LITTLE ROCK If Arkansas real estate agents like to use the "location, location, location" theme, many Arkansas deer hunters reply with "habitat, habitat, habitat."
They realize that without suitable habitat, all the wishing in the world for deer won't bring them to where the hunters can get a shot at them.
Habitat is one of the six elements of the new Strategic White-tailed Deer Management Plan of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. The other categories of the plan are Resource, Sociological, Education, Communication and Enforcement.
The plan created with the assistance of several dozen private citizens who participated in idea and planning sessions, and their influence is reflected in many of the plan's objectives. It was approved by AGFC's commissioners at their February meeting in Dumas. The plan supplants a 1999 deer management plan for Arkansas. It is called the 2007 plan because most of it was constructed last year.
Today's focus is on a summary of the Habitat portion of the plan.
Arkansas's terrain is as varied as Arkansas's people. Mountains, swamps, extensive forests and wide farm fields are present over much of the state. So are highways and cities. All of these factors figure into the deer habitat segment of the management plan>
"Ideal" habitat for white-tailed deer is hard to pinpoint, but not nearly as difficult is the conclusion that deer are adaptable and can live and even thrive under varying circumstances. Deer habitat in Arkansas also has to recognize that by far the most land used, or potentially used, by deer is privately owned, not in governmental hands.
The management plan lists a simple goal of "enhance and improve deer habitat." That's easy too lay out for Arkansans to see. Everybody wants this.
The plan then divides habitat work and goals into that on AGFC lands, that on other public lands and that on private lands, which includes the large corporately-owned acreages of south Arkansas.
Sometimes a tract will fall into more than one of these three divisions, and an example is the new Moro Big Pine Wildlife Management Area near Hampton in Calhoun County. This is 15,923 acres, much of it bottomlands, that is being worked by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission, Arkansas Forestry Commission, Potlatch Corporation and The Nature Conservancy, and it is open for public recreational use.
The AGFC has a number of private lands biologists stationed all over the state. These are professionals who work with private landowners to enhance and improve deer habitat with techniques like timber thinning, prescribed burning, replanting of trees and planting of seasonal materials used as food by deer.
The new deer plan is now in operation, and its structure calls for continued cooperative input from advisory groups and from the Arkansas public. The plan also specifies that AGFC wildlife management areas to be worked to meet "public expectations, habitat composition and deer populations."
The complete deer management plan can be found online at: http://www.agfc.com/hunting/deer/deerplan_revision.aspx.
