Jess "The Undertaker" Essex of DeWitt pulled a Tom Sawyer type scheme to acquire a new duck blind at his lease on Mill Bayou.
The old Essex blind is a classic bit of southeast Arkansas duck hunting architecture. It is a wood structure built on pilings sunk into the mud. It contains a little boat "garage" in the rear that leads to a narrow shooting platform in the front that can comfortably seat four shooters. It has a roof made of corrugated steel, and the whole thing is covered in brush which must be refreshed annually.
A tornado wrecked the blind to an unsalvageable state.
Over the last few years, Essex has hunted frequently with a couple of strapping young men in their late 20s. He calls them his "flatbellies." Their function is to get Essex safely to and from the hunting grounds in exchange for standing invitations to hunt.
"That's not why I take them hunting," Essex insisted. "It's the other way around. They take me hunting! I do it because I just sincerely enjoy taking these boys hunting."
The destruction of the old blind opened up new possibilities. The flatbellies suggested a modern, much more comfortable design that would be less vulnerable to damage from extremely high and extremely low water fluctuations.
"I told my flatbellies that if they would build it, I would pay for the materials," Essex said.
Essex, a frugal sort, somewhat regrets that offer. The flatbellies got the best materials available. Essex showed me photos of the work in progress. It is built on a foundation of sealed plastic barrels. A lot of barrels. It will be stout and stable, and it will rise and fall with the water. Essex's only demand is that it must be built to enable easy access to a senior citizen. I anticipate hunting this palace in the fall. I look forward to giving a full report of the experience with Essex's flatbellies. We do not expect them to wear neckties as Essex does.
Essex also complained about being called upon almost annually to retrieve a wayward blind owned by a mutual friend. It also is a floating blind, but our friend does not rig it to rise and fall with the water. It gets yanked from its moorings and floats down the bayou until it is entrapped in brush. By the time our friend notices, the water has fallen. Extricating it is a major undertaking.
For this, Essex also has developed a system using only a flatbottom boat and a surprisingly small outboard motor.
Here's how it works. Essex snugs the bow of the boat against the center of the blind. He secures ropes to the corners of the blind and runs them to the corners of the boat stern. Then, he winds the ropes on both sides around metal pipes to create what Essex calls a Spanish windlass. By rotating the pipes, you can effortlessly wrap the ropes around the pipes and that makes the rope extremely taut. This combines the blind and boat into a single unit, almost like a railroad locomotive attached to a car.
Also, these taut ropes essentially become fenders.
At this point, the blind is essentially motorized. Essex said it is easy to pull it out and about because the taut ropes repel brush and other obstructions that would otherwise snag and stop the blind.
Naturally, this conversation led to speculation about the quality of the upcoming duck season. As always, if you have good habitat, you will have ducks. If you have poor or marginal habitat, your season will be marginal to poor.
Because of poor breeding and brood-rearing habitat in the Prairie Pothole Region, ducks experienced another bad hatch year and poor recruitment this year. They will run an increasingly intense hunting gauntlet that begins in Canada. Young of the year ducks are most vulnerable to early hunting in the prairies, and the initial pressure will lop off a sizable percentage of young ducks.
Hunters insist that migration patterns have changed, and that ducks that usually migrate down the Mississippi Flyway have switched to the Central Flyway. I don't believe that is true. There are just a lot fewer ducks, and those migrating down the Mississippi Flyway are dispersed over a very large territory, and most concentrate on the best habitat.
And the best habitat is private ground where hunting ends at 8 a.m., and where mud motors and all-day scouting are now allowed.