No, this column is not about New York’s Central Park, but it is about what seems to be the goal of our wildlife management, which is to turn the state into one big Central Park. If you have been to Central Park, I am sure you have marveled at how the city managed to keep such a large block of trees and vegetation intact. And when you sit on a bench late in the afternoon and hear a wolf howl—-you better get up and head out of the park because the real wolves left about the time the settlers bought Manhattan Island.
Central Park is a welcome relief from the high-rises, traffic, and hordes of shoppers. But in fact not only is the park empty of buildings and other New York staples, it’s also empty of wildlife. Oh, the lake in the park gets a few ducks occasionally, and a squirrel or a pigeon might check out your bench to see if you left anything edible, but overall, it’s more like a nice movie set. Some rocky outcrops, a lot of trees, plants, and a cute little lake. Do you like it that way? Well, if you do, you’ll love the direction Arkansas seems to be taking when it comes to wildlife management; which is the Central Park direction. If the state keeps heading that way our grandchildren will just have little slivers of Arkansas that resembles what was once the Natural State. If you don’t believe me, check out the loss of wetlands and just for a clue, just think about why the Buffalo River was named.
We were once called the Bear State when we had bears in every county in the state with an estimated population of 50,000. But I guess, after we killed almost all of them, we were too embarrassed to keep the slogan “The Bear State”. Oh, I know we have restocked the black bear, and we even have a “hunting” season that allows baiting for bears. You put out bait and when the bears get used to stopping by for a quick snack, you blast away with your AR-15 and get your picture in the paper, kinda like a modern-day Davy Crocket. Well, killing around 200 bears annually when the bear population has already had a 90% reduction is very much like we’re heading for the Central Park look. How, can we say we’re restoring the state’s ecology when we are adding with one hand and taking away with the other? What would be wrong with going back to having bears in every county again, and then getting rid of the baiting and actually going on a bear hunt? The way we’re heading is to slowly but surely confine the restoration to one small area, have a lottery type hunting permit to kill off the “excess” , at least the excess in that county? It looks as if the way we’re going, one day the Little Rock Zoo will have a drawing to cull down any of the abundance of any part of the animals there. You know, “The Little Rock Zoo announced today, a drawing will be held to reduce the over-abundance of black tail antelopes.” Don’t chuckle. I know some folks that would be standing in line for the drawing.
To have proper wildlife management we much have a goal and that goal should be a statewide goal and not an attempt to restock something like elk and keep them confined to a small acreage around the Buffalo River, and then mow ‘em down when they reproduce. What’s wrong with having elk in South Arkansas instead just restoring one tiny part of one county? Restoring the ecology in the entire state should be an overriding priority, and not an attempt to add something else to shoot at and keep them penned up in a small section of the state.
I’ve hunted and fished all my life and the idea that I would kill something such as a black bear that is eating bait I put out, is not what I call hunting. Let’s insist the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission take, as an overriding commitment to the State’s ecology, a program to restore as much of a natural Arkansas as possible and protect the few functionally extinct animals like mountain lions.
In over two centuries we have systematically destroyed much of our state’s ecology by, at first not having any controls on wildlife management and our great grandparents were part of a slaughter of animals and birds such as the passenger pigeon. There is a place down on the lower Ouachita River called Pigeon Hill that once was a roosting place for passenger pigeons. Hundreds of thousands of birds once roosted here until they were systemically slaughtered. We can’t restore the passenger pigeon, but we can restore many of the other animals and birds that were once so plentiful. When you add back to what was taken away from a perfect environment, the result will always surprise you in how much you improved the overall ecology.
We have the opportunity to do just that by adding back the predators, and the way to add is to focus on what once was, and 4000 black bears ain’t what is once was. If some of those 4000 black bears can roam the woods in southeast Arkansas or north central Arkansas and not gobble up any little children or even chickens or calves, why can’t Union County or even Pulaski county have the bears return? Actually, Vertis, my wife, spotted a black bear one morning about 5 a.m. near our house, when we were going out for coffee and I went back in the house for my billfold when a black bear ran across my neighbor’s yard under a nightlight. That same week on a road behind our house, two teenagers out parking reported a Bigfoot sighting, which I am sure was a bear standing upon its hind legs. It had wandered up from the Felsenthal Wildlife Refuge.
But back to the threat to turn Arkansas into Central Park West. It seems to me that trying to restore the ecology of the entire state should be a goal that would, if accomplished, give us the ability to have not only a thriving and sustaining abundance of wildlife, but it would give us multiple and varied numbers of game animals, and in the process control the hordes of feral hogs and other out-of-control animals that filled the vacuum left when we made the predators essentially extinct.
The few places that have reintroduced animals into their wildlife mix are examples of the benefits that arise when ecology is retuned toward what it once was. We can never go completely back to what the early settlers found when they first arrived, but we still have millions of acres that are suitable habitat for the reintroduction of bears, wolves, and mountain lions. Let’s move toward the goal of rewilding Arkansas instead of the rush to become Central Park West.
Richard Mason is a registered professional geologist, downtown developer, former chairman of the Department of Environmental Quality Board of Commissioners, past president of the Arkansas Wildlife Federation, and syndicated columnist. Email richard@ gibraltarenergy.com.