Hunting in the Home of Hot Sauce

The sensation that struck me as I settled into those moments of dawn’s early light came as a surprise: I was quickly chilled, shivering with cold. I had not expected to be cold in southern Louisiana, even in January. Just three miles inland from Vermillion Bay and not far from the Gulf itself, I was standing in calf-deep water inside a waist-high sink-tube inside a blind on the edge of a marsh. I was filled with the anticipation known to all duck hunters at that hour, and it was clear that I had miscalculated on the climate. The temperature was in the 40s, and I was immobile, under-dressed and standing in cold water.
None of which detracted from the extraordinary privilege of my circumstances or my renewed wonder at the connections made among those who care about good guns and the wild places that waterfowl inhabit. Those connections ran deep that January morning, looking out over a small spread of decoys on the mirror-smooth waters of one of The Duck Ponds—so called by their creator, Edward Avery McIlhenny, the pioneering sportsman and conservationist who built them in the early 1900s.
My host was beside me in a sink-tube of his own: Buzzy Brown, from New Orleans, one of E.A. McIlhenny’s 27 great-grandchildren and thus connected by lineage to the McIlhenny Co., famous producer of Tabasco Sauce, the ingredients for which once grew on the ancestral lands of nearby Avery Island. From his knowledge of family history and his memory of a photograph of his grandmother—E.A.’s daughter, Leila—that was taken at The Duck Ponds when Leila was in her early or pre-teens, Buzzy can date the creation of the ponds to pre-1920.
Shooting light arrived along with skeins of distant birds silhouetted against the sky. While the pond we were in is maybe a quarter-mile long, the bayous beyond characterize the region and extend for many miles in a band along the coastline. Avery Island itself, despite its name, is not surrounded by open water; it is a salt dome—a nearly circular mineral deposit where upwelling has created elevation above its surroundings—surrounded today by marshy wetlands. The broad horizons of the vast marshes offered a view of ducks flying in the hundreds, with only our few decoys and calls to mark our spot as better than any other.
The shooting came in brief bursts of furious action, as teal performed acrobatic U-turns over the decoys and offered challenging pass-shooting; redheads flared upward just out of range, and then offered overhead shots as they came back from behind us. Amongst lesser scaup (dos gris locally) and pintails, we watched for the larger profiles of off-limits canvasbacks and erred on the side of caution.
Buzzy Brown shoots well, and that morning he used his quintessential American duck gun, a Winchester Model 21, to splash teal out past the decoys—out past the distance where I am comfortable shooting. Buzzy comes from a long line of famously sporty shooters—especially famous for the shooting they did on and around their home grounds. From auspicious beginnings, Buzzy has made a lifetime study of shooting.
In my hands was a gun Buzzy had loaned me: a Parker 20-gauge with 32-inch barrels that had belonged to his grandmother. Not surprisingly, my take for the day was far more modest than Buzzy’s: a cupped-wing bird above the decoys here, a decent shot at a crosser there . . . . When we chose simultaneously from a group and a bird fell, Buzzy generously congratulated me for the shot. We kept his black Lab, “Sam,” busy enough. I certainly can’t fault that heirloom Parker for my mediocrity; perhaps the shivering chill or awe at my surroundings were to blame.
Edward Avery “Ned” McIlhenny was born on Avery Island in 1872. His father, Edmund, was the inventor of Tabasco-brand pepper sauce and founder of the family company that still produces it. Drawn powerfully to exploring the island’s abundance, young Ned began a lifetime as a self-taught naturalist in the most natural way: adventures with rod & gun. His early tutelage included “instruction in the ways of the wild” from a freed slave 16 years his senior, John Goffney, who he called “a splendid hunter and woodsman.” Though tutored and classically educated, McIlhenny dropped out of Lehigh University to serve as an ornithologist on an ill-fated expedition to the arctic. Returning home, he found a calling as he championed an early conservation campaign to save snowy egrets from extinction from being slaughtered for ladies’ hats. He publicized the birds’ plight, and in 1895 he caught and raised eight young egrets on the island and released them in the fall. Their return migration the following spring—with more egrets in tow—marked the beginning of the refuge he called “Bird City,” one of the first significant private conservation efforts. By 1911 the refuge sustained 100,000 egrets.
Ned was president of the McIlhenny Co. for 51 years until his death in 1949. It was a period of global growth in the popularity of Tabasco Sauce. Throughout his career, McIlhenny preached and practiced the now-familiar, intertwined tenets of both conservation and hunting. He was the first president of the Audubon Society in Louisiana, yet he explained, “I have always been, and am yet, an enthusiastic duck shooter, but also . . . one who has an inborn love of birds, and a sympathy for them.”
Perhaps his greatest contribution to conservation was his pioneering effort to raise private funds for the purchase of vast swaths of waterfowl and shorebird habitat along the Louisiana coast, then turning over most of it to the state for public wildlife refuges. Starting with the purchase of 54,000 acres of wetlands in Vermillion Parish, McIlhenny and a partner subsequently donated 13,000 acres to Louisiana, creating the first private-to-public refuge. He lined up support from philanthropic foundations to purchase 75,000- and 86,000-acre parcels of coastal marshland, then convinced the groups to donate these to the state.
Amidst all this, McIlhenny created The Duck Ponds just off of Avery Island with a system of berms and water-flow controls to improve duck habitat close to home. “This was his easy place to go shoot,” Buzzy said.
As for how I ended up at The Duck Ponds that chilly January morning, I can thank another heirloom Parker for making the connection. Buzzy’s grandfather, Alfred “Brother” Brown, had married one of E.A. McIlhenny’s three daughters—Leila, from the photograph at The Duck Ponds. As a gift, Brother had received a VH-grade Parker from his father-in-law. Eventually that gun came to the bench of gunsmith and gunmaker James Flynn, in Alexandria, Louisiana.
I had worked with Flynn editing two articles he’d written for Shooting Sportsman, and I had the chance to meet him at a Vintage Cup event. His enthusiasm for the customized Parker and its history seemed boundless, and I kept looking for a way to present his story about the gun. When I had the chance to travel to southern Louisiana in January 2008 to hunt woodcock, James insisted that I accompany him to Avery Island, where he would deliver some Parkers he’d worked on for another family member and executive of the McIlhenny Co.
The 2,200-acre island is essentially held in family trust, and the McIlhenny descendants with homes on the island face family strictures: They do not own the land, thus they cannot transfer the land out of the family. Avery Island is still home to the company headquarters, factory and some employee housing, and it remains the single source of all of the Tabasco Sauce the world has ever seen. The island has been known and exploited for its salt going back well before written history, and the first Avery married onto it and into the second generation of a sugar plantation family in 1837. Salt and sugar were slowly displaced by peppers and sauce production through successive generations, but the land has not quit: Since 1942 it has provided a little oil and gas as well.
Thousands of fans of Tabasco Sauce make the pilgrimage to Avery Island every year, touring the factory where it’s made and shopping at the Tabasco Country Store. More visitors come for the island itself—for the imprint of its caretakers over the course of generations and especially “Mr. Ned’s” 250-acre Jungle Gardens and Bird City. The paths and ponds of the gardens highlight Ned McIlhenny’s interests in horticulture, with extensive collections of azaleas, camellias, irises, papyrus and bamboo, plus the protective pens of the snowy egret rookery where thousands of birds still nest each spring.
The day of our arrival, James Flynn and I received a personal tour of the island’s narrow, winding, park-like roads highlighted by Buzzy’s stories of both family and his time growing up on visits to the island. It is an estate and refuge that is still home to the family, the family’s famous company and its share of history, yet in Buzzy’s narrative it is the boyhood stomping grounds for adventures with rod and gun—stories full of ’gators, snakes and other exciting critters.
The coffee-table book of the business, Tabasco—An Illustrated History, also serves essentially as a family history. From the hunting party portrait of Ned’s older brother, John, with Teddy Roosevelt in 1907 to Ned’s three daughters duck hunting in 1910, the company’s official history has plenty of guns and shooting. Walter S. McIlhenny, John’s son, took the company helm upon Ned’s debilitating stroke in 1946. In addition to ushering Tabasco through the post-war era, Walter’s gun collecting, international big-game hunting and English pointers dominated much of his free time.
Following in family tradition, Buzzy shot competitively while studying at Tulane University and in the years immediately after, shooting trap, skeet and the new game, sporting clays. “I was maybe in the top 50 in the world in skeet,” Buzzy says without boast. His love for shooting evolved into a lengthy working relationship with the late Rex Gage, the Holland & Holland shooting instructor. Buzzy worked with Gage for years during the Brit’s twice-annual teaching tours in the States, and he counts himself as the only American trained as a shooting instructor by Gage.
“It was a great relationship—he was truly a gem,” Buzzy said.
After our morning duck hunt, we went on an intriguing “scavenger hunt” for an item of family curiosity: the single-barreled gun Ned McIlhenny called “Long Tom,” which he shot in his later years. While remembered as a 40-inch Parker 12-gauge, what we found was a 36-inch 20-gauge by Hoffman of Prussia—a surprise that we all enjoyed discovering together and a bit of a twist on family stories.
There’s a single point of access to Avery Island, and so I left the way I’d come: through the toll booth at the entrance and down the long straight line of elevated road through the marshes, toward the main highway and Lafayette. But long after our fond farewells and my departure, I got the subtlest praise, which came by way of James Flynn:
“Y’know, Buzzy doesn’t invite strangers hunting,” Flynn drawled over the phone weeks later. “He told me he hasn’t been in a blind with someone he didn’t know in years, because he doesn’t like what can happen with some idiots.
“He said you’re not an idiot—you’re OK. He said he’d shoot with you again.”
The privilege—and the shivering pleasure of that morning in the blind—was all mine.
Ed Carroll is Shooting Sportsman’s Associate Editor.