Why were 50 acres of trees cut from protected land in a popular South MS hunting area?

Davy Murrah considers himself the “unofficial steward” of the Pascagoula River Wilderness Management Area, a 39,000-acre tract of land in Jackson and George counties popular among hunters, fishermen, birdwatchers and local families.

It’s also a biodiverse and ecologically rich area that is nurtured by the unobstructed rise and fall of the Pascagoula River, the largest free-flowing river in the continental United States.

Murrah is the third generation of his family to live on the banks of the Pascagoula River.

His father, Herman Murrah, was the game warden when the land was privately owned. When the owners decided to sell the land to a timber company to be logged in the 1970s, Herman was among a group of people who successfully advocated for it to come under state ownership and management by the state’s Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks (MDWFP).

“These people actually managed to do the impossible: they convinced the state of Mississippi, and the government of the state of Mississippi, to buy this land to keep it from being clear-cut,” Murrah said.

In the WMA’s articles of dedication, its founders sought to affirm that purpose in writing by stipulating that “timber harvesting shall be limited to selective cutting.”

So Murrah was shocked to learn from a text from a friend in January that the MDWFP had apparently begun a clear-cutting logging operation in a patch of forest he described as “a very popular and productive area for some of the local hunters.”

He drove out in his pickup and saw for himself that loggers had begun to raze what ended up being 50 acres of forest — mostly pine trees and some hardwoods — in George County.

After the timber harvest, Murrah, a retired engineer who worked in the offshore oil industry before dedicating himself to the welfare of the WMA, started a full-throated campaign to bring attention to what he saw as a clear violation of the Articles of Dedication.

He worked with members of a group he had started a year below, the Friends of the Pascagoula River WMA.

On February 26, Steve Shepard, chair of the Mississippi Sierra Club’s Gulf Coast Group, wrote a letter to the MDWFP and the state attorney general protesting the clear cutting and asking that no clear cuts ever take place on the WMA again.

Why was the clear cut done?

Murrah says the reason clear cutting is prohibited in the WMA’s articles of dedication is that its authors feared “that eventually one day the state would see dollar signs in the shapes of trees and decide that they wanted to clear cut it.”

But biologists at the MDWFP say they were not motivated by profit in the decision to clear the 50 acres. Rather, they say, they were engaging in proactive forest management in service of their mandate to protect wildlife.

Russ Walsh, the head of MDWFP’s wildlife bureau, told the Sun Herald that the upland pine stand that was logged had been damaged by storms, including Hurricane Zeta in 2020.

“What we did not want to happen was another storm event would come in there and clearly just devastate that stand,” Walsh said.

Was it clear cutting or selective cutting?

The Sun Herald learned through a public records request that the MDWFP sold the timber on the 50-acre area to Blackwell Timber Company of Ellisville for $72,500. Walsh told the Sun Herald the proceeds from the sale would primarily fund habitat management programs.

Walsh said the agency defines its action as selective cutting rather than clear cutting, since it only affected 50 of 40,000 acres of the WMA.

Murrah disagrees.

“They could have easily gone in and cut whatever damaged timber there was. And if they were concerned that maybe some of the pine trees were getting too big and maybe would start being diseased or something, they could have cut out the biggest of those pine trees and left 75, 80% of the original forest as is,” he said..

Calling Walsh’s argument for the cut “pitiful,” Shepard said using storm damage as a justification only made sense from the perspective of loggers, rather than wildlife managers.

“They behaved absolutely appropriately if they’re dealing with a tree farm,” he said.

Mark LaSalle, an ecologist who was until 2018 the director of the Pascagoula River Audubon Center, said Walsh’s storm damage justification was a “weak argument,” but defended the MDWFP’s intention to proactively manage the forest, including through cutting.

Murrah said the 50-acre cut has set an unwelcome precedent.

“What are they gonna do next year? Another 50 acres somewhere else, or 500 acres or 5000?”

Walsh said the MDWFP has “no master plan no master plan to systematically clear cut the Pascagoula River WMA.”

What happens to the cleared land?

Now that the 50 acres have been cleared, there remains the question of what to do with the land.

LaSalle says the disagreement over how to manage the cleared area reflects a broader debate among ecologists regarding how much foresters should intervene when managing wildlife areas. Whereas some conservationists tend to advocate for letting nature take its course, others say such this ignores the irrevocable impacts human habitation has already had on wilderness.

In a document announcing the planned timber sale, the MDWFP said the tract would be “artificially regenerated with loblolly pine” after the timber harvest. Murrah and other critics took this to mean the department intended to create a pine monoculture — a term in agriculture for the planting of a single crop, which they say would adversely affect the site’s biodiversity.

“Hunters know better than the rest of us that loblolly pine plantations are relatively sterile compared to any other stand of trees in our area when it comes to supporting deer, turkey and squirrel. And for the Sierra Club, which is concerned with the maximum diversity of our habitats, replanting with loblolly pine is objectionable for the many species no one hunts,” Shepard wrote in his letter.

Walsh says this was never the department’s plan.

“We did say early on that we may replant with loblolly, but we never said that it’s going to be a monoculture,” he said.

In his letter, Shepard asked the MDWFP not to replant the cleared 50 acres and instead let the forest regrow naturally. Murrah has also advocated for natural regeneration.

“If they plant this in loblolly pine, 20 or 30 years from now they’ll be coming in here and clear cutting it again,” Murrah said.

Drew Arnold, a wildlife biologist who supervised the region for the MDWFP when the decision was made to cut down the trees, said the affected area largely consisted of overmature loblolly pines, some of which were damaged by wind.

He told the Sun Herald he recommended the area be “thinned” rather than a clear cut. He also suggested longleaf pine be replanted instead of loblolly, a suggestion echoed by LaSalle.

He said the management of an upland pine forest requires regular prescribed burning, which could actually restore greater biodiversity to the area than there was before the cutting.

Arnold, a Hattiesburg native, no longer works for the MDWFP.

Arnold said letting the area regrow naturally isn’t a viable solution.

“If you just let it come back naturally you’re gonna get a lot of invasive species,” he said, citing cogon grass as a species that already poses a threat to the native ecosystem.

Walsh said the department was still evaluating its plans for how to replant the area, and would determine this partially based on what grows from the existing seedbank in the ground this year.

“Ultimately the plan is for it to be a mixed pine and hardwood forest,” he said.