Bringing an Ecosystem Back

Wafer Creek, the landmark for which the ranch was named, runs through an intact bottomland forest. For more than a century, it has been left mostly uncut, meaning that Wafer Creek Ranch thrives in its natural and near-historic condition.

At a Glance

Location
Lincoln Parish

Flora
In the precolonial era, grasslands and shortleaf pine-oak-hickory woodlands were dominant in the Upper West Gulf Coastal Plain ecoregion, which spans Northwest Louisiana, Northeast Texas, part of Southeast Oklahoma, and Southwest Arkansas. They thrive today at Wafer Creek Ranch, which contains five active grasslands. As the Wildlife Heritage Foundation states, “The importance of protecting/conserving grasslands is matched only by our need to have open spaces and breathe clean air. These ecosystems are critical for the health of our natural world. The grasslands provide feeding grounds for all manner of prey and predators and give balance to the world.”

Mother Nature isn’t always sweet, but she is always in charge,” writes Johnny Armstrong in “Rescuing Biodiversity: The Protection and Restoration of a North Louisiana Ecosystem.” At the ecosystem in question — Wafer Creek Ranch outside Ruston, where Armstrong and his wife, Karen, have lived for more than 40 years — nature hasn’t always had to fight as hard as it has in other places. Cotton farmers in the 1800s reshaped much of Northwest Louisiana but stayed clear of this land. For that reason, shortleaf pine-oak-hickory woodland and grassland groundcover — virtually extinct elsewhere in the region — continue to thrive today much as they did in precolonial times.

“Opal and I go on our little field trips, our safaris,” Armstrong says of their regular inspections of Wafer Creek Ranch.

A retired pathologist from Ruston, Armstrong sets out several times each week to explore the land he has spent the past 10 1/2 years working to protect. To do so, he merely steps out his front door. “Opal and I go on our little field trips, our little safaris,” he says of the dog he sometimes calls Miss America. Today, with Opal beside him in his truck, Armstrong sticks his head out the window and sniffs the land: milkweed and blazing star, sensitive-briar, downy ragged goldenrod, eastern agave, and the distant smoldering of a recent controlled burn. In one of five active grasslands at the ranch, the kind once dominant in the region, he pulls over.

“Look at how the trees are spaced apart,” he says. “See the way the light gets in.” Armstrong speaks with the enthusiasm and wonder of a specialist examining an exemplary specimen for the first time. Beside him in the morning breeze dances waist high bluestem grass. Through this landscape, Opal prances while Armstrong bends for closer admiration.

All told, Wafer Creek Ranch contains 160 acres of active grasslands such as this. But grasslands across the planet are being destroyed, mainly due to agricultural development. This poses a grave threat to wildlife and ecosystems that are as biodiverse as rainforests. It’s one reason Armstrong began his work here. While Opal explores in the distance, he plucks a whiteleaf mountain mint and crumples it in his hand. Lifting it to his nose, closing his eyes, he relishes the scent before returning to the truck to explore his favorite area of the property, a 100-acre old-growth forest.

Due to restoration, the grasslands at Wafer Creek Ranch have led to a significant increase in plant and animal diversity. Seeds from this broomsedge grass serve as a food source for winter birds.

Armstrong remembers when Lattimore Smith, then a botanist and restoration scientist with the Nature Conservancy, first visited this section of Wafer Creek Ranch. “Because this area has never been logged, the shortleaf pines here are older and larger than in other places. He had never seen so many shortleaf pines in so much acreage,” Armstrong says, less boastful than in awe of the riches this land — his backyard — contains.

Before Smith’s visit, Armstrong knew that Wafer Creek Ranch contained remarkable biodiversity. But seeing it through Smith’s eyes planted the seed for what became the decade of work he chronicles in “Rescuing Biodiversity.” “It’s all Lattimore’s fault,” he says, laughing as he walks among the white flower milkweed that blooms bright as cotton beneath the old-growth forest. “He lit the fire under me.”

With the help of Smith and others, Armstrong began this work, as he writes, “bringing an ecosystem back to close to what it was in precolonial times [to] create something on the order of a museum piece to show us what it looked like back in the days when the only people around were Native. What did they see and what did they know when they hunted and gathered in those times long past, and how did their connection to their natural surroundings affect their very survival and their culture?”

We should take the time to appreciate those who speak and write of all we have been given, those who identify the miracles of the land and what it tells us about our past and present, all that it can reveal, if we pay attention, about our future. With Opal panting beside him, Armstrong pulls into his driveway and ponders the land outside his own front door. “You can scratch out all this biodiversity that was in these hills. You can actually find it with restoration ecology.” Pausing to pet Opal behind the ear, he says, “Isn’t that cool?”

A retired pathologist, Johnny Armstrong serves as a mentor at Louisiana Tech University, working with biology professors who conduct research throughout the year, often with students, at Wafer Creek Ranch.

In 2019, he published his first novel, “Shadowshine: An Animal Adventure.”

In June 2023, LSU Press released his book about Wafer Creek Ranch, “Rescuing Biodiversity: The Protection and Restoration of a North Louisiana Ecosystem,” a rallying cry for global biodiversity.

Armstrong considers Edward O. Wilson “the epitome of a naturalist.” In Rescuing Biodiversity and in person, he quotes the biologist and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “On Human Nature” and “The Ants” who, in “The Diversity of Life,” writes, “Here is the means to end the great extinction spasm. The next century will be the era of restoration in ecology.”