EP 384. The Eider Godfather

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Duck Season somewhere. And if I ask you the question, what duck do you think of when you think of New England, when you think of the Atlantic Ocean, when you think of Massachusetts, when you think of Maine? It’s got to be the common eider. Probably one of the most iconic species in the United States. I’ve got to travel clear up to New England to get a chance to hunt them, and I have, I love them. Joining me today is the eider godfather, Mister Phil Stanton, who knows a lot more about eiders than I do and has got some great stories to tell. Phil, how the heck are you?

Phil Stanton: I’m doing great, Ramsey. Thank you.

Ramsey Russell: Where do you call home, Phil?

Phil Stanton: Right now I’m living on Cape Cod in the town of Falmouth, an area about two miles from Woods Hole, which is the marine biological capital of the world. And I’m probably, as the crow flies about half a mile from the ocean.

Ramsey Russell: Are you from Massachusetts?

Phil Stanton: I was born and raised in Massachusetts. I actually was born in Watertown, which is a small town outside of Boston. And that’s where I started my interest in wildlife and birds. And then from there I went to college, and two or three colleges, and ended up in the town of Upton, Mass, which is part of Worcester County, which is in the interior part of the state, and had a farm called “Wild Is The Wind Farm”. I used to go back and forth to the coast in those days to do my hunting and now I live on the coast.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. What is your relationship with duck hunting, when did you start, How did you start, and who did you hunt with, who brought you into the sport of duck hunting?

Phil Stanton: Well, I was always interested in marine biology. In the summers, we went to Marshfield, Massachusetts, in a little town called, well it was Marshfield but in a section called Brant Rock. And Brant Rock had a large rock that went out and it got its name because people used to go on the end of Brant Rock to shoot Brant, particularly in the spring in those days. And my interest in the ocean. I ended up getting a skiff and doing some lobster fishing and raking sea moss and was very interested in duck hunting. And my friends and their family, a traditional family in Marshfield, last name of Blackmun, actually had land that went back to the charter days of colonial America, and they were great sea duck hunters. And I guess that’s where I got my first introduction to sea duck hunting, and went out with them, and I think my first hunt was in 1954.

The Early Days of Sea Duck Hunting

“In those days we hunted in small skiffs and some people would row out, others would take a small engine. In those days, in order to take a crippled bird, you had to stop the engine and lift up the engine before you could fire.”
— Phil Stanton

Ramsey Russell: Oh my gosh.

Phil Stanton: Just a teenager. And in those days we hunted in small skiffs, and some people would row out, others would take a small engine. In those days, in order to take a crippled bird you had to stop the engine and lift up the engine before you could fire cripple. Nowadays, you are allowed to pursue them to a certain degree. And every year starting in September, around September 15, because the season started earlier then, people would go out off the coast and there would be a bunch of boats that would go out of the Cut River and Green Harbor. It was pretty well organized. The first person that went out got set up, and people had to either set up inside them or outside them, and you made a line of boats. One boat might be 300 yards offshore, and the next boat would be probably 300 or 400 yards off that and it would sort a make a line going out on an angle off the coast. The idea in those days because the scoters and eiders, and in those days we called the scoters “coot”, not to be confused with the mud hen coot but that was just the New England name for the coot, they used to call the old squaws quandi. All the scoters, whether they were white-winged surf or common scoters, were referred to as coots, and the eider was just referred to as the sea duck. Those were just common names, and of course, common names have always been confusing to people. But getting back to the hunting, the birds would be flying from the north going south, and they would come in lines almost like a shoestring line, If you look towards the horizon, you could sort of see it waving up and down because Sea ducks always fly quite low to the water. They never high flying bird. They fly a few feet off the top of the water in lines. The idea was when they hit one of these lines, if the flock was flying down in towards the coast, it would hit the first group of gunners, and they’d be in these dories, sometimes waving a black flag or just hollering at them to get their attention. You’d sometimes just yell, whoa-ha-ha, just any kind of sound to make them turn to see your decoys. Most of the decoys in those days were silhouettes.

Ramsey Russell: Like V-boards.

Phil Stanton: Not three boards. They were stacked two and two, one on each side, but there was a wide bottom one, and you’d stack them in between until you had maybe a set of twelve doubles. They would all be stacked up. So the first one might only be a foot wide and the bottom one might be almost three to four feet wide. You’d kind of just drop them off the stern as you were going along. The first ones first until you had twelve of them out, and then you’d drop a line, and then you’d have another group of silhouettes. We also called them shadows and up in Maine, they called them sleds. And you would put them out and they just kind of, go up and down the surf. Sometimes we’d have some real giant ones that we almost referred to as a “luma,” and we’d put those out a little bit further and that would just kind of get the attention and get the flock moving. But the idea was if the birds came to the outside line, let’s say three-quarters of a mile offshore, they would commit to the decoys and then would break up, and sometimes going right down the whole line. If they were in a tight line coming along the coast, they would hit that one and sort of swing up the line, and so people to get more shooting done. In fact, in those days, if you weren’t in the line and you weren’t doing it right, you would haul at somebody fire a shot over your bow to get you out of the way. That’s the way it was done. There were quite a few birds then and not many people did it unless they were coastal people. People never trailered the duck boats like they do today. Nothing was sophisticated. A lot of them were just the boats they used for lobster fishing, many of them dories or lap streak boats. Sometimes they even painted the birds on the side of the boat. It was not similar to bushwhacking like that goes on down in the Chesapeake, but these would be in a line. In those days, we could shoot seven birds, and it was in aggregate, I mean you could shoot seven scoters or maybe an old squaw which now called long-tails, or a couple of eiders. At that particular time, it just seemed to be waves and waves and much more scoters than we see today. Probably we saw fewer eiders in those days and than we see lately. They all decoyed well. The old squaw were almost always a lot of passing shots but the long-tailed ducks, as they’re called today, it’s hard for me to keep calling them long-tailed ducks when I’ve called them old squaw all my life. All gunners called them quandi, which started with a queue because they were always in a quandi when they flew. Sometimes they would just pass by and if you fired at them when they were coming at you, sometimes the whole flock would hit the water and go down and actually swim underwater and then break behind you and go back into the air again.

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Phil Stanton: If you really wanted to shoot old squaw, which I learned later in life, it’s better just to have all old squaw decoys out. They’re pretty suicidal to their own kind but If you mix the decoys, if you mix old squaw with scoters or eiders, they don’t decoy as well as if you leave them all as old squaw decoys. That’s how I cut my teeth in the bird business. I was always very interested in waterfowl, and then as I graduated from college, I was still hunting sea ducks. We had long seasons then. It would start in September and go into January. Nowadays, up here, sometimes it doesn’t start until the middle of November. And oftentimes many of the ducks have already passed by here by then because the peak of the migrating season in those days was right around the 10th to the 20th of October. This one most film came through and that was my beginning in duck hunting and then I went to college.

Ramsey Russell: Wait a minute. Let me ask you a question. How old were you when you started duck hunting in 1954? How old would you have been and who took you?

Phil Stanton: I’m 82 now. I graduated from high school in 1959, so I was probably about 12, 13 years old.

Ramsey Russell: And who were some of the old water-men that took you under their wing and took you out?

The Challenges of Modern Sea Duck Hunting

“Sea duck hunting in and of itself in the year 2023 is not for the faint of heart. It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s windy. At times, when the chop kicks up, it’s not so much you shoot right to left on a fast low-flying bird. You’re going up and down, almost like you’re on a slow-motion trampoline.”
— Ramsey Russell

Phil Stanton: That’s correct. I went out with somebody’s grandfather at that particular time. And they were always pretty anxious for sea duck hunting and most of them were fishermen or lobstermen that just enjoyed that time of the year. And they relished the birds and they made the old-fashioned coot stew, which is not the story with the brick and the stone, but they actually made a good stew with them and ate them and probably had different taste buds then because it wasn’t too much before that, people were legally shooting loons. And a lot of people never could acquire a taste for anything that tasted quite fishy. And I guess we’ll get into that later, but nowadays, we have better ways of preparing the food. But that was a tradition.

Ramsey Russell: Back in 1954. Now, sea duck hunting in and of itself in the year 2023 is not for the faint of heart. It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s windy. At times when the chop kicks up, it’s not so much, you shoot right to left on a fast low-flying bird. You’re going up and down almost like you’re on a slow-motion trampoline. But it’s cold and it’s wet and I’m wondering, what kind of equipment were these men and yourself using back in the 1950’s and what kind of guns for you shooting?

Phil Stanton: Well, people would be wearing boots and some rain gear, and if you went back to the same area today, you’d be lucky if you saw one or two people out sea duck hunting in that area anymore with those traditional ways that I described. Somebody might be out there in one of these new big fiberglass duck hunting boats and so forth and so on. But the hunting up here now is not as prevalent as it was in those days. And there’s a handful of people up here that still take people out sea duck hunting, but they don’t go out into the open ocean as much and in big long lines. They’re hunting off closer to shorelines or up around the Cape Cod canal or on the bottom hook of the Cape Cod. They just don’t go out. Sometimes when we went out in those days, if it was a bluebird day, the birds would fly further out. And we used to go out a couple of miles offshore and get into some pretty rough weather and we did get cold, usually, when it got real cold in December and January, people weren’t as interested in duck hunting as they are now. And a lot of people go out much later in the year, December and January up here because they’ve got better equipment, warmer clothing. I mean, in the beginning I hunted with people that had ten bore shotguns and they reloaded their own, and they brought out a shell box with the powder and brass shotgun shells and did a lot of reloading. And I still have my ten gauge shotgun in my shell box. It still has the brass shells, some powder and shot, which I don’t use anymore, of course. And in those days, we were using lead, and we no longer can use lead as we all know.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. It sounds like a lot of those old water-men and those hardcore eider hunters were hunting more to make coot stew and to eat and to subsist on. They weren’t or were they sport hunters back then?

Phil Stanton: No. I mean, they were interested in hunting but they were interested in the food, too. And they perhaps had different taste buds than we have now, but it was just part of the tradition to go out and sea duck hunt as another way of getting some food for the table.

Ramsey Russell: You grew up interested in marine biology. You hunted with some of the old timers back in the 1950’s, very hard core duck hunting.

Phil Stanton: Well, some of those people that I hunted with in the beginning were market hunters and also used live decoys. I’m talking inland now with geese and things like that up here. And I was very active with an organization called the Massachusetts Water Fowlers, which kind of disbanded in the end of the 1960’s, but in those days, there were still gunning stands inland where they had big gunning stands on lakes where they would have decoys out on triangles and would move them in and out like an outhaul line. So if they landed out front, they’d move the decoys in on lines, and then when they got in close, they’d fire the first shot on the water and the second shot when they got up. And they kept that tradition going right into the 1960’s.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Mister Phil, back in those market hunting days, was there a market for sea ducks, for eiders, and coots, and long tails and things of that nature?

Phil Stanton: Well, not really, I mean it was a local deal. When I say market hunters, most of the market hunting was done in coastal ponds and that sort of thing, where they could shoot mallards, black ducks and the sea ducks were never really worth much in terms of the market, and people really never brought many of those in. Everybody in those days wanted black ducks, mallards, canvasbacks, redheads, you know, that sort of thing. And that was going on inland. But I kind of got away from the sea duck hunting and brought you back into inland again.

Ramsey Russell: That’s some great storytelling. So where did your interest in marine biology growing up out there with those old timers sea duck hunting, where did it take you educationally?

Phil Stanton: Well, I went to Bridgewater State College, which is now part of a university system. I went to Boston University for a few courses. I took wildlife biology at the University of Massachusetts, where I did a thesis on black ducks and beaver ponds and that sort of thing. And then I ended up teaching at Framingham State College at the time, and now it’s Framingham University, and I taught wildlife biology there. Then I was a wildlife biologist consultant for the division of fisheries and wildlife. And I used to do a lot of inland banding of black ducks. But the interest in the ocean and the marine biology and having my folks summer on the ocean in the summertime just brought me right into the duck hunting world.

Ramsey Russell: And where did the duck hunting world did it intersect with eiders? Because I understand reading a little bit about you, that you became involved with oil spill rehabilitation of eiders, how did that working coming back?

Phil Stanton: Well that’s how I get started, I had a farm Ramsey, and farm was enough in mass and believe it or not, I used to buy and sell a lot of draft horses, mules, but I also had a collection of wild ducks, geese, and swans. And I kept a lot of the native species in captivity and one of the things that happened was that most people never kept scoters and eiders in captivity as they do today, now, there are people that keep them in captivity and actually raise them, but that’s a whole other subject. But in keeping these birds, an oil spill occurred off the coast in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. We don’t have as many oil spills as we used to now because we have better ships and we contain our oil better. But birds would get caught in an oil spill. I brought some of these with the permits, and working with the fish and wildlife people, I brought some scoters and eiders to my farm and started trying to get the oil off them. I did a lot of research on that and have quite a few publications and worked with Mass Audubon and different oil companies. We tried to get the oil off the birds and then get them back into the population again, but we found out that it was pretty costly and by the time we rehabilitated them and got them back and released them, they just didn’t fit into the wild situation very well. A lot of them never really made it because we banded them and they were found dead shortly afterward. So oil bird rehabilitation really wasn’t the way to go. But afterward, I said, let’s try something else, rather than washing these birds and rehabilitating birds, why don’t we see if there’s another ways of doing it. So I first got involved with puffins and sea ducks and these other birds called alcids, which guillemots, murres, and puffins. We started collecting them and raising them in captivity and releasing them. I thought maybe we could do something like that with the eider ducks and try to replenish some of these birds that were caught in oil spills. It all started when the state of Maine was going to put in some oil refineries off Portland. They have some tank farms there where they store oil. But when they started the idea of putting the refinery up there, we thought, well, gee, this is going to jeopardize the eider breeding population because at that time eiders only basically bred from the Portland area north up into the maritime provinces. So we said, let’s try to see if we can transplant some of these populations and introduce them further south, where they’ve never bred before. They always wintered here, but they never bred here prior to the 1970s. So the first year, we went up to Maine and under permits with the federal and Maine people and the state people. We collected some female eiders in the nest just as they were hatching out. We tried to move them at night so that when we brought them down here and released them, they would sort of swim off with the young ones, and maybe the young ones would imprint to our area here and get a population going. So that’s what we tried at first, but that was a big failure because as soon as the females found out when they get out of the boxes at night and were put into nests on the ground in a strange environment, they just bolted and flew away. The black-backed gulls and other predators just pounced on the ducklings, so that was a big failure. The second year, we said, well, let’s try to raise some. So we collected eggs, and the next two years, at my farm in Upton, I hatched out eider duck eggs in incubators after collecting the eggs up in Maine. We raised them to about a week old, then we brought them to this island off the coast of Massachusetts called Penikese. We put them in acclimation cages where the tide would come in and out of the cage. We were giving them basically trout chow and dog food, ground up to start them on a diet on their own. Then we started introducing natural feed to them. So for two years in a row, after we had them in a large pen, we released probably three or four hundred young birds. When they’re released, they sort of form a crèche. A lot of sea ducks, when they swim around, rather than, following one hen will just make a large group and be attended by several females, and it’s referred to as a crèche. They move around and feed and so forth and so on. After two years of putting out a few hundred ducklings and having some survival rate, about a year and a half after that, we had the first nesting, which was right around 1974. They slowly spread from that particular island to Cuttyhunk Island, Nashawena Island, which are part of the Elizabeth Island chain around Penikese. Some of them ended up going down the coast and up the coast, and ending up as far north as Boston. We banded them, and some of our birds were spotted up there in the late 1970s. They became familiar with that area and started breeding. I think it was about four years ago, the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife did a waterfowl survey. This island that I started on was only 72 acres in size. Three years ago there were 148 eider nests on that one island.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Phil Stanton: And the birds now have dispersed from that original stocking all the way as far north as New Hampshire and are breeding in Boston Harbor Marblehead and so forth. And have gone as far south breeding, this is from the 1970s till now, all the way into Rhode Island and even off Fisher’s Island in New York. We’ve established a sort of a homegrown population. There was an article recently in the Mass Fish and Wildlife bulletin called “Homegrown Eiders” that talked about the whole story of how Massachusetts ended up with an established population that never bred here before. I kind of got my ideas from a fellow named Foley who moved some redheads into New York and started raising redheads New York and some other people brought gadwalls from the West and got them started in the New England area, but they never took off like these eiders have. And now we’ve got quite a local population of birds that stick around here and actually migrate farther south than they used to. Massachusetts used to be basically the furthest south that these birds actually migrated to, maybe a few in Rhode Island. Since I’ve been working with that population since the 1970s, they’ve increased their breeding range and they’ve also increased their southern migration route. We’re getting some of these eiders now in some southern states which they never showed up. Two years ago, a friend of mine called me up, and I think you could probably verify this, but they had a female eider seen off the coast of Florida one winter. This has not only established a breeding population here, but it’s also increased the overall movement of them. I’ll predict in a few years that they’ll be taking eiders in the Chesapeake and other areas, as they probably occasionally get one or two now that are flying down with the scoters.

Ramsey Russell: I want to circle back and ask you a question about the rehabilitation program you initially started with. So there’s an oil spill, and you all are out picking up these birds that are covered with this tar-like substance.

Phil Stanton: Well, what happens basically, Ramsey, is when a bird gets into oil, it’s kind of like having gum in your hair or something. It soaks in and it destroys the whole feather. And as you know waterfowl have that expression, “water off a duck’s back.” The birds normally have waxes and general oils in their feathers that they obtain from a preening gland on their rear end called a uropygium gland. You’ll sometimes see birds take their bill and go back to the rear end, pick up some of this oil, and then were kind of not come out but work it into their feathers and so on and when the oil hits these birds, it’s just really, it’s almost like putting holes in a raincoat and then seawater soaks into them soaks them down, freezes them, and they end up walking up onto the beach. If someone comes along, they’ll go back in the water, but basically oil just kills them or predators pick them off. If you catch them and bring them home and you can wash the oil off with all kinds of products, detergents and things that clean out bilges. We tried every detergents under the sun. And some of them, you wash them, you get the oil out, and then you have to keep them in captivity for three or four months before they molt or produce new feathers. By then, maybe disease kicks in, or they just become too oriented to an artificial environment and they never can associate back to the wild again. And so this whole business of rehabilitating birds that are caught in oil spills, maybe in the case of an endangered species, you could justify it, but the cost is doing it and the end product in terms of the survival rate is so low that it’s not worth it. That’s why we have to protect our breeding habitats or try other methods and like I said, we started with puffins once, not to get off the subject of ducks. But a lot of these seabirds do not have many young. Eider ducks usually only have four eggs in the nest unless somebody dumps one in there. It’s not like a mallard that will have a dozen or 15 and they don’t breed until sometimes they are two and a half years of age and so the productivity is really low. If you hit a population of sea ducks that have a low reproductive rate to begin with and wipe them out in an oil spill, you can eliminate entire populations.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Wow. I used to know a man in old sea duck captain, Mr. Adam Smith. Captain Adam Smith, I should call him, down around Boston Harbor.

Phil Stanton: I knew him and he took out duck hunting parties.

Ramsey Russell: He did? Captain Adam.

Phil Stanton: And there was another fellow named Jerry Smith up in Marblehead. There were two Smiths. But Adam, I knew Adam, and I used to go to a lot of these hunting clubs and fundraisers and things like that and I ran into him. He also had permits to go into racetracks and other places to take out geese that were a problem in some of these areas. He was quite a character.

Ramsey Russell: Quite a character. He told me one time. I was up visiting him in the summer. We just did a little weekend vacation and went to see Captain Adam. He pointed out a lot of eider pairs around Boston Harbor and up in that area. He said, it’s weird because I’ve never seen them here, but 20 years ago, they weren’t here, 30 years ago, you never saw them here, but they are your birds?

Phil Stanton: These are all the results of the birds that I released.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, they’re your birds.

Phil Stanton: And that’s where that article that you referred to when we were talking prior about the godfather. Because as I go around like, I was on the water today, I was out striped bass fishing, and I just came in and I saw some eiders with some broods in the Woods Hole area along the Elizabeth Islands.

Ramsey Russell: And those are your birds, aren’t they?

Phil Stanton: My friends that I was fishing with said, those are all your grandchildren.

Ramsey Russell: That must make you proud.

Shifting Habits of Eider Populations

“The Eider population has kind of moved around, and not just so many of the ones that I’ve released, but I think their feeding habits have changed. And you see them in backwaters now and you see them up in salt marshes.”
— Phil Stanton

Phil Stanton: Well, everybody likes to leave a mark, so I guess that’s my contribution towards something. Now, we have a very good population of breeding eiders in Massachusetts above and below us, all from the result of that transplant that took place in the middle 1970s and into the late 1970s.

Ramsey Russell: Well, a lot has changed with respect to estimated eider populations, the seasons have changed, the bag limits have changed. And somebody recently said that it could be a function of, you know, they survey the same areas, and it could be a function that maybe there’s eiders in places they don’t survey. And this could be just an opinion of yours, you are the eider godfather, but how are common eider populations doing overall and do you think that your birds there in that new area, with all those breeding pairs you’ve established over the years, are they a part of that survey?

Phil Stanton: Yeah, but Eiders have also changed their habits, Ramsey. When I was a young man, you would never see an eider up in a salt marsh, you would never see an eider in a harbor or in backwaters or rivers and things like that. And the Eider population has kind of moved around, and not just so many of the ones that I’ve released, but I think their feeding habits have changed. And you see them in backwaters now, and you see them up in salt marshes. I mean, people have taken them out of duck blinds that they say in the Plymouth, Massachusetts area and other places, and even in brackish water areas where you would never see one before.

Ramsey Russell: Wildlife is very adaptable. Why do you think that is? What has happened between yesteryear back in the 1950s and on 1970s, when you were hunting them to now.

Phil Stanton: Habitat changes and probably food. And eiders are very partial to mussels and shellfish, and they’ve probably gone up into these areas looking for food because a lot of the mussel beds have been, maybe some of them over-harvested, others have come and gone. And they’ve changed their feed a little bit. And they’re probably feeding on different things. I mean, a perfect example is this of the Atlantic Brant, I mean, Brant used to feed strictly on eelgrass and you would never see a Brant up in coastal waters. Now we have Brant grazing like geese on lawns and on grass. And they’re much more adaptable now and they’re not just programmed to one sort of food source. And so, as climate has changed and as coastlines have changed, what they used to say in biology, if a species will become extinct, if it only is feeding on one particular thing, and if something happens to that, like in the case of the Brant, they primarily fed on eelgrass. And then the eelgrass population was hit by a blight and the Brant population collapsed. Then the Brant started eating algae, and then they started grazing on grass and they became much more adaptable and had a greater food source, and their population came back. There’s an example. Now you can go inland sometimes or go to a ball field and see Brant grazing on a football field.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Phil Stanton: Something that’s never occurred in, when I was a boy or anything. A lot of things have changed, I mean, when I was a boy, we never had a big deal was to see a cardinal or a mockingbird, and we never had tufted titmice, we never had different types of woodpeckers and a lot of this stuff has just moved up from the south either nesting along highway systems and furthering their increase. And birds have done the same thing. And getting back to your question on the Eider ducks. A lot of them have just sort of changed their habits and some of these might not be counted, but yet, at the same hand, nowadays, there’s been more pressure put on the sea ducks. We went from a lot of pressure in the beginning, but just a few people that lived along the coast were taking them and now anybody that’s got a duck hunting boat and, I mean, when I was a boy, they never sold duck hunting boats. People made their own snake boats and things like that. Now they’re mass-produced and there are shows and duck hunting things and there’s a lot of young people that trailer their boats and head down to the Chesapeake and other places. And, of course, sea ducks are a little easier to decoy than mallards and black ducks and some of these others, and they have perhaps more of a liberal bag limit and they’re easier to harvest and people are out taking more and more of them than they did actually back in the days when I was referring to, there’s just much more pressure on the sea duck population today than there probably ever was in the beginning.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I was gonna ask you how eider hunting has changed since the glory days, when you described the first of the podcast, to now.

Phil Stanton: Yeah, I can tell you there’s more eiders around available to shooting on our coastline than there was in the 1950s and 1960s. There were far more scoters then, and now there are less scoters and some areas and more eiders. So there’s been a lot of different population changes and it depends too, Ramsey, in the area that you’re in. I mean, some of the traditional areas off a Cape Cod that had large mussel beds, some of these no longer exist and the birds that used to pretty much concentrate where 80% and 90% of your population would winter in one particular area, now they’re spread out in a much larger area than they were many, many years ago.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. What continues to be the greatest threats to viable eider populations? Is it increased pressure? Is it habitat loss? Increase civilization?

Phil Stanton: I think, it’s increased pressure, better equipment, boats that are designed to go into areas where people might not have ventured before. Many more people are interested in hunting sea ducks than there were years ago, also food supply. And then we’ve got, and we don’t know where these things come from, I mean, I could go on and on this, but there’s all forms of pollution that we never had before and viruses that are hitting these populations. In the old days they had botulism and things like that. But now with all of these pharmaceuticals getting into water supplies and going through treatment plants and getting out, there’s been an awful lot of changes in not only the habitat but in terms of what the birds are ingesting and what’s going on. We’ve got a lot of pressure on the birds, and then there’s a lot of disease as well as climate change, as well as habitat change. And it all contributes to decreased population, of course, that’s affected the bag limit too. You’ve gone from a season that was from September to January now down to a 60-day season and then a seven-bird bag limit to a four-bird bag limit. And this is also kept in line with trying to keep the population still a resource that everybody can enjoy. But as the population shifts, you have to make management decisions, and you have to regulate your bag limit as you see fit. If the population increases, you can increase the bag limit, if it decreases, you gotta decrease the bag limit. And all of the things we just mentioned factors. Many more people are hunting now than they used to, I mean, maybe hunting populations across the country have gone down in terms of the number of people that are still doing it. But waterfowl hunting, and particularly coastal hunting has really increased much greater than it was in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Shrinking Hunting Landscape

“I tell you what else that changed… the areas and places we all have to hunt have declined likewise. It’s declined so much that much fewer of us are becoming more highly concentrated on a very shrinking landscape.”
— Ramsey Russell

Ramsey Russell: I tell you what else that changed, and you bring up a great subject, mister Phil is, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, Canadian Wildlife Service, and everybody else, numbers of duck hunters have declined. But I believe that the areas and places we all have to hunt have declined likewise. It’s declined so much that much fewer of us are becoming more highly concentrated on a very shrinking landscape. I wonder sometimes, I’ve hunted around with a lot of guys and that target different species to hunt than I do because it’s what they’ve got. They don’t have great populations of favoured puddle ducks, so they’re chasing divers or something else. And I wonder if it’s kind of like an opportunity on the one hand now, since those good old days of those salty old-timers out there chasing their birds, it’s become a sport, It’s become like a collection. It’s almost like a vast trophy quality placed on that resource. But at the same time there may be younger duck hunters that simply don’t have access to some of those interior species, and that’s what they’ve got. It’s public and I am going on hunt.

Phil Stanton: Right, and another thing with the sophistication on the duck boats, the decoys, the methods of hunting, it’s a lot easier and a lot more exciting and a lot more shooting opportunity to get down on a coast or get into these larger bays, and up and down the Atlantic coastline. And they’re seeing a tremendous, much more gunning pressure than they’ve seen in a long time.

Ramsey Russell: Yep. Wow. Wow.

Phil Stanton: And I mean, people like to go sea duck hunting because they see a lot of birds. And if they get out in an area where there’s a lot of scoters around and mergansers and other things, there’s a lot more action. And, I mean, when I used to go sea duck hunting, and I still do, once in a while, I take a fishing rod with me. I used to jig for codfish while I was waiting in between shots. And we were always fishing and sometimes we’d have a flock of birds come in, and we’d be fighting an eight or nine-pound cod, which are almost gone these days. You’d put your foot down on the fishing rod and try to hold that and pick up the gun and shoot, and then you’d miss the birds and lose the fish. You tried to do too much. But I never went sea duck hunting without having a fishing rod in my boat.

Ramsey Russell: One thing, I’ve eider hunted a few times up in Maine and New England, and one thing that’s really unique or different about hunting that area is it’s almost like, when I’m out hunting off of that point or hunting off that jetty or hunting up in that bay or wherever, I’ve always got an audience. There’s a lot of humanity, there’s people out walking their dogs or beachcombing or doing something that ain’t hunting. And the last time I did it in Maine, it was a little, I’d say unnerving, but it didn’t bother my hunt any other than the fact that within a few hundred yards away there were people out walking their dogs. And largely in that community, they weren’t really hunters anymore. And I mean, have you seen that shift also? Have you seen complex like that?

Phil Stanton: I can just tell you, when I was hunting birds in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, everybody that lived on the coast knew at that time of year people would be out firing guns. And some would say, well they’re just duck hunting or coot shooting or something like that. Now there’s very few people that go out in these areas. So you go out, you fire two shots, and they’re calling the Coast Guard.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Phil Stanton: And it’s legal to gun off of so many hundred yards off of a beach. But when you fire a twelve-gauge shotgun towards the shore, it shakes people up and they can’t believe that people are out firing guns and this whole gun issue and firing shots and the so-called shot that’s heard around the world. Now all you have to do is fire a couple of guns in a marsh and you’ve got four or five people that would normally summer people that didn’t live there in the fall or the winter that now have computers and are working at home. And you start aggravating these people or they don’t realize that it’s legal, and they call the police and the police have to come and then they call the wardens and everybody has to explain this and that and it’s not an easy game anymore.

Ramsey Russell: Wow, man, how times have changed, isn’t it. That’s crazy.

Phil Stanton: It’s completely legal but nobody wants to accept it anymore.

Ramsey Russell: Now it’s becoming very much marginalized. A lot of these guys, especially in the coastal areas, some of those big communities, massive houses, and developments. They’re not connected to nature the way we are.

Phil Stanton: Right, and people are living on these islands. I mean, the only place nowadays, I mean, I go down to Havre de Grace, Maryland a lot because I’m a big decoy fan and of course, that’s another subject. But I’m really into collecting decoys. But I go down there in the wintertime to decoy shows and I go to the Havre de Grace museum, and that’s a waterfowl town and you can hear shooting going on all the time. In fact, you can sit at the decoy museum and look out and watch people body booting and shooting out there, and it’s acceptable. And people in that area know that that’s the tradition that’s gone on. But the days of all those men lining up the dories and the cedar coming and all the people going off the coast are gone, and they’re concentrated in areas. And if somebody tries to go into an area that’s completely legal, I mean, completely legal, somebody’s calling about the gunshots, what have you, and it’s a different world we’re living in.

Ramsey Russell: Very different. We came in from eider hunting in Maine last year. As we were loading the boat up, the harbor police came by, they knew each other, my host and he, and he said, how many phone calls did you get? He said, four. Yeah, we know that you texted last night to say you were gonna be off that point. But yeah, we got four phone calls. Somebody was acting up shooting.

Phil Stanton: I mean, I used to go out and hunt sea ducks and then check my lobster traps on the way in, or I’d be out sea duck hunting, and somebody would come by in a lobster boat, and they’d give me some lobsters and we talk, and they might want a duck or two or something like that. But those days are gone.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Do you know a man named Steve Britell, a Maine decoy carver?

Phil Stanton: Oh, yes, I know him very well.

Ramsey Russell: You know, Steve used to guide eiders. And I don’t know how the subject came up. I was sitting at his shop, which is a really nice shop, to go sit and visit, and he said, that common eiders were his most favourite duck to eat. But you could never freeze them, you had to clean them immediately, and you had to cook them. He said, if you freeze them, they’re ruined. If you do this, they’re ruined. He said, but I’m telling you, if you’ll take a fresh eider and prepare it this way, very simply, very quickly, he said, it’s delicious. And I’d never heard that.

Phil Stanton: I’d address a very good and the way I traditionally do it is, I soak them in, I cut them in strips, almost like finger size strips, and I soak them in milk, and I change the milk maybe twice in a 24-hour time period. And then I stir fry it or make a stir fry or put it on the grill and it’s very good.

Ramsey Russell: So your taste buds haven’t changed since you were a young man hunting with the old-timers.

Phil Stanton: I know, and I probably, it’s like, I can still eat a sardine out of a can.

Ramsey Russell: Me too.

Phil Stanton:  And if a kid took a can of sardines to school today and opened up and started eating at his desk, every one of the kids would run out of the room.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I did have a friend in elementary school that brought sardines regularly. The teacher made him eat them in the hall, and sometimes I’d go out there and he’d share them with me.

Phil Stanton: Well, I mean, I don’t think I’d want to eat a loon right today either. And a lot of the birds that feed on shellfish or feed on fish get a very strong fishy flavour. And one of the ways to get rid of that is, like I said, put it in milk. And I think the lactic acid or something has a way of neutralizing a lot of that.

Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah. And it tenderizes it.

Phil Stanton: And I do the same with breasts from scoters, and even red-breasted mergansers are excellent on the grill.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. What do you remember about how the old-timers would cook coot stew? How would they cook a stew out of those scoters? What do you remember that they would do to it?

Phil Stanton: What they would do is they used a lot of turnip and onions, and they cut the meat into squares, and probably the vegetables that they use, especially turnips, would probably take, but turnips, carrots, onions and potatoes and chunks of the breast, and they even took the legs and that chunk meat and they’d make a stew, and it was very good.

Ramsey Russell: Would they skin them? Would they leave the skin on or would they remove the skin?

Phil Stanton: Oh, no, no, they never leave the skin on, the skin has got a lot of the material, a lot of the taste of the fish and so forth. Probably collected more on the skin.

Ramsey Russell: Hmm. Man. Do you still duck hunt, Mister Phil?

Phil Stanton: Yes, I do. I’m slowing down now. I mean, I only go out a few times. I’m lucky enough to have good sea duck hunting right here in the area that I live. And I have friends like, from the West Coast that I hunt with out on their rice farms that come and visit me that are decoy collectors. The first thing they want to do is to have an eider duck. So I take them out eider duck hunting. I usually put them on rocks or on the shoreline in some of these cuts and areas and then put out the decoys and let them go at it.

Species-Specific Duck Hunting

“A lot of people try to combine everything and they’ll put some eiders and some scoters out. But I always pretty much went species-specific when I was hunting them.”
— Phil Stanton

Ramsey Russell: Is your hunting style with respect to decoys and setups, would it most reflect how you began or most reflect, I mean, are you using plastic decoys or old decoys?

Phil Stanton: No, I still use shadows or silhouettes for scoters, just because I like to see them on the water but most people are using all plastic today. But I also feel very strongly if you’re hunting a certain species. If you put somebody on a shoreline, you put a big spread of eider ducks out, you’re going to get pretty good eider duck shooting. Most of the other stuff is going to pass over the eiders. And then if you are out somewhere where there’s a lot of oldsquaw or long-tailed ducks, you want to put out a rig of those, just those on their own. Don’t mix them up with eiders or scoters and you’ll have much better shooting and then a lot of people try to combine everything and they’ll put some eiders and some scoters out. But I always pretty much went species-specific when I was hunting them.

Ramsey Russell: Mister Stanton, I sure do appreciate you joining us today. That has been a fun and informative podcast episode. I learned a lot and I really enjoyed falling down the rabbit hole of common eiders. I really did. I enjoyed this a lot and I thank you very much for your time.

Phil Stanton: Well, I appreciate it and if I can help you in any other way, give me a shout.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I’ll holler at you next time I come through near Cape Cod.

Phil Stanton: If you want to Maine hunting or you go somewhere else, you’ve got to go through Massachusetts.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely.

Phil Stanton: So give me a shout and we’ll meet somewhere.

Ramsey Russell: I will.

Phil Stanton: I’ll show you all the different eider duck and scoter decoys and oldsquaw decoys.

Ramsey Russell: I would love it. That’s worth the drive.

Phil Stanton: The mid-1800s up until now, I’m not into plastics or anything, but I’ve got some really classic sea duck decoys. I’ve got some eider ducks that probably weigh 70, 80 pounds.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Phil Stanton: The size of a coffee table.

Ramsey Russell: I cannot wait to see that. I will be sure to take some pictures and share them with all my friends online and listen to the podcast. Folks, you all have been listening to the eider godfather, Mister Phil Stanton from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Duck Season Somewhere. We’ll see you next time.