The Old Duck Hunters Dinner, Other Mississippi Delta Times, Place‪s‬

Ramsey Russell: I’m your host, Ramsey Russell. Join me here to listen to the conversation. Welcome back to duck season somewhere, I’ve got in the mobile duck season somewhere studio today Mr. Hank Burdine, local legend hunter and Mississippi Delta Celebrity. How are you Hank?
Hank Burdine: I’m doing fine man. I’m glad to be down here with you and whenever I see you and I’ll tell them what we’re going to end up talking about.
Ramsey Russell: It ain’t no telling what we’re going to talk about. I think the same thing, you know hank for those who don’t know, you’ve got a book yourself and I’ve read it. You’ve been a writer for a long time.
Hank Burdine: Well not really. I lost my wife about 15-16 years ago when we were living in Florida and I wrote a little story about being down there in Florida. And about that time, Delta magazine had just come out with its first issue. And I read the issue and really liked it is all about Delta stories and Delta people and Hadley and Pot McCarthy with McCarthy’s pottery from Mayor Gold on the cover and I called and I said I’d like to write a final word and which is the last page in the magazine, it’s about why I can’t leave Mississippi, even though I was living in Florida at the time. And they called me after they ran it and asked me would I write a story on such and such, and I kind of really didn’t want to write that, and I said, what if I write one about this and came up with an idea and they said that would be good. Well, from that point on, after every issue, they call me back up. Well, when you’re going to try in your next story, they don’t tell me what to write about, they just kind of come up with an article, come up with a story and that’s what I write about.
Ramsey Russell: But you have a great thing, gosh it’s funny to say why I can’t leave Mississippi because I can remember being a young man in my twenties in college and wanted to leave Mississippi, want to go out west and be a foster, be a biologist and just, I love it out west guys. But something happened, I know somewhere along the way, I just started having kids, started having a family and Mississippi’s home, it’s freaking home. And even though I’ve lived here in the hills central Mississippi for since high school, since before high school, we moved down here around the seventh grade. The Delta is unto itself, I mean, it’s like if you’re born in the Delta, you’re always the delta.
Hank Burdine: That’s correct, that’s correct. I left about 1994-1995. Did about a 15 year walkabout, move my family out to Westcliffe Colorado, lived up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains range, which was absolutely one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been in my life. My wife got sick with breast cancer and we moved to Florida and the Niceville Florida area across from destined Choctawhatchee Bay, to be closer to her family and closer to my operations in Mississippi at the farm and everything. And when I lost her, my daughter had about three years finishing up high school. So when she finished high school I moved home and I’ve often told people that if I never leave the state line of Mississippi, again I’ll be happy. And they said well, Hank what if you want to go to Memphis? I said well Memphis is the capital of the delta and New Orleans is just right down the river and between New Orleans and Memphis and Mobile why I want to go anywhere else, I’m home right here. It’s just something about the delta and Mississippi itself that it’s so unique and the thing about the delta to all of us that enjoy the outdoors so much. There’s so much to do in the Mississippi Delta. I often stay around where I live and hunt that we work nine months of the year just so we can hunt three months out to get and deer hunting, turkey hunting, the duck hunting. I’ve been involved in duck hunting just about all my life. My daddy was a big goose hunter. When the after 1927 flood that came up with the Mississippi River Tributaries Project and they were able to channelize the river. Take a lot of these bends, I’d create a lot of these oxbow lakes and in that program they took the Greenwood bends out short in the river by 30 something miles, build the dyke, the green Bell harbor dyke and created Lake Ferguson. At that point, folks that wanted one and could get one would have these big river boats. My daddy had a 48 ft. twin screw Matthews’s boat that he’d take out on the river and goose hunt off, freed borderline to dad, a big Joe borderline, had a steel hulled boat called the gulf pride. He was in the gulf oil business, Big Joe Verdant had a boat and these folks would go out on the river and they were mainly goose hunters and that’s what they really enjoyed and they would stay out there for a week at a time. You had the big boat to Mr. Charlie, which was Charlie P Williams boat and they were duck hunt for sport in the afternoon when the ducks would be coming into little breaks and flues and off the river and sandbars and all but mainly they were goose hunters. The big duck hunting at that time in the 30s and 40s, when these big compounds such as swan lake, which is now part of the Yazoo Wildlife Refuge, you had lake Wapanocca outside of Memphis Over in Arkansas, you had a lot of these other big flooded timber areas that were basically the duck hunting habitat where folks would go and hunt, those that weren’t hunting on the Mississippi River. You had breaks and slashes and sloughs and all these woods and everything where ducks would congregate, had a lot of wood ducks in here. And you got to remember the Mississippi flyway, there’s about 40 percent of all the duck population that migrates in America each year. And historically coming out for the breeding grounds of Canada, they follow that river. And as the river flooded, the grass fields on the sandbars, the grass flats and the thousands of acres of hardwood bottoms that would go underwater with the millions of tons of hardwood master pecans, yaupon, your Yukon’s, all of this food that the ducks followed. But the duck hunting back in the 30s and 40s was not at all as big as it is right now. And at that time, back in the 60’s, I had lost my daddy, Sunny Rich who was a tremendous trap shooter and one of the biggest, one of my great mentors that I had in my life happened, once I lost my daddy bringing me up and, duck hunting and deer hunting and I grew up hunting and whiskey shoot, which was an old shoot off the Mississippi River there, Longwood, which in those days was, it was about five miles from Swan Lake. That was after Swan Lake had been taken over by the federal government. But here I was 18-19-20 years old, going to college, trying to work in the daytime. But the one time, come on boy, let’s go duck hunting. Well, his son, Male Rich was a dear friend of mine and I remember hours on end sitting in that truck with Mr. Sonny Rich, right on the bank of whiskey shoot about midway down the chute listening to mallard ducks. He said, boy, you hear all them ducks and I’ll tell you something, my son, he just sit there with his ear out to want to be cold as it could be listening to ducks. And after about 20-30 minutes he said, son, that’s why I’m going to send you to first thing in the morning. I’d get so excited I couldn’t stand it. But whiskey shoot was too thick, too tight to take a boat out in. You had to wait out in there with chest waiters, where he would send me, the depth of the water was about two inches below the top of them chest with, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to swim out of whiskey shoot. But it wasn’t until several years later that I realized what Mr. Sunny Rich was doing. He’d always go down on the west end of whiskey shoots where it was much shallow it was about 2 ft. thick, 2 ft. deep down there and there’s a bunch of hardwood trees down there. Well, Sunny Rich was a national champion trap shooter and he shot a Winchester 21 duck grade gun, which is a full amount of the full choke gun, three Magnum Winchester. And every now and then during the daytime those ducks would come into me and I’d shoot, do what I could do. I wasn’t that good of a shot back then and then normally about an hour or so into the deal. I’d hear him howling, come on up here, boy, come on up here, what he’s doing the whole time. He knew I wasn’t going to kill many ducks and he knew that’s where those ducks wanted to go, was right where he sent me. But as soon as I’d shoot at them ducks, they flied straight to the end of whiskey shoot, they’d make that end, make that turn right over those tall trees where he was and he dropped him every time he would pull that trigger. I’d go down there and he had old Chesapeake dog back then and he had trained that dog or whether that dog trained himself. I never saw Mr. Rich miss a duck, when that duck came over and he didn’t call that much, he didn’t have to because he knew what those ducks were going to do and yes, he was past shooting them, but he knew the length that he could shoot, he knew how to kill those ducks and he did. And that Chesapeake would go out and pick that duck up and bring it to that log he was standing by and he would line no ducks up precisely on that log with the heads in the same direction, you would look down there and maybe eight ducks. However many of the limit was at that time, never shot over the limit, of course, but he’d line no ducks up and if one of them ducks flopped down, a fellow that dog will pick it up and lay right back on that log.
Ramsey Russell: So Mr. Rich had a Chesapeake Bay retriever lining ducks up and he had a Hank Burdine helper to help push him ducks over to it?
Hank Burdine: Help flying those ducks away from me pushing straight to him. And we didn’t put our decoys. He knew that those ducks were going to fly to the end of that Whisky shoot and make that turn right over the treetop height and turning head back around. And that’s all he do when he hear me shoot, he’d get ready because here comes the duck. And then you would go and join them and finish up shooting your ducks. And then I’d go up and join him sometimes when he’d howl at me and I would never forget one morning Doctor Justus Win came down there, he was a wonderful doctor surgeon in Greenville, showed up down there to counsel bond first thing in the morning, about 04:35 o’clock driving that Cadillac, pulled out a box of Converse waiters and we’re all sitting in there getting ready to go and he said, come on boy and help me pull the waiters on. Doctor Win was a big man. So I got him in the chest waiters and he goes down there with Sunny Rich on that end and then he’s shooting a model 12 pump, three inch pump. Just like I had, I was shooting my dad’s model 12 three inch pump. Well finally he called me up there and then I came on up there after I realized what the game was and we had a wonderful hunt, got all our limits and so we get back to sale barn there where we’ve dressing all up and Doctor Win looked at the watch and he was trying to get those waiters off, now this is a brand new pair of Converse waiters that we just put on him two hours before. And he looked at his watch, he said, I got an operation in 30 minutes. I said, let’s get them waiters off. He reached in Santa Richard Drawer, pulled out a case, pocket knife, he said, cut these boots off me boy, I got to be operating, put on a brand new pair of $100 waiters and cut them off of him within two hours. But those, that was the kind of duck hunting that I came up with in that time. And then as I got a little older in college and was developing my place at Villebrun and we didn’t have four wheelers back then, didn’t have three wheelers. Big red Honda, big red hadn’t come out yet. I had one of the first three wheelers. It was an adventurer, three wheeler made somewhere down in Louisiana, one wheel up front, two in the back then had the motor sitting between your legs. But it was it one at all like a regular three wheel is was back then. And we used to have to hunt out of these red ball waiters. We didn’t have all the mossy oak camouflage a different gear that you have today. You go to the army navy store. You may remember the army navy store, by these old army coach will as soon as he got wet is the worst thing coldest thing in the world. And we didn’t have these nylon mesh decoy bags, you put them at the crocus sack. And they were all cork decoys and they were heavy and you could take you an hour, sometimes a slog a half a mile out across the Bean field to get to a slash. Well, what began happening at that time is Rice was beginning to be farmed in the Mississippi Delta. They were beginning to level land. The Mennonite group were the big dirt movers back then and I remember some of the first dirt that I moved on my farm and on some road jobs we had at the time were these double barreled dirt buggies. They had two tractors hooked tonged front and back and two buggies behind those two tractors and that supplied the horsepower. And when they would shower down on those tractors, that tractor would stand straight up in the air and the driver was on there and that’s how we was moving dirt. Well by this time I had been developing, will run down there had some wonderful breaks and sloughs on that place and flooded bean fields where the water went out into beans and had great duck hunting. And after about four or five years I realized that my ducks were diminishing. And Senator Rich would always tell me. He said, son, if you want to kill ducks, there’s nothing you can do to make a duck come into where you want him to go. A duck is going to go where he wants to go. You can put food out there if he doesn’t necessarily want to come visit it, he’s not going to. And I said, well something is happening because I used to have ducks and I got up in an airplane and flew and looked around Leroy Percy Park and the park itself looked like a forested oasis and an ocean of water. The fields had been leveled. They were holding field in water and rice fields holding water and bean fields, the flooded fields that the farmers were leaving out for duck hunting began to pull the ducks away from the natural habitat that I had. So that is what I think we’re seeing now. You’ve got a lot of areas, a lot of farmers have become attuned to the fact that they can flood fields and they can hunt them from Malmo, leasing them out, selling hunting leases and the ducks are getting scattered. There’s a lot of food out there for the ducks, we’re planning a lot of corn now, which we didn’t plant when I grew up hunting. And so you’ve got cornfields, I’ve tried to grow rice for ducks, but I found out that the black birds come in and eat all the rice up. So I’m getting more and more tuned to more soil habitat foods that you can fertilize and grow these barnyard grass is and try to keep the broadleaf weeds out of them. And that is the natural food that the ducks have been involved in all along. I was involved in not a member of but the Fighting Bayou hunting club, outside of Ruleville.
Ramsey Russell: Talk about that Hank.
Hank Burdine: Knew all those boys Skipper Jernigan, his brother Taltson, George Kladouhos, Billy Van Devender, all that group of Dr. Charles Lanny, Dr. Bush down here, Dr. Barrett, such a great good group of people. And that is an area outside of Ruleville that according to skipper will flood on a heavy do. It’s in the bottom of what’s called Bulgaden. I’m from Ruleville and know a lot about that area up there and ducks have been coming there as skipper Jernigan says since man’s memory retaining, not to the contrary. So it is a natural area that timber that floods out. And those ducks just have been flocking in there forever and ever, amen. And it’s a wonderful club that was originally put together by some folks down here in Jackson that came up there and leased some land and hunted on it. And then gentleman named Mr. P.L Blake had it for a while and had big fancy hunting stands out there. And the different holds, Wanderrie hold the different types of areas out through there, but mostly its timber hunting and when you’re in there the water is not ankle deep, but it’s no more than knee deep. We’re standing out here and it’s a sight to behold to seeing flooded timber no matter where it is, whether it’s a York wood, the coca cola wood, fighting bow, areas like that. When those mallards want to come in there, they circle and they come in by the thousands. And I’ve seen some mornings when we just choose and I’ve done this on my place was very rarely, but up in areas like that often times more. Sometimes you just won’t raise your gun, you just want to see what happened and you just sit there and it’s a great thing. BC Rogers, the friend of mine, talks about God’s own church. When you can’t go to church on Sunday, you’re going to be out of duck hunting, you as close to God, and a duck swamp and a pad and a set of flooded woods. And you are sitting in a church with a staple on top of it. It’s just something that raises the hair on the back of my head. And there was one time I had a dog named bud, which was a big red Chesapeake Bay retriever and it’s often said that a man is do two things in life, a good woman and a good dog. And I’ve had both, my big dog bud was one hell of a dog. I’m going to tell you, you had a lot more sense than a lot of folks. I know to tell you the truth, but now I’ve got a little Boykin Spaniel which have just peak blood, bred into them. I’ve got a picture of my Daddy’s boat taking in 1938, of the Boykin Spaniel laying on the console inside that boat, so I didn’t realize it at the time, but my Daddy had a Boykin Spaniel. So my last book in spaniel named boogie woogie, called him boogie for short. You know, I was sitting out in the lost 40 duck hole, one morning, just boogie and I, and I was drinking coffee, hadn’t even loaded my gun up and it was just beginning to try to get light. Duck Hunter knows that moment. It’s that moment when all of a sudden the temperature drops about three or four degrees and you know, something that’s fiction to happen in that first inkling of the sunlight begins to smudge itself in the east and the wind was blowing a little bit and it stopped blowing, and I pulled myself another cup of coffee, and duck started coming in. Well, I hadn’t loaded my gun, shooting a double barrel at the time, and my dog looked at me, ducks coming in and it looked at me and knew I hadn’t even loaded my gun. And all of a sudden I felt a cold blast of air hit me in the face, and I raised my eyes up and I looked around and I’m choking up thinking about this because I got to thinking about all the duck hunters, the old duck hunters that I knew that had helped raise me, that it helped bring me up and had brought me into duck hunting as I know it and as I love it today. And I got to thinking about all these old duck hunters. And I began thinking further and I said, where are these old dark hunters? And all of a sudden I realized they were all gone. And another cold blast of air hit me and it dawned on me that at this stage in the game now, I am one of the old duck hunters. And I got to thinking about other friends of mine that I’ve grown up duck hunting with the Sid laws, the Chuck Cage’s, the Brother Taltson’s, George Vanlandingham, all of these people that are in my age group that have hunted all our lives and are now teaching young ones, grandchildren, children and end the duck hunting tradition. And I got to thinking about these folks and I decided that I would have what I called an old duck hunters dinner. And I called my friend Cameron Jenkins got Esperanza outdoors over across the lake and beautiful old home over there on the bank of Lake Washington and linden plantation. And we put together an old duck hunters dinner. And I invited Sid Bollweevils law, I invited Chuck Cage, I invited Bubba Talisman’s son Zach because Bubba is no longer with us, had George Vanlandingham and of course Cameron Jenkins was there with us and Stuart Robinson, had Joe Verdan there, Joe was another one that was of the older duck hunter group that brought me along, taught me how to blow a duck call. And I asked them all and I wanted Jimmy Presswood to be there. Jimmy Presswood was the one that devised and built and had the concept of the ugly duck boat and talk about later on. And I asked them all to come and I said, bring your duck calls with you, bring your lanyards with you. Because I knew a lot of these people had a good number of duck bands on their lanyards, I had a house fire that burned up my first lanyard full of duck bands. And so we all came, had a wonderful dinner and then we sat around and we started telling old duck hunting stories and at one time I said, I want everybody to bring out the duck calls. And we had a little duck call an exhibition, I said, I want you to lay those calls on this rug and let’s take a picture of them. There were seven duck lanyards laying on the rug and on those seven lanyards were 550 Doug bands. That’s a lot of duck bands and every one of those bands were taken within a 70-80 mile radius of Greenville Mississippi. Now some of you all duck hunters can do your math on it. But from what I have seen and what I’ve understood and what I’ve checked records fighting bio in different areas that have hunting and talk to different people. It’s anywhere from 250 to 350 ducks that is harvested per band. And when you run the numbers on 550 bands on 300 bucks a band, that’s almost 16,000 ducks between these seven gentlemen that were there and Jimmy Presswood ducks trap was not there. Some of them had over 100 bands on them and that’s not talking about the goose bands, but duck bands only. So when you think of that and you look at the area that we’re hunting in and that’s the Mississippi River, the big wooded areas, the big timbered areas, you’re flooded bean and rice fields and cornfields now that’s a lot of duck, it’s a duck mecca. And you’ve got the confluence of the Arkansas River coming in around Big Island at Rosedale and it is a dark magnet down here. And some of the best duck hunting of course, is once the freezes come in and your bean field and your ice field and cornfield freeze up. If you’ve got a rise in river, then that’s the time to hit the river and duck hunt. But the problem with that is, and I did it too many times as a youngster refused to do it now, is your safety factor in hunting that Mississippi River. If you’re not in a safe boat, a big boat don’t go out there. I’ve hunted too many times and little john boats out there before day, that is not necessary anymore. Along about the 60s, Lake Wedington was a very hot spot to duck on and they were building floating blinds out there and they were trying to build permanent blinds and some of the willow trees in the middle ground, in the grass flats and all but on a permanent blind in the lake like that, it may be six ft. out of water one weekend and four ft. underwater the next weekend. A floating blind, not necessarily is always in the right place, the ducks maybe using another area. As a fellow named Jimmy Presswood from Granville who was a master welder and fitter and he loved the duck hunt. Yet he hated to get cold. And he came up with an idea to design a floating duck blind that was mobile that he could move from one place to the other wherever the ducks were using. The first generation of what we now call an ugly duck boat Jimmy would sit in it and have his hand outside running the motor well, that didn’t last too long until it was morphed into what was called the original ugly duck boat. And it was a low slung boat made of steel that was 60 wide, 12-14 ft. long, had to walk board around the side of it, positive flotation, anywhere you could put in it had positive flotation. It had a top on it that was hinged that would raise up that three men could get in with a dog. And when you close that top the other side of it, the port side was slanted and it had three port holes, three holes cut in it, that you had sliding Plexiglas, you could raise up and down and you’d come flawed that boat, you had your gas tanks on the outside, you had a propane tank on the outside, you have a propane burner inside the boat. You turned it on it warm up like your bedroom in there. When you got out to where you wanted to hunt, you throw your decoys out. Jimmy had rigged up a flop down dog ladder on the bow of the boat where your dog could work off the bow of the boat and could come climb himself right back up on the boat without any trouble, without you having to reach over and grab him and pull him back in the boat. And the boat was a lethal weapon for killing ducks, but there was only one problem Jimmy hunted in Lake Wedington, he didn’t like to get out of the room. He killed all the ducks he wanted right there in Lake Wedington. Yet when you take one of these boats sides, he had some friends, Jeff, Dr. Ernie lane, Dr. Joe Pulliam, Heavenly Brent. They all got it, Jimmy, you got to build us one of these books, got to build us one of these boats. They’re made out of steel, but they had a flat bottom and a flat by on the front cause jimmy wasn’t rigged up to build a modified V hole. So when you take that boat out on the Mississippi river, it almost beat the feelings out your teeth didn’t bother Jimmy because he hunted in the lake. He didn’t get out of the river with the big waves and the current. So the third generation of Jimmy Presswood’s boats, now when jimmy first built that first one that was totally enclosed the motor on the outside, he took it to the lake, somebody came up and saw it and he said, Jimmy, I don’t know what that is if it’s a duck boat is the ugliest duck boat I’ve ever seen, which it was pretty ugly, but the name stuck. So it became known as Jimmy Presswood ugly duck boat. Now, after jimmy was making that first series of the second generation of boats, they went over to and he couldn’t make a V hood boat, it went over to Monarch Boat Company in Monticello Arkansas and you had F&F welding fabrication shop or you see a lot of F&F boats out there now, but they’re no longer manufacturing boats. They would build the whole, the modified V whole, bring it back over there, Presswood welding. And he would build the top to fabricate on the top of it. Now we’ve got books like that that access this river and they have 50-100 mile range, you can go to where the ducks are. But back into the seventies, in the late seventies and early eighties when we were hunting you never knew where the ducks are going to be. So you ride the room until you see some ducks go up and then go in there and hunt. Well, we fly the airplane, we fly J three Cubs. You can find the ducks by the air, then mark it on a map and go right back the next morning. These boats were safe, they were comfortable and you could get in the water, you can go to the ducks before daybreak, get set up and as the sun came up, you were often hunt. So it was a very effective way to hunt big water in a very dangerous river situation. You in a good wide bottom safe hold the boat. Grinch Grayson came down here and did a whole series on duck hunting in America. One of them was caged birds up in New England, which I just don’t even get me started on that. And then they had another hunt somewhere and then they came to Greenville, Mississippi and we put to duck boats in the river and we put the film crew in an airplane to try to find these boats on the Mississippi River. And at one point in time whoever was in the airplane with the pilot and the film guy, they couldn’t find the boats, it was so well concealed, that’s how so camouflaged you can make these boats and Grinch Grayson was on a boat and with Jimmy, talking to Jimmy about those votes and the concept of the ugly duck boat. And he asked him, he said Jimmy, how often do you hunt? Just look straight at him, He said, Greg, I hunt every day of the season No matter what the weather is. And he did every day of have a long season was Jimmy Presswood would hunt it. Greg asked him, he said Jimmy, I have to tell you one thing though, this boat looks like a coffin and without batting an eye Jimmy Presswood looked at him and he said grits, it is to the ducks.
Ramsey Russell: Absolutely. Tell me this, you mentioned Swan Lake several times earlier in the podcast and I can just recall the dozens, not many, but just a couple of dozen photos my grandfather had. He was born and raised around Washington in Mississippi to but he had a, I remember seeing a picture of holding strap of duck down in swan lake. Tell me about swan lake, Where is it? What is it?
Hank Burdine: Swan Lake is was an old riverbed of the Mississippi River. If you google it up, its right there in Yazoo Wildlife Refuge. And then from there you had another oxbow, which was lake Washington. And from there you had another oxbow which is Lake Jackson and then you got the Mississippi River. So it’s an old historical bend in the Mississippi River. There were landowners inside on the islands and outside of the old Swan Lake bed that were landowners. And they incorporated the Swan Lake Hunting Club in 1893. Today is the oldest incorporated hunting club in the state of Mississippi. The land owners that owned the land to the middle of the lake were landowning members of the club and they took in maybe 20 other members in this hunting club, Swan Lake had the perpetual hunting rights on over 5000 acres of the Swan Lake bed. And back in those days, I’ve got a lot of the recorded history on it, a lot of the minutes from the different meetings that they had. And the 20s and 30s before they had legal limits, the way they hunted Swan Lake, there was only two blinds in that whole 5000 acre lake, but they had trails that ran all through the lake and different, you have Jen Slew, you had long pond and you had all these flooded Cyprus trees, hardwood bottomland in there and grass flats in there. And they had what is called the old swan lake duck boat, which I have the only one remaining in existence. They were Cyprus double hulled, flat bottomed boats with duck boards in the bottom of them. And what you did, the shooter would sit in the front of the boat in a slat back pain, bottom chair with the legs caught off of it and a man would stand in the back with a pole and he’d pull you through these trails. And they came up with their own limit of ducks in the swan lake hunting club. And that limit was the number of shells you carried into the swamp in your boat and you could not carry any more than 100 shells into the swamp. How many ducks you killed with that 100 shells that was your limit. So it was a prime evil area where ducks had been coming for the millennia. And the federal government came up with the US Duck stamp charging $2 a duck stamp back then. And those duck stamps were designed to fund a program of putting land back in the habitat as waterfowl reserved up and down the Mississippi flyway and other places also, but primarily it was in the Mississippi Flyway that a lot of that money was used. As the timber companies cleared the land around Swan Lake and all and some of the farm owners that owned some of the land, the government came down there and bought up a huge chunk of that area down through there. And the last part that they bought contained the old swan lake bed. And that area had been given perpetual hunting rights to the swan lake Hunting club of the old swan lake bed. The government took that hunting right by eminent domain, the lawyer, Jimmy Robert Shaw, who was a member of the club, took it all the way to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and lost. So the swan lake hunting club went into the Yazoo Wildlife refuge system. And at the turn of this past century, they came up with the Corps of Engineers, came up with a program to compartmentalize the Swan Lake bed into four different compartments. And the idea was to capture good water during the rainy season, to put into the swan lake bed, you keep the bad pesticide and chemical ridden water out of there during the planting season. Well, they built all these dikes and I’m not going to get into it too much because I know too much about it. But those dikes didn’t say that they sunk into the swamp bed. They built them three or four different times, the system didn’t work where they channelized to tie in Silver Lake to the steel bowel where black bowel comes into steals bowel. The channelized the whole stretch through there that kept sloughing off, sloughing off. Now they’ve had to redo that completely and build a whole new project. And I’m afraid basically it hadn’t totally done away with the compartmentalized idea, but we don’t have, we’re not holding the water, we’re not having the ducks in there that we had over the last 100 years that we’ve got recorded history down there.
Ramsey Russell: And you grew up hunting there at Swan Lake before it was condemned?
Hank Burdine: My dad had died in 1961. He was a member of swan lake hunting club. They gave me his membership in 1962, I was 13 years old, a full-fledged member of swan lake Hunting club. And that was the year that the government condemned it and took it over. So I never was able to hunt down there I had breakfast down there with Sunny Rich one time.
Ramsey Russell: You know their policy back in the day of exercise an eminent domain to continue a piece of property that they wanted, which is as I understand it, Hank, you clear it up if I’m wrong, they just come in and say we’re taking it and here’s what we’re going to give you. It ain’t a negotiated sale, it’s just whether that property for sale or not. The US Federal government comes in and says, here’s the check that’s all we’re going to give you, we’re going to take it because we like it. And we actually had a guest on here not too long ago who was a former federal agent in that refuge complex, right after all this happened. And he said, man, it was not a good PR stunt for the federal government. It really rankled a lot of failed and everything else locally. People have been hunting that property or property floral for generations.
Hank Burdine: And taking care of it.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Hank Burdine: Doing what needed to be done. And yes, that is the case or was the case back then? Now that couldn’t happen.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Hank Burdine: So had they waited about 10 or 15 years, we’d still have Swan Lake hunting club down, which was a great magnet. It was a sump for all of Washington County, where that water would come in there and the ducks, it was a duck magnet.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Hank Burdine: And right, it was in 3/4 of a mile of whiskey shoot. So you know, you could pattern your ducks and when they had ducks in Swan Lake, you have ducks everywhere.
Ramsey Russell: Boy, duck hunting in the south especially. But I think everywhere, it really is a social sport in it. I mean, you know, it’s a common thing, you know, the first time we met with those place in Greenville Mississippi. And every time we start visiting about duck hunting, it just start spinning into friends and people in places, you know what I’m saying, like a real social thing. It ain’t like a solitary deer hunter going out on the stand to go drawback.
Hank Burdine: That’ right. I can’t bow hunt because I’m sitting up in a tree, in a stand with a bow. But no wait boy. Now I can get in a big deer stand. Where I got a booth, doing on my telephone such as that. But duck hunting is such a social sport where you got two or three good buddies in there with you and you’re talking about this and talking about that and you’re able to talk and you’re able to have the camaraderie and the just being together out in God’s great, God’s great outside out of doors. And turkey hunting when I used to have turkeys, I love the turkey hunt because I was interacting with those turkeys. You can’t call it well, you can call it then, but not like you can a turkey or duck, but to be able to work at duck call and to know what the ducks want to hear when they’re doing a certain thing and their flight patterns and all. It’s an art to do that. And the worst thing in a duck blind, if somebody doesn’t know how to call a duck.
Ramsey Russell: Oh boy. And that’s the truth. You know, I think it’s one of the most over used tools, there is in duck hunting. I mean you said it previously, it’s where the ducks want to be.
Hank Burdine: That’s true. You give them a little Quakers to every nine and forget about all that high ball. Now if they’re flying up trying to go somewhere and you’re trying to call them back. Yeah, that’s one thing. But if the ducks are working down there coming in, be quiet, come on in, they see what you’re doing. That was way before we had all these flapping wing ducks and mojo ducks and all like that. And we a jerk coat is one of the most effective things that I’ve seen you can use and you know, it’ll keep you warm sometimes to cause you exercise pulling on that jerk coat. Yeah, but I go back to Jimmy Presswood I remember one time we were hunting over on, well we might not have should have been hunting where we were, but we were and I had Jimmy Presswood come over there and a couple of his boats and we were sitting out on a log and had old Bubba was with us. And Bubba was supposed to be the man in charge of the jerk coat. Well, he got tired of jerking that coat, his arm so, he just tired of the ride his waist and he’s sitting out there in the waterways, waters going back and forth. He not only was pulling the ducks, making the ducks move, he’s creating waves. That’s a great way to make a duck call do. But Jimmy Presswood was sitting on the log with me and I’ve never hunted wigeon before. And all of a sudden I looked over at him. He began shaking and was shivering and he’s turning blue. I said, Jimmy, are you okay? He said Hank, I’ve never been this cold in my life. Well it wasn’t that cold, I said Jimmy, wait a minute. You’ve been duck hunting all your life and you’ve never been this cold. He said Hank I have never until today hunted in anything but tennis shoes and blue jeans because he’s always in his duck boat.
Ramsey Russell: Always in that duck boat. Hank, I know this is a reach, I get asked this question some myself, but if I asked you one of the most memorable duck hunts, what the first thing comes to mind.
Hank Burdine: I’m going to tell you two of them. One of them was on the morning and fighting by when we got lost. It was a New Year’s morning and I with my partner Thomas Sledge, skipper Jernigan and maybe one more Dr. Parrot might have been with us. And we were going to one place after you draw the card to figure out where you’re going to hunt. You know how the card draw gold, who gets the high card, go to that place and we were going to a good spot but we got lost in those woods and it was getting daybreak and we said we just stop the boat, we’ll find ourselves later on. We got out of the boat and the thickest part of woods I think I’ve ever been in and when that sun came up, it just happened, that was where the ducks wanted to be. And those ducks were knocking themselves out, falling down through those trees and if you’ve ever seen a duck coming into a set of flooded temple right at daybreak and he’s hitting tree limbs, knocking limbs off, knocking himself over here trying to get to that water. That was one of the most memorable duck hunt I’ve ever been on. The other one what we were doing a story for Delta magazine and eyes up there, on the wood skipper. And the editor was going to be there that day and I didn’t realize that until I saw a walk in the door at 04:35 o’clock in the morning. And uh with John Mumford Jones was there, he was going to be the photographer. So I ask if I said skipper, if you don’t mind, can I please beg off going with your group and go with them because I wrote for Delta magazine and I wanted to go with him and they were going to go with Bubba Talisman. I don’t know if a lot of, you all folks know who Bubba Talisman was, but he was called the Duck Doctor and I don’t mind telling this because I’ve gotten into this in an article before about him. One of the baddest federal game wardens ever was of all time was a man named Jimmy Pill Green. Jimmy Pill Green, I think that half his career trying to catch Bubba Talisman and he finally did, that’s a whole another story. But Jimmy Pill Green told me when I called him and interviewed him about that article, he said, I’m going to tell you something about Bubba Talisman. He said he was one of the best duck hunters that I’ve ever known and coming from a federal game warden that have been trying to catch him for a long time. That says a lot about Bubba Talisman. Now that morning we were going to the Wanderrie hole or wherever it is and fighting about we were going to and we were Bubba Talisman was the guide of that group and I asked to go with him and I did. So they were set up the, editor she was sitting over on one little old dog stand and gone months we were taking pictures with Bubba Talisman and I was standing in the middle of the whole after we put all our decoys out. No duck showed up. We never saw a duck. We never loaded the gun. But I sat in the middle of those woods with Bubba Talisman as we were talking about earlier. And I think that may very well be the best duck hunt I ever spent.
Ramsey Russell: Why?
Hank Burdine: We never loaded a gun, we never saw a duck, but Bubba Talisman and I sat in the middle of those woods and talked for an hour and a half and I can’t say that that’s not the best duck hunt I’ve ever been on.
Ramsey Russell: What a good story Hank. What did you all talk about if you don’t mind me asking?
Hank Burdine: Everything about ducks we could talk about. And I realized at that time that is never a disaster when you’re learning and listening to a master. And Bubba Talisman was a master duck hunter. He often said that if you had enough wind to wrestle a gnat’s wing, you better take note of it because the ducks knew it.
Ramsey Russell: I remember reading in your book a little bit about Bubba Talisman. Tell me more about Bubba.
Hank Burdine: Bubba Talisman and Archie Manning grew up together. Archie was from Drew, Bubba from Ruleville. Bubba could run faster than lightning. And he and Archie in their senior year in high school and the all-star game down here in Jackson and they went to one of the sports reporters and the sports reporters said to Bubba, says, how many folks you reckon from Ruleville, and Drew going to be down in Jackson watching his All-star game with Archie Manning and Bubba Talisman. Bubba said, well come whatever the name was, he said there ain’t going to be nobody left in Ruleville and Drew but tonight watchman. But Bubba and UA ramp [**00:51:22], one of his dearest friends from outside the room with big rice farms, farms all around outside of them. UA ramp said the only time he’d ever been invited to go duck hunting on his own place was by Bubba Talisman. Bubba called him one time, called him Black Hand. The reason bubble called UA ramp, Black Hand. They had all this old farm equipment, he always had grease on his hand. I don’t know whether it was a grease stain on that hand all his life, but I’ve never seen UA ramp with a pair of gloves on in my life and I can be absolutely shivering about to freeze to death in my hands blue and UA ramp be sitting there reaching his hand in the water and all like that. But Bubba called him one time said, hey you black hands, sit down man, I don’t find a mess with duck. You want to go duck hunting in the morning. You said, yeah Bubba where we’re going? He said that 40 acres right south on your farm from your house and that’s where we’re going to go in. So Bubba grew up duck hunting. He’s the only man I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen his Duck band and I’ve counted the bands on it and his duck strap. And I’m not going to tell you how many bands it is, but it was one of those I spoke of earlier. He has a black bird band on it. Now, I don’t know if anybody has ever seen a black bird band, but back in the days during the high school, in the 50s and 60s, you’ve seen these former black birds and flying and say you can shoot a 22 up there and kill one of them. Well, they would go out on the turn rose and they would have a dime of bird on whoever killed it, I mean the blackbird, you’d get a diamond bird and they didn’t want to get the money. Well here come a flock of and Bubba reached up at bone, pulled the trigger. Blackbird went fell when pick it up had a band on it. So on the Bubba’s duck strap, he’s got a black bird band. Bubba messed his eye up, he reloaded some shotgun shells and one of them didn’t do right and he messed the eye up. And that kind of had got him out of the football game at old miss. He was wide receiver, running whatever, he could run like lightning. And he went to old miss with Archie Manning and George Kladouhos and Billy Van Devender and skipper Jernigan. And that’s why they were all such close friends because they all play football together. But his eyesight getting banged up and beat up in the head. They said no, you can’t do this anymore. So Bubba didn’t play much more football but he did not stop him from duck hunting.
Ramsey Russell: I believe I read that story you talked about with Pill Green chasing him. He must have shot a bunch of birds. I mean because that was back in the day that you know, look I’m not beating up on a man. I’m saying times were different.
Hank Burdine: Totally different.
Ramsey Russell: Times are different 20-30 years ago than they are today.
Hank Burdine: You had a point system on certain years and I never could figure all those things out and then you know, but that there was a stretch through there about six or eight years I believe where the duck population was way down, way down. But you can you get that book dust in the road recollections of a Delta boy that I have out by Cupid Publishing and read about the Duck Doctor in that.
Ramsey Russell: Very, very good book by the way, I’ve read it recently and enjoyed it greatly. How have things changed in the Mississippi Delta other than the Zero grade. I mean, you know, some people say maybe they aren’t as many ducks as they were back in those days. What are your thoughts on that Hank?
Hank Burdine: I think we still have the ducks, there are certain areas that are harboring a lot more ducks and other places. There are certain magnet areas. Growing up, I think we had a lot of ducks that follow the Mississippi fly away and hung close to the Mississippi River. The Corps of Engineers projects the four lakes over there but ain’t its artists and Grenada were built as flood control reservoirs and to control the water coming out of the hills. And for years they weren’t necessarily used as flood control reservoirs. They would keep water in it for the folks to fish into one of time they loved and duck hunt in those lakes or they hold water in it. Then after 73 and into the 80s, they realized that they really need to start using these legs for what they were built for as flood control reservoirs. So when I think began to happen, they started dumping these lakes in the fall and they started flooding these Tallahatchie river bottoms out earlier than they normally were flooded. And I think that the ducks began an eastward migration beginning to move over and I may be totally wrong in that, but that’s my take on it. That because the lakes were being dumped earlier and you can go over there now, Tallahatchie River chock full, they dumping all that water. So all of those river bottoms are filling up with ducks. So there’s water in there when the ducks are beginning to come down here. And the fact that we used to be known as the mound builders, the Indians around here, building all these mounds around. Now, we’re known as the land levelers. The leveled land for agriculture is better than your center pivot. It’s more economical once you get that land level. So a lot of these areas on these farms are being leveled and catching water into one time. It does to fold things, it gets rid of a lot of grass seeds, and it kills the grass seeds under the water. Plus it produces habitat for the ducks. And the ducks, as you know, use different things during the course of the year. They are eating hot cereal certain times, they’re eating one thing one time and you’ve going out in rice fields toward the end of the duck season and saying, I’ve seen ducks get sideways and just stripped if the little amoebas, the little stuff off of those stalks and getting that for the building the calcium up for the egg bearing and all this kind of stuff. So different times during the year and there’s so much more water, there’s so much more habitat farm out there. It’s just like duck hunting used to be, you could scatter some wheat out in a wheat field, and you’d have ducks come in. Now with the corn harvest that goes on there is so much scattered corn grain out there. If you don’t have a jam up show enough good sunflower field, you ain’t going to have a duck hunt. I mean a dove hunt, but what I have found out the best way to have a good sunflower field is to have a neighborhood that have one.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Hank Burdine: You go up with him.
Ramsey Russell: That’s why I call you buddy chuck cage.
Hank Burdine: Hey, you go, oh chuck. We can tell it was told about my Buddy Chuck cage. He is and has been as dedicated a duck hunter as anyone that I know, I don’t know how much involved guiding in it he is now. I think his son is doing a whole lot of it, but Chuck, not only like Jimmy Presswood would hunt every day. He was just hunting out of the boat and liquidity. Chuck Cage would hunt over an 80 mile area.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, my gosh, everywhere.
Hank Burdine: And you’d see him at dove one night and then he’d be duck hunting next morning. He’d be at the Boston bells on for lunch and he’d be scouting that afternoon and duck hunting somewhere else the next morning. I personally don’t know how he did it, but he did.
Ramsey Russell: He did. I think he still does. He’s a heck of a guy.
Hank Burdine: If there’s ever anybody I wanted on my team, it’s Chuck Cage.
Ramsey Russell: Yes sir.
Hank Burdine: And no matter what I was involved in.
Ramsey Russell: Yes sir. I appreciate your time, Hank. Folks, you all have been listening to my friend, Mr. Hank Burdine, tell the name of your book one more time, in case they want to read that.
Hank Burdine: Dust in the Road Recollections of a Delta Boy, by Cupid publisher out of Cleveland Mississippi.
Ramsey Russell: Hank Burdine, Delta boy extraordinaire. Thank you all for listening to this episode of duck season somewhere.