Jack Branning shows a part of his 3,500 acres of land in Sharkey County, which won for him the national conservation award.(Jon Giffin The Vicksburg Post)

[4/12/04]He calls himself a retired pencil salesman.

A Washington, D.C.-based group calls him an exemplary conservationist.

And if the geese and the ducks and the deer and the dove were talking, they’d call him a friend.

In May, Jack Branning will travel to Washington, D.C., to accept a National Wetlands Award, joining other winners in the Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building.

Branning, who owned and operated Southern Office Supply in Vicksburg for many years, retired and moved to Eagle Lake several years ago.

In 1999, he also bought nearly 3,500 acres of land in Sharkey County where the False and the Little Sunflower rivers join and just east of the Delta National Forest. At the time, the land had been cleared for soybean production since the 1970s.

It had never operated very successfully in the production of soybeans because of nearly annual flooding from the two adjacent rivers, so he placed the land in a permanent trust that will allow it to revert to a bottomland hardwood forest for generations to come.

“Back in 1999, this farm was put into the Wetland Reserve Program,” he said.

Since then, with help and advice from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the entire 3,498 acres of land has been managed by Branning and federal specialists as a wetlands habitat for the benefit of wildlife.

Branning, a “country boy” who grew up in French Camp, first worked in Vicksburg as an office supply salesman. He parlayed the pencil profits into ownership of the business and now, at 72, owns and manages business properties in Vicksburg, Jackson and elsewhere. But all that’s secondary these days, he said. “I don’t carry any keys because I don’t have to open up a store every day,” he said, explaining how he could devote so much personal time to the preserve he calls Woods and Wildlife.

According to the nomination form filled out by Homer Wilkes, state conservationist with the Mississippi Natural Resources Conservation Service, Branning has restored 721 acres of seasonal wetlands and 30 acres of semi-permanent wetlands. He has also replanted much of the land area in bottomland species such as oak, cypress and persimmon; installed several control structures and two water wells; and put up 43 nesting boxes for wood ducks.

“What has been done up here has been sort of a corporate effort between me and NRCS,” Branning said while lounging in Mallard Lodge, his getaway house on the property.

He said the Wetland Reserve Program is just what it says. Woods and Wildlife is a wetland area that was taken out of farming and put into trees and water for migratory birds and wildlife.

An avid hunter and fisherman when time allowed, Branning said he entered conservation work as a “plaything,” but it has become something else.

“It has become a passion,” he said. “When the farm was enrolled in the WRP, I yawned and said that’s going to be good. That’s going to get this thing out of the farming business, and the price of beans was not very good, and this is a way to put this into hunting where I would like to see it anyway, a recreational opportunity for my family.

“The two guys who were working with me, Kevin Nelms (a biologist) and Bill Shepherd (an engineer), … were assigned to this project to develop it according to how NRCS thinks a wetland program ought to look. They brought so much enthusiasm to it, that it just caught me on fire,” Branning said.

Branning, first nominated for the Environmental Law Institute award in 2002, described the project on his land as having all elements in place. The next goal is to protect and maintain it so the project can become mature.

“Where effort needs to be put, we’ll put it to see to it that it grows old gracefully,” he said.

Branning said even though the project is still in its youth, it is having an effect on the wildlife. The nomination said the biologist reported counting 51 species of birds using the wetland areas. Also, the food plots and additional cover are attracting deer from the nearby Delta National Forest and Sunflower Wildlife Management Area.

Ducks are important to Branning, and he’s seen mallards, hooded mergansers, shoveler, blue-winged and green-winged teal, gadwall and pintails using his restored wetlands.

“We were holding around 15,000 birds last year when hardly anybody had any birds at all,” he said.

“This possibly could be one of the best programs the federal government has come up with for landowners and the government,” he said. “Marginal land that floods like this land does, crop insurance was collected fairly regularly, that’s a cost to the government. This land has been taken out of farm land, put back into what it was … bottomland hardwood and will be that way forever.”