Legendary Reelfoot Call-Maker Leonard Douglas Wins NWFT Working Duck Call Competition
By Mike Faulk





Troy, Tennessee's Leonard Douglas has spent a lifetime in the duck business - a business he knows from top to bottom.

Leonard is a consummate duck guide serving private clients from the Douglas Family Blind tucked within the marshes of Green Island on Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee.

While his son Warren operates the guide service these days, Douglas is still the duck blind cook with a knack for frying eggs, sausage, and ham, slapping them with sliced cheese between two slices of light bread, and making the clients salivate as the sandwiches come together.

That Leonard is a charmer, too. His lifetime of duck hunting on the Mecca of Tennessee waterfowl lakes has allowed him to live many of the colorful stories he'll share if one asks. An he's a fast-talking, sweet sounding suitor according to wife Gracie and according to the ducks that have succumbed to his pick-up lines.


The expertise he uses to guide duck hunters such as me includes meteorology, hydrology, wildlife biology, and woodcarving.

Just this past month at the National Wild Turkey Federation Convention and Sports Show in Nashville, Douglas was asked by the Chairman of the Duck and Goose Call Makers Competition, Mike Warmath, to enter. True to form, and with an audience of over 42,000 attendees, Leonard Douglas took home the Blue Ribbon for Working Duck calls.



Douglas reports his pleasure in being recognized for his carving but confirmed what I already suspected. That winning working call was one and the same as the call he carried beneath his boat seat during the entire duck season recently passed.

Leonard Douglas is a turn-key duck man. He makes a sweet sounding call that has turned many a Susie's head over the years. But wife Gracie is on to him. He'd better hope she never finds a way to warn those female ducks.