This was just one of many successful green-timber duck hunts I've enjoyed in Arkansas. All agreed it was a fine morning for hunting green-timber greenheads. Other hunters were coming in, too, and we swapped "How'd you dos" on the front porch. When the time was right, George signaled: "Get ‘em!" And some got got.īy 10, we were celebrating our good fortune over a welcome cup of coffee back at the clubhouse. They circled twice, then gave to the pull of gravity, falling through the trees. Hundreds of mallards traded through the timber. The birds circled once, cupped their wings and came in through the canopy. A staccato burst of feeding notes was the final persuader. Vern turned this way then that, trying to keep an eye on the mallards speeding through the maze of trees.
The whole thing seemed choreographed.Ī pod of greenheads and susies rocketed by at treetop height and banked sharply in response to Vern's hail call. The sky at first light was alive with mallards. A cold front passed the night before, and with it came a new wave of flight ducks. No ice was on the water, so the birds were flying. The sky was robin's-egg blue with wisps of white clouds. Weather conditions were ideal for a timber hunt. Ripples in the water convince flying ducks that their kind are feeding below. Occasionally, one man swirled his foot in the water, sending ripples through a small block of decoys. Wearing waders and standing close beside trees in the almost-knee-deep water, the three men, almost invisible in their tree-bark garb, made the sounds of a mallards feeding, gabbing, cajoling their friends in the sky to come down. Our hosts, Vernon Baker, Bob Bendigo and George Peters remained outside. When we reached it, after navigating a maze of narrow woodland boat trails with a small spotlight, Sammy and I climbed into a blind. Our hunting spot, "The South Hole," was a small clearing amidst hundreds of acres of pin oaks flooded with shallow water. Here, mallards and flooded green timber are the basic ingredients in a decades-old duck-hunting recipe. Sammy Faulk, a friend from Louisiana, had joined me for a hunt on the Poor Boy Duck Club just outside Stuttgart, Arkansas, the Rice and Duck Capital of the World. Three hours earlier, before first light, we had boated to brush-covered blinds in the flooded timber. In this instance, however, not a shot was fired. Under different circumstances, some ducks never would have left that hole. I have witnessed many wonderful things during 40 years of hunting, but none more memorable than that shower of mallards, which fell last fall. As quickly as they had come, they were gone.
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We watched them leave, a backward-played video on nature's TV screen.
The entire flock followed in an explosion of swamp water and feathers. Something in her tiny brain told her something wasn't quite right, and she shot from the water like a stone from a catapult. Somewhere within the flock, a wary susie flushed. But despite our best intentions, the inevitable happened. My hunting companions and I were afraid to move, afraid even to breath, for fear of destroying that magic moment. The sky, dark with their forms just seconds before, shone bluebird-blue again.Īll was silent now. One hundred? Five hundred? I could not determine, but in less time than it takes to tell it, they covered the shallow water before us like a warm feathered blanket.
One might easier count snowflakes in a blizzard. I tried guessing their numbers but it was useless.
The soft whistling of their wings filled our ears. One landed with a splash, then another and another. They plummeted into the flooded trees from a single point of the compass, wings cupped, feet splayed, the emerald heads of the drakes glistening in sharp contrast to the vivid crimson and orange of the autumn-colored oaks. We watched the tempest take shape as one might watch a rain squall on the horizon, and knew, in seconds, we'd be caught in the deluge. As the shower drew near, a hush swept through the flooded timber-the calm before the storm.
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