The Art of the Hunt with Ramsey Russell: The Art and Waterfowl Hunting, Hunting’s Relationship With Conservation, and Appreciating the Deeper Experience Hunting Has to Offer

Taylor Gallegos: Welcome to the Art and Life podcast, I’m your host, Taylor Gallegos. My intention with this experiment is to inspire hope and inspiration in your creative pursuits. Follow along as I interview artists, makers, entrepreneurs and creatives from all walks of life. Listen while you work, listen while you create, listen while you dream up the next breakthrough idea. It’s possible to make a life from your art skill or craft, whatever that may be. These interviews are evidence of that fact. If you enjoy what you hear, please subscribe to the show and leave a review on Apple podcasts. Share this with your friends, family and all those creative people, you know out there. Now, let’s dive into this concept we call creativity. What is happening all you creative humans out there? Taylor G here Art and Life, this is I think episode 30, 29 or 30 maybe 30. Obviously I didn’t check before I started doing this today, but I’ve got a very special one for you today I have with me Ramsey Russell out of Mississippi. Now Ramsey is a waterfowl hunter, he’s got a background in wildlife conservation. He worked with the US government for years, in the last 20 years has built his own small business around his passion which is waterfowl hunting, he goes around the world taking people on these trips, he experiences far off lands and hangs out and interacts with people from all walks of life, all backgrounds and he absolutely loves what he does. In this podcast we dive into the art of duck hunting of waterfowl hunting. We dive into the concept of conservation through hunting and what that relationship is like. I didn’t always know about this. Me, I’m sort of a peace loving hippie and I don’t hunt or I don’t have any desire to and I used to have sort of an – I used to have a negative viewpoint on hunting since I’ve learned a lot about hunting and conservation and how that all ties in together, my perspective has changed on it and he dives into that a little bit. What else? Yeah, here’s some really beautiful stories in this one. It’s really fun, I just love hearing people talk about what they love and this episode is no different than that and especially in the end we get to hear some really cool stories, so sit down, relax, get your creativity on, maybe make a painting or do a drawing or do whatever it is that you do, that’s creative, that’s the intention of this podcast is to get you inspired while you work and press play, just enjoy. And without further ado, Ramsey Russell. Welcome back to the podcast, I’m your host, Taylor Gallegos. And with me today is Ramsey Russell. So Ramsey, thanks for being on Art and Life.

Ramsey Russell: Hey Taylor, I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Taylor Gallegos:  Definitely and so you have a background in duck hunting and wild lands and why don’t you tell everybody about it?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’m Ramsey Russell, I’m born and raised in Mississippi if you can’t tell by the accent, I’ve got a background in forestry and wildlife management. I practiced half my career anyway with the federal government as a forester and wildlife biologist. And about 20 years ago I chase the passion, I found a niche and I created a name brand of duck hunting services that we call getducks.com. And like we say its duck season somewhere 365 days a year you can duck hunt on earth, you just got to have passport we’ll travel. So that’s kind of in a nutshell, what I do, I spend about 200-225 days a year traveling when it’s not COVID and my many clients love to duck hunt.

Taylor Gallegos:  Yeah. And this is your first time – I mean you’ve been on many podcasts before, but this is your first one where you are talking about it as an art.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I’m honored to be here. Of course, you and I met up in Bozeman and we were visiting and talking and I’ve got a very small podcast, it’s all about waterfowl and it’s called Ducks Season Somewhere and you and I were sharing notes and about our respective podcast and I was flattered that you asked me to join you on Art and Life.

Taylor Gallegos:  Oh, totally. And I mean that’s the cool thing about this podcast that I really love is that, it really showcases that everybody is an artist in something if they choose to put their focus, their energy into it and really make their passion and art because the definition of art as we’ve seen on this podcast is pretty wide. But a lot of it comes down to presence and passion and it’s just like really giving your all into something and that’s obviously what you do.

Ramsey Russell: That’s kind of what art is. It’s an expression of life as seen by the artist. And that’s my definition of it and we – people use a lot of different mediums and people see the world and perceive the world, I should say or perceive reality differently how they express it and I think and I’ve given a lot of thought since you asked me to join his podcast tonight about duck hunting as an art. And I think that as a lifelong hunter. I’ve been hunting since I was a child going with my people and then later and I say not much later, single digit aged, I learned to shoot and learn to clean birds and learn to cook and learn to socializing and just the whole pageantry and drama of the hunting experience. I did start at a very young age, but hunters kind of go through stages and phases as a young person, you don’t know as much, you’re relying on the guidance of a mentor like your daddy and your granddaddy or a family member somebody and you’re learning and really you look up to those older people and they’re accomplished hunters and so you aspire them, shoot as many as they do and shoot and kill and build your own self esteem or your own ego or your own sense of self and I do think and I do see in my own Children who are younger, I raised him but I do see the stage that they’re in, in their teens and 20s, which is more – let’s just say numbers oriented and then you go start going through different phases and some people say there’s 4, some people say there’s a dozen. I look it like just a gradient of progression to where now 40-45 years after I joined my grandfather as a young boy, now I’m at a stage where it’s much different for me than it is for my Children or for people that have not hunted and seen as much. But how I approached the hunting part of it and my relationship with the resource with the wildlife with the habitat is also much different. It’s much more satisfying. It’s much more rewarding then it was when I was a young person just out trying to just be good enough to shoot something.

Taylor Gallegos:  Yeah, so we talked a little bit before we started recording and you were mentioning this sort of thing and I mean what I was picking up on it was that – when you’re younger you’re more numbers oriented, you’re maybe more like results oriented and as you’re older, it’s almost like you’re more like a steward of the overall experience, including your experience and also –

“And a lot of my life now with the career I’ve cultivated is like walking through the pages of National Geography, but with a shotgun and waiters, you follow what I’m saying? It’s not just the bird or the strap of ducks, it’s where those various species and their life habits and their behavior take me in the world.”

Ramsey Russell: That’s the key word is the experience. It’s just the whole rich experience. Now, a lot of people just hunt near home within an hour’s drive or something to the nearest public land or marsh or private club or wherever they hunt and my world of duck hunting is the entire world. We hunt waterfowl on 6 continents. There’s Probably 170 species of waterfowl worldwide geese and ducks and swans and so a lot of my life, I remember as a young person, one of my grandmothers bought me a subscription of National Geographic and I poured over, I didn’t just look at the pictures, I actually read it treasure those books, the experience of the world. And a lot of my life now with the career I’ve cultivated is like walking through the pages of National Geography, but with a shotgun and waiters, you follow what I’m saying? It’s not just the bird or the strap of ducks, it’s where those various species and their life habits and their behavior take me in the world. One example, we’re in South Africa and it’s a very dry desert environment. South Africa is very dry and desert, one of the particular species of birds over there is called a pygmy goose and it weighs about not as much as McDonald’s quarter pounder it’s a tiny bird about the size of a teal here in America. And its habitat is lily pad ponds, its tiny little bird about the size of a pigeon, but it’s a goose. It’s a duck, but it’s called a goose. And its habitat is lily pad pond, it’s got this short stubby little bill that it uses to clip the shoots and it lives in lily pad. And so to hunt this particular bird, there was a report of 2 pair sitting on a lake down in Zulu land and we drove a couple of hours early in the morning to get there and we got out of the truck and loaded up and began to walk the bank and glass. It was mile and a half long oxbow lake at the river, oxbow is where the river used to run centuries ago. It was just covered wall to wall with lily pads, the water was obscured. And we’re hunting for these tiny little birds. And we spent hour’s glass and stopping and just glassing and we saw the other bird life and insect life and reptile life and we were just carefully glassing until we found those birds. And it’s a really cool bird. And one thing I remember we shot, there’s a nearby village, very remote grass roof village, the kind of place where the ladies literally walk down the street with 50lb of laundry balanced on their head, young boys are carrying massive jugs of water, they’d walk miles to the river to collect fresh water to wash clothes to drink, to bathe, they sleep on grass mats and all these Children, all these locals came out to meet us after we had shot these little bit of these 3 little birds. We shot 3 out of 4, these tiny little birds. And we were showing them and explaining to them what the birds were what the bird behavior and they were – I just never will forget these small African Children just reaching out like petting the feathers and smoothing it to emerald green head, the bright yellow bill, just pointing and looking and this was right in their backyard and they were just unaware of this little duck. And they were really unaware of why 2 American men would come halfway across the world fly 18 hours from Atlanta Georgia to hunt these birds. But for me, we shot a lot of different species and a lot of different habitats but to me that that’s a real big example of where the experience that a quest for a bird, a relationship with this bird takes you in a desert environment. I find myself in an oxbow covered with lily pads. You see what I’m saying? Way off the beaten path of Africa. And those experiences are what resonates me when it comes to the actual hunting part, we hunters kill wildlife and as hunters we responsibly own, that is fact it’s what we do. We’re not out there to just watch the sunrise and we’re not out there to look at wildlife with binoculars that’s called bird watching, we’re hunters and we do kill and we eat and we utilize and we take and we collect experiences. I do believe based on my background in forestry and wildlife and the practice of it throughout North America and some of the consultations I’ve had around the world, some of my observations around the world. I do believe that conservation is defined as wise use. And I think use usage of that resource is a very important component of hunting. But I also see where the recreational interest in hunting animals create commodity value. It creates a value for that wildlife. So, I respect and appreciate that all of your listeners may not hunt may never have hunted, may even be offended by the concept of killing a wild animal, in my world I deal primarily with waterfowl. I do know people that kill all kind of critters around the world big and little some of them would really offend you. But for somebody that didn’t grow up and doesn’t understand the hunting culture, how can you love something and supposedly be a conservationist for this increased existence and like yet kill it? Well, it goes back to that commodity value and here is a very good example of what I’m trying to say of why the recreational or sporting interest in hunting a wild resource create commodity value which leads to its continued not just existence but extremely good well-being –

“So, real quick when you say it leads to its commodity value, so what you’re saying is that because there’s interest in it then that makes it valuable in terms of like hunting market?”

Taylor Gallegos:  So, real quick when you say it leads to its commodity value, so what you’re saying is that because there’s interest in it then that makes it valuable in terms of like hunting market?

Ramsey Russell: Well, it gives it to me a societal value. And let me explain just rudimentary components of wildlife hunting economy. Back to South Africa we were driving at daylight going to hunt that little bird, that little goose. And we were up in this very high path and to the north was just – it looked like a scene out of Lion King. The sun was kind of obscured, but it was getting light and the sun was still kind of behind a mountain, it was getting light and just as far as you can see out to the horizon was this valley, this wooded valley of Acacia just as far as you can see. This beautiful maroonish colored tapestry of habitat out through here. And my host says Ramsey and he pointed, he says that valley has the highest leopard density in all of South Africa. I said, wow, that’s incredible. I didn’t think about leopards being around when I’m walking around in these bushes, he said, but unfortunately, the Zulu land government voted to protect them to ban the hunting of them last year. And what that translates into Taylor is you’ve got poor 3^rd world country villages and some of the – just take a particular farmer in that local community, he’s got 50 goats and it bought them, trade them and raises them and he feeds his family and he sells a few at market and that’s how he lives. And in the past when there was hunting for those leopards and I’m not a leopard hunter, I’m a duck hunter, so bear with me people, he comes out to his pastor one morning and there’s a dead goat leopard kill or maybe the cat’s drug it up into a tree and he accepts that because he knows that a hunter from another country will pay $30,000 to come hunt that spotted cat. And it doesn’t affect him. He just donated a go to 5 to it, it doesn’t, but it does affect him. He knows that the money that the hunters are bringing to hunt those leopards trickle down and end up in his school system that his Children go to school. It ends up in bringing him fresh water to his home, maybe power, it increases his quality of living and so he is willing to sacrifice a couple of goats to feed a leopard until a hunter comes in and kills it. Now, in the Athens of hunting all he sees in that leopard, the only value that that leopard has is eating his goats and he kills them on sight. And so what’s happened in the last couple of years in Zulu land is leopards are now dying and unregulated an unprecedented rate because in the absence of commodity value that hunting, sport hunting brings for that resource, now it’s just a competition for his livelihood. Another example would be also Africa back in the mid-70s, you could hunt African elephants in Kenya and 1976, they prohibited the hunting for elephants in Kenya and decided ecotourism would be enough all these years later, Taylor, there’s 4% the number of African elephants in Kenya that there were because without regulated harvest, without that commodity value, they just have elephants on the landscape that are eating their watermelons, they’re knocking down their forests, that are knocking down their crops, they are walking through their villages and potentially stepping on their Children. So what do they do? They go out and kill them.

“How do poachers figure into that whole equation?”

Taylor Gallegos:  How do poachers figure into that whole equation?

“For me, the art of it is, is what I call a clean game. The limit in California is 7 mallards, so I want to shoot my 7 mallards with 7 or fewer shots, it doesn’t always work that way. I’m good, but I’m not God, but it’s that sport it’s that search and that hunt for perfection.”

Ramsey Russell: Poaching is a bad deal that’s scourging all over the world. And where you’ve got a precious commodity, whether it’s wildlife or crops or gold, you’ve got interest, you’ve got people looking, you’ve got people watching, you’ve got people tending those crops, whereas you had a lot of tracks in Africa and we’ll keep talking about it because it’s an easy example. You had hired patrols, government or community vigilante type patrols protecting that resource. Now, there’s no commodity value. And so in come the poachers that can find illegal black market money for that resource, rhino horn, the illegal trade in rhino horn and ivory or just rampant, over in the Asian markets and that rhino horn – It’s unbelievable that if you’ve ever seen a rhino in the wild than I have, it’s a magnificent creature. It’s one of those things. It’s just in all to sit there 30 yards from a rhino and look at something in its natural element. Of the 5 I saw one of them had a scar, a fresh wound on a skull where a poacher had shot him because that poacher, if he can manage to come onto a piece of property and kill that rhino and get away with that horn, he’s going to make $3,000 that’s enough to feed his family for a year. But the mobster over in Thailand, it’s going to make about $1 million. And the sad part about it is that the fewer rhinos there are on earth, the more he’s going to make off that rhino horn he sales. It’s a very sad situation. It makes me sad to think about the plight of some of the mega fauna. Here in America I was asked on a recent podcast who in the world seems to be playing the long game in waterfowl conservation. And I believe its America. We’ve got a lot of government agencies, we’ve got a lot of non-government agency supporters such as Ducks Unlimited Delta waterfowl, you’ve got a lot of conservation dollars, sporting good taxes, individuals managing habitat on private property. It’s just a tremendous recreational economy that spins around waterfowl conservation. So you’ve got a federal government that is doing spring counts, that is doing brood counts, that’s doing harvest estimates this big long algorithms setting seasons a lot of very good law enforcement and it is a good long term strategy to protect that national treasure of waterfowl. And you don’t see that and unfortunately in a lot of other countries, even if you have rules and regulations and surveys, enforcement may be lacking and just one man’s opinion, I believe it boils down to money. It boils down to the commodity value and the recreational interest because hunting is not a cheap sport. If you hunt in the modern day and age in America, you pay for lease or you buy permits or you draw for tag and you buy licenses and you burn gas and it costs money. It’s not just literally walking out your back door like Daniel Boonie shooting an animal and dragging it home and eat, it cost. And it really and truly we all joke as duck hunters, if we add it up everything, it really costs from dog training, the dog food to shotguns and shells and camo and ammo and boats and motors and gas and clubs and we don’t want to know what water fowl meat cost per ounce as compared to beef at the grocery store, but it’s what we do. And I do believe there’s a conservation value to get back to the art before I hit that tangent. We really get into – it is to me cultivating a very profound relationship with that resource. It is an intimacy. Pick a duck. Mallard duck, everybody knows what a mallard I assume is. You know with a big green head, you see them in city parks but there’s also wild populations and to successfully hunt mallard ducks you have to hunt in their habitat, you have to know what their life history is. And in different times of year different times of the hunting season, difference in September, October, November, December, February, March our season’s run in February down in Mexico. They typically end in end of January but between September and January they go through, they have different life cycle requirements. There’s times a year they’re feeding on carbohydrates. There’s times a year they’re looking for concentrate sources of protein and fat such as invertebrates. So, there’s time, there’s parts of their life cycle that they need to feed that they need to roost, they need to lay up and just and just climb out of the water and do ducky things. And so that affects what habitat they’re utilizing and how they’re utilizing it. Well then you’re talking about a wild bird that’s got the entire stratosphere around earth to fly. There’s no fence in the sky and now I’ve got to seduce him to an ethical range to make a clean, respectful kill. Decoy placement, the art of calling, when to call, when not to call, what sounds to make to make them think that I am a wild duck that those decoys are wild birds and then the skill level, the patients, they’re getting closer there, you’re watching that bird, you’re calling or not calling, but you’re watching that bird as he works. He’s looking, he’s circling, he’s high, he’s getting closer, he’s downwind, you talked to him, he’s locking his wings, I can tell by the way his body language is telling me he wants to come in. And I’ve positioned the decoys just right to make it easy for him to come in on the downwind approach, make it easy for him. And then it comes the moment of truth of shooting and I want to be accurate. I don’t want to cripple this bird. I want a good clean kill, a good ethical kill. For me, the art of it is, is what I call a clean game. The limit in California is 7 mallards, so I want to shoot my 7 mallards with 7 or fewer shots, it doesn’t always work that way. I’m good, but I’m not God, but it’s that sport it’s that search and that hunt for perfection. When that wild bird is out there and he’s free to go anywhere on earth he wants to go, I want to get him right here. I’ve got to get him here within a 100ft and I’ve got to get in position within that 100ft just right towards he’s vulnerable. And it takes skill and it takes patience and it takes experience. And it really is an energy, that I feel the way my heart beat, the way I breathe when he’s close and I’m watching him and I’m looking at him and I’m studying them and it’s so funny when I think back to the last hunt, I went on to the last ducks season to my past life, I don’t remember kills, I don’t remember what birds do when they get hit and they die and dogs go and get them and bring them back, it’s everything else. I remember the smell of the marsh, the sound, the sound of their wings cut, the look, the way he tilts his head when he’s looking, that’s what I remember, that’s what I’m focused on during the hunt. That’s the art of the hunt playing a super-clean game getting in that bird’s head. Well, remember I said there’s 170 about 170 species worldwide and they’re not all mallards, they’ve all got their own little life history. They’ve all got their own little behavior. They’ve all got the way they come in the snow geese, they get above the decoys and drop down Canada geese get out downwind of the decoys. A long approach like a B-52 coming in down the runway, mallards and teal and pintails then you get into diver ducks, not puddle ducks, but divers that are out on big deep water. Now, then we get into sea ducks that are pelagic species. Like we hunt in eider pp in Alaska, we go to the middle of the Bering Sea on a little 40 square miles piece of volcanic rock in January. And we shoot these king eider and it’s the experience, it varies place to place. And so I always think of the function, the fundamentals of duck hunting calls and decoys and shotguns and waiters and dry clothes and be hidden and be concealed and be still, it’s a lot like a baseball player. At some level, a major league baseball player at some level, it’s as fundamental as when he was in the backyard, pitching baseball with his dad. But then it’s a whole another level. And that’s what I love about it is art. Because you’ve got to be creative, you got to think outside the box. Let’s go back to taking decoys, let’s talk about real art and let’s talk about the functional art in the world of duck hunting, decoys. You can go buy store bought plastics, they work heck, you can use milk jugs if that’s all you’ve got, you set them up right and play the game, it’s just a duck. He sees objects on the water and he hears call and he thinks the birds. But I’ve actually carved my own decoys have actually taken blocks of wood blocks of cork and whittled and shaved and cut and painted to look like that duck. And I have not carved or made duck calls, but it’s an art unto itself. Guys that can take a block of wood and saw it and shape it and hit a toning board to where when you blow air through this call, right quality air over this reed, it makes a sound that sounds like a duck, it’s a variable part. The shotguns are – I treasure some of the old family heirloom guns. I’ve got an old late 1800s era colt double barrel shotgun that was best we can figure my grandmother gave it to me when I was about 15 and the best we can figure just tracing through, she did not know whose it was. She found it in her attic. She lived in the house she was born in, we think it was her granddaddy’s and to take that gun out and hunt ducks with it. I feel this connection to my predecessors to my family, because who they were hundreds of years ago, 150 years ago, it’s who my people were. And that’s what I see in my world of hunting, especially are connections to the resource to people, to cultures, to traditions, to wetlands. That’s what really gets me going about it all.

“And I mean you’re exactly doing that and you’re taking in the sights, the sounds, the feeling of the air and you’re so keyed in. And then you’re making creative decisions to solve a problem like these are all things that go across the board and art and sports and I mean sport is an art as well.”

Taylor Gallegos:  Yeah, I could definitely see that. I mean, as you’re saying, all these things, it definitely reminds me of the element of presence, which I like to talk about a lot and think about in terms of art and for me making art the process of it is somewhat of a meditation. And meditation is connected to your breath and controlling your breath and then being hyper present in the present moment. Not thinking about the past, not thinking about the future you’re right here right now with what’s going on. And I mean you’re exactly doing that and you’re taking in the sights, the sounds, the feeling of the air and you’re so keyed in. And then you’re making creative decisions to solve a problem like these are all things that go across the board and art and sports and I mean sport is an art as well. And I mean, yeah, that’s really interesting. I mean your connection –

Ramsey Russell: I like the way you articulated that because in a word that thought about the people and the culture and the place, the decoys it’s the ritual. I’m no artist that paints and does that kind of stuff but for me to take paints and brushes and paint decoys to where it would convince a duck that it was a duck. It looks like a mallard, looks like a teal whatever I was painting. You know what I enjoyed the most about it. I can remember spending long, hot, sweaty nights in the shop, the smell of salt dust as I was whittled or cutting or shaving on the wooden heads or the cork bodies or later painting and the brushes and the colors, boy, you just hit the nail on the head talking about being in the moment because it’s sitting there for hours lost in time, just lost in the moment of painting those decoys or carving those decoys and shaping and the whole time just this thinking this cognizant thought of being in the blind with that decoy floating on the water. But the process of it all was just in the moment. I found a lot of reward. Anytime I carved or any time I painted, I was never in a hurry, I was just glad to be there.

Taylor Gallegos:   That’s one of the things that’s really interesting and unique about – I mean I talked about on the podcast too about, it’s like getting into the artistic zone, like the zone, like losing yourself in the moment, time really sort of evaporates and all you are left with is you in this space with the action and the activity of what you’re doing and one brushstroke can take 5 minutes or 10 or 30 seconds but it really doesn’t matter and you don’t care and you’re not thinking about that anyway like you’re right there in that moment. And one thing you said earlier about when you get older, the experience changes for you, as I get older with painting, I feel like I get – like I’m getting more and more into the quality of the execution of what I’m doing. So like finding the perfect – like taking paint and not just slapping it on the canvas and doing this not. Like I want to make sure that that paint is the perfect consistency, the perfect balance between like the actual paint and the water so that it and then I don’t want to use some cheap crappy brush, I want to use a great brush and I want to use a great brush stroke and spread the paint and I want to enjoy every moment of that not. And no one’s going to see that layer, it doesn’t matter. The only layer that matters is the end. Like similar to you, when I was younger, all I was really considered or considering was the end result and it was more like result based. But now it’s like every step of the way, I’m appreciating more and more.

Ramsey Russell: Taylor, I would share a duck blind with you any day based on that statement right there. That’s my kind of duck hunter. It really truly is because I really cannot tell you how many ducks I shoot or anything else because it’s in the moment. I was listening to you talk about your art and I do remember this one particular morning this year just one particular morning. We were in Azerbaijan which is – we were hunting about 8 miles from Iran west of the Caspian sea. We have flown in Baku, we’re hunting, this is our 3^rd year there. I love it. I love that country because you think time or you think distance it’s a long way to go to Azerbaijan. I’m going to tell you by the time I leave Mississippi make the connections fly the overnights, I’ve been in travel status for 40 hours, it’s a long trip to go over that part of the world. We go by way of Istanbul, Turkey and land in this foreign country at midnight and get our guns checked through, go to a hotel and sleep. And then we go down to this marsh and it’s so fundamental. It’s not just a long ways distance, but it’s one of those kinds of experience similar to Mongolia. It’s almost like you go through a time warp. So you’re not just traveling through space, you’re traveling through time. And what I mean by that is, like my hometown Greenwood Mississippi is the self-proclaimed cotton capital of the world and there’s 4 highway, 4 ways leading north, south, east and west into this little town in the Mississippi Delta. And every one of them had a billboard with full of cotton bolls. Cotton capital of the world. And the first time I went to this little village in Azerbaijan, there was a big sign over the road coming in had 2 cotton bolls because they form a lot of cotton out there, just a farming community. But then you step back and it’s like hunting 100 years ago. They do have an outboard not a fancy one but most of the guides staff who speak strictly Azeri but they’re very good hunters. They meet you, we meet in the mornings, we step off into these tiny little 10 to 12ft skiffs and I mean, when I sit on my seat, my left hip is touching the left gun wall and my right hip touching the other. I’ve got my feet pulled up, tiny little seat I’m sitting on, I’ve got my gun bag, my shotgun lying next to me. He’s got a sack of decoys, maybe some cover for blind and he push polls. We push polls 30 minutes in the pitch black dark. Have you ever been on the water like that? You really can see. You can navigate better in the dark because of the shine of the water coming off the stars, coming off the moon, the objects, the shadowy. You really can’t see a lot better than with a light on when you put a light on in the dark. Oh, usually what’s in the beam of that light? So in the dark we push poll for half hour, maybe an hour. We’ll go through big, tall density of cane it’s like a rat maze off the open water into the rat maze with this tall cane and the cane is scratching along the side of the boat, you hear the push poll lunge in the boat and then that sometimes that rat mazel the trail of fork in 3 or 4 different ways and he knows just where he’s going to come out to this little duck hole, this little opening. We put decoys out, he doesn’t speak English, I don’t speak Azeri we’re both duck hunters, we speak a universal language just with our body movement and what we’re going to do. And we start placing decoys and we go and hide that skiff perfectly and natural vegetation and then we hunt. And this year I do remember this one particular morning, it was very shallow water and for as far as you can see in any direction, it was just native bull rush and it’s just maybe knee high vegetation that make a real fine seed that the teal and wigeon and pin tails and that they especially like that seed but they also like to lay up in that cover because the water may be ankle deep and the cover is sparsely knee high, they can get in there and they can feed and they can loaf and they can really do ducky things and feel protected and safe. And it was a tough season, we went kind of late and this was the first Christmas and recorded history that Moscow Russia had no snow during Christmas. It was the first non-snowy winter that anybody ever can remember. Well, a lot of waterfowl migrate ahead of cold weather and when it’s real cold up north migrate south come from Canada down into California to Sack valley and the same thing happens in the whole northern hemisphere. And so not many birds had had migrated it was a little bit warmer not quite as many birds. And so it really took focus and really playing a clean game and we get out and we put our decoys off in the bull rush and we stuck some limbs we had cut and built just a real scanty blind next to a little bush, little button bush. And we just built a nice little blind and I got up the bush was between me and downwind. The birds are going to approach downwind and to see perfectly but be hidden, I had this like a little fold out chair like the ones we sat in your brother’s backyard around the fire but to see well I couldn’t sit comfortably I had to stand very still or I had to sit on the arm of it or the back of it just while I’m just high enough to look. And so the whole time – I didn’t look anywhere but downwind and I had to be completely motionless. There weren’t a lot of birds and in that moment time just withered away you don’t look at your watch, you got to be focused because when you’re sitting there fiddle farting around with your cell phone or texting your wife or looking at your watch or pouring a cup of hot coffee, here comes a duck. You can’t do that, you got to play for keeps man. It’s a tough hunt, there’s not just a lot of ducks to spare, so you’ve got to play. And it took an immense amount of focus and it wasn’t just perfectly comfortable, but I like that and it was very humid and so that moisture – and it was cold, a little bit of cold wind and by cold, I mean cold like California, it was 38° cold, not 0 degree, but it was just cool enough when that humidity sunk into your bones and I like that a little bit of uncomfortable. And my guide Adil, he and I’ve gotten to know each other the past 3 years, we get along very well. He had positioned himself as some natural cover about 70 yards away and he was my eyes, he knew I was looking downwind and he was looking everywhere else and he’d whistle and I wouldn’t move, I just start cutting my eyes looking, I knew if the birds are going to work, they’re going to work over me and set up downwind and I can start talking to them with the call. And I’m struggling to articulate sitting there not comfortable but so alive, it’s cold and I’m uncomfortable and I’m standing in water and I’m hidden and I’m watching and I’m downwind and 3 teal set up. And boy, they’re rocking and zig and zag and they come through decoy. No, it’s not right. So I chatted to them and boy, they turned back around and get downwind when they start to bank, I chatted to them again. And I can tell this is it, they’re doing it. And they set up, well I can kill 1 or I can kill all 3. Which one you going to set up on first? How do you sweep it? How do you run the table? You got to get the balls lined up on the pool table to run the table. But that takes experience, 3 teal and a pair of pin tails. They’re just beautiful pair of drakes and they come in and in a way they bounce way they just kind of come in and it’s picked back up, I could have shot but I didn’t, I start whistling with a pin tail call and I can tell that one drake is wanting so bad, so I called to him again and when he banks, he bring his buddy with him, they get downwind. I whistled to them again and this time they set their wings and come right in the decoys and before I knew it, we’ve been sitting there doing it for 8 hours. But it was just so encompassing. Finally Adil walks over and says, we go lunch, but it’s okay. I was tired of standing, my back was tired, my legs retired I was cold, but it was okay. It was living in that moment, taking what they gave me and playing a perfect game. No prisoners, no cripples, no lost birds. And that’s the art of it. Man and I don’t care what you do, whether it’s painting or sculpting or duck hunting or carpentry or pottery man, anything you can do that passion just brims over and consumes you and you just lose track and you’re just living in the moment and the moments just disappear. Time just stops in that way. That’s a very rewarding experience there.

Taylor Gallegos:   And I feel like what you’re talking about right there that reward comes from the passionate pursuit of excellence. Like you weren’t going to settle for a shot, that wasn’t perfect, you weren’t going to settle for anything that wasn’t like absolutely the highest level that you could do and when you do that in art, painting, sculpture, carpentry, sports, life, everything like duck hunting, it’s like, that’s when you are at your top and when the game that you’re playing is at the top level and that’s when the result doesn’t necessarily matter what matters is how you do it and that’s when anything that you do becomes an art is when the absolute and most important thing to you is how you it.

Ramsey Russell: I agree. And waterfowl are wild creatures and they don’t always come in and present themselves say within 60ft, they don’t. I’ll never forget the first time we hunted Azerbaijan the entire week was very cloudy, there’s no sunshine, the thing I love about hunting and sunshine is you can step into natural cover and disappear into the shadows and when it’s cloudy it’s like the birds have X-ray vision and the later you go into a season, the more hunting pressure, the more of those birds have seen, more buddies they’ve seen get shot, they get a little wary, they get a little call shy, they recognize certain decoy patterns but then as they’re a little bit further, a little bit wilder – like I can remember one morning hunting in Azerbaijan with Adil, it was cloudy and it’s like if you blinked the bird would see you and they bounce and instead of being 20 yards, 25 yards, they were 40 or 50 yards and it required -and it’s going through experience, it required expert shooting, it’s doable, it was ethical but it was a far more challenging shot to bag birds, but that’s what we do. I agree, I think I’ve said this many times that we American hunters, especially duck hunters have elevated so many aspects tools of the trade to art form, our camo patterns, the performance of our guns, our ammo, the quality of store bought or manufactured decoys, everything is the best that you can lay hands on, the best quality that exist in the world, it goes that way, but it’s all that excellence better and better like you say. But then there’s a skill set. One thing that I bristle a little bit, my grandfather who introduced me to hunting he was an attorney but he was an old school attorney, land deeds, he didn’t believe in a lot of junk lawsuit type stuff, he’s just a practical guy, World War 2 veteran, he never breasted a duck, he plucked, used everything, he plucked them very ritualistic, he taught me how to cook and he was very practical person. He didn’t have a lot of these camo patterns, he didn’t have a lot of fancy guns just the hard boiled basics. Since the time I was a child, until the time I’m now, this kind of rubs me wrong that a lot of the marketing, I call it hype marketing to sell products. It’s like they’re not saying this, but you can infer from their marketing message that this product, this technology will make you a better hunter. It’s like the subliminal message is you substitute skill for technology. This technology is a crutch, it’s a good leg up. But Taylor, in my world of hunting, in that relationship, in that intimacy, there’s no substitute for experience and for perfecting the art and the craft of hunting those animals perfectly, if that makes sense. I think of a little league baseball player and these parents showing up with $200 baseball bat, you know what? You can strike out with $200 bat just like you can with a $5 bat, it’s all about the skill, eye hand coordination and making contact with that baseball. A great bat is not going to make a poor hitter a better batter. And I’m sure the same could be said in your world with the brushes.

Taylor Gallegos:   Oh yeah.

Ramsey Russell: This conversation has reminded me and its funny the things you remember all the years after school and I don’t remember much from college and then there’s a time and a place for everything in college, is this. I don’t remember much, but I do remember certain things. I had to take an art appreciation class, don’t remember the teacher’s name. It’s one of the great big classroom with 200 students I’m going to say, I made a C because I skipped a lot. I didn’t appreciate as much as he wanted me to. I did enjoy the little project we did that I vaguely remember. But I do remember he said something the first day of class and I’ve never forgotten. He said, I think therefore I art. And that’s where my definition of art come from. We all think, our realities and our life and our passions and what we care about is what we think a lot about and then we express it differently. In addition to hunting as an art, I’m 54 years old and I guess I’m at that age now, I can remember being 20 something years old and looking at a 50 year old, thinking of him as an old guy, I am an old guy and it’s become important to me through my podcast, through our social media forums, it’s become important to me to impart, especially to a lot of young people. I don’t say this in a condescending way, I don’t say it critical stages and phases everybody goes through a different stage. But I do worry sometimes that people get lost in a false narrative, be it marketing, be it the stage there in life with hunting and it is important to me to impart to our followers on social media and on the little short films we do and the subtext of the narrative we create in our podcast, the understanding that that we are hunters, but we’re also conservationists. You can’t just have your cake, you got to clean the dishes too. We’ve got an obligation to this resource and we’ve got an obligation to speak and act intelligently and respectfully as perceived by people that may not do what we do. We’ve got an obligation to take care of that habitat to pick up after ourselves to tend the garden, so to speak. And so that’s become a very important part of my own narrative. And I hear from people in social media and email and text and different things, I hear from people that they appreciate that. Like I’ll tell you one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever been given and I knew that my message was hitting home because of this conversation. We were at convention in Dallas great big hunting show, we’ve got a great big booth and we’re talking to a lot of hunters and about species and ducks and hunts and adventures around the world and a gentleman come in and when guys bring their wives to hunting shows, most wives don’t hunt and so they’re just there to be polite, go eat dinner, go shopping later, whatever, they’re not really fully engaged oftentimes in the hunting conversation. And a guy came up and he’s seen our short films and he’s seen our social media and seen some different things when we were talking on the monitor, the TV monitor behind me, I had a lot of these little short films we’ve done around the world playing without sound, just the art of it all. And he said, my wife, I’ve been showing her these videos, you all are doing in your social media page and after 20 years she wants to go duck hunting. I said really? And just like that she had been standing off about 5ft just minding her own business her hands crossed, just sitting there politely while her husband talked hunting. And the minute he said that she stepped in and she pointed over my shoulder to monitor she says, I want to feel that. And I look back and I’m holding a duck and it’s one of the little cutaways we’re doing where I’ve – I’ll take some time in Mexico or Azerbaijan are somewhere, I’ll run through the different species and show the different attributes and what characteristics of that particular species. I said ma’am, she goes, I want to feel what you feel holding that bird because she said, I see a lot of hunters the way they hold and treat and handle birds and you don’t, I want to feel that connection. That’s why I want to go hunting. And that makes me proud Taylor, it makes me proud. She didn’t say I want to go kill a duck but she sensed this relationship of sorts that I have with that resource of respect and the admiration and thankfulness that I have with that duck and it spoke to her and she wants to feel that connection and that’s what I hope your listeners would take away and not just mean old guy from Mississippi that blasting birds out of the air that’s not it. It is a quest for perfection, a quest for a greater understanding, a quest for a stronger relationship and intimacy, if I can say that with that wild resource, it makes me feel my truest self.

Taylor Gallegos:   Absolutely. That’s great. I mean that’s it right there. And that’s from a lifetime of an experience and that where you know what matters and that’s what you’re passing on. And that’s awesome. We do only have a couple of minutes left here, so I’m hoping that maybe you can give the people – like tell people where they can follow you.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, Taylor. We do have a podcast available anywhere you listen to podcasts called Duck Season Somewhere. And it’s not a how to kind of thing, I like to meet with biologist, I’d like to meet with hunters, I’d like to meet with people around the world and offer perspectives and insights into the world wide version of duck hunting. Now get this and this, this is relevant. Goes back a little bit to that National Geography especially with all this bullshit that we’re being bombarded with in the mainstream media, my world, my working world, my living world when COVID did not happen I’m traveling several 100 days a year and my world consists of like a big giant crayon box all the colors, races, religions, creeds, all walks of life economically but in the moments, in my moments with all of those people, we’re just duck hunters. You follow what I’m saying? And I’ve hunted with Pakistani feudal lords, I’ve hunted with servants. I’ve hunted with folks from 6 continents and in that moment nothing matters except the hunt. And that’s very rewarding for me and we try to articulate that in our podcast just through conversations. In social media we’ve got a Facebook page, but I think Instagram is a lot more happening @RamseyRussellGetducks, all one word. And we post photos and I try to tell a little bit about the biology or the bird, the experience of the hunt or the time or the place, something relevant. And as we travel and I travel a lot. And I’ll be traveling through California this year in January in Oregon, probably about 20 states between September and end of January this year. We tell a lot of Instagram stories that really him up, not just the hunt, not just the duck part but people part, in the place part, in the food and the culture and the camaraderie. And so between all that, our web page getducks.com. Instagram @RamseyRussellGetducks. Podcast Duck Season Somewhere. And we released about 4 or 5 short films a year in social media.

Taylor Gallegos:   That’s awesome. Yeah, that sounds really good. Sorry, you met Haley, she just came in with the dog. She thought we were done well.

Ramsey Russell: You got a couple of good looking labs too.

Taylor Gallegos:   Oh yeah, right, that was a fun little party at camps house, it was.

Ramsey Russell: It sure was.

Taylor Gallegos:   Well, Ramsey this has been a real pleasure. Thanks for coming on the podcast, I appreciate it. I mean like I said, I really like to hear from different people from different walks of life from different artistic pursuits and you’re exactly that and this has been really great.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you Taylor, I’ve really enjoyed it and I appreciate you’re giving me the chance to express what I do in a different perspective than just going out and shooting something because it is much more than that. Thank you very much.

Taylor Gallegos:   Yeah, absolutely. Well yeah, Ramsey, I’ll be talking in the future. Yeah, thanks for coming on.

Ramsey Russell: Yes sir.

Taylor Gallegos:   All right, cheers. So, that my friends was a Ramsey Russell from Mississippi. That was awesome. Ramsey is my first hunter that I’ve had on this program and I really appreciate it. He and I had a really awesome conversation around a fire a couple of months back and I’m just always really interested in places that we can connect with other people. I’m not personally a hunter, but I am conservationally minded and I think it’s really interesting how a lot of people sort of assume that hunters just want to kill things and then that’s all they’re concerned with. But there’s so much more to it and conservation is a main element, especially from Ramsey’s perspective. And we dove in real far last time around the fire and this was just a little taste of it. But you got to hear him speak about it and with true art comes passion and I think that it was obvious and clear listening to that podcast interview that he’s extremely passionate about duck hunting, waterfowl hunting and all the different elements to that. And yeah, I just really enjoyed that and I hope you did too. Definitely jump over check out his podcast. Follow him on Instagram, reach out to him, tell him what you thought about the interview, hit him with any questions that you’ve got. That was one thing that we did around the fire was like, I just kind of like threw a lot of questions that I had about various things in terms of hunting and conservation and poachers and like it was really nice to hear somebody who’s been around the world on these types of trips and really knows what’s going on. So if you have any questions, reach out to him say hi. If you got any questions for me, reach out to me, I’m on Instagram at Taylor G Murals and yeah, check out my artwork there. Check out my artwork on my website at taylorgmurals.com. And yeah, I hope that you are pursuing your creativity, your passion, what lights you up, what really dials you into the moment. What makes it so that time it completely evaporates in your special way because if you’re not – I feel like you’re missing out on life. Like what else is there? Like we only have one time through and I feel like we all should be pursuing whatever lights us up. So, I hope that you’re doing that and yeah, enjoy that, cheers.

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