January 6, 2007 Outdoor Column

The following column appeared in the January 6, 2007, edition of the Morning Sun in Pittsburg Kansas:

“Now, tell me, again, why you’re driving six hours to go duck hunting in Arkansas when we have plenty of ducks around here?” inquired my mother.

If I had a dime for every time I have answered that question I could have paid for 10 hunting trips to Arkansas by now.

Arkansas’ attraction to ducks and duck hunters can be boiled down to, basically, landscape and biology:

Landscape

According to Steve Bowman and Steve Wright who penned the book Arkansas Duck Hunter’s Almanac, Arkansas contains 8 million acres of the 24 million-acre Mississippi River Alluvial Plain. At one time, that huge floodplain was one vast bottomland hardwood forest.

This floodplain is wide and flat, thus enabling small amounts of fall rainfall to exponentially impact the creeks’ and rivers’ capacity to contain flood water. One inch of rainfall in the right place can inundate thousands of acres of not only bottomland hardwoods but agricultural land as well.
Rice is the main agricultural product of this region. In the early 1990s, Arkansas produced more than 40 percent of the rice crop of the entire United States. The rice crop is another key factor to attracting swarms of ducks to Arkansas. But rice alone cannot meet all of the nutritional needs of wintering ducks. This brings us to biology.

Biology

As a former wildlife biologist, I can officially tell you ducks are divided into two categories; dabbling ducks and diving ducks.

Dabbling ducks, like the common mallard, don’t dive completely under water to feed. Instead, they prefer to tip up their bottoms and reach underwater with their necks to secure food. Typically they like shallow water areas — about 24 inches or less in depth.

Diving ducks do just as their name implies. They dive completely under water to find food and usually are found in deeper water bodies like large ponds and lakes.

Oak trees dominate the bottomland hardwood forests. One also will find a few hackberries and sycamores as well as many herbaceous, moist-soil plants such as millet and smartweed.
Among those moist-soil plants, one will find invertebrates (creatures with no backbone, like insects), with which dabbling ducks supplement their diet in order to obtain the nutrition needed to survive winter and prepare for the long migration north in the spring.

To pull this all together, when creeks and rivers of east-central Arkansas overflow their banks there may be anywhere from two to 18 inches of water in adjacent bottomland hardwood forests and nearby soybean and rice fields.
Think of this as a duck “food pyramid” with the proper diversity and balanced diet that includes all of the “food groups” required to meet the nutritional needs of wintering waterfowl.

(At this point in my answer my mother usually begins to nod off.)

“Now, how, exactly, do you hunt ducks in the woods?...How do they fly around all those trees?” queries Mom.

The answer:

Duck behavior shifts 180 degrees from a horizontal, visual world in a wide open marsh to a vertical, auditory world in the woods.

They cannot glide gently downward to a graceful landing — rather, they hit their “air brakes” and drop down perpendicular to the towering oak trees surrounding them. They are clumsy, hitting limbs on the way down and knocking off the any remaining auburn leaves that have escaped the chilly grip of autumn.

The silhouettes of trees prevent them from seeing other flocks of ducks already on the water, so they rely more on tuning their ears to the quacks, chuckles, and murmurs common of resting and feeding ducks.

This switch to auditory signals is one reason the duck call was invented. In the right place at the right time, a duck hunter worth his waders can stand next to an oak tree, blow a duck call, kick the knee-deep water with his foot to emulate the splashing sounds of feeding ducks, and call ducks into flooded timber without the aid of any decoys.

In the early 1900s, the advent of commercial duck hunting operations meant the need for landowners to give Mother Nature a hand during dry years in order to have ample water upon which to hunt ducks. This led to the concept of “greentree reservoirs” whereby levees were constructed around tracts of bottomland forests so that mechanical pumps could artificially flood them.
In the spring, the water would be drained from the forest prior to the start of the growing season to ensure the trees would not die. “Green” timber or “greentree reservoirs” became common slang for this new endeavor.

Now, if you’re still awake, you know more than you ever wanted to know about duck hunting in the woods.

Oh, in case you were wondering, my mother and most of the rest of my family still think I am half crazy for driving six hours to pay hard-earned money to stand knee-deep in 40-degree water hugging an oak tree…but they love me so mostly they just smile and shake their heads.

Brad Stefanoni is a lifelong waterfowler and former wildlife biologist. He can be reached at brad.stefanoni@yahoo.com

A Tale of Two Timbers...

Well, it's obvious that SwampBuck Outfitters has a different idea of what "green timber hunting" is as compared to what Chris Miller and I expected. Day one, December 28, we hunted a bald cypress brake and shot a limit of greenheads "below the treetops." Day two, December 29, we hunted a willow hole and only shot three greenheads (one of which was double-banded with a voided $100 reward band)...and we were rained on. On the drive home my alternator went out near Searcy, Arkansas, and I spend three hours in a Lincoln dealership...fun.

Overall, it was a great time with my bud, Chris Miller, but we are looking to hunt at McCollum's Stuttgart Hunting Club near Stuttgart next year. Live and learn!

Next will be some "camera hunting" as the Kansas duck season is closed until January 20.