Holla If You Need Us

March 26, 2023 — Day 39

We stayed up late playing board games last night. I came in second in both of them. Susan was second to last, so I think it was a good evening. We headed over to the Holla Bend National Wildlife Refuge around mid-day to see what we could see. We knew it wasn’t a good birding time, but I wanted to get a lay of the land for tomorrow’s adventure.

The fertile bottoms along the Arkansas River have long provided a home for man. The Osage and Cherokee Indians called this area along the Arkansas River home. Holly Bend was named after an early settler Holly Brown.

Around 1830, a survey crew began surveying the entire area. Subsequent mapping showed a misspelling of Holly Bend, changing it to the present usage of Holla Bend.

I wonder if Holly and Edith knew each other?

It is heavily wooded in places.

And open grassland in others.

This is still actively farmed.

Today the refuge continues its farming program for wildlife. Crops are planted and left in the fields. Many of the shallow depressions on the refuge are irrigated to encourage the growth of native wildlife foods and supplemented with plantings of milo and millet. In the fall and winter, these areas are flooded to provide habitat for migrating ducks and geese.

It is a beautiful place, we’re planning on coming back tomorrow morning to see more birds, first stop will be this observation deck.

We were about 20-25 feet in the air here. We spoke with some locals and they said that there was a 1,000 year flood back in ’19 and the water would have been above our heads. The structures were all destroyed, many animals drowned.

Oh Donna, we’re east enough to find Cheer Wine!

It was pretty good. Sweet, but good. I’m not sure it will make it into a permanent rotation, but man, I wish I could eat ice cream, a Cheer Wine vanilla float would be epic!

(susan here: Wow. That was…something else. It’s Dr Pepper but a cherry version. Really, really sweet. My pancreas is still trying to figure out what to do with the sugar from that one sip.)

New Life Birds: 2, the Lesser (or Greater, we’re not sure yet) Scaup and the Bufflehead. We found both of these on the drive home.