Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander

more than one thousand ducks now.
    The crazy part is we can make as many improvements as we want to our duck blinds, but they’ll never be as good as the ancestral holes. Some of the land next to mine used to be a swamp, but the owners leveled it in the 1960s and turned it into rice fields. Some guys got in a duck blind over there and noticed that ducks kept flying to one particular spot on the field. They asked the farmer why ducks were sitting there, and he told them it’s where a lake used to be. The trees and the water are gone, but the ducksare still flying there because it was where the lake once was. It’s in their genetic makeup to fly there.
    It’s one of the phenomena of Mother Nature that can’t be explained through science. There are a lot of them, and the only explanation I can come up with is that God is in charge and has a blueprint for how everything works. Take, for instance, the Arctic tern, a medium-sized bird, which is famous for flying from its Arctic breeding grounds to Antarctica and back every year, covering more than 43,000 miles round-trip. The terns travel down the coast of Brazil or Africa to get to their wintering ground every year. Some evolutionists want us to believe that the reason they fly to Antarctica every year is because once upon a time one tern found its way there, told some terns about it, and then they all started going there. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
    I, for one, believe the terns were born knowing they had to fly to Antarctica every winter to survive. To prove the point, researchers once robbed a tern’s nest and raised the little birds away from their mother. Then they banded them when they were old enough to fly. The terns had never seen Antarctica and had never been around another tern to tell them to fly there. So when it was time for the terns to fly south, the researchers flew over the Arctic Ocean and dropped them from an airplane. The terns made one circle and then flew south, arriving in Antarctica a few weeks later.
    Why would they do that? Because there were about twenty different life forms that relied on the terns to survive. The Arctic fox couldn’t survive without its eggs, and certain plants and worms couldn’t live without its droppings. Hawks couldn’t survive without feeding on the birds. The terns were part of the food cycle in both the Arctic Ocean and Antarctica.
    The ducks that fly south from Canada each year and winter throughout Florida, Louisiana, Texas, parts of Central America, and beyond are the same way. Everything from alligators to snapping turtles to skunks rob ducks’ nests and eat their eggs. Foxes, coyotes, and birds of prey eat their babies when they’re young. Humans hunt ducks, too, and they put meat on our tables. It’s the Almighty sending literally millions and millions of pounds of protein from one end of a continent to the other end, feeding all of these things along the way.

    The Almighty sends literally millions and millions of pounds of protein from one end of a continent to the other end, feeding all of these things along the way.

    It’s like the mayfly on the river. A mayfly starts out as a larva in the water and looks like nothing more than a little maggot. When the water level rises, the larvae crawl up the trees on the riverbank. They build cocoons that look like spiderwebs and then emerge as flying creatures. You see mayflies flying all over the river and they liveonly long enough to drop their eggs into the water. Why? Because when they die and fall into the water, fish come up and eat them. Mayflies are fish food! It’s a cycle: mayflies drop their eggs and then they die, fish eat them, the larvae climb up the trees, and then it starts all over again. Who’s feeding the fish? The Almighty is feeding the fish.
    God is feeding everything, including you and me, and a lot of us in His ecosystem eat us some crawfish.

PRODIGAL SONS
    Rule No. 12 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy
    Learn to Forgive (Life’s a Lot Easier That Way)
    T he good Lord blessed Kay and me with four healthy, obedient sons, each of whom grew up to become a godly man who loves his wife and children and shares God’s Word through his work with Duck Commander and in our church. But I’m not sure I needed to see how they came into this world! A few weeks before our youngest son, Jeptha, was born in 1978, Kay informed me she wanted me at the hospital to witness his birth.
    Now, I didn’t want to be in the delivery room when Jep