Having moved back to my home state after 35 years of living in Minnesota I was looking forward to getting into some good Arkansas duck hunting.

The duck hunting in Minnesota had been exciting but sometimes a tough sort that left something to be desired. It wasn’t a thing you could always depend on as sometimes the lakes were froze solid by the opening weekend of duck season. If the water didn’t freeze over then the ducks had 14,583 lakes plus numerous rivers to thin out over. This made hunting ducks in Minnesota mostly a hit or miss situation. You could get lucky and really get into them or you might hunt your butt off for three days and never fire a shot.

When it’s a good wild rice year in Minnesota you can have fantastic shooting so long as you have open water. But, there’s a price to pay when hunting wild rice lakes. They are usually very shallow with a very, very boggy bottom. The locals refer to them as “four feet of loom crap covered by six inches of murky water”. That presents some rough boating and they are nearly impossible to wade through. Some of these areas are so boggy that you can stand on one side, shake the ground and watch the tamarack trees tremble on the other side of the lake. This is not the kind of stuff I care to wade, or matter of fact, even send my dog wading into.

There are few guys in Minnesota who have more than three days at one time to duck hunt as the work force up north generally work in factories or an office and find it hard to get off from their jobs for many prolonged hunting trips each year. Unlike many of their counters parts in the south where most duck hunters do not work in industry and thereby many of them have the whole duck season off from work to pursue their pleasure.

After being back in Arkansas for a while and finally getting moved into our new home I had enough time to try some of the great duck hunting it provided. When I had moved back from Minnesota I had assumed that it would be easy to begin hunting with my two brothers-in-law who did a lot of duck hunting. It didn’t take long to figure out that this was not to be the case though as they both already had their own established hunting groups. With the brother-in-law scenario not working out I tried hunting on my own, but hunting on my own didn’t produce many ducks for the pot. I became so desperate that I telephoned up a couple of old classmates whom I had graduated high school with so long ago to see if I might hunt with them in their flooded rice fields. They too seemed to have their own established full group with “no room at the Inn” left for me. After 35 years of absence, these “good ole boy groups” were proving hard to break into.

In modern day Arkansas I found that most of the good duck hunting area is either leased rice fields or the flooded river bottoms managed by the Fish & Game Department. I soon realized that if I didn’t want to pay a King’s ransom for a spot in some farmers rice field I would have to hunt the river bottoms.

 

 

These huge areas of flooded river bottoms can be very intimidating. The river itself is exciting, yet a bit spooky. Boating the in the predawn darkness gives you an ominous feeling intermingled with your anticipatory thoughts. During those river trips the thoughts and feelings are usually interrupted several times by the three or four dozen high powered boats adorned with their million candle powered spot lights whizzing pass you in the early morning darkness, all of them being in a race and vying to be the first hunters into the best duck holes which the flooded timber offers.

Here again I found that while I was hunting the flooded bottoms if I didn’t get into one of those good holes I wasn’t going to shoot at many ducks as they tended to shy away from the actual river. If it’s one of those rare cold weather spells when the flooded areas freeze over then the river itself with its current offering the only open water to be found and will support some shooting. Another thought here is, if it’s cold enough to freeze the flooded area it will also freeze the water in the rice fields and ninety percent of the ducks will pick up and fly farther south seeking open water and you’ll probably be hard pressed to get much shooting anyhow. So, if you are new in the area don’t expect to harvest many ducks on the river by itself.

The first year back had become terribly frustrating for this wannabe duck hunter and I was beginning to have some second thoughts about this whole duck hunting struggle. No hunting with the brothers-in-law, no hunting with the classmates, I didn’t know the river bottoms well enough to be effective, the leased rice fields cost too much, I was really beginning to wonder, what the heck was going on and what the heck was I doing?

The second-year things changed though. In the off season I had stopped in at Carter City & County Realty to check out a firearm ad Larry Carter had placed in the local paper and quite by accident I happened to meet Jack Weitkamp who was in there checking out an ad on some hill property. I had heard about Jack’s duck hunting prowess and with one of his sons-in-law being a shirttail relative of my wife, I at least had a starting place to get to know him better.

After meeting Jack at the realty office, I stopped by his home a couple of times and visited with him. Soon I met his son, Bill and his two grandsons, Billy Don and Kevin who are good duck hunters. Jack is a retired rice farmer with a lovely understanding wife when it comes to his hunting. The area around where Jack lives and where he has practiced his craft of duck hunting all his life includes Delaplaine, Peach Orchard and Knobel, Arkansas and is one of, if not one the best places to hunt ducks in all of America. The numerous rice fields and flooded timber draws mallards by the millions. Jack was born and raised in this area of northeast Arkansas and has probably killed more ducks than ninety nine percent of the other duck hunters who live around there. Not only is he a dead shot with his ole three-inch Browning 12 gauge but with a duck caller in his mouth he could land ducks in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

Jack finally invited me on a duck hunting forage with them. There were five of us and forage is a good word to describe the hunt as we all had our limit of ducks in just a few minutes after opening shooting hours. This was quite a change of what I had become used to while honing on my own.

Jack and I hit it off well as hunting partners and after a few hunts together we found that our talents complimented each other’s. We found that my ears and eyes would hear and locate circling ducks first and then by me pointing them out to Jack he would get on his duck caller and entice them into our decoys where in most cases I’d watch as Jack shot most of the ducks before I could get my gun shouldered.

During the first few hunts I found it amusing that Jack was overly cautious with his hunting spots keeping me turned around and completely lost in the flooded timer, so I wouldn’t be able to find the place where we had been hunting without him. It seemed that Jack had been burned in the past by people he had taken to one his spots. The next thing he would knew, Jack shows up to hunt his spot only to find the novice hunter hunting in his hole with his own buddies. I knew where Jack was coming from as I have had the same thing happen to me by some of my so-called bowhunting buddies in Minnesota. You show someone one of your good deer stands then the next thing you knew you’d show up an hour before daylight at your chosen place and find some jerk already occupying your deer stand.

Hunting with these guys awhile it didn’t take too long to figure out that my slow reflexes and the light 12 gauge I was carrying wasn’t going to take many ducks around these veteran shooters. By the time the ducks were in range of my light gun Jack, Bill, Bill Don and Kevin with their heavy 12-gauge guns would have ducks falling all over me so the best I could do was cover up to keep from getting thumped in the face by the falling fowl.

Chris Rice, another grandson of Jacks, showed me a remedy for this as one day he happened to be hunting with us and was suing his Browning 10-gauge pump. I noticed that he didn’t have any problem of being out shot by these guys, plus the range that he was making clean killing shots was impressive. Also, he didn’t seem to be getting kicked very hard by the big gauge gun. I had only fired a 10 gauge once before, it was a Mossberg and when I shot it I swear that it tore my brain loose. For three days after that shot I could shake my head and feel my brain floating loosely around inside of my skull. Reluctantly, I asked Chris if I could fire his Browning once and he said I could. Surprisingly, it didn’t kick any harder that the light 12 gauge I was carrying. What a relief! I remembered that the Mossberg had only weighed about seven pounds whereas the Browning weighed a little more than 12 pounds thus producing much less agony on the butt end of the firearm.

The next morning, I showed up with my own Browning 10-gauge pump. By the end of the morning ‘s hunt with my new equalizer and the blessing that I could usually see the ducks before the other guys, I had my gun up and blazing away as the ducks entered the treetops over the decoys. I could finally compete.

The ducks hunting had finally come around and had turned out to be a very successful endeavor. And the fact that Bill, Billy Don and Kevin still farmed the family farms where geese sometimes cover their fields by the tons of thousands I thought this would be a good time to try my hand at goose hunting. Seeing these geese cover up the field reminded me of a 12-inch snow in Minnesota the way the fields would turn solid white from the thousands of geese pushing and shoveling while trying to make room for one more goose to land amongst them. Jack had sunk a 14-foot ground pit in one of his fields the year before to shoot ducks from so we decided to get into it the next day and wait in hopes that the geese would return.

The next day in the pit I was to discover another side of Jack’s personality, “his wit and dry humor”. We had only been in the pit a few minutes where I had been trying out a goose call someone had sent to me to field-test back when I was a member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America. Suddenly, seven Canadain geese broke the horizon heading directly toward our hiding place. As they flew over we fired three shots each. Just beyond the blind one of them folded up, hit the ground hard, flopped up and started running. Jack said, “you got him, you’d better get after him”. Being doubtful about this as Jack can shoot circles around my wing shooting ability I asked him was he sure. With a smirk on his face he insisted that indeed I had been the one who had hit the goose and that I had better hurry up to get after it before it got away. Wanting to believe this and the fact that I had never harvested a goose before gave me a reason to climb up out of the pit and get the chase on.

A half of mile later after wading knee deep gumbo mud the whole distance, soaked and wet in the seat with a huge goose in my hands I finally realized what the urging and smirk were all about, although it was a little tough to see the humor of the whole episode at that moment. From the then on I learned to pace my shots to know which shot bought the flying behemoth fowl to ground. I had found my niche in the “good ole Boy” fraternity thanks to the Weitkamps. I knew I was one of the boys when leading up to our second season of hunting they invited me to mix my decoys in with theirs.

So, if you are new in the area or if you are returning after several years of being away and really want to duck hunt, don’t give up. Hang in there and keep trying, maybe you’ll get as lucky as I did, maybe you will even meet a man named Jack, thus finding a good hunting partner and a great friend. Thanks Jack.

Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to Arkansas Outdoor Country Magazine today for $20 a year!

Subscribe to Arkansas Outdoor Country TODAY!