The White River National Wildlife Refuge is a 160,000 acres (650 km2) wildlife refuge located in Desha, Monroe, Phillips, and Arkansas counties in the U.S. state of Arkansas. The refuge is managed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
White River National Wildlife Refuge was created in 1935. The refuge is 3 to 10 miles (4.8 to 16 km) wide and encompassing 90 miles (140 km) of the lower 100 miles (160 km) of the White River. It also includes 3 miles (4.8 km) of the Arkansas Post Canal which is part of the Army Corps of Engineers' McClellan-Kerr Navigation System on the Arkansas River.
The refuge has the largest concentration of wintering mallard ducks in the Mississippi Flyway. It also has large concentrations of snow and Canada geese. The refuge is home to a population of black bears and four active bald eagle nests. It is believed by some to host one of the last populations of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a bird variously considered extinct or nearly so.
The refuge lies with the Mississippi lowland forests ecoregion. Within the refuge, the Sugarberry Natural Area includes a 973 acres (394 ha) old-growth bottomland hardwood forest of varied composition. The area contains four forest types: American Sweetgum, Nuttall's Oak, Willow Oak; Sugarberry, American Elm, Green Ash; American Sycamore, Pecan, American Elm; and Baldcypress.
The refuge has 356 natural and man-made lakes which make up 4,000 acres (16 km2) of the refuge. There are 154,000 acres (620 km2) of forestland, 900 acres (3.6 km2) of agricultural land, and 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) of grassland.
The refuge is classified as a Wetland of International Importance.
Famous quotes containing the words white, river, national, wildlife and/or refuge:
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A reaction: a boat which is going against the current but which does not prevent the river from flowing on.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“It appears to be a matter of national pride that the President is to have more mud, and blacker mud, and filthier mud in front of his door than any other man can afford.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)
“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)