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Paper short abstract:

The creation of Big Lake Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas in 1915 was crucial to the survival of a narrow corridor along the Mississippi River Flyway. This paper traces the surprising fragility of the flyway over ten centuries of earthquakes, floods, and, finally, development-oriented drainage projects.

Paper long abstract:

For centuries the swamps and lakes in Eastern Arkansas served as a life sustaining stopover for many species of migratory birds long the Mississippi River Flyway from Central Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. One of four such flyways across the United States, it narrows considerably when it reaches Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee, literally forcing birds into a funnel and creating a great density of avian species. Intense logging and drainage activities in the early twentieth centuries threatened this important flyway’s collapse within a mere fifteen years. Little opposition arose until plans emerged to drain Big Lake, a feature of the landscape since at least the ninth century. A group of local settlers were the first to resist development, and together with a consortium of out-of-state sports hunters they secured the establishment in 1915 of the Big Lake National Wildlife Refuge – the first in the nation. The historiography on the Big Lake refuge focuses on the politics of its creation, but this paper will use a variety of documentary and geo-scientific data to trace the lake’s origins and the formative importance of more than nine centuries of periodic earthquakes, droughts, and indigenous interaction with the river. While it challenges the political narrative on certain points, the paper’s goal is to introduce geoscientific evidence to better understand its long history and surprising fragility. The flyway is already experiencing challenges because of Climate change. Will history repeat itself?