HISTORIC DUCK HUNTING STORIES THE GOLDEN AGE OF DUCK HUNTING

To many, it would become the eighth wonder of the world. It is not an official designation but a reflection on the awe inspiring, spectacular natural phenomenon and wonder that covered the sky with billions of pigeons, but it wouldn’t last, as billions dwindled to millions, to thousands, to one, then to extinction. Sadly, this spectacle was lost forever, driven to extinction in a matter of a few decades, going from billions to zero in a span of less than 50 years.For 50,000 years or more, wild passenger pigeons traveled the skyways inincredible numbers that seem unimaginable to us today. When the Old-World people began arriving, millions of pigeons saturated the skies. Over the interveningyears, European and settler invaders were immensely ecstatic and teeming withextraordinary admiration as they witnessed this unique innate beauty of the grandest and most unique natural phenomenon in the history of the world.

The question must be asked, “Will the canvasback or can the canvasback ever recover and occurin numbers that would allow no closed seasons?” It is doubtful, and if it does it will be through dedicated restoration efforts by transplanting and sowingthe seeds of wild celery, wapato, and a plant I haven’t mentioned for canvasbacks, the pondweed. In doing so, many depleted ducking wetlands can be restored and thus new ducking grounds can be created.

E64 LISTS 17 OF THE EARLIEST DUCK CLUBS IN AMERICA, ALL ORGANIZED BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR, SOME OF THE MOST FAMOUS DUCK CLUBS SUCH AS WINOUS POINT, CURRITUCK SHOOTING CLUB AND MORE.

The evolution of the duck call began some 45,000 to 50,000 years ago or earlier and this episode takes you from that time frame up until E16 which was starts in 1854.

Year after year, waterfowl have followed the ancestral Mississippi Flywayand made their usual stops, where along the way they feasted abundantly in theforested White River bottomlands on acres of high-energy pinoak acorns andaquatic plants, like wild millet, Chufa, and smartweed.Before rice production came to the Grand Prairie,ducks were found foraging in the small prairie wetlands, seasonal herbaceouswetlands, the vast flooded bottomland, hardwood forests of the White andArkansas Rivers, and other smaller meandering rivers and bayous.Once rice had been plantedfor the first time in the first decade of the twentieth century in theeast-central part of the state, it spread rapidly throughout the Grand Prairie,mainly in the counties of Arkansas and Prairie and small sections in westernMonroe and eastern Lonoke during that decade and especially during the 1920sand the 1930s. Doing so, prairie lands, bounded by the bottomlands of four streams, the White andArkansas Rivers, Bayou Meto, and Wattensaw Bayou, could not exist and was converted tofarmland, so the prairies essentially vanished after 40 years.Rice changed the flyway intwo ways. For one, it moved a lot of the waterfowl migration from theMississippi River westward to the rice-growing regions of Arkansas. Second, italso shifted lots of waterfowl from overflying Arkansas and going to the ricefields of Louisiana. No place in the Grand Prairie of eastern Arkansas prior tothe construction of reservoirs reaped rice’s benefit more so than the twinlakes of Jacob’s Lake and Pecan Lake in Arkansas County.