ESPN Hunting

Making Mudpies

Mud flies in big chunks and little droplets, sticking and banging and flying off the ATV tires as we rumble down the levee.

Gumbo mud, y'know, that nasty-ass thick stuff that looks to be about 4 inches deep and concocted with clay, SuperGlue, a smidge of water and some corn starch for thickening.

Take a step and you get a half-inch on your waders' soles. Next step, another half-inch. Third step and you're back in 8th grade gym class, trying to leg out the end of the second lap around the football field.

Halfway to the blind, you're wondering if the mud will ever come off the waders, or is attached permanently, like a giant sheet of thick, near-black plywood.

You can't flick it off. Can't brush it off. Water helps get some of it off, but not all of it.

Step about 10 feet from the blind to retrieve a duck and hesitate. You can't tell, really, but your foot is sinking into the mud under the muddy water of the flooded rice field. That next step can be a doozy.

Why? Because the wader stays in place and your foot comes halfway out of the bottom. You fall forward, then back, windmilling your arm to gain balance as your buddy laughs.

It's OK. You laughed at him the day before, when he fell and got wet.

Sundown after a long day isn't time to get the ATV stuck in a rice field rut, but you can see it coming. The way things appear can portend bad luck, and too late you say loudly, "Don't go off in there!"

Too late.

Front wheels stuck, back wheels spinning, mud churning, water flying, everything turning chocolate and nasty. You push and pull and tug and lift and try to shimmy-shake the durn thing with the throttle on full blast.

It's tough to get a grip, tougher yet to get much of a foothold in the mud. Lift the ATV and exert pressure — and you sink.

Call a friend, try again, lift the back and it sucks out of the grip of the ruts.

Lift the front somehow and then push as a buddy throttles in reverse ... don't stop, keep going, pushing, water churning, mud flying, all the way to the levee. Don't stop, don't stop, don't stop and the ATV thrums in the darkening sky.

You call the friend to let him know it's out and head on to the truck.

Through the mud, of course.

— Alan Clemons

Snow Storm!

The snow geese fall from the sky like pelting snowflakes of a winter blizzard. Thousands blanket the ground already, but hundreds more fly in to join them.

"It'll be difficult competing with a flock that big," our hunting guide says. "But some should fly over us on their way to that flock, and maybe we can coax them into our little spread of decoys instead."

"Little" does not accurately describe the group of decoys in which we lay. There are more than 1,000, including full-body models and white trash bags draped over soybean stalks to imitate a flock of snows.

Our guide is correct, nevertheless. It will be hard to coax birds our way when 10,000 live, calling snow geese are feeding nearby. Read more.

— Keith "Catfish" Sutton

The Dog On The Duck Stamp, Part I

King Buck, a black Labrador retriever, was the only dog ever featured on a federal duck stamp. Buck appeared on the 1959 stamp in a watercolor painting by Maynard Reece, the most prolific duck stamp artist of all time. Reece has five federal duck stamps to his credit—1948, 1951, 1959, 1969 and 1971—more than any other person.

Perhaps, like me, you have wondered how this particular dog came to appear on a federal duck stamp. The story is interesting.

In 1959, Reece learned the Federal Duck Stamp Competition program was encouraging artists to enter designs featuring a retrieving dog. The government felt this would emphasize the dog's role in conservation—that of retrieving wounded or dead ducks that would otherwise be lost. Read more.

— Keith "Catfish" Sutton

What your rig says about you

When duck season rolls around, it's always a hoot to see hunters and their rigs throughout the country.

Several weeks ago I was heading home through northern Mississippi when a red light caught me at an intersection. Beside me in the left turn lane, a dirty Chevy Suburban — the outdoorsman's limousine — eased past with a trailer and four-wheel ATV.

Mud covered the lower half of the Suburban. The tinted windows were spattered and dingy, great for writing something like "Wash me!" on them. On the rear window were several stickers, including the unmistakable Ducks Unlimited greenhead decal, along with an Avery Outdoors feather sticker and some others.

The ATV looked like it had been run through a mud bog competition. Knowing duck hunters and the afternoon downtime hours, it may well have been in a little boys-will-be-boys contest.

In restaurants, you often can tell the duck hunters from other folks. If they're not in camo, the weary expressions and tired eyes often give them away. Or maybe a snippet of conversation, something about the blind not being brushed enough or decoys not being set right.

Most recently, I bumped into Fred Zink of Avery Outdoors over in Mississippi. He and his crew were returning from a hunt in Louisiana with the Coco family of Go-Devil Boats. Funny little engines, but they damn sure cut through the muck and get you into some skinny water.

Zink and his guys were heading to Memphis to the Avery headquarters. He said a pal had told him hunting was good up in northeast Arkansas, "but all the timber's frozen up and it went frrrrttt."

Hey, good news for me. Maybe all those ducks vamoosed south a little bit so their tailfeathers wouldn't get stuck in the ice.

— Alan Clemons

The Duck Stamp Story

If you enjoy hunting ducks, geese and other migratory waterfowl, you probably recently purchased a federal and state duck stamp. But how much do you really know about duck stamps, their history and the people who created them? Probably less than you think. Here are some interesting facts sure to entertain and enlighten you.

The Beginning
America's waterfowl were in deep trouble in the early 1930s. Loss of crucial nesting, breeding and wintering habitat, combined with the after-effects of years of unrestricted market hunting and a lingering drought, had devastated waterfowl populations across the continent.

Fearing that many waterfowl species were near extinction, a group of dedicated conservationists, led by Jay N. "Ding" Darling (photo, right), an avid duck hunter and nationally famous editorial cartoonist with the Des Moines Register, began looking at ways to provide money for habitat protection and restoration. Read more

— Keith "Catfish" Sutton

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The Season, by Steve Bowman

The memories are very clear of early duck hunts, when as a kid, you were constantly reminded to keep your head down.

"Keep that head down boy! Or they'll see the whites of your eyes."

At a tender age, that was a very strong statement: It made you almost too scared to move. There was no way in the world I would be the one to flare a flock of ducks with the whites of my eyes. Those little slivers of white surrounding my irises stayed tucked well away. I think I even learned to shoot a shotgun peeking out from behind the bill of my cap, the camouflage one with the white stitching around the John Deere logo. Read more

— Steve Bowman

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Ducks for Dinner

This week is "Wild Game Cookery Week" at Catfish Gumbo, and to start things off, we'll continue with last week's waterfowl theme and share some recipes for the ducks you're hopefully bagging right now.

I started hunting ducks late in life, but they occasionally showed up on the dinner table when I was a boy, gifts from hunting relatives. I did not like the ducks my mother and grandmother prepared. Both women were wonderful cooks, but ducks weren't common fare in our household, and apparently my mom and granny had no proper experience in their preparation. The birds they served were roasted for long periods with no enhancements. They tasted like liver and were dry and tough. Read more.

— Keith "Catfish" Sutton