HEBER SPRINGS – Students of Heber Springs High School had the opportunity to sit in with commissioners of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission today at a special town-hall style meeting in their school gymnasium.
“To my knowledge, this is the first time we’ve attempted to offer this direct involvement to students at an official meeting of the Commission,” Commission Chairman Andrew Parker said.
Students heard presentations focused on the many aspects of the aquatic wildlife and habitat in the Greers Ferry reservoir area. Bill Posey, AGFC assistant chief of fisheries, gave a presentation about the diversity of species and conservation work taking place in the tributaries upstream from Greers Ferry Reservoir. Then students heard an overview of the fishing and work the AGFC is doing on the reservoir itself in a presentation by Matt Schroeder, AGFC district fisheries supervisor. Christy Graham, AGFC trout program coordinator, concluded the presentation portion with a talk about the world-class trout fishery in the Greers Ferry Tailwater portion of the Little Red River.
The Commission also heard a presentation from AJ Riggs, AGFC wildlife health biologist, about current results from the 2020-21 chronic wasting disease monitoring effort. The AGFC received 7,808 samples from white-tailed deer and 57 samples from elk during the 2020-21 hunting seasons. Of those samples, 261 white-tailed deer and seven elk tested positive for the disease.
“This is an agency high of samples that have been collected by agency staff,” Riggs said. “All the credit goes to the AGFC’s wildlife management staff for their dedicated work throughout the year to meet our sampling goals.”
Riggs spoke about two important partnerships that have developed since the detection of the disease in Arkansas: the increased testing ability thanks to the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission and the latest research project being conducted by the University of Georgia on the impact CWD may be having on Arkansas’s deer population.
Thanks to increased testing brought on by the ALPC lab, turnaround time between when a hunter submits a sample and the time results are available has decreased. According to Riggs 94 percent of CWD tests submitted by the AGFC during the 2020-21 testing season were processed by the Arkansas lab.
“We’re still looking at an average of five to six days, but we’re figuring out how to make that as quick as possible,” Riggs said.
The University of Georgia is currently tagging and outfitting live deer in Arkansas’s CWD Management Zone to evaluate the impact of CWD on deer in the state and research any behavior changes associated with contracting the disease. To date, 84 deer have been captured, tagged or radio-collared and released for surveillance.
“In addition to that 36 of the female deer were outfitted with transmitters that will activate and alert researchers when the doe gives birth,” Riggs said.
