Brent Birch: Guided by History

What Birch has in hunting The Grand Prairie, of which he’s written a comprehensive history, is Arkansas’s famous flooded timber bottomlands. Hunting within them, the chittering of a talented caller bringing greenhead mallards fluttering through oak limbs to splash into tannin-stained waters, is an experience about which the word “spiritual” is not hyperbolic. Working in concert with those flooded forests are the rice fields of eastern Arkansas and the Delta, all of it fed by the confluence of waterways that that funnel to the Mississippi River, flooding so regularly as to preserve the wild places Birch says are “still in existence today because they're not worth doing anything else with...these wild places give ducks a place to go where they want to be, where they want to seek refuge, where they want to eat, where they want to loaf.”

But those places are under pressure, and as a leading voice for Arkansas waterfowling and editor of Greenhead Magazine, Birch is adamant, “The hunter has to look at controlling the controllables and think about how much pressure we're putting on ducks. And then we've got to do all we can from a habitat standpoint, too. A lot of that falls on the private landowner, the private land duck hunter. But the public land guys can have influence on that too. Those are probably the two biggest things.”

Those “two biggest things” are the purview of Ducks Unlimited of which Birch says, “I'd hate to think where we would be without Ducks Unlimited. When they came on the scene, ducks were in a bad way. Somebody had the foresight to create an entity that really cared about ducks and wanted to see them rebound. I value the work they do coast-to-coast, border-to-border, or even across borders, because they work in Mexico and Canada, too.” Even as an admitted Arkansas parochialist, that expansive approach appeals to Birch. “I mean, [ducks] leave here in the late winter and come back in the early fall, and they've got to have places to survive and do well in between.” 

Birch can’t help but bring it all back to Arkansas. “DU is at the forefront of helping the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission restore the green tree reservoirs that provide a public land hunting experience. Their ability to help raise dollars and also to funnel those through programs that have matching funds available is huge for helping pay for the restoration of these places, which is extremely expensive.”

Birch’s passion is as deep as his knowledge of the sport is comprehensive. At fifty-five he’s passed through Professors Jackson and Norton’s first four stages of a hunter’s life: Shooter, Maximalist, Trophy, and Method hunter. Now he finds himself ascended, in the fifth and final phase, that of The Sportsman. Of that evolution, he says, “The satisfaction you get of taking someone and allowing them to experience something that I've done a thousand times, [and] they start asking me questions or inquiring how I hunt and my thoughts on the sport itself, and you start to see them replicate some of those things, and eventually evolve to this point that there's a lot more to it than just what we're killing, that's a pretty satisfying piece of this.”

Perhaps that portion of his evangelical nature, his waterfowl ministry if you will, is the most critical to the welfare of the ducks and the passion that is hunting them. Birch knows that the only way ducks and duck hunting survive, are through the personal attentions of every hunter. Ethical hunters making ethical hunters is critical so he exhorts duck hunters to, “Get the full picture of what's involved to make a duck season, because it's really a 12-month-out-of-the-year deal. It's not the 60-day duck season because there's something we as hunters could be doing all the time to make this thing better than it is today for our kids and grandkids and on down the line.” Through his personal efforts and his partnerships with organizations like Ducks Unlimited, Brent Birch spreads the faith that it will happen.