Waterfowler's Journal: Bo Whoop Comes Home

The young specklebelly was gliding at treetop height, its second pass. I thought to myself, this bird is plenty close enough; you would have shot it already with your Benelli. But I hesitated. I was holding Nash Buckingham’s legendary shotgun, Bo Whoop, in a blind full of other hunters, and the whole situation had me uneasy. Lamar Boyd barked on his speck call. The bird banked our way again, but a little higher this time. Anybody could see that this pass would be my last chance.

“If you don’t want to shoot him with that gun, somebody needs to shoot him with something,” Lamar hissed, snapping me out of my moment of self-doubt. The goose was almost directly overhead when I rose and shouldered the 12-gauge, an HE Grade Super Fox with 3-inch chambers, double triggers, and no safety.

I pulled the right trigger. Bo-whoop! The goose wilted and wobbled. I pulled the left trigger. Bo-whoop! I saw the bird’s legs drop, and it sailed hard into the cypress behind the blind. Lamar stepped out onto the back of the blind for the coup de grace and soon I was admiring the goose. An hour later, a pair of mallards sailed into the hole, and I fired my third shot from the big gun, folding the greenhead in a crumple. I watched the suzie wing out of that ancient cypress lake, and I broke open the gun. A plume of smoke curled behind the spent shell, like a whisper from long ago. 

A Gun of Legend

Among America’s best-known outdoor writers, Theophilus Nash Buckingham was an associate editor for Field & Stream and the author of numerous books such as De Shootinest Gent’man and Mark Right! Named for its signature two-note report, Bo Whoop was Buckingham’s gun of choice and a regular character in his stories. The nearly 10-pound gun was built by Philadelphia gunsmith Burt Becker and designed specifically to fire Western Cartridge’s 3-inch magnum Super X shotshells.

A native and longtime resident of Memphis, Tennessee, Buckingham hunted with Bo Whoop for 20 years. In 1948 Buckingham and a friend were checked by a game warden after a duck hunt in Arkansas, during which time the gun was placed on the fender of the car and forgotten when the hunters drove away. Buckingham remembered the gun a short distance down the road and they turned around, but when they reached the spot, Bo Whoop was gone. We may never know where it went for the better part of 60 years. Buckingham died in 1971.

Bo Whoop turned up again in 2005 when an anonymous customer carried it into Darlington Gun Works in South Carolina to have the stock repaired. Master gunsmith Jim Kelly recognized the gun for what it was (the barrels are engraved with both Nash Buckingham’s and Burt Becker’s names), and offered to buy it for $20,000, but the owner declined. A few years later, the gun sold at auction for a staggering $201,250. The buyer was Hal B. Howard Jr., a retired investment manager who was Buckingham’s godson and whose father was one of Nash’s closest friends. Howard then donated Bo Whoop to Ducks Unlimited in 2010, and it was put on display at DU’s national headquarters in Memphis, where it remains today.

Out of Retirement

We took Bo Whoop out on Beaver Dam Lake in Mississippi—one of Buckingham’s favorite haunts—in January of 2016. I was an editor for Field & Stream at the time, just as Nash had been nearly a century earlier. I pitched the idea of taking Bo Whoop out of retirement for one more special hunt and story. My friends at DU were open to the idea but understandably hesitant as well. Dollar value aside, we wanted to be sure that any story we told about Bo Whoop would do justice to the shotgun’s storied past.

After weeks of discussion, DU’s leadership ultimately decided that Nash would have loved to see Bo Whoop back in action as the centerpiece of a story about the role hunters play in wetlands and wildlife conservation. So that’s exactly what we did. The gun was carefully inspected by Jim Kelly. After all those years, Bo Whoop was deemed to be well used but in remarkably sound mechanical shape. On a dreary winter morning, I joined Mike and Lamar Boyd, the father-and-son proprietors of Beaver Dam Guide Service, along with a select group of senior DU volunteer leaders. This hunt was the beginning of a tradition in which DU Presidents and other conservation leaders have the opportunity to hunt with Bo Whoop to raise money for wetlands and waterfowl—something Buckingham would have applauded. With lead shot no longer an option, we brought a special box of 2 3/4-inch, 1 1/4-ounce loads of tungsten-matrix No. 5s.

Bo Whoop proved to be just as accurate as ever. In fact, everyone in the blind shot at least one bird with the iconic shotgun, and most got two. My high specklebelly was the closest thing we had to a miss. In the story I wrote for F&S, which appeared in the October 2016 issue, I suggested that perhaps Bo Whoop was magic. A decade later, that’s still the best way I know to describe it.