When the topic is duck searching in Arkansas, most individuals consider the japanese half of the state. Nonetheless, a number of the oldest and most historic duck-hunting golf equipment are in an space of southwest Arkansas close to the place the Little River empties into the Pink River.
This waterfowl-rich space of 18,000 acres is managed by 5 non-public searching clubs–the Hempstead County Looking Membership (generally often called Grassy Lake), Yellow Creek, Po-Boy, Cypress Bayou and Bee Bayou. The Grassy Lake membership was based in 1897 and owns nearly 6,400 acres in these bottomlands. Yellow Creek was shaped in 1946 and owns 2,206 acres of bottomland hardwood forest close to McNab in Hempstead County (which had a inhabitants of simply 68 individuals within the 2010 census).
The golf equipment flood inexperienced timber for duck searching and in addition handle their land for deer searching. Yellow Creek, as an example, has about 25 duck blinds (just a few of which have kitchens) for members to make use of and 20 deer stands. These golf equipment additionally characteristic turkey searching, squirrel searching and fishing.
In its February/March 2017 concern, the upscale Southern life-style journal Backyard & Gun featured a narrative wherein author Invoice Heavey accompanied famous Arkansas enterprise leaders Randy Wilbourn of Little Rock and Emon Mahony of El Dorado bream fishing on Yellow Creek, which turns into Beard’s Lake close to Millwood Lake.
“Six of us crammed right into a 16-foot skiff with a pail filled with crickets and too many rods, attempting to fill the cooler for the ‘Brim Rodeo,’ the annual barbeque that the Wilbourn and Mahony clans have been holding collectively each spring for almost 20 years at their searching camps in southwest Arkansas’ Little River bottoms,” Heavey wrote. “A few of the golf equipment right here date from the Nineties and are among the many oldest within the state. … The bottoms are like Eden however with greater mosquitoes–18,000 acres of waterways, swamps and bottomlands.
“They’re residence to the most important breeding inhabitants of alligators within the state, venomous snakes (rattlers, cottonmouths, copperheads and coral snakes), birds just like the tricolored heron, the white ibis and the wooden stork, and virgin stands of 350-year-old bald cypress.”
Method again in 1950, Dwight Moore of the College of Arkansas wrote a paper on Grassy Lake titled “A Biologist’s Paradise.” Moore famous that the lake is nearly three miles lengthy and greater than a mile huge in locations with a mean depth of solely three to 4 ft. He mentioned one cypress tree measured 24 ft in circumference, with most of the bushes a minimum of 110 ft tall.
“The lake and adjoining land are owned by the Hempstead County Looking Membership, with members mainly in Hope, Texarkana and Nashville,” Moore wrote. “There is a restricted membership, and these well-advised males attempt to take care of the lake in as pure situation as attainable. On this account, the wealth of plant and animal life is little disturbed and thus renders it a veritable biologist’s paradise. However entry to the lake is strictly on a foundation of particular permission from the membership.
“The identify Grassy Lake has evidently been utilized due to the quite a few stands of Southern wild rice. This coarse grass grows to a top of 10 to 14 ft in massive and small patches all through the lake. It’s in lots of of those dense growths that the alligators dwell. They could be noticed by very cautious method, however too usually the alligators’ ears are extra delicate than the observer’s eyes, they usually slip away, leaving solely the traces of their presence within the mud and vegetation.”
Moore went on to explain the cottages of membership members, the boathouses, the massive oak bushes across the cottages and the varieties of ferns discovered few different locations in Arkansas.
“From the boat touchdown, marked lanes prolong towards varied components of the lake,” he wrote. “The extra shallow components of the lake are dominated by buttonbush, which in lots of locations kinds dense thickets, even in water a number of ft deep. On this account, the boat lanes have to be marked to make sure the secure return of those that exit to fish or hunt. … Towards the west aspect of the lake, there may be appreciable open water the place the cypress bushes and buttonbush happen solely in scattered bunches. However even right here the water is just waist deep.”
The searching golf equipment on this space acquired some undesirable consideration when members entered right into a protracted authorized battle with Southwestern Electrical Energy Co. over the development of the John W. Turk Jr. coal-fired energy station. The 600-megawatt station offers electrical energy to SWEPCO prospects in Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. Building started in 2008, and the plant was commissioned on Dec. 20, 2012. The development value was $1.8 billion.
In a March 2011 story distributed nationally by The Related Press, Jeannie Nuss wrote: “The barbed-wire fence surrounding the Hempstead County Looking Membership divides greater than property strains. It separates wealthy from poor. On one aspect: rich duck hunters who’ve preserved a personal forested paradise largely untouched by chain saws. On the opposite: the individuals of a struggling Arkansas city the place jobs are scarce and households dwell in run-down trailers.
“The hunters are actually waging a bitter authorized battle over development of a coal-fired energy plant, and the dispute has laid naked the category tensions which have lengthy beset this rural space. Townspeople welcome the brand new facility as a result of it’s going to carry jobs and helpful tax income. Membership members concern the plant will spew pollution that trigger acid rain, threatening the pristine searching grounds they’ve protected for greater than a century.”
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Senior Editor Rex Nelson’s column seems commonly within the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He is additionally the writer of the Southern Fried weblog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
