Beck’s Bay Ltd. is not your average hunting camp.

Sure, there are deer stands in trees, food plots on the ground and four-wheelers barreling down dirt roads. But there is also a 15,000-square-foot lodge and a 30-room storage unit filled with boats, all-terrain vehicles and mini-trucks.

And it takes a hefty annual fee and some good connections to kill a deer on this land.

Bruce Lewis, a local attorney and the national president of Ducks Unlimited, helps run the limited liability partnership of the hunting club.

He said what started in 1989 as a modest plot of land for a few guys to hunt on has become a six-figure, 30-membership operation spanning 8,500 acres.

Each membership comes with a room in the 15-year-old lodge, complete with a private bath, water heater and air conditioner and a space in the storage unit.

“Each room is different,” Lewis said. “All we did was put up the 2×4 walls and the electricity and the plumbing.”

The members all decorate their rooms however they want — one even hired an interior decorator from Jackson — and each partner can bring family and friends to the camp year-round.

“We have pretty elaborate rules developed over the years,” Lewis said of bringing visitors. “We try to create discipline. When you’ve got something like this, you have to have certain rules on how you use it so that you don’t infringe on others.”

The lodge, built by David Holland Construction of Natchez and located on the site of the old Woodlawn Plantation, features a full kitchen, a large dining room and great room with willow paneling, a bar, a children’s room, a walk-in freezer and cleaning station, members’ rooms and private and bunked guest rooms.

It’s a great improvement, Lewis said, over the pink house the members were using before 1993.

And the lodge even comes with its own groundskeepers to watch over the property and cook meals for guests — for good reason.

“The insurance company, for us to have insurance on the lodge, requires us to have someone in sight of it at all times,” Lewis said.

That’s why the groundskeeper’s house is just a stone’s throw away from the main building.

And inside the lodge, among the wafting scents of a large breakfast, are large aerial photos of the camp’s land, littered with little white stickers.

These spots designate where the more than 100 club-owned deer stands are situated, along with GPS coordinates.

“You can leave before daylight and go straight to that stand in the dark if you want to,” Lewis said. “Most of our hunters know where the stands are anyway, but they are accurate.”

Stickers are posted for the stands that members have put up for their own personal use as well.

Lewis said including the private stands, there are close to 200 on the property.

Yet he knows where every hunter is at any given time.

“Every morning they have to sign up to go hunting,” he said. “They have to sign out and say where they’re going so that in case something happens we know where to look for them. It’s for safety, and also just to let people know that they’re hunting in that location so no on else will come close to them.”

Every afternoon, the members pull poker chips with numbers on them. The person who pulls No. 1 gets to decide what stand he or she wants to use the following day, followed by No. 2 and so forth.

Even if a hunter wants to use his private stand, he has to sign up for a club-owned one nearby so that he or she can be found if needed.

The land is bordered on either side by the Homochitto and Buffalo rivers, and a good portion is situated right in the flood plain.

Lewis said in the spring, many of the tall deer stands in the low-lying swamplands will be completely covered with water, and the wildlife is flushed up to the hilly areas around the lodge.

That swampland, about 5,000 acres, is good for duck hunting — Lewis’ personal preference — but there are also squirrels, rabbits and turkeys on the land, as well as a 17-acre lake for fishing.

And at any given time families can be found at the camp, barbecuing or sunning on the lake’s sandbar.

Fourth of July and Labor Day parties are also held for the members.

Lewis said a lot of work goes into maintaining the 8,500 acres Beck’s Bay Ltd. encompasses.

The members must attend biannual meetings to discuss hunting rules, the distribution of funds and the management of the property.

“We have to decide if we want to buy more deer stands or plant more food plots or put a culvert in the road here, cut some timber there, put a water control structure here or trap water to hunt ducks,” Lewis said.

The club has planted live oak trees in many of the fields of what was once a cattle farm.

Both summer and winter food plots are scattered all over the property to help sustain the deer population.

“In the spring we’ll come in here and plant soybeans or some kind of summer crop, and if we don’t put an electric fence down, the deer will eat them the day they sprout. So we’ll put an electric fence down until the bushes get two- or three-feet tall, then we’ll raise the fence so the deer can go eat.”

The deer stands are located near these plots and also scattered throughout the woods, named after nearby landmarks or previous structures.

But the best part of the hunting camp may not actually be the hunting.

“It’s the companionship,” said Patrick Duffy, an Natchez ophthalmologist who owns a membership.

He and Natchez Heating and Cooling owner Yates McGraw have hunted at the camp for years and enjoy ribbing each other as much as taking deer.

“He takes all my good hunting places,” Duffy said of McGraw. “Every time I go somewhere good, he takes it.”

McGraw said he’s at the camp every weekend during deer season and two or three times during the week.

“In the winter I live here,” he joked.

McGraw has two memberships, which means he has two private rooms for his family and two storage units to hold his three ATVs and two mini-trucks.

“Fishing, turkey hunting, swimming in the creek,” he said, “there’s something going on here all the time.”