OPINION

REX NELSON: The spoonbill hunter

The second part of the 2019-20 Arkansas duck season begins today, and it has me thinking about the years I spent growing up in southwest Arkansas. We were far from the world-famous flooded timber and rice fields of east Arkansas. We couldn't afford to be choosy when it came to shooting ducks.

The folks in my area were from the "if it flies, it dies" school of waterfowl hunting. A morning hunt in our neck of the woods might produce a wood duck, a gadwall, a teal and, if you were lucky, a mallard. A favorite hunting spot during my college days was a slough that backed up to the city of Arkadelphia's sewer ponds, which served as a sort of rest area for ducks. The hope was that you weren't downwind from those ponds during the hunt.

It's probably fitting that I'm among the few people in Little Rock with a mounted spoonbill--the official name of the duck is Northern shoveler--in my house. There's a bumper sticker out there that says: "Spoonies have green heads, too." I have Gene DePriest of the famous Gene's Barbecue in Brinkley to thank for that mount. If you hunt ducks anywhere around Monroe County, you've likely eaten at Gene's. When my two sons (now 26 and 22) were young, Gene insisted that they both take a mounted duck off the wall in the back room of the restaurant and bring it home.

When I protested, Gene said loudly: "This is between me and those two boys. You stay out of it."

One boy picked a pintail. The other chose the spoonbill, which is known by veteran hunters as a "trash duck" since it's generally inedible. Like I said, it's fitting that the spoonbill mount is still at my house. In southwest Arkansas, we weren't too proud to shoot at spoonies.

In the 1970s, my father and a group of his friends formed a hunting club in the Ouachita River bottoms south of Arkadelphia. The official name of the club was the Open Banks Hunting Club. Informally, it was simply called "the duck club." There were never many limits of ducks killed there. I would tell the members: "Why don't you call this what it really is? It's a supper club."

Members would gather monthly for dinner. They might have fried crappie to eat one month and rabbit the next. Basically, the menu consisted of whatever the members caught, shot or ran over. As a teenager, I often became frustrated that we weren't killing more ducks. It seemed to me that the dinner the night before the hunt and the big breakfast after the hunt were the members' priorities. As I look back more than 40 years later, I realize that my father and his friends had it right.

My father, who died in 2011 at age 86, considered duck hunting and quail hunting to be sports for gentlemen. Gentlemen didn't get in a hurry. They weren't greedy, and they didn't boast. He had grown up in a poor Saline County family during the Great Depression, hunting rabbits and squirrels 12 months a year just to put meat on the table. He was the best shot I ever knew. When I would ask him how he became such a talented shot, he would reply: "If you wanted something other than biscuits and gravy on the table in those days, you learned to shoot well."

Dad owned a sporting goods store and could have had his choice of the finest guns and clothing later in life. But his 12-gauge Browning was an old one that he had used since his days as the head football coach at Newport High School in the late 1940s and early 1950s when he would duck hunt with professional baseball player George Kell in the offseason. His hunting clothes were just about as old. Now that I'm age 60, I realize that I've turned into him. My friends joke that my hunting clothes are so old that the camouflage patterns have gone out of style and come back again.

I've had the opportunity to hunt at some of the finest east Arkansas duck clubs. These are the kinds of places I could only dream about when I was growing up in Clark County and watching coots land on the sewer ponds. One of the best decisions I ever made was about a quarter of a century ago when I accepted an invitation from Wiley Meacham to speak to the Brinkley Rotary Club in the back room at Gene's. Wiley and I hit it off that day, and an invitation came to hunt at Wiley's Piney Creek Duck Club. I can't begin to recount all the great stories I know from Piney Creek, which is among the most special parcels of flooded green timber in the duck hunting universe. It's a place where limits are common but folks don't take themselves too seriously.

Each duck season when Steve "Wild Man" Wilson was still working for the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission, a television show would be filmed at Piney Creek and then shown at Christmas on AETN. Wiley and "Wild Man" usually would invite me to tag along. We would decorate a Christmas tree in the flooded timber. At the end of the hunt, we would all put on Santa caps and sing Christmas carols as the cameras rolled.

My wife and two sons were watching the program one Christmas morning when my wife commented: "So that's how you act on those days when you leave the house at 3:30 in the morning to drive east? I had no idea that was what duck hunting was all about."

I explained to her that it's exactly what duck hunting is about at this stage in my life--close friends, good food, lots of laughs and watching the sun rise over an Arkansas farm. If we happen to kill a few ducks along the way, that's just gravy. I'm going to leave the fast boats, expensive guns and popular new camouflage patterns to the younger hunters out there. As the old saying goes, I'm not as mad at 'em as I used to be.

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Senior Editor Rex Nelson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He's also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.

Editorial on 12/11/2019

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