By Tom Kelly
Editor and Publisher

Sometime during the early half of the 1950's I was a young reporter at the Winn Parish Enterprise in Winnfield, taking notes at a regular monthly meeting of the Winn Parish Police Jury. A delegation from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, or whatever name the agency went by then, was making a presentation to the Parish governing authority, asking for an unusual action. (If memory serves, one of the LDWF group was Game Warden Hoyt Harrington of Winnfield, father of H.W. Harrington who operates a machine shop today in Dodson, two blocks down the street from our present Journal office.)

The group asked the Police Jury to establish a closed season on deer hunting for five years, during which time they, the LDWF, would begin a program of releasing deer in the woods of Winn Parish to build of a herd which could then be hunted. The Jury agreed to the proposition.

Sometime later, I accompanied a group from the Police Jury and the Wildlife agency out into the woods somewhere in the west part of Winn Parish. A part of the caravan was a truck containing cages of white tail deer which had been trapped, as I recall, in the hardwood forested area along the Mississippi River bottoms. We stopped. I focused and cocked an old 4x5 Speed Graphic camera while the LDWF guys unlatched the cages. I got off a couple of quick exposures as a group of three, maybe four - I don't remember exactly - deer sniffed the cage momentarily, then bolted into the woods and were out of sight in a flash. I was twenty-something, and had been around the area woods more or less all my life. It was the first time I had seen a deer outside of a zoo. That was the beginning.

It was also near the beginning of the widespread practice of modern forestry as a sustainable industry in Louisiana and the Southeast. Forestry and development of wild game habitat have grown up together during that half-century, and are most successfully done as part of the same management program, complementing each other to maximize timber and wild game production on the same acreage. I witnessed such a successful enterprise the last week of May this year, during a two-day field tour at the Cooksville Forestry and Wildlife Research Area on the Walker Brothers Farm at the small Mississippi community of Paulette, 50 miles southeast of Starkville, just across the Alabama state line from Aliceville.

The Area is a joint venture of the Walker Brothers Farm, Mississippi State University, the Mississippi Forestry Commission, and BASF Corporation to experimentally test various management practices for results in timber and game productivity.

At the Field Tour 2003 at Cooksville Research Area, Bobby Watkins, technical specialist for BASF's Field Development & Technical Services Group, reminded the tour group of about 20 guests how the Southern forest has changed over the past 50 to 100 years.

Before commercial logging began, the forest regularly saw fire - started either from natural causes, or by the Native Americans who used fire to control and clear the undergrowth for game and other uses. Various game and bird species found survival niches to their liking in the variety of forage plants which grew up on the forest floor, as fire kept the brushy hardwoods under control.

As logging took down the old-growth trees, and fire was kept out of the forest whenever possible, a new undergrowth of brushy hardwooods, sweetgum and others, grew up and choked out the juicy plants used for food by the forest wildlife. Thus in time game species found less food, and became scarcer.\par }{\plain Mississippi State University biologist Dr. Wes Burger, one of the four guides on the Field Tour 2003, said that a fundamental fact of ecology is that every species is adapted to exploit a particular plant community in the forest. If the plant community is there, the animal can flourish.

On the Walker Brothers Farm, a variety of timber plots are treated to study the effects of chemical and mechanical control of forest growth, and on the production of forage plants for various game species.

Results range from an untreated forest area that may grow in timber value at $2 to $3 per acre per year, with undesirable hardwood species crowding out game browse and competing for nutrients with the pines, to a treated area earning at the rate of $100 per acre per year.

With 40 acres of timber at $100 per yer growth, that's $100,000 over 25 years - making the cost of doing nothing on your tract $100,000, according to Bobby Watkins' calculations.

Herbicide treatments such as BASF's Arsenal, or Chopper, can be applied in a variety of ways - by helicoptor, with a skidder-mounted spray rig, a back-pack spray, or by the method called "Hack and Squirt," injecting small amounts of the chemical into specific trees.

In addition to chemical herbicides, depending upon the terrain and the desired result, mechanical control of brush includes the use of a specially-designed tractor-drawn disk to take down weeds and smaller stem saplings.

Dr. Steve Demarais, professor of wildlife and fisheries at Mississippi State, said white-tailed deer browse is enhanced with application of Arsenal, which opens the way for growth of legumes such as lespedeza, partridge pea, and beggarweed, and kills brush hardwood and weeds. Many of the legumes produce 20 to 25 per cent more protein in the foliage with the competing brush plants under control. Arsenal works well for pine timber also, controlling the sweetgum and other competitive hardwoods.

Dr. Jeanne Jones, professor, department of wildlife and fisheries, Mississippi State University, does research on habitat restoration and management of private and public lands. A plant specialist, she showed the variety of wild plants whose growth is restored in the herbicide management program at Walker Farms.

Professionally managed forest lands are making use of these methods to enhance the profit from pine timber, and also provide game habitat for recreation. Private, non-industrial landowners still own over 65 percent of Southeastern forest lands, but do much less intensive management.

For additional information about the experimental results, contact Bobby Watkins, 662-323-7950, Starkville MS, email at watkinrm@basf.com

Funds are available through the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service and other agencies to assist with cost of wildlife habitat development and other forestry management practices.

Back