Job title/position: Executive director
Company: Downtown Little Rock Partnership
Number of days you hunt a season? Depends. On average 10-15.
Where do you hunt? Arkansas and Jackson counties.
Club name? Frequent guest at the One Horse Hunting Club.
What kind of gun do you use? Twelve-gauge Benelli Nova pump.
Duck call? Echo open water call, but I typically have the most success turning over the calling responsibilities to someone else.
Fields, reservoir or timber? Timber and fields.
Rainy, nasty or bluebird sky? Bluebird, by all means.
Favorite hunting story/memory? Couple years ago, towards the end of the season I was hunting timber with Ben Noble, Dow Brantley, Grant Tennille and Mitch Berry near Reydell. Dow was calling the shots that morning, and we had a group of four that were working the hole pretty good.
As they were making their third or fourth pass, I had pulled up my gun and had a bead on the lead duck coming toward me. Dow says, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, there’s another bigger group coming.” As I lower my gun to wait, Mitch, who is to my right, shoots the lead duck I had a bead on. To this day, Mitch claims that he was the only one that didn’t hear Dow.
Mitch then walked over to pick up the drake, while getting quite a bit of grief from the rest of us for shooting one bird without giving us a chance to kill the other seven. When he picked up the duck and showed us the band, the howling and laughter lasted the rest of the morning. Luckily, a few days later on the last day of the season, I was able to claim my first banded duck.
Then there was the time that Chad Causey and I accidently hunted the wrong pit blind; to this day we still don’t know who owns it.
What got you into hunting? I didn’t start hunting regularly until after high school. I credit Chris Thompson with taking me deer hunting when I was about 18; we attempted duck hunting a few times, but never had much success.
I started working for former congressman Marion Berry right after college as what I would now describe as a driver. That said, being the low man on the org chart came with the benefit of being required to staff the boss while hunting some of the best duck woods in east Arkansas. To say he was patient with me would be an understatement. He taught me a lot about the history, culture and etiquette of duck hunting in the Arkansas Delta, and because of him, I met most of the guys I still hunt with today.
What is your most unusual “must have” in the duck blind? A bottle of water and boots that don’t leak.