2W Outfitters
Brenden Gallagher for SPLIT REED
In nomadic fashion, James Cioni and the guides from 2W Outfitters spend their year chasing different birds across different states and seasons. From spring snow geese to early teal and across both Arkansas and Texas, the 2W crew does a little bit of everything to bring unforgettable hunts to their clients and friends. While growing up James kicked off his waterfowl hunting career on public land in Texas with his father when he was about six years old, “it was so expensive to deer hunt because in Texas you had to have big private land leases so my dad took me public land hunting every weekend or when he had time off, pretty much my entire childhood that was our thing to go out and beat the bushes duck hunting. Growing up we never got to go on guided hunts and when I got older I finished college and still was hunting just public land when I was 22 we ended up going on this guided trip and it was a big expense and a big thing for us and we were so excited for it. The duck hunting was phenomenal but the guide was drunk a lot of the time. We actually had to wake him up one day and the food was horrible, it looked like it was whatever they had left in the freezer and they actually did not have enough silverware so we had to rotate eating meals. My buddies and I had paid a lot of money to come on this vacation, especially when you're in your twenties paying $400-500 a day, so we decided right then that we could do this so much better”.
After guiding and picking up some clients around Eagle Lake in Texas, James and his buddies still had the mallard sickness in the back of their minds brought on by that original guided trip in Arkansas. James and his friends started bringing their clients from Texas to hunt in Arkansas and after that year clients wanted to not just go on hunts but also bring their families with them to share in the experience and thus 2W Outfitters was officially born. “The cool thing is everyone at 2W has been there forever our guide Josh Bennet has been my friend since 6th grade, Mat Morris is a partner in 2W and he was my college roommate, Brad Gordy has been with us since we started, everybody we’ve all just been in it together for so long. When the season comes around people are excited about the hunting aspect but for us, we’re excited we all get to be together again on top of all the hunting. We have nine guides now and it's like all of a sudden all of us get to just chase our childhood dreams together with our best friends and that's 2W.
Doing Things Differently in Arkansas
“One of the things we do differently is we had seen a lot of the guys in Arkansas had transitioned to hunting a single blind, leaving decoys out, and maybe they’d bounce into another blind sometimes but that just isn't working anymore. These guys had been hunting the same puddles for 20-30 years and they've seen this decline in ducks they're killing and they couldn't figure out why and a big part of that was these ducks knew not to go in those holes anymore. So we went to a blind rotation system, in Arkansas, we’re hunting water/timber for ducks we’re not hunting dry fields you go out and scout. We lease everything and right now we have up to 112 blinds so the variety our clients get to see is just incredible. We have clients that will come six weekends a season and last year that group shot their limit every day but one and they never hunted in the same blind or on the same farm. I want to have a variety and I don't want my clients to hunt the same blind twice, we want you to see the country and not just experience one spot. When you're hunting you're hunting wild birds and ducks can be ornery sometimes but what we can control is how our lodge is run. Our guides all stay at the lodge, so when you have a duck guide, you're not just having a guide for just that morning. You're having dinner with them, you're praying at dinner with them, you're having a drink with them at night, this is your guide for the experience and not just the hunt. If the clients want to see something or go scout with us our guides take them, you are a tourist in my town, and being a good tour guide on top of a good duck guide is a huge deal because people are coming to Arkansas for the experience. Clients are coming for the ducks but the ducks are only four hours out of a 48-hour trip”.
“In Arkansas, we’re shooting our mallards every day but we’re also shooting gadwall, widgeon, and all these great puddle ducks that winter here. The mallards have always been a drawing force in Arkansas but hunting mallards in big water versus dry fields is just so different. When I’m dry field hunting in Canada I sometimes find it too easy, they all come in big groups and you don't have to call them that hard. Overwater though, we’re shooting into groups that a lot of the time are singles or doubles or they are coming down through the trees and it's just an experience to have that one on one scenario with a duck. We are working hard to coax that one bird into a position to shoot and really that's my favorite part about it. In Texas we aren't really blowing our calls or maybe we do to just get their attention, but in Arkansas, we’re talking to them the whole time and with the volume of mallard and ducks we have here, you're able to do things a little different to make sure your clients stay on ducks. Texas was called the goose hunting capital, but now a lot of those geese are in Arkansas, so every day our clients are able to shoot a variety of ducks, maybe a few snow geese, and then we’re also shooting our specks every day”.
The Texas Coast
“The big thing about Texas is the early teal and the pintail. Early teal is the first part of the migration, a lot of people do hunts in North Dakota for early honker but we’ve always liked hunting over water. Teal gives us that chance to break in the first part of the season with a lot of clients that have hunted with us forever and with pintails, a lot of the allure around them is people haven't had the opportunity to shoot them and later in the season we’re also shooting that trophy green-wing and blue-wing teal guys want to put on the wall. As well as shovelers that people can put on the wall, I know that might sound weird but a lot of the time, for people that hunt up north, you are not getting the chance to shoot these birds that are taxidermy quality. Texas is also just a cool place to go to because it's so vast, you can be on one side of the state hunting lessers, honkers, and field mallards, and where we’re at on the coast we’re hunting redheads, teal, pintail, and gadwall.“
Spring Snows
“We’ll run snow geese for about thirty days this year and they are just the bird that breaks my heart most often. You can be on a great feed, you can do everything right and they’ll still just say nope. There's so much that goes into scouting snow geese and I’m convinced we could have a television show just based on how we scout, so when we scout we’ll send nine guys out and everybody will stage across town waiting for the geese to come off roosts. Basically, I’m the central phone line, I run two different phones, having the guys calling me so we can get permissions, and then I’m also on speaker phone listening to where the guys see the geese going and what properties we have permission on and don't. It is just the most maddening two hours of my day every single day. I've had clients want to come along and ride with me and they can't take the stress of it because we have to find three feeds for the three groups we run, make sure it's something we can hunt and the grand prairie is huge so sometimes I’ve got guys two hours away from me scouting”.
“Last year we changed how we hunted snow geese. I like laying in decoys, there's nothing better but we figured out how to play the wind so we would get 20-30 yards off our decoys on the opposite side of the wind and catch them on their loop and basically side shoot them. This is pretty weird but you could even be 50-60 yards off the spread because those snows are still gonna work that spread they don't just commit. You're still getting those great 15-20 yard shots but they're never looking at you while you're making that shot, whereas if you're laying on the ground or sitting in an A-frame with the wind at your back they’re looking right at you while you're shooting and that can be really challenging”.
The Real Deal
“We farm here, this is not our life 60 days, this is our life 365 days a year. We do this every day, there's something done related to duck hunting every day. Most people I think assume, come November it's just time to go duck hunting but we breathe duck hunting and our families are duck hunting families. When people come here I want them to have the whole Stuttgart experience, I want you to come to the lodge and duck camp, I want you to hang out with your friends that you come with, I want you to make new friends and I want to have great hunts that show you a lot of different country. I also want clients to experience the town of Stuttgart and when you leave I want you to feel like you came to duck camp and got the true Stuttgart, Arkansas experience”.
“When it comes to Texas, early teal is a cultural deal really. Wade Shoemaker did an early teal video and it showed Buc-ee’s the gas station that like thirty different outfitters meet at in the morning and it’s just madness. It’s like a thousand people at a gas station at four in the morning all wearing camo and it's just the coolest part of the hunting culture that Texas brings with the comradery and of course Texas is where the teal are coming. They’ve flown a long way to be right where we’re going and you're hunting a completely different place culturally than Arkansas”.
If you're looking for your next hunt in Arkansas or your next early teal trip to Texas look no further than the 2W crew, follow along with them on their social media, and be on the lookout for more content from Split Reed and 2W!
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