Wild about Waterfowl

After the rice fields are harvested and millions of ducks begin their annual migration south along the Mississippi River flyway, John Stephens can be found sitting in a camouflaged blind

After the rice fields are harvested and millions of ducks begin their annual migration south along the Mississippi River flyway, John Stephens can be found sitting in a camouflaged blind on his father’s farm east of Stuttgart, Ark. (pop. 9,745), awaiting the familiar quack of migrating mallards.

“I always look forward to it,” says Stephens, 33, of the fall hunting season. “I like to communicate with the birds and see how they react to the call.”

Stuttgart, the self-proclaimed Rice and Duck Capital of the World, is home to Riceland Foods—the world’s largest rice miller and marketer—and each year thousands of sportsmen and women converge on the town to participate in the fall hunt and attend the World’s Championship Duck Calling Contest.

Last November, Stephens won the championship for the third time, outperforming 70 of the nation’s best duck callers in the oldest and most prestigious event of its kind. Held annually since 1936, the contest today is part of the weeklong Wings Over the Prairie Festival, featuring a Queen Mallard pageant, duck gumbo cookoff and youth duck calling clinics.

In short, Stuttgart is wild about waterfowl, and townspeople take great pride in the community’s claims to fame. The Stuttgart High School mascot is the Ricebird; the city maintains farming and waterfowl exhibits at the Museum of the Arkansas Grand Prairie; and visitors can lodge at the Best Western Duck Inn or shop at Mack’s Prairie Wings, the nation’s premier waterfowl outfitter.

Surrounded by thousands of acres of flooded rice fields and wooded wetlands, Stuttgart is a haven for waterfowl and hunters alike. Flocks of ducks and geese feast on grain that harvesters leave behind, and truckloads of hunters pour onto nearby farms and wildlife refuges to pursue the birds during a season that generally begins in mid-November and continues through January.

Migrating waterfowl have been drawn to the hardwood bottomlands of eastern Arkansas for eons, using the secluded backwaters of the Arkansas, Cache and White rivers to feed and rest on their journey south.

“Water is the most important thing for ducks,” says Larry Mallard, manager of the 160,000-acre White River National Wildlife Refuge, 25 miles east of Stuttgart. “They’ve got to have water. Water sustains them.”

When farmers began planting rice on the Grand Prairie in the early 1900s, the grain-loving waterfowl had a reason to land on the flooded fields around Stuttgart. At first, the marauding birds were considered pests for eating the farmers’ grain, but soon townspeople began catering to the sportsmen who came to hunt the enormous flocks of migrating mallard, gadwall, pintail and wigeon.

Among the first was the late M.T. “Mack” McCollum, the 1941 world duck calling champion who began selling sporting goods at his hardware store in the 1930s. By 1944 his trade with waterfowl hunters became so brisk that he opened a separate sporting goods store.

“It’s been said that it was the first full-line sporting goods store,” says Marion McCollum, 64, son of the store’s founder.

Today, Mack’s Prairie Wings sells everything for hunters, from battery-operated duck decoys to Winchester shotgun shells, in a 32,000-square-foot store north of town. The store also carries duck calls manufactured by John Stephens, last year’s world champion duck caller.

“The mallard is the only duck that makes a quack,” says Stephens, the owner of Rich-N-Tone Duck Calls. “The other species make a whistle or other sound.”

In a few weeks, Stephens will get to demonstrate his award-winning skills, teaching his children—Reese, 6, and Riley, 4—the finer points of quacking. It’s a ritual that happens each fall in duck blinds around Stuttgart.

Stuart Englert is the Senior Editor with American Profile.

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