Even in our worst year, the Hendricks family has bountiful reasons for which to be thankful.
Thank you to our readers that give space to these musings. Most major newspapers, except for those in Texas, have dropped or greatly curtailed their outdoors coverage. Curious exceptions are the San Francisco Chronicle and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette readers demand and value the outdoors beat. From Steve Bowman to Trey Reid to present, our hunting and fishing coverage is one of our most widely read features. I am thankful to live in -- and hail from -- a state with such a rich outdoors heritage.
I am thankful to our ownership that continues to prove that a well-run, proactive and visionary newspaper is still a vibrant, healthy and relevant communications medium. We have a very fine newspaper, and I am proud to be a part of it.
I am thankful to our editors that frequently present outdoors related issues, like the discovery of chronic wasting disease in our state's deer herd, in the most prominent sections of the paper.
I am especially thankful to Wally Hall, Jeff Krupsaw and Jason Yates, the brain trust of our Sports staff. I wish everyone could have such great bosses.
I am thankful to the outpouring of support that so many readers extended to my family after the passing of my son Daniel in May. Your cards, letters and e-mails were voluminous. I think I answered them all, but thank you again.
I am thankful to the friends that I have made through these musings. Many of them populate these pages as recurring characters, but they are more than that. They are a vast extended family bound by the love of hunting and fishing.
Bill Eldridge, Rusty Pruitt, Mike Romine, Zach Smith, "Fowl" Al Thomas, Rev. Mike Stanley, Wayne Crutchfield, Paul Crutchfield, Basel Khalil, Adam Ratcliffe, Scott Hunter, Glenn Clark, Tyrone Phillips, Dr. Bobby McGehee, Tim Griffis and Kevin Short are just a few of the folks that make this thing go. I am proud to know you, and it's an honor to share the fields, streams, woods and waters with you.
I am thankful for Ray Tucker, host of Ray Tucker's Arkansas Outdoors radio program on KABZ-103.7 FM, The Buzz, and my fellow co-host Mark Hedrick. We recently celebrated our second anniversary on the air, and we have a lot of fun talking about hunting and fishing every Wednesday from 7-8 p.m. And it's always a treat to chat with "Freaky" Joe Franklin, the Buzz's engineer, before airtime.
I am thankful for my little piece of God's country in Hot Spring County. It's pretty cool to step out the back door with three or four rifles and several boxes of reloads to test them on my 150-yard Redneck Rifle Range. Or to step out the door and bag a few squirrels or an occasional deer. This is a source of great amusement and, I believe, subdued horror to some of my friends in cosmopolitan centers.
I am thankful that the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission appears to be making a sincere attempt to re-establish bobwhite quail in our state. The proper name is Northern Bobwhite Quail, but as Democrat-Gazette Editorial Page Editor David Barham once wrote, "there's no reason to go around insulting them."
I am thankful to the people that are succeeding against seemingly insurmountable odds in this effort, including Clifton Jackson, the Game and Fish Commission's quail biologist and Dan Epperson, president of Quail Forever's Big Rock chapter, and especially Warren Montague. He's a U.S. Forest Service biologist in the Ouachita National Forest that crafted the Pine-Bluestem Restoration Plan. It successfully creates habitat for the red-cockaded woodpecker, but it also produced the largest expanse of high-quality quail habitat in the South. Montague demonstrated the effectiveness of controlled burning and selective timber harvest on a landscape-wide scale.
The western Ouachita Mountains are full of quail, too, if you don't mind the torture of hunting in such an environment.
I am thankful for all of the fantastic hunting and fishing opportunities this great state provides. Our deer hunting truly is some of the best in the country. Field & Stream magazine ranks Arkansas as a sleeper hotspot for trophy whitetails, as exemplified by the state-record buck that Jacob Ayecock killed last year. Its unique rack is No. 5 all-time.
Where else can you spend a morning hunting deer or turkey and then spend the afternoon wade fishing for smallmouth bass or hitting a lake or river for largemouths or walleyes?
People ask me all the time, "What's it like to make a living writing about hunting and fishing?"
Truthfully? I don't know how I live with myself.
The only way to describe it is "thankful."
Sports on 11/24/2016