calsfoundation@cals.org
June 12, 1980
The public got its first look at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s plan to end a ten-year-long controversy by taking control over major areas in the middle and lower Cache River Basin for a national waterfowl refuge. The 62,000-acre Cache River National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1986, is the most important wintering area for ducks and the largest remaining tract of contiguous bottomland hardwood forest in North America. It runs along the floodplain of the Cache River and Bayou DeView for seventy air miles from the mouth of the Cache River at Clarendon (Monroe County) to Grubbs (Jackson County), encompassing Jackson, Monroe, Prairie, and Woodruff counties. In February 2004, the ivory-billed woodpecker, once thought extinct, was rediscovered on the refuge.