Landowners Make Way for Wildlife
More press on the Woodson Project and restoring Arkansas' natural resources.
Lile Real Estate
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE: by Austin Gelder, Friday, April 22, 2005
WRIGHTSVILLE — The tiny saplings poking up through the weeds on the 7,156-acre Woodson community reforestation project can be hard to spot. About 2 feet tall and dotted with just a handful of leaves, the baby hardwoods barely peek over the prairie grass. But give it three years, said biologist Mark Tidwell, and the one-time soybean and wheat fi elds will be well on their way back to resembling the woods and wetlands that existed before the bulldozers and tractors first came through. “We just plant them and let Mother Nature take over from there,” Tidwell said. “They seem to do pretty good.”
The Woodson project, which hugs the Arkansas River in south Pulaski County, is the largest Arkansas property to be rehabilitated through the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Wetlands Reserve Program. The land was thick with trees and carved through with oxbow lakes before it was tilled up in the 1960s, when skyrocketing soybean prices persuaded many farmers to plant all the land they could.
Landowner Gar Lile led the push to get the Woodson property enrolled in the federal program aimed at restoring wetlands to improve water quality, reduce fl ooding and improve bird and wildlife habitat. While soil on the Woodson project land is rich enough, farming it was difficult without extensive irrigation systems, he said. And hills and rivulets carved by fl oodwaters from the Arkansas River made the fi elds diffi cult to navigate. “Economically and from a land-use perspective, this is defi nitely a better use of the land,” Lile said. So he persuaded 11 adjoining landowners to give up farming and dedicate their fi elds to the Wetlands Reserve Program. In exchange for a lifetime easement and a promise never to farm it again, landowners were given a one-time payment of more than $700 an acre. The $1.2 million rehabilitation was paid for with money from the reserve program, which is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Arkansas ranks second among states in the number of acres rehabilitated under the Wetlands Reserve Program. About 185,000 acres are enrolled in the program in the Natural State. While the program offers landowners the option of granting only temporary easements lasting 10-30 years, more than 80 percent of landowners have opted for permanent easements.Audubon Arkansas and Ducks Unlimited were hired to oversee the rehabilitation work at the Woodson project. “It’s part of their mission to restore wetlands, and they make some money off of it to help with their other programs,” Tidwell explained. Audubon Arkansas was responsible for planting about 3,500 acres of the Woodson project. The organization has worked on rehabilitation projects before, including a project near Danville last year. The Wetlands Reserve Program is a good way to protect the land, Audubon Director Ken Smith said. “It’s an incentive program for farmers to no longer plant marginal lands that are easily erodable and that used to be prime wetlands,” he said. Rehabilitating the wetlands will bring many birds back to the area, said Kevin Pierson, Audubon’s conservation director.
Pierson spent an afternoon this week watching red-winged blackbirds, blue-winged teal, hawks and other birds already laying claim to the land. “The Arkansas River is a major fl yway for migratory birds,” he said. More ducks, geese, raptors and pelicans are expected to frequent the rehabilitated land eventually. Of particular interest to birdwatchers will be the osprey, bald eagles, redheaded woodpeckers and prothonotary warblers listed as Arkansas “birds of conservation interest.” “Birds on that list are ones that can be used as a focus for conservation,” Audubon Bird Conservation Director Dan Scheiman said. “Some of them are rare throughout their range; some of them are rare only in Arkansas.”Biologists tested soil types to determine what types of trees would thrive on the project and provide appropriate habitat. The seedlings planted include oak, ash, pecan, sycamore, cypress, tupelo, buttonbush and cottonwood. Oxbow lakes that were dried out decades ago to make more room for planting were dammed last summer, creating shallow watering holes to attract birds, frogs and other wildlife. Already, dozens of blue-winged teal have found their way back to the pools.
While landowners participating in the Wetlands Reserve Program give up farming, they still can profi t from their land by leasing it out for hunting and fi shing. On the Woodson project, parcels will be planted with wheat, clover, beans and peas to attract deer and other wildlife. Some timber harvesting may be allowed in the future — if it won’t harm bird habitat. “We are going to maximize the migratory bird habitat on that property,” Arkansas Wetlands Reserve Program coordinator Jody Pagan said. “If it doesn’t protect or enhance the long-term integrity of the tract for migratory birds, it’s not something they can do.”
