Tell you what, if you've been hunting the same patch of woods since you were old enough to carry a .410, sometimes what you need isn't better gear or a hotter call. It's new ground under your boots. Over in Arkansas, outdoor writer and photographer Corbet Deary put together a piece on Wattensaw Wildlife Management Area, and it's worth a look if you're the type who likes a backup spot for when the honey hole goes quiet.

Wattensaw sits down in the Arkansas River valley east of Little Rock, and it's a different animal from the Ozark ground I grew up on. Where I'm from it's hills and hollows, creeks you can jump, timber so thick you earn every step. River bottom ground like Wattensaw is flatter, wetter, full of sloughs and bottomland hardwoods, and the deer and ducks move through it on patterns all their own. Flooding shapes everything down there. Some years the water gives you easy boat access to timber nobody on foot can reach, and some years it rearranges the whole chessboard.

That's really the pitch for a place like this, and it's the same reason I tell folks back home to branch out. Public land hunting rewards the man who knows more than one piece of ground. When the wind turns wrong on your usual stand, or the squirrels go quiet, or the ducks just don't show, having a second WMA scouted before season is the difference between a good morning and a long drive home muttering at the steering wheel.

Deary's piece runs with video, which I appreciate. You can read about a piece of public ground all day, but there's no substitute for seeing the timber, the water, the lay of the land yourself. A map tells you where the sloughs are. Footage tells you whether you'd need hip boots or waders to get to them, and anybody who's guessed wrong on that knows exactly what I mean.

Arkansas keeps doing right by its hunters on the access front. Between the agency's groomed dove fields I wrote about last month and WMAs like Wattensaw, that state has a lot of public ground where a person with a license and a little legwork can find some solitude. Not always easy walking, but that's fine. The spots that take some effort are usually the ones worth the effort.

If you're within a tank of gas of the Arkansas River valley, scout it before the season gets deep. Drive the levees, glass the timber at first light, mark what you see. And if Wattensaw ends up in your rotation this fall, I'd like to hear how it treats you. I've got my Ozarks trip coming up and I'm still arguing with myself over the route, so I'm always collecting intel on ground I haven't walked yet.