The Bay Prairie Outfitters Story
Bay Prairie proprietor Mike Ladnier and I both watched the same 1970 episode of American Sportsman featuring TV personality Andy Griffith and golfer Sam Snead on an Eagle Lake prairie hunt. Their guide was Marvin Tyler, one of the Texas pioneers who decoyed snows, blues, Ross’s, and white-fronted geese over the Texas white rag spread. We were separated by a thousand miles – Mike in Mississippi and me in Maryland ¬– but we both swore that, one day, we’d go to Texas and do what Marvin Tyler was doing.
Mike got to the Eagle Lake prairie before me, and when he did, it changed his direction in life. “When I went out there and met Marvin Tyler,” he says, “I was just blown away by his Blue Goose Hunting Club operation. I saw what he was doing, with the whole integrated package of hunts, a restaurant, and lodging, and that was the model for me. I said to myself: ‘One day I want to do this. Whatever it takes. I don’t care how much work is involved.’ Marvin had a big influence, he really did.” The result, although it took a few years, was Bay Prairie Outfitters that Mike founded in 1988. His was a geographic odyssey that began in Bay City, Texas, then moved to nearby Midfield, and finally to Saskatchewan. The story of Mike Ladnier and Bay Prairie Outfitters is an entertaining journey.
Mike Ladnier was born in Texas, moved to Pascagoula, Mississippi, then returned to Texas in 1975 to work for a Houston-based engineering construction company. He hunted and fished in Mississippi, but it was during his stint in Houston that the hunting bug bit, and when it did, it bit harder than a Gulf Coast green-headed horsefly.
Before the internet, Houston sportsmen relied on the Sunday Houston Chronicle newspaper for their hunting and fishing opportunities. It was in these ink-smudged pages that Mike uncovered an advertisement for $10 a day hunts at Barrow’s Ranch, a place as famous for long hikes through boot-sucking black mud as it was for uncountable numbers of ducks and geese. Mike shared its habitat with alligators, mosquitoes, and cottonmouths every winter weekend and holiday for several years. Fifty years later, he says of that mean marsh: “I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”
Jack Holland, one of the more legendary – some would say notorious – Barrow Ranch guides of the day, saw the straps Mike was bringing back and he heard him call birds. Mike wasn’t necessarily looking to guide, but Jack, then of Greenhead Guide Service, had other plans. After listening to Mike’s mallard high ball and without any prompting, he announced: “You’re hired!” That opportunity moved the 28-year-old duck hunter a step closer to his waterfowling career. As much as Marvin Tyler influenced him on the pieces he would incorporate into his business, it’s Jack Holland that Mike credits for teaching him “the guiding part of the business. He was somebody to look up to, and he did it all, and he taught me about dealing with people.”
Mike left the coastal marsh east of Houston for the rice fields of Jordan Farms, on the Katy Prairie west of Houston, in 1985. It was near the peak of the oil field boom, a time when money and white goose hunting were big business. It was here that Mike thought maybe, just maybe, he was ready to open his own guiding service. But he took a detour first. With his double-reed Yentzen duck call in hand, Mike Ladnier set his sights on becoming one of the best duck callers in the United States.
He was intimidated, at least at first. Mike would have to compete against his idols, some of the big guns in the calling industry at the time. Names like Vernard Solomon, the recent holder of the World Champion title. Renowned call maker Billy Starks and his nephew, World Champion David Starks. Judges such as Sonny Kirkpatrick of SK Calls and Louisiana’s Eli Haydel. As Mike remembers it: “So here I'm at the contest with my Yentzen and those guys get up there and they start blowing calls, and I just cannot believe how good they sound. It was incredible.”
Respect for his competitors remained for the next six years, but not the intimidation. Mike won the novice category in the combined Texas State and Ark-La-Tex Regional Championships in 1985. In 1988, he took first place for the Texas State Duck Calling title. Former World Champion caller Vernard Solomon took second. The next year, Mike won the Ark-La-Texas Regional Division honors and came in second to Solomon for the Texas State title, and both callers qualified to compete for the World Championship at Stuttgart. In 1990, Mike took second in the Texas State and third in the Regional. Then in 1991, he was the Texas State Champion for a second time.
There’s no telling if Mike might have earned the World Champion title. Between calling contests, Mike had indeed realized his dream, and in 1988, he hung his guiding service shingle. In his usual understated manner, he says simply: “Because of my guiding service I couldn’t call anymore, and I had to quit doing it. But I enjoyed it a lot we had a lot of fun. Now I’ve lost a lot of it because I don't practice, but at the time I was on my game!”
There were dozens of guiding operations in Katy and Eagle Lake by the mid-1980s. But southwest of Houston, in Matagorda County, there was only one – Bobby Hale’s Third Coast Outfitters. Mike and Bobby were friends, and Bobby didn’t protest when Mike, avoiding the guiding crowds, opened his operation at the Cattlemen’s Motel in the Matagorda County town of Bay City. As business grew, he moved to the Holiday Inn. Mike remembers: “I started putting so many people at the Holiday Inn that I thought, well, I’m going to go ahead and find a place of my own. So one day I’m going through Midfield, and I see a foreclosure sign for a motel, and there was a restaurant, too. The restaurant was owned by a farmer up in the nearby town of Danevang.”
Midfield was once a bustling railroad and farming town, its businesses shuttered after the Depression in the 1930s. By the 1970s, it was little more than a crossroads with a few houses. There was a glimmer of a revival in 1979 when Bay City investor Bill Richardson opened Bill’s Steakhouse and built an adjacent motel. Then came the savings and loan collapse six years later, and one of its victims was Richardson’s corner hotel and restaurant. Now in need of a buyer, Mike didn’t think he’d have much competition when it went to auction.
Mike inspected the property and took notes for three weeks, carefully estimating its value. The man who had never been to an auction before thought he was prepared for the big day. He wasn’t. He walked into an auction room filled with hundreds of people, and in Mike’s words: “I thought, ‘Holy smokes, all these people for Midfield, Texas?’ Then the bidding started, and I’m looking at my figure and I’m thinking ‘I’m going to do this.’ But on the very first bid, it started out above my figure!”
In the end, the high bid went to some Korean investors. “I went back to talk to them about maybe leasing it,” he says, “and they asked me where Midfield was! They had never even been there.” But the winners did not have the resources to back their bid, and the auctioneer announced he was going to rebid it. Most of the other interested bidding parties had already left the room, and the rest, as they say, is history. Mike remembers: “So it started out a little higher than my maximum figure, and I raised my hand, and the auctioneer said to me, ‘Do you want it?’ When I said yes, he replied, ‘You got it!’ You know, at that time I had no idea what I was doing, and it just worked out.” It was 1991, and Mike Ladnier was the new owner of his renamed ‘Bay Prairie Outfitters & Lodge.’ Later, Mike bought the restaurant.
Mike looks back with his characteristic modesty: “I had some real good guides out of El Campo, and the business just took off.” And take off it did. He quit his day job, busy with an operation that offered morning goose hunts, afternoon duck hunts, and an upland bird facility he built on the property to supply a game bird shooting preserve. Mike kennelled a dozen bird dogs for his upland shoots and remembers of those hunts: “The rattlesnakes were bad – thank God nobody got bit! We killed one at least every day.”
Mike’s Bay Prairie Outfitters could accommodate a hundred customers a day, and they came from all 50 states, Canada, and from across Europe. He was featured in dozens of newspaper articles and sporting magazines. His guiding staff grew to 12 for the goose piece and another six who handled the duck hunting. It was a heady time on the Texas coastal prairie, and Mike adds: “When I first started down there, it was unbelievably good.”
But, by the early 2000s, dark clouds were forming on the horizon. Things were changing. Too much hunting pressure. Critical roosting habitat was under siege by Houston sprawl. Years of drought would lead to a ban on agricultural water, with the result that the number of rice acres eventually declined by 90% in Matagorda County. For a few years, Mike’s customers still shot birds, but consistent 30-bird mornings were becoming less common.
By 2005, Mike was looking for other opportunities. He says: “When it started going down, I decided that if I was going to stay in business, I needed an alternative.” He investigated waterfowling opportunities in Arkansas and Mexico, and a fishing operation in the Chandelier Islands. Then a friend convinced him to consider Saskatchewan. He did.
Canadian law requires a new outfitter to purchase an existing guiding service, and one of his initial hurdles was finding someone willing to sell. With his dog at his side, he drove north to get an introduction to the land, and he spoke to as many people as he could. But no one was interested in selling, and he returned empty-handed. Still making phone calls when he was back in the US, he finally got a lead. “I called a gentleman in Melville who was about 80 years old,” Mike says, “and he was interested in selling. So I got a good CPA and lawyer, and they helped me get things going. We started working on it in 2006, and I was in business by 2007.”
He’d crossed one major hurdle, but there were other challenges. Mike advises: “Up here, you’re dealing with a different country. It’s not the same as the US, and there’s a big learning curve. They have their own laws and customs, and you have to follow them if you are going to have success. I started out slow and learned as I went.” Part of the reason he took his time was because of the challenge of getting work permits to build his staff, and it took several years before he found a service that made it easier for foreign workers. So, for the first few years, Mike did most of the guiding, but “once I got to work permits it was it enabled me to do more.” He recalls: “There were a lot of tough times trying to get everything to work.”
Mike ran Bay Prairie in Canada and maintained his Midfield operation for the next seven years. But as his Canada operation continued to take flight, goose hunting on the Texas Gulf Coast continued to decline. “I was going between Canada and Texas until 2014. Everything was going gangbusters up here, but it was a strain at home. I just didn’t have enough birds. I had customers flying in, and I just couldn’t be sure I could get them a good hunt. The quality was not there, and then I finally decided – that’s it!” Closing his Texas hunting service was a bittersweet decision. Texas goose hunting, he says: “Was just nowhere near what it was. And it will never be that way again.”
Saskatchewan. It’s big open country, with very little gunning pressure. There’s a rhythm to the fall migration. First to arrive are the different species of Canada geese, varying from the largest they call “honkers” to the smaller “lessers,” and mallards that initially don’t have much color. Next come the snows, blues, and Ross’s geese, and with them the first push of pintails, wigeons, and greenhead mallards from further north. At times they fill the sky ¬– and the decoys. Mike watches the patterns, and he knows what they mean. He’s been in Canada long enough now that the local farmers call him a friend. When those birds fill their grain fields, it’s Mike they trust on their land.
Mike’s a busy man. During a typical day, he might drive hundreds of miles to scout, and he’s answering the phone, handling guides, and arranging lodging for his guests. It’s what he loves to do. And he’s grateful to Marvin Tyler and Jack Holland, who helped show him the way.
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