Black Duck Revival: The Jonathan Wilkins Story

Ryan Barnes for SPLIT REED

Photos Courtesy of @blackduckrevival

All across the U.S., there are thousands upon thousands of run-down vacant buildings. Buildings destined to be knocked down and turned into another housing development, strip mall, or some sort of fast-food restaurant. It’s a sad reality, really. But unfortunately, there’s a competitive market out there for real estate and most people are willing to sell off old-time buildings to make some money. Luckily for one of these places, a church in Brinkley, Arkansas, Jonathan Wilkins, a passionate waterfowler and a handy “DIY” man came to its rescue. He created what’s known today as Black Duck Revival.

Wilkins, from St Louis, wasn’t raised in a hunting family. It happened to be a friend he was working with who introduced him to the world of hunting and helped him kill his first whitetail. “I got really lucky and killed a really nice whitetail just a few weeks after I started, and that just sent me down a rabbit hole with hunting and the outdoor lifestyle. I started waterfowl hunting the year after that. I had a guy take me a few times, just between The Delta and Central Arkansas, shooting shovelers and what not. I just fell into it”, he says. Starting out with a half-dozen broken down decoys, to now being a well-seasoned Arkansas timber hunter, Wilkins says, “that’s about the only hunting I still do. I very rarely hunt fields. I’m pretty much a public land hunter, exclusively for ducks”. Using the same Remington 870 that he first shot when he started, Wilkins has a black lab mix as a duck dog and blows a 50’s cutdown Olt. He is the epitome of an Arkansas duck hunter.

When asked when the love for hunting set in, Jonathan states, “I think the answer to that is ‘right away’. I started out doing what everyone did a long time ago when you’d go to Walmart every September and buy all the Realtree and Michael Waddell DVDs. I’d watch those and try to figure out what was going on. But it was immediate. I didn’t grow up hunting and fishing, but I grew up romanticizing independence and the outdoors. I grew up watching westerns with my dad and I really revered mountain men and the like, so when I had someone who could point me in the right direction then I very quickly fell in love with it”. Wilkins, being determined to put in extreme amounts of work to be successful, became more and more successful as a hunter. By allowing himself to hunt with more and more frequency to find the patterns that allowed him to become better at his craft. “You have to find stuff out on your own. If you Google ‘how to set up a decoy spread’, you’ll get things like the ‘J’ and how to make these landing zones, but those are all written by people that are hunting marshes, or hunting in the North of the country or even out West. That doesn’t work hunting in the timber. Timber is completely different. So when I started I was trying to apply stuff that wasn’t applicable to the situation I was in. I had to figure it out through trial and error”, Wilkins says.

Jonathan hunted (and still hunts) frequently on the Dagmar WMA in the Arkansas Delta, which was about an hour and a half from his home in Little Rock. “I was always leaving my house at 1:00 or 1:30 in the morning trying to get to my spot by 4:00 so I could beat the boats, so I started driving around the area looking for a place that I could buy that was cheap enough with running water and enough room for a space heater that I could stay in and hunt for a few consecutive days in instead of driving back and forth all the time. There were times when I was driving 160 miles in a day and it just was exhausting”. It was then that Wilkins came across an old church, which would later turn into what is known today as Black Duck Revival.

“When I bought the church it was in really, really rough condition, but I didn’t know that until I started peeling the layers back. So it just turned into this really extensive gut and rebuild job. I was just trying to figure out how I could swing it, and I figured I would list it on AirBnB when I wasn’t hunting, and maybe some folks wanting to hunt all the public land around the area would like to stay there. I mean, we have the White River access within a 10-minute drive, we’ve got the Cache River about 5 or 7 minutes away, we’ve got Dagmar, we’ve got Black Swamp and a lot of other well-known famous duck hunting places both State and Federally owned all nearby”, Wilkins says about his initial ideas for the Black Duck Revival hunting lodge. Jonathan repurposed the old wood to help with the design and add some flare to the lodge. He used the old pews to create the bar, he removed some of the walls and replaced them with some of the old Cyprus Timber that served as the original floor joists. Needless to say, Wilkins is quite the handyman. “I just put in all the things that I would want and it became pretty apparent that it’s what other people wanted as well” he says. Wilkins mentions that the more he got into it, the more he realized that he had a unique place and a unique situation. He had created an amazing lodge, with access to amazing hunting ground all around him- but he also “looked different from what your average waterfowler looks like”, as he puts it. “I’m a black guy with a bunch of weird tattoos, and I come from a different background, and I knew that entering waterfowling had a bunch of barriers. Between money, gear, and cold weather (it can be dangerous if things go wrong) as well as some societal barriers; I now had base of operations to change that a little bit,” Jonathan says about his creation of Black Duck Revival.

Jonathan mentions that Black Duck Revival and his lodge isn’t a lodge for only seasoned veterans, but it is also a place for people who have some barriers to overcome; whether they be women, people who grew up in cities, or people of color trying to take those first steps into the waterfowling community and don’t know where to start. “First, I just wanted a place to sleep for my hunts. Then it turned into a way to make a little money on my investment. Now, we’ve moved into offering these outfitted hunts for specklebelly geese, all in the meantime trying to help people who are looking for a way to move past those societal barriers to get involved in waterfowling”.

When asked if being African American has created any riffs or hardships in his efforts to create Black Duck Revival, Wilkins responded, “I don’t think there’s been any more barriers than what you see in your daily life as a person of color. I think more than anything it gives me a unique perspective,” he continues, “I think part of the reason I’ve wanted to develop the business into what it’s becoming is due to the fact that I have had a lot of experiences of what people in this space here in Arkansas think is the norm, or who they think they should expect to see when they go places to hunt. You know there’s people who say some unthinkable stuff, occasionally you get people who are hostile. It’s something I try to stay aware of when I’m out hunting and fishing. You’ll hear stuff and occasionally you’ll feel threatened, but you get enough stuff like that out duck hunting so I want to make it that people don’t have to worry about that stuff the weekend they’re coming to hunt with me”.

Wilkins also shared some interesting insight to the history of African American hunting heritage in the South. “I think many people are misinformed in thinking that black people aren’t in the space of hunting. I was a history major in college and I’m bringing that into a lot of these areas, but I think that a lot of it is that most of these stories haven’t been told. Going back into the Antebellum, when there was slavery, into places that would be considered the ‘Deep South’ they had these plantation cultures, and these bird-dogging cultures and the people who trained those dogs were black people. The people who ran and guided those hunts were black people. This occurred during the time of slavery, and the time afterwards”. Jonathan continues by explaining that the early hunting done in the South was done by African American slaves, however, their stories have never been told. It was also noted that after the Civil War white plantation owners were complaining because they couldn’t get any African American men to come help- the reason being they were successful enough hunting and providing for their families on their own that they didn’t need to go work on the plantations. They were doing fine living off of what they hunted. Because of this, laws were then set in place to prevent black people from owning firearms and to force them into more urban areas to try to find a living. Wilkins explains, “You have the consequences of these laws that prevented black people from hunting and took a population that was predominantly rural, making them predominantly urban. After a generation or two, you get this narrative that black people don’t hunt when in all reality, that’s not the case”.

Without a doubt, Wilkins is a man with all sorts of talent and knowledge, and all sorts of ability, running an undoubtedly one of a kind lodge in a one of a kind place making it all the more appealing to those looking to come out and hunt. Jonathan has taken many friends and acquaintances hunting. He also gives hunters the chance to use the lodge to go out, shoot some specks, then offer them culinary lessons on how to better cook what they harvest. Once again demonstrating the versatility in his abilities. From solo-hunting to taking out friends, to teaching people how to cook specks, all are apart of the Black Duck Revival experience.

If the history, the lodge, Jonathon’s knowledge, and the hunting isn’t enough to entice you to pay a visit, maybe the cooking will be. Jonathan is a master of cooking all sorts of wild game in all kinds of ways. Having worked in different restaurants a divine talent for cooking wild game, he’s found himself in a position to combine all these different things that he was passionate about. “You know I have this awesome place with a whole lot of great access, but it’s also like a base of operations to let my brand develop. And that brand involves broadening the hunting narrative, getting people to do more than just breast out their birds and learn more ways to cook and eat what they harvest. I give people a look at more ways to use the entirety of the bird when they cook. That’s where it started, and where we’re at right now”, Jonathan says.

Wilkins also finds himself with multiple income streams. While Black Duck Revival is considered his “day job”, he says that he does a lot of handy-man work, private cooking jobs, and mastering skills to use on his own projects to save money for other things. He also has entered the world of outdoor writing, and publishing recipes. “I’m in a situation where I get to pursue all of my interests, and I don’t have to get tired of pursuing any one thing,” he says. While he does mention that he is passionate about writing and reading and the English language, his primary focus is Black Duck Revival, and he plans to find every way possible to combine the two together. “What I’m most interested in doing, is doing things that I love doing, and things that I’m good at. I want to combine all of them to bring something to the world”.

With so many different abilities such as being an experienced hunter, being able to restore a church, being a top-tier chef, it’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that Jonathan Wilkins can bring something special to this world. In fact, he already has by helping knock down some of the societal barriers that stand in the way of hunting for people of color, or people that otherwise wouldn’t find their way into a decoy spread. He’s also helped people discover the many different ways to cook and prepare their ducks and geese in ways they would have never otherwise known to. “So many people just breast the bird out and leave it at that, but there are so many different ways to cook waterfowl and to make them taste amazing,” says Wilkins.

All in all, with Jonathon Wilkins at the helm, Black Duck Revival, barriers are being broken, friendships are being made and good food is being cooked and consumed. All things that Wilkins wants. All things that Black Duck Revival was made to be. So take the time, book a hunt, shoot some specks, and get to know more about Jonathan and the Black Duck Revival lodge this coming season!

Check out some of the Black Duck Revival Lodge in the slideshow below!