Date: 1/28/25 3:02 pm From: JACQUE BROWN <bluebird2...> Subject: Re: Different Short-billed Gull trip
I was considering making this drive this morning. I'm glad I didn't now. Was it a train delivering Chickens to the Simmons Plant? There isn't a whole lot of excuses for a random train to be parked over a crossing for several hours.
Jacque Brown, Centerton.
On Tuesday, January 28, 2025 at 11:34:08 AM CST, Joseph Neal <0000078cbd583d7c-dmarc-request...> wrote:
#yiv2630811354 P {margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;}My Dad grew up in Van Buren. I have that whole Arkansas River country in my DNA. I just couldn’t wait to go down there and sort through the Ring-billed Gulls for … a Short-billed Gull. Matthew Matlock photographed it at Lee Creek Park in Van Buren last Sunday (1/26)!Part of what drives this morning’s trip are memories of some previous successful and memorable Arkansas River rare gull trips. Gulls often found by Kenny and LaDonna. Like a trip, also with David Oakley, to see the Great Black-backed Gull at Dardenelle. I’m looking at my photo from January 23, 2015, of that gull, plus others, and thinking about running up the score with Matt’s Short-billed.Today, David and I load up in Fayetteville at 8 AM for the 1-hour +/- trip to Lee Creek Park. Then we’re in old town Van Buren, which I remember well from my childhood. Back then it was basically all or most of Van Buren. There was a grocery once managed by grandpa Grover Cleveland Neal. There was the hole left on Main Street when a truck lost brakes on Logtown Hill and demolished Ben Franklin’s. And there was the … (more childhood memories – I will spare you) …Then just past the Crawford County Courthouse and its statue of a Confederate soldier. You’re in the bottoms, along the Arkansas River – with its exciting promise of a rare bird -- with the walls built after the flood disasters of the 1940s. Here are the railroad tracks, a big Simmons processing plant, and the sign “Lee Creek Park.”It is true enough that in Arkansas, with our robust winter population of Ring-billed Gulls, only a very skilled gullophile -- or some retirees with gulls on the mind -- would drive an hour on the unlikely premise that a rare gull in one place on Sunday would still be there on Tuesday. Yet, as Emily Dickinson once observed, "Hope is a thing with feathers …" It sustains us … often against logical premise … against the notion somewhere, midst all those Ring-billed Gulls, there lurks a Short-billed …Yet, as we arrive at the turn to Lee Creek Park, there is a train across the tracks! It’s not moving. We try a bit to the west, a bit to the east. It’s the mighty Arkansas River on the south. It’s a high ridge to the north. After some thrashing around, we find that turn is the only road into Lee Creek Park.And still the trail isn’t moving. And there are no other cars waiting in line. Like they know something we don't know about these trains, parked on these tracks, and for how long???Maybe we just need 15 minutes … I think David might like to go back up Logtown Hill and see Fairview Cemetery, filled as it is with Neals dating back to 1830s. Or maybe the section full of white headstones for unknown Confederate soldiers ... or my Granny Neal’s little house on William Penn?Did all that … train is still over the tracks … Only now things are further hopeless … is that possible? A second train. I will not repeat here David’s comment … We watch train #2 moving …Then it too stops …Over the tracks …At the Lee Creek Park sign …
