Duck hunters have a simple faith. They believe that when they die, if they've been good callers and have loved a Lab or two, they'll go to Stuttgart, Arkansas.
And, for all I know, the devout mallard believes that if he eats his crustaceans and is good to his mother, he'll die in the skies over Stuttgart.
Stuttgart is to duck hunters what Lourdes is to people with ailments, Graceland is to Elvis fans. The town of 10,000 bills itself the "Rice and Duck Capital" presumably of the universe. The radio station call letters are KDUX and KWAK.
The National Duck Calling Contest is held at Stuttgart and you can't walk five feet during duck season without seeing someone being led by a Lab or wearing hunting clothing. If a four-wheel-drive vehicle isn't pulling a johnboat rigged for waterfowl hunting, the hitch ball is covered with a plastic duck head.
The Wings Over The Prairie Festival (to give it the proper name) draws nearly 60 of the world's greatest duck callers to Stuttgart each Thanksgiving weekend (along with thousands of eyeballers).
Contestants vie in the Junior, Intermediate, and World's classes, as well as the Arkansas State Championship and a women's division. There is competition among youngsters for the Chick Majors title which carries a college scholarship. Majors was a famed caller and maker of duck calls.
Stuttgart lies in what is inaccurately called the Delta. "Everything east of Little Rock is the Delta if it's flat," says Richard Davies, longtime director of Parks and Tourism and my hunting partner. It's a vast level region of rice fields and flooded timber. You can see Stuttgart for miles. "It looks just like the skyline of Dallas," Davies says, and it does--if Dallas downtown is looming grain elevators, full of rice.
Ducks are full of rice, too. Thousands of them, resting in the flooded paddies, tipped up to feed, butts skyward.
Rice is the food staple of the migrating ducks. Once, the region was a vast plain of tallgrass--Indiangrass, big bluestem, witchgrass--but in 1904, farmers began to plow and plant the prairie to rice. Today, the region is the largest rice-growing area of the country and the prairie has shrunk to tiny remnants, one along a railroad; another of 40 acres owned by the Nature Conservancy.
During duck season, the motel parking lots are full of vehicles with foreign plates: Louisiana, Kentucky, Georgia. They share a symbol, the Ducks Unlimited sticker.
Unless you know somebody, duck hunting around Stuttgart is a challenge. There are four options: private club hunting, public club hunting, private land hunting, and public hunting.
All can be outstanding. I hunted both at a private club and with a private landowner and shot (at) ducks...but the best hunting that weekend was on nearby Bayou Meto, a nearly 40,000-acre public area.
Davies has been hunting Bayou Meto since he was a kid. "It's the only place I ever hunted ducks until I was grown," he says.
Davies loves to hike in, 50 minutes each way. "I call it the Death March," he says. "But if it's right you need two hunters to stand back-to-back because if you don't, ducks'll run into you from behind."
Once, he kept hearing a mallard quacking somewhere behind him and answered each time. "I couldn't see anything flying," he says. "Finally I turned around and he was about 10 feet behind me, swimming around. I missed him twice."
Hunters can motor into the heart of the vast swamp or hike in. There's both open-water and woods hunting and the canny hunter checks with locals to find out where the birds are. "You can come in on the west side, for example, and it'll be slow, while hunters on the east side are covered up with ducks," Davies says.
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, No. 2 Natural Resources Drive, Little Rock 72205 (501-223-6300) has a map of Bayou Meto. We visited the various accesses to the area on a sunny morning during the second of the three segments of Arkansas's 30-day duck season. Every lot was full of cars.
"Ought to rename it 'Bayou Metro'" Davies said. "But the area's so big you still can get off by yourself and work ducks, even with all the hunters." Most hunters we saw coming out had ducks (and virtually all were mallards).
Another option is hunting out of public clubs. It's expensive and not to my taste--there is a guide/caller and you're in a party of anywhere from three to eight other hunters. Unless you work out some sort of gentleman's agreement on shooting, every duck is everyone's duck.
Private hunting clubs which usually are owned by big corporations and are used to entertain business contacts, are run pretty much the same way as the public clubs.
Sometimes you're in a blind with someone who doesn't know much more about duck hunting than what he saw in a Daffy Duck cartoon when he was a kid. One guide recalled having a client call out, "Here's a cripple. Should I shoot him or wring his neck?"
"I wasn't looking at the guy," the guide says, "and figured he had a broke-wing duck that was swimming away, so I said, 'shoot him.'" The duck was about two feet from the end of the gun muzzle when the guy shot it.
Try to make special arrangements with a duck club which will allow you or you and your party to hunt by yourselves, using your own dogs and doing your own calling.
Many flooded timber hunters don't use decoys. They call and splash the water to simulate activity by roosted ducks. By the time incoming mallards realize they've been fooled, they're hovering in gun range.
Arkansas has an embarrassment of waterfowl habitat in the eastern half of the state, including the huge Arkansas River, which bisects the state west-to-east, and the swamplands of the east, all the way from Jonesboro in the north, south to the Louisiana line.
The so-called "Grand Prairie," between the St. Francis River to the north and the White and Arkansas rivers to the south once was the spout of the great Mississippi Flyway funnel that begins in Canada and narrows in the Mississippi Valley. The flooded rice fields are a set table, while flooded bottomland hardwoods are a mallard's delight.
Edgar Queeny, author of the historic Ducks Unlimited book and movie Prairie Wings hunted in the area and the photography originated there. Drainage projects, especially the infamous Cache River Corps of Engineers boondoggle of the 1970s, chewed away at the bounty of habitat, but there still is far more habitat than there is duck to occupy it.
Arkansas is heavily involved with the North American Waterfowl Management Plan. In fact, about a third of the Plan's goal of 386,000 acres of new wetland habitat in 10 states of the Lower Mississippi valley by the year 2000 is in Arkansas, specifically in the corridor from the Cache River south to the White River.
The best hunt I had was with a local landowner. It didn't even involve getting up early, the curse of the waterfowl hunter.
Milton Stovesand sank a trio of culvert sections in the ground 20 years ago, decorated them with native grass, and has been hunting over his flooded rice fields ever since.
He uses about 200 decoys. Big spreads pull birds into the open rice fields, though they aren't nearly as important in the flooded timber.
"Probably won't get much activity until about 4:30," Milton said. That would give us just a half-hour to hunt. He watched the Dallas Cowboys on a tiny portable TV while Davies and I checked the sky.
At 4:29:30 the first flock of ducks appeared and in the next 30 minutes we had constant action. With a minute left we had five mallards in the pit and needed one for a limit. Davies shot a greenhead that hit the water as the sand ran out on the shooting day.
We collected our gear and splashed toward the levee. Long lines of blue/snow geese wavered from horizon to horizon. The huge goose flocks are newcomers to the area and few hunt them--they don't know how.
We stood on the levee and watched flock after flock of ducks spiral into the decoys as the sky flamed to the west.
If you squinched your eyes just right, the rice fields looked like dark native prairie and the sight was that of a century ago when Stuttgart was the Grand Prairie.
The lighted grain elevators of Stuttgart jutted dramatically from the dark flatlands and the sound of someone practicing a hail call echoed through the motel parking lot in the Rice and Duck Capital of the World.
General Information
Contact the Stuttgart Chamber of Commerce, 507 South Main, Box 932, Stuttgart, AR 72160 (501-673-1602) for general information, a list of public duck clubs, and information on the Wings Over The Prairie (the national duck calling contest).
Make reservations well ahead of time at Stuttgart's motels. They fill up quickly. As for food, there is no contest. Eat suppers at Li'l Cajun Restaurant and try the spiced shrimp appetizer. It will enable you to speak French with a hominy accent. If you're driving Highway 65 from Little Rock, be careful at Allport and Humnoke--they're speed traps.
Be sure to visit the Stuttgart Agricultural Museum, a wonderful commemoration of the historic area, farming, and the waterfowl resource. See Edgar Queeny's famous Prairie Wings movie to realize what the area once was and, if the North American Waterfowl Management Plan works, may be again.
Copyright (c) 1996 Joel Vance. All rights reserved.
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