EP 411. Pacific Flyway Glory Days

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere, I have got a great story for you today. Way back in the good old days, and it starts like this, somebody asked me one time, of all the places I’ve hunted throughout the United States, where would I consider living outside of Mississippi? And my answer surprised him because I said, if they got their politics right, I’d move to California tomorrow. It is still an amazing wetland, still an amazing place to duck hunt. Great climate, great weather and as far as that goes, I like Oregon, Washington, Idaho. I like the entire Pacific flyway. It’s my kind of place and bang, you can shoot seven Mallards out there, but imagine back in the good old days. Just imagine pre migratory bird tree deck. Just imagine going on the gold rush and getting to bag that number of birds back when it was possible. Joining me today is Dr. Wayne Capooth, who you all have heard of before, and also my buddy out in California, Mr. Yancey Forest-Knowles. They have just completed a fascinating coffee table book entitled the Pacific historical waterfowl. Images slap full pages, hundreds of pages of these beautiful black and white pictures, and a lot of great detailed captions. If each picture really does speak a thousand words, and I think some of those speak much more. It would fill up an entire library, just the words that these pictures represent. Guys, how are you all doing? Thank you all for joining me today.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Thank you for having me. This is Wayne Capooth speaking. But Ramsey, I met you, I guess, 6 months ago maybe.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: I think this will be my third podcast with you. But what I like about you, Ramsey, is you not only have a knowledge of the United States and Canada, but you also really have a knowledge of the world. And I think you’re putting it to a great benefit. As far as my buddy Yancey on the other end of this podcast, I’ve done the history of the United States, but I have run in very few historians of water fouling like Yancey. It’s certainly for the Pacific flyway. He had a large collection of images and knowledge of what happened out there. And he is really the reason volume two came about. Volume two was going to be, which is the Pacific flyway that we’re talking about here. I was going to just do the whole United States that I didn’t cover in volume one, but he talked me into doing volume two, and that’s where we are. And I’ll turn this back over to Yancey now to.

Ramsey Russell: How you doing today, Yancey?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Thank you. Hey, I’m doing really great, and I tell you, one of the things that I look forward to every year is being able to visit with you, Ramsey, sometimes in person, of course, and sometimes a podcast or a phone call. We do a nice job of keeping in touch with each other. And just to let your listeners know, I met Ramsey 7, 8 years ago now. We went on a hunt together in Obregon, Mexico proper, right on the coast and we hunted a variety of different waterfowl, but the unique one was Pacific Brant. And I’ll tell you what, I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, and when I came back, I realized I had one of the grandest experiences of waterfowl hunting in my life. Not only that, but I met a fella who is the most honest, the most genuine, the most humanistic, and the most fun to be with imaginable. And when I think about my relationship with, with Ramsey and the fact that I was so far fortunate to get to meet Wayne also about 7, 8 years ago. And we became fast friends and now we’re partners in this book, and who knows what else in the future, but two of my favorite people in the world. It’s a pleasure to be with you both.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you all, both very much for the kind words. I greatly appreciate it. I was very glad I’ve heard about this book for a while, and I was very glad to get my hands on a copy and I love to look at pictures. I think everybody does. That’s how so many people spend their time today is scrolling through pictures of hunting. But I love to go back in time. I love to see what the world was like back then. And one thing that struck me about this book, the Pacific Flyway, was that California absolutely predominated the pages. It really did. Why did California predominate the page, or the book? So many images from California versus other parts of the Pacific flyway?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Wayne, if you’d like, go ahead.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Yeah, go ahead.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: From my perspective, it’s a couple of reasons. First of all, there were a lot more waterfowl hunters in California, as opposed to the other Pacific flyway state, 13 states in total, and the population is larger, there was more need for subsistence food initially, and then as wealth increased and leisure time increased and transportation increased, hunting increased in California as well. And it became a way of life here. And I know we’ll talk about that as we go on today, but I want to mention also that I’ve been collecting archival photographs primarily in California for 50 years, and in that effort, I’ve traveled about 55,000 miles and been to over 200 clubs and met an amazing array of people in museums, libraries, private collections, et cetera. So my collection in California, combined with Wayne’s national collection, was a winner for us both.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. I loved every bit of it. What was it like back in the glory days? What was it really like? Why was it so magical in that time? What was it like, and why was it like that?

Dr. Wayne Capooth: You mind if I step in here, Yancey-

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Please-

Dr. Wayne Capooth: And then you can. Yeah. California is a huge state, first of all, and you start at the northern part of the state, and you go to the very southern end of that state where it joins Mexico, it’s full of wetlands. Then you add in the gold rush, which is really the start of waterfowling in California that started in 1848, 1849. It really got stuck going. And it’s hard to imagine unless you know history, the number of people from the middle part of this country and the eastern coast area that came across through the wagons to California for the gold rush, and those people had to be fed, and they didn’t have any wheat fields or rice fields back then. So what did they rely on? They relied upon game. Not only was California a waterfowl, but it was a big game country. So that was the attraction that got the population booming. Then you had the Northern Pacific railroad come across the northern part of this country, and transportation is such a big issue. That was a biggie that got California going, so those were the instruments. You start at the northern part of California, you have one of 2/3, I don’t know what the percentage of waterfowl on the Pacific flow that come through Klamath, probably 90%, but Yancey can address that. But so in the northern part, you have the Klamath Lake area, the lower Klamath Lake, and then you come down to the Central Valley and the northern part of that to Sacramento river. The southern part of the Central valley is the San Joaquin, then you go the southern part, and you’ve got Salton Sea in that area. First of all, a huge country or a huge state, a huge population after the gold rush and huge amount of wetlands. And I’ll let Yancey go from-

Ramsey Russell: Expand on that Yancey?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: As a matter of fact, Wayne’s absolutely right. California is slightly over 100 million acres, and we had about 5 million acres of actual defined wetland at the time of the gold rush, sadly, it got down to about three quarters of a million acres. But it was our water fowlers that came in primarily for a variety of reasons. When they came back from the different world wars, they needed to place to recreate, and most of all, they wanted to hunt. And clubs were so firmly established at that time. And then the federal and the state refuges started as well. And all of these entities either brought back specific wetlands or developed new wetlands. So we’re back up to about 3 1/2 million acres of wetlands in California right now. Let me say today, we still harvest about a million and a quarter to a million and a half waterfowl every year. We have about 6 1/2 to 7 1/2 million waterfowl come into the state at the height of the migration. But, in the turn of the century, in 1908, I’ll take that specific date. And the reason that’s important, is that when President Theodore Roosevelt declared the Klamath basin as a refuge basin, specifically, Lower Klamath Lake was the first waterfowl refuge in the nation, second refuge, but the first waterfowl refuge in the nation, and at that time it’s estimated that there were some 40 million waterfowl that came into California at the height of the migration. And as Wayne was addressing the issue of transportation, the need for food, so on and so forth, there was a real defined sequence of the evolution of waterfowling in California. And of course, as Wayne said, it was subsistence hunting initially and then as leisure time came with wealth and transportation evolved, first the trains, of course, then the cars, planes, et cetera, people will be able to expand and start going to these different areas and hunting more frequently under the auspices of clubs, so clubs became very important in the history of waterfowling in California. Matter of fact, over time we’ve had some defined 2600 waterfowl clubs. The estimation may go as high as 3000, but of defined 2600 and that’s not counting, the here today, gone tomorrow small rice clubs that evolved with decomposition of rice. But it truly is a way of life in California and we value it and we protect it.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Ramsey, if I could add also about California here, this is an image book we’re talking about and when I take in the whole United States, when I collected images for this future three volume deal, if you had to list the top five states for water fouling from a historical standpoint, certainly Illinois would probably be in that top five. But it probably had the fewest number of old images that I’ve been able to find, and then you put California, there’s not a state in this nation that has more historical water fowling images than California and you can include Chester Peak Bay, Long Island, Kertuck Sound, Wisconsin, all of that stuff, the images and that’s the reason it dominates this book. Of 220 pages, I think 150 are California, if I’m not mistaken.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: The images from California, it just was unbelievable. And Yancey, when he got me going on this volume to do it, I was blown away by what he had available to put this thing together. So anyway, that’s my little spill.

Ramsey Russell: Let me ask you this. You mentioned a lot of folks piling into California back during the gold rush, 1848, 1849. How important was waterfowl to feeding humanity back then? Because I think of deer and bison and elk and sheep, not ducks. How important was waterfowl to feeding the world back then? Do you have an idea?

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Yancey you want to start that one?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: I would tell you beyond, the aspect of subsistence eating, just the average family, as hotels begun to develop, other restaurants and other places that people could go to, not just to stay, but to eat, the preferred food was unquestionably waterfowl. It was what people were willing to pay their hard earned money for.

Ramsey Russell: We did a great podcast years ago now with the late Hank Burdine and the author of a book about a man named Holt Collier who market hunted to feed the rail labor and levy labor down the deep south, and I was shocked that they were getting nearly five to ten times as much for bear meat as they were for whitetail venison, and I suspected it had something to do with the fat content. I just wonder if that, may be where waterfowl came in, it’s got to be something to it. But I find it just amazing that waterfowl plays such a critical role in feeding humanity back in those days.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Yes. Let me add here that the gold rush obviously had a lot of market hunters, but this marketing game of waterfowl continued from the gold rush. I’m going to read you or tell you about the transfer companies. It’s where the gun game came from the market hunters to the to the game markets in places like San Francisco and LA. This is in 1910 and the season of 1910 and 1911. This one game company, there were actually 5 games transfer companies that dealt in Waterfowl of this period. The season, 1910, 1911. Those five totalled 185,000 waterfowl that they marketed in that area. So this gold rush business, it just kept going, and we bad mouth the market hunters all we want to, but for the most part, they were out there making a living. So I have a hard time bad mouthing them, per se, but whatever.

Ramsey Russell: I have a hard time bad mouthing market hunters too, because I explained to a group the other day I was talking to, I said, market hunters get a bad rep in history, but the truth of the matter is, they were feeding all of humanity. It was 150 years ago, everybody ate wildlife, and they didn’t eat just ducks and deer, they ate songbirds. They ate everything. That was what it was for, eating.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Yeah, I just mentioned that. 1910, 1911, they mark those five game companies marketed 185,000. For the next season, 1911 and 1912, it was 350,000 ducks, with 250,000 went just to the San Francisco market.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: San Francisco was a huge game market for waterfowl. When the colonists first came over, and for the first couple of centuries, New York was it, then Chicago was it, and then San Francisco was it.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Talking about market hunting in California, deer, antelope, elk, and bear played a significant role to about 1880 and then the population was so decimated of those animals by that time that they switched almost a 100% to waterfowl.

Ramsey Russell: But they had the habitat and the waterfowl to do it, that’s what’s so amazing. There were no bag limits. I suppose there weren’t seasons, except for when the duck showed up and when the ducks left.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: But we’ve got what I would call 13 major areas for waterfowl in California. Each one an entirely different kind of habitat and environment and each one of those has a specialized type of hunting and the primary areas that everybody thinks of course, are not only the Klamath basin, but the North Sacramento Valley and then the San Joaquin Valley. But a whole different story is the amazing hunting that took place in southern California.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about that a little bit. That was the next question I was going to ask you is where did the great duck hunting exist yesteryear versus now. Where are some of the historical areas that were hunted?

The Evolution of Hunting in Southern California: A Legacy of Abundance.

So you put all that together, and just a proliferation of clubs developed primarily all throughout southern California, but primarily in the coastal area, and these were quality clubs, too. They were not fly by night clubs.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: I’ll go ahead and start and then Wayne’s got a lot of information on this area as well, but basically, addressing southern California, there were 3 basic areas. You had the coastal area, you had the inland area, and then you had the high desert area. And they all had their unique habitats for waterfowl. But the thing that made the coastal area so unique and so the waterfowling so pretty prolific is the fact that, number 1, there was nobody that lived there but a few farmers. It was too far from the city of Los Angeles, and transportation wasn’t developed yet. It changed about 1920, but so you had all of this great area that was away from the masses of people. You had a huge amount of barley and other grain products that were grown in that area, then you had artesian wells up and down the coastal area. You just had to break a hole in the ground and an area got flooded. It was just amazing. So you put all that together, and just a proliferation of clubs developed primarily all throughout southern California, but primarily in the coastal area, and these were quality clubs, too. They were not fly by night clubs.

Ramsey Russell: We know we’ve talked about market hunting, but at some point in time, it evolved from market hunting into clubs. Did a lot of these clubs exist at the same time that there was a lot of market hunting? Were clubs as big a deal back when there was a lot of subsistence and market hunting? As let’s just say before the Migratory Bird Treaty act is after, were there a lot of clubs preceding migratory bird treaty act?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Huge number. And some of the most famous ones that were well known, started in the 1870s. There were some in the 1860s, but towards end, the 1870s famous clubs, some of them that still exist today, nicely started developing. For example, one of the most famous wetlands in California is the Suisun Marsh, an area that’s still hunted, had about 250 clubs at one point. I think it’s got 130 active clubs today. In 1879, the Ibis Club, and then right after that, the Teal club, and right after that, the Cordelia, then the Tule bell. And those clubs are still active today. But, Wayne’s got a lot of information on that too, but the point I’m trying to share is that club started actually very early in California.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. Who? –

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Yancey. The first four clubs that got started in California, and Yancey knows more about this than I do. But the first one was the Hardland club. That was in 1879, and then it morphed into the Ibis gun club correctly in 1874. And then the second actual club was the Teal shooting club, that was 1871. No, I’m sorry. 1881. And then the Cordillera shooting Club, 1881, and then the Tule Belle in 1884. So that was the first four, and they were basically in the Suisun marsh area, but hunting clubs just proliferated after those four clubs got going, especially in the Suisun march. Wouldn’t you say, Yancey?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Absolutely. And then there were places where people gathered as early as the late 1860s that weren’t really formally clubs but functioned as clubs. People would come in and hunt for the day, pay to hunt for the day, or several days. That brings up another interesting point Ramsey, that the whole idea of a club changed over time in California. Initially it was a place that people went to hunt, not a building or a private owned land or anything but it was an area that people would go to, and they functioned like a club, but they would tend to go because before transportation developed, to the extent that it did, that allowed people to travel easily and far, people would go by wagon, by boat, and they’d go and they’d stay one to two weeks, and they’d hunt as a group. So that was the first idea of a club-

Ramsey Russell: And it might be the only one or two weeks of a year they hunt. They just go over with.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Yes, you’re absolutely right and then it evolved, again with transportation, with more leisure time, with wealth. Then actual places started being leased initially, but then purchased and turned into clubs.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about some of the famous personalities and some of the famous personalities to do with the Pacific flyway, yesteryear. I love this topic, I’m always intrigued when I go through some of these old books and photographs is like I said previously, as recently as 100, 150 years ago, everybody ate wildlife. Everybody hunted or knew a hunter to get meat from. And now, especially when we get off into the modern world of athletes and Hollywood moguls, it’s such a woke ass world, everybody’s scared to hunt or talk about it, but not back then boy. Everybody did it and you all’s pages are full of a lot of colorful people to include athletes and Hollywood moguls. Let’s dive off into that topic a little bit.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Wayne, please.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: No Yancey the star, the movie stars. Go for it, baby.

Ramsey Russell: And it wasn’t just movie stars. There were a lot of people.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Yeah And you know what? Every governor that’s ever been in California was a duck hunter, for example, most of the movie stars-

Ramsey Russell: What about the one you got now?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: No, I don’t think so.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, see, that’s what I’m saying. Back in old days, every governor duck hunted-

Yancey Forest-Knowles: His uncle, who was Pat Brown, Governor Brown, Jerry Brown of course, was the son and then Pat Brown. Jerry Brown was actually a hunter before he went to divinity school and then his father, Pat Brown, was a prolific hunter, and he hunted mostly in the California Delta, and he hunted mostly at Venice island with his good friend Baron Hilton. Now, Baron Hilton, of course, we’re aware of his history, that name, the Hilton Hotel chain. And I got to actually spend some time with Baron Hilton, one of the finest gentlemen I’ve ever met in my life. He was just amazing fella to spend time with. His best friend was Clark Gable. He would fly him up every weekend to their Venice Island club and then fly him back after the weekend. But I forgot to mention, Pat Brown, used to hunt with, who was governor of California, used to hunt on Venice Island with Baron Hilton all the time. I don’t want to tell any stories I shouldn’t be telling, but he was not the most law abiding fellow when it came to game regulations that you, you could imagine in your life. But the area that most of the celebrities hunted, especially those from southern California, were the San Joaquin Valley. The San Joaquin Valley is divided in two parts. The upper part is, the area that we call the grasslands, very famous area we can talk about in a little while that’s still extremely active. About 250 clubs there today. Best teal shooting in the world, absolutely amazing. But below that was the Tulare basins, the southern half of the San Joaquin and it was just about an hour and a half to hours drive out of Hollywood area. So a lot of those fellas would come up on Friday nights, they’d party all night, they’d hunt Saturday morning and be back to work by Saturday afternoon, back on the movie lot by Saturday afternoon. And you name the stars from those days and they hunted there.

Ramsey Russell: Really? Name some of them Yancey.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Clark Gable, of course. John Wayne.

Ramsey Russell: John Wayne, I wonder how good a duck shot he was.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: You hear stories, and then, of course, the fellows, more from the 40s and 50s and 60s, like Robert Stack and that whole group, they were huge duck hunters, too. Matter of fact, one of the famous duck clubs in the famous Butte sink in the North Sacramento Valley is still called the Stack club. Robert Stack’s father owned it before Robert Stack and then others, and Charles Schwabs of financial fame is a member of that club today. Waterfowl hunting is a way of life in California.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Yancey, if I could add here. This was in 1897, ex president Benjamin Harrison, he’d already served his second term as president. Anyway, he traveled to California to hunt geese with three famous hunting guides, Ed Plant, Abe Crump, and Claude Kagi, and Kagi for their old historian, California. They all know Claude Kagi. These were three experienced market hunters, and they worked for a guy called Doc Stewart. I think he was actually a doctor too, Ph or Md. But anyway, ex president, Harrison went there in September, 1897 to hunt geese on the glide ranch, which is north of Rio Vista, and I think that’s in Solano county and Harrison ended up killing 77 honkers-

Ramsey Russell: Golly-

Dr. Wayne Capooth: That morning, out of pit hunting. They were pit hunting-

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Can I read something real quick?

Ramsey Russell: Yes, please.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: In regards to the story he was just telling there, this will take 1 minute. In 1902 at Norman, which is the North Sacramento Valley record, killing for morning shoot to a sportsman was done by Frank Rustaller, a Sacramento famous fellow. I’ve got a lot of information on him. He killed 240 geese one morning here, highly sought after professional guides were Abe Crump, Claude Kagi, and Doc Stewart. The former two considered the best goose callers in the state. Now, in September of 1897, ex president Benjamin Harrison traveled to California to hunt geese with Ed Plant and Abe Crump and Claude Kagi, three experienced market hunters and the most skillful callers in the state, the latter two being members of a great goose calling team of market hunters known as the Doc Stewart outfit at the glide ranch north of Rio Vista. The morning of the hunt, Plant raised geese from distant fields and had them circling above. The ex president, who killed 77 honkers, seldom missing a bird stated that, although I have enjoyed fine goose hunting east of the Rockies, I have never seen anything to pair with this.

Ramsey Russell: Do you think they were hunting? Go ahead-

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Ramsey let me add just one thing. The President also hunted in the San Joaquin Valley in a pit. He hunted for two days, and they named a hole after him, Harrison Hole. One of the pits was named Harrison Hole. I don’t know if it still is the answer. Do you know?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: You know what, I couldn’t answer that. To be honest with you, I haven’t found it. I found a few holes that I’ve stepped into, but not that one.

Ramsey Russell: Hunting over. Go ahead.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: He and the other four hunters killed over 400 geese in that two days. They mostly snows.

Ramsey Russell: Hunting over was a big deal, though the goose hunting, I saw the pictures. They had a lot of live geese out there. How did they deploy those geese and manage them?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Usually they brought them out by wagon and they were in chicken wire pens, and they would do one of two things. They bring them out, these geese were trained-

Ramsey Russell: Trained Geese-

Yancey Forest-Knowles: A lot of them domestic, but a lot of them were wild geese too, who had been shot and wounded and had healed, but were kept captive. And all of a sudden, over time, they started performing just as the domestic geese did. But they would take them out and do one of two things. Either put them in these chicken wire cages where they were on the ground, or they would actually stake them to the ground with a cord attached to their leg. I know Wayne’s got the same stuff, but I’ve got some great old videos, converted into videos, these old super eight movies where after they were through hunting, they put these geese in a line and walk them right back to the wagons. They were just used to doing this, and that’s what the geese did, and it worked. It worked beautifully.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: We’re on pit hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Before we started this episode, there were three or four very definitive things about the Pacific flyway Wayne. We’ve talked about the hunting clubs, and you said pit hunting was very distinctively Pacific flyaway. So let’s talk about pit hunting.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: It was done a little bit in Oregon and Washington, and it also was done in the coastal area of Texas and Louisiana and on the sandbars of the rivers, like the Mississippi river. But as far as pit hunting, it was California from the get-go and in the central valley was probably where they really did the pit hunting in California. Most of it occurred on the main prairie in Solano county, and the other was near Norman and Glen county and also Princeton and Colusa county. Those were all big pit hunting sites. They also did some down in the San Joaquin area. Those I just mentioned were up in the Sacramento River area of the central valley, but they dug a pit. It would be about 4ft deep and about 3ft wide enough that you could get your body down into it and sit on a little bench. Your shoulders and your neck was above the level of the pit, and then they had decoys that would be around each one of those pits to sort of shield the neck and shoulder area, then head of the person they’d line, if they’re anywhere, if they were guiding sportsmen, to be anywhere from one to four sportsmen, even five, lined up in the front pits, and behind them would be anywhere, be one to two guides behind them in the pits to call the geese.

Ramsey Russell: And they were hand digging holes every day. They were hand digging one man holes in the ground.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Yeah. They basically hunt in the morning. The guides would then leave in the afternoon and search different areas to go. They never hunted one area, basically, over a day, because the guides would go out in the afternoon and find a different area to go and dig the pits.

Ramsey Russell: How many of those live geese would they normally stake out or put in chicken wire, would you guess? A few dozen?

Dr. Wayne Capooth: The live, which ones?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, the live geese.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: It’d be anywhere from twelve to 24, wouldn’t it, Yancey?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Exactly, and then they’d have a little wooden stake, and once the geese were killed, they would stake these geese up. So they added to the display that they had there. It looked like more decoys, and the duck, the goose would be up, and his head would be over the stake, then over time, of course, what that developed into was a different kind of decoy, and Wayne, I don’t know if they used them elsewhere, but they used them a lot in the Pacific flyway, and they still do in some places, what we call stuffers, where they take actual stuffed geese, not plastic or wooden birds, but actual stuffed geese, and set them out in the fields.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Pit hunting did a lot for the sportsmen with the guides taking them out and doing pit hunting, but it was also done strictly market hunting. I’m going to give you an example. In 1880, a farmer had 1300 acres of grain planted near Princeton in Calusa county, which the geese was devastating. And he hired two hunters, and he furnished him with ammunition and board for the season to shoot from pits. They plucked the geese, cut out the breast, which they pickled and smoked and melted the fat. Their assets were game pedal, $342 feathers sold for 180. They sold 180 pounds at $54, and six barrels of pickle smoked breast bought $162. 50 Pounds of goose fat bought $10, which total $568. You know what they did with the goose fat?

Ramsey Russell: No. They did what?

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Made candles.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Isn’t that something? That’s a great story.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: These guys didn’t mess around. They didn’t waste anything to make a little money.

Ramsey Russell: Heck, no. We talked about pit hunting. What was bull hunting and how did it relate to the Pacific Flyway?

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Yancey you want to take that when you-

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Wayne, that’s an area that you’ve done a lot of work on. Why don’t you talk about that?

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Bull hunting really started with the Mexicans, really, before even the white men came into California, and the Mexicans saw geese feeding in a pepper grass field or some grass field, and even there, some of their wheat fields paid no attention to cattle. So they said, maybe we can train the steers and the bulls to tack up on them and shoot them. When the whites came in there with the gold rush, they saw all of this, and they started bull hunting. And it took about three weeks to train or steer a bull to tack back and forth. You couldn’t just go straight to the geese. You had to sort of tack back and forth. You get up to about 300 yards from the geese in the field, and then you’d line up your one steer or bull, and you just tack back and forth, not straight to them, back and forth and you like to work within at least 40 yards of them before you discharged your bull gun. And the bull gun was anywhere from a 2 to basically a 6 gauge. And they eventually had to go to an 8 gauge because they outlawed an eight gauge for bull hunting, and larger. With the first discharge, there was usually 1 hunter behind that steer or bull or horse, sometimes 2, but let’s say one hunter with a double barrel, and they had all the way up to a 6-barrel guns. But with a 2 barrel, the first barrel, the hunter would discharge on the ground. The second one, when they took wing. And these 6 barrels were so set up that one pull of the trigger would ignite each barrel. Does that make sense? Is that sort of the way you understand it?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Yeah. There’s a couple of pages that we put in the book that show some of these guns. A 4-barrel gun, for example, the two gauge gun and these things weighed more than 20 pounds. They were huge, but very effective. A couple of hundred birds in a shot.

Ramsey Russell: I wonder if they trained them to sit still when the gun went off, or if they had to round up those bulls in the next county.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: If that bull didn’t stay still, it wasn’t a bull hunter, but it didn’t take them about 3 weeks to train one accordingly. Now, that 2 gauge double barrel he’s talking about, the hunter would step out in front of the bull to shoot, and he would bend down on his knees. He’d shoot that first barrel, it’d straighten him up, and the second barrel would knock him down on the ground.

Ramsey Russell: Or you had to be tough to shoot that thing, I guarantee you.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: And you wonder how long it took to tack some of these geese out in the field. It took anywhere from half an hour to oftentimes half a day. Like I said, you tried to get within 30 to 40 yards of them to do it.

Ramsey Russell: What about the duck and goose patrols?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: We-

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Go ahead Yancey.

Agriculture and Waterfowl Conflict: The Rise of Goose Herding in California.

So you can imagine how much land was planted in wheat long before rice in the 1870s, 1880s, and they would hire 40 to 80, for example, on a big ranch, what we call goose herders that came in, and they would provide them with ammunition and guns and place to stay.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Wherever you had a proliferation of agriculture, these were developed, for example, in the North Sacramento valley. I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not, but California controlled the world’s market of wheat. So you can imagine how much land was planted in wheat long before rice in the 1870s, 1880s, and they would hire 40 to 80, for example, on a big ranch, what we call goose herders that came in, and they would provide them with ammunition and guns and place to stay, and their room and board and a crew would go out, up to 40 men on horseback, and they might either shoot to kill the animals or shoot just to drive them off for 12 hours. And then they would switch and the next group would come in for 12 hours, and that would go on during the whole season prior to harvesting. That’s the only way they could keep the birds out. Then, of course, as soon as rice started being developed, the first commercial crop in the North Sacramento valley was in 1912. I think it wasn’t long before they started having the same problem with rice, and they had to hire these people to keep the birds out. A good sized flock of ducks, could come in and eat three acres of rice a night, so you can imagine if you had 100,000 geese come in, or 20,000 ducks, and not just, an average flock of two or 300 birds, they could do significant damage to a farmer’s field. As a matter of fact, I have a friend whose father was a goose herder in the famous Butte sink and starting at twelve years old, he was hired to ride horseback all night long and just shoot in the air and just keep the birds out. And that was only 60, 70 years ago. So, they had real need for these goose herds. Interestingly, these ducks and geese are creatures of habit, and we all know that if people are high shooters, what happens? The ducks and geese start flying higher to outreach the shooting that’s going at them. The same thing happened when the Spanish first came into California. The geese, of course, weren’t being shot at. There were no guns, or there were so few guns that it didn’t have any significant effect. The Spaniards would ride on horseback into a flock of geese with a long stick and just whack them and kill several dozen before the geese would even be gone. So they were really the first goose herders. I have an illustration talking about the Spanish on horseback with the geese. I have one illustration where it shows a Spaniard on a horseback riding through a herd of geese, and he’s lassoing one around the neck, so that’s sort of unique. We mentioned before we really started podcasting, the unique things about topics of California. We mentioned pit hunting and goose herding, which Yancey just covered, but another one they had was the airplane duck patrol and that started in the second decade of the 20th century, when rice planting had increased to the point that ducks and geese had enough another crop to feast upon. Yancey mentioned wheat, and then rice came along. So rice was being decimated by the geese and ducks, mostly the geese. Rice, its damage increased from 1918 to 1933 and so duck patrol got started in 1919 to save the rice crop because it was so serious. So, they came up with a new idea, and with the end of World War 1, many airplanes became surplus and were converted to civilian use. So farmers would hire these old world War one pilots to get in their biplanes and herd these geese off of their hills. And a lot of them would just herd them off the fields to get them off, and they would go into another field several miles away. But they also would do some hunting and shooting out of the biplane. So the pilot in the back would be the steerer. The one in the front of the biplane would be doing the shooting. And I got an image of a biplane that’s on the ground after they did the patrol. And it’s just loaded between the two wings, but loaded with geese on both sides, the left wings and the right wings. The other unique thing on some of these duck patrols, when they didn’t shoot, but they wanted to collect ducks, is they had a tunnel net that narrowed down at the end. It’s about 4ft wide at the propeller area, so they drive through those geese and those geese and ducks would fly into that netting, or that was on each side of the wing. Does that make sense?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. They were just basically out there netting them up with an airplane. That’s crazy.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: The farmer paid fifty cents per acre for the air planning patrol and the migration, usually, the goose migration usually began by September 1^st and continued until the harvest about December 10^th . So their air patrol was going on during that time, and they worked 24 hours with 4 hour shifts. And so they’d land and two pallets would get on and two more would get on and do a four hour shift.

Ramsey Russell: That’s one of the craziest stories I’ve ever heard. First off, I think it’d be pretty fun to be in the backseat shooting flying geese from a plane.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: In the front seat, the back seat was the pilot.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, I got you. And second off, that would be just too good. It’s almost like you want shotguns, like the old World War 2 show. It’d be fun. And second off, I’d love to see somebody netting geese with a biplane. I just can’t even imagine that. I wonder how many don’t care.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: They’d hit that patella, but they had a sort of a special made patella for that duck patrol.

Ramsey Russell: That’d be the craziest story I’ve ever heard.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Yeah. I was going to tell you another interesting place and a unique way that they hunt birds in California. Matter of fact, it still takes place in the very southeastern area of California. It’s high desert. There’s a place called Little Lake, and it’s still a very active and respected club, and it’s surrounded by basalt cliffs that are, a couple hundred feet above the lake. A lot of canvas backs use that lake, so they take half the hunters and they’ll go out in the morning and they get at the far end of the lake in their rowboats. And then the other half of the hunters go to the other end of the lake, up on the top of the basalt cliffs, and the rowboats start driving the canvas back, up the lake and finally, the birds can’t go any further, so they raise up in the air, and the boats get some good shooting. And as the birds rise, the fellas standing up on the basalt cliffs get some good shooting. Then the birds turn around and want to go back to the lake, and the guys in the rowboats once again get some good shooting from the returning ducks. So just another example of some of the unique kinds of duck hunting that used to take place, and some instances still do.

Ramsey Russell: You mentioned canvas backs, and canvas backs were the absolute duck of yesteryear from, from Chesapeake Bay clear out to California. That was the king of ducks. That was the duck everybody wanted. Looking through the many photos, when I think of California, I think of Pintails. What were some of the favorite species? And did it vary among the different parts of California, the different clubs, the different states out in the Pacific flyway?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: I agree with you. Initially, canvas back, especially for market hunters, was the bird that they wanted primarily, but sprig were and still are for the recreational hunter, the king of birds in California. And initially, from some of my earlier memories, hunting, when I was about 10, 12 years old, in the late 50s, we had a three bird bonus that we could add onto the seven bird limit of sprig. I could kill ten sprig a day. Of course, it’s one a day nationally now, and by the way, there’s a lot of work that’s being done to do an experiment for 3 to 5 years to see if hunting is actually additive on the sprig or not. And so there is a slight possibility that limit may be increased, at least on a trial basis, until they can discover whether it’s additive or not.

Ramsey Russell: Excuse me, we actually did a great podcast back this spring, and Pintail, their population is not being contained it is thought, by hunting pressure. Regulated hunting that we’re doing right now, whether it be Mexico, the United States, Canada, or up to Alaska, where the bag limits vary, it’s all got to do with the conversion of short grass period in agriculture. And I actually had a guy on here back this spring say that, as much as if the powers that the US Fish and Wildlife Service accepts the science that coming into the 2024-25 season, we’ll likely be shooting as many as 3 Drake Pintail, provided that their base population doesn’t dip below 1.75 million.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: And that’s absolutely accurate. That’s going to be on a trial basis, though, 3 to 5 year trial basis. And if they are able to prove that it’s not additive, it will become a national limit. And interestingly, there’s only a few states that really shoot a lot of sprig, the main ones, Louisiana, Texas, California, a few others. But, those are the main states. I would say California. If you came out here, when we have the federal officials come out and go out on our clubs and look at the number of sprig that we have, they can’t believe it. They leave shaking their heads that just saying, I can’t believe there’s so many sprigs still left. One of the neat things about California is we have a unique population of sprig that come here. We not only draw from southwestern Saskatchewan and a little, primarily Alberta, a little bit of Saskatchewan, come into California, but we have a huge population of sprig that are raised and migrate to California from Alaska. Now, we will never lose these birds because that habitat is perfect. That habitat will not expand, it will not shrink, so that population will never grow, but it will never decrease either. Interestingly, when those birds come initially across the southeastern part of Alaska to cross the ocean, they don’t come around by the land. They cross over that whole southeastern section of the water and come into Washington, Oregon, and California, and just while I’m thinking about it, I don’t want to lose this thought, there is actually a flock of a couple of hundred birds that come in to Kauai, Hawaii, every single year. They have a waterfowl refuge on the island of Hawaii, and they come in every single year. And if that’s not amazing, isn’t that, what drives those birds in there? But they do.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: If I could add here, for the coming duck season, one good thing about the census count is the Pintails are up 24%. So the Pintail outlook for California looks good. And I might add so why is the Pintail so attracted to California? My opinion, and it’s probably only my opinion, the Pintail, when we go back to the last glacier period, before it started melting, it covered the whole northern continent of Canada and came all the way down to the Ohio, Mississippi river. The Mallards could not come out of northeastern part of Russia and that area of Asia, they couldn’t make it across the ice barriers, so they got bottlenecked over in south or northeast Asia, and they also got bottlenecked in the southern part of the United States because of the ice up above. They couldn’t migrate any further than Ohio and Ohio river. But the Pintail that journey northeast Asia all the way to California and Mexico, as could the Teal. So, to me, that’s the reason the Pintail is attached to that flyway. I may be wrong on that, but that’s my opinion, at least on that.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Yeah. I’d like to extend something else also, if I might, Ramsey. I wanted to talk about Mexico because I consider it an extension of the Pacific flyway.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, of course.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: A friend of mine, well known in the waterfowling world, Gary Kramer, phenomenal photographer ran the federal refugees on all of the Sacramento River at one point. But Gary was the person about, I guess, 35 years ago now, did the research initially in Mexico regarding, the complaints that people are going down there and shooting too many birds, that’s going to affect our pop bird population, et cetera. What he found out from the time he sent down there, he said, there are individuals that shoot a lot of birds down there, or individually, people shoot a lot of birds down there, but so few people go, that it has a negligible effect.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: On the population.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. That’s been pretty much demonstrated. I’ve always argued, and I’ve read the numbers. It was probably Gary’s numbers. Gary’s actually been on the podcast a couple of times, and the third time he’s on here, we’re going to get into this Pintail conversation, but I’ve actually heard that there’s probably more Pintail shot in California on an opening weekend than are shot in Mexico the entire season.

The Western Mallard Model: A Decade of Collaboration with State and Federal Agencies.

But we have something here called the western Mallard model, and it’s something that we worked on with the federal government, state and the federal government for about 10 or 13 years prior to getting acknowledged as being a western.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: I would absolutely agree with you. In California, interestingly, we can still harvest 7 Mallards a day, up to 2 hens, but 7 mallards a day. And a lot of states, when we talk to them, that the different flyway groups get together and talk, there’s concern. Why do you shoot? How come you have the rights to shoot that many birds when we can only shoot 4 or 5 in the other states or on the East coast? Is it 1 or 2 now? But we have something here called the western Mallard model, and it’s something that we worked on with the federal government, state and the federal government for about 10 or 13 years prior to getting acknowledged as being a western. And the reason is that in good conditions and we’re moving back towards them now, with the rain we had last year and the rain that is expected this year, we have 400,000 mating pairs in California and so that allows us to go ahead and have an initial hunt before the migratory birds get down and continue. That first big migration, the first birds that come in are the sprig and they start arriving mid August. About the end of August, the first Specklebellies start coming in. We have phenomenal speck hunting, a 10 bird limit for Specks. It’s amazing here. But other than the birds that come in on August and September, we rely on the local birds until the first migration comes in, and it’s really neat the way it works. You can count the days. Thanksgiving weekend to the 1^st December, the first new migratory birds show up. And the hunting from thanksgiving weekend to mid December is the finest one could imagine in California. That’s the magic, 2 to 2.5 weeks.

Ramsey Russell: Before we fell down this fun rabbit hole and got off subject a little bit, we were talking about favorite species and you had something to say about Pintails. Do you remember, you told-

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Well they were the king of ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Right, and they still are.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: And they still are. They are the preferred bird. They’re an amazing bird to hunt. They’re amazing bird to eat of course. You won’t find a more beautiful, a more graceful bird, and I’m going to give you one example of how important the Pintail are. I’m guessing 50 years ago now, one of the very famous clubs in the Butte Sink in the North Sacramento valleys called the wild goose. It was all tree areas you would think you were hunting in Arkansas. It’s just an amazing place, but the hunters there, the members, loved sprig so much, they had most of those trees cut down so it was open water so they could hunt sprig. In the mid 80s, of course, the population went down and the limits went down seriously. So they had a new caretaker come in, a very famous guy named Gary Caroulis. And he was able to, to convince those members that they needed to put those trees back in, and the importance of being able to attract Mallards. So they did that. It’s all grown back now. It’s one of the most amazing habitats I’ve ever seen. But, there, Mallard is still the kingbird. Interestingly, in treed areas in California like the North Sacramento Valley and particularly the, the Butte Sink, a lot in the delta as well, we have fabulous wood duck hunting as well.

Ramsey Russell: It’s unbelievable. I’ve never seen it. That was the biggest surprise I encountered when hunting in California was the abundance of wood ducks. Thanks to California Waterfowl Association efforts in some areas, I just couldn’t get over it. It was unbelievable.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: In that area people say, wood ducks eat acorns, and they’re horrible to eat. They do eat acorns as well as Mallards and other birds. But you know what? Those wood duck go out of those marsh every single night, and they consume every piece of waste rice they can possibly find. And you never ate a better tasting bird?

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Exactly. Right there, brother.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Yeah.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Ramsey.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, sir.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: We talked about rice and wheat depredation by the waterfowl. Have you ever heard of problems being with lettuce?

Ramsey Russell: No. I would think a lot of-

Dr. Wayne Capooth: We mentioned the salton sea down in the southern part of the state. That was a huge body of water, but at times it’d go dry, but when it had water, it was a spectacular duck hunting place and the Wigeons would come in there. When they started planting lettuce around the Salton Sea area, they would eat that lettuce up big time.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: That leads into a good story, if I may. The Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when a levee in the southwestern corner of the state along the Grand Canyon. Excuse me, I just lost my train of thought there. The Colorado river broke through a big levee and- I’ve gotten to that age guys. Anyways, the water just rushed in for almost a year, and before they could stop that levee break, and it formed this famous place called the Salton Sea in the Imperial Valley. That’s another place where a lot of the movie stars used to go and hunt because it was so close, the travel time was short from the LA basin where they lived and worked. But Salton Sea, huge number of duck clubs formed around there. At the north end, as Wayne said, they started growing a huge amount of lettuce, and the wigeons came in, and it was just horrible. So the the ranch owners, the farmers, went to the state, went to the Feds and asked if they could start a feeding program, and they were successful. So up until about 1989, clubs below the Tehachapi mountains in southern California were able to enroll and participate in, ‘the feeding program’. What they did was they were required, depending on how many acres were there, to bring in so many 100 pounds of wheat every single week. And they had to place it in one specific location. Wherever they put it. It could be no closer than 100 yards to any blinds. But the point is that all these clubs actually abided by all the regulations. They have very few citations ever issued in any clubs. So they had these big piles of wheat, and all these birds, not only these wigeons, started coming to the wheat, but you know what else it attracted? It was Sprig.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, boy.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: And the sprig came in by the thousands to southern California, and they would get above these big wheat piles. These birds were so smart they start circling around like a plane, and they’d come down and land right next to that wheat. I’ve got some great photographs, huge piles, 3-4ft tall of wheat, and they would feed on this wheat, and so it created phenomenal hunting. It got all the birds out of the lettuce. Everybody abided by the law. Then in the late eighties, some ultra environmentalists came in and convinced the Feds that this was baiting, and it wasn’t anything else other than baiting. And so the law was outlawed. They could no longer do it.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: As far as baiting, Illinois was a big baiting place. They outlawed baiting, I believe, in 1935. Prior to that time, they got into commercial baiting area, where they bring in the hunters and over baited fields. Illinois was very big, but topping it as number one was California. As far as baiting goes.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: All the early clubs baited, and one of my favorite stories, the most interesting hunter that I’ve ever learned about was a hunter primarily in the 20s to the early 30s. And his name was Bill Banta.

Ramsey Russell: Bill Banta.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Yeah, Bill Banta. And Wayne, his nickname was Duck-a-minute Bill Banta. And the reason, the way he got that was he was known as a prolific, a fabulous hunter. So this fellow that wrote the sporting issue for the San Francisco examiner wanted to go out and hunt with him and just see how good he was, and he went out and Bill Banta killed 30 sprig in 30 minutes. So that’s how he got, the nickname Duck-a-minute Bill Banta. But he was, without question, from my perspective, the most interesting hunter we’ve ever had in California. And I think Wayne, we’ve got, what, 8 pages on Bill Banta?

Dr. Wayne Capooth: I don’t know. And those were all furnished by Yancey to me for this novel or for this history book. But I listen, when you talk about duck hunting and what has obviously drainage or the wetlands and things like that for farming purposes and development, another biggie was obviously transportation was just huge. So when you start with the colonists, you go from stagecoach to a steamboat to railroads, planes to automobiles, four wheel drives, ATV’s. But anyway out of all my images prior to running into Yancey, I may have had two images of old time duck hunting with airplanes pictured in them. When Yancey sent me those things of Bill Banta with those airplanes and the duck strung all over them, I just marveled at them. They’re unbelievable photos and documentary. Just incredible. I think 7 or 8. Anyway, ages of Bill Banta, his airplanes with his hunters, because he ran a club plus a commercial club, too. And this airplane is showing them with the hunters and ducks just strung everywhere on that airplane.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Unbelievable.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, we’re talking about species and one of my favorite pictures in the book, was a club photo with a bunch of Coots. It was like an annual Coot shoot. And it was California, not Louisiana. Tell me about this.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: That was a Raisin city duck club. Yancey probably knows more about that club than I do. But I was blown up. Coots, please. We call them Louisiana mallards.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: There’s a great picture in there with a fence line covered with might be a 1000 Coots.

Ramsey Russell: 1000 Coots.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Huge amount. Anyways, this club, Raisin City club, was very close to the San Joaquin city of Fresno. As a matter of fact, the club is still active today, and I’m very pleased that one of the members called me and asked if he could get a book and everything because he understood there was a photo or two in there. But they would culminate their season with a big Coot shoot and they’d go out. Now in California, you can still shoot 25 Coots a day. And, it’s something you see that youth will learn to shoot on sometimes and so on and so forth. And, interestingly, a lot of research has been done on them. They migrate only at night, very unique birds. You just never see a migration of a flight of coots. And the reason is they all migrate strictly at night. They’re cumbersome flyers, but they work at it and they get up in the jet stream and they move hundreds of miles in a night. But there is a story about a young man who hunted in the North Sacramento valley in an area called Lambertville. Every year, they would put on a Coot shoot, and on a particular Sunday afternoon, every club would go out and they haul one of the little eight foot plastic boats behind them, and everybody would shoot their limit of Coots, and they’d bring them back into this multiple club area, and they would put them all down. And everybody was asked to take their Coots home to their clubhouse and make the best hors d’oeuvres they possibly could and then come back in a particular period of time. And then all of that food would be shared, and it would be declared, who made the best recipe and everything. And I know who that young man was because that was me and I’ll tell you, I could eat Coots, but they are fairly strong now-

Ramsey Russell: Wait a minute. Before you get off into that, tell me this. What were some of the recipes that you remember?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Oh, a lot of it had to do with, making particular sauces over the breasts, that kind of a thing. But up there, of course, they eat almost exclusively rice. So, I mean, they’re really not bad. They’re just a little strong. But I will tell you, in the San Joaquin Valley, particularly in the grasslands area, there was a particular immigrant group. I won’t tell you what group it was, but I will tell you that they came from a particular nation that started with the letter I. And these immigrants, quite a few of them, didn’t have a lot of money when they first came here, and they relied on the game that they could kill. And when they went duck hunting, they would often kill the Coots and make their spaghetti sauce out of it. So they edible? You bet they’re edible.

Ramsey Russell: Just as recently as last year and in Azerbaijan, we got taken out at night to shoot Coots, and they asked that we shoot the blackbirds, and in rank order, Coot, Mallard, green winged Teal, that’s their favorite birds to eat. I challenged them, I said, make it and really and truly, they made, an elaborate pilaf. It was amazing. And I just can’t believe I’m as old as I am, never having hunted Coots. They love them over there and taught me a thing or two about how to cook them.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Also known as Mud Hen.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: American Coot, mud hen.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Were there any also?

Ramsey Russell: Go ahead.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: The Raisin city Duck club wasn’t the only one that had Coot shoots. Other clubs in California had them also. They’d set a day aside where they invite all the members and the surrounding guests to come and shoot Coots as possible. On this particular in 1915, Raisin City had their closing day for Coot shooting, and they killed 200. So there were guests come over, too. There’s 200 sportsmen all together, including the club members and people who came. They killed 3000 Coots that afternoon and 4000 for the day.

Ramsey Russell: Thats a Coot shoot now.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: That night, they feasted on the Coot, just like Yancey just said. And they had a concert band there, and it was called the Razor City Mud Hen Band.

Ramsey Russell: Somebody heard that story and just said, I’m moving to California. Were there any surprises? I mean, both of you all have done extensive research throughout California now and the United States, Wayne. But as you all really got into this and started digging over the years in the Pacific flyway, were there any surprises? What might have surprised you or what might surprise the listener? We’ve talked about a lot. I’ve been surprised a bunch this evening, but what stands out to you all? Like, wow. That surprised me.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Go ahead, Yancey.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: About, in California-

Ramsey Russell: Pacific Flyway. Yeah.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: It’s not just in California. There’s some great waterfowl hunting in the other Pacific flyway states. You go to the snake river in southern Idaho. It is absolutely amazing. Mallard Montana quite likely. I’ll tell you the secret of hunting ducks in Montana, and that’s spring creeks number 1. It’s unbelievable. But rivers, any flowing water so it doesn’t freeze in the winter, you’re going to have some great waterfowl hunting in Montana. But I’ll tell you, my favorite is hunting on spring creeks. And you don’t need to get up early. You don’t need to rush out there in the cold. You wait till it hits about 6 to 10 degrees. And those Mallards are going to come out of those fields, where they’ve been working to get a little something to eat. And they’re going to come back into those spring creeks. They got a drink. They got to work that gizzard, and get back in there and drink, and so those spring creeks are amazing. Southeast Washington. I’ve been hunting that for, 30 years now. Real regularly go up about 3 times a year. There’s a couple of famous areas up there all flooded corn. Initially, Washington was really known as a goose hunting area, once they started putting that flooded corn in there about 20-25 years ago. It is a big time Mallard hunting, I mean, amazing hunting and 90% of the people that go there to shoot those Mallards, believe it or not, are Californians. Southern Oregon, the Mallard hunting there, just off the charts, and then, just out of that, we’re not talking about Arkansas today, but just out of that Pacific flyway, there are some areas you’d think you were in Arkansas, some great Mallard hunting in the Pacific flyway.

Ramsey Russell: We’re about to wrap this up. I have a few more questions I’ve got for you, actually, but cover to cover, black and white photos and beautiful black and white collections, captions, but the cover is full color, and it hearkens from a state in the Pacific flyway we haven’t mentioned at all. The dry state in the United States of America. And talk about the cover picture. Just a little bit. I think it’s amazing. One of the biggest surprises to me a few years ago was just how good the duck hunting in California still is. That’s a huge surprise. It’s unbelievable. Like I say, get the politics right, and I’ll move there tomorrow. But the Pacific flyway has been a great waterfowl destination since forever. And I think it goes back to the cover of this book. Talk about that picture real quick.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Wayne, if you’ll talk about the cover I’ll talk about the state a little bit.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Let me add just previous question, and then I’ll get into that. You ask what is to me is unique about California. And I could mention duck clubs, I could mention the market hunting, and all that stuff, but what’s impressive to me when I got into California, first of all, being an old southern boy, you don’t want to say anything as good as Arkansas. Arkansas is number one, but when I got into this business, I was overwhelmed by California and if I had to say what really I saw, the greatest attribute of California has been their conservation effort. I’m telling you, as far as association goes, the California Waterfowl association is it. It’s the number one in this country. They have done a great job and are doing a great job. So that’s that. On the cover of this album is the decoys from the Lovelock cave in Nevada. And they discovered some scientists, or what do you call those guys, anthropologists or whatever they are, in a cave in Lovelock, Nevada. On the Humboldt river area, they found a cache hidden below the ground in a cave. The bottom of the ground in a cave about 6ft, a cache, a basket that had about eleven or twelve decoys and parts of other things. And that decoys on that cover is one of the decoys. It’s a canvas back and the Humboldt sink and the Carson sink, which was sort of in the southern middle part of Nevada, it would’ve attracted canvas backs. This was when the Humboldt sink and the Humboldt Lake had great wetlands. Yeah. And when the part of the gold rush, people came through Nevada, they didn’t go necessarily northern route through Colorado. They came through that area and they were fed on canvas backs out of the Humboldt sink and Carson sink, which are wetlands, two areas. But that decoy is 2000 years old and I’m going to tell you, we see our decoys now and we think, okay, these things probably got started in maybe around the start of the 18th century, about 1792, maybe in Connecticut by the, the old cobblers, shoe cobbler people that set in the old ducks goose stands up in, Connecticut in that area, and while they were doing their cobbling and shoes, they also began whittling out decoys. So this would have been 1790. But these go back to 2000 years and they’re mind boggling, these decoys.

Ramsey Russell: It’s just beautiful.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: It’s hard to wrap your mind around these things and the hunting. Nobody thinks of Nevada, of course. It’s not like it used to be, but back in the time of the gold rush and up until about 1900, it was outstanding for canvas back hunting. And the last Indian market hunters took place in the Humboldt sink area, and they would market hunt. The Indians would market hunt for the gold rush people, and eventually the settlers that came into Nevada with a waterfowl. The Indians market hunted from about 1860 to all the way up to 1900. So they are the last great Indian market hunters. And that’s the Nevada Indians. Take it away, Yancey.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: A couple of things I’ll add to that. These decoys, interestingly, were found in 1925, and they are in the Smithsonian Museum today, whom we got permission from to use this photograph here. That’s near the town, probably the best known town that you would know about besides Lovelock, in that area, where they still do some duck hunting anytime they have water, is the town of Fallon. And Wayne’s absolutely right, Canvasback was king of ducks. When the Canvasback population started dropping, they too started shooting a lot of sprig there. And when the sprig dropped down to national limit of 1, their favorite duck, once again, it’s reverted back to the Canvasback. But I want to tell you one other thing about Canvasback. We have actually a fairly good population of Canvasback that still come to California, and they come to the San Francisco Bay Area, and specifically they go to the Napa Sonoma Marsh, which is part of San Pablo Bay, the north end of San Francisco Bay. And I’m fortunate that I get to hunt out there 3 or 4 times a year. And you always get your 2 bird limit of canvas back first thing in the morning. I mean, I feel so fortunate to get to hunt that bird, still in modern days. And it’s just great seeing the good, prolific number of birds that do come in out there.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic. How did you two of my favorite waterfowl historians and people, come up with the idea to collaborate to do this? And how in the world did you all select through thousands of photos to come up with this collection of photos to represent the Pacific flyway?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: If I may, Wayne. I’m going to go not way back, but about 8 or 10 years ago, I had seen some advertisements about some earlier books that Wayne had written, and I was able to acquire a couple of them and just enjoyed them so much that I just called him up. I wanted to talk to this interesting man, and just about the same time, I had gotten an invitation to go out to hunt Arkansas for a particular magazine, and they were going to do an article on multiple clubs out there. So I got to go out and was very fortunate, got to hunt 5 of the famous clubs in Arkansas there on that trip. But I got to spend time with Wayne Capooth, who took 3 days of his life and drove me all around the areas that he knew, around Memphis, where he lives, and into Mississippi. He took us to Beaver Dam, the famous Nash Buckingham hunting area, the National Retriever Hall of Fame, some other areas where individuals cooked a southern dinner, showed us their collection of history items from the Civil War and so on and so forth. Wayne took us to the checkerboard restaurant where, the duck hunters famously ate in that part of Mississippi.

Ramsey Russell: He didn’t take you to go eat some famous Memphis barbecue, did he? I hope so.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: We ate it all. This a quick little story, if I might. I’ll do this real quick. I was hunting these different clubs in Arkansas, and each one of them knew in advance that I was anxious to have some southern food. And the reason was I had southern food, but in particular Crappie with Wayne and some of his good friends, which I just went crazy over. So each one of these clubs, what would you like to eat, Yancey? And I say, southern food, Crappie, if you have it, please. So four of them provided these great Crappie meals. Then the last one I went to, coincidentally, is a club that’s owned by the nephew of Nash Buckingham. It’s called Blackfish Bayou, Buck Neely. And so my host, who was working for one of the national magazines at the time, had set something up with him that I wasn’t aware. So he says, Yancey, what would you like for food? And I says, gosh, I’d love some southern food, if you please. So that night, we were around the table and, and the cook came out with his big pot. And inside this pot was an interesting looking creature, right? I’m thinking, oh, my gosh, what have I gotten myself into here? So I wanted to be polite, but I used a term, an often used term in a situation like this. So they asked me to serve myself first. So I was cautious only to take, not quite a regular portion. But I took a portion of this creature and sat it down, and they all served themselves, and they waited for me to take the first bite, which I did. And what do you think, Yancey? And I said, interesting, nice safe term. I said, by the way, what are we eating? He goes, Opossum.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Yancey, in the southern boys, we don’t say opossum. It’s possum.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: Possum.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: We don’t say raccoon. It’s coon. Isn’t that right Ramsey?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: But long way of saying, that I spent three wonderful days with Wayne. He was a perfect host and we became friends very quickly. Lasting friends, good friends.

Ramsey Russell: Where can everybody buy this book? Where right now can the listener go and get this great book that will sit prominently on their coffee table and they’ll pour over for days and weeks?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: My copies are gone. Wayne, but we are going to do a small printing and, I think Wayne’s willing to. I’m certainly am. We can give you our phone numbers or our email addresses and folks can contact us and hopefully get something out of this next printing.

Dr. Wayne Capooth: Yancey, I’ve got about 30 left. I’m probably going to keep about half of those. But if they’re interested, they can reach me through my waterfowling.net. And on that site there’s a contact button and you just punch your contact button and they can send me an email and we’ll arrange to get them that book. Like I said, Yancey’s book sold out. Volume one didn’t sell out this quick. It took me about a year to sell out volume one. I’m going to tell you, volume two, mine sold out in four to five weeks. And Yancey’s is sold out. Not too much longer than that, right, Yancey?

Yancey Forest-Knowles: About 90% of them sold in a week and, all of them are gone now. But, and I would also mention that, we are going to have this small reprinting by the end of October. So if somebody wants to contact either Wayne or myself, they’re more than welcome. And is it okay to give a website here?

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely.

Yancey Forest-Knowles: yknowlesprodigy.net. I’d be more than happy to see that people get a copy.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you all very much. I have enjoyed the stories. I have been pleasantly surprised. Heck, I went through the book and I’m still surprised. But I’ve greatly enjoyed having you all. Always love to have you on, always love to hear your stories. You all are a tremendous wealth of waterfowl history and information. Folks, you all been listening to Dr. Wayne Capooth from Memphis, Tennessee and Yancey Forest-Knowles from way out west in California. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Duck Season Somewhere. Good luck getting a copy, but like they said, you can get in line to get the second printing. See you next time.

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