The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission held a live presentation on YouTube Thursday to quell rumors over a false social media post about Dave Donaldson Black River Wildlife Management Area.
The trouble started at a recent public meeting about the WMA last week in Jonesboro. Luke Naylor, chief of the commission’s wildlife management division, showed a slide that listed items that the commission originally proposed to renovate the popular duck hunting area in Northeast Arkansas.
A person representing a group called the Arkansas Tiller Handle Outlaws & Performance Boats, posted a screenshot of the slide on a popular Facebook page. The post went viral and foisted a “fake news” brushfire on the commission.
The provocateur did not post the next slide, titled, Preferred Scenario — Refinements. That slide showed some controversial aspects of the first slide crossed out. Naylor explained at that meeting that those items were deleted because they would be too detrimental to public access.
Naylor was the primary presenter on Thursday’s session along with Rob Willey, the commission’s habitat program coordinator. Commission director Austin Booth moderated the session.
Naylor repeated that the agency will not decommission the Little River Dam, nor will it remove the east end levee at the upper end of the Winchester Green Tree Reservoir.
The original plan called for permanently closing siphons. The new slide said the siphons will be left open as needed.
The old slide said the agency would remove all of the slough plugs between the Black River and tributary channels and sloughs. The new slide changed “all” to “most.”
The renovations are still in the design phase, Booth said, and will not be implemented for two more years.
On Friday, the Facebook site remained ablaze with hyperbole about the Game and Fish Commission conspiring to destroy public duck hunting. Against this backdrop, Naylor and Willey were edgy and defensive during Thursday’s presentation.
Instead of concentrating on refuting the Facebook misinformation, Naylor and Willey made the presentation an educational exercise about managing bottomland forests. They plunged deep into the minutiae of bottomland forest management, including a detailed history of timber degradation at the green tree reservoirs. They dove deep into the process that the commission is using to renovate the state’s green tree reservoirs, the most popular of which are in a highly degraded condition.
Biologists are most comfortable in the thicket of “data” and “process,” but all of that information has been thoroughly explained and disseminated in public forums. Naylor and Willey shot a very loose group on the intended target, the Facebook “Fake News” Fiasco.
Public land duck hunters are upset that the commission’s new water management protocols on Dave Donaldson Black River WMA and other popular green tree hunting areas will not allow enough water to support hunting opportunities for a full 60-day duck season. Naylor and Willey acknowledged that reality. They explained that the green tree areas will be managed at lower water levels than before, and that new water management protocols will focus on moving water through the green tree reservoirs during the growing season instead of holding water.
“Growing season” is the salient phrase of this discussion. This is necessary, they explained, because trees need moving water to infuse oxygen into their root systems during the growing season, which extends into late fall. Stagnant water is anoxic and damages root systems during the growing season.
During the dormant season, anoxic water does not damage trees. Green tree reservoirs can hold water during the dormant season, so that’s when the areas will offer maximum duck hunting opportunity.
A large portion of the presentation was a question-and-answer session taken from emails, text messages and Facebook. Here, Booth — an attorney — employed an effective courtroom tactic of letting a hostile witness discredit himself on the stand. The “witness,” again representing the Arkansas Tiller Handle Outlaws, cited Naylor’s Kansas nativity and the fact that Naylor did post-graduate work in California. He questioned Naylor’s qualifications for managing Arkansas forests.
Fixating on the Education portion of Naylor’s resume ignores the fact that Naylor was the state’s waterfowl biologist for 16 years. His experience in Arkansas far exceeds his experience elsewhere.
Naylor noted that highly respected forest management experts outside of the agency compiled the data and context for the modernized forest management proposals. Naylor’s role is to execute a management strategy based on aggregated data.
The commission will hold another public meeting on this subject Feb. 10 in Jonesboro.
