HITHER & YONDER
Bleeding shiner. Cliff White/Missouri Department of Conservation
A few stories and upcoming events worth knowin’ about from around the region:
Fish DNA and the Ice Age. Researchers testing fish DNA in Ozark streams found how genetic lines tell the story of ancient geology. Northern Ozark rivers got repeatedly rerouted by Ice Age glaciers, splitting and reconnecting drainages, while the more isolated southern rivers (Black, White, St. Francis, Spring) held onto their own unique species and genetics.
Plant your fall food plot's neighbors while you're at it. MDC's State Forest Nursery opens seedling orders September 1 through mid-April, selling native trees and shrubs for as little as 44 cents. Cheap way to do some real habitat work on the back forty this winter.
Alligator gar are making a comeback. MDC and partners have stocked more than 6,000 juvenile gar into southeast Missouri waters since 2013, working to bring back a fish that spent decades getting treated like a “trash species.”
Where does fine money go? AGFC just handed out $690,000-plus in wildlife fine money to conservation education grants across Arkansas, funding initiatives like Fishing in the Natural State, Project WILD, Archery in the Schools.
Cane Hill Harvest Fest. Mark September 19 on the calendar. The Cane Hill Harvest Festival returns to Historic Cane Hill in northwest Arkansas, and this year's tied to the nation's 250th with a look at the area's Revolutionary War veterans and a Cherokee syllabary printing demonstration.
Overturning The Roadless Rule. The Trump administration wants to roll back the 2001 rule protecting 59 million acres of national forest from logging and road-building, citing overgrown, disease-prone stands as a wildfire risk. Environmental groups are pushing back hard. Whatever side you land on, it's worth watching when this much public land is involved.
Heard a good story we ought to share next week? Hit "reply" and send it our way!
THE CURRENT STATE OF THE BEAR STATE
Arkansas Game & Fish Commission
Before it was The Natural State, Arkansas was known as The Bear State.
Something like 50,000 black bears roamed Arkansas's forests before settlers arrived. Hunters were drawn here for that population from the 1700s clear through statehood in 1836.
But by 1927, unregulated hunting and cleared land had knocked that number down to fewer than 100 bears.
AGFC spent a decade, 1958 to 1968, trapping bears out of Minnesota and Canada and turning them loose here. The plan worked, and more than 5,000 bears call Arkansas home today. That’s regarded as one of the most successful large-carnivore comebacks in the country.
Hunters play an important role in co-managing the bear population.
Hunters as Co-Managers
We had Spencer Daniels, AGFC's bear program coordinator, back on the show this week. We had him on the show about a year ago, right as he was starting the job. So this time we wanted an update: what's changed, what's coming this bear season, and what he's learned the hard way since.
Some of it's good news: The Ozarks and Ouachitas are still growing, slow and steady. The Gulf Coastal Plain is growing even faster. Some of it’s bad news: The White River area — one of the few pockets where bears held on when the rest of the state's population got wiped out — is actually declining right now, and AGFC doesn't fully know why yet.
Harvest tells its own story. 2023 was a record year, quota hit faster than ever. The last two seasons came in well under quota because the acorns dropped before the season even opened, and bears just stopped showing up to bait. So this year AGFC moved the opener up a week, hoping to catch hunters a window while baiting still works.
Why Hunt Over Bait?
Hunting bears up close over bait is what lets you actually judge one before you pull the trigger.
Whether the bear is old enough, and not a female, since a sow only has one or two cubs every other year and isn't mature till three. The real case for baiting over distance hunting is that it allows you to be selective.
But getting that close to Arkansas’s largest land predator comes with risks.
Know The Risks
Last year Arkansas saw two fatal bear attacks, the first in over 100 years.
It's heavy, and real families are still living with it, so we handled the conversation delicately. But we wanted to get Spencer's take on how to stay safe in bear country:
Keep your distance (Rule of Thumb: if you can hold your arm all the way out and your thumb doesn't cover the full bear, you're too close)
Never run, and fight back if a black bear comes at you. Carry bear spray or a side arm.
We got into explanations of last year’s unusual bear attacks towards the end of the episode. For anyone spending time in the woods, it’s a worthwhile safety lesson.
RELICS OF THE NEW DEAL ACROSS THE OZARKS
Credit: Shiloh Museum of Ozark History
This week on The Old Ozarks, we head out looking for "ary" trace of the Great Depression left on the Ozark landscape, and it turns out, once you know what to look for, you can hardly go "nary" a mile without finding one.
We'll start in Grandpa's hayfield with the hillside ribs known as Mangum terraces, tracing their spread from a North Carolina farm in the 1880s to the terracing craze that swept the Ozarks under FDR's New Deal. Along the way, our short sweetenin' digs up the backwoods twins "ary" and "nary," archaic descendants of "ever a" and "never a" that once peppered everyday Ozark speech.
Then it's on to the long sweetenin': a whirlwind tour of just how much New Deal alphabet-soup labor — the CCC, WPA, PWA, CWA, and NYA — physically remade this region, from state park lodges and courthouses to WPA schoolhouses, Razorback Stadium's earliest bones, and post office murals still hanging in Berryville and Fredericktown ninety years later.
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We’ll be back next week with more stories from the Ozarks.
Til then,
The Ozark Podcast