenburg area.

It's still a very well known hotspot for ducks, but yeah, I mean, this was in the infancy of television, and they pulled this off on live national television, running cables out through, you know, into the trees to have cameras.

I believe there was some sort of explosion that they detonated to get all the ducks to, to get up at one time, I've heard, on natioal TV live.

This was live.

Look.

Look at this.

That is just, I mean, it doesn't even look real.

Does it make your heart beat fast?

It does make my heart beat fast.

Yeah.

That's just unbelievable how, and that's kind of what put Arkansas on the map.

I mean, they almost got to the point, I think, where the people in New York were saying, hey, this is boring because they weren't moving yet, but they they went with it and thank goodness they did.

It's an iconic, there's photographs of that scene as well.

But you know, to that, talking about the good old days, I would, Arkansas still has the best duck hunting probably anywhere in the world.

You're right.

So let's be clear on that.

But yeah, there has been a lot of change and some of those changes we've already alluded to, the clearing of eastern Arkansas for agriculture.

So the habitat changed.

Even now, rice fields are great surrogate wetlands for ducks.

But even then, you know, we're not leaving, the efficiency of harvesting equipment is not leaving near the amount of rice that it used to.

We know that they're harvesting rice in August, in early September now, they used to shock it and leave it in the fields until October or November back, you know, in the 50s when that video was shot.

So a lot of things have changed, mainly habitat wise.

We're putting, there's a lot of pressure on ducks.

I think if you talk to, we talk about declining numbers in hunting a lot, that's not an issue, as you probably likely, you know, deciphered from our from our duck stamp sales, because there still are a lot of people come and it's easier to find them.

We have equipment that allows us to stay out in the cold longer, you know, better waders, better insulated clothes, the technology of things like, you know, Google Maps to find spots that we didn't know about before.

Shallow drive motors that get us into water that we couldn't access 25, 30 years ago.

So there are a lot of things going on.

And and I do, you know, I've never seen that site like Claypool's, I don't know many who have, but maybe a few.

But you know, I do want to point out that we still, because of our geography, we're the spot for mallards.

And we still kill more mallards than any other state in the country.

I started to say, you know, you know, if you've hunted and you've experienced some of those times, it might not be as good as it was.

But we're still kill more mallards here in Arkansas than any other state in the United States.

That is correct, Wildman.

Louisiana typically leads the nation in harvest, of course they are at the bottom of the Mississippi Flyway, the highest volume flyway.

And there's nowhere to go after that, right, unless they go down the coast either way.

But yeah, we're typically second or third in total duck and always number one in Mallard.

You mentioned all those things that we try to do that, technology is going on, I know Game and Fish has got a lot of efforts, the green tree reservoirs restoration.

Yeah.

There's so many things that determine when they migrate that we have no control over.

Most of it we have no control over.

We're going to get into talking forecast.

Everybody knows we're in the midst of an epic drought right now, but we can't control that.

But here's what we can do.

We can set the table.

Yeah.

When they do get here, we want them to stay.

Yeah.

I mean, we're providing the resources they need when they do get here, even if that's later than it used to be.

But we farm about 11,000 acres of what we call moist soil plants.

Basically, you and I might look at those and say those are weeds, but I talked about the efficiency of of rice harvesting equipment.

Well, there's not that much waste rice out there, but we're leaving all of those seeds there.

I mean, we are growing literally tons and tons and tons of duck food on that 11,000 acres.

We're farming.

And then the invertebrates that, when that stuff lays over in those moist soil units.

It's a perfect substrate for invertebrates.

We're in the midst of massive renovation of our green tree reservoirs.

You know, we have a lot of people know, we're not flooding a little, we're flooding a little later than we used to and have for a number of years now because we were starting to see declining health and sometimes death of some of our, our bottomland hardwood timber.

When you put water on it for years and years and years the same way, for the same length of time, at the same depth, it can be detrimental.

When we did that, when our predecessors at Game and Fish did that in the 50s and 60s, the science wasn't there.

They didn't know they were providing waterfowl habitat an opportunity.

We now know that we can't do that.

And so we are changing wholesale changes to preserve this very unique and special type of habitat for future generations of both humans and ducks to be able to enjoy.

Yeah, I mean, there's a balance there.

You got to because you risk the future.

You've got to invest in the future too.

But those white, those, trees, like green tree reservoirs, produce acorns.

They produce acorns.

They produce in what, you know, barnyard grasses and things like that.

And those openings in the timber where a tree does blow over and die.

Well, that's a great duck hole because there's all kinds of food there.

The sunlight reaches the forest floor and gets that to blow up.

But those trees aren't made for water, like you said, standing water.

They are made to, they are a bottomland hardwood ecosystems.

And we're talking red oaks, primarily Nutall's, willow oaks specifically.

But they can take some water.

Not long periods.

They can't be like, specially during the growing season.

And some of our people say, well, you're it's the springtime in summer when water gets on their way.

Yeah, that's exactly why we're changing the infrastructure so we can get that water out.

In places where we've completed projects, Earl Buss Bayou DeView, not very far from where that Claypool's video was shot.

Shirey Bay Rainey Brake and Henry Gray, Hurricane Lake WMAs, we've completed projects there in what was taking, oh, 8, 10 weeks to get the water off.

Now we're doing in a matter of like ten, 12, 14 days.

So that's got to be a hard decision because, yeah, if you don't have water like we don't this year, you pump water.

Lots of people pump water.

You put the boards in to hold the water.

Yeah.

But then it comes a big rain, where does it go?

You can't get the water off because you're draining into major rivers and systems like that.

You know, I'm glad you brought up pumping water.

I don't know how much time we got left, but looking ahead, there's a lot of people that are like.

It's awfully dry.

Why doesn't Game and Fish just drop the gates right now and put the boards in?

Well, number one, there's not anything to catch, but most of our areas are rainfall dependent, okay.

And we do take surface water from, you know, rivers, streams, bayous, creeks, whatever irrigation ditches.

But in many cases, Wildman, we don't even, our pipes can't reach the water right now.

So until we get the rainfall to bring those streams up, you know people, well, why don't you drill a well?

It would, number one, it's not a responsible use of groundwater resources.

Agriculture and municipal water supplies really, really need that.

Yeah.

And even our groundwater supplies have dwindled in some cases.

But it would take, we would have to drill dozens of wells and run them for like weeks and weeks.

We're not flooding a 40 acre rice field.

We're flooding ten, 15,000 acres in some cases.

And it's just not efficient.

It's just not logistically possible.

Trey, all that's good information and it's educational, informative.

But I think everybody's wanting to know how's duck season going to look this year?

What do you think?

Give me a prediction.

I'm going to try not to be Debbie Downer here.

But Wildman, until we get some more rain, it's not looking good.

I mean, it's just not I mean, again, we talked about photo period and temperature and things like that that drive duck migration.

But we know of scientifically data driven point of here is that nothing drives duck abundance in Arkansas like water.

We can look at our aerial surveys and we conduct three of those every wintering period.

And when you look at the precipitation tables in duck abundance, boy, they are strongly correlated.

So we're in a drought.

We're in the midst of a 15, 16, 18 month drought.

We need over two feet of water to come out of that drought.

And I know we've gotten some rain, getting some this week, but but we need a lot more.

It's going to be awfully dry and especially public land hunters, but even private land hunters too need to understand that it's like we're spending money on diesel to pump where we can.

We have even bought some new pumps, moved some around to try to get access to some of that surface water, but in some cases it's just not there.

Hey, before we go off the air, give the folks an idea of how many ducks come through Arkansas.

I hear these, it's just hard for me to imagine.

I mean, tens of millions.

Tens of millions of ducks coming through that.

I don't know what the population estimate was this year, but yeah, it's.

But still, that's hard to believe that again, we're duck capital of the world.

We're the duck capital of the world.

And don't, look, even though I'm expecting a tough season, I promise you I'll be out there.

Trey, thank you so much.

It's been a lot of fun.

A lot of fun.

Now you know why I call him co-host.

Especially on a duck hunting show.

Well, now you know that we are duck capital of the world.

And now you know why.

So be sure and tune in next week for another Naturally Wild.

This program was made possible by Arkansas Hunters Feeding the Hungry, East Harding Construction Company, David's Burgers, Greenway Equipment, Arkansas Farm Bureau, and the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas.