DUCKS CAME FOR RICE, HUNTERS CAME FOR RICE AND THEY BOTH MET IN THE GRAND PRAIRIE

Year after year, waterfowl have followed the ancestral Mississippi Flywayand made their usual stops, where along the way they feasted abundantly in theforested White River bottomlands on acres of high-energy pinoak acorns andaquatic plants, like wild millet, Chufa, and smartweed.

Before rice production came to the Grand Prairie,ducks were found foraging in the small prairie wetlands, seasonal herbaceouswetlands, the vast flooded bottomland, hardwood forests of the White andArkansas Rivers, and other smaller meandering rivers and bayous.

Once rice had been plantedfor the first time in the first decade of the twentieth century in theeast-central part of the state, it spread rapidly throughout the Grand Prairie,mainly in the counties of Arkansas and Prairie and small sections in westernMonroe and eastern Lonoke during that decade and especially during the 1920sand the 1930s. Doing so, prairie lands, bounded by the bottomlands of four streams, the White andArkansas Rivers, Bayou Meto, and Wattensaw Bayou, could not exist and was converted tofarmland, so the prairies essentially vanished after 40 years.

Rice changed the flyway intwo ways. For one, it moved a lot of the waterfowl migration from theMississippi River westward to the rice-growing regions of Arkansas. Second, italso shifted lots of waterfowl from overflying Arkansas and going to the ricefields of Louisiana. No place in the Grand Prairie of eastern Arkansas prior tothe construction of reservoirs reaped rice’s benefit more so than the twinlakes of Jacob’s Lake and Pecan Lake in Arkansas County.