Richard W. Davies
Executive Director, Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism.
Number of days you hunt a season? 25 or so.
Where you hunt? Lonoke County at our club, the Arkansas River in Conway County, and various timber clubs if I get invited.
Club name? Crooked Creek.
Pump or semi-automatic? I’ve hunted with semi-autos, and over and unders, but I have about settled on an old Remington 870 pump. It always works and you don’t have to worry about it.
Duck call? Rich-N-Tone.
Fields, reservoir, river or timber? Mostly fields, but river and timber too. Timber would have to be my favorite.
Rainy, nasty or bluebird sky? Nasty.
Favorite hunting story/memory? In 50-plus years of ducks seasons, this is a tough one. Probably it would be the hunts in the early 1960s walking in at Bayou Meto WMA with my dad, brothers and assorted friends. Of course, as the youngest, I would always fall in (we only had hip boots in those days) and my oldest brother would hold me by the collar and use me like a mine detector to find the stump holes. When we got to the hunting hole, they’d take my clothes off, start a fire on a log, dry everything, including me, out, and tell me how much fun we were having … and let me shoot the cripples.
Favorite place to eat during duck season? The White Pig Inn in North Little Rock.
What got you into duck hunting? My dad, Ladd Davies, and his duck-hunting buddy, Tom Hatley. It was always a grand adventure, and to this day the camaraderie with good friends and family is what it’s all about. If we were lucky, we got to eat breakfast in England.
If you have children, do you take them duck hunting? If so, what are some of the highlights from these youth hunts? I have two girls, and neither exhibited much interest. … I think they thought I was crazy to get up that early and get cold on purpose. Their mother did nothing to dispel that notion.
What is your most unusual “must have” in the duck blind? I don’t know how unusual it is, but you can fix or rig almost anything in a duck blind with a pocketknife and a small roll of tarred decoy cord.
Which Arkansas executive calls ducks the best? Jim Glover or Hank Browne.
