Exploring Red Slough

A May morning in east Oklahoma

by Mel White

With a rumble like faraway thunder, a flock of White Ibises lifts off from a shallow wetland, whirling in pied confusion before forming a ragged line aimed at the northern horizon. Ignoring the commotion, Great Egrets continue their slow stalking, and snowies their manic chasing of fish, crawfish, frogs, and whatever else the water hides.

Not far away, four men with binoculars stand on a levee, scanning a marshy impoundment. “Least Bittern!” one calls, and a tawny bird skims the tops of the cattails before quickly dropping out of sight. A Pied-billed Grebe laughs somewhere as two Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks fly by, white wing patches shining in the sun. The ducks give their odd twitters and wheeps as they head for a nearby lake, where several Anhingas perch in dead trees. Below, a female Wood Duck leads a brood of eight young across the water. Common Moorhens and Purple Gallinules, too, will soon be raising young here—if they don’t fall prey to alligators.

None of these goings-on would be unusual in a Gulf Coast marsh, in Texas or Louisiana, say, but this happens to be a May morning in Oklahoma. Barely within its borders, true—just two miles from Texas and ten from Arkansas—but this is indeed the Sooner State, known for arid high-plains grassland and gypsum hills and the scrubby oak woods called the Cross Timbers.

Among biologists, conservationists, and birders, Oklahoma is also known for Red Slough Wildlife Management Area, a patchwork of creeks, wetlands, old fields, and woods covering 5,800 acres of flat bottomland just north of the Red River. Since it came into public ownership and conservation management less than 10 years ago, it’s become home to a diverse, and surprisingly anomalous, array of wildlife.

David Arbour of the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation has been conducting weekly bird surveys at Red Slough for five years. On this coolish Monday, he’s accompanied by Robert Bastarache, district biologist for the Ouachita National Forest, and Berlin Heck, the retired manager of nearby Little River National Wildlife Refuge. The mix of government agencies reflects the fact that Red Slough is an administrative patchwork as well as an ecological one.

“This was an operation called Push Creek Farm, growing mostly rice,” Bastarache says. “The owner wanted it to go to a public conservation purpose. He wanted a price that would have been too much for acquisition, but in 1996 he got money for enrolling in the federal Wetlands Reserve Program.” (The WRP pays landowners who allow property to be managed as wetlands while remaining in private ownership.) “The Conservation Fund later bought 3,855 acres and donated it to the Ouachita National Forest. They paid the difference between what the owner had already gotten through the WRP and the asking price, so it was more affordable. The Ouachita National Forest eventually bought the rest of the 5,814 acres.”

The question that arises, of course, is: Why the Forest Service? Why not the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the country’s national wildlife refuge system? The answer can be found, as is so often the case these days, in the compromises required by economic and political pressure. As Red Slough was being established, local cattle ranchers and poultry farmers were resentful of previous conservation-driven restrictions and worried about possible future regulatory actions. They found it easier to accept ownership by the Forest Service, under the Department of Agriculture, than by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, under the Department of the Interior.

After protracted wheeling and dealing, and with the WRP in the picture, what transpired was a unique partnership: the Ouachita National Forest owns Red Slough, but the area is managed by the National Resource Conservation Service (formerly the Soil Conservation Service), the national forest, and the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, in consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The private hunting organization Ducks Unlimited also provides funding and management assistance. To complicate matters further, more than 2,000 adjacent privately owned WRP acres are included in the general Red Slough management plan. Nothing else like Red Slough exists in the national forest system.

With so many politicians today quick to blame environmentalists and “government interference” for everything from oil prices to the problems of disposing of pig manure, this sort of ad hoc conservation arrangement has become increasingly common. No doubt the bullfrogs and bitterns don’t care which agencies’ logos are on the uniforms, as long as they’ve got a place to eat, sleep, and raise young.

“The Willow Flycatchers are back!” David Arbour calls, immediately after spotting the Least Bittern. In 2001 he discovered the Empidonax breeding at Red Slough, considerably south of its main range; the call note he’s just heard from a nearby willow-topped levee is his first record of the season. The flycatcher is one of several significant breeding species in the area, including Purple Gallinule (a nest at Red Slough in 2001 was the first confirmed in Oklahoma in 36 years), Black-bellied Whistling-Duck (its range has expanded north into the Red River area from central Texas), and American Bittern (another species south of its normal range), as well as Anhinga, Ruddy Duck, and Common Moorhen.

“We have possibly 20 pairs of King Rails here,” Arbour says. “I talked to a researcher who said this is one of the highest populations in the interior United States.

“Our best shot at seeing a King Rail is going to be right over here,” he says, pointing to an area of Pintail Lake crowded with cattail, rush, and American lotus. “We’ve got a pair nesting, and they usually show themselves.” The birds don’t appear this morning, though a series of keks proves their presence.

“We recently added a 160-acre tract of bottomland hardwoods where Swainson’s Warbler nests,” Arbour says, as the group climbs back into a national forest-owned Ford Explorer. Two recently sighted species, Greater Roadrunner and Bachman’s Sparrow, have brought the Red Slough bird list to 272, including such rarities as Swallow-tailed Kite, Yellow and Black rails, and a vagrant Ash-throated Flycatcher.

Arbour’s weekly surveys have made him intimately familiar with Red Slough’s expanse, from seasonal changes to the details of daily life.

“Is the Killdeer nest still over there?” Bastarache asks, on a levee near Otter Lake.

“Naw, a coon got it,” Arbour says. He knows where the alligators hang out, whether the Prothonotary Warblers have started nesting yet, and who’s living in the Tree Swallow houses at Unit 21.

As the SUV bounces over the levees that define Red Slough’s dozens of management units, the conversation illustrates how much of the area’s operation revolves around practical matters: allocating people and money, keeping the tractors running, repairing gates. And though the banter is easygoing, it’s obvious that there’s a certain amount of dissension about Red Slough’s purposes—if not in the Explorer, then in offices miles away.

“Our goal is to manage for maximum diversity of wildlife,” Robert Bastarache says. Some of those involved with Red Slough, though, see it as just another cog in the great duck-producing machine stretching from the prairie potholes of Canada to the hardwood swamps of the South. Arbour tries to make sure that the needs of nesting marsh birds, migrant shorebirds, and post-breeding waders are taken into consideration when schedules are made for draining and filling ponds and planting or clearing vegetation.

“They appreciate David because he’s here and he knows what’s happening on the ground,” Bastarache says. “With 5,800 acres and four different agencies, there’s a lot of coordination and cooperation that goes into it.”

“A lot of frustration,” Arbour quickly adds. “I tend to get real emotional about this place. We butt heads every now and then.”

Complicating the situation is the current drought in Oklahoma. “We usually get 45 inches of rain a year here,” Bastarache says. “It was about that for the first three years of the project. The past two, we haven’t had that much, so it’s changed the habitat, the bird populations, and the management. We have a very high evaporation rate here in the Oklahoma heat and wind.”

“Crawfish production is important,” Arbour says. “That’s the main food source for the birds here.”

“Winter rainfall is the determining factor for many species, and for many management issues,” Bastarache says.

The Explorer stops on a willow-lined levee beside Unit 14, and all pile out to look for migrant songbirds. Soon, Berlin Heck spots a small bird flitting from tree to tree. After a little stalking, an ID is confirmed: it’s a female Cerulean Warbler. Arbour is excited about the find.

“That’s one of the last warblers I’d expect to find here,” he says. “That’s 273 species for Red Slough.”

Three months later, the Oklahoma corn that was a foot tall in May is over head-high, and the fog is thick on an unusually cool midsummer morning. At dawn, David Arbour has set up a spotting scope on an observation platform beside Unit 44. Not much can be seen yet, but sounds drift in from all around: the squawk of a night-heron, the whistle of a Greater Yellowlegs, the chips of an early-rising Northern Cardinal, the tinking of Blanchard’s cricket frogs like Geiger counters in the marsh.

At this season, Arbour begins his survey by watching the flight of waders leaving Ward Lake, a wetland a mile east with abundant dead trees for nighttime roosting.

“It’s starting,” he says, as a Little Blue Heron appears, followed by another, and a group of five, all materializing out of the fog. “Watch these for that tricolored,” he says, referring to an out-of-range heron present the previous week. Then, “Here come the first ibises,” as a flock of White Ibises, adults and young, flies over. Great and Snowy egrets and Great Blue Herons join the parade, dozens of birds, but Arbour is disappointed that the numbers are so much smaller than a week ago.

“Yeah, something’s happened to our birds this morning. I think there are some oxbow lakes down on the Red River that are getting low and competing with us.”

Shortly after the Cerulean Warbler, he added species number 274 to the Red Slough list—a Canada Warbler—and he’s been busy keeping up with the breeding birds in the area: two Willow Flycatcher nests found and a total of 10 territorial pairs, for example, and King Rails leading broods on walks from one marsh to another.

Arbour’s truck pushes through giant ragweed to Unit 52, where the shallow water is dotted with adult and young Pied-billed Grebes and Common Moorhens. “Of all the units, this is by far the best for breeding,” he says. “There are more nesting birds here than in all the rest of the units combined. I call this the Brood Pool. There’s way more moorhens here than you can see. Before the vegetation got so high, there were 15 pairs, and each pair had five or six young.”

Two dozen Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks loaf around the edges of the wetland, or take off for circling flights, landing again to bicker and engage in brief wing-flapping quarrels. “I never get tired of seeing that bird,” Arbour says. “They seem so out of place here.”

At a call from the marsh, Arbour says, “There’s our Least Bittern, finally.” An American Bittern and a juvenile Purple Gallinule were present the week before, but neither shows itself today. He drives west to meet Robert Bastarache, and the two take Blackland Road to Unit 7, to check on more birds that seem out of place in the Red River bottoms of Oklahoma.

Six Roseate Spoonbills—one roseate colored, four pinkish, and one barely a shade past grayish-white—perch in low trees near the levee. As the truck approaches they fly a short distance to the edge of the pool, where three of them pick up sticks and begin bowing to each other. Now and then they drop the sticks to clap their bills. No doubt this courtship practice will be put to use next spring, somewhere on the Gulf Coast. The Wood Storks that accompanied them last week have wandered elsewhere, but 50 or more southbound sandpipers—Stilts, Spotteds, Pectorals, and assorted peeps—have paused to feed.

Back eastward, at Unit 16, juvenile Snowy Egrets (some of the 278 Arbour will count today) crowd together on branches sticking out from a brush pile, resting in the midday heat. Though the day started cool, the forecast is for 94 degrees—more typical of an Oklahoma summer, for sure, than flirtatious spoonbills and fledgling gallinules.

“Look, here’s our gator,” Arbour says, pointing to the borrow ditch paralleling the levee. The eyes and nostrils of a small alligator protrude above the brown water, the body and tail showing just under the surface as it slowly propels itself forward. Gators add considerable interest to the Red Slough environment, though nobody knows exactly how many there are or how they got here. Some undoubtedly occur naturally, since the species thrives a relatively short distance down the Red River in Arkansas. Some “problem” gators have been relocated from populated areas, and still others have been released after being confiscated in drug raids. (Apparently an alligator is considered a more effective watchdog than a pit bull at a truly up-to-date methamphetamine lab.)

Here and there a few Blue-winged Teal swim slowly along the edges of the impoundments, the first of the migratory ducks that will arrive over the next few months. With them will come the inevitable complaints from hunters that many wildlife-area managers must deal with: too much water, or not enough; too difficult access, or too easy; too much vegetation, or not enough; too early a season, or too late—as if Red Slough existed solely to provide recreation for a few weeks in the fall; as if rain could be requisitioned from a central warehouse.

Bird watchers complain, too, about locked gates and restricted access. Right-wingers complain about more private property being taken over by the feds. And the different agencies involved in management struggle to find compromises on issues large and small.

Meanwhile new generations of herons and egrets learn to catch crawfish, and Prothonotary Warblers and Painted Buntings prepare to leave for Central America, and flocks of sandpipers passing overhead spot the shimmer of mudflats and drop from the sky in search of bugs and worms. For people who care about the future of wildlife, Red Slough offers the hope that these and hundreds more species will find, season after season, a new and secure home in the Red River bottoms of Oklahoma.

Postscript: On September 8, David Arbour found Oklahoma’s first Least Grebe on Red Slough’s Unit 48. The bird stayed at the impoundment for three weeks. The record brought Red Slough’s cumulative species list to 278.

 

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Tim Gallagher, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-2443. email: twg3@cornell.edu