Dewey W. Wills Wildlife Management Area

The land behind this sign is one of the state's great duck marshes. The management area covers about 64,000 acres of bottomland along the east side of Catahoula Lake and the Little River, mostly in LaSalle Parish with pieces of Catahoula and Rapides. Between 40,000 and 300,000 ducks winter in the overcup oak and bitter pecan, including about a quarter of the recorded canvasbacks, and it is a Ramsar wetland. A 400-acre flooded-timber reservoir holds the birds, a 3,000-acre one opened in 2015, and Louisiana black bears live here too.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Catahoula National Wildlife Refuge — 4.4 mi
  A 25,000-acre bottomland refuge beside Catahoula Lake, a Ramsar wetland that is a major early-season stop for ducks on the Mississippi Flyway.
• Frogmore Cotton Plantation and Gins — 23 mi
  A working cotton farm near Ferriday that tells the plantation story through the people enslaved there, with quarters, an ancient mound and a rare steam-engine gin.
• Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum — 24 mi
  A National Guard museum in a replica WWII barracks at Camp Beauregard, built around the huge 1940-41 war games in Central Louisiana. Free.
• Forts Randolph and Buhlow State Historic Site — 28 mi
  Two Confederate earthen forts on the Red River at Pineville, built with enslaved labor and never attacked, beside the remains of Bailey's Dam.

More markers nearby

• Crooks Mound — 1.5 mi
• Troyville Earthworks — 15 mi
• Troyville Earthworks — 15 mi
• Red River — 19 mi