John Stephens chuckled at the question of whether babies born in Stuttgart, Arkansas, are given duck calls instead of pacifiers to suck on.

"It seems like everybody that comes from here knows how to blow a duck call," the 48-year-old call maker said.

Stephens is a world duck calling champion who grew up on a rice farm near Stuttgart, long known as the "Rice and Duck Capital of the World." 

A town of about 10,000 residents, Stuttgart is a six-hour drive from Oklahoma City and is hallowed ground to duck hunters. Mallards have been flocking to the rice fields and bottomland forests around Stuttgart for many, many years. 

That, plus the maze of rivers, bayous, sloughs and oxbow lakes make Stuttgart, located 45 miles southeast of Little Rock, a magnet for ducks. 

"We have a lot of hardwood bottoms around here that flood naturally," Stephens said. "It's just kind of a natural funnel where ducks come for wintering grounds."

And it's wintering grounds for duck hunters from across the country.  

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The flooded timber of the Bayou Meto Wildlife Management Area, about 15 miles southwest of Stuttgart, is considered the crown jewel of public lands for waterfowl hunting.

The opening days of waterfowl season can get crowded at Bayou Meto, even with its 33,832 acres.

Between 1,500 to 2,000 hunters use the area each day in the early days of duck season and about 350 hunters use the area daily the rest of the season.

Thirty-five miles southeast of Stuttgart is the White River National Wildlife Refuge, home to the largest concentration of wintering mallard ducks in the Mississippi Flyway.

Across the Delta region of southeast Arkansas, near the confluence of the White, Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, there are duck hunting opportunities galore when there is adequate rainfall to flood the public hunting areas along the river bottoms.

"This is a very dry year for us and we don't have quite the public land available because it's not flooded," Stephens said. "But on a normal year, that's what I think brings a lot of people here. You can just put a boat in and go somewhere and hunt." 

Last weekend, Stephens met duck hunters from Florida, Maine, North Carolina, Montana, Oklahoma and Texas in Stuttgart. In addition to mallards, hunting speckled-belly geese has become extremely popular in recent years, he said.  

"There's a lot of good hunting in Stuttgart, for sure," Stephens said. 

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The town of Stuttgart embraces all things duck and duck hunting, during and outside of waterfowl season. 

"That's one of the cool things about Stuttgart," Stephens said. "It's kind of duck season 365 days a year. Everything is just centered around the rice harvest and the fall migration of ducks,"

There are numerous of duck hunting guides operating in Stuttgart. It is home to the world duck calling championships each Thanksgiving weekend.

Mack's Prairie Wings, which advertises itself as America's Premier Waterfowl Outfitter, calls Stuttgart home.   

Down the road from Mack's is Rich-N-Tone Calls (also called RNT Calls), one of the largest duck call manufacturers in the world. Stephens is RNT's president and chief executive officer.

And his journey to the top of the call making world began when he was a young boy in Stuttgart.

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Stephens first went duck hunting with his dad at age 5.

"I don't remember a whole lot about it, but I remember when I got to be the age of 6 or 7 they gave me a duck call to blow when we were sitting out in a blind," he said. "I was just making a bunch of racket, really."

A duck flew in and the hunters shot it. Stephens said there is no way that duck could have been responding to the noise he was making, but it hooked him on duck calling.

In Stuttgart, there was a community of call makers, and a young Stephens would be a frequent visitor to watch them work and pick their brains.

"There were probably a dozen call makers in this town," Stephens said.

One of the best was a local craftsman named Butch Richenback, who won a world duck calling championship in 1972 and was the 1975 Champion of Champions caller.

In 1976, Richenback started Rich-N-Tone duck calls. In the beginning, making duck calls was more of a hobby and not a full-time job for Richenback, Stephens said.

"I grew up going over to his little shop in his garage, learning how to blow a duck call," Stephens said. "And that is where I got interested in making calls."

More than 20 years later, when Richenback began having health issues, he began looking to sell the company. Richenback could have sold Rich-N-Tone to a larger company but he asked Stephens, whom he had mentored as a boy, to buy it.

Stephens was working as a landscape architect at the time and was reluctant about taking over for a legend, but he bought the company in 1999.

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Today, Rich-N-Tone is one of the top sellers of duck calls in the world and the company has its own duck hunting show on the Sportsman Channel. Stephens is one of three co-hosts.

Rich-N-Tone calls are machine-built then finished by hand and tuned, but Stephens also has his own brand of custom-made calls that he still makes by hand. The Rich-N-Tone calls sell from $65 to $200, while Stephens' custom calls start around $500.

Visitors to Rich-N-Tone's headquarters in Stuttgart can view how the calls are made. They can also see a collection of vintage duck calls.

In addition to being a call maker, Stephens is a call collector. He displays old duck calls from different collectors around the country at his store and manufacturing facility in Stuttgart."Right now, we have a duck call collection from Tennessee," he said. "It's over 200 calls dating back from 1880 to 1950. We get a lot of people that come through to see the calls and get a beer." 

That's because three years ago Stephens also added a tap room for craft beer at Rich-N-Tone. The company's flagship beer is the "Flying Duck." 

Rich-N-Tone partnered with Flyway Brewing in Little Rock to make the "Flying Duck" beer, which is sold in Harps Food Stores and liquor stores across Arkansas and Oklahoma.

The Flying Duck tap room gets crowded during duck season. 

"During duck season we are packed," Stephens said of the tap room. "It's cool because you don't go to too many places where the whole place is filled with duck hunters."

Reporter Ed Godfrey looks for stories that impact your life. Be it news, outdoors, sports — you name it, he wants to report it. Have a story idea? Contact him at egodfrey@oklahoman.com or on Twitter @EdGodfrey. Support his work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.