WILDFOWL 40th Anniversary Article: Stuttgart—Still a Great Place for the Mallard Hunter

This article originally appeared in WILDFOWL Magazine in 1985; in the August/September issue Volume 1, Issue 1.

It wasn’t really a good morning for an East Arkansas flooded-timber duck hunt. The sky was leaden gray at daylight, a weather condition which most experienced hunters know usually means slow hunting, especially in the woods. That was one thing.

Another thing was that we were three days into a deep cold snap, and during those three days we had seen night-time lows dip into the single digits.

The flooded fields were frozen solid, of course, and the ducks had moved elsewhere in search of open water. At the first of a deep cold spell like this, timber hunting is usually a good bet. The water in the woods is more sheltered from the cold and tends to stay open longer. But after three days of cold as intense as this had been, even the woods had frozen, and most of the ducks had hauled off to Louisiana for the duration.

But a duck hunter is nothing else if not an optimist, and so we were going duck hunting—my Dad, my uncle and I. We didn’t figure to kill any ducks, but it was Saturday and the season was open, and that was all the reason needed to go.

And we found exactly what we figured we’d find—more than two inches of ice covering the timber in which we planned to hunt. The two inches wasn’t bad, though, because it was thick enough to walk on, and the first half mile or so into the flooded woods was a rather enjoyable semi-skating expedition.

But the farther we went, the thinner the ice got, and before long we started breaking through.

Have you ever tried walking very far through knee-deep flooded timber covered with an inch of ice? It’s a lot of fun. The ice will almost hold your weight but not quite, so that you really have to bear down on it to break off a chunk so that you can take a step forward and do it all over again. It makes for a rate of forward progress which makes for situation under which the average person will quickly lose his religion.

We took turns breaking trail, and finally we all said to hell with it, and stopped where we were. We broke out a hole in the ice about the size of a living room, muddying the water as we did, in the hopes that some addle-pated duck or two might fly by and see our openwater and commit suicide by trying to light in it. We stood around that hole for more than an hour, shivering in our waders, while nothing flew over at all.

But then we started seeing a few ducks, coming high out of the east and losing altitude as they came over us, ignoring our pitiful little patch of open water but obviously showing great interest in something farther west. They appeared to be going down about a half mile from us, and we took a vote and headed that way.

The inch-thick ice was tough at first, but then it began to grow thinner and thinner, and inside of three hundred yards we were wading waist-deep in ice-cold open water. Meanwhile, the duck traffic over our heads was growing in volume. We could also hear ducks on the water in front of us.

The timber we were now in was thick and scrubby-looking, not at all the type of stuff you’d look for when duck hunting in green timber. We couldn’t see more than 50 yards in any direction because of the thick, tangled undergrowth. That’s why we were able to walk into the middle of a thousand or so mallards before they saw us and made their noisy escape.

It was pretty exciting when they got up, and what with two thousand wings all beating the air at the same time and our reflexes being numbed by the cold and the lack of shooting opportunities that morning and this and that and the other, all of those ducks got out of there unscathed except for one scrawny old hen mallard that my dad finally scratched down with his third shot.

But it didn’t matter, because within five minutes those ducks and other ones started piling back into that 40-acre patch of open water, and all we had to do was call at them a little bit to get their attention, kick the water a couple of times to make a few ripples, and slip the safeties off our shotguns. This was in the days before the point system came to Arkansas, and the limit was four mallards.

Ducks fell back in there by the pair and by the squad and by the platoon and by the company, and we stood there under them and picked our shots. There toward the end we were taking turns shooting, with only one of the three of us being allowed to shoot at a particular bunch of ducks, and even then with only a single shell. We did this in an attempt to stretch the hunt out a little bit, but it didn’t work very well.

It took us only 30 minutes to kill 11 more ducks to round out our limits, and it wouldn’t have taken that long if it had been clear instead of cloudy. We had to let the ducks get in closer, you see, because of poor light, so we could try to pick out the drakes from the hens. We did pretty good at it, too, despite the heavy gray skies, because when the last duck hit the water we had only two of what my uncle calls, “brown ducks”—the hen dad had killed at the first and the one I dropped when she got in the way as I shot at (and missed) a big greenhead.

We never did figure out whether the ducks were in there because the water was open, or whether the water was open because the ducks were in there. But it’s been that way since who knows when.

In the late 19th century, ducks swarmed by the literal millions in this east Arkansas region known as the Grand Prairie, in the vicinity of the pioneered German settlement known as Stuttgart. In those early days, the ducks kept mostly to the flooded bottomland areas along the creeks bayous rivers of the region. Venturing out into the lush prairies only when heavy rains fell and puddles formed here and there since major use of the Prairie land in those days was for hanging, no one minded that the ducks were there. In fact, they were a handy source of food, and the early settlers killed them by the droves. The hardest thing about killing 100 ducks back then was carrying them home afterward.

But time changes all things, and it came to pass that in the early days of the 20th century Colonel Robert Crockett, a gentleman farmer and grandson I believe it was, of Davy himself, raised a tiny, experimental patch of rice in his front yard, about 15 miles east of Stuttgart. The little patch of rice measured only a few feet on each side, but it changed the course of agriculture on the Grand Prairie in a few short years period Colonel Crockett raised several acres of rice to the next year, and a new industry was born. Today Stuttgart boasts 3 full-fledged rice mills, and the surrounding towns bristle with them as well.

And now that rice was an important part of the picture, those hordes of ducks began to be looked at differently by many people a flock of mallards could descend on to a mature field of rice and completely destroy a year's worth of hard work in a single night throughout the 1920s in the 1930s it was a common thing to see ads in the local and Little Rock newspapers as Grand Prairie farmers begged hunters to come and help keep the ducks shot out of their fields until the crops could be harvested some farmers even offered to furnish shotgun shells new line Bag limits were generous in those days; First fifty ducks a day then 25, then 15, then 10 is habitat dwindled, ducks grew less numerous and the ranks of duck hunters swelled. And even with the generous bag limits in those early days, it was simple matter to kill more than a limit and most folks didn't hesitate to do it. There was an inexhaustible supply of ducks, after all, and the skies over the Grand Prairie would always be black with them.

Or so they thought.

We know better than that now, of course, not because we are smarter than our parents and grandparents but because we have an advantage they did not possess: we have hindsight. Duck populations are only a remnant of what they once were, and the skies or the Grand Prairie you're no longer black with them. But it's still a good place to be, come November when the Arkansas duck season opens. Because even with only a fraction of its original quota of webfeet, the Stuttgart area still winters one hell of a bunch of ducks and geese.

Sometimes I wonder, in my more philosophical moments, how things would have turned out if I'd been born in the Canadian Rockies or Death Valley or Miami Beach or some semi duck-less place like that. Would I have grown up to be such a duckaholic anyway?

As it was, I never had a chance. Because, you see, this little E Arkansas farming community I've been telling you about is my own hometown. And when Stuttgart is your hometown, from pre-puberty to post-senility you are subjected to a God-awful bombardment of duck propaganda that you either reject it completely or you embrace it with all the fervor of a zealot.

I chose the latter route. I have been paying for it and enjoying it ever since.

Stuttgart is also home to the world championship duck calling contest, an annual happening that started very modestly in the 1930s and has grown in the last 50 years into the most prestigious duck calling contest in the world. People who know a lot about duck calling and duck calling contests are in general agreement that the highly ritualized style of calling used in contests today had its origin right here in Stuttgart. And whether that's true or not the world championship is still the goal toward which contest hopefuls aspire, when the world championship contest itself serves as the model after which other lesser contests are patterned. More often than not, whenever you see an advertisement or a flyer for a regional or a state duck calling contest, somewhere toward the bottom of the thing you'll find the words “Stuttgart rules apply.”

Stuttgart's world championship duck calling contest is actually a whole series of contests—the Arkansas State championship, the Junior World championship, the women's world championship, the chick major memorial championship and the world championship itself, and, every five years, the champion of champions event, which is open only to former or current world champions the contests are held on a blocked off section of Stuttgart’s Main Street, amid a lively, tacky slice of Americana: a traveling carnival, complete with make-you-sick-to-your-stomach rides, board Shetland ponies, cotton candy and ring toss games. There are also other events thrown in for good measure—the Queen Mallard pageant and the duck gumbo cook off, a zany event started a few years ago which has become much an exercise and weird customary as it has a culinary contest there is also a 5K and A10K race, appropriately called the great duck race, for those who care to subject their bodies to such things. Just as appropriately, one fellow a few years ago donned hip boots, hunting coat, slicker suit and other hunting garb and ran the entire race dressed but the main thing, the glue which binds all these festivities together, is the duck calling the contest, which in recent years has come to be called the “Wings Over the Prairie Festival,” draws people from all over the country and the world. Luminaries such as gene hill and Ted Williams have served as judges for the world championship event, and quaint but nevertheless famous personalities like Grandpa Jones and Jerry Clower have emceed the event. The contests are held, rain or shine, on Friday and Saturday of carnival week.

Many of the faces there are familiar ones, because many of Stuttgart’s residents are diehard supporters of the world championship event and all that goes with it. But a good 50% of the attendees every year are newcomers, a high proportion of which are out-of-state people who have come to Stuttgart and the Grand Prairie to sample the famous duck hunting they've been hearing about all their lives. Some of these out-of-staters have been coming, year after year, for longer than I’ve been living.

Though many who come to Stuttgart arrange their schedules to coincide with the duck calling contest, it’s already said, the hunting can be fantastic at times, even though it’ll never again be what it once was.

Green timber hunting is what made Stuttgart famous, and vice-versa. The style of duck hunting which involves shooting mallards and flooded green timber probably didn't evolve here (although it could have, and since it had to evolve somewhere and this is as likely as spot as any), but it certainly gained its fame here. The naturally and artificially flooded oak flats attract mallards by the thousands, and dozens of private and commercial clubs in the area catered to thousands of guests each year, providing them with dreams and memories enough to last a lifetime.

However, green timber hunting is not the only thing the Grand Prairie has to offer in the way of quality duck hunting.

There's also flooded field shooting, and around Stuttgart, flooded filled shooting has been elevated to its highest form. Many clubs are equipped with roomy, heated, weatherproof roll top pits, big enough for a game of ping-pong and surrounded by spreads of decoys numbering into the thousands. There are some clubs where guests are paying hunters can get to and from the pits without even getting their feet wet, by riding in jeeps or on tractors across the shallow, flooded rice and bean fields.

In most flooded field situations, though, it's every man for himself in the struggle to and from the pit. And if you've never waited across 1/2 mile of knee deep water and shin deep gumbo mud matted with rice straw, wearing a pair of semi leaky hip boots that are a full size too large for your feet, then brother, you don't know what misery is. The only thing that can possibly make things worse is if you fall down about halfway to the pit. And you probably will.

The hunting often makes this self-inflicted torture worth it though. The professional guides around Stuttgart are the cream of the crop (he said modestly, having once been a Stuttgart guide himself), and almost to a man they are excellent duck callers.

Their success rate at bringing ducks into gun range isn't hurt any by gargantuan decoy spreads many of them use, either some of the commercial guides on the Grand Prairie used cotton trailers for decoy storage during the off season, and a few of these people have to use more than one trailer. And 2000 decoys in one bunch have a remarkably magnetic effect on a flock of gun-shy mallards.

Still, it's not a lead pipe cinch, this Stuttgart duck hunting. It used to be, maybe, but not anymore. But it's better around Stuttgart, on average, than practically anywhere else in the Mississippi Flyway.

And if you're a duck hunter, there's no place better for you to be. I'll be there, when the wind blows cold out of the north late this November, because I've been there before and I know what it's like.

And when the first trace of sleet begins to sting my cheeks, if you'll give me some knee-deep muddy water in a Bayou bottom somewhere, a big Willow oak to snuggle into and a lease side of, an antique caller to make duck music with, and a few ducks to work, well, you can have the rest of it. Because I'll have everything I want

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