The bottom line is the U.S. government doesn’t have to be so strict about duck hunting. In my opinion, it only needs to educate people about what you can shoot and what you can’t shoot. It’s a great sport, but it would be even greater if there weren’t so many rules and regulations.
Of course, I’ve always been of the opinion that I’ve been given permission from headquarters to shoot and kill whatever animals I want. According to Genesis, God instructed Noah to build an ark to save himself, his family, and a remnant of all the world’s animals after God decided to destroy the world because of mankind’s evil deeds. God instructed Noah to build the “ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.” God told Noah to “bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.”
After Noah did what God told him to do, the floodgates of the heavens opened on the seventeenth day of the second month, and rain fell for forty days and forty nights. The earth was flooded for one hundred and fifty days. As Genesis 7:23 tells us, “Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.”
When the floodwaters finally receded, Noah and his family left the ark. According to Genesis 9:1–3: “Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.”
Now, I’m not a man of great intellectual depth, but it sounds to me like God Almighty has said we can pretty much rack and stack anything that swims, flies, or walks, which I consider orders from headquarters. I have permission from the Almighty to shoot whatever I want! Of course, I’ll follow whatever rule or regulation the government puts in place. My days as an outlaw have long been over.
I really wonder if the U.S. government has any idea of the cost and work it takes to get ducks to fly to my land in the first place. At last count, we had fifty-four duck blinds on about eight hundred acres of our land. As Duck Commander grew and became more profitable through the years, Kay and I had a little bit of money to invest, and we decided to buy land. What I wanted was something I could feel, touch, and stand on—something tangible. When the stock market collapsed a few years ago, a lot of the young bucks came to me crying about all the money they lost on Wall Street. I never could figure it out. They said their money was in a brokerage account they could see on a computer, but then it was gone. Where did the money go? It didn’t disappear. Someone had to take it. Where is it? That’s why I invest in something tangible like land—no one can take it from me.
Our first purchase was a plot of forty acres in the wetlands near our house. We bought it, then added more land through the years, until we accumulated what we have now. Mac Owen, a longtime hunting companion of mine, who appears in many of the Duckmen videos, also wanted to get in on the investments. Together Mac and I bought surrounding land as it came up for sale—usually forty acres at a time.
Our investment has paid for itself many times over, primarily because the land we purchased was the most feasible and economical place for oil and gas companies to cross the Ouachita River with their pipelines. The fees we collected from the utility companies were more than triple what we paid for the land. I also bargained with the companies to ensure that the duck habitat would not be damaged. In the end, the pipelines were laid in a natural-looking curve. I think the plan may even have enhanced the area’s appeal to ducks because I mow the pipeline right-of-way regularly, eliminating brush and encouraging more grass to grow.
We have planted, cultivated, and protected the grasses on our land primarily for ducks. Our wetlands are covered with native millets, sedges, and nut grass, as well as planted stands of Pennsylvania smartweed, American smartweed, and sprangletop, creating a mosaic of wild and cultivated plants. They are all prime foods for wildlife. The grasses are heavy producers of the seeds on which ducks thrive. Millet is one of the best foods available for ducks. In a good year, smartweed can produce more than five million seeds per acre. Ducks love them, and their craws are often found stuffed with the small black seeds. Sprangletop is another heavy seed producer; some of its seeds will remain edible for as long as seven years.
That the grasses also sustain crawfish is a bonus. Everything eats crawfish at every stage of a crawfish’s life: fish, birds, raccoons, bullfrogs, snakes, turtles, large water beetles, and humans. Crawfish are a Louisiana delicacy, and we’ve harvested them to eat and sell. Crawfish are also an important ingredient in the swamp ecosystem, so I do everything I can to propagate them.
Crawfish are an important ingredient in the swamp ecosystem, so I do everything I can to propagate them.
Shortly after we bought the land in the wetlands, I observed all of the water leaving through one low drainage area on the edge of our land. The water dumped into a creek before emptying into the Ouachita River. To control the water depth on our land, I built a low levee across the area. I marked the highest level the water reached on trees, which allowed me to determine how high and long to make the levee. As I was building it, I installed a forty-eight-inch culvert through it at the lowest spot, and then put a weir, or gate, across it to control the water depth. I can adjust the water depth of the wetlands six inches at a time simply by adding or taking out a top board from the weir.
I regulate the flooding of my land in accordance with what crawfish require—which, coincidentally, meets the needs of migrating ducks as well. The crawfish normally hatch in October, when the rains return. They grow through the winter, reaching adulthood in March. Hopefully, enough rain will fall to refill the area. If the area isn’t filled naturally, I use a big pump to draw water from the river. Normally, I have to do some pumping to ensure that most of my land is covered with water to a depth of twelve to eighteen inches—ideal for both the crawfish and duck populations. The depth is determined by how far a duck can stretch its neck to feed when it bobs underwater. After duck season is over, I drain the land to promote the growth of grasses and trees.
After we purchased the wetlands, a Louisiana Fish and Wildlife Department survey showed that 65 percent of the timber in the area was bitter pecan trees, which can grow as tall as one hundred feet. The wood is not as desirable as hickory or regular pecan, but it is resilient and is used to make such things as axe and hammer handles. The worst thing about bitter pecan trees is that they drop pignuts, which taste so bad that most wildlife won’t eat them. I set out to eliminate the bitter pecan trees and replace them with oak trees that would produce more palatable fare for a wider variety of wildlife—including both squirrels and deer, which love acorns.
It turned out to be a formidable task. After the bitter pecan trees were cut and sold, the following year suckers began to sprout from all the stumps. Left alone, multiple tree trunks would grow from the stumps, and the area would be reforested with bitter pecan trees, thicker than before. So I got a lawn trimmer, the kind with a blade, and went from stump to stump, one at a time, and mangled off all the sprouts. Then I treated the stumps with poison to finish killing them off. It took me three years to clear them all.
Then I was thinking about how to get the area seeded with oaks. I had planted and seeded many oaks and cypress trees but was still working on it when the Almighty stepped in and flooded everything in the area in 1991. The water picked up acorns and deposited them over all the area I’d cleared. When spring came, there were thousands and thousands of oaks of all kinds, sprouting every foot or so. It was a blessing from above, and while the flood destroyed the
home where Pa and Granny were living and its water rose to the front steps of our house, the floodwaters provided us the now heavily wooded areas where we hunt today.
About 90 percent of your success in duck hunting is determined by the location of your duck blind, and we’ve made major improvements to water conditions, soil conditions, and how natural feed gets to the holes we’re hunting. I’ve kept detailed records of every one of the hunts on our land for more than two decades, including specifics about weather, wind direction, types of ducks we saw, and the position of the sun. It’s amazing to look back and see how much better the hunting has been over the last few years after the improvements were made.
I’ve kept detailed records of every one of the hunts on our land for more than two decades.
For instance, on opening day of the 1995 duck season, we hunted Dog Bayou, a blind on my land, and we killed one mallard, seven teals, and one ring-necked. A few days later, we hunted the Dog Bayou and didn’t even fire our guns. Good night; we stayed until two o’clock in the afternoon and didn’t kill a duck! During the 1995 season, we killed 266 ducks in 60 days. Now we try to average twenty ducks per day between four or five of us in the blinds. During the first split in 2012, we killed more than two hundred ducks in the first ten days. We’ve gone from two hundred ducks in 1995 to more than one thousand ducks now.
The crazy part is we can make as many improvements as we want to our duck blinds, but they’ll never be as good as the ancestral holes. Some of the land next to mine used to be a swamp, but the owners leveled it in the 1960s and turned it into rice fields. Some guys got in a duck blind over there and noticed that ducks kept flying to one particular spot on the field. They asked the farmer why ducks were sitting there, and he told them it’s where a lake used to be. The trees and the water are gone, but the ducks are still flying there because it was where the lake once was. It’s in their genetic makeup to fly there.
It’s one of the phenomena of Mother Nature that can’t be explained through science. There are a lot of them, and the only explanation I can come up with is that God is in charge and has a blueprint for how everything works. Take, for instance, the Arctic tern, a medium-sized bird, which is famous for flying from its Arctic breeding grounds to Antarctica and back every year, covering more than 43,000 miles round-trip. The terns travel down the coast of Brazil or Africa to get to their wintering ground every year. Some evolutionists want us to believe that the reason they fly to Antarctica every year is because once upon a time one tern found its way there, told some terns about it, and then they all started going there. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
I, for one, believe the terns were born knowing they had to fly to Antarctica every winter to survive. To prove the point, researchers once robbed a tern’s nest and raised the little birds away from their mother. Then they banded them when they were old enough to fly. The terns had never seen Antarctica and had never been around another tern to tell them to fly there. So when it was time for the terns to fly south, the researchers flew over the Arctic Ocean and dropped them from an airplane. The terns made one circle and then flew south, arriving in Antarctica a few weeks later.
Why would they do that? Because there were about twenty different life forms that relied on the terns to survive. The Arctic fox couldn’t survive without its eggs, and certain plants and worms couldn’t live without its droppings. Hawks couldn’t survive without feeding on the birds. The terns were part of the food cycle in both the Arctic Ocean and Antarctica.
The ducks that fly south from Canada each year and winter throughout Florida, Louisiana, Texas, parts of Central America, and beyond are the same way. Everything from alligators to snapping turtles to skunks rob ducks’ nests and eat their eggs. Foxes, coyotes, and birds of prey eat their babies when they’re young. Humans hunt ducks, too, and they put meat on our tables. It’s the Almighty sending literally millions and millions of pounds of protein from one end of a continent to the other end, feeding all of these things along the way.
The Almighty sends literally millions and millions of pounds of protein from one end of a continent to the other end, feeding all of these things along the way.
It’s like the mayfly on the river. A mayfly starts out as a larva in the water and looks like nothing more than a little maggot. When the water level rises, the larvae crawl up the trees on the riverbank. They build cocoons that look like spiderwebs and then emerge as flying creatures. You see mayflies flying all over the river and they live only long enough to drop their eggs into the water. Why? Because when they die and fall into the water, fish come up and eat them. Mayflies are fish food! It’s a cycle: mayflies drop their eggs and then they die, fish eat them, the larvae climb up the trees, and then it starts all over again. Who’s feeding the fish? The Almighty is feeding the fish.
God is feeding everything, including you and me, and a lot of us in His ecosystem eat us some crawfish.
PRODIGAL SONS
Rule No. 12 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy
Learn to Forgive (Life’s a Lot Easier That Way)
The good Lord blessed Kay and me with four healthy, obedient sons, each of whom grew up to become a godly man who loves his wife and children and shares God’s Word through his work with Duck Commander and in our church. But I’m not sure I needed to see how they came into this world! A few weeks before our youngest son, Jeptha, was born in 1978, Kay informed me she wanted me at the hospital to witness his birth.
Now, I didn’t want to be in the delivery room when Jep was born. When our oldest son, Alan, was born, I wasn’t there and he turned out fine. I wasn’t there when Jase came, but everything still turned out okay. When Willie came next, I didn’t want to press our luck, so I didn’t go to the hospital again (in fact, I was fishing when he was born). But when Kay became pregnant with Jep, she told me it was the last baby we were going to have, so she wanted me beside her to witness God’s greatest miracle. Women being the strange creatures they are, Kay decided she needed a coach for the birth of her last child, and she insisted that I was the one to do it.
When the day arrived for Jep’s birth, Kay decided she was going to deliver him without an epidural or any kind of medication. I knew then that I had a tough woman! Over the next several hours, I watched my wife thrashing around and gritting her teeth, and then I saw Jep’s head emerge from my wife’s loins. Let me tell you something: I salute womanhood worldwide, because women are exceptionally tough for enduring the misery of childbirth. I’ve cleaned hogs and gutted deer, but in my experience on Earth I’ve never witnessed such a brutal event.
I knew right then that my sex life was over—although I somehow managed to get over my concerns thirty days later! Let me put it to you this way: after going through it once, I’d never go back and do it again. It was rough to watch, so I can’t imagine having to experience the pain. If men were in charge of carrying and birthing our babies, we’d have a lot fewer people on Earth, because we’d only do it once—I can promise you that!
Each of our boys was a blessing, and after I repented and had my life in order again, I set out to give them the same sort of childhood I had as a boy, learning to hunt and fish and live off the land. Alan, Jase, and Willie were very close when they were growing up, and then they kind of took Jep under their wings after he was born because there was such an age gap between them. My philosophy on discipline was very simple. Since rules are made to be broken, I kept the rules few and far between. However, there was a code in the Robertson house: three licks was the standard punishment. It wasn’t ten licks or twenty licks for doing something wrong; it was always three: thump, thump, thump! It was a principle, and my boys always knew what their punishment would be if they stepped out of line.
They received three licks if they disrespected their mother. As it says in Ephesians 6:1–3, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’—which is the first commandment with a promise—‘so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy lon
g life on the earth.’ ” I never had to tell my boys not to disrespect me; that rule was understood and it never crossed their minds to break it. None of my sons ever disrespected me, not even once. Nobody ever bowed up and told me I wasn’t going to tell them what to do.
There was literally flawless obedience when they were living under my roof—at least when I was home. If I told them to go to bed, they jumped up and went to bed. If I told them to rake the leaves, they raked the leaves. If I told them to clean the fish, they cleaned the fish. People would come over to visit us and were amazed at how obedient our sons were. Their teachers always told us our boys were among the most well-behaved students in school. I believe it’s because my boys were always aware of the consequences of not doing what they were told to do. They always respected me, and they respected their mother because I didn’t want them taking advantage of the woman who put them on Earth.
I also didn’t allow my sons to fight with each other. They could argue and disagree all they wanted—and Jase and Willie managed to do it regularly. I didn’t have a problem with them raising their voices at each other to make a point. I wanted to encourage them to argue and make a case for their beliefs. But if it came to blows and there was meat popping, they were getting three licks each. I didn’t care who threw the first punch. If it ever came to physical blows, I’d step in and everybody involved got three licks.
Another thing I didn’t allow was tearing up good hunting and fishing equipment. I wanted them to respect someone else’s property and to be thankful for what we had, even if it wasn’t much. If one of the boys borrowed one of my guns or fishing poles and tore it up while they were using it, they received three licks. I always wanted my boys to have access to my guns to hunt, just like I had access to Pa’s guns when I was growing up. When I was young, I knew if I broke a gun, we probably weren’t going to eat that night because we were so dependent on wild game for food. But since my boys knew there was going to be a meal on the table every night, they weren’t always as respectful of my equipment. When Alan was about fourteen, he and a few of his buddies borrowed all of my Browning shotguns to go bird-hunting. They were hunting on a muddy track and because they were careless and immature, mud got into a few of the shotgun barrels. They were very fortunate the guns still fired and didn’t blow up in their faces! When Alan returned home, he was so scared to tell me what happened to my Browning shotguns—my Holy Grails—that he enlisted Kay’s help to break the news. I’m sure Alan thought I was going to beat him on the spot, but I simply told him to go outside. I was afraid to whip him right then because I was so angry. After cooling off, I pulled Alan and his buddies together and gave them a stern lecture about gun safety and respecting other people’s property. I also told Alan—after I gave him three licks—that he was on probation from using my guns for a long time.
Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander Page 12
