EP 418. Saskatchewan Goose Guides

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere live from Saskatchewan. Not really live, but we’re recording live up here in Saskatchewan with my buddy, Jake Slimp. Northern skies outfitters well underway. It’s just what you expect. It’s just what you want from Saskatchewan. I fall in with some clients from the Carolinas and down in Missouri. Great bunch of guys. They’re broken into 2 teams of 5. We call them the young team and the old team, and they’re having a grand old time. Darks and ducks in the morning. Light geese in the afternoons, and it’s working like a charm. Matt, glad to be here, man. As usual. I love this fall. Stop. How you doing?

Matt Schauer: Oh, we’re doing great. Doing great. Glad to have you here again. It’s always a good time. The season’s been a great one. Big snow goose hatch this year. Lots of young birds in the white flocks. That always makes it easy. Looking like really good duck numbers this fall, too. I haven’t seen any official counts, and we won’t get those nesting reports till next spring to know what the real counts are, but we’ve seen more pintails and mallards this fall than we’ve probably seen the last 3, 4 years.

Ramsey Russell: That’s good to hear, because I don’t think all parts of Saskatchewan or Canada can say that. I know I’ve been up here to Saskatchewan for a while, and the ducks are real across the landscape, clumpy. Some areas have a lot more work. You all obviously got a lot of water, more water than other parts of the drier stuff. The snow geese. I have never seen as many snow geese from one part of Saskatchewan to the next, and it’s been like that since mid Sept. Been like that for a month. Yeah, more and more.

Matt Schauer: We had snow geese arriving already, and I think the 5th September was our first limit of snow geese this season, and we’ve had consistent limits all the way through. That’s an early arrival for the snow geese to get here.

Ramsey Russell: You said something the other night at dinner about how for you all, snow geese are just the easy part. You all make it seem so easy to shoot snow geese.

Matt Schauer: We’ve got a lot of experience with snow geese. I started guiding snow geese 20 years ago in the US, and when our guides come in and start working with us, they start in the US on the spring snow goose hunts, and there’s a lot of pressure on those geese. They’re a very difficult bird to shoot. Come March in the USA, they’re just under so much pressure. So many guys, gun informed, big spreads all over. They’ve seen all the little trinkets and whirly machines, but you get up here in the, in the fall, and these are fresh snow geese. A lot of the young of the year birds have never met people before.

Ramsey Russell: One thing I have noticed in the last 5 or 10 days, I’m not seeing as many Ross as I was seeing to start with, and that is my favorite white bird, the Ross geese. They freaking love decoys and love the calls, and here they come and they bring their big cousin, the snow geese in with them, but the snow geese is still hanging in there strong. I mean, the numbers are good, and you know what shocks me about it is a lot of times when I’m used to hunting snow geese, Matt. Elsewhere, especially down south of the border, it’s massive spreads. For the last few days hunt with you all, we’ve been putting out 2, maybe 3 seed bags full of full body decoys. That’s it. That’s a relatively small spread. I’d say 150 decoys, maybe 200.

Matt Schauer: Yeah, a couple hundred decoys. Anything more than that? We run out of a place to put them. We got to leave the birds room to land in them, and up here, what we’re doing with these snow geese. We’re landing them. We’re not scraping for them. We want to leave them room to land. We’re working them, and sometimes you got to let them spin at 10 yards multiple times before you get them to finish right where you want them, and when you do get them to start landing, you need to have room for them to land.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah good point. One of the secrets to you all’s field success in terms of client comfort, in terms of convenience, in terms of being hidden anywhere on the landscape that you can park, it is you all’s tiki hut, and the first time I met you, many years ago, you had started using this tiki hut, and you had it brushed up, and it looked funny when you was pulling, trailing it down the road, but you all have since absolutely perfected the cover. It’s just a big clump of brush. It’s another clump of brush in the parklands of Saskatchewan sitting out there. It’s unbelievable. It is so tight at times that, if you don’t get it adjusted right or learn how to punch through the wall, you ain’t got no I can’t get through there, but it’s unbelievably effective. Talk about what the tiki hut is, that you all deploy. How long is it for starters?

Matt Schauer: We’ve got 2 of them. We’ve got one that’s 24 foot and the other’s 28 foot.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Matt Schauer: They’re 6 and a half feet wide on the floor and slope to them. Similar to a conventional A frame blind, but nice shelf to put your coffee on, a solid 3 quarter inch plywood floor to stand on so you’re not sinking in the mud or tripping on a badger hole. It’s just comfortable. Get up. Stand up to shoot. Every one of our clients over the years is, we’ve noticed a vast improvement in shooting when you can stand on solid footing.

Ramsey Russell: It makes a huge difference. One thing you. You didn’t say is 28 foot long, and it’s like a mobile pit, blind on double axle trailer, and we pull into the field. The guide has already pinned it the last night. He knows exactly where he wants to be. He gets out, he throws the grass or the dirt up in there and says, the wind’s blowing this way. This is exactly how I want it, and your guide, the guy driving a fan and pulling us, goes out in the field, gets out, tests the wind, whistles to the truck behind him. In comes the tiki hut, hydraulically lowers, and it’s already brushed with, I guess, raffia or something like that. You all have got it covered with, but stacked inside are these beautiful bundles of grass and switches, and it just goes together, and then the last icing on the cake is we surround the sides with popper cuttings, and it just vanishes, disappears, and what I like is how those bundles come up above you. You all used to have a roof on it. Now it comes up above you. These grass bundles. You know what it reminds me of is having hunted specks down in south Louisiana with spec killing sons of guns. You can’t see daylight. They can wear white shrimping boots and orange jumpsuits into the blind. The birds can’t see them inside there. That’s what that tiki hut reminds me of. It is utter concealment and comfort.

Matt Schauer: Yeah, we’re hunting. We’re hunting young of the year birds, but at the same time, there’s. There’s mature birds mixed in with them, and you have to have concealment. Concealment’s number one. You’ve got to have everything covered. Like I said before, we’re not trying to just shoot the geese. We’re trying to land them. We’re trying to get them right there, finishing in the decoys, and to do it right, it takes proper concealment.

Ramsey Russell: One thing we were talking about this morning while we were in a tiki hut, the wind was supposed to be blowing 15 miles an hour. 12 to 15 miles an hour, and we get out there this morning, and it’s frost and it’s light, and the minute the sun came up, boom. The weatherman’s report was accurate, and it started howling, and even though it was out of southeast, it was brisk. It was 40 degrees with a 12 to 15 miles an hour wind. It was chilly, and we all got talking about, how good is this, that we’re behind this steel wall right here, instead of a flopping, flipping A frame? Because it does knock the wind down, but by gosh, that air comes up under that current comes up under there. It gets a little breezy. It gets a little chilly in an A frame as compared to something like this right here. I can see where if it got sure enough cold, you all could put a heater in there, and probably hunting shorts and t shirts. If you had a heater in there, it’d be unbelievable, and something else I’ve noticed too, as we get back, and I brag on this every time I’m up here mad Miss Jen’s cooking. I mean, we come back to your beautiful lodge and Miss Jen’s the hardest working woman I’ve ever met. She’s almost like she gets up at 05:00 or 06:00 and don’t go to bed till midnight. Cause she’s feeding us excellent meals, and then she’s feeding the guide staff too, and Lord knows what else she’s doing, but her meals are just par excellent. You come in and as I’m in the mud room shucking off the outer clothes. I can smell breakfast down the hall, and it’s never a small breakfast. I got eggs, I got potatoes, I got sausage, I got bacon, I got pancakes. What was breakfast pizza this morning? I love it. Any of it. I all love it. Pots and pots of hot coffee and just whatever a man could possibly want for breakfast, and then we come in for dinner and that’s an adventure unto itself, and I heard through the grapevine her cookbook is finally underway.

Matt Schauer: Yeah. We’re actually meeting with the publisher here next week. He’s coming to camp to shoot some geese and hopefully pick up everything he needs to get into print. She’s got some pretty incredible recipes in there. Some fancy goose and goose Oscar and peppercorn goose, and a dozen other snow goose related recipes and a few of the other favorites. A lot of the desserts. Cheesecakes and her secret brisket recipe.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve been smelling the brisket all day. My mouth’s watering as I’m sitting here talking to you, but you said something to me a little while ago. I thought you were fixing to show it to me. Let me get a sample of it, but you just feeding your dog. One of my favorite things she cooks we have last night, and I loved it when she had it was bacon wrapped meatloaf. That’s got to be a client favorite.

Matt Schauer: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Who wouldn’t like a bacon wrap meatloaf?

Ramsey Russell: Tell me what I want to talk about today, though, Matt, I want to get deep in the bushes, because, you and Miss Jen do an amazing job, all the details and everything else, but what I’ve learned is very successful outfits have good staff. Tell me about some of your staff.

Matt Schauer: I wouldn’t say we have good staff. I’d say we have the best staff.

Ramsey Russell: The best staff but say why they’re the best.

Matt Schauer: What makes them, what makes them the best is they have a true passion for waterfowl hunting. I mean, their passion is the only thing that keeps them doing this. The reward is in being able to get out there. Fool the birds, put it all together, and that’s what drives them. They’re just people that come from a different breed. Ain’t everybody like that. There’s a lot of serious waterfowl hunters out there, but it takes a person with a real passion to do this job at the level that our guys do it at.

Ramsey Russell: Talk briefly, if you would, because one thing I noticed, there’s a lot of outfits, a lot of good outfits what you start seeing, you all been going at it hard now. We’re mid-September. You all are 6, 7 weeks into a lot of clients coming through. A lot of birds hitting the ground, a lot of early morning hours, a lot of afternoon scouts, a lot of bird picking. A lot of everything. I mean, just the grind that the clients don’t really experience. We get to go out and pull the trigger and have a great time and experience this wonderful Saskatchewan landscape full of birds, the land, living sky, as I call it. The guides that are grinding it talk about why they ain’t walking into walls. Talk about how your guide staff organizes themselves and day to day, to where, 5 and 6 weeks into it, they’re not running on fumes and bumping into walls. Cause you’ve got a very unique system of managing their energy levels, I’d call it.

Matt Schauer: We’ve got 6 guides to cater to 2 groups of hunters. So, when there’s 2 guys out in the field, we got 2 groups out hunting. This morning, we got 2 guides out there in the field hunting, one with each group. Then we’ve got 4 other guides that are out scouting and finding the afternoon hunt. Then in the afternoon, the guides that found the best afternoon hunt are going to be the guides that are out there guiding the afternoon hunt, and the guides from the morning will be out scouting, looking for the next morning hunt, along with the other 2 guides that have been in the scouting rotation, and we’re just always hunting the best possible options.

Efficient Task Management: Dividing Responsibilities Among Guides.

I’ve hunted in a few hunts with you, I’ve hunted with Jeremy, I’ve hunted with Noah, and I’ve hunted with Clint, and they all have different responsibilities.

Ramsey Russell: More than that, what I’ve noticed is each morning I’m liable to be hunting with a different of the 6 guys. I’ve hunted in a few hunts with you, I’ve hunted with Jeremy, I’ve hunted with Noah, and I’ve hunted with Clint, and they all have different responsibilities. Clint drives out. Somebody else comes up behind him with the tiki hut. Drops it. Boom, he’s gone. He’s gone to scout. There are already 2 scouts out coming to landscape. Now, the other guide’s going out to scout. The next morning, I’m hunting with, say, Noah, and Clint’s pulling, the tiki hut. Now, tiki scouting. He’s not just grinding every single day. That’s a lot, because, there’s these outfits out there that they have to find the hunt in the afternoon, leave the clients on their own, and then go out and hunt each morning. Now the birds got to be processed. Now they got to oversee the cooking. I think it makes a difference. Petitioning everybody to where, yes, they’re working from daylight to dark, but they’re not just getting burnt out, doing the same thing and doing too much of the same thing. Is that a pretty fair strategy to say?

Matt Schauer: Yeah, that’s a pretty fair summary of it all. It’s a lot of moving parts, for sure, and it’s a long season, so we have to. We have to make sure we have enough people to carry the workload, and we can’t have anybody getting burnt out now because it’s not just Saskatchewan for us, it’s Saskatchewan, and then from here, it’s Wyoming, it’s North Dakota, it’s Texas. It’s the spring snow goose season through the US, and then it’s ultimately back to here in May for one more month before we go into summer.

Ramsey Russell: 10 months, a year, you all are going at it 10 months, and your guys ain’t bumping into walls, just strung out like so many people get, are they?

Matt Schauer: No. You and you’ve been through here in the spring, and the same guys you hunt with in the fall, with the same attitudes they had in the fall are going to be here in the spring, still plucking away.

Ramsey Russell: How do you find the right guides?

Matt Schauer: Oh, it’s really, you have the right guides. You start with the right guides, and guides train guides, and they learn from each other, and everybody learns from each other, and you end up just with a staff full of great people.

Ramsey Russell: You ever had any staff that, have you ever had any staff that thought they want to be a duck guide until it’s time to do real duck guide shit?

Matt Schauer: Oh, yeah. We see a ton of people that think they want to be a duck guide until it’s time to do real duck guide shit. We start all of our staff, everybody starts with spring snow geese in the US because it’s the most work and the least reward of any guiding you can do.

Ramsey Russell: You told me a story last night after dinner about 2 particular staff. I’ve known one of them for a very long time, and I met one of them this trip that I recall, but excellent snow Goose guide. Tell me how you met Jeremy.

Matt Schauer: Well, Jeremy. One of my other guides in the US was out scouting, lining up some snow geese for a spring hunt in Arkansas, and he had got permission on this field full of snow geese, and he seen somebody crawling down a ditch and maybe thought, I don’t know if they’re scouting or they’re going to jump, shoot, or what they’re doing out there. He flagged him over to the truck and turns out they had dual permission on this field, and he convinced Jeremy that instead of pursuing those geese right then and there, that maybe he liked to come along and hunt them in the decoys with us the next day and-

Ramsey Russell: Try to decoy them instead of creep them.

Matt Schauer: He came out and did it, and he’s just a great lively kid to have around. Was instantly great with the people, the hunters that we mixed them in with, and one thing led to another and asked him if he wanted to do more of that and be around more of that, and I think at the time, he was 17 or 18, and we invited him to come along with us and apprentice through the South Dakota season, and really, the rest is history.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about when he drove up to camp.

Matt Schauer: Oh, when he came to South Dakota, his, his mom had to come along with him to make sure that we weren’t going to abduct him.

Ramsey Russell: She wasn’t going to let it. She hadn’t met you all before. She said, maybe you can, but I got to go up there and meet these folks.

Matt Schauer: Yeah, and I guess we, we passed mother’s approval.

Ramsey Russell: So let me talk to Jeremy real quick. Mister Jeremy Bolanbarker. What are you doing, man?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Not much. Getting ready for in the morning.

Ramsey Russell: What do you got for in the morning?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Oh, I got a big old mixer lined up. It should be, should be a wild time. I got about 5000 snows, couple thousand mallards, a couple hundred honkers out there. So big old mixer. Looking at being a good time in the morning.

Ramsey Russell: See, I think you like snow geese.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: I got in the blind yesterday and those, those boys were saying, man, this guy’s good. He’s mad at some snow geese with him other day, and he just works his ass off and keeps on going, and I think he’s mad at snow geese.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Then to hear, hear Matt tell the story about how you all met. One of his guys down in Arkansas had a feed he was setting up. Seen a head bobbing in a ditch and binoculars coming up. Some young whippersnapper trying to sneak up on his geese, and it was you. Been there, done that. Who was that guy?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: So I was out there in Arkansas. I ended up swapping hunts with a guy that messaged me on Facebook. He wanted to come out to middle Tennessee and shoot some net collars and ended up shooting some net collars, and then he took me out there to Arkansas and we were shooting banded snow geese in a ditch, and that’s when I linked up with Clayton Mayer.

Ramsey Russell: Really? I know Clayton.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: The dog trainer.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: Now tell me more about this collard geese deal. So you met somebody on social media and you obviously had some dibs on collard geese.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yes, sir. It was Andrew Giles. I don’t know if you know Andrew. Yeah, he messaged me on Facebook and told me if I could put him on a neck collar, he’d take me to Arkansas. Me and buddy, and we’d shoot some banded snow geese, and at the time, I was young and I was like, hell, yeah, that sounded like a good time. So we ended up taking off and we shot his neck collar. Yep. White neck collar with black lettering.

Ramsey Russell: Obviously. Resident birds. Tennessee somewhere. Ain’t that something?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yeah, just some resident birds.

Ramsey Russell: Jeremy, talk about how you grew up. Did you grow up a duck hunter?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: I grew up doing a lot of big game hunting and got invited on a juvenile hunt, and it was the last year that I could hunt as a juvenile. I got invited and ended up lighting a fire. I shot a goose and shot a duck, and that just lit something inside of me, and ever since then just never stopped.

Ramsey Russell: Never stopped.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: It never stopped.

Ramsey Russell: So you go to Arkansas and you’re crawling ditches and Clayton and them invite you to come over and hey, why don’t you join us tomorrow? Save the geese for tomorrow. Come with us. You 2 guys come and jump in the blind with us. We’ll show you how to do it right, how to decoy them. Had you ever seen anything like that? Did they get any good spins that morning?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yeah, we got it. We got a couple good spins.

Ramsey Russell: Have you ever seen anything like that before?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Never seen nothing like it.

Ramsey Russell: What was that? like a first kiss?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Oh, yeah. It was something that just kept you on your toes, knees and knocking, and hell, to this day I still get that knee knocking when that spin gets a going.

Ramsey Russell: How many more miles did you slog through ditches after that?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: I haven’t slid through another ditch since then.

Ramsey Russell: I used to, I used to crawl ditches back when they first come out with it back in the day, and that was, that was a lot of fun but that’s for young folks.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: It is.

Ramsey Russell: Especially those ditches where you can’t stand up. You got to bend way over and crawl in the mud. The ditch is about 4 foot deep, but the mud’s about 2 and a half foot deep. That ain’t no fun.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: No, them are the worst but sometimes they paid off big, but boy, were you sore after.

Ramsey Russell: So you go, you jump out there with Clayton and northern skies, you see, your first goosebins, you obviously shot some birds. How did you go from there to being a year round goose guide here?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Clayton ended up needing my number, so I gave him a number, and it wasn’t 5 minutes after I had left the field that evening. After hunting with them all day and setting up decoys and moving decoys and whatnot, Matt called me. Matt said, hey, we’re going to South Dakota here in a couple weeks, if you want to come and try it out, and if you like it, we’ll see you next year.

Ramsey Russell: How old were you?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: I was still in high school at the time. I was 17.

Ramsey Russell: So a couple of years before graduation. I mean, a couple of, couple of weeks for graduation.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: A couple of weeks for graduation.

Ramsey Russell: So you graduated and gone straight to South Dakota?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: No, it was the year before that.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, your junior year.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yeah, my junior year.

Ramsey Russell: You’d have gotten out for summer break there more and then gone up there? Yep. So what’d your mama say and Daddy say when? You said, I want to go to South Dakota and be a goose guide in my junior year.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Mama, she was leery about it. So she actually ended up, riding up with me to, South Dakota to meet, with Matt and Jen to make sure it was legit, and then she flew back, and that just started it.

Ramsey Russell: You ain’t never looked back.

.Jeremy Bolanbarker: Ain’t never looked back.

Ramsey Russell: What are you up? We talked about your hunting background. We talked about how you got into it, but how did you grow into it? How long have you been here and how did you grow into being a goose guide that goes at it like you do now?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: I started as a helper the first year.

Ramsey Russell: Which does what?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Just went out and did a lot of scouting and helped the guide out, basically, moving stuff around, setting decoys, and he’ll hunt for the first little bit in the states, and then he’ll head out and do the scout for the evening, and then the next year, I moved up and I started guiding by myself, and then it just kept going up from there.

Ramsey Russell: What do you look for in a goose field? I mean, you drive, drive from here to Saskatchewan. There’s freaking birds everywhere. I mean, which field do you go after?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: There’s a bunch of different variables in this, so I tend to look for more juvenile, higher percent juvenile birds in a field-

Ramsey Russell: You’re looking at those birds through glass. You’re looking for great birds.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: Then a good hide, good place to a strategic point to get those great birds.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: That’s it.

Jake Slimp: Yeah.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: If you got a good hide, it’s always going to be a little bit better.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, these tiki huts do it, don’t they?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: That’s it. Them tiki huts are something else. Makes life 10 times easier and 10 times nicer.

Ramsey Russell: How long do you think you’re going to be a goose guy?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Shoot, I don’t know. Until I guess I get tired of it, which, I don’t know. That’ll be a long time from now.

Ramsey Russell: You ain’t even hit your stride yet, have you?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: I haven’t even hit it.

Ramsey Russell: What do you like most about it? I hear from a lot of young folks that think they want to be goose guides, talk about the highs and the lows of this career you’ve chosen.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: The lows would be, all the work that comes with it, that nobody really sees. All the brush and the blinds, the decoy, washing, the no sleep, the naps, you know. The always scouting, just making sure everything’s just perfect for that hunt. Takes a lot of work.

Ramsey Russell: You were in and out of blind all day yesterday. I saw you move the decoy. I saw you tweak this, tweak that. I mean, just constantly in and out.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Oh, absolutely. Always moving stuff around, changing it for the better. If something didn’t work as right as I wanted, I’m going to move it to make it fit the wind or make it fit the birds that I’m working.

Ramsey Russell: There were a few times yesterday I almost popped out and shot. I couldn’t see, but just slivers through the gaps in the blind, the tiki hut there. I tell you what, you all do it right. I mean, you all let the birds get in. You’ll even let a few birds peel off and land and get up and fly away, and still that big column is getting itself sorted. Maybe it’s broken up into 10 little flocks and everything’s getting sorted, and the birds will come in and they pick up and light up and circle back and they twice as many of them to get back and do something to be more of them. How do you know when to pull the shot? I mean, do you find yourself getting greedy?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Oh, yeah. We, us guys here at northern skies are some of the greediest goose hunters out there, but 95% of the time, it works out for the better. You get those bigger, better rain outs. You get those tighter wads, you get those big spins, just walls of geese, where you shoot and it just echoes back at you immediately.

Ramsey Russell: How long did it take a young guy like yourself that had formerly been a ditch crawler to. To begin getting greedy? I mean, how many times did you jump the gun and shoot the first little. The first pass in there? How do you learn?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Well it took me a few years to figure out when the birds are done or when they’re not done, and there’s a lot of key deals there with that. You got to have a good hide, make sure everything’s perfect. If you’re going to get greedy like that, everything’s got to be, perfect. Blinds got to be shut. There can’t be no shadow in the decoys. All that good stuff. It’s got to be perfect for you to get greedy or those birds will leave.

Ramsey Russell: What do you look for to know that tells you those birds going to come back around versus they’re probably fixing to leave, I better get on them.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: I can hear them where I’ve done it so long. I can hear when the birds are-

Ramsey Russell: Talking to each other.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yep. You can definitely tell when they don’t like something anymore or definitely by the way they act. They’re definitely swing hard, just not interested as much anymore. They definitely seen something that they did not like. Whether it be someone’s glasses glaring in the sun or whether it be a dog out or just anything that sparks one bird, it’ll tell them all.

Ramsey Russell: One bird sees something, he tells everybody else.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: I’m sure that’s how they-

Ramsey Russell: God dog. You got an interesting dog name. So yesterday I’m in the duck blind, the goose blind, the snow goose blind. We having a pretty decent shoot, and I realized that my mid Tennessee goose guide has got a dog named Pisser. How does a dog get a name pisser?  That’s a pretty unique name for a dog. She’s a sweet dog. I can understand if she was a shit eater, but she’s a pretty nice dog for a dame named Pisser.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yes, she’s definitely something else, that’s for sure. There was another puppy in camp that got the nickname Big Pisser, and she looked at-

Ramsey Russell: How did he get that name?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: He was just a puppy and he just always had the happy peas, and he just always pissed all over the place. So his nickname was Big Pisser. Every time my dog Kimber would run in, everyone would say, get out, big pisser, and I told him that it wasn’t big pisser, and Sam, one of the other guys, he goes, that’s little pisser, and ever since then, it just stuck, and clients love it. So I only call her Kimber when she’s in trouble.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, Lordy. You’ve been up here long enough. Now you hunt in Canada, you hunt south. I mean, you jump back and forth with these snow geese. You follow them from the headwaters of the migration down to the Gulf coast and back. What are some of the differences between here and there and back? And what are ways some of your strategies change for hunting snow geese.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Early season, they’re not as pressured. So I definitely don’t go as crazy with the decoys or anything like that. As well as-

Ramsey Russell: They’re 60 days old maybe.

Adapting Snow Goose Hunting Strategies: From Young and Naive to Mature and Cautious.

As I go south is when I start adding decoys and getting louder with my caller because everybody is starting to hunt them, as they go south up here, they’re kind of, young and dumb right away, and then they start picking up on it, and then, we start running those bigger spreads down in Arkansas beginning of February.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: They’re 60, 70 days old, still got eggshell stuck to their head as they’re coming in, you know. As I go south is when I start adding decoys and getting louder with my caller because everybody is starting to hunt them, as they go south up here, they’re kind of, young and dumb right away, and then they start picking up on it, and then, we start running those bigger spreads down in Arkansas beginning of February, big 1500, decoy sock spreads and stuff like that, and we shoot them pretty good down there, you know, and then as we move back up north and as we bounce into South Dakota, we’re starting to bounce into some little bit bigger spreads to pull those migrating geese that’s headed north, pull them down, and then we’ll bounce up into, into Canada, and once they cross that border there, rutting snow geese. So basically, it’s like hunting deer in the rut. They’re just dumb, and you’re decoying these adult snow geese that know what a decoy is, and they’re flaring at 150 yards at the states, and you’re decoying these geese at 10 yards in the spring.

Ramsey Russell: It’s really interesting to me that because there are outfits like you all, many of them up here, hunting snow geese in the spring. You cross that border spring, I guess there’s not enough hunting pressure for them to feel pressure because they start to settle down, and later in the year, when the big push has gone on, starting its way up to the Arctic and those holdover flocks are sitting out here eating last year’s grain, which is probably fermented, they really get calm, calmer, and it’s got to be a lot harder using bigger decoys. It’s like you’re talking about one goose sees a glint of a glass or a dog sticking out of a blind or whatever, telling the whole flock, up here the flocks are, 500 down there, 5000, 6000, 7000, 8000. That’s a whole lot of eyeballs to fool, isn’t it?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: Especially a pressured bird looking for a reason not to land there.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yep. Bird that gets hunted every single day that it’s in the states.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve noticed, too. The reason I asked you about what you look for in a field, is like, back in the day I was crawling those ditches, especially, I would see where them birds would get in a routine. It’s like they would, it ain’t like a morning field. They had a morning field, an afternoon field, maybe 2 fields jumping around in between, and if I ever saw them just sitting on water for extended periods, I’m like somebody’s fixing, they’re fixing to migrate, they’re hydrating, and they’re out here, and then they get off in, down the deep south, they get off in them wheat fields. They’re building up in protein reserves. How the heck do you hide in a solid green wheat field? It’s a lot of differences, a lot of different challenges geese present between here and there and back. They’re totally different. It’s almost like hunting different critters.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Absolutely, and not every field that you come across, big field that you come across is going to have a good height or a good spot to hide your blinds.

Ramsey Russell: If you ever showed up and seen a field, you just know tomorrow I’m going to beat the brakes off of them and then they just don’t show up.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Absolutely, and weather has that weather has a lot to do with that.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. How long do you think these geese are here yet? We’re mid-October and they’re staging. I’ve seen in the month I’ve been here, the Ross geese have largely migrated out but there’s a lot of white birds around right now, which tells me maybe a lot of them are still coming off the Arctic or have been, and it seemed to me the flocks are building a little bit. Like maybe they’re just bundling up, fixing to take off. How long you think we got?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: It could be. It could be a week. It could be 2 weeks here. Lately I’ve been seeing it dwindle down quite a bit. There was a lot of birds around, a week ago, week and a half ago, and it’s just been dwindling down since then. This morning I actually watched a bunch of birds get up and take off south.

Ramsey Russell: Get migration high.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: That’s it.

Ramsey Russell: Build up and go.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: They were gone.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. I was hunting just a few days ago south of here, about 60 miles, and they, I guess about last week they caught a slug of them.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Maybe those geese were fixing to bundle up and go, too. Do you find that you like because you have to hunt at all? I mean, on a perfect day, if everything works out, you take the clients for darks and ducks in the morning and snows in the afternoon. Do you have a preference? Is there something you’d rather hunt? One or the other? Is it all the same?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: I tend to like to change it up a little bit. I like snow goose hunting in the morning. Tend to get bigger, nastier mobs do it-

Ramsey Russell: Hungrier.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Absolutely. They’re definitely a lot hungry in the morning. In the evenings, sometimes if the weather is not right and they didn’t go back to roost, it could be a little tougher. Sometimes, hell, you’ll shoot most of your birds before the main flight even starts coming back to you in the evenings. Towards the end here, you get on these good little pockets of great birds, and they’re just young and hungry.

Ramsey Russell: Have you. Have you ever gotten a ticket out in the field?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: No.

Ramsey Russell: Even for facing a public road?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Oh, yeah absolutely. Actually, I did. I did get a ticket for doing that. I got a ticket a couple weeks ago. I was facing toward the road, taking a leak, actually, and one of the clients had hollered and said that there was a cop driving down the road and they had slowed down and pulled in the field. Well, before I knew it, he was driving all the way out there to us. Come out there and wrote me a $1,200 indecent exposure ticket.

Ramsey Russell: $1200?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: $1200.

Ramsey Russell: $1200. How do you come up with that figure?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: He ended up charging me $100 an inch.

Ramsey Russell: Lord have mercy. So what do you do? You’re guiding for 10 months out of year. What does a guy like you do? Are you still mad at those birds? Like, if you had next 2 days off, would you go goose hunting?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Absolutely.

Jake Slimp: Really?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: After seeing all them birds dying, putting in all that work, and all that time, you get out there and just do it for yourself.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Never gets old.

Ramsey Russell: What do you do for fun during the off season?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: In the summertime, I head home to one of the best freshwater fisheries for giant stripers.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: In Tennessee?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yes sir, and go out there and chase after 40 inch or better stripers just about every single day.

Jake Slimp: Really?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: I need to check that out. What time of year is that?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: I do that.

Ramsey Russell: June, July?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yep. June, July, and August. Those are my best months. Just shallow, clear water-

Ramsey Russell: What are you catching them with?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: I run big 2 and a half, 3 pound live baits.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Chasing after them big girls.

Ramsey Russell: Had no idea somebody did that. No casting, no crankbaits.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Every now and then I’ll get-

Ramsey Russell: Are you looking for schooling fish and just throwing them big baits out in the middle of them?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Sometimes I’ll get out there and throw some lures at them big swim baits, but other than that, I do a lot of trolling with live bait?

Ramsey Russell: No. Turkey hunt.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Oh, I turkey hunt.

Ramsey Russell: Do you?

Jake Slimp: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I’m glad that bug ain’t got me. I miss that bug. Thank goodness. I mean, my motto is duck season somewhere, and I travel so much. I mean, lord have mercy, if I got the turkey bug, too. I don’t know how I’d pick it all out. I guess I’ll see you next time. I know you got to get up in the morning and go get on it, man. I mean, you got 2 groups of clients in there dying to go shoot a bunch of geese and ducks.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Oh, yeah, and it’s. It should be a pretty damn good time in the morning, so I’ll be ready for that, and they’re pretty damn ready, too.

Ramsey Russell: You think the, would you expect the ducks going to come in early? And once those geese start, once you start seeing geese in there, are you going to let the ducks go?

Jeremy Bolanbarker: More than likely, yes, because I have plenty of ducks to play with in the morning to get our limit. The snow geese, they’re going to come out hot and heavy, and that’s my thing. We’re going to spin them off and decoy them and rip them pretty good in the morning so.

Ramsey Russell: Jeremy, I appreciate you.

Jeremy Bolanbarker: Yes, sir. Thank you so much.

Ramsey Russell: So tell me a little bit about Jake. Now, I’ve known Jake since day one. I met Jake same time I met you, and Jake’s a Texan. He ain’t from middle Tennessee. He’s from Texas. How in the world did you meet Jake Slimp?

Matt Schauer: Jake’s been with me for ages, and I met Jake when he was a client, and I can’t remember how old he was the first time he hunted with us, maybe 15. He might have been 15 or 16, but he was young and he was up on a spring snow goose hunt in Missouri with some family friends that had got the trip and brought him along, and at the end of the hunt, he said that this is what I want to do. This is what I want to do when I graduate, and sure enough, he called me when he graduated and asked for a job. So at the time, we had a duck camp down there in Arkansas, and I told him, come on, and he came out and he worked for a day and then another day, and he has been lighting the goose hunting world on fire since the day that he walked into my duck club in Arkansas.

Ramsey Russell: Was his skill set the same?

Matt Schauer: His skill set is pure ambition.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Matt Schauer: He won’t take no for an answer. He gets out there scouting, and he’s coming back with a, with a good hunt option.

Ramsey Russell: Every time?

Matt Schauer: Every time. If there’s one person comes back into camp that you can count on always having a hunt, it’s Jake Slimp.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s see what Jake has to say.

Jake Slimp: I don’t know about that Ramsey.

Ramsey Russell: Oh Jake.

Jake Slimp: I don’t know about that.

Ramsey Russell: Come on, now. World famous Jake Slimp. I met you the first time I was here, and I’ve hunted with you every time I’ve been here. Fall and spring. Been a long time.

Jake Slimp: It has been a long time. Yeah, it’s been, what, 4 or 5 years?

Ramsey Russell: 6 years? Longer than that. I mean, it was 2 or 3 years before COVID Yep. It was a while back now.

Jake Slimp: I reckon this was a long time. Long time coming here.

Ramsey Russell: Cause that yellow dog is now dead, and she was, she was in her prime first time I came up here.

Jake Slimp: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: The old chicken dog, but Matt brags on you a lot. You know what Matt said just a minute ago? He said that you weren’t coming back to camp without a hunt. Guaranteed 100%, if nobody else could find nothing, that Jake was coming back with a hunt if he was scouting. Is there any truth to that?

Jake Slimp: I mean, a guy’s got to find something. You got to be hunting something. That’s for sure, and nowadays, we got a good crew of guides, and guide doesn’t have to worry about that near as much, but, you got to scratch something together.

Ramsey Russell: How many miles a day would you say you are? Miles a week? Do you average scouting?

Jake Slimp: I don’t know. I guess a guy doesn’t really look at the mileage because, you don’t really want to see that truck mileage going up, it’s about a tank of fuel a day. That’s how I look at it.

Ramsey Russell: For the longest time, I didn’t realize, just because you’re so active in the blind with the setups on the scouting, I didn’t realize you was a partner.

Jake Slimp: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: You’re a partner in this operation, and how in the world come you’re a young man? How old are you?

Jake Slimp: I’m 28.

Ramsey Russell: 28.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, 28.

Ramsey Russell: Golly, you may not even been legal age or, drinking age when I met you.

Jake Slimp: Far off.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, probably one far off. How in the world, how in the world did you get into this business? He said you were a client, and then the next year, you just want a job. So you must have been in high school at the time.

Jake Slimp: Yep. So, a long time ago, it feels like, at least, but nope. Back in high school, I guess I was a sophomore and a junior and went along on a snow goose hunt as a client, from Weatherford, Texas. So we shot a lot of ducks back there, shooting potholes, shooting puddle ducks, and random ducks like that, but didn’t really get to do a lot of goose hunting, so I had a couple buddies from back home, they taught me how to duck hunt, went on my first duck hunts with them boys and everything, and they’d already gone with Matt on a snow goose hunt a time or 2, and I got the invite and got to go on the hunt, so went snow goose hunting and had a good year in Missouri, had an okay year in Arkansas. Shot good many geese at least a couple of days that were there and it was after that senior year-

Ramsey Russell: Had you ever shot geese? Like it?

Jake Slimp: No. Well I’d been down to Houston one year. Yeah, one year and we were hunting over a rag set-

Ramsey Russell: You missed a heyday of that now.

Jake Slimp: Oh, yeah. It was past that, that’s for sure. No, we were shooting some, snow geese, but it was, 60 yard geese over the rags, and it was a good time, but it wasn’t anything like them guys were doing, decoy.

Ramsey Russell: What’d you grow up hunting in? Deer.

Transitioning from Deer to Duck Hunting: A Personal Journey.

When I was growing up hunting with dad, he was a deer hunter, he was raised for hunting deer for meat. It wasn’t a trophy thing.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, when I was growing up hunting with dad, he was a deer hunter, he was raised for hunting deer for meat. It wasn’t a trophy thing. Didn’t have just a whole lot of deer where we hunted, you know? And so I’d go with him and we didn’t really feeder hunt, it was legal in Texas at the time, but, just the way he grew up, a little poor. It just wasn’t a thing, you just went out there and deer hunted. So I went out deer hunting with him, for, years and years. I was young when I was going deer hunting with him. Shot a couple of deer, the rifle, and then eventually got into bow hunting, shot a couple nice deer of the bow but, when I went with them 8-year boys, that was who we were, duck hunting with that. That was it. So after. After a couple duck hunts, it was off with the deer hunting. It was straight ducks that have been.

Ramsey Russell: All in high school?

Jake Slimp: Yeah, that was all high school. Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: So you go on a hunt. You love it. I talked to a lot of young guys that want to be a duck guide or goose guide, but that’s a long ways from working 10 months a year, being a partner in a big operation like this right here, and being hands on like you are. How did you go from high school? Hey, I like snow goose hunting. To freaking hear it. Northern skies outfitters. What led you to go knock on Matt’s door wanting a job?

Jake Slimp: I really don’t know. I did not. When I first asked Matt for a job, I had no intentions to have, any kind of living made out of it. I wanted to go kill shit.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I want to kill stuff.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, that was it. So after that snow Goose hunt, and didn’t really know what I was getting myself into, he told me he’d pay me $300 a week.

Ramsey Russell: $300 a week.

Jake Slimp: We had $300. I didn’t even bat an eye at it. I was like, oh, whatever. That sounds good. I don’t give a shit.

Ramsey Russell: You going to be rich.

Jake Slimp: Yep whatever. Get to kill snow geese, all year long. Whatever.

Ramsey Russell: That’s not even $50 a day.

Jake Slimp: No, yeah, it was. It wasn’t.

Ramsey Russell: On a 10 hour day. That’s not even $5 an hour.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, no, it wasn’t worth it, that’s for sure. I guess it is now.

Ramsey Russell: You told me. You told me before we mic’d up, you said something about you tried college briefly, and you took one class.

Jake Slimp: Yep. Me and my buddy hunter, we took English 1301, and it was still while we’re in high school.

Ramsey Russell: Well, of all the classes in college. Oh, you’re still in high school when you took. I’m going to say, of all the classes in college, why would you start with English? Why not basket weaving or something? To be a lot of good looking girls in something.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, I chose the wrong one, I guess. I guess I failed. I don’t know. I was not into it. I knew from halfway through the classes, like, yeah, it was just me and Hunter hanging out at that point, and he passed, and now he’s a CPA, and smart as he can be, but I was like, nope, that ain’t it, but I talked to Tyler. He was the one of the guys that was running the trip going, and he was like, I’ll call him, and he called him. He talked to Matt, and I emailed him. Why I wanted to be a hunting guide, I’m sure it was some cheesy email or whatever it was, but he picked me to, to do it, and I went out there. I had some guys. He put me with the crew that we were running down in South Arkansas, and he was staying up in north Arkansas. I went with the guys that had been there for years and years.

Ramsey Russell: They talked you to rope.

Jake Slimp: Oh, yeah, and they were the Ogs, they were the old guys, and I learned everything I know about goose hunting for them boys. Davey, Pete, Tony, Shorty, all them boys.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of the things they taught you? I mean, because you’ve got a system. When that trailer stops, you’ve got a system.

Jake Slimp: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, you grab those bags and start pulling them around behind you and tossing. Tossing geese everywhere and getting them in a pattern like you want, behind. Come up, staking them up, getting them going, but you’ve got a system and you got a technique, and it works. Every time I hunt the blind, we kill birds. So what they teach you?

Jake Slimp: A lot about, just really read birds, and a lot of it wasn’t them telling me or anything like that, but seeing and getting to hunt with each one of them, I’d go and hunt with them for an hour at least in the mornings, and you pick up a little bit on everybody from a little bit of something like how they work with clients, how they work the geese, a little bit on their decoys. Blind setup. Why do we sit here? Why do we sit there? I just learned, everything you can learn. Anything that I could see wasn’t that they had to tell me about it or not, but I was picking up on it.

Ramsey Russell: How good of a duck and goose, and what collar were you the first time you ever hunted with a dares up here? One of those trips you went on.

Jake Slimp: How good is a-

Ramsey Russell: I mean, could you blow a duck call? Could you blow a goose call?

Jake Slimp: I could blow a duck call pretty well. Yeah, I’d learned a duck call. I’d always been young. When I was younger, I could pick up a call and learn it fairly easily. A duck call I learned fairly quick. A turkey call, a diaphragm call, slate call all that stuff. Anything, anything I picked up, it’d be easy. I’d say once I started guiding. I started blowing a honker call. That was definitely the toughest thing I ever learned, over a spec and less.

Ramsey Russell: You picked it up pretty good.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, I can blow one now. That dang sure good enough to kill a goose, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: You’ve killed a few since then, hadn’t you?

Jake Slimp: Yeah, I got me one or 2. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What, what’s the hardest thing about this job? I mean, it’s like you hadn’t really learned it. You really hadn’t done much of anything else. So I guess it all comes to natural. What, a lot of young people want to be a duck guy. They won’t live his dream. What’s the reality of it all?

Jake Slimp: I mean, you see, it’s a long year, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It’d be hard for me to tell a whole lot of people that, yeah, you should do this.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, what do you look for? Because I know you’re very active in guide management. You manage a lot of staff. You’re the El Jefe over here at the guide house. What do you look for when somebody comes up, hey, dude, I want to be a good duck guide? I want to be a goose guide. I love this stuff. What qualities do you look for in the people you choose to keep and the people that just don’t make the cut? I know there’s some we get down doing real goose guide shit. They, they don’t make the cut.

Jake Slimp: Oh, yeah. There’s been plenty of come and gone, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: What’s that? Just get tired. They don’t, pick it up or they don’t want to do it.

Jake Slimp: You have some guys. I’ve had plenty in the past. We try to start our guys in Arkansas.

Ramsey Russell: Why?

Jake Slimp: The mud, the rain, the running and gunning.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jake Slimp: The spreads. It’s just, and we do all day hunts in Arkansas, running a lot of traffic. We do some migraine hunting. We do some field hunting.

Ramsey Russell: That’s the proven ground.

Jake Slimp: Yep, and it’s just. It’s just an all day deal, and it’ll you if a guy’s going to make it or not.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, sure.

Jake Slimp: we started. I got Max here. He started in Arkansas, and I think 5 days into him working with me, we had an ice storm, and it was a bad one, so it was 4, 4 or 5 days of ice. Had some decoys out. Some decoys we pulled a lot of them, but anytime you get an ice storm down there, it’s just hell.

Ramsey Russell: Ice storm. I’m thinking a few years ago, I was supposed to go to Arkansas to snow goose hunt. Couldn’t get there because everything between there and Jackson, Mississippi, was black ice on the road but the guys that were there beat the brakes off of.

Jake Slimp: Oh, we beat them up. That’s for sure. Yeah. We’re sitting there wondering, we’re in south Arkansas, wondering if we were going to run out of birds or what, you know? And they just held on, and they didn’t. They thought they could tough it out, is what they are doing. They sat there, and it got to the point where there was no open water, really open. There was. It was solid shut, and they were huddled up. You’d go out there in the field in the morning where you had decoy set, and there’d be a huddle of geese all tight together. Just huddle them up, stay warm, get water out of the snow or ice, whatever they’re doing, but they weren’t going back the roost. Cause there wasn’t one.

Ramsey Russell: There wasn’t one.

Jake Slimp: No, but they were. They were hungry, and they were dumb, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: So the guys that show up in Arkansas, that just ain’t going to make it. They just give out. It’s just more working than what they expect.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, I mean, you have guys that won’t make it a week, really? Yeah. You have guys that try, quit on their own?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jake Slimp: There is some guys. They made the week, and I decided it was just, you could tell a lot of times, sometimes you don’t know for sure, but.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, you can tell you get a bad attitude.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, you just.

Ramsey Russell: It’s just not going to sleep in the mornings. Can’t do that.

Jake Slimp: Can ain’t going to work.

Ramsey Russell: You talk about Arkansas being a mess with that old gumbo mud and all that mess down there but in coming up here, most days you can drive out to the field and pull the tiki hut and do all that stuff, but buddy, let it rain over here for 5 or 6 days.

Jake Slimp: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: All of a sudden that’s a mess, too.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, we just. We just had a little stretch. Oh, what was it, week and a half ago? I don’t. It blurs together now, but it was out. 6 days of tracking in and out and when you’re driving in to these fields every day, you really notice when it does rain, you’re like, oh, God.

Ramsey Russell: You got a whole lot of extra steps because now you got to move everything and to the trailers, to the sleds, to this, to that. I mean, it’s just a lot more weight to move, a lot more moving pieces in it.

Jake Slimp: You go from your 40 minutes set up or whatever it is, to about an hour and a half, and shoot your snows in the evening or whatever you’re hunting and get done closer to dark, and then you got that going on, and then get them home and cleaning birds and. Yeah, it’s a definitely later night, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: Most clients I’ve ever hunted with up here pitch in, you know. Yo, the trailer stops. We all know our jobs. Some of us are throwing decoy, some of our stake, and some of us are brushing blind. Some are doing this, doing that, but you got some clients that don’t do that.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, you have a few.

Ramsey Russell: That’s okay, isn’t it?

Jake Slimp: That’s your choice. Yeah, they pay for the hunt and we appreciate every bit of help they’ll give us, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: Some guys, that’s their deal. They pay for the hunt. They want to just get in the blind and shoot and have a good time and come back here and eat Miss Jen’s cooking and. To me, it’s a hands on experience, got to do something, but to some people, it ain’t that way, right?

Jake Slimp: No, yeah. I don’t blame or reckon. They pay for it, whatever. Maybe one day I’ll be a client and sitting in the van, I don’t know.

Ramsey Russell: You’re hunting. You bring up a good point. You hunt 10 months out of the year, you guide 10 months out of the year. Do you still like to hunt? Do you still. Do you still get mad? In Saskatchewan, you’re not allowed to shoot a shotgun with a client there and stuff like that. Do you ever go out? If you had 2 days off, next 2 days, would you go out and hunt them yourself, or would you just know?

Jake Slimp: Oh, yeah. Yeah, we’d be out there. Yep. Me and the boys. I’m sure we.

Ramsey Russell: Would you still like to hunt them?

Jake Slimp: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. When we first started up here, I wasn’t really that old, and wasn’t too far into my guiding career when Matt found this allocation up for sale, and he’d been up here, for years, freelancing all over the providence, looking around, and he knew the area that we needed to be in, you know. So when this allocation came up for sale, he asked me if I wanted to be partners with him in it, and I obviously jumped on it as quick as I could, borrowed some money from my parents to get it going and paid them back and whatever but, yeah, it was one of my things. When I first started, I really did think it was going to bother me not being able to shoot the shotgun, with the whole garden thing and. Yeah, it doesn’t bother me one bit, really. Just the whole thing for me is just fooling the. Fooling the geese, fooling the ducks, whatever it is, get them as close as I can, and you never know when you’re going to have the best mob of snow geese or whatever it is, that you’re going to see, and that’s what keeps it going, you just never know what it’s going to be, and I got to see it for myself.

Ramsey Russell: I think that this outfit is notoriously good about being patient, letting the geese work and get settled?

Jake Slimp: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Matt showed me a video the other day, and I mean, boy, there were several times. I know good and well my heart horse. I’d have jumped, I’m saying, I could have killed birds. We could have killed birds, but it’s not, it’s not. It was a full 2 or 3,4,5  minutes into the video that the 3 that initially landed got it, flew away, turned into ten, turned into 15, turned into 50, turned into 60. Right on the deck in the hole. We own them. How long did it take you to develop that? For a young guy?

Jake Slimp: It took a little while, that’s for sure. It’s scary, you know?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jake Slimp: Especially when you got clients that are looking at you like, what? What you just do? You let that group go, because you’re getting greedy. You’re going to let some go.

Ramsey Russell: You find, like, the older you get, the more the seasons go by, the greedier you get in that respect.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, absolutely. The years go by, and I definitely am greedier.

Ramsey Russell: It seems like you want more and more of them in that hole.

Jake Slimp: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Watch those rain outs.

Jake Slimp: Oh, I catch myself sometimes. I mean, there’s days that you’re going to have to shoot them a little taller than you want. We do have clients out here. We’re going to get the geese. If they’re gettable, we got to get them. I let more geese go than a guy probably should. He’s just trying to, trying to see that, put them feet down.

Ramsey Russell: It sure is beautiful when those snow geese really hook up and start to spin, slide and just the flocks are working in sync, getting closer and closer. It’s an amazing sight.

Jake Slimp: There’s nothing better.

Ramsey Russell: Then when they get up at the valley, they ain’t really got nowhere to go but towards the guns and over it, and that’s just when all hell breaks loose.

Jake Slimp: Yep. You couldn’t have enough shells.

Ramsey Russell: What do you do for fun? If you’re guiding for 10 months a year, what do you do for 2 months a year? Sleep.

Jake Slimp: I got a girlfriend that lives in Florida, in between Arkansas and coming back up here in the spring. I used to do the South Dakota, but I actually take off during that. Go do some turkey hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jake Slimp: Yeah. When I get done in Arkansas, I’ll go down to Florida, meet her, and hang out with her a little bit, and then the Florida turkey season starts down there. So go down there and do some turkey hunting. Hop over to Texas back home and do a little turkey hunting. Maybe hop somewhere else, do a little turkey on somewhere else, but come up here and do the spring hunting, and then when we get done there, I might make a pit stop, shoot a turkey or 2 somewhere. Last year we got done, went to Montana with some of the boys and shot a couple turkeys, but after that, go home, spend about a month in Texas, a month in Florida or something like that. Try split it up and see her. She comes, sees me do a lot of bass fishing, do a little work, but I do a lot more invest around than anything, I’m sure. I feel like after 10 months of doing all that, I just, I need a break for some people and go sit on a boat and do some fishing.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely. I want to ask you this question. Is somebody that has chased, seriously, snow geese from the headwaters of the migration clear down to Gulf coast and back. What’s it like, hunting techniques and how greedy can you get? How does your game change in response to chasing these birds from up here? In one life cycle, part of their life cycle down to the coast, one of the part of life cycles and back up here, they’re the same bird, but their behavior and their flocking tendencies and what they’re feeding on and everything changes between here and there and back. What are some of the obvious differences, setups and ways? I mean, your approach to hunting snow geese. I really don’t know many people that have chased snow geese like that so extensively.

Jake Slimp: Yeah. Up here, in the fall time, you get the young birds. Yeah, we hope that there’s a good hatch and, this year was a pretty good hatch, I’d say.

Ramsey Russell: Was it?

Jake Slimp: You know? Yeah, I’d say it’s above average, but not too much above, plenty gray birds, plenty to have a good spring down there, but not, as good as the best year I’ve seen. So up here, we’re running full body spreads using the tiki blonde, trying to hide on tree patches or tree lines or sometimes out in the middle. Just depends on the day, depends on the wind or whatever it is, but yeah running them full body spreads up here.

Ramsey Russell: I’d say maybe a couple hundred decoys.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, smaller spreads. A lot of times smaller spreads.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it’s small.

Jake Slimp: Back in the day, we’ve always ran big spreads, even down and down in Arkansas, the last couple years we’ve gone down to some smaller spreads and done some full bodies down there and what not when we’re mostly in the past, run socks, running 2500 or whatever it is, but it’s a lot the same but somehow different. You get down in Arkansas and all those snows have split up. They push their young’s to the side. You’ll sometimes see them carrying their young, sometimes not. Just depends on the year, depends on the different fronts. The different cold fronts. If you get a couple different cold fronts, them juvies really break off from adults.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jake Slimp: Yep. So you see it more some years than others. It just depends.

Ramsey Russell: So you all go from running a couple of hundred decoys up here to 2500 down there?

Jake Slimp: Yeah. Our migrator sets will be big rigs down there, big sock rigs, and then we have some traffic rigs that are 4500 full bodies. We got some traffic rigs that are 1200 socks. We have some pits that we run socks on. We have some pits we run full bodies on. It’s just all depending on the spot, it’s just.

Ramsey Russell: Then you back up here in the spring, you meet them back, and I’ve always heard, and I’d love to be here the last 3 or 4 days of the season because I’ve heard you all might not put out, but a couple of dozen decoys.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, we run a few more night usually, but, yeah, we do. We get them real big, real wide and spread them out, and any I run smaller spreads on them adults.

Ramsey Russell: It’s not really flock. Somebody told me one time it’d be more singles. Just a constant stream of singles coming in.

Jake Slimp: Yeah. If you get a hot feed, you get that feed line and you get some wads and what not. There are days where, if they’re not doing it good, you’re not getting the big flocks. You wait around till mid morning and you get a lot of pairs, just pairs of adults squawking adults just talking it up and, made it up and ready to, get up there and do a thing, you know.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Here at this program right here, you do darks and ducks in the morning, snows in the evening. That’s a typical program. Tomorrow this bunch of clients is leaving, and you all are going to do. I heard they’re both going after snows and ducks. That’s what the big 2 hot feeds were. If you could do just one. I mean, do you have a favorite species?

Jake Slimp: I’m going after the snows.

Ramsey Russell: You want the snows?

Jake Slimp: Oh, yeah. Can’t beat the snow geese.

Ramsey Russell: It always blows my mind when I hear a few people, we all want to go and have a big shoot, 5 guys in a blind, 6 guys in a blind, whatever. Shooting half a limit of snows is still a heck of a shoot.

Jake Slimp: Oh, yeah, it’s a good shoot. It’s always a good shoot. It’s just a guy has different standards, I guess.

Ramsey Russell: I can remember when I was about your age, Jake, the limit was 5. 5 snow geese and all the best of days down in Texas. Back in those days, on the final of the heyday, on the best of days, you shot 5 apiece.

Jake Slimp: Oh, yeah, and you’re happy as hell.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. There were days you wish to limit. Been more, but you’re happy to get that limit.

Jake Slimp: Yeah that’s how it is. They set the limits and then you start getting to a standard and all that.

Ramsey Russell: Good limits set an expectation below which you feel like you didn’t quite achieve it. I was on a hunt, and I guess yesterday we had 50 something birds. That was a heck of a shoot.

Jake Slimp: Oh, yeah I’ll take it.

Ramsey Russell: Especially after we shot limits in the morning of ducks or whatever. What a heck of a day, man.

Jake Slimp: Yep. I ran a snow goose hunt just a couple days ago here, and we could have shot 120 snows, and I think we shot 65 or something like that, but they came out hot, and just had 3 or 4 wads that did it upright and very good decoying geese, and that was all I needed. That’s what a guy’s looking for.

Ramsey Russell: You think you’re going to do this rest of your life?

Jake Slimp: I plan to, I don’t know. I guess you just never know where it’s going to take you. I do plan to guide it. Hunt something for a living, for as long as a guy’s going to have to do.

Ramsey Russell: You don’t think you ever going back to college.

Jake Slimp:  No.

Ramsey Russell: Take English, too.

Jake Slimp: No, English. 1302. That’s out the window.

Ramsey Russell: I appreciate you, and I look forward to hunting with you again.

Jake Slimp: Yeah, Ramsey, I’m sure we’ll do it again.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, we will. I promise you we will. Thank you, folks. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere Podcast. We’ll see you next time.

[End of Audio]

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