EP 609. Arkansas Public Land Duck Hunters

And we’re going to talk about Arkansas public land duck hunting, how it influences their lives, how it influences the way they hunt, and how it influences who they are in the product world

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where today we are in hot Oklahoma City for the Delta Waterfowl Duck Hunters Expo. Today’s topic is Arkansas public land duck hunting. And I want to introduce you all to 3 good friends of mine from Arkansas. Mr. Jeremy Brown, Todd Ezzi, I’ll never get that name right and Bryce Decker. And we’re going to talk about Arkansas public land duck hunting, how it influences their lives, how it influences the way they hunt, and how it influences who they are in the product world. Guys, how the heck are you?

Todd Ezzi: Doing great.

Ramsey Russell: Glad to see you. Little technical difficulty behind us now. How was the drive over?

Todd Ezzi: Pretty long.

Ramsey Russell: You ought to come from Mississippi, I talked to somebody today, they come from South Carolina and I’m like, man, what a drive.

Todd Ezzi: 5 hours from central Arkansas. I know these guys had a little bit more.

Jeremy Brown: 7.5 hour.

Ramsey Russell: 7.5. Introduce yourselves. Starting with you, Bryce.

Bryce Decker: I’m Bryce Decker, I got a little company called Black River Duck Calls. I do duck calls and duck call accessories, a little bit of apparel, just a little shop in the backyard.

Ramsey Russell: And you were on previously, sometime last year, we talked about shooting a raft.

Bryce Decker: Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: Big episode. Anybody hadn’t heard that? Go back and check it out. What about you, Todd?

We started making portable collapsible dog stands for exactly what you’re talking about public land, Arkansas, duck hunting and for using anywhere

Todd Ezzi: Yeah, Todd Ezzi, I own Rixie Outdoors, it was a company I started about 5 years ago. We started making portable collapsible dog stands for exactly what you’re talking about public land, Arkansas, duck hunting and for using anywhere. But really Arkansas was the epicenter of that and being able to walk into timber holes and try to get away from people like, we talk about it was something that I’ve always been passionate about and kind of spurred my mind, got me going, and helped me kind of create that. And since then it’s kind of taken off and been a fun deal.

Ramsey Russell: What about you, Jeremy? Who are you?

Jeremy Brown: A hillbilly that makes stuff out of dead cows?

Ramsey Russell: You do, don’t you?

Jeremy Brown: I’ve got a little leather shop in my yard that’s turned into a pretty good sized leather shop and we do lots and lots of stuff and a lot of waterfowl related products, duck totes and gun straps and turkey totes.

Ramsey Russell: You make a hell of a gun strap, I’m going to tell you right now.

Jeremy Brown: I appreciate that.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, you really do. I love it. Here’s where I want to start with you guys to include Bryce, but I’m going to back up into Bryce. Tell me about how you grew up, Jeremy. How’d you grow up duck hunting, what were your earliest introductions, your influences and stuff like that?

Jeremy Brown: I didn’t really grow up duck hunting, we hunted everything else, it was a grocery store, basically.

Ramsey Russell: Is that a function of hillbilly?

Jeremy Brown: That’s a hillbilly.

Ramsey Russell: Like how far do you go from where you live to get into duck hunting in Arkansas?

Jeremy Brown: I can be at Rainy break in 32 minutes or Dave Donaldson in 34.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Jeremy Brown: But we live in the hills.

Ramsey Russell: So you grew up close enough to do that, I mean, a lot of people drive further than that. You grew up deer hunting, rabbit hunting?

Jeremy Brown: We shot everything but ducks because rich people duck hunt.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Who’d you hunt with?

Jeremy Brown: A little bit, everybody.

Ramsey Russell: Was your daddy a hunter? Was your granddaddy?

Jeremy Brown: My dad was, most of my family and most people up there is outlaws. I mean, there’s not a lot of seasons and stuff like that. But I grew up some people that duck hunted quite a bit and they killed a lot of ducks and I loved it and enjoyed it.

Ramsey Russell: Why you think just rich people duck hunt?

Jeremy Brown: It’s all I was ever taught.

Ramsey Russell: But I wonder where that come from. Because I’ve heard that too only rich folks duck hunt. You think it has to do with licenses and steel shot, waders and equipment and decoys and all the accoutrements it takes to go to duck hunt?

Jeremy Brown: Probably. We had old bolt action shotguns and Mossbergs and all that mess and couldn’t afford the fines that they’d get when they’d go, I guess.

Ramsey Russell: Tell me one of your fondest memories growing up hunting with whomever you were hunting with, squirrel hunting, I’d guess maybe, or deer hunting. What’s one of the most indelible memories about somebody, your daddy or your granddaddy taking you hunting?

Jeremy Brown: We had quail when I was a kid and there was an old guy named Russell Jessen, he was a paramedic there, him and my dad were good buddies. And Spring River had froze over and my family’s got a bunch of ground down on Spring River, if you’re from that area, everybody knows Spring River, but it’s pretty wild river. But I can remember I wasn’t carrying a shotgun, they let me carry an old bolt action, 22 single shot 22.

Ramsey Russell: For quail hunting.

Jeremy Brown: That’s what I carried. And I can’t even remember who shot it. But we had an old speckled white bird dog called Jake. And one of them got, dad or Russell, one of them had shot a quail and it got out on that froze river in a bend of a river, which for everyone, it’s going to be cold, which I can remember it plain as day. But they slid me out on that ice to get that bird. I couldn’t have been 5 or 6 year old probably. But one of them held, Russell held my feet and dad held his feet.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, and ever since then you’ve been a hunter.

Jeremy Brown: That’s all I’ve ever thought about.

Ramsey Russell: Do you duck hunt with a 22?

Jeremy Brown: No, rather not. I can’t afford the fines.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I’m just talking about the pattern, I figured he must be a pretty good old shot. What’s your story, Todd?

Todd Ezzi: Man, I’ve got the exact opposite story of Jeremy. I’m from North Little Rock, and nobody really in my family hunted, I was always super passionate about hunting. I used to wake up on Saturday morning, watch fishing and hunting on TV, and I wanted to do it. And when I was about, I don’t know, 11 or 12, my parents bought me a BB gun and boy, we had a wood lot, it’s probably 40 acres across the road and I’d sneak over there and I’d come back with rabbits and squirrels and my parents look at me like I had 3 eyes because they didn’t know anything about it. And then, luckily enough for me, my dad kind of picked it up a little bit and started doing a little duck hunting. One of his coaching friends, he was a basketball coach, and one of his coaching friends took us out duck hunting, I was probably 13 years old and started me and my dad and he hunted for a few years, I think mainly just to take me. And I was really lucky to have some people that put that time into it because I think I loved it more than they did. I’d blow my duck call and drive my parents crazy and just kind of got into it like that. So just was lucky enough to have some people around me that cared enough to invest in my passion.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of your earliest memories of being with those mentors, those guys? I think of it, I’ve heard it articulated before is learning to duck hunt on the shoulders of giants. And I’ve always just thought of our dad and granddad bringing us into this thing.

Todd Ezzi: Yeah, one of my best memories from that, I wanted so bad to duck hunt by myself and I was probably 13, and they were hunting out of a pit blind, and they finally said, take your call, grab a couple decoys, you walk over there. And I walked probably 200 yards and laid down on a field levee, had those decoys out, and I was calling this lone mallard drake came circling, he circled about 20 times, I was just laying there, and they kept saying they were watching for me to shoot, and they couldn’t believe I wasn’t shooting because it looked like it was right over my head. And as soon as that thing hit the water, I let him have it. And I was so proud of that thing. My dad took that duck home that day and then about, I guess, a month or two later, maybe it was the next year for Christmas, I had that thing mounted, it’s on a dead mount, still the only duck mount I’ve got.

Ramsey Russell: How old you been?

Todd Ezzi: I was probably 13, so probably 1993. And I got that thing for Christmas and that one memory, I can still see that drake just flying around and doing the drake whistle. And I mean, if I think about that, it just gets me going still to this day.

Ramsey Russell: All things equal, it’s easier to hit a swimming duck than a flying duck, do you agree?

Todd Ezzi: That’s a fact. Absolutely. I’ve missed a bunch of them either way, I’m sure. But when they’re sitting on the water, it makes a little bit easier. And I wasn’t going to give up that opportunity to make sure that duck went home with me that day.

Ramsey Russell: Jeremy, what was your first duck hunt? If that was a quail hunt, wonder they didn’t send you out there with a BB gun. What was your first duck hunt?

Jeremy Brown: I probably wasn’t a whole lot, I was probably 12 or 13 first time, I remember going by myself and we had a little farm pond, and I watched a pair of wood ducks flying there every day. And I sat down there for probably a week before I ambushed them.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, they finally come in.

Jeremy Brown: They finally come in right there at dark, I got them killed.

Ramsey Russell: Well, it’s kind of born from that deer hunting experience.

Jeremy Brown: Yeah. I didn’t know no better about duck hunting, just go kill him.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, well, I mean, that’s kind of the whole point.

Jeremy Brown: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Really, all right. Decker, you’ve told us a little bit, but I want to hear some more. Talk about growing up, how you grew up hunting where you hunted and who your influences were.

Bryce Decker: I grew up from the time I was big enough to be considered an extra limit with my grandfather and his brothers and all their buddies, neck deep in Black River bottom was my whole life, chasing squirrels and a little bit of deer hunting, a little bit of rabbit hunting, a lot of duck hunting. And just being their tag along, being their gopher, if they needed something out of the boat, I’d go get it out of the boat once I was big enough. And just watching them do their thing and learning all I could from them being like a little sponge out in the woods.

Ramsey Russell: It’s really a good way of thinking about it now that you articulate it that way about being an extra limit. Todd, did you ever feel like you were just an extra limit they could bring along?

Todd Ezzi: I don’t remember being on that many good duck hunts to feel that way. I think we were lucky to scratch out a few here and a few there. So I don’t think that I was ever in that capacity, like I said, I try to hunt as much as I could, but most of the time we were hunting, it was with my dad and a friend. So we weren’t in a lot of banger hunts when I was really young, we had to really work for them and hunt a lot of fields early on and scratch out a few here and a few there. So when I started getting into some public timber hunts and lighting groups of 50 and 100, my eyes lit up because it was something that I had never seen before. So that was exciting. So, no, I wasn’t ever the kid who was there for an extra limit, maybe when I was fishing, but definitely not when I was hunting.

Ramsey Russell: I heard that. How did you all 3 guys meet? How did you all 3 meet? Did you all go to high school together? How did you 3 guys come together to become friends and buddies and business partners of sorts? And duck hunting buddies?

Jeremy Brown: All around a dog.

Todd Ezzi: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: All around a dog.

Bryce Decker: Dogs and duck calls.

Ramsey Russell: Dogs and duck calls. Tell me this dog story.

Jeremy Brown: Everything I do revolves, starting from a dog, from a bad dove hunt. I got invited on a good dove hunt, and we killed a lot of birds and somebody, I don’t know the kid, but had a big old black dog and when this shooting started that morning, that dog started picking up doves. And when everybody quit, nobody had any birds. The dog picked up every dove in the country and carried them off in the bushes and dropped them here and there.

Ramsey Russell: He didn’t bring him to the owner, he didn’t pick them up. Did he eat them?

Jeremy Brown: I don’t even know. They yelled and screamed at him all morning, I told the guy who owned the place, I said, I’ll have us a dog next year.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a dog that needs a piece of logging chain tied to him.

Jeremy Brown: I went and bought a coal black dog in Ozark, Arkansas, from a guy and worked him all summer, and we had us a good dove dog and then it just blew up from there. Everybody wanted dogs trained. I got to hanging around some guys who knew what they was doing and learned a little bit. And then next thing you know, I’ve got his dog, I really don’t know how I end up with his dog, I’m not sure how we done that, but there was a lot right there.

Ramsey Russell: How did you hear about him, Todd?

Todd Ezzi: I don’t know.

Ramsey Russell: This is a great story.

Todd Ezzi: Jeremy and I kind of connected online, I guess, I don’t know, probably four years ago or something like that. And I had Harley coming, and I was just looking for a trainer, and we kind of connected about it, and I don’t even –

Jeremy Brown: I don’t really know how that worked out.

Todd Ezzi: Know how he knew that I own Rixie Outdoors. But anyway, we got to talking through that, and the next year, we took the dogs and some kids on a youth hunt a couple times. My son got to go on that, we shot them good. And then we’ve kind of been hunting and hanging out, and Jeremy’s kind of helped me with some of the Rixie stuff and tried to kind of promote some of his stuff. And through Jeremy got to meet Bryce and kind of become friends with Bryce.

Ramsey Russell: You don’t hold that against Jeremy, do you?

Todd Ezzi: No, not most of the time.

Jeremy Brown: Weekend ain’t up yet.

Todd Ezzi: Bryce is kind of a legend. I was listening to a podcast last night, and they were talking about last year putting stickers in Devin’s booth, Devin Singleton’s booth. And Bryce has definitely got some character, but I love that about him. He reminds me a lot of one of my really good friends. So, yeah, it’s been fun.

Ramsey Russell: Bryce, how did you meet him? That wasn’t your dog running around in the dove field, was it?

Bryce Decker: No.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Bryce Decker: I wouldn’t have that. I believe it was just through duck calls, was it not? You ended up with one of my calls, and it just kind of went from there. I put a few in his little leather shop, and he sold them to some boys that he was running with. We kind of hunted the same block of woods a little bit, we didn’t hunt together any. But we knew each other, and we were friendly and passing and just kind of in the same little industry here around the same folks a lot, so we just ended up buddying up.

Ramsey Russell: And how long ago would all this meeting and all this going on would have been?

Bryce Decker: Probably 3 years or me and Jeremy and probably just going on two years with me and Todd being buddies. And then him and Jeremy met a year or two before I was in the picture.

Ramsey Russell: I see. Do you all duck hunt a lot around Arkansas public land together?

Jeremy Brown: Try to, but the best hunt we had was youth hunt and they took that away from us.

Ramsey Russell: I haven’t heard that.

Jeremy Brown: Their youth hunt right between the first and second split that week. And we’ve got 2 or 3 years of some absolute excellent. Take as many kids as we can get that we can manage without trouble, and let them absolutely have a ball. And then they took that from us and moved it to the end of the year.

Ramsey Russell: Moved it to the end.

Jeremy Brown: You ain’t going to kill and you ain’t going to work any mallards in that area. And now I don’t know what we’ll do.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. So here’s what I want to get at is, you all grew up duck hunting, now you know each other, swapping products, swapping dogs and getting to know each other, birds of a feather flock together. Where did you come up with idea about these dog stand, Todd? Rixie Outdoors. Because my son Forrest knew about it. And the first time I was at Delta Waterfowl Expo, boom, there you were. I’m like, this a super light dog stand, definitely had its application, if I had to hoof it in anywhere, that’s a stand. How’d you come up with that idea? When did you come up with that idea?

Todd Ezzi: Yeah, I’ve always been a super mobile hunter from doing whatever it took to get in to places to get away from people, so that was always my game. And I guess it was probably 2018, I was back in the middle of Bayou Meto, probably a mile into a walk in area there, walking only. And I was carrying a big dog stand and I saw another guy carrying through, walking in the same way. And I was like, there’s got to be a better way to do this. And immediately went home and started cutting and welding and trying to come up with a better design, I kind of had an idea in my head and then built a prototype and was lucky enough to have a lot of people around me that helped me kind of get it through, get some patents on it and get it to production, which if you’ve ever done that, you know it’s extremely difficult. It sounds easy to get that idea and make something, but to actually get it and actually be able to make money off of it has been a journey, but I mean, what an awesome opportunity.

Ramsey Russell: It’s kind of a scaling process too. So you come up with one, you come up with 10. Well, now you got to come up with a bunch.

Todd Ezzi: Exactly. And we’re still made here in the US we were all made in house and we’ve tried to keep it that way, but it is that way every year. We’ve sold out of our stands every year for the last 5 years. And it’s one of those things you look at trying to grow it and the idea of ordering several thousand of them and then you got to look at going overseas, which is what most companies do when they scale up. And that’s just been something that has been kind of a passion of mine to keep it made in America. Now with the tariffs heading and things like that, it makes a whole lot more sense.

Ramsey Russell: You feel good about that now, don’t you?

Todd Ezzi: Definitely. I’ve had a lot of people tell me the only way to make money off this is to go to China or somewhere to have the product made. But we’re trying to scratch it out, keeping things made here in the US and completely made here in Arkansas. So we’ll keep doing that as soon as we can. But yeah, scale on the product and try to increase production is definitely not an easy thing to do.

Ramsey Russell: Bryce, when did you get into the duck call making business?

Bryce Decker: I’ve been tinkering with calls since I was a kid.

Ramsey Russell: That’s kind of an Arkansas thing, isn’t it? You grow up like you did.

Bryce Decker: Not so much in my area where you didn’t have people that were known for it in my area, down around Stuttgart, you got a bunch of people that are known for it. But up here, up in northeast Arkansas where I’m at, there just wasn’t a whole lot of call history. And we don’t have any festivals, we didn’t ever have any expos or any kind of big events or anything centered around duck hunting up there, especially on my side of the river. But I tinkered on calls for a long time, I actually staffed for echo calls whenever I was younger for several years. Thankful that Mr. Dunn had me on board for a while and ended up meeting Kirk McCullough through a mutual friend that was going down there, we were practicing our contest call and didn’t really know, never really noticed the market for a cut down style call and I knew a few old men that had them and a couple of my relatives hunted an olt and started noticing that they were selling and that it was something that I might be able to dip into a little bit. And I started just selling a few keyhole olts and a few round hole olts, I used to cut them and I was selling them on the forums at the time and just kind of worked. It was really organic word of mouth, there wasn’t hardly anybody else in the game at the time, I think it was Fleming, Spencer, Halford and me were like the first 3 or 4 guys there that had a production call that was not an actual olt. Of course, Kirk had been dealing with them for years and years, he was kind of the forefather of all that. But yeah, and it just kind of has slowly grown, I’ve got a therapy degree, so I worked in therapy for a long time and kind of put it on the back burner. But anytime I focus a little bit of effort on it, it grows just a little bit and I’ve been just inching my way forward ever since.

Ramsey Russell: So did Kirk McCullough invent that style call?

Bryce Decker: No, the cut down’s been around a long time. But Kirk definitely popularized it and helped give it a name.

Ramsey Russell: What do you know about the history of a cut down call? Now that I think about it.

Bryce Decker: I figure they started up there around Pekin, Illinois, where they originated, and that’s kind of how it was here too. You only had a couple calls, you had Haydel’s, Mallardtones and Olt is primarily what I remember as a kid, we didn’t have any prominent duck call makers around. So if you wanted your call to be different, you tinkered on it. There’s a bunch of old guys that still blow a Haydel barrel or a Haydel insert in an olt barrel up where I’m at, that’s kind of a local thing. They didn’t like that little skinny Haydel barrel, so they’d stuff it in their D2 barrel, especially if the insert got where it was falling out, they got loose over time. But just tinkering it, it all stemmed from tinkering on duck calls.

Ramsey Russell: Which call was that I got? That’s a good sound.

Bryce Decker: You’ve got my J frame.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a fine sounding call.

Bryce Decker: It’s a heavy duty meat call is what it is. It’s not a cut down, but it’s basically a standard Arkansas style –

Ramsey Russell: That’s why it blows so easy.

Bryce Decker: Frame on steroids, basically. It’s got a real long tone board on it so you can adjust that reed, trim it or put a longer reed and it’s got a huge range of adjustment to, I can dial one in to fit pretty much anybody. You can do it as a double reed, I got a guy blowing in the world’s double reed here with it tuned as a double reed this weekend.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll be darned.

Bryce Decker: So hopefully he wins, that call needs some attention. It’s an underrated call. I designed it as just, if I was to have one duck call to use day in and day out and that’s it, that’s the one that I would grab.

Ramsey Russell: That calls in my go box. I mean, I got a lot of duck calls, I love a lot of them. But I blew that and I’m like, oh yeah.

Bryce Decker: I’m known for my cut downs, but that tyrant’s a mean little dude.

Ramsey Russell: The cut down takes a lot more air?

Bryce Decker: Different air. It’s a little more sharper air, you deliver it a little quicker. But once you learn how to blow with your diaphragm and I tell everybody to open up everything, open up your lips, open up your throat just like you’re fogging up a pair of sunglasses, going to clean them off, hot clean air. And a lot of guys, especially guys that started on a double reed or like a goose call, they blow real thin pinch forced air.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Bryce Decker: And that’s a cut down, most of your cut downs typically like hot clean air, you can get away with it, but you get more out of the call with hot clean air and it doesn’t exhaust you like it does trying to blow that thin cold air.

Ramsey Russell: Jeremy, what about you? How’d you get in the leather business?

Jeremy Brown: Everything I’ve ever done has tried to kill me or been hot and nasty work and I broke a leg up pretty bad and I couldn’t do nothing and I had a boy working for me helping me with dogs and he would bring me a dog and I sit in a chair and run dogs all day and I was trying to find something to do that I could –

Ramsey Russell: Well, there’s a lot you could do. I mean, where the background for something leather come to being? I mean, if you had just told me, well, my great great granddaddy used to do leather and it’s a hand me down tradition, I’d have believed it, looking at some of the work you do during your social media and some of the product I’ve got of yours. So that’s just something you came up with how recently 5, 10 years ago?

Jeremy Brown: I’ve always done a little bit of it. It’s like everything else, it takes money to do stuff like this and I never could, I never dreamed I’d be in a place like I’m sitting right now with everything I need at my fingertips and somebody that’ll just hand me whatever I need and take care of me. But we started playing with a little bit as something to do. My wife was about ready to kill me because I was sitting in the house and she was getting me around and taking care of me. But we stopped and I wanted to make him me a belt because I could not find a belt I wanted. I bought a little bit of leather and some tools and I set at the kitchen counter and I made one and then I made 2 or 3 more for a few other people and in just a few weeks I had several orders and it was a – I had a man, heard say one time, if you come to fork and road, you best take it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’ve heard that.

Todd Ezzi: Yeah.

Jeremy Brown: And here we are.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, opportunity knocks like that.

Jeremy Brown: Social media made it, I don’t know, because I did not, 2 or 3 years ago, I didn’t know what social media was.

Ramsey Russell: So when you started your leather product, you started with a belt, then what?

Jeremy Brown: I’ve always worked on some saddles and all of our old harness stuff, some of the people I grew up with, he’s got a big team of steers that we can put a yoke on. And I grew up with a man who had big horses dragging logs and cutting timber and used mules and big horses. I mean, there’s always been around that kind of stuff and you work on it yourself.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeremy Brown: I mean, there ain’t nobody, there’s one old man right there on the house that does it, I bet he’s in his 80s, every bit of it now, and he don’t do much of it. And I visited him a little bit and he wasn’t too interested in it, so I just kind of started playing with it and here we are. I don’t know, I started making some pretty wild stuff and that made it climb a little quicker.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what it went. See, I guess it was a duck tote that I saw you were in the Rixie booth a few years ago at Delta Waterfowl and you’d hand paint some stuff on it. And I came by and we started chatting about a gun strap.

Jeremy Brown: You made the comment about it, it was tooled. The whole deal is I carve and tool.

Ramsey Russell: That made a difference.

Jeremy Brown: Yeah, like on your sling, it’s not just anybody can paint.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Jeremy Brown: Anybody can carve and do that, I say anybody, but for the most part, anybody who’ll practice, if you’d take a little bit of lesson, you could draw anything you want on a piece of paper with the right education. But I’m really adamant about detail, all the birds, all the different species needs to be –

Ramsey Russell: Well, you knew all the ducks and geese I had you put on there.

Jeremy Brown: I done a lot of Googling.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeremy Brown: But you know how –

Ramsey Russell: Well, for a boy from a hillbilly from Arkansas to paint various and sundry ducks, geese and swans from 6 continents, I thought it turned out just magnificent.

Jeremy Brown: I do a lot of that stuff and it’s crazy that that’s what it’s turned into, but I’m really particular about detail. I throw away more stuff than what most people send out because I can’t stand it if it ain’t right. We posted that deal here a while back and let people try to figure out it was a snow goose, very few could figure out what a snow goose was, just a picture carved and tooled there and that’s one of the easiest birds out there.

Ramsey Russell: It is.

Jeremy Brown: When everyone seen it painted, everyone knew what it was.

Ramsey Russell: The grinning patch.

Jeremy Brown: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I got a question for you all, I just thought of. I mean, because you all are a little bit younger than myself. Did any of you all take high school shop?

Jeremy Brown: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You did. See, because the only time I’ve ever fooled with leather was in high school shop a 100 years ago.

Jeremy Brown: We didn’t do that, but we –

Ramsey Russell: I mean, I had a little snuff holder, I had a pocket knife holder, I had all kinds of cool stuff. I had a belt, my name on it, that’s my favorite part of shop. You took high school shop?

Todd Ezzi: I wish I would have, we didn’t have shop at our school. And I’ve always been like that. My dad doesn’t touch a tool. My mom is the only one, if some light switch needs to be changed, she’s the one that does it. And I kind of taught myself how to do a lot of stuff, watched a lot of stuff on YouTube and figured out how to weld and do some basic stuff. And I’m probably not great at any of it, but I can do a lot of stuff. And I wish when I was younger I would have had the opportunity to be in that. I might not have ended up as a high school coach, I might have ended up as something else as my full time job, but I think shop would have been great. I think every kid needs exposure to that.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, my gosh, we need to cut half the classes in high school and bring back shop.

Todd Ezzi: Absolutely.

Jeremy Brown: I never took computers, I didn’t take – I started in 7^th grade in a science class and I graduated and still hadn’t passed that science class. But I had every shop class you could take.

Ramsey Russell: I was a grown man, I was 22 years old at Mississippi State University, 21 maybe, when I turned on my first computer and it made my palm sweat because I turned in a handwritten term paper. And one of my professors, God bless him, he called me to his office and took me down to computer lab and sat me down and said, push that button and do this and do this. He said, now don’t ever turn in nothing else handwritten. But I mean, when I was in high school, computers was something on Star Trek, there wasn’t nothing like that. Did you take high school shot Bryce.

Bryce Decker: They called it Agarai, but yeah, we had an Agarai that kind of merged into aqua culture.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Bryce Decker: At my school.

Ramsey Russell: But I mean, do you grew up in farm country or -? You must have somewhere nearby.

Bryce Decker: Yeah, there’s a lot of row crop farming. And then we’re right there where I’m at you’re at the edge of the Ozark foothills and the delta, so you’ve got hill ground and bottoms.

Ramsey Russell: Why did they take that program out of school? You’re the close thing to a teacher here Todd.

Jeremy Brown: Our school still has a good ag program.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know a high school teacher just shop.

Jeremy Brown: We’ve got a really good act.

Ramsey Russell: We learned to weld, stick stuff together. We learned leather, we learned paint, we learned all kinds of just basic small mechanics, just little things.

Bryce Decker: Most of ours was woodworking until you went over to the aquaculture, and then we raised tilapia and some other stuff. But it wasn’t too sophisticated.

Jeremy Brown: If it wouldn’t have been for my ag teacher, I’d never graduated.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeremy Brown: I mean, that’s the only teacher I had that we done anything. I would go our computer teacher, her husband was superintendent, and I would go into computer class, and then he would pick me up, a lot of times I’d go work out of the computer class. I never had to mess with it.

Ramsey Russell: What do you all 3 love, each of you all, what do you all love about Arkansas public land duck hunting?

There’s days you get out there and get your butt kicked, but when it all happens and it happens right, there’s nowhere else in the world

Todd Ezzi: I’ll start that. To me, number one, it’s the whole chase, I mean, I love that. I mean, I would love to have a piece of ground and farm it and get it ready for the year, but there’s something special and unique about it, especially in Arkansas, being able to go scout and figure out where the ducks are and it’s a big game to try to get out there and have success that, I don’t think you get that same thing in a lot of places because it is so hard. And there’s days you get out there and get your butt kicked, but when it all happens and it happens right, there’s nowhere else in the world –

And I think that’s where a lot of disharmony comes from. Some of the stuff you see expressed poor as me is the fact that sometimes you get your butt kicked duck hunting anywhere

Ramsey Russell: That happens on private land, too, Todd. And I think that’s where a lot of disharmony comes from. Some of the stuff you see expressed poor as me is the fact that sometimes you get your butt kicked duck hunting anywhere.

Todd Ezzi: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: I used to know a guy whose son was being scouted by the pros in 10^th grade for baseball and we got talking one time about travel ball. You know what I’m saying? That’s what all these kids, all these folks putting their kids in travel ball, and they spend every waking moment year round playing baseball, going two states over like college teams. And Gene was saying, he said, Ramsey, thing about baseball is you ain’t got to go no further than your backyard to get your butt kicked in baseball and duck hunting’s the same way. Sometimes the ducks play, sometimes they don’t. But go ahead, I didn’t mean to interrupt it, but I’m just saying it ain’t public versus private ducks, sometimes they do it, sometimes they don’t.

Todd Ezzi: No, I just think that there’s a whole another level of challenge when you’re out there and you are competing against other people and when it all works right, it is a friendly competition and everybody is there and you’re excited for the guy next to you when he does well, I think sometimes that’s where it kind of turns wrong and people start to get ruffled the wrong way. But I think that when you’re out there and you find the X and you’re able to be on public land that everybody has access to and have success, there’s something special about that.

Ramsey Russell: So is it the competitiveness? That’s what you love most about it is the competition or just the availability? The challenge?

Todd Ezzi: I think the thing I love the most about it is that everybody has access to, and it’s something that, I know there are private clubs that have groups of ducks landing, a 100 into a timber hole, but they’re not accessible to 99% of the world. There’s nowhere else that somebody in my socioeconomic status can go and watch the show that I get to watch when it happens right? There are places, and I’ve been to a couple and had some invites to places that were unreal. But just on an everyday basis, the opportunity to go out there into anywhere from northeast Arkansas to southeast Arkansas and find the X and watch the show, I just don’t think that happens for a normal guy anywhere other than on Arkansas public timberland.

Ramsey Russell: What about you, Jeremy? What do you love most about Arkansas public land duck hunting?

Jeremy Brown: Where else can you go and get a cussing every morning and still enjoy it?

Ramsey Russell: I ain’t got to go far from home for that. I try.

Jeremy Brown: I don’t know. It ain’t really a competition or a competitive or –

Ramsey Russell: Is that what you’ve always grown up doing, though? I mean, all 3 of you all pretty much, that’s where you cut your teeth. That’s you all bread and butter, is Arkansas public?

Bryce Decker: Basically 100%.

Jeremy Brown: I’ve got to hunt quite a bit of private ground. I’ve got to help guide a little bit on private ground, I would 10 to 1 rather be in public timbers. There’s nothing better you can kill 70 and 100 birds on private ground with groups in a day or you can go shoot 4 mallards break in through the timber.

Ramsey Russell: And you’d rather have that –

Jeremy Brown: Any day. I’d rather shoot one – We took a kid last winter and we didn’t hunt hardly at all. And we let a group of 10 or 15 mallards in there and it was my nephew and me and him stood and watched them like idiots and just enjoyed the show and turned around and Riker’s about to pee on his self because we ain’t said shoot. He was mad because we never called it, but I like watching them.

Ramsey Russell: Lithic ducks.

Jeremy Brown: I like watching them land, break through the timber and sit in front of you, if they’ll swim around, it’s even better.

Ramsey Russell: What do you love most about it, Bryce?

Bryce Decker: My favorite thing is being able to be in the woods with them and being able to interact with them. I’m a call guy through and through, I like to be able to call at them, I like to talk them into coming in and sitting down where I’m at. Seems like public land culture has drifted away from that a lot, it’s more of a chase now than it is, you chase ducks down instead of call them to you now, I don’t like that. But duck calls still pretty important, a pretty important piece in the woods. But I like interacting with ducks and I like being in the woods with them. I don’t have to fire a shot, I just want to call some down and just be in their environment with them and interact with them, that’s my thing.

Ramsey Russell: There ain’t hardly nothing like it anywhere else. I mean, really and truly, I think that Arkansas public land is singularly definitive. As somebody that has travelled around in Dunsford, there really ain’t nowhere like that.

Bryce Decker: No, there’s not. And you have to be such a high level, high status person to be able to afford private timber. Timber is just an expensive commodity and we’ve got more of it in Arkansas that’s dedicated to duck hunting than anywhere else and it’s still good, it’s not what it was, but it’s still really good.

Ramsey Russell: But some of the best green timber hunting in the world is on Arkansas public timber.

Bryce Decker: For sure.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve been asked a million times at shows about it and I say, well, a lot of the TV shows, your references were filmed on Arkansas public, but there’s a lot of things that go into it. Now let me flip the question and say this, what do you hate most about Arkansas public land duck hunting?

Bryce Decker: I hate that it has become so gear centric, I call it. Everybody’s chasing who’s got the coolest fastest boat, who’s got the most expensive waders, whose truck’s got the most undercarriage lights on it and it’s become a status symbol instead of a family centered, which it’s always been pretty competitive, but we used to just all hunt the same spots and call against each other and now everybody’s running over each other and the etiquette and the decorum has gone downhill because of the hyper aggressive tactics that have become popular in the last 15, 20 years. You can still chase down ducks and kill them, but I like to go to a mediocre spot and call them to me and that’s hard to do now because that’s not what is in anymore. So it’s tough and I hate that it’s devolved into that, but it’s a young man’s game now. You don’t hardly see any old timers up there, you don’t hardly see any grandpas with their grandkids or any – I think Mr. Stewart was talking about that a while back how the demographics have changed so much now. I think even like the average age of the Arkansas duck stamp buyer or maybe the WMA permit buyer, I forget was like 23.

Ramsey Russell: You talk about that and somewhere on thread, somewhere on something, we were talking about that very thing and some young whippersnapper said that’s just cause your testosterone’s dropping and that’s why them old man ain’t getting out there. I’m like, no, I don’t think that’s gone.

Bryce Decker: Because it’s not enjoyable. They don’t enjoy it anymore.

Ramsey Russell: Exactly. When you got a benchmark for something and it’s changed so differently, it’s like, screw it.

Bryce Decker: My folks got really discouraged when they saw how people were coming into the woods and just didn’t show any respect towards the ducks themselves and it’s just, go in there and kill everything we can, get out, and we don’t care what happens in between. And like we talked about on the previous podcast, public guys used to be kind of stewards of the land in there, even though it was public, they took care of the place. They took care of their holes, they took care of their boat lanes, they took care of the ducks, they didn’t kill everything in sight, they did just enough to make sure they had some meat and some feathers if they were doing feather beds or pillows or whatever, and they left and come back and made sure there was still some left to kill the next day if they could.

Ramsey Russell: What about yourself, Todd? Is that pretty much what you hate the most about it?

Todd Ezzi: I hate to say that I hate anything about it because there are some things that I dislike. I know it’s all part of it, I know it’s those bad apples and Bryce said a word that really stands out to me is respect. And I think there’s a lot of people that don’t respect the land, they don’t respect other hunters. And I think that that’s the thing. If I could change something, that’s what it would be, it would be just the respect.

Ramsey Russell: I want to be vanity driven, isn’t it?

Todd Ezzi: It is. And it’s selfishness. And I think in every part of our society, that’s such a big thing, not just duck hunting. It’s the lack of respect, it’s people online feeling like they can say whatever they want because they’re on a keyboard. And some people, and I don’t say a lot, but some people have taken that same approach into duck hunting and it leaves a bad taste for everyone that’s there. And even if 1 out of 50 people have that one group, that one group is going to piss off 15 groups that day. So I think it’s that respect, and I think that that comes from people being taught number one. And my parents weren’t hunters, but they taught me respect. And I think that that’s something that if you pick up hunting and your parents have raised you right, you’re probably going to end up doing it right, even if you see somebody doing it wrong, I think at the end of the day, you’re going to figure out how to do it right. But having a good hunting mentor at a young age, you’re more likely to make stupid mistakes when you’re younger and I think having a mentor at that age makes a huge difference. Yeah, that’d be my one thing.

Ramsey Russell: Well, with the old guys fading, it’s hard to find.

Bryce Decker: There’s not much more mentorship in the woods anymore. It’s kids teaching kids how to hunt, and it’s a mess, sometimes.

Ramsey Russell: It’s what I call or refer to it as Internet Orphans. The blind leading the blind sometimes, I’m not criticizing nobody, I’m just saying. What about you, Jeremy? Is there anything you hate or dislike about Arkansas public?

Jeremy Brown: Just a complete lack of respect. They don’t care. There’s a group, a bunch of kids around there that we’ve hauled and took from the time they was little bitty and they’ve grown up and there’s something to be proud of and they’ve completely abandoned all their buddies. But it don’t matter how hard you try, you can’t teach the buddies. All it is pictures of ducks and if they can’t get pictures of ducks, they’re going to figure out a way to get pictures of ducks, if they’ve got to buy them from the friends, that’s all it comes down to.

Bryce Decker: Or save them for few days.

Jeremy Brown: Save them, keep them in the freezer instead of just learning how to do something to be proud of. They don’t care if they’re respected.

Ramsey Russell: Bryce, you talked about Mr. Stewart, Itchy Stewart, who was on there talking about the public timber project, what spoke to you most about that message he’s putting out there?

Bryce Decker: I’d never even heard of Mr. Stewart before that. And just the things he spoke about, I guess because he’s in the same area, he hunts in the same area as me?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Bryce Decker: Same bottoms.

Ramsey Russell: He’s one of them old guys.

Bryce Decker: Yeah, for sure.

Ramsey Russell: That ain’t willing to quit without a fight.

Bryce Decker: It reminded me of something that some of my, God rest their souls, all my old folks are gone and it just reminded me of someone that I would have been in the woods with back in the day. He sounded like one of the old timers that I would have been with and he made a lot of sense, he put it a lot more eloquently than I ever could, I’m a lot more rough around the edges than he is, but that was one of my favorite podcasts I’ve ever listened to.

Jeremy Brown: He said, one of the smartest things I’ve ever heard.

Ramsey Russell: What’s that?

Jeremy Brown: Going in the duck woods like you would your turkey woods.

Bryce Decker: Amen.

Jeremy Brown: It don’t work, nobody does that. You can’t even lay on the deck of your boat and watch ducks down the dark because somebody will come in and run you over.

Ramsey Russell: God.

Jeremy Brown: But he put that on there that ought to dig in somebody’s brain somewhere, they ought to think about that.

Ramsey Russell: Do you think that lack of respect that you all are talking about, it has to do with just a kind of a lack of ownership in that resource. Because it’s somebody else’s, it ain’t mine, I’m just going to come over here, I’m going to take, I’m going to hunt, I mean, is that what it’s boiling down to? Because to me, it’s like if I got skin in a game, if this is mine, I mean, if anybody’s got kids, guarantee you give them something versus them by themselves and watch which one they take care of the most.

Bryce Decker: I see two different sides to that. And you know the guys that are all local to these places, like your Bayou Meto guys, they really care about Bayou Meto, Black River guys, they really care about Black River. Your guys that don’t live in these areas and don’t have a tie to these areas over the course of their lives, they didn’t grow up in them, seem to not have as much care about it or respect with it because they have no sweat equity in the place. But then again, there’s a lot of guys that come in from all over God’s creation and they’ve taken time away from their families, they’ve taken time off their jobs, they’ve scheduled it months or years in advance and they treat it like it is their last hurrah. And they are as serious as a heart attack, they respect the resource, they do everything by the book to ensure their own success and those are the good ones. And then you’ve got a lot of guys that just go in there and they don’t, they have none. And all they want to do is kill, and we’ve seen kids pull ducks out of the tool box of their truck and take them back out to the woods and take pictures of them from the day before and just ridiculousness. Just social media’s had a lot to do with that.

Jeremy Brown: It all goes back to that shop class deal.

Ramsey Russell: What’s that?

Jeremy Brown: They didn’t learn anything as a kid. They’re driving a three quarter ton Ford pickup, cost you what, $70,000.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of money.

Jeremy Brown: Hook a prodigy or any of them other high dollar surface drive boats up behind it, how much you got? They didn’t pay for it. They’re 17 year old.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Jeremy Brown: The kids that are running around there, no worry going to 20 horse, 2 stroke, they’re probably going to ease around there and try to hunt and enjoy themselves and go back to the house that morning.

Bryce Decker: If they don’t get run over.

Jeremy Brown: Yeah. But they get run other.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. All 3 of you all on this podcast has talked about lighting groups or lit the ducks. I mean because that’s kind of – you touched on it, Jeremy about Arkansas public or public timber versus anywhere else is you go out there and shoot 100 ducks in a rice field, who don’t want to go limit out with a bunch of folk, but at the same time, you might only kill 2 or 3 ducks in the timber, but all 3 of them landed right in your lap and there’s something about that.

Jeremy Brown: If you can watch –

Ramsey Russell: Oftentimes I’m so spellbound watching them flutter through the trees and bob and weaving, I forget to shoot until they’re on the water. I mean, it’s like I’m holding my breath when that comes down. It’s something I can’t even articulate how amazing it is just to see that.

Jeremy Brown: If you can watch mallard break through the treetops and land in front of you and swim around and quack and talk to the ducks, not get beside yourself excited chills, there ain’t much going to excite you.

Ramsey Russell: How hard is that these days?

Jeremy Brown: It can be pretty tough.

Ramsey Russell: Does it seem tougher to you?

Bryce Decker: A lot tougher than it was used to be. If the weather was cooperating at all, you were putting ducks on the water.

Jeremy Brown: But then just the last year or two. I’m not talking years ago, I’m talking just the last couple years. We could always go kill some ducks, always find a few holes and not hunt, all over the country, hunt the same, how big is that we hunt?

Bryce Decker: It’s an 8^th of the area that they normally flood.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeremy Brown: I mean, it’s a small spot. And go in there every day, always find birds to kill. He can drive from two hours south of us and may not have a clue, but we can still go find birds in there, you can’t now. You can’t work them, you can’t land them, you can’t even call at them.

Bryce Decker: Last year was a real eye opener they changed a few rules on us and you’re allowed to use electronic decoys and stuff again and it took a lot away from the art of calling. I had a hard time calling ducks last year against guys that have all the electronics, it was tough.

Ramsey Russell: Arkansas’s always kind of led the charge in the deep south against that technology probably for that exact very reason. You said previously as a duck call maker, maybe a duck call is not the end all be all, but if I got that motion, if we don’t have that motion or that artificial attractant, it’s every man for himself. I got pull strings, I got calling, I got whatever I could do –

Bryce Decker: It’s a double edged sword for sure.

Ramsey Russell: But if I’ve got that technology, well, now it’s shifted a little bit it makes it tougher.

Bryce Decker: It seems to be if you’ve got the technology, you’re going to consistently put down singles, doubles, small little groups. If you don’t have the technology at all, anyone, everyone is more able to put down big groups of ducks like we want to see, ducks circle a little bit more without a single dropping in on your stuff and you’ve got a little more time to build up a big group of ducks. If some people don’t have them and some people do, the guys that have them are going to kill singles and doubles and you’re just pretty much SOL unless the stars align and you get a couple that’s circling you over them, it’s tough.

Jeremy Brown: Your groups are getting educated quick.

Bryce Decker: Yeah.

Jeremy Brown: Because they’ll shoot the first duck that falls in there on their spinner because they’re standing there vaping and braiding each other’s head.

Ramsey Russell: You don’t hold no punches there, Jeremy, you don’t hold no punches.

Todd Ezzi: I think I’ve seen the same thing. Like back in the late 90s, early 2000s, it was pretty common to light groups, big groups. When my son was younger, he was probably 7 or 8, we walked into some public land and lit a couple groups of a hundred in the first hour of daylight. I mean, it was a lot more commonplace and that’s been much fewer and further between. I don’t know. I think that the spinners and things have definitely diminished how many big groups you land. But I think maybe a lower duck population has affected that pressure. I mean, I think pressure is higher than it’s ever been.

Ramsey Russell: I think everybody listening would agree there is unprecedented hunting pressure and disturbance. I think it’s a two edged sword. It’s one thing if we’re hunting so many man days, so many man hours on this geographic region, plus running louder and faster and brighter and everything else and more.

Bryce Decker: Just create more disturbance in general.

Ramsey Russell: More traffic just to disturb them.

Bryce Decker: Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: What the heck. I mean, a duck don’t know what to do because he’s kind of a quiet nature creature, he gets wigged out, any bird does, they don’t like noises.

Bryce Decker: Nope.

Ramsey Russell: That’s why it bothers them.

Bryce Decker: No animal does, that’s why you don’t run through your deer, your turkey woods with straight pipes on your side by side and light bars blaring and music going and all that. Duck hunting, especially public seems to be the more aggressive and the more loud and the more visible you are, the more likes you get on social media, but it is absolutely terrible for those ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Everywhere else we hunt we’re walking in as quietly and as softly as humanly possible. But duck hunting, who can look most like a Kid Rock concert coming in. Talk about some changes in Arkansas public, the worst, which we’re kind of touching on. Some of the changes for the worst, some of the changes for the better.

Bryce Decker: I think they should have left the WMAS sovereign used to, they were kind of all governed individually and I think each environment needed to be governed like that. Each place is different, it’s got a different demographic, it’s got different rules and decorum, based on the people that had been there for so long and it was really a special thing to go over to Big Lake and when people weren’t in them to be able to get to hunt one of those big permanent blinds out in the timber. It was really special to be able to go over to St. Francis and get in on a river blind. It was really special to be able to kind of grandfather in certain spots where I was at, because they would let us leave our decoys out all year long. But again, it was public, so if someone beat you there, you’d go somewhere else or hunt with them. But it was really special and I think it worked out better for everybody when you could go somewhere that kind of was set up the way you preferred. And it wasn’t just a blanket set of rules for everybody, it just doesn’t seem to work real good. And it seems like every WMA that has been managed like that seems to have gone downhill to some degree when there’s not the focus on what Big Lake needs or what Bayou Meto needs versus let’s just throw this whole plan at everything. So to me, that’s what I’ve noticed.

Ramsey Russell: Have you seen any changes for the better? Any policies, anything at all that’s better?

Bryce Decker: I think the Game & Fish is genuinely more concerned than they’ve ever been about the health of those woods.

Ramsey Russell: I do too.

Bryce Decker: And I don’t know that there’s a good solution because you just, at the end of the day, you cannot defeat Mother Nature. And we’ve had water on them woods ever since duck season, it ain’t been off them woods yet this year, and there ain’t nothing they can do to keep it off.

Ramsey Russell: My background’s forestry, specifically bottomland hardwood and I got invited onto a podcast and the host took it down that path and I apologized, I’m sorry that that’s where you hunt, I’m sorry the woods got to be dried up and they got to be cut. But for the long term health of that forest, that’s what needs to happen. And mysteriously, the recording got corrupted and lost the recording and I believe that’s why, I believe that’s why they did that.

Bryce Decker: And we Arkansas boys, we love to complain about the Game & Fish and put all the blame on them, but if we treated those woods like they were ours, if everybody in there just agreed, shook hands on it, talked about it before they left the ramp and just treated them woods like they were their own, that would make a huge difference.

Ramsey Russell: Taking ownership.

Bryce Decker: Ownership. We do own them. We pay for those woods.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Bryce Decker: But I do think, and the Game & Fish does listen, we grip for years and years, they’re killing our trees and then they pull a little bit of water off of there and they were like, we ain’t got no water, we ain’t got no water no more. So we’re our own worst enemy and we shoot ourselves in the foot at every turn and we can’t agree on nothing but dialogue like this and having people just talk about it and other people being able to listen has helped a lot. And there’s a lot of young men that look up to guys like us and that come to us for advice and stuff. And it’s tough to be a mentor sometimes when you see how things go out there, it’s real easy to just recluse and avoid everybody. And I was taught to be that way when we were growing up, you don’t make friends at the boat ramp, but it’s a double edged sword, I think this kind of stuff gets more people in the sport, but I also think it gets more people thinking. So overall, I think just if this is only mentorship we can provide, then so be it, it’s a good thing.

Ramsey Russell: I agree. You all got anything to comment, Todd? Are there any improvements?

Todd Ezzi: Yeah, improvements, I thought the last few years under Director Booth, I thought he did an amazing job and was moving the needle in a really good direction with a lot of transparency. I know, I went to a couple of the meetings and he did a really good job laying out their plan and just communicating to people, because I think that’s when people get skeptical of any kind of government plan, is when it’s not communicated and people are worried something’s going in the wrong direction. So I thought they did a great job of communicating that about the trees and what needed to be done. I think there was a lot of ignorance about that. I was the same way, I didn’t understand completely, but after listening to some biologists and it kind of opened my eyes to that. And I think at the end of the day, every duck hunter who has kids wants their kid to experience what they’ve gotten to see. I mean, my son’s 18, he’s gotten to see the show. I hope that I have grandkids, they get to do the same thing. So I think that was moving in the right direction. I haven’t seen a lot from the new director, but I’ll be curious to see what he does with that. But I hope that those channels stay open. I hope that that all will continue, because I think that’s really important. Downside and as far as that, I think, the biggest negative we talked about it is the lack of respect. And I think if there could be a way, you hate to want game wardens out there writing tickets. But there are a lot of times where people are crossing the lines and getting away with it, videoing it, I think if that stuff stopped and they kind of cracked down on some of the shenanigans, if you will, that are happening on public land, I think that it would clean it up a lot. I think that’s something that could be moved in the right direction.

Ramsey Russell: Question for all 3 of you, how has Arkansas public land duck hunting influenced what you all make, what your products are? I know you Todd, because it’s mobile.

Todd Ezzi: That’s right. And when I started duck hunting heavily on public land I didn’t really have – I had a boat, I had a 99 on an old flat bottom. But I walked in most of the time, and even if I boated in, I was still going to walk in. So being mobile and I still carry some old Cherokee inflatable decoys a lot of times, I try to pack everything I can take in my arms most of the time. So that’s really influenced me and everything I’ve done and obviously centering it around dogs. I had a dog growing up, and taking a dog just adds a whole another dimension to the hunt.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t want to duck hunt without one. I don’t want one running all over the field –

Todd Ezzi: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Hiding them from me. But at the same time, yeah.

Todd Ezzi: Yeah, those two things have really made me. And Arkansas public land has really shaped Rixie outdoors. And if it wasn’t for Arkansas public land, I’d definitely wouldn’t have created what I have and continued down that path.

Ramsey Russell: You bail off into, you’re going to go to such and such public land this morning, and you got a vague idea. And I know there’s spots on the map, there’s this hole and this hole and hole behind the hole and all these holes out there. But to hear you say it, it’s not just those duck holes. A lot of times, is it like you show up like where you wanted to go, well, there’s people in there, so I know it’s going to be a shit show, so you just take off walking?

Todd Ezzi: There’s a lot of mornings where I’ve killed ducks and the thickest stuff with maybe one tree blow down in there, and it is thick and everybody else –

Ramsey Russell: Was it something you saw, or were you just walking and watching and say, oh, the ducks are kind of tipping and reacting to that.

Todd Ezzi: A lot of times it’s been a morning where I’ve said, the ducks are pitching in over there and there’s nobody there, let’s make a move. And a lot of times it’s, I know ducks are in that area, so I walk in in the dark or sometimes on a map, but a lot of times just walk in to find a small open area and some really thick stuff. And that’s honestly been a way that I’ve had a lot of success on Arkansas public land, because if you’re in one of the big holes and –

Ramsey Russell: One of the established holes.

Todd Ezzi: The established holes –

Ramsey Russell: But there’s lots of places out there that ducks may respond to. They just need somewhere they can break down into it.

Todd Ezzi: That’s right. And I personally feel that they’re a lot more confident, especially late in the year, in that thicker stuff, getting away from those big holes. And not that you can’t kill them in the big holes, but to me, I would rather be away from groups of people and land 10 or 15 ducks in the morning, then in the thick of everybody racing people into holes and landing 20. So that’s kind of the way I look at it.

Ramsey Russell: That pretty much how all you all agree? I mean, do you have as much competition problem? Like, is there any instance where I’m walking out and I just find that blowdown or I find that little spot they want to be, and all of a sudden I got neighbors?

Todd Ezzi: There’s a lot of mornings where I will be walking to where I want to go see a headlight turn, go to kind of my second option, see a headlight turn, go to third option and I’ve turned 7 times and seen 7 different lights that happens a lot. And especially up in northeast Arkansas, where these guys are from, when I’ve hunted up there with them and a lot of times on the youth hunt and it’ll still be that.

Jeremy Brown: Them lights don’t mean anything anymore.

Ramsey Russell: They don’t.

Jeremy Brown: If we walk 300 yards to go to somewhere to get away from you, and then you crawl in there on top of us, when we start shooting, what do you do then?

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know. It’s changed as I was doing that kind of stuff. I mean, really and truly, back in the day, you could blink, somebody blink back, they’d go the other way.

Jeremy Brown: That means we’re here.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeremy Brown: That ain’t invite, but now it is.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Oh, there they are.

Jeremy Brown: You can guarantee if you shoot them as much morning, you’ll go somewhere else in the morning.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeremy Brown: Because they’re going to be somebody will be piled in there.

Ramsey Russell: What about your duck call? Because I asked you the same question, Bryce. How has it influenced to what you make? I guess just the whole Arkansas duck hunting culture.

Bryce Decker: I hunt by myself quite a bit, and I have to have a reliable call, I can’t have a call that’s going to squeal out on me or mess up when I need it to work. So I’ve just kind of tinkered on physics and geometry with these calls enough to get them to where they’re pretty reliable when they’re full of spit or tobacco or cold or whatever and still sound good, there’s give and take with everything with them. But over the course of the years, I’ve come up with some calls that fit me really well and that in turn fit a lot of other people really well. The way I set up a call is pretty easy for anyone that’s got any kind of experience to blow. But hunting public ground has mainly made me focus on sound quality and reliability of the operation of the call. Because if you’re in, especially in the thick of things with people, your calls got to work, you can’t have it messing up on you when you’re trying to land ducks and so is everybody else around you.

Ramsey Russell: You see a lot of these guys boating in, we talk about these rock stars, let’s call them, but really and truly, what do you really need to go duck hunting?

Bryce Decker: Shotgun and duck call, that’s all I grew up with, we were poor.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, it’ll just about all fit in a duck coat.

Bryce Decker: We were dirt poor and a lot of people are taught, like Jeremy was saying earlier, a lot of people are taught that you got to be rich to duck hunt, we were dirt poor and we duck hunted, my folks did it. At one time to survive they had feather beds, feather pillows, they eat them, they’ve sold them like, they lived off the land and so you don’t have to be rich, I still run around in a cheap little beat up flat bottom, I still don’t have the best of anything, but we go in there and make it work.

Ramsey Russell: Rick, do you feel like you’re able to go – Todd, say I want to call you Rick.

Todd Ezzi: You call me that.

Ramsey Russell: Do you feel like having that stand, having made your stand? I can say same thing to Bryce, having made that your duck call. Does it affect how you hunt now as compared to before? I mean, I would guess you’re able to go 5 miles further walking in public land, plan A, B, C, D, you have run through the whole alphabet of plans, a lighter blind on your back.

Todd Ezzi: There were several times where I would be walking in public land and there would be water that was waist deep and we wouldn’t go hunt over there even though there’s a bunch of ducks pitching in. And we wouldn’t hunt over there that day or even the next day because our dog stand wouldn’t get up above waist deep. A lot of the platform stance, you can’t extend them and then your dog’s sitting in water the whole hunt or sometimes I’ve hunted even deeper than that and you can’t even put one up. So it’s just opened up a lot of opportunities for me to be able to get away from people and take my dog. There were times where I left my dog because I wanted to hunt a spot and I knew there were ducks in there and there was no way to hang a dog stand in there. So I wanted to kind of solve that problem. Whether it was a tiny tree or a giant cypress or deep water, shallow water, I wanted to be able to get there and be able to hunt it.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. That Rixie stand, it’s not just that it attaches to a tree and that it’s light, it’ll fit a whole lot of different tree types, won’t it?

Todd Ezzi: I put it around cypresses with two different straps, they’re about 20ft around, I’ve used it on things that were about as small as my arm. So, yeah, it’s super versatile.

Ramsey Russell: How much does it weigh?

Todd Ezzi: Just a little bit less than 8lbs.

Ramsey Russell: About the same as a shotgun.

Todd Ezzi: Yeah. And it’s got a lot of lightning holes on it, so you can clip it to your backpack or whatever and pack it in. And that’s usually what I carry, I don’t carry a blind bag, I usually carry a backpack and box of shells, my thermos and my dog stand and we’re off.

Ramsey Russell: Jeremy, has Arkansas public hunting influenced what you make or how you make it or how you hunt?

Jeremy Brown: Probably not in the best way it should have.

Ramsey Russell: How so?

Jeremy Brown: Anybody, everybody can get, you can get a leather gun strap or a duck tote anywhere, but if you want something pretty.

Ramsey Russell: Let me say this too. As somebody that has had, I like a shotgun strap, I’m a shotgun strap guy. I can walk in with it on my shoulder, I can do stuff on my shoulder, I can take a break, put a dip in with it on my shoulder. I use a shotgun strap once in a blue moon and I’ve gotten so adept to it, I don’t even take it off when I’m swinging through cover anymore, I’m used to it. And I know people that will use a gun strap, bring it in, take it off when they get ready to hunt, put it back on when they’re walking out. I use a gun strap. I mean, it’s essential that I have a shotgun, I don’t care where in the world I’m hunting. But I’m going to tell you something about that leather gun strap, besides being beautiful, that some bitch don’t slip. I mean, it is as on my shoulder where I put it as anything. What is that you’ve done to the back end of that makes it so, I want to say the word sticky?

Jeremy Brown: I don’t even know what’s on the back of yours, but it’s just good quality leather.

Ramsey Russell: It looks like alligator.

Jeremy Brown: The whole deal, you can go to right over here at Cabela’s or whatever and buy a shotgun strap and it’s going to fit everything, but it ain’t going to fit nothing real good. You’re going to walk through there hanging around your waist for you if you ain’t careful, but make something that fits quality.

Ramsey Russell: It’s not just slick leather, it’s something. It’s got a texture on the back that absolutely, I love that gun strap.

Jeremy Brown: Leather can be tanned. I mean, it’s made out, that’s all veg tan, that’s all made out of cowl. But you can go right in that room and there’s chrome tan, oil tan, veg tan, brain tan, there’s so many different ways and it’s all different, it’s not just leather. A lot of the stuff you buy is, well, it’s not even real leather. I mean, it comes from overseas.

Ramsey Russell: Artificial cowhide.

Jeremy Brown: It wasn’t eating grass here a while back there. You got to find something that works. Waterfowl stuff’s going to be wet and nasty and slick, and you need something that’ll stick to you and not rot.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Does everything you make, if the product you make, like my gun trap, is beautiful, it’s very personal, it’s one of a kind. Would that find kind of what you make is a one of a kind, high end, or do you make something just utilitarian?

Jeremy Brown: The goal is to try to have inventory of stuff for like, we’ll have dog collars and dog leashes over here tomorrow, just a general something you can buy. It’s hard for me to make a bunch of gun slings or a bunch of totes or whatever. I do a lot of it, but everybody wants something personal.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, well, of course.

Jeremy Brown: You can’t make something personal and sell it to somebody else.

Bryce Decker: Right.

Jeremy Brown: Your strap –

Ramsey Russell: That’s why I want it.

Jeremy Brown: I made your strap and I’ve made a bunch of them that fit a Benelli just like your shotgun. That’s the link they’re going to be, if you order that strap, that’s what you’re getting, if you don’t like that buy Benelli, I guess.

Ramsey Russell: Right. You could do more harm than buying a Benelli, I tell you, the world ain’t got enough of them. Last question I got for you all is this, with regards to Arkansas public land, how has it influenced how you all hunt, where you all hunt? How does it influence who you are as a person, as a human being? Not just as somebody that makes this product, but it’s just who you are. How that influenced your life?

Jeremy Brown: I want to say a lot better. It makes me want to be something to encourage young people, have the conversations, this right here is what needs to happen regularly.

Ramsey Russell: Are you saying that 5 years ago, 10 years ago, before you really got off into this, you’d have been different?

Jeremy Brown: Probably not, but I wanted to kill stuff. Now I just want to go hunting and I want to see other people just go hunting. Killing don’t mean much.

Ramsey Russell: Todd, how do you think Arkansas public land duck hunting has shaped who you are?

Todd Ezzi: Yeah, I think seeing something that’s so special and seeing it in danger from multiple different ways. We talk about tree health, we talk about people being disrespectful and the change in our society and how that’s affecting, I think it’s just made me want to be a better steward and also made me want to pass it to the next generation to be able to show that to some kids and teach them how special that is and show them how to do it right so they know. I think that duck hunting in Arkansas has really made me feel like that. Like this is something that is, it’s not anywhere else. And you mentioned that, Ramsey, like there’s nowhere else, you can’t replicate it. And it’s something that is finite, and it’s something that can go away. So we’ve got to show that to our kids every time we get an opportunity. And my 3 kids are old now, so every time I get a chance to take younger kids and introduce somebody, it makes me want to do that. And I think that it’s made me a better person overall. And I think hunting has been a big part of that. And you talk about, there’s no other place that I see God probably more than watching the stars before the sun even comes up, and then watching the sun come up and watching those ducks pitch through the trees, I feel as close to God during that as I would sitting in Mass. So I don’t know, it’s just something that is special, and it’s not something that we can bring back. So I just hope everybody gets that message, like, this is something that we’ve got, and we got to treat it right.

I mean, to me, yes, I love it, I love to go shoot ducks and do all this good stuff we do and we live for. But at the end of the day, I’ve come to revere it as this national treasure

Ramsey Russell: We live in some crazy times, there’s no denying the politics and the gas lighting. I mean, just a few weeks ago, and it’s still going on, I guarantee you. Talking about selling off millions of acres of public land and all this kind of stuff. And it’s like, gosh, I know that son of a gun does duck hunt, but I believe if you could get even somebody like Donald Trump into that duck hole to see what you just described, he would realize what a national treasure this is that must be protected, both in just the waterfowl population in North America, but these resources, they’re irreplaceable, completely irreplaceable. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Once they die, they’re dead. There’s no bringing them back ever, not for my kids, my grandkids, my great grandkids, and that’s what’s a very profound statement. I mean, to me, yes, I love it, I love to go shoot ducks and do all this good stuff we do and we live for. But at the end of the day, I’ve come to revere it as this national treasure. I mean, everybody talk about Fort Knox, these natural resources are that in the bank that nobody else in the world has. Bryce, has Arkansas public land influenced who you are as a human being?

I’ve lived right there next to them and in them my whole life. So I’ve got a lot of personal feelings to those woods and it bothers me when people treat them bad, it bothers me when people misbehave

Bryce Decker: Oh, yeah. I’m probably the grumpy old man out of these three, but I get wrapped up in the negativity of it a lot. I’m blessed to have friends like this to pull me out of it whenever I do. But, yeah, it’s my life. It’s literally my livelihood now. So it’s very important to me, I love that place, I grew up there. My best fondest memories in the world are in those woods, it’s right in my backyard. I’ve lived right there next to them and in them my whole life. So I’ve got a lot of personal feelings to those woods and it bothers me when people treat them bad, it bothers me when people misbehave. And being a duck hunter is an evolution. And we all start out, I was gung-ho whenever I was a kid, and I did the boat racing and the yeehawing and all the competitive stuff too. But as you grow and mature as a man, you also grow and mature as a hunter and it becomes about the experience, it becomes about the family, about the friendships, and not just taking a bunch of pictures for Instagram, trying to outdo the group that was 200, 300 yards away from you. And I think, the more we can talk about it and the quicker we can get some of these younger hands to kind of see through the smoke and set their eyes on what really does matter that the better off we’ll be and the better off the hunt we’ll be and the better off the resources will be. Because if we keep going like we’re going, there’s going to be places that it’s over. There ain’t going to be no more duck hunting, if there is, it ain’t going to be worth going. So anytime we get a chance to talk sense into people, sometimes these guys got to talk sense into me. But things like this are a blessing, and I’m just thankful that you’re here to do it. But, yeah, duck hunting’s absolutely shaped all three of our lives and immensely.

Ramsey Russell: All of us. Good note to end on. I don’t want to get into details on this project, me and you talked after our last podcast, and I just talked to Jeremy before you all got here. I’m going to come see you all opening week. And he said if you won’t do it, he will.

Bryce Decker: We’ll try to accommodate you.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’m going to come see you opening week we’re going to do a deep dive into this topic. Before we wrap up and go because I know you all got to get finished set up there at the Expo, tell everybody how they can connect with each of you all. In case I want to plug into you alls product you all stuff, I follow all to you all, but how can people listening connect with you?

Bryce Decker: The best way to get ahold of me as far as duck calls or anything like that would be my website, blackriverduckcalls.net my information is all over the place. I’m very active on social media. I’ve got my phone stuck up my butt 24/7, so I’m probably one of the easiest fellers in the world to get a hold of. Call me, text me, Facebook messenger, Instagram, I’ve got a TikTok account now, but the website, as far as getting stuff from me is the easiest way to do it. If I’ve got it, it’s on that website.

Ramsey Russell: Todd, how about you?

Todd Ezzi: Yeah, all the social media. Rixie_outdoors. TikTok is probably one of the biggest ones, Instagram. TikTok has been really good for me promoting business and stuff. And I’ve helped a couple people with small business stuff with that, but it’s really helped me explode. But TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, we’re on all those. So you can get a hold of us Rixie_outdoors.

Ramsey Russell: What about you, wing shootah?

Jeremy Brown: That’s about it. You can get a hold of me on about anything, social media. Text me is the best way you can do it. If you call me, I probably won’t answer.

Ramsey Russell: But how do I look you up on social media?

Jeremy Brown: You can go on my website, Jeremy Brown Custom Leather, Wing Shootah. There’s my Facebook’s.

Ramsey Russell: It ain’t Wing Shooter.

Jeremy Brown: No, it’s AH instead of ER, they wouldn’t let me do ER.

Ramsey Russell: WING ShOOTAH.

Bryce Decker: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Night Wing Shooter.

Jeremy Brown: That’s right. That was strictly just a –

Ramsey Russell: Who wouldn’t let you do it? The people up there in your neighborhood? The hillbillies?

Jeremy Brown: Instagram. I typed in 40 times trying to come up Wing Shooter.

Todd Ezzi: They filtered you.

Jeremy Brown: It wouldn’t let me do it and that’s what it came up with, finally and I just said the heck with it and it worked. It stuck.

Ramsey Russell: So that’s why you come up with that.

Jeremy Brown: That wasn’t intentional.

Ramsey Russell: Wing Shootah.

Jeremy Brown: But it works.

Ramsey Russell: I appreciate you all being here. I’ve enjoyed getting know each and every one of you and I appreciate you setting me up here with traditional leathercraft, this is a heck of a place right here, we’re recording today.

Jeremy Brown: KC’s got a heck of a place here.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, I’ve seen some leather shop, but I ain’t never seen nothing like this.

Jeremy Brown: We sure appreciate him letting us do it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, what a fine place. I hope we get to go eat dinner tonight. But thank you all very much for taking time out of your day, I know I’ll see you in upcoming days. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. What are you all thoughts about some of the topics we’ve talked about today? Comment below or heck, you know how to get in touch with all of us, let us know your feedback. See you next time.

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