Happy, Happy, Happy (22 page)

Our first purchase was a plot of forty acres in the wetlands near our house. We bought it, then added more land through the years, until we accumulated what we have now. Mac Owen,
a longtime hunting companion of mine, who appears in many of the
Duckmen
videos, also wanted to get in on the investments. Together Mac and I bought surrounding land as it came up for sale—usually forty acres at a time.

Our investment has paid for itself many times over, primarily because the land we purchased was the most feasible and economical place for oil and gas companies to cross the Ouachita River with their pipelines. The fees we collected from the utility companies were more than triple what we paid for the land. I also bargained with the companies to ensure that the duck habitat would not be damaged. In the end, the pipelines were laid in a natural-looking curve. I think the plan may even have enhanced the area’s appeal to ducks because I mow the pipeline right-of-way regularly, eliminating brush and encouraging more grass to grow.

We have planted, cultivated, and protected the grasses on our land primarily for ducks. Our wetlands are covered with native millets, sedges, and nut grass, as well as planted stands of Pennsylvania smartweed, American smartweed, and sprangletop, creating a mosaic of wild and cultivated plants. They are all prime foods for wildlife. The grasses are heavy producers of the seeds on which ducks thrive. Millet is one of the best foods available for ducks. In a good year, smartweed can produce more than five million seeds per acre. Ducks love them, and their craws are often found stuffed with the small black seeds. Sprangletop is another
heavy seed producer; some of its seeds will remain edible for as long as seven years.

That the grasses also sustain crawfish is a bonus. Everything eats crawfish at every stage of a crawfish’s life: fish, birds, raccoons, bullfrogs, snakes, turtles, large water beetles, and humans. Crawfish are a Louisiana delicacy, and we’ve harvested them to eat and sell. Crawfish are also an important ingredient in the swamp ecosystem, so I do everything I can to propagate them.

Crawfish are an important ingredient in the swamp ecosystem, so I do everything I can to propagate them.

Shortly after we bought the land in the wetlands, I observed all of the water leaving through one low drainage area on the edge of our land. The water dumped into a creek before emptying into the Ouachita River. To control the water depth on our land, I built a low levee across the area. I marked the highest level the water reached on trees, which allowed me to determine how high and long to make the levee. As I was building it, I installed a forty-eight-inch culvert through it at the lowest spot, and then put a weir, or gate, across it to control the water depth. I can adjust the water depth of the wetlands six inches at a time simply by adding or taking out a top board from the weir.

I regulate the flooding of my land in accordance with what crawfish require—which, coincidentally, meets the needs of migrating
ducks as well. The crawfish normally hatch in October, when the rains return. They grow through the winter, reaching adulthood in March. Hopefully, enough rain will fall to refill the area. If the area isn’t filled naturally, I use a big pump to draw water from the river. Normally, I have to do some pumping to ensure that most of my land is covered with water to a depth of twelve to eighteen inches—ideal for both the crawfish and duck populations. The depth is determined by how far a duck can stretch its neck to feed when it bobs underwater. After duck season is over, I drain the land to promote the growth of grasses and trees.

After we purchased the wetlands, a Louisiana Fish and Wildlife Department survey showed that 65 percent of the timber in the area was bitter pecan trees, which can grow as tall as one hundred feet. The wood is not as desirable as hickory or regular pecan, but it is resilient and is used to make such things as axe and hammer handles. The worst thing about bitter pecan trees is that they drop pignuts, which taste so bad that most wildlife won’t eat them. I set out to eliminate the bitter pecan trees and replace them with oak trees that would produce more palatable fare for a wider variety of wildlife—including both squirrels and deer, which love acorns.

It turned out to be a formidable task. After the bitter pecan trees were cut and sold, the following year suckers began to sprout
from all the stumps. Left alone, multiple tree trunks would grow from the stumps, and the area would be reforested with bitter pecan trees, thicker than before. So I got a lawn trimmer, the kind with a blade, and went from stump to stump, one at a time, and mangled off all the sprouts. Then I treated the stumps with poison to finish killing them off. It took me three years to clear them all.

Then I was thinking about how to get the area seeded with oaks. I had planted and seeded many oaks and cypress trees but was still working on it when the Almighty stepped in and flooded everything in the area in 1991. The water picked up acorns and deposited them over all the area I’d cleared. When spring came, there were thousands and thousands of oaks of all kinds, sprouting every foot or so. It was a blessing from above, and while the flood destroyed the home where Pa and Granny were living and its water rose to the front steps of our house, the floodwaters provided us the now heavily wooded areas where we hunt today.

About 90 percent of your success in duck hunting is determined by the location of your duck blind, and we’ve made major improvements to water conditions, soil conditions, and how natural feed gets to the holes we’re hunting. I’ve kept detailed records of every one of the hunts on our land for more than two decades, including specifics about weather, wind direction, types of ducks
we saw, and the position of the sun. It’s amazing to look back and see how much better the hunting has been over the last few years after the improvements were made.

I’ve kept detailed records of every one of the hunts on our land for more than two decades.

For instance, on opening day of the 1995 duck season, we hunted Dog Bayou, a blind on my land, and we killed one mallard, seven teals, and one ring-necked. A few days later, we hunted the Dog Bayou and didn’t even fire our guns. Good night; we stayed until two o’clock in the afternoon and didn’t kill a duck! During the 1995 season, we killed 266 ducks in 60 days. Now we try to average twenty ducks per day between four or five of us in the blinds. During the first split in 2012, we killed more than two hundred ducks in the first ten days. We’ve gone from two hundred ducks in 1995 to more than one thousand ducks now.

The crazy part is we can make as many improvements as we want to our duck blinds, but they’ll never be as good as the ancestral holes. Some of the land next to mine used to be a swamp, but the owners leveled it in the 1960s and turned it into rice fields. Some guys got in a duck blind over there and noticed that ducks kept flying to one particular spot on the field. They asked the farmer why ducks were sitting there, and he told them it’s where a lake used to be. The trees and the water are gone, but the ducks
are still flying there because it was where the lake once was. It’s in their genetic makeup to fly there.

It’s one of the phenomena of Mother Nature that can’t be explained through science. There are a lot of them, and the only explanation I can come up with is that God is in charge and has a blueprint for how everything works. Take, for instance, the Arctic tern, a medium-sized bird, which is famous for flying from its Arctic breeding grounds to Antarctica and back every year, covering more than 43,000 miles round-trip. The terns travel down the coast of Brazil or Africa to get to their wintering ground every year. Some evolutionists want us to believe that the reason they fly to Antarctica every year is because once upon a time one tern found its way there, told some terns about it, and then they all started going there. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

I, for one, believe the terns were born knowing they had to fly to Antarctica every winter to survive. To prove the point, researchers once robbed a tern’s nest and raised the little birds away from their mother. Then they banded them when they were old enough to fly. The terns had never seen Antarctica and had never been around another tern to tell them to fly there. So when it was time for the terns to fly south, the researchers flew over the Arctic Ocean and dropped them from an airplane. The terns made one circle and then flew south, arriving in Antarctica a few weeks later.

Why would they do that? Because there were about twenty different life forms that relied on the terns to survive. The Arctic fox couldn’t survive without its eggs, and certain plants and worms couldn’t live without its droppings. Hawks couldn’t survive without feeding on the birds. The terns were part of the food cycle in both the Arctic Ocean and Antarctica.

The ducks that fly south from Canada each year and winter throughout Florida, Louisiana, Texas, parts of Central America, and beyond are the same way. Everything from alligators to snapping turtles to skunks rob ducks’ nests and eat their eggs. Foxes, coyotes, and birds of prey eat their babies when they’re young. Humans hunt ducks, too, and they put meat on our tables. It’s the Almighty sending literally millions and millions of pounds of protein from one end of a continent to the other end, feeding all of these things along the way.