LITTLE ROCK — Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour describes duck hunting this way: “The camaraderie and collegiality you get in duck hunting is totally different from other hunting because you’re together and form a bond of shared experience. You may be an ambassador or a governor. But when you duck hunt, you can always be a 17-year-old.”
I thought about those words on my most recent duck hunt in east Arkansas as my hunting companions laughed, told jokes and generally acted like a bunch of 17-year-old boys. My host, mind you, is past the age of 80. I’m past the age of 50. It really didn’t matter.
For those who love duck hunting-and there are thousands of Arkansans who do-the latest book from Wild Abundance Publishing is a must. A Million Wings focuses on 12 duck clubs along the Lower Mississippi Flyway-three in Missouri, one in Kentucky, three in Arkansas, three in Mississippi and two in Louisiana.
The Arkansas clubs featured are Greasy Slough near the upper Bayou DeView in northeast Arkansas, the Coca Cola Woods near Wynne and Screaming Wings near Stuttgart. A Million Wings is the third in a series of coffee-table books from the publishing arm of ArtsMemphis.
Susan Schadt, president and CEO of ArtsMemphis, produced the first book in 2008. First Shooting Light focused on clubs in Arkansas and Mississippi. The Arkansas clubs in First Shooting Light were: 713 in Lee County, which is near the north end of the St. Francis National Forest.
Bayou DeView/Section 13 Farms in Woodruff County.
Bear Bayou near Humnoke, which was founded in the 1940s by the Marks family of Stuttgart.
Blackfish Hunting Club in Crittenden County.
Circle T near Wabbaseka, which was established in 1959 to entertain customers of Central Transformer Corp. of Pine Bluff before later being sold.
Five Lakes Outing Club on Horseshoe Lake in Crittenden County, which has been around since 1901.
George Dunklin Jr.’s Five Oaks Duck Lodge in Arkansas County. Dunklin will soon become the national president of Ducks Unlimited.
Greenbriar Hunting Club near Stuttgart. Referred to by locals as the Old Winchester Club, the club was founded in 1945 by John Olin of Illinois.
Hatchie Coon Hunting & Fishing Club between Marked Tree and Trumann, which was established by a group of Memphis residents in 1889.
Kingdom Come near Stuttgart, which is owned by the David Snowden family of Little Rock.
Menasha Hunting & Fishing Club between Gilmore and Turrell, which dates back to 1902.
Mud Lake Hunting Club near Hughes, which also dates back to 1902.
The famed Claypool’s Reservoir near Weiner, which was purchased by Wallace Claypool of Memphis in 1941 and was the site of a well-known NBC national television program in December of 1956 in which dynamite was used to scare up millions of ducks.
The second book in the series, Wild Abundance, came out in 2010. The concept was to take some of the South’s best chefs and put them in the region’s top hunting clubs. One of the nine chefs in the book is Lee Richardson, formerly of Little Rock’s Capital Hotel.
Greasy Slough consists of more than 1,000 acres of timber and farmland on the northern end of Bayou DeView. J.H. “Jim” Crain formed the Greasy Slough Outing Club in November of 1945. The property included timber that could be flooded, a reservoir and the namesake slough. Crain sold 33 memberships for $1,000 each. There are now 26 members, about half from Memphis, and the others from Arkansas.
Coca Cola Woods is owned by Memphis businessman John Dobbs Jr. Everett Pidgeon, whose family bought the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Memphis in 1909, acquired the property over a three-year period decades ago at a price of $1.20 an acre. There was only one small cabin there at the time. Pidgeon moved a house from Snow Lake to serve as the lodge. The Pidgeon family sold the club to Harvey Robbins of Tuscumbia, Ala., in 1995, and it was renamed Harvey’s Duck Club. When Dobbs bought the property three years ago, he officially changed the name to Coca Cola Woods.
Screaming Wings, the third club featured in A Million Wings, is owned by Witt Stephens Jr. of Little Rock.The land on which the club sits was purchased by Otis McCollum in 1925. A nephew, Russell McCollum, bought it in 1952 and charged visitors for daily hunts. He placed a full-page ad in the Daily Leader at Stuttgart in 1952, urging landowners to flood their fields to attract ducks. Schadt writes: “McCollum’s marketing ploy surely contributed to Stuttgart’s undisputed reputation as Duck Hunting Capital of the World. After some 50 years as a commercial hunting operation known interchangeably as Wildlife Acres, McCollum’s and Russell’s, this property is now a private retreat.” The average duck hunter will never be invited to the clubs in these three books. But they want a glimpse inside. I’ve written before about the state’s legendary duck hunters, men such as Wiley Meacham of Monroe County and George Dunklin Jr. While impressed with their ability to call and shoot ducks, I’m most impressed by their dedication to the land and their conservation efforts. Thesebooks celebrate the contribution of Mid-South sportsmen like them.
Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial, Pages 13 on 12/26/2012