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FEATURE FOR
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2003
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Champion of Champions Mike McLemore |
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"Champion of Champions" duck caller Mike McLemore of
Huntingdon was just a kid the first time he called a
group of mallards in. He was wading through the shallow
waters of the Mayo bottom near "old man Morgan's house"
with best friend Joe Sidney Pritchard when the birds
flew chattering overhead.
"I started kicking in the water to make ripples like
birds in the timber swimming," he tells. As he blew into
his black P.S. Olt duck call, his excitement grew into a
heady rush as he watched the ducks "pull the bottom out"
and settle onto the waters where, his call had promised,
was food and rest.
"It was the prettiest thing I've ever seen; I'll never
forget it," he reflects, his gaze still locked on the
memory.
Mike lived a mile outside of Huntingdon on the Jackson
Highway, the only child of M.C. and Meredith McLemore -
a location that gave him the perspective of a country
boy.
"Dad was a hunter, in fact he's the one who got me
started," says Mike, recalling early hunting days when
he was eleven and twelve years old. Nobody had chest
waders back then, he muses, and hip boots offered little
protection for a boy who seemed to fall in the water
"just about every time" he went hunting.
"I'd be soaking wet, that was part of it," he grins.
He practiced for hours the sounds he heard his father
make to call the birds in. The P.S. Olt "was really a
good call, that's what I used back then," he says.
"Daddy said if you practice long enough it'll eventually
come to you. Once you do it and it sounds right, it's
automatic from then on."
By the time he was 14 or 15 years old, his father would
take him, Joe Sidney and Joe Fortner from McKenzie on
Saturday mornings to the bottom where they would hunt
all day. He'd come back in the afternoon to pick them
up.
"We had a ball, we had a bunch of experiences there,"
Mike smiles.
His first shotgun was a Remington 870, a gun his son
still uses from time to time.
"I named him Hunter hoping he would be a hunter and he
is," Mike nods appreciatively.
He and wife Anita also have two daughters, Holly, whose
husband is Cliff Kelley, and Mallary, a senior at
Huntingdon High School.
"Holly was our first girl; she wasn't born in December
but she was still a Christmas present," he explains. His
eyes take on a wary, slightly mischievous glint as he
admits he couldn't call his second daughter "Mallard" so
they dropped the "d" and added a "y" to make Mallary.
Hunter and wife Brandi are the parents of Mike's
grandchildren, Haidyn, who at age 4 or 5 has already
been hunting with her dad, and son Bo who is 2 years
old.
These days, Mike uses a Winchester Super X2, automatic
12-gauge shotgun and Winchester supreme shells. He wears
NaturalGear "chameleon" camouflage - "It's good stuff,"
he says - and touts Triton Boats.
"I've been fortunate enough to get hooked up with them
and they make a fine, fine boat," he nods sincerely.
He admits his evolution from pump shotguns to automatic
came about due to a bad habit he picked up called
"short-shucking".
"It's a real hard habit to break," he says, explaining
if the shell isn't shucked far enough back when the gun
is pumped, the shell hangs up and the gun can't shoot.
Mike was 24 years old when he started calling in
competitions in 1969. Three years later, he won the
state championship, a two-time honor, after which he
claimed the title of World Champion in 1973, 1974, and
1977, the most times a competitor can hold that title.
In 1980, he competed against seven other former World
Champions to earn the one-time honor of Champion of
Champions.
Mike put his expertise to work the year he won "World
Champion" for the first time, starting a guiding
enterprise that lasted 26 years.
He proved his stuff in the final year of his guiding
career in a 1999 "shoot out" sponsored by War Eagle
Boats. Mike was pitted against 1994 World Duck Calling
Champion and 1995 Champion of Champions Buck Gardner and
State Champion Eli Haydel of Haydel Game Calls fame in a
three-day hunting competition set in Arkansas timber.
The men rotated each day between three holes to even the
score, with points awarded for the number and species of
birds killed.
"I was fortunate enough I won that," Mike nods, "I led
it all three days." Calling contests, he notes, are
judged by humans, but skill in the hunt is judged by the
ducks alone.
"We had outdoor writers and dignitaries there with us
every day," Mike continues. "That's one of the best
things that's happened through all this; I got to meet
people and go places I never would have been able to
without it."
He's slowed down on the cross-country travels that
allowed his participation in televised sports shows and
as emcee and speaker at various events and seminars.
Instead, he opts for events that are "fairly close"
while still playing a part in the McLemore Game Calls
enterprise he and his father founded and that now
involves his wife and son. Mike still custom tunes the
acrylic calls that are turned to his specifications.
"We first started making our own calls in 1974, Dad and
I," says Mike. The calls are sold in stores as well as
by mail order and have been shipped as far as Japan and
Australia.
"This time of year the phone rings quite frequently,"
Mike says. "When duck season opens they all panic; they
want a duck call that's ready to go and they want it
today because they're hunting today."
The single-reed, Arkansas style calls are made of
cocobola wood, black wood or acrylic in shades including
clear, red, two shades of green, blue, orange, black,
amber, yellow and one Mike calls iodine.
"We probably sell more black and mallard green that any
of the others," he says, "and we do sell a lot of orange
ones to Tennessee fans."
Mike says it makes him feel "especially good" when young
people come by and want to "learn to blow".
"I'm always willing to help them," he says, "When I was
young I was starved to death for knowledge of how to and
what to. When I do seminars, if young people are in the
crowd I really try to help them there too."
He paraphrases a quote attributed to the late Tennessee
exhibition shooter Herb Parsons: "If you take a kid
hunting you won't have to go hunting for the kid."
"There's a lot of truth in that," says Mike. "Most young
people hunger for something that's different to them and
something that's fun. This is something they remember
for a lifetime."
It's rewarding at any age to see a group of ducks fly
overhead and watch as they respond to the call and "know
you have control of them," he says.
As he is not musically inclined, Mike believes that
isn't a prerequisite for learning. He does admit his
keen interest resulted in a willingness to practice "a
lot."
"The Good Lord gave me the ability to blow, or to pick
up on it easily," he says, explaining, "You've got to
bring the air from down in your stomach up through the
diaphragm. When blowing you sort of grunt through the
call - it's a guttural sound."
Mike breaks his instructions into simple steps,
believing some people make the art of blowing
unnecessarily complicated.
"All the drake does is sit around and go zsheeep,
zsheeep..." he says in a quiet, low voice. "The hen
mallard does all the other calls."
The first step, he says, is just learning to quack.
"It's simple; a lot of people try to make it hard but
it's not. Any man, woman, boy or girl can learn if they
want to put forth the time and effort to do so."
After learning to "quack like a mallard", there are only
four basic calls to learn, he explains: the "hail call"
or long distance call - "a loud, real high pitched,
excited call" to get the ducks' attention to decoys on
water; the "feed call" or chatter the birds engage in
while feeding on corn, soybeans, rice, pin oak, flats,
and milo; the excited "comeback call" that calls back a
flock that has passed overhead - "it's quacks put in a
series like coming down a staircase, with high notes
tapering to low notes"; and the "contented hen call" -
the peaceful quacks a hen mallard makes when she is
"real contented, like at peace with everything,
everything's going fine."
But while Tennessee's statewide duck season opened
November 27 and runs through January 25, Mike says the
best-laid plans of hunters are still dependent upon the
one variable that can't be controlled - Mother Nature.
"Mother Nature has so much effect on anything in the
outdoors," he says, "Ducks will respond a whole lot
better when it's real cold."
While Mike allows there may be "some migration just for
the sake of migration," he no longer believes birds'
southward journey is specifically instinctual. "They
migrate for one reason." When ducks sense a change in
the weather, "the first thing their mind says is 'We've
got to get ready, we've got to get food,'" he theorizes.
They're in a panic mode, so they work a little better.
If they're not hungry they don't respond near as well."
As snow covers over their sources of food and water in
northern climes, they head south seeking other sources,
he says. If they deplete the food at one source, "they
pick up and move on farther south, because they've got
to have food."
Duck hunting in Canada is "the ultimate," Mike says, and
a treat he has experienced just once in a long career of
duck hunting.
"There's a big difference up there," he says, the mere
thought of the hunt filling him with obvious excitement.
"Around here you may work a flight with 500 birds but
mostly there's one or two or 25 to 50. In Canada there
are 1,000 to 5,000 birds in one bunch. There are so many
it sounds like a jet airplane when they go over."
Hunter's safety is a subject that can't be taken for
granted, Mike has learned over years of guiding. He
recalls being in the blind with a gentleman preparing
for the morning's hunt when suddenly he heard a blast
behind him. "What happened?" he asked, turning around
slowly. The hunter replied he had checked to see if the
gun was on safety by reaching down to the gun that was
propped up in the corner and pulling the trigger.
Boat safety is also an important issue in terms of
safety and comfort. Boats not steadied enroute to the
blind can become filled with water, making for a cold
and soggy hunt, while falling in the drink in cold
temperatures can be deadly.
"If you turn your boat over, you can't swim, I don't
care how good a swimmer you are," cautions Mike, "In a
couple of seconds you can't feel anything. I'd rather be
safe than sorry. Waterfowl hunting is a lot of fun but
always wear a life jacket and be safe."
"Be sure the safety is on and don't take the safety off
until the gun is to your shoulder. If it goes off and
shoots someone at that close range, once you pull that
trigger, you can't take it back - it's gone."
In crowded, excited conditions in the blind, he
continues, "you have to be on your p's and q's to what's
going on."
He tells the story of the time he was guiding a group
from North Carolina when a flock of blackjacks came over
the blind. "They're diving ducks, real fast-flying
birds," he tells with a gleam in his eye, his hand and
arm following the swoop of their course. "They came over
blind and went down and made a swing and came back. I
was in the right corner of the blind, and I said, 'Y'all
get ready now, they're coming!'"
"They came up from behind the blind going 100 miles an
hour and they came up and shot and six or seven birds
started falling."
One bird that had been hit came right at Mike, slapping
him in the shoulder as it fell inside the blind.
"How many did you get?" Mike asked, turning to look at
the ashen faces of the hunters who simply stared at him
without saying a word. Mike's face was spattered with
the bird's blood, but the hunters thought it was his
own.
"They thought they'd shot me and, man, it scared them to
death," Mike says. Once he's called the flock in these
days, "I just drop to my knees and get out of the way."
Since having heart surgery in 2000 to install three
bypasses and replace a bad aortic valve with a
mechanical one, Mike says, "I still duck hunt; I do what
I want to do, just on a lesser scale and I take my time
doing it. Fortunately I have a son who is a duck hunter.
I always thought I was a rabid duck hunter, but he's
worse than me!" He describes hunts in which Hunter and
his friends do most of the work involved. "Basically
what I do is go with them and enjoy it."
He also enjoys squirrel hunting. "I get good
walking exercise out of that," he says,
preparing for a morning hunt with the
squirrel dogs he keeps. The crisp morning
brings the promise of a good hunt and one
other plus, the good squirrel stew Anita
makes that has him smacking in anticipation.
For more information about McLemore Duck
Calls contact Mike at 731-986-3090.
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2003
Feature
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2002
Feature
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2001
Feature
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Phone (731) 352-3323 or
Fax (731) 352-3322
washburn@mckenziebanner.com
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