If it quacks like a duck ... Jackson's Steinmeyer wins duck-calling world championship

Two men stood on the stage. One would soon have his life forever changed.

“And first runner-up ... Trevor Shannahan.”

With those words, Michael Steinmeyer of Jackson had won this year’s Wings Over the Prairie Festival World’s Championship Duck Calling Contest in Stuttgart, Arkansas.

“These past 72 hours have been very surreal,” he said Tuesday. “The thought went through my mind, ‘Wow, I did it! I don’t have anything to prove to anybody else again. I’m a champion, and no one can take that away from me.’”

Stuttgart claims the title of duck capital of the world, and the duck calling championships awarded annually there are the sport’s top prize. This year’s contest was Steinmeyer’s 14th attempt, but his journey to the title began his junior year of high school when a friend, Chris Boettcher, asked him whether he wanted to hunt ducks the coming weekend.

“From that point forward, I loved the waterfowling community,” the 37-year-old Sterling Insurance Agency producer said. “In 2002, I was watching a Mossy Oak video, and John Stephens of Rich-N-Tone duck calls did a segment on competition calling. I was like, ‘I can do that.’”

Steinmeyer located the Stuttgart Chamber of Commerce website, which had a duck-calling video on it. While viewing the video dozens of times, Steinmeyer taught himself how to blow like the pros. Later, renowned callers helped him improve his craft, and he qualified for the world championship for the first time in 2006 by winning a regional contest in Sturgis, Kentucky. He recalled competing against some of the sport’s top names, surprised he won at age 24. Still, his first world championship competition was an eye-opener.

“I thought it was the best I had ever blown. I made it to the second round. That was a pretty big accomplishment,” he explained. “I had a taste of it at that point. From that point forward, it basically engulfed my life.”

For the next few years, Steinmeyer practiced an average of four hours a day, working on specific parts of his scripted performance.

Competition duck calling requires participants to work through a standard routine in a given amount of time, usually 90 seconds. The routine begins with a caller “hailing” an imaginary passing group of ducks to get them to stop their journey and come to the hunters. Then, the caller uses a series of “greeters” to calm the ducks as they circle the area and encourage them to join the decoys on the water. Finally, a feeding “chuckle” entices the ducks all the way down to the water. The full routine usually works through this series twice.

“You are trying to paint a picture,” Steinmeyer explained.

To paint his quacking masterpieces, Steinmeyer uses Refuge duck calls, made in Harrisburg, Arkansas, and while he doesn’t need to work on his skills nearly as much as he used to, his practice these days has a specific purpose — building up the lung capacity necessary to perform the lengthy and loud continuous call.

Following a fourth-place finish last year and eight top-10 finishes at the world championship, Steinmeyer said Saturday’s performance came after fine-tuning practices and attention to detail.

“All I could think about was blowing clean. After the first round, I felt really good about the routine I blew. I felt like I’d blown the strongest, cleanest I could,” he said. “Everything seemed to align at that point. ... When I walked off the stage, I thought to myself, ‘I’ve just blown the three best rounds in Stuttgart I’ve ever blown.’ I left everything I had on the stage and left it in the judges’ hands.”

With a big group of finalists on stage waiting to hear their names called — hopefully last — Steinmeyer began to sense a potential win when he saw his family and friends crowding the stage.

And then his was the last name, the winner.

“My son stepped up with tears in his eyes. I gave him the biggest hug I’ve ever given him in my life,” he said. “Mom and Dad came up there the same way. Just the emotions — unbelievable, breath-taking. They’ve never missed a contest. They have been there every year.”

Steinmeyer’s win in the prestigious contest, which came with a $10,000 prize, has already opened exciting doors. An offer to hunt at an exclusive Arkansas reservoir came mere hours after his win, and in the days since, he’s planned trips to Texas and Oklahoma to hunt with well-known guides.

His championship win allows him to compete in the once-every-five-years Champion of Champions competition, but Steinmeyer isn’t ready for that just yet.

“I enjoy it entirely too much. I don’t ever want to not be able to stand on that stage and compete with my buddies.”