100 Years Texas Waterfowl Hunting

Ramsey Russell: I’m your host, Ramsey Russell. Join me here to listen to those conversations. Welcome back to another great episode of Duck Season Somewhere. If I say the word Texas, what do you think? Texas. I think of the Alamo, Bluebonnets, Comanche Indians and Texas rangers and maybe even J. R. Ewing from back in the day. And of course, especially now that we can all crew social media this time of year and see hunting pictures. We know there’s great waterfowl hunting here in Texas and it is, man. Maybe it wasn’t, what it was in different parts, but Texas is a big state, got a lot of history. A lot of great duck hunting. Today’s guest can speak to a colorful history of water fowling in Texas that I was completely unaware of. I think you’re going to find this extremely interesting and informative. Today’s guest is Rob Sawyer. He’s authored three books. The first one was 100 years of Texas Duck hunting. He’s also written a book Texas market hunting stories of waterfowl, game laws and outlaws and most recently published a book, images of the hunt, a photo history of Texas water fowling and they are incredible. I get a lot of inboxes and several people have suggested, hey, you’ve got to get this guy on here to talk about the history of Texas duck hunting. Rob, how are you today?
Rob Sawyer: Good afternoon Ramsey. Welcome to Texas.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, you all are killing some ducks around here I understand.
Rob Sawyer: This has been a real good teal here.
Ramsey Russell: Good.
Rob Sawyer: Even with the recent tropical storm bringing all the water to the prairie, it’s just been a great year. People from the gulf on the saltwater side, all the way up into the prairie, are all saying the same thing. Great teal season.
Ramsey Russell: Rob, introduce yourself to the listeners. Who are you? I mean, obviously, you’re a duck hunter so you are our kind of people. But how did you get into duck hunting? What were your earliest memories who introduced you to it?
Rob Sawyer: Well it’s interesting Ramsey I wish somebody did introduced me to it. When I was a kid, I grew up on the Chesapeake Bay and I lived on a peninsula, that stuck out between two co’s and a big piece of Broadwater. And as a kid in the winters, there weren’t a lot of people around, I kept seeing all the waterfowl. So, my parents bought me a couple of books and they got me a magazine subscription and by reading and looking at pictures, I figured out how to hunt. And when I was old enough, they bought me a gun and let me go.
Ramsey Russell: How old were you?
Rob Sawyer: I started out I guess, when I first got interested in 8. I guess they let me go by myself, 10 or 11.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. That’s back in the good old days.
Rob Sawyer: It was. In the way, I learned my ducks is, I had no idea how to identify it on the wing. So, I would just shoot it, then bring it home and try to match it up with a picture of a book or a magazine.
Ramsey Russell: Same here. And I think that’s a good way to do it. I mean a bird in hand, right.
Rob Sawyer: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: How did you end up down in Texas and into duck hunting down here?
Rob Sawyer: Well, I left Maryland and went to college and got a job, which you know is unfortunate, but most of us have to do it. And that job was in New Orleans. So, I got a chance to continue duck hunting. And then oil business moved me to Houston about 32 years ago now. And I got the tail end of the really great white goose years on the prairie. And nowadays, with fewer geese, moved more to duck hunting. And it’s almost as fun.
Ramsey Russell: It’s funny you say that, because 30 some odd years ago, I was at Mississippi State University. And back when I was in high school in study hall, some people called it detention. I would go through the old hunting magazines, field and stream or what not. And back in those days there was always, I was fascinated by the snow goose stories. And back in those days, they were hunting over sheets or diapers or cloth or tablecloth, something white. It is really 30-40 years ago it is what it has become, snow goose hunting. And I was fascinated because I was born and raised in the Delta and to my knowledge, I don’t remember driving out through agricultural fields and seeing masses of white birds like we see now. They were, I can remember them flying over the neighborhood, migratory high flying south and they were coming down here to the coastal marshes and Haglund in Texas. And through a friend of a friend, of a friend I booked a trip down here. It was the first time I’d ever left the state of Mississippi to hunt anything. And the little snow geese was five. We also shot speckled belly, shot a few ducks coming into the decoys and it was just amazing. And it really and truly, it was kind of like, I was thinking on the drive over here this morning. It kind of just the idea that it’s Duck Season Somewhere, else than Mississippi occurred, and it began this whole long odyssey right there on this Katy Prairie and 30 years later I mean, I was just hanging on for dear life, running through Houston like traffic. And had I not seen the water tower with the geese, that said Katy Texas, I wouldn’t have known where I was. Right by the big stack of interstates and highways. I had no idea where I was. Didn’t look anything like it did 30 years ago.
Rob Sawyer: No, that’s absolutely right. It’s been, we call it death by 1000 cuts. And so, today’s generation of hunters when they think of the changes, they tend to think of the white goose. But those changes have been occurring over the last 120-130 years. And what the four generations before us lost the whooping crane. They lost the canvas backs. They lost the big numbers of mallards. Then, came the white geese. As one guy told me when I interviewed him, he said, well, when that old white goose came, we sort of forgot about the fact we lost all our mallards. And change is certain and not all of its good.
Ramsey Russell: Yep, change happens. And there’s nothing we can do to stop change really. As a goose hunter here in Texas, what was the transition? How did you go from avid hunter to these magnificent books? And these aren’t flimsy little paperback books. Folks, these are great big coffee table books, that it’ll take you a while to get through and read and absorb the information. But how did that happen?
Rob Sawyer: Well, it really wasn’t supposed to. Well, every place that I moved and lived and visited, everywhere around the world where I hunted, I’d always look for waterfowl history books. I loved to buy one or two and see the old boats, the old schooners, the old sculling skiffs and the old wooden decoys. So, when I moved to Texas, I went looking around for those kinds of books. They were all over from the Chesapeake Bay, all over from Louisiana. And there wasn’t anything in Texas. So, I called some outdoor writers and some biologists and I said, if you guys would write these, a book or something, I’ll go out on weekends and make interviews for you and I’ll do research for you. But there’s a book I want to read and it’s not out there. And nobody took me up on it and their quote was right. It’s too much work and not enough money. But it turned out to be a great hobby. What I’ve done for years.
Ramsey Russell: Great life passion wasn’t it? Great purpose in life for waterfowl. And I’ve always been enamored myself with the history. I think of the Chesapeake Bay and did not know until you said that, that’s where you’re from. I think of it in a lot of respect, as the cradle of American Water fowling. Because there’s so many books written on the market hunting and the decoy carving. But you know, until I stumbled across your book several years ago myself, and a client had given me that 100 years or showed me that 100 years of water fowling. I had no idea there was that kind of history in Texas, Texas, big trophy deer, exotic ranches. I had no idea. There was a real water fowling culture at one time here.
Rob Sawyer: It was a remarkable culture and I was surprised too. But I was also really glad because I didn’t know, when I started it, whether I had a book or not. The market hunting in Texas approached what it was, on the Chesapeake Bay, approached it a little bit later in history and didn’t last as long.
Ramsey Russell: You say it approached what it was. What do you mean?
Rob Sawyer: By that, I mean there used to be what was called Canvasback Wars. So, the Chesapeake Bay Susquehanna flats was producing an average of 15000 to 30000 to 40,000 canvasbacks for the local market and just like a lot of things each year, they needed new marketplace. Demand exceeded capacity. So, they started shooting a few in Currituck Sound sent those up to the Chesapeake Bay region, New York, down to Philadelphia, Baltimore Washington. But then, we started sending Texas canvasbacks up. It took the railroad to do it. And railroad was late to Texas, compared to what it was on the east coast. But once Texas got ice in a railroad, the rest was history. And we had numerous canvasbacks. There was an outfit in a place called Lake Surprise. In fact, you’re going there tonight. Right next to it, an oyster bite. So, it’s over in Chambers County and a walk area, monstrous freshwater ecosystem right next to salt water. And the wild celery grew there just like it did in the Susquehanna Flat. So, famous old name in Texas is Colonel Moody and Moody was Galveston. And Colonel Moody’s hobby was shooting ducks, but he didn’t like to pay all that money for his guesthouse and his guide. So, he ran, he let a couple of gentlemen run a market hunting outfit for him. And at the peak, he was shipping 10,000 canvasbacks north per year. Now the interesting thing was that Chesapeake Bay started getting a little bit ornery about that. So, it was a big old battle in the newspaper. And the deal was, if you want second rate canvasbacks then go ahead and buy them from Texas.
Rob Sawyer: And that was the canvasback wars. And it went on for a little while it got pretty nasty in the press.
Ramsey Russell: Nasty how? I mean, what did Texas say? Our canvasbacks are bigger. Everything’s bigger in Texas.
Rob Sawyer: Exactly. Right. So, what Texas did was started under selling the market and that made him even more angry.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. I had no idea of that. What are some other stories from those market hunting days? That was a good one.
Rob Sawyer: Well, you know what surprised me is seeing things on the market hunters lists like passenger pigeons.
Ramsey Russell: Were they in Texas.?
Rob Sawyer: Oh yeah, huge numbers.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Rob Sawyer: Huge numbers. And they call the pigeons, wild pigeons and they sold them for about 75 cents a dozen. The other thing that surprised me was seeing whooping cranes on a list of available waterfowl in the Galveston newspapers. Also, swans. Ramsey in your trips to Texas, I don’t think you’ve seen too many swans come into your decoys.
Ramsey Russell: No, I have not. Never.
Rob Sawyer: But they covered the entire coastline.
Ramsey Russell: I had read, reading some of Nash Buckingham’s. I’m from Mississippi of course. But reading some of Nash Buckingham stories like Up in Northern Mississippi, there’s lakes in the Mississippi Delta named Swan Lake and they talked about seeing swan. But very rarely, do you see the occasional tundra swan in Mississippi and usually they’re juvenile birds that are just lost or waiver.
Rob Sawyer: And my favorite is, every now and then a swan would make its way to Texas in the mid 1950’s to even the 1970’s and somebody’d shoot one and they take a picture of themselves with this, what they call the Greater Snow Goose.
Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah the Greater Snow Goose.
Rob Sawyer: I loved seeing those. In fact, I think a lot of your listeners may have heard of Eagle Lake and that’s one of the, that and Katy drove through there today [**00:14:20]. Those were the big goose hunting areas for a while. And two big names were Jimmy Reel and Marvin Tyler. And what the story goes, told by Marvin’s son Clifton, that it was 1964. For some reason, the trumpeter swans came through here and this guy came in with four trumpeters and that they’d shot and he carried him right into the restaurant, didn’t know what they were. So, the way the story goes is, everybody was impressed with those big old geese except for Jimmy Reel. And Jimmy Reel and the guy had walked in, he just stopped, he braced himself at the front door and he said, get him out of here.
Ramsey Russell: Oh he knew.
Rob Sawyer: He knew they were not greater snow geese at all. So, the swans were part of the market hunting story and huge numbers of birds and you have to look at these poor, I hate to say that but not necessarily a fluent waterman community around Texas. It was rough to live here in the turn of the century. They made their money with oystering, fishing and shooting ducks. So, imagine the year was 1878. And this refrigerated steamer came into Galveston Bay and wanted to take barrels of canvasbacks to London and see what they were, what they sell for in the marketplace. 1878 and they sold for $25 a pair.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Rob Sawyer: Think of that money.
Ramsey Russell: That was good money.
Rob Sawyer: That was real good money.
Ramsey Russell: It’s not bad money now.
Rob Sawyer: That’s true.
Ramsey Russell: That’s pretty damn good money back then.
Rob Sawyer: Yes sir. It was.
Ramsey Russell: What was the scale of shooting back then? I mean, were their clubs back then?
Rob Sawyer: Yes, that’s kind of interesting because, in Texas because market hunting started late. Mainly because there was no infrastructure, no ice houses, trains came first to the east side of the state and then moved down. So, things came late compared to the east coast. So, when the train came it did two things. It brought sportsmen south. And a lot of sportsmen and Texas was called the last frontier of wild duck shooting. And a lot of promotional articles and clubs immediately started following the railroads. Well, going the other way, were the market hunters, all the ducks that they had shot, and it got to a point in Texas pretty quick within about 20 years where the Market Hunter was competing with the sport hunter, the wealthy sport hunter. And you know, the wealthy sport hunter like those big numbers of birds. They like that 1000 bird morning. So did the market Hunter. And what I thought was so fascinating as Texas is, most people are aware of the 1918 Migratory Treaty Act. The law that really put the teeth into cutting down on, not eliminating but cutting back on market hunting. But Texas its own Anti Market Hunting Law in 1903. It was a state law and it was all done by politicians who duck hunted. They got tired of going out in the duck blind and finding that the Market hunter had already been there before and not shooting any ducks. So, it wasn’t done for conservation. It was done solely because they want to shoot more birds.
Ramsey Russell: I had heard something very similar in a book written by Mr. Caputh and he was talking about hunting down the deep south. And a lot of those sports were coming out of Chicago. They had great places over in Arkansas, Sunken Land. And back in those days, they didn’t hunt every weekend all the time. They weren’t passionate, obsessed, anything like we are today. They would leave a busy job in a busy life and travel by train down to Sunken Lands in Arkansas, ducks hunters come for two weeks, go back and make a living. That’s how they did it and they get there, and some of the bags were astounding in the hundreds.
Rob Sawyer: Yes.
Ramsey Russell: But it got to be, to where they would get there and market hunters would move in and made their living, put a bunch of ducks in wooden barrels, salted down and got him on the steamboat there on the Mississippi River or the train. And they hired caretakers, they tried to hire little posies [**00:18:31], to kind of police and it never worked. And I asked Dr. Caputh one time, did he intend to spell it out like this? Because it wasn’t until I was reading that book that I realized, how migratory bird game laws as we know them. Unplugged guns and sell of ducks and all that kind of stuff came to be. And if those rich sports went home, work through the political system, not to conserve water fowl, but to get market hunting out and make it more available to themselves. And once they got legislated here, I mean, you think about some of these laws here. I’m not saying, I think, laws are good. That’s what I’m trying to say. But at the same time a lot of migratory bird laws were stuck with today or vest to go from market hunting day to protect the sportsmen’s on his property resources, his shooting opportunity. That’s kind of, you saw the same thing here in Texas.
Rob Sawyer: Yeah, and it was contentious. There was quite a battle zone over in between market hunting and the sports, because if you think about it from the people standpoint the people are going to boarding houses, what do they want to eat? And while in those days they wanted to eat fish, oyster and ducks. All of a sudden, all the ducks are being pulled off the menus. So, you’ve got restaurant owners, you’ve got market hunters that are of course waterman and they want to make a living. And when you yank that resource away from them and gave it to a privatized smaller group of people, that caused a lot of discounts for nation.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, know how it feels today to be hunting. I don’t know public land and the blind over the guys that beats to the whole you were going to our banging ducks and you’re sitting there birdwatching. That’s contentious enough, but when it starts interfering with your making a very meaningful living for back in that day and time or you’re having paid a lot of money and invested money into a resource and somebody is just in it for the money coming in and shooting your ducks. That I can say, what I would make a, did you ever hear of any gunfights? Old west gunfights or gun battles or fights or anything going on like that?
Rob Sawyer: There wasn’t much of that. They were boat burnings, mostly.
Ramsey Russell: Boat burning?
Rob Sawyer: Oh yeah. That market gunner had a skiff pulled up anywhere, it was going to get burned. It never got worse than that. Most in Texas, most of the poor sportsmen just shot themselves. The gun safety didn’t exist. And Texas was losing as best I can tell somewhere between 70 and about 120 documented accidents per season.
Ramsey Russell: My goodness. They’re probably shooting black powder back in other days.
Rob Sawyer: Right up until the 80s. Yeah. But 1880 right about there, is the threshold where we went to white powder and then preloaded shells and gunning technology exceeded any other technology in our sport. John Browning started putting out the pumps and the auto loaders in 1880s. So here are these sportsmen and market hunters that their boat might be an old wooden leaky Cyprus vessel with one oar but they were shooting some fine armaments and they were capable of taking out a lot of birds.
Ramsey Russell: Well, while we’re talking about some of the equipment, the boats and the guns and things that nature did. During your research, did you discover much or find much about the hunting methods or hunting styles or hunting techniques of hunters back in those days? Down here in coastal Texas?
Rob Sawyer: Yeah, I looked hard for and I also looked for what was different about Texas than parts of the other parts of the United States. And one of them that I stumbled on, that I really enjoyed, was something called ox hunting.
Ramsey Russell: Ox hunting. What is ox hunting?
Rob Sawyer: It was honest to God, Ramsey, what they did, and they were worth a lot of money. People would train steers oxen to the gun. So, the way it worked is, you have a couple steers, a couple of oxes that would take a card out and they would locate feeding birds and then 2-3 sportsmen would stand behind the oxen and it would move closer and closer and closer to the duck pond and then they lay their guns over the top of this beast and shoot the pond.
Ramsey Russell: Like the punt guns?
Rob Sawyer: No, these were those 8 gauges, 10 gauges and it went into the 1930s and 1940s. So, by then they were using auto loader 12’s and things like that. But in Texas it was a huge deal. People would come down from the north just to use the moving blind, the steer hunting, it was a huge deal. I got a bunch of stories on those and they are a lot of fun. There was a great quote from Lyle Jordan who was actually, he was the first commercial goose operation in Katy, and his dear wife provided me with a number of tapes of Lyle before he passed away. And so, in his country voice, he’s describing steer hunting on the Texas Prairie. And he goes, and let me tell you, there ain’t nothing that has a more surprised look on his face than a duck when he sees guys step out from behind it with shotguns.
Ramsey Russell: Wow, that’s a pretty good description. That’s a great story too. How do you think they hunted, the big bays out for the divers? And, how do you think they hunted those? Like we know up in Chesapeake Bay, they had massive spreads of wooden decoys and sink boxes and sometimes bait piles and different stuff like that. How did they typically hunt them down here in coastal Texas?
Rob Sawyer: I wish I could give you a short answer to that Ramsey. The problem is Texas is so diverse. So, if you start up in the southeast side, you’re in the black mud marshes that looks just like Louisiana. By the time you get down to south Texas, you’re in these beautiful flat sailing bays of manatee grasses. As you can imagine, the style of shooting both market and sport are very, very different. So, in the southeast part, in the black mud, what they used were, small skiffs and they used two or three shotguns, with as much magazine capacity that they could. Very few decoys. What they did, they didn’t want to wait. So, what they did was, they shot a few, stuck a few out on twigs and then just kept shooting. Now let’s go to the whole different spectrum. Let’s start heading down to coastal bend and more of the sailing bays with hard bottoms. So, there was a few sink boxes used not many, not the same popularity as Susquehanna and a few punting or gunning skiffs. But they did use punt guns for part of the market period. And they used them well, like a lot of places, well after they were outlawed. And they used lights for some of those skiffs. So, some of that was done at night time.
Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy.
Rob Sawyer: So, there’s one story that came out of that, I just loved it. And it came from a Robin Dowdy who was a professor in Texas and wrote a beautiful book on declining resources. And he told a story where there’s a place called Harbor Island which is actually about to become a supertanker port. But if people stopped and looked at it and its history, it was one of the finest gunning areas in Texas and what made it so special was right adjacent to it is a big channel that leads out to the gulf of Mexico and then two famous islands, San Josie and Matagorda Island. And they used to shoot so many ducks there that the sharks would come in from the gulf into their edge of their decoys and you know, like the alligators do today and the sharks would stay on the edge of their decoys and feast on ducks.
Ramsey Russell: That’s incredible.
Rob Sawyer: Yeah, that was a great story.
Ramsey Russell: That is incredible. You got any more stories like that? Like I know from looking, reading your book and talking to you before the thing, I mean, you start throwing some shorebird numbers out and some of the clubs getting and competitions. I’m like, holy cow.
Rob Sawyer: Well, yeah, I’ve got stories like that in three books, Ramsey. But there’s another one that I think is kind of unique to Texas, I can’t tell for sure, but I’ve never run across it anywhere. Something called the prize hunts. So as these sportsmen started, mainly Texas folks. So, cities were competitive and the big shooting cities at the time, turn of the century, late 1880s forward, Waco was big, Core San Antonio, Galveston, Houston. So, they would compete, they had a competitive spirit with a shotgun. And so, what they did was something called a prize hunt, where they took a list of birds and gave them points and you ever had the most points at the end won. And the list of birds they shot was fascinating. By today’s standards, it’s not very much of a conservation movement, but times were different. So, the list was snipe rails, bittern, curl lose, plumbers, woodcock, prairie chickens. Another that’s the Atwater prairie chicken. It’s just about extinct. But there’s a few left ducks, owls, hawks, geese and sandhill cranes. So, their price hunts were big sport and they would take the trains, they would pack them with families. There would be a car that just was the gunning car. Another railcar was the seafood car. It was a big deal. They had bands with them. And then the men and a few women went out to shoot as many birds as they could. And some of the numbers were pretty phenomenal. I guess, about the highest number was, that I’ve seen is a Houston match with 26 shooters to a team and they came back with almost 5000 snakes.
Ramsey Russell: Of what period of time would they have done that record?
Rob Sawyer: 1880-1900.
Ramsey Russell: How long do you think it took them to shoot that many birds I wonder?
Rob Sawyer: Well, if they shot like me, they’d be added a few days. But they had a time limit and usually that was afternoon to dark.
Ramsey Russell: My goodness. So, lunch to dark.
Rob Sawyer: Yes sir.
Ramsey Russell: That’s some good shooting
Rob Sawyer: It is. When you think about it.
Ramsey Russell: what else did you find interesting in all this research?
Rob Sawyer: Well, you talk about Texas and it’s you know, everything’s bigger in Texas. Well, when it came to duck hunting clubs, the state did have that title. That title was earned in 1899. So, you had a New York family that had a lot of money wanted to come to Texas and start a little old duck club. He started one, called the Tarpon club. And that Tarpon club I mentioned, Harbor Island and ST Joe’s Island was located right across from Harbor Island on St. Joe’s. So, think about 1899, very remote. So, you’re going to start a fluent hunting club on this island. The nearest town was Rockport, very small Waterman’s town. But you had one train line that stopped at the edge of Rockport and that’s what brought the sportsman. So, in its very first year they built this massive complex, the fanciest lodge. I think it was three storey’s with it, looked like a New York hotel. And the way the newspapers wrote it up was, it had 300 members. It was considered the wealthiest club of any type in the world at that time. Their wealth combined, reached up to hundreds of millions of dollars and more politicians and businesses than any other organization in Texas, including two Presidents, Grover Cleveland and President McKinley. So, the first gasoline engine in a boat in Texas was ones that were brought in, to ferry people from the Rockport docks out to the island, but nobody knew how to maintain them. Nobody knew how to pilot them. So, they took the two of the guides or one manager and a guide, took them up by train to Chicago where they learned about “combustible engines”.
Ramsey Russell: Got to keep those motors going.
Rob Sawyer: That’s right.
Ramsey Russell: What kind of, 1899, that had been preceded the Migratory Bird Treaty actually. They were probably going out and shooting pretty respectable bags in those days.
Rob Sawyer: Tremendous. They sort of, the high-end number of the great places in Texas was usually about 1000 ducks to a handful of gunners. Occasionally, it would be one gunner that would do 1000 ducks. But most of the time it was a group of up to six.
Ramsey Russell: Again, just going back to the state of Utah. I was a guest at a, there’s lot of old camps that predated Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Like these camps were established in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And again, the railroad and those two rails, one from the east, the one from the west met in the middle. Boom connected the two sides and it brought all the sportsmen in. But looking back at some of the logbooks, going back in the late 1800s- 1900s it was just astounding. It’s like Argentina today.
Rob Sawyer: That’s correct.
Ramsey Russell: They’d go out an open day and shoot, members would shoot 70-80 ducks and it was just another day out in paradise just another day in Texas. That’s just hard to get my mind wrapped around back then. And you know, it was a different time. They really back in those days, they either didn’t think about the future. Where would these birds and these populations be in the year 2020, or if they did, it’s my understanding based in wildlife management background, it was viewed as just a depleting resource when it’s gone, it’s gone. They didn’t understand the concept of management. You know, it was just like putting a big bag of M&M’s in a Ziploc bag and enjoy it while it lasts because when it’s gone, it’s gone.
Rob Sawyer: That’s an excellent point I’ve never heard about, you know, it is a depleting resource and we’re just going to enjoy it while it’s here. But certainly, there are examples of that. The passenger pigeon, great example. Carolina parakeet, buffalo. Great examples. But I’d like to think and I would say that those are events that did wake a lot of the sportsmen up. New York city was, very different than it is now. But New York was headquarters for all the great influential sportsmen during the day. That’s where all your big sporting magazines came out of. Everybody traveled from New York. Your writers were there. It was the place and that’s where an awful lot of our game laws got their start.
Ramsey Russell: Well, moreover than that. It’s interesting to me how modern technology of a railroad, which is kind of becoming obsolete. You know, it’s nothing like what it was now. Even the greyhound bus is nothing like it was back in its hay day. It brought in a whole new era. And you think about preceding the big club, the big Tarpon Club. What you think of it being market hunters, people that were consuming a resource for profit, along comes the sportsman, along comes the duck hunter’s conflicts and everything else though there may be, because they enjoyed what they did recreationally. I think it gave birth to conservation ethos. I think they said, wait a minute. Maybe, my grandkids want to come out here and shoot ducks like this one day. I think we duck hunters, we always say hunting is conservation. And I think there’s a lot of truth to, I think history bears the truth that hunters woke up and said, how can we do this?
Rob Sawyer: That’s an excellent point. And hunters get such a bad rep and some of them deserve it. But hunting as it’s intended to be, whether it’s big game to small game, it’s the sportsman that put the dollars towards things that would never be put there any other way, towards habitat, towards management. I once had a birder tell me that. Well, the only reason that you put all this water on the prairie for waterfowl is so you can shoot them.
Ramsey Russell: And we have to own the fact that as hunters we’re not living back in the late 1800s and providing meals for our family. Of course, we eat and I love to eat duck. And I know a lot of people that do and I know a lot of good duck cooks. But at the end of the day, we’re hunting them for our recreational enjoyment. We have to own it. But what we do as hunters digging up to our elbows in our pockets, putting our time and our money into habitats so that we can go enjoy quality hunting experience, buying duck stamps at the federal government, can help produce more ducks and things of that nature while we take hundreds or thousands of ducks accumulatively over season and as a continent nonetheless, we provide for future water fowl and subsidiary benefits for other species associated.
Rob Sawyer: Absolutely Right. So, I thought about our comments for a minute and I said, we’ve created a little pond that’s in front of me this morning. I’m going to see 1000 ducks, and me and my buddy are going to shoot 12. You know, the other 900 some ducks are probably really pleased with what we’ve done. And I almost got a moment of hesitation from her.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I just believe that, you take a landowner or a club or something like that, that puts a lot of great duck hunting habitat. Most clubs aren’t shooting at daylight to dark, 60 days a year in the Central Flyway. They’re hunting at mornings, they’re hunting in Summer. The club I was hunting with this morning, not too far from here, they hunt Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday. And every afternoon, seven days a week. And four days, four full days, the ducks get their resource. And they’re taking just a part of my little slice of pie, of the big pie. And if you’re a bird watcher, you get to enjoy the benefit of those ducks being attracted to that area.
Rob Sawyer: Absolutely.
Ramsey Russell: And the duck benefit because they’re gaining a biological fitness to reproduce and fly back north and do ducky things for future years.
Rob Sawyer: Every time you take a sportsman out of the equation, there’s no volume of money that’s spent that can compete.
Ramsey Russell: The anti-hunters aren’t doing it, not here, not in Netherlands, not in Australia, Not anywhere that anti hunters exist. Are they putting their time and their money where their mouths are?
Rob Sawyer: Absolutely correct.
Ramsey Russell: Well, tell me some more of these great stories we can find in your books. Because this is a good topic.
Rob Sawyer: Well, I did collect a couple of them for you. And the stories were the most fun for me. I enjoyed hearing them, I enjoy collecting them. And I don’t tell them as good as the original story tellers do, but I sure have enjoyed them. So, one from Corpus Christi Bay. All the newspapers put out a publication. I guess it was 1905 and they were inviting sportsmen to come down to Corpus Christi because it was called a biological phenomenon in the bay. There was a floating island of ducks 10 miles long.
Ramsey Russell: I wonder what kind of ducks they were.
Rob Sawyer: That they didn’t say. But of course, if you look back on it, they had to be red heads, pin tails and a few blue bills. A lot of folks might remember a call that dominated the marketplace, a duck call in the 1950s. And for quite a while after that called the Jenson duck call and later sure shot. So, cowboy Fernandez ran that company for a long time. Everybody who knows, he knows, what a great storyteller he was. We just lost him recently. And for a boy with a straight face, old cowboy is looking in the eye and he says, you know, there’s sadar many good caller, duck callers in Jefferson County. That one year I put a mallard duck in a calling competition and it finished seventh. I love that one.
Ramsey Russell: You know, I’ve just got to go there because every time I hear about a Jenson and about cowboy Fernandez, I’m reminded of growing up in the delta and all the men that duck hunted, kind of blew a double reed against all. Every one of them and some of the guys that competed. One of the neighbors down the road showed his kids one time how he put a little piece of tin fall in between those double reeds to give it some high-end buzz that they like. And that’s what, he get out on the back patio and start calling and my dad might be flipping hamburgers, something about, he’d run inside and get his duck calling. He’d holler back years every three houses down, start calling. It was just, everybody got the call and just the whole neighborhood started coming.
Rob Sawyer: It was wonderful.
Ramsey Russell: And yeah, it was good times.
Rob Sawyer: That’s amazing. So, we have different cultures in Texas. So, if you look at the southeast, that’s a big southeast part of the state, a big Louisiana culture and that’s around Port Arthur and where you’re going on Oyster Bay. And they’re storytellers and they’re just wonderful folks. And so over at Port Arthur, people sit me down and they say, well if you’re going to write a book and you’re going to talk about Port Arthur, you need to know some things about Port Arthur. We took this very, very seriously for the last 100 years and indeed they did. In fact, Port Arthur was founded by a duck hunter. This was John Gates who came out of think Chicago, but he came, he was a Yankee, came down, went for a hunt on the edge of Sabine Lake killed 1000 ducks. And he built the first house on Sabine Lake. That and then a whole bunch of people followed him and his people were all investing people big money. And that’s how Port Arthur got its start. Because of duck hunting. So, I’ve got this gentleman saying you have to realize that in Port Arthur, all our Parish priests would duck hunt. So, we had to make accommodations for them and for the duck hunters. So, we used to have a mass at about four o’clock in the morning, finish it up fast and everybody jump on their four wheelers and go, this would have been 1970s to 1980s. And so, they get to the marsh by dawn. And then there was another priest, he was always running late to the regularly scheduled mass because he was duck hunting. So, they bought him a four-wheeler. I guess they had a separate collection plate and once they bought him a four-wheeler, he was completely out of excuses. Great story that comes out of what was called the Port Arthur Hunting Club. Really big hunting club in the area. And, I love the story, was told to me by a couple of different folks and always ended up the same way. So, the customer brought his hotshot vice president out for a duck hunt and Port Arthur with all that heavy cane, heavy grass is just filled with mosquitoes. They reached underneath the blind seat and pulled out a can of mosquito spray in the dark and started spraying themselves all over. And when it was dawn, what they realized was that the customer and the hotshot VP had actually pulled out the can of green paint.
Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah, the can of paint?
Rob Sawyer: They had painted each other quite green.
Ramsey Russell: That’s pretty funny.
Rob Sawyer: There was a gentleman at Oyster Bayou. His name was Freddie Absar. What a brilliant interview. Could listen to him for hours. The way he spoke, he was just. As he told me one day, he said, I’m having so much fun talking about duck hunting, I forgot you’re a Yankee. That’s the nicest thing somebody can say to you. So, his wife was listening to the stories and we were having a great day, great interview. And he talked about shooting ducks for all his customers where they would sit back and sleep in and he’d go out and shoot them all. And this would have been about 1940s. And he said, I had so many birds that if I were picking them up and they were still alive, the first thing I did, I just put their head in them in my mouth and I bite him through the head. The head would just crush. He said, when I look back, that’s the reason my teeth aren’t so good now. Well, his wife had never heard that story. They married 50 years, she had no idea. And she was just horrified. I mean he got himself in a lot of trouble on that one.
Ramsey Russell: No good night kisses.
Rob Sawyer: Yes sir. And there’s just a covey of stories like this one I enjoyed was Canada Ranch in East Bay Lodge over in Chambers County. That’s where Lyndon Johnson and John Connolly and a lot of the big players in Texas used to duck hunt on. It was at the Brawn and Root Lodge. And the manager and the guide had a pretty arrogant group of politicians come in to make a hunt and you know they have quiet ways to get even, and they didn’t want a guy, they just want to go hunt. So, they thought they were shooting white geese over their decoys. But, what they were shooting were pelicans and the dear old man that he was, he was probably 87-88. And he died a week after the interview. But he smiled. He goes, well, we sent him home with those pelicans. We even had them cleaned. Oh, so you can picture this white bird in the oven and
Ramsey Russell: Hope the windows were open.
Rob Sawyer: No kidding. No kidding. There was one of the things that Texans like the lot, we’re live decoys really. A lot of Texans quit when the live decoys were taken away in the 1930s.
Ramsey Russell: Did not know that.
Rob Sawyer: It was both geese and ducks. So, if you look at a place like Houston that enjoys its reputation as a modern cosmopolitan city. But I’ve got all these photographs of hunters in Houston that used to raise these mallards in their backyards right off a main street. So, you see pens of wild mallards. There was a gentleman named Peg Melton who was pretty well known in early Houston circles, good conservationist and on the Olympic shooting team of 1938, I believe it was. So like a lot of hunters, he raised his mallards and he would transport them at about three in the morning in these wooden cages. He was headed to Jackson Ranch in the WAC [**00:45:50] area and the cages fell out. The problem was in those days there’s no air conditioning. So, he’s chasing these mallards all down Main Street of Houston and people are opening up their windows and yelling out at him, woke everybody up on Main Street Houston with the live mallard decoys.
Ramsey Russell: Do you think they were hunting snow geese back then? With those live decoys?
Rob Sawyer: Only in certain places. You have to remember the distribution of snow geese in those days being right up until about 1950-1951. The snow geese were a black marsh bird. And as the biologists will tell you, there was no feed, no water between summer nesting and winter migration. They flew all the way from fill in the blank arctic circle.
Ramsey Russell: Hoping none of it all the way down to the gulf coast Marsh.
Rob Sawyer: Yes. One journey. And the stories that I think are true or there were times when they would fall out and you could go around and pick up white geese on the Texas coast that retired from the journey.
Ramsey Russell: Well, that brings up a good point because I am going over here to around Oyster Bay this afternoon. Going to duck hunt over there in the morning. And it’s no longer rice. But at one time, Texas was a very, very preeminent rice state. When did that all start? When were the snow geese able to kind of shortstop the marsh expand into rice fields and that became a big thing.
Rob Sawyer: Yeah, great question. And it’s a neat story. So, rice was early in Texas, 1898 was the first crop and it was Eagle Lake and then there were two other places, you’re sitting right now in what was the third rice crop that was grown. So, this one started just out the door of our house here in 1899. So, there were three places, three nucleus’s of rice that took off. Now you have to remember that, it wasn’t monoculture in those days. You could just barely work out 100-200 acres with your mules and your steam thrashers. So, rice would be mixed in with standing native prairie. So, once we got to the railroad, the train was such a big deal. Well, so was the tractor. And we started really turning the natural, the native prairie down and under and planting rice. So, my understanding is that the first big wads of geese hit Eagle Lake first, 1949. And all the duck hunters in that area were saying, well, you know, I think I want to try to shoot these and people didn’t know if they were worth eating. Well, now everybody on the coast knew, but up in the prairie, which in those days, it was a long way from the Texas coast. They didn’t know. And the geese would come in, in the early 1950s and then they would leave and go back to the coast. What changed the game were roos ponds. Once again, we go back to management, we go back to taking something that nature provides and maybe we change it. But whatever it is, we’re doing, we’re making it better for nature. And the first roos ponds started exploding the population and changing them from the black mud of the.
Ramsey Russell: Were they man made?
Rob Sawyer: Every one of them.
Ramsey Russell: So, it was like irrigation ponds for rice or ponds or lakes or water resources for civilization.
Rob Sawyer: You know, I always wondered about that, but as best I can tell, it was actually done by sportsmen in the 50’s who came up with an idea of building a roos pond for geese.
Ramsey Russell: And that again, sportsman.
Rob Sawyer: First one I think was just outside Eagle Lake, once again.
Ramsey Russell: That’s very interesting. That’s very, very interesting. And then, when did it go from, people are playing around with it or the goose good to eat. How to build a few ponds, exploded into what I called the Katy Texas Prairie became, I mean it was legendary.
Rob Sawyer: Yes, it was. And I sort of attributed to 1969 being the real key. That was Andy Griffith, Sam Snead and they took a hunt on what I think was, I remember right, ABC wide world of sports with Curt Goudy. So, there it is February. All these people like me are up in the north. You can’t hunt, it’s bloody cold. So, you’re actually stuck inside watching TV and as Marvin Tyler’s son put it, that television show with famous television screen characters hunting snow geese over white cloth diapers. He started, it sounded like a 10 gauge on a foggy morning. Everything changed. Everybody around the United States saw that show. I know, I did. And I said one day I’m going to shoot white geese in Texas over rags in a rice field and of course, one day I did. And that’s what started it. And it just exploded after that.
Ramsey Russell: It’s hard to believe. It’s just hard to believe that it was doable back in those days. I mean, because every time I came to Texas, we may not all limit, we may out of the shoot five, but we shot white geese in the decoy over very primitive decoys compared to these beautiful, realistic life like full body type hungover. It was incredible. Just old timey wind socks and a little dowels.
Rob Sawyer: Yes, and before that of course there were no dowels. It was a piece of white cloth over a piece of rice double. So, for me the Canada goose hunting on the Chesapeake Bay was a bit of a gentleman sport. You dug a pit or you were in a nice blind and you put out 36 decoys and you weren’t covered in mud, you weren’t covered in mosquitoes and you go home clean enough, you could go to work. So, I come to Texas and my very first white goose hunt. And I walked out and I said, where’s the duck blind? And somebody grunts and points to a levee. I said, where are the decoys? And they had a bag of rags. And as this was coming together in the pre-dawn hours, I said, I don’t think these Texas boys really know how to hunt geese. Now this was Larry Gore’s first year and I was probably one of his first bookings. This would have been 81 or 82. And so, the pretentious northerner changed his whole tune when the entire sky filled up with these white birds that were just screaming and squawking and doing what we call Tornado. Going down from then on. I would lay on any rice levy at any time and put anything white out on the field and expect a good day. But very different goose hunt than what I’ve grown up with.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it’s totally different. And the geese work differently. And so you set up differently. And I can remember those days, laying in a white coat in a muddy, muddy fell. Water running down my waiters and my pants or my neck. But it was worth it. It was just worth it. Looking over your feet and seeing all those white birds in the day just growing like a cloud and coming into the decoys are just hanging right there.
Rob Sawyer: Once you’ve seen it, you cannot forget it.
Ramsey Russell: Back when blogging was a deal. I wrote a blog one time talking about my first trip going down to the Katy Prairie and experience in that. The limit was five geese. And the best age to shoot five white birds and it was enough. And then, there were water issues, their habitat changes, commercialization, whatever. It just, it changed. And a young man reached out to me that’s all this was. Gosh, this has had to been 10 years ago and invited me to come down to Eagle Lake And he said, man, I’d really like you to come down. We still hunting my old school. We put rags out and we hand call, no electronic calls. And I think my boys were 10-12, and I want them to come down and see it. I’ll tell you this. This has been 10 years ago because I had that little yellow lab. It’s now retired. And when she was a pub and we go down and it was opening week and of course we limit on spec like that. But it was just quick. There may have been 7-8 of us and we just limited on specks like nothing. But they worked those geese in with their old salt had been doing this forever. And it was a young man, they were blowing goose calls. And it was magic. It was really exactly like I remember it being 30 years ago and then a little bit later there was a little piece of remnant marsh or roost back behind us. And I don’t know back behind us, a half mile, let’s say the other side of the field. And we were picking up, standing around, waiting on some flight to go. They’re white, look, they’re blowing up, they’re rolling and that was, it was impressive amount of bird, 2500-3000 birds roll. And I said you should have seen that 30 years ago. Whenever tens of thousands.
Rob Sawyer: Yes.
Ramsey Russell: A lot of birds now are short stopping up in Arkansas, There’s a lot of agriculture, there’s a lot of storage pond, there’s a lot of this perfect habitat for them. They don’t have to come to the marsh. I was actually down in south of Venice Louisiana with a good buddy of mine one time, it’s just, we’re getting those boats and go down river, down the Mississippi River and a big boat 8 to 10 miles and then stop and put a pirogue off and paddle off into the stuff and one day, and it’s just a horrific wind and rain and everything. The horrific tale about that kind of weather being good for duck hunting. I hate hunting that kind of weather. And I’ve never seen it to really be true, where we hunt and rice fields and stuff like this. But you get off in the wash habitat is often a big great lake. It blows those birds off the body of water. That particular day was epic. We shot our canvas back limit. We shot our pin tails. We shot the teal and just the marsh ducks and we shot about three or four snow geese. And it been years, it’s been since he was a little boy, since he had killed snow geese in the marsh.
Ramsey Russell: Times changed.
Rob Sawyer: Yes. They do.
Ramsey Russell: Not always for the best. What do you think? What do you know, what have you seen as contributing to a lot of the changes going on down here in terms of, because times certainly have changed since the man go out and shoot ship 10,000 campus back anywhere. What do you think’s happening down here?
Rob Sawyer: Well, you take it back, we have to take it back to 1870- 1881 of the first things they did was, take these big beautiful inland marshes and start to drain them. So that took a lot of fresh water out of the natural lowlands. That was kind of number one. Number two was, our bays used to be what we call sealed bays. So that was no deep channels. So, these bays will hold a lot of fresh water next to a scale and Gulf of Mexico and the amount of grasses that the ducks had access to was phenomenal. So, we start dredging out the channels. What do we do? We change the bay salinity we lose the food. More recently, it’s like we use the term death by 1000 cuts. So, when we went through a seven-year drought, the water was cut off for the first time in history to agriculture in Texas. So that could be used for Texas cities. Well, that’s not how that law was written or intended when it first came out in the 1911-1910. So, the farmers lost their water. Well, So, did the duck hunters. Rice is a water intensive crop. And the first crop that went was rice. And within two years you could watch the numbers of geese follow the number of rice acreage. So, we lost, we gave our resource away because we made a choice about water. Today, remind you, Texas still has some of the finest waterfowl in the world and you’ve seen it. Species have changed a lot. We have more teal, Gadwall compared to the mallards and the greater Canada geese that we used to have. The thing that worries me now is, what we’re doing to our coastal environments. Just, we’re going a little crazy with our petrochemical industry, all of Corpus Christi Bay now where a lot of these stories are from just ringed with concrete and import-export facilities as well as refineries. We’ve done that at the Port Arthur. We’re doing that in a lot of places. We’re taking the most precious resource, I think Texas has. Which is it’s what we’re even up to 30 years ago, just pristine coastal environments. And we’re turning them, as I call it, we’re turning them into New Jersey. New Jersey was a spectacular coastal water fowling mecca in the 1800’s and we know what parts of it look like now. Well, we’re doing our best to do the same thing
Ramsey Russell: You know, I’ve always said that I have come to believe, at the ripe old age of 54 that the future of hunting lies in its past. And, and we sat down at the table a little while ago and started talking about history and some of these wonderful stories, the history of Texas, water fowling. And I certainly, want to have you come back on to tell more. And I didn’t really expect to stumble upon railroads and hunters as conservationist. I just didn’t expect that to come out of this conversation. But I think, it’s a good reminder for anybody listening that with all the things going on, any duck blind, I’m sitting in the country, its recently, this morning, the last three mornings, people lamenting the changes that have happened. What’s going on? Where are my ducks? Where are my geese? Where are the speckled bellies? Where are the snow geese? Where are the mallard? The pin tails, everybody nationwide is asking this question and I don’t think there’s a single answer. There’s not a single answer. I think of it like a big long, I remember back in mass school when my head was swimming, I knew, I was going to flunk the class anyway and some foreign gratitude and got up, wrote some long algorithm on a child board. You know, there’s a lot of input to what’s going on. But I believe that now more than ever, we all need to stone up and man up and, and commit our time and our money into some form of conservation right in our backyard, if nothing else. If everybody listening, if all the duck converse nationwide would commit something, become involved in the organization and commit something to make duck hunting and duck habitat better in your backyard. It be okay. It be better, than it is right now.
Guys, if you’re listening, we’re definitely going to have Rob Sawyer back on, to talk about some of these topics. Hit us up inboxing, social media or emails or text. You can reach me in a million different ways and ask some questions. When I get back if we’ve got some questions, I’m sure he’ll be happy to answer them next time he’s on. Until then Rob, How can people get in touch with you? And how can they find your books? Everybody needs these books on their coffee table, especially if you live in a state of Texas, you all need to have these books on your coffee table. They’re treasures, they truly are. Tell us how we can get in touch with you and how we can find your books.
Rob Sawyer: Well, I appreciate those words Ramsey. I really do. For me, when I collected duck books, I didn’t care what state they were from, because they were they were duck stories. I guess the best places is a web page that we built called www.robertksawyer.com. And then I think if you search on Facebook or Instagram, it’s probably Rob Sawyer or Texas waterfowl history or hunting, any of those things will get you to me. But that website is probably the best way www.robertksawyer.com
Ramsey Russell: Thank you for your time. I bet it’s nap time since you’re also a duck guide full time Rob. But folks, thank you all for listening to Duck Season Somewhere. The future of hunting lies in its past. Don’t forget our history. Thank you all for listening. See you next time. Duck Season Somewhere.