What to look for in nature in Arkansas this February

Usually from late January through March, on calm evenings, and February is the heart of it. The American woodcock is a chunky, upland cousin of the sandpipers that hides in damp thickets by day, with eyes set high on its head and a long bill for pulling earthworms out of soft ground. Woodcocks winter across the southern states, Arkansas included, and the males start courting during the trip north, long before they reach their breeding grounds.

The Missouri Department of Conservation describes the display: on the ground the male gives a raspy, loud “peent” every few seconds, then launches into a twittering spiral flight that climbs 200 to 300 feet before he tumbles back to earth. He lands near where he started and begins peenting again. Displays are mostly at twilight, especially dusk.

Researchers from the University of Arkansas at Monticello tracked this behavior on an industrial timberland bordered by the Saline River in Cleveland and Bradley counties. They listened for peenting males from 20 minutes before to 20 minutes after sunset from January to March of 2010 and 2011. The peak came between January 17 and 27 in 2010 and between February 3 and 9 in 2011, so the busiest week shifts with the weather. Males chose young pine plantations with more shrubs and more standing and flattened grass than the bare, sparse openings other southern studies had described.

Log the clock time when the calling begins, how long after sunset that was, the temperature and the wind. A few evenings of notes will show you how tightly the birds follow the fading light.

The chorus frogs, small brown and gray tree frogs that breed in winter rain pools, are the first big voice of the year, and spring peepers join them as the nights soften. You will hear them from ditches, flooded fields and woodland pools on mild, damp nights, often when it still feels like winter.

The best frog night is the first mild evening after a soaking rain. Drive slowly with the windows down, stop where the sound is loudest, and note the date and air temperature on your map of sounds.

Mostly from February into early March. The light geese (snow geese, their dark “blue” form, and the smaller Ross’s goose) that spent the winter in the Delta and farther south begin working north through Arkansas’s rice country, and the white flocks are the spectacle of the month: long, wavering lines overhead, and fields that look snow-covered until the whole flock lifts at once.

Those numbers are a problem as well as a sight. Game and Fish explains that light geese grew so abundant that they began eating themselves out of house and home on the sub-Arctic and Arctic tundra, damaging nesting grounds they share with other birds. Congress responded in 1999 with the Arctic Tundra Habitat Emergency Conservation Act, which allows a spring Light Goose Conservation Order once the regular season closes. In Arkansas, the Commission says most of the conservation order action typically comes in February and early March, which is also when the birds are moving.

Food along the way matters. Flooded rice fields are estimated to provide 11 percent of all the food energy available to ducks such as mallards and pintails in the Delta, and the Commission’s WRICE program pays farmers to leave rice stubble standing and flood it during migration rather than plowing the waste grain under.

For the winter counts of ducks and geese across the Delta, see the January page. In your journal, record the hour and direction of every goose line you see this month; by early March most will be heading north or northwest.

The first ones usually appear in February. The Purple Martin Conservation Association calls these early arrivals scouts: the very first martins seen back at a colony each year. They are the oldest birds in the population, male or female, and they migrate as early as the weather allows. The old belief that scouts fly ahead to choose a site and then go back to lead the colony north is a myth; martins travel and arrive independently. Purple martins winter in the rainforests of Brazil, and east of the Rockies nearly all of them now nest in houses and gourds that people put up.

The association’s Scout-Arrival Study collects first-arrival reports from martin hosts. In Arkansas the earliest reports of recent years have come from the south and east, from places such as Wheatley in St. Francis County and Warren in Bradley County, while hosts around Rogers, Siloam Springs and Harrison have mostly logged their first birds in March.

The purple martin is North America’s largest swallow, and adult males are glossy blue-black all over. If one turns up in February, note the date and weather in your daily field log.

The trees go first. Silver maple flowers before almost anything else, and on the forest floor a tiny plant called harbinger of spring opens its first clusters while the leaf litter is still brown. Spring beauties follow in lawns about the time the garden crocuses bloom.

Ozark witch hazel along rocky creeks keeps flowering into March; see the December page for where to find it. Sketch the first flower you find each February and in a few years you will have your own spring calendar.

The big owls and hawks. Long before the songbirds build, the raptors are paired, settled and, in some cases, already feeding young.

Any nest you find this month deserves distance: a disturbed owl or hawk may leave eggs to chill. Mark it on your nest observed page and come back with binoculars in April to see what hatched.

It can, and sometimes more than in any other month. Normal February snowfall in the NOAA 1991–2020 normals is 1.6 inches at Little Rock and 2.4 at Drake Field in Fayetteville, a little more than in January at both, but only 0.6 at Fort Smith. Averages hide the big years. In mid-February 2021, a piece of the polar vortex broke south and two snowstorms crossed Arkansas within four days. The National Weather Service in Little Rock measured 8.4 inches there on the 14th and 15th, and another 11.8 on the 17th and 18th. Over the two storms Sheridan picked up about 15 inches. February 2021 ended with 20.3 inches at Little Rock, more than in any other month on record. On the morning of the 16th Fayetteville hit 20 below zero and Little Rock fell to −1 °F, its lowest reading since December 1989.

February is also a month for warm-air outbreaks. On February 5, 2008, the Super Tuesday outbreak killed 14 Arkansans, and one tornado stayed on the ground for 122 miles from near Atkins past Clinton, the longest track on record in the state since 1950. The day before, Little Rock had reached a record 78 °F.

The odds this time are lopsided: NOAA’s ENSO forecasters wrote on September 10, 2026, that a peak in El Niño’s top category over the cool season was more than 90 percent likely. The Little Rock forecast office has looked back at moderate and strong El Niño winters since the early 1980s: December through February came out wetter than normal statewide in four of five, by more than two inches in three of them, and warmer than normal in four. The exception was 2009–10, when a long stretch of the negative Arctic Oscillation drove one cold blast after another and the winter ran more than four degrees cold. In its outlook for the strong El Niño winter of 2023–24, the office explained that this pattern tends to mean fewer rounds of cold air rather than mildness all season, along with more big slugs of moisture, which can turn wintry whenever cold air is in place. For the official outlook for February and the months after, check the latest maps among NOAA’s 90-day outlooks, which are updated each month.

February’s normal highs run from about 51 °F at Harrison and Jonesboro to 55 at Little Rock and 60 at El Dorado, so a single week can swing from frog weather to ice. Look at the forecast and radar before any drive into the hills, and gardeners can check the last spring frost dates for their town before setting out tender plants.

Close to an hour, and faster every week. From February 1 to February 28 the cities below each add 50 to 57 minutes, which works out to roughly two extra minutes of light per day, and the pace quickens as March nears. Fayetteville and Harrison in the north gain the most and El Dorado in the south the least, because the change is always larger farther from the equator.

Punxsutawney Phil makes his call on Tuesday, February 2. Astronomically, winter is half over a day or two after that, on February 3–4, when the Earth is midway in its orbit between the solstice and the spring equinox. The groundhog’s shadow predicts nothing; the stretching afternoons are the honest sign.

Sunset creeps north along the skyline all month. Look up the minute the sun rises and sets over your own town with the sunrise and sunset tables.

Two planets at opposition, a full moon with a faint eclipse, and Mercury at its best evening showing of the winter, while Saturn sinks into the western twilight and Venus rules the dawn. Times are Central Standard Time.

The first ten days or so of the month have dark, moon-free evenings, ideal for Mercury and for faint stars. Today’s sky shows when the clouds will part between fronts, and the moon phase calendar lists rise and set times.

1. Evenings of February 2–10: find Mercury. A low, clear western horizon and binoculars help. Never sweep binoculars toward the sun before it has set.
2. Wednesday, February 10: Jupiter at opposition. Let children count Jupiter’s moons with binoculars and draw their positions, then look again the next night.
3. February 12–15, Friday through Presidents’ Day: Great Backyard Bird Count. Fifteen minutes on any of the four days counts; report at birdcount.org.
4. Any calm evening: a woodcock watch. Bring warm coats and a thermos to the edge of a brushy field at sunset. The Northwest Arkansas Audubon Society has led woodcock evenings at Wedington in mid- to late February in recent years; check its site for any 2027 trip.
5. The first mild, rainy night: a frog drive. Roll the windows down near flooded fields and ditches and count how many kinds you hear.
6. Eagle tours on the lakes. Arkansas State Parks offers interpreter-led winter eagle watches, such as the cruises at DeGray Lake; check the parks event calendar for February dates before you go.
7. Saturday, February 20: Snow Moon night. Watch the full Moon rise and find Jupiter, Mars and Regulus around it.
8. All month: Project FeederWatch. The season runs to April 30, so a family can still sign up and count at the feeder through spring.

Ice or high water can cancel park programs, so confirm the day before. Arkansas’s other months and the rest of the country are linked from the nature pages; pack the Naturalist’s Field Journal to record what you find.

• Late-season hunting. The regular duck and goose seasons close January 31, but the youth waterfowl hunt and the hunt for active-duty military and veterans both fall on Saturday and Sunday, February 6–7, and the Light Goose Conservation Order runs February 1–5 and February 8 to April 25. Archery deer season stays open through February 28. Squirrel and rabbit seasons run to February 28, bobwhite quail on private land to February 7, and crow season to February 21 on Thursdays through Mondays only.
• Furbearers. Bobcat, fox, mink, muskrat and river otter may be hunted until February 28, and coyote, raccoon and opossum year-round. Furbearer trapping closes at sunset February 28, but beaver, nutria and coyote trapping continues through March 31, so leash dogs anywhere near beaver ponds and creek bottoms.
• Hunter orange. The AGFC’s safety-color rule (a hat plus 400 square inches on the upper body, in orange, chartreuse or blaze camo, for every hunter and companion) applies where a modern gun or alternative firearms hunt for deer, bear or elk is under way. With only archery deer season running in February, the rule generally does not apply this month, but bright clothing on public land and an orange vest on your dog are still wise while bowhunters and goose hunters are out.
• Ice and snow. February 2021 was Little Rock’s snowiest month on record. When freezing rain or snow is forecast, stay off the roads, and stay away from trees and power lines loaded with ice.
• Tornadoes and flash floods. A warm, humid February day can turn violent, as on February 5, 2008. In a wet El Niño winter, low-water crossings in the Ozarks and Ouachitas can flood quickly; never drive into moving water.
• Cold nights and cold water. A frog drive or woodcock walk can start near 60 °F and end below freezing. Dress in layers, and wear a life jacket in any boat, since the lakes are still winter-cold.