Gaining Ground
We're proud of the efforts our president, Gar Lile has done to aide conservation in Arkansas. This article was published in the November/December 2005 issue of Audubon Magazine. We hope you enjoy!
Lile Real Estate
AUDUBON MAGAZINE: by Mara Leveritt, November-December 2005
A MALLARD CRUISING OVER the Arkansas River about 15 miles south of Little Rock might be inclined to treat the swath below as just another stretch of inhospitable farmland: an open, largely treeless, mostly waterless landscape. But on this fl yover the duck catches the glint of a pond. It’s a notable feature because, just a few months ago, it didn’t exist.
As Gar Lile watches the duck splash down, he knows he’s seeing not just a bird landing but history changing course. Over the millennia, as the Arkansas River wound its way through this area south of Little Rock, it created 100,000 to 150,000 acres of wildliferich wetlands. To local farmers, the land was valuable only for hunting. Until 1973, that is, when the soybean market topped out near $13 a bushel.
Suddenly, farmers were draining and clearing even the most challenging wetlands, bent on planting every acre they could. By the time, a few years later, the price of soybeans had begun to drop, the damage was done. And in recent years, with soybeans averaging about $5 a bushel, the land was again nearly as worthless to farmers as it now was to deer, mallards, northern bobwhites, and other wildlife.
Lile, 43, who runs a Little Rock real estate fi rm and owns more than a thousand acres here, found a way to reverse that tragedy. In late 2000 he began urging neighbors to form a partnership and enroll their property in the Wetlands Reserve Program (WRP). By forming a partnership, Lile explained, they could combine their marginal cropland, sell a permanent easement on it to the government, have it returned to wetlands-and retain ownership.
For Lile, who grew up hunting and fi shing, the idea of restoring marginal cropland to its “highest and best use” was irresistible. “The thought of starting at ground zero and building a piece of property into a utopian wildlife reserve is incredible,” he says. “For me the decision was easy.” For his neighbors it was anything but.
After about a year of work, says Lile, 11 landowners joined in the project, which totals 7,186 acres. When the group’s WRP application was completed in 2003, the site became the largest tract of private farmland in the country slated to be restored to wetlands.
In 2004 Audubon Arkansas and Ducks Unlimited began the restoration, under contract to the USDA. The fi rst step was a massive digging effort to restore water fl ow. Next the groups planted more than a million trees, including cottonwood, bald cypress, willow oak, and water oak.
By early 2005 the area, known as the Woodson Project, was coming alive, with 2,100 acres of shallow and permanent bodies of watermost are 5 to 10 acres, but one slough is more than 200-250 acres of native grasses, and more than 3,500 acres of newly planted trees. As spring progressed, the scars from last year’s big dig were fast being softened by green.
That’s good for the ducks, as well as for the Wilson’s snipes, American woodcocks, herons, egrets, and blacknecked stilts that have already begun populating the site. And it’s exciting for visitors like Ken Smith, executive director of Audubon Arkansas, who has already seen a lot of Mississippi kites here. “I can’t help but think of the incredible forests
and wetlands that once existed here,” says Smith. “At one time, I am sure, ivorybilled woodpeckers dug for grubs under the bark of the old bald cypress trees and willow oaks. The partnership with Gar Lile, his neighbors, and Audubon is the best and perhaps the only opportunity we will have to restore the Arkansas River bottomlands.”Good news gets around, it seems. About two years ago 19 landowners approached Lile for advice about a similar project. Earlier this year, with his help, the group’s WRP application for an 11,400-acre wetlands-restoration project on the other side of the Arkansas River was accepted.
