Jack Burns Lives!

Thoughts on The Mississippi Flyway

Photo: Bill Pinson, North Mississippi

It’s duck season again in the Delta, the biggest season of the year, other than football, of course.

Thousands of Southern men and boys are jumping into their 4×4′s, pick ‘em up trucks and SUV’s, clad in Gortex camouflage gear, equipped with Beneilli and Browning shotguns and ready to get their limit or possibly more. The less fortunate carry Remington’s purchased at Wal-Mart.

The whiskey and the stories will flow and birds will be slaughtered by the thousands during the annual observance.

It’s made possible by the Mississippi Flyway, a bird migration corridor that generally follows the Mississippi River from its northern terminus on the Arctic coast of Alaska. Millions of birds, roughly 40% of all North American migratory waterfowl species, fly via this route. It narrows considerably in Arkansas and Louisiana, producing a paradise for hunters in the Delta.

My father was a avid hunter, and he managed a 600 acre private club when I was a kid. He was a guide for rich folks before he got married, produced a son and had to get a day job. I started going along when I was about ten years old and went on my first real hunt at twelve. Killed my first bird that year, a Green Wing Teal flying over a dike in a rice field just outside of Fair Oaks, Arkansas.

I remember those days well, especially killing my first duck. Wanting desperately to please my father, I tried to be “manly” and act like I was having a good time, but I never really enjoyed hunting. It was damn cold, and waking up at 4:30 in the morning isn’t something most teenagers enjoy. I missed my girlfriends, and I always felt sorry for the birds.

Walking out through the frigid water to retrieve my first kill, I remember crying and apologizing to the bird before I wrang its neck.

Nonetheless, I kept going, and by the time I reached seventeen years old, I was a pretty decent hunter. We didn’t have much money when I was a kid, and I always got the impression the duck club revenue was a crucial part of the family cash flow. I had a cheap gun, a Remington 1100. It was probably the best duck gun ever made, because it didn’t jam, performed well, and since it wasn’t expensive, you didn’t have to worry about putting the butt down into the slime at the bottom of the blind.

My hunting clothes came from the army surplus store, except for my waders, which we always bought at the Wal-Mart in Wynne, a store always gave me the creeps. Still does.

One of my most fond memories is of being invited to a clay pigeon shoot (called shootin’ skeet in the South) by a school friend. Robert was wealthy, and most of his other friends were also wealthy. They all had nice cars, really nice guns, and their fathers were decked out in the latest hunting accoutrement. The tailgates of the Range Rovers were open, and the brandy was served by dutiful country club wives and girlfriends there mostly for the gossip.

It was the Gentlemen in Tweed Hunting Club, founded by Winthrop Snowden Grosvenor IV. Or so I imagined.

Watching all of this, I remember feeling embarrassed by my outfit which consisted of an army fatigue jacket and a beat-up gun. I felt like I had many times before, ashamed at my appearance and by the fact I obviously wasn’t “one of them.”

But as I watched, I noticed something. All those fancy clothes, guns and cars weren’t helping them shoot. In fact, they couldn’t hit shit. It was one of the poorest exhibitions of marksmanship I’d ever seen. It was hard not to laugh.

Eventually, one of the dad’s looked my way and asked if I wanted to “give it a try.”

“Yessir,” I responded.

So, I walk up to the spot and look over toward the fellow operating the skeet machine to my right.

“Pull”

He launches a single clay pigeon that travels quickly across the horizon. I instinctively do everything my dad taught me, lean slightly forward, follow it, lead it slightly, and knock down the pigeon with a single shot. The first one is followed by two, then three. All fall without a wasted shot.

“Take that, Mr. Hoity-Toity!”

I recall missing one shot that day, and I also recall fighting back the tears again. But they weren’t for sadness. I was proud. Proud of who I was. Proud of where I came from, and proud of my dad, who in my eyes was the greatest man alive.

Years later, after my children were born, I gave up hunting and sold my guns. I became a bird watcher, not a shooter. But in hindsight, those days in Eastern Arkansas weren’t so bad. They were good days with my dad doing what he loved, and gawd knows I loved him. I thought he was the greatest dad the world had surely ever seen.

A couple of years ago, I took my two sons out with their grandpa to shoot skeet for the first time. My dad is now in his seventies, has a degenerative eye disease and doesn’t see well. We set up the skeet machine and show my boys how to handle their guns. I go first. Miss three in a row! I can’t hit anything.

Jay and Alex follow. Similar results.

Next is my father. Seventy-three and nearly blind. He knocks down all of his and is still the king.

While musing on this subject, I suppose it might be worthwhile to discuss how I feel about hunting now that I’m older. I believe hunting is a good skill to master. I believe it’s preferable for a man to harvest his own food in his bioregion, as opposed to driving a car to a grocer to purchase a slab of mass produced, hormone fed meat that took an enormous amount of fossil fuel to raise, harvest and ship to your table top.

That’s a completely non-sustainable form of food production that has no logical defense.

The key is to live within limits. To embrace the conservation ethic espoused by Aldo Leopold in his now famous work “A Sand County Almanac.”

To harvest game in a sustainable manner, meaning you don’t harvest more duck, deer, elk or rabbit, for example, than the population can bear. You live in harmony with the land. You respect and care for the land, because you need the land to live.

That’s how the native people of this continent lived, particularly the Chickasaw within this bioregion. Or at least until white men showed up and changed the whole paradigm. The Chickasaw gave thanks for their harvest and lived sustainably from what is now known as Yazoo City up to Memphis. It wasn’t just killing for the sake of killing. It was hunting to produce food to live. Taking only what was sufficient to sustain life.

The core problem, as Leopold accurately identified, is the profit motive. The view that land must always be viewed through the lens of commercial profit and that conservation should take a back seat to profit and growth. It’s stupid. A terminal disease that if allowed to continue has unfathomable consequences.

A man does not have “the right” to develop what he “owns.” Humans must learn how to live responsibly and sustainably within communities and bioregions, think of the bigger picture and realize how our actions affect all living things, not just our pocket books. It’s either that or stay on the development course, continue to ruin ecosystems and one day wake up and wonder what the fuck happened.