George Hillary Dunklin Jr.

Grand Prairie rice farming is his work, but ducks are his passion; the lifelong hunter and current president of Ducks Unlimited knows that where the ducks land, the land is healthy.

“Duck hunting is what led me to the importance of conservation.” - George Hillary Dunklin Jr.
“Duck hunting is what led me to the importance of conservation.” - George Hillary Dunklin Jr.

STUTTGART -- George Dunklin Jr. is first to see the V-shaped formation of birds on the fly this duck-weather day in duck country.

"Pintails," he identifies the fliers -- fluttering specks of promise up there in the wet gray, the clouds about to let go another blur of rain, the kind of day that only a duck or an Arkansas rice farmer could love.

"The first pintails I've seen this year," Dunklin says. The same as Davy Crockett claimed to be half alligator, and Pecos Bill was half coyote, Dunklin might as well be part duck.

He is one of the state's major rice growers, but counts himself mainly a duck hunter. And these pintails signal the soon-to-come arrival of what he really wants to see, another year's descent of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of green-headed mallards. Duck season opens Saturday.

One day soon, the sky will turn the blue of a hunter's eye -- the color of another perfect day's duck shoot, and no need to go anywhere else.

"We have the best right here," Dunklin says.

But for now, the nearest mallard in the air is the emblem on one of three flags posted high at the entrance to Dunklin's Five Oaks Duck Lodge in Humphrey near Stuttgart. The Stars and Stripes. The state flag of Arkansas. The green duck logo of Ducks Unlimited.

Dunklin, 58, is in his second year as president of Ducks Unlimited, the national organization that musters nearly 700,000 members to the cause of wetlands conservation. He came to the volunteer job as immediate past chairman of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Both positions, he says, taught him the need to balance nature and commerce, the wild and the regulated.

"It's how do you balance regulation with access," he says. "How do you make things as open as you can, as free as you can, and at the same time protect our natural resources."

The king had a royal answer in old times across the ocean. The king's deer and the king's ducks inhabited the king's land at the king's pleasure. No hunting.

"That system doesn't work," Dunklin says.

The alternative makes wildlife a public responsibility, one that must answer to the future.

"Duck hunting," he says, "is what led me to the importance of conservation."

See, it takes wetlands to have waterfowl. But of course the issue is more complicated: a duck's nest tangle of migration patterns, land rights, bag limits, ecosystem and industry.

Ducks land in greatest numbers where they find "the table is set," Dunklin says. Likening the birds to tired and hungry drop-ins, he means for these visitors to find the tablecloth straight and the silverware polished at his place. He welcomes ducks with flooded timber.

Elsewhere, they are more and more apt to find the old landmarks gone in favor of agricultural and urban ideas of progress -- the marsh gone, drained in favor of row crops. Grass gives way to shopping malls that sell nothing a duck wants, to housing developments that no duck would call home.

Hunting isn't the big issue, Dunklin says. Wetlands are essential to all the wildlife they contain, and to the natural environment.

Ducks tell him the water is clean. Ducks assure him "the habitat is good," the land is healthy. So long as the ducks keep coming, he knows he is doing things right on the farms and fields that surround the lodge.

If the ducks ever go away, Dunklin says, "then I'll be worried about us."

All this explains the greeting he calls to these early-arriving migrants in the sky:

"Hello, boys. Welcome back!"

ON THE FLY

Dunklin rose through the ranks of Ducks Unlimited like a teal on the takeoff, from local to state to higher offices.

His presidency comes from 30 years of volunteer service, the Memphis-based organization's Chief Executive Officer Dale Hall says.

The president's title recognizes such accomplishments as when, in 2009, Dunklin won the Budweiser Conservationist of the Year Award that came with a $50,000 grant. He applied the money to conservation work at the state's duck-rich Bayou Meto Wildlife Management Area.

The president oversees the efforts of 53,000 volunteers, Hall says. Volunteers stage 4,500 fundraising events each year, "from small chapters to major conventions." At his own expense, the president attends as many as he can.

Dunklin "is phenomenal," Hall says. "He is a leader in conservation, which is our business. He understands fundraising. He understands the land."

A third-generation rice farmer, Dunklin credits a good measure of his happiness and success simply to living in the country near the duck lodge.

"I live it every day," he says. "I feel it, I touch it."

Absentee farming could have been his choice. It could have made sense, too. His big interest, besides duck hunting, used to be tennis. His father, the late George Dunklin of Pine Bluff, was nine times the state men's tennis champion.

Dunklin Jr. bagged the title himself in 1980. After that, he says, "I quit competitive tennis." But not before he met his wife-to-be, Livia, at the Memphis Racquet Club.

Moving to the farm to see how the family business looked close-up, the newlyweds lived in a trailer until the house was finished.

Dunklin can't tell the traditional farmer's tale of himself as the boy who couldn't wait to climb on a tractor. But then, he didn't have to be dragged off the tractor, either.

He advocates no-till farming -- fields never plowed, a concept that came naturally to him, along with a sense for the natural cycles of wet and dry, ducks and no ducks.

The Dunklins' three grown-and-flown daughters -- Megan, Hillary and Lauren -- all were born during duck season, he says, "and don't think I didn't take some razzing over that."

In Stuttgart, especially.

DUCK COUNTRY

Stuttgart was founded by German immigrants, not ducks. But a visitor wouldn't know it from the sign by U.S. 63 on the way in, proclaiming this place of about 9,000 in Arkansas County the "rice and duck capital of the world." The sign gives rice first billing as befits the state's top crop. But the picture that goes with it shows a duck on the wing in eye-stopping black silhouette on red.

Stuttgart's Wings Over the Prairie Festival, Saturday-Nov. 29, centers on the World Championship Duck-Calling Contest and World Championship Duck Gumbo Cook-Off. The 79th event begins with a Queen Mallard and Junior Queen Mallard pageant inside the Grand Prairie Center at Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas and ends seven days later on the Main Street Stage with the duck-calling contest.

In case anyone is left wondering, the duck statue in front of Mack's Prairie Wings Sports Shop makes clear where to buy duck calls, duck decoys, duck blinds, duck boats. Politicians and sports celebrities blend in so long as they understand the superstar in these parts is the duck guide.

So much duck commotion comes from Stuttgart's ducky position as a waterfowl magnet. "Wings Over the Prairie" refers to the Grand Prairie, part of the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, or Delta. This flat land is "easily the most significant winter habitat area for mallards in North America," according to Ducks Unlimited. Hunters have been bagging birds around here for centuries. The ducks arrive from Canada, following an instinctive flight plan called the Mississippi Flyway.

Add to this rice. Where cotton didn't do so well, rice thrives. The land floods easily, just the way rice and ducks like it.

"Ducks need rice," Dunklin says. "Rice needs ducks."

BAM!

Dunklin remembers his first BB rifle. He remembers, at age 10, his first real duck gun -- a single-shot .410. By his teenage driving years, he was off like buckshot to hunt ducks, the start of his reputation as a big gun in the duck world.

Hunting ducks, he found friendships that have lasted for decades. Two of his duck-hunting chums are Allen Homra of Stuttgart and Chuck Smith of Memphis.

"He is a wonderful guy to share a blind with," Smith testifies. Volunteer secretary of Ducks Unlimited, he is president of National Guard Products, a building supply company in Memphis. Dunklin was 16, he remembers, the fall they met in Pine Bluff on the opening day of duck season.

"We called him Little George," Smith says. "His father was Big George, and he was the perfect Southern gentleman."

The occasion was supposed to be a social gathering at the Dunklin home, but the young sports had ducks on the mind, and Little George knew the spot.

"Dawn broke on the Grand Prairie," Smith says, "and I'd never seen so many mallards. I said, 'George, I can tell we're going to enjoy a lot of duck hunts in the future,' and we have."

Homra is Dunklin's financial adviser at Edward Jones in Stuttgart, frequent hunting buddy and "way more than that," he says. "Best friends."

They attend the same church, First United Methodist in Stuttgart. They share the same birthday -- today, Nov. 16, and count themselves the entire two-man membership of what they call "Club 11/16."

And ducks?

"I don't think I've ever seen anyone more passionate about ducks" than Dunklin is, Homra says, but ducks aren't the man.

In 25 years of finance, "I've seen that people are givers and takers no matter how much money they have," Homra says. "And you know which George is -- he's a giver. There's not a better giver in town. He supports all the causes."

Some of those contributions, "people don't know," Homra says. Some would be Dunklin's story to tell -- details the normally talkative public figure leaves out of a newspaper interview.

Hunting, farming, conservation, whatever the situation -- ducks, even -- "George wants to make it better," Homra says.

"He wants to make ducks better than they are today. He wants ducks for the next 100 years, that's how he thinks. He wants ducks for the grandkids."

DUCK!

For all he knows about ducks, Dunklin defers to the chef at Five Oaks Duck Lodge, Brian Hargis, on how to cook one.

"Don't overcook it," Hargis says. He recommends a marinade, "something like a soy-orange marinade," to take the gaminess out of the bird's flavor. Also, he recommends not cooking as many ducks as he does, or risk feeling ducked-out by the end of the season.

Duck can be grilled, roasted, made into Peking duck and turducken, the fancy French dishes of duck confit and cassoulet, duck soup and duck pizza. And more, to quote Bugs Bunny from the cartoon in which he recites from a cookbook: "Barbecued duck meat with broiled duck bill Milanese. Yummy-yum."

The hottest stove burner might approximate the seat that Dunklin took as chairman of the Game and Fish Commission. Appointed to the commission by then-Gov. Mike Huckabee, Dunklin took charge in 2011.

The commission had been "fiercely criticized," Democrat-Gazette outdoor writer Bryan Hendricks reported the allegations that year. Meeting in private, the commission had "alienated" hunters and fishermen, also news reporters. In his first meeting as chairman, Dunklin said he wanted the commission's work "off the front page and back in the sports section, where we belong."

The job was no duck hunt. But Dunklin says the experience helps him every day as president of Ducks Unlimited.

"They're both volunteer jobs," he says. "They're both dream conservation jobs for me. They're not honorary positions, they're a lot of work."

LUCKY DUCK

Dunklin counts blessings as well as ducks, even as he confronts the prospect of change coming soon after duck season closes in January.

He co-owns the lodge and farms around it with his sister, Deborah Dunklin Tipton of Memphis, and "my sister and I are dividing assets," he says. Auction of the property is a possibility Dunklin says he hopes to avoid, having managed the Five Oaks Duck Lodge since 1983.

The wood-paneled lodge features his sister's decor. Guides lead Dunklin's duck-hunting guests from their cozy rooms to an area of flooded trees as depicted in a painting in the lobby.

His tip for hunters in or out of the lodge is that, "it's a weather-dominated sport. Weather overrides anything else we can do."

Ducks Unlimited research and tracking points to "especially good news for waterfowlers" this year -- more ducks than usual. Any one day in the blind could be a different story, so "we never measure success by how many ducks are killed," Dunklin says. "We measure it by the quality of the experience."

His guests arrive looking worn-out, showing job stress, Dunklin says. They go hunting, they shoot ducks, they come back with grins. Or they go out, they don't shoot ducks, but then they come back looking better for having had a day in the country.

So alights another lesson on why people should be good to ducks: Ducks are good for people.

"When I'm out selling Ducks Unlimited," Dunklin says, "I'm selling what I do every day."

High Profile on 11/16/2014

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