EP 430. Australia Outback Goose Camp

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I am way down under, but I’m in the Northern Territories, which I’ve never been to and we’ve been down here for several days at magpie goose camp up in the Northern Territories up against, I don’t know, I’m asking a guest what the ocean is. First up today is Mr. Trent Leen. How the heck are you, Trent?

Trent Leen: I’m great, Ramsey. Great to be here.

Ramsey Russell: Trent, it’s been a long time since, I’ve hunted with you twice, but it’s been a long time back before the world got crazy.

Trent Leen: Yeah, certainly lots happened in that time.

Ramsey Russell: Nothing makes it feel more simple than coming back, seeing my Australian buddies and shooting ducks and geese and having a good time eating.

Trent Leen: Yeah, we’re in a different state this time. We’ve hunted in Australia before, but in Victoria and up here on a new experience with the geese and it’s great.

Ramsey Russell: One of the most obvious differences coming this far north is it one hot son of a gun. It’s hot as Vietnam. It’s hot up here. And I’m used to it, but I guess I’m just not used to coming down here where I normally pack a heavy coat and long johns or something to go out there and hunt on the marshes. And it feeling like opening day of dove season Mississippi hot. It’s hot down here. Why is our season run so odd like that?

Trent Leen: Well, it’s just how it works. It all lines up with the breeding so the seasons are always lined up out of the breeding seasons. So just happens to be a very hot part of the year. And, yeah, we’re up here and doing our best in the heat.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about the obvious differences in terms of duck hunting, like, it’s very different hunting up here. Yesterday you all warned me there’s going to be different. It was going to be pass shooting which I’ve passed shot before. But, son, that was some pretty sporty shooting.

Trent Leen: I guess the biggest difference and that was highlighted by what happened today was the fact that there’s crocodiles in the water.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, boy. Talk about that a little bit because we had an interesting conversation yesterday on the drive in. You all were talking about the crocs and I was kind of busting your balls a little bit. What are you scared of snakes? You scared of spiders and mice? But these ain’t just your run of the mill little 3 or 4 foot alligators, aren’t it?

Trent Leen: No, we had the discussion about the difference between alligators and crocodiles. So at 4 or 5 meter croc you won’t even see him coming.

Ramsey Russell: 4 or 5 meter, 3.3ft/meter so we’re talking 17, 18 foot long. Got ahead probably, what? Long as you?

Trent Leen: Yeah. Meter joel.

Ramsey Russell: 3 and a half foot tall. Have you heard any crocodile stories?

Trent Leen: Well, we had a good one today.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Cause we were leaving, I want to take a picture of that sign because I guess in all these public lands there are big signs warning people of the date that a man eating croc was last seen in the body of water, everybody’s going out to hunt and go ahead and tell that story. So, we met a park ranger officer.

Trent Leen: Yeah. On the way out we saw the, we spotted the sign on the way in, we thought we’d better get a photo of that on the way out. And unbeknownst to us we actually saw a croc that morning but only a little one. And yeah, bumped into the ranger and had a quick yarn with him and he was telling us a story about a, unfortunately fisherman was out in his tinnie and the crocodile hit the side of the boat. He fell over on the back of the motor and got dragged out the back of the boat, never seen again.

Ramsey Russell: How big a boat would you imagine? We’re talking about a 14 foot jon boat, a 14 foot skiff, something like that.

Trent Leen: Probably about a 12 foot.

Ramsey Russell: So he’s going along. The crocodile knew that hunter was in that boat and bumped it to try to knock him off or something.

Trent Leen: What can happen? And this has actually happened to one of my cousins and he was trawling at the back of the same thing. 12 foot tinnie little 15 hp motor, trawling along and sometimes the crocs can be on the edge of the edge of the bank and as you trawl along, you might spook them and they might just rush out and so it might be accidentally that they hit the boat. Most people aren’t still there to ask the croc whether it was accidentally or on purpose. But, yeah, he got hit in the side by the crocodile, knocked him into the bottom of the boat, fortunately and the tiller went full lock and he’s there just buzzing around in circles. So he was lucky he landed in the bottom of the boat. The gentleman, the story that we got told this morning, he fell back on the motor and whether it was just opportunistic or what, nobody will ever know. But the croc grabbed him and they never found him.

Ramsey Russell: The croc knew he was up there, jumped up into the boat, grabbed him, pulled him in, never seen again.

Trent Leen: Yeah, never seen again.

Ramsey Russell: Now, have you had any personal experiences with croc other this morning? Talk about this morning because you all didn’t have to go get one particular bird.

Trent Leen: Yeah, we had to give one up this morning. It was a good morning on the geese, we limited out on the geese pretty early.

Ramsey Russell: Paul did. That was really good.

Trent Leen: It was red hot this morning, so really happy. And then we know that the ducks come back in for a drink around the 08:00 mark. So we sort of stuck it out and yeah, the waves of whistlers just, you saw the waves of whistlers were just coming in. It was just magic and we dropped quite a few and we were out getting the birds only in the shallow water out the front. We won’t go in any deep water, of course.

Ramsey Russell: To qualify that, how deep water will you go into in croc country?

Trent Leen: Well, the problem is a 5 meter croc can probably hide in 200 mil of water. That’s a problem.

Ramsey Russell: A foot.

Trent Leen: A foot of water, under a foot of water.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Trent Leen: Well, under a foot of water.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t see how.

Trent Leen: Well, I mean and it’s, you don’t want to take undue risks, but, I mean, we’ve been dropping birds all morning. There’s lots of activity and stuff like that. So if there’s a cranky croc in there, he’s probably already going to have sampled one of your waterfowl. And that’s my first encounter with him out actually hunting, fishing, quite a lot. we’ve been stuck on sandbars before and we’ve had a 4 and a half meter croc circle on the boat. You’re stuck on a sandbar waiting for the tide to come in.

Ramsey Russell: So you all are out there and when did you see, what did you first tip you off? I mean, did he stalk around on the goose? Could you all sell the duck over there before anybody could get to him or figure out how to get to him?

Trent Leen: Yeah. So I mean, our first retrieval plan for the ducks in the water is the fishing rod with a treble. So a nice, sharp treble with a bean sinker down on it and you just cast out, hook the bird, bring it in, so that’s our first method. Any of the ones that’s in the shallower water, I guess some could call it a calculated risk. Others would say it’s stupidity. You’ll go out and grab them in the shallower water. So I proceeding to go out and get some of the shallow ones while Paul was casting out to the longer one and I’m on my way out to a bird and then all of a sudden, the other bird got, we thought it duck dived under the water and it come up out of the water quite agitated. And, yeah, then we saw the bow wave behind it and yeah, the croc was attacking it from behind, and that’s why I’m on the way out to grab the bird that’s probably 6 meters in front of that bird.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Did it dawn on you? Because, like, back home, alligators don’t just live in the water. They like to lounge up undercover and I’ve seen the caimans down in Argentina do the same thing. They don’t just lay out in the open sun like a turtle, they’ll climb up in cover. And there you all were. Glenn and I were in, like, belt high grass, a little clump of grass sizes kitchen table hidden well enough for the birds, but you all just disappeared. You all were in head high Yokapin lily pads. I mean, did it occur to you that possibly there might be a crocodile just taking a nap up in there?

Trent Leen: Well, look, it’s always possible, but they are cold blooded and it’s pretty hot, so they don’t spend a lot of time out when it’s that hot. So they’ll come out, sun themselves on the bank and then slip back into the water. So it’s also pretty hard going for them in there. So there’s all the things that run through your mind when you’re in those areas. And like any animal, they like to take the easiest route possible. So they’re not going to come up and sun themselves on a bank that’s full of lilies where it’s hard going for them to get in and out. They’ll be on the muddy banks where it’s nice and easy for them to slip in and out and that’s when you’ll see the crocodile slides going down. It’s one of those things that you just sort of calculate through your mind. You don’t have a think about it. But they are ambush predators.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, they are. Well, you were saying yesterday, don’t ever go and wash your clothes or go to the river in the same exact point because they’ll figure out, something’s coming here, I can hide and get him.

Trent Leen: Yeah, well, what everybody does, you pull up at a nice camp spot and beautiful view and then, look, there’s the nice little trail down to the creek. And now that could have be a game trail that everybody just uses to get down there, but the crocs just can be lying there waiting and he might wait there for days, whether it be a feral pig or wallaby, whatever, to come down and drink. And that might just be you filling your belly up out of the river.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. How long have you and your dad and others been coming up here to Northern Territories to hunt magpie geese?

Trent Leen: So last year was my first trip up here. So a few of the other boys have been doing it for quite a lot longer. And I did a trip around Australia last year as well, so we did a lot of hunting up the top end and then I come back with my father and targeted the geese with Glenn and a few of the other boys that are here today.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a night, it reminds me of like guys down south back home going up to Canada and it’s a seasoned extension, isn’t it? But it seems to me, with all the crap going on down here with the anti-hunters, that the government here is a lot more hunter friendly. There’s a 7 goose limit, a 10 duck limit per day for months.

Trent Leen: Yeah. Things are different in the territory.

Ramsey Russell: They are different in the territory.

Trent Leen: It’s definitely different in the territory. Hunting and fishing and subsistence hunting is a way of life up here.

Ramsey Russell: Are there more aboriginals up here? Is that what it is?

Trent Leen: Well, yeah, that too. And that’s a whole another story. But it’s just generally accepted a lot wider, it’s probably, I’m going to say probably, normally it is –

Ramsey Russell: How many big cities are there? I mean, that maybe have something to do with it, like Melbourne and Geelong and all the places around the big cities. It seems to be where radical liberals congregate.

Trent Leen: Yeah. There’s not you just don’t have the political landscape up here is a lot different time.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What are your favorite things about coming up here to magpie goose camp?

Trent Leen: Oh, look, I mean –

Ramsey Russell: Good eat for sure, it’s a lot of fun.

Trent Leen: Yeah. Good eating and as any trip away is always good. And getting away in a completely different climate, completely different area, dealing with completely different things, challenging yourself with a species that’s completely different hunting, you don’t hunt in the wetland. You hunt adjoining the wetland.

Ramsey Russell: No.

Trent Leen: So if we were back home we would have been out on those islands.

Ramsey Russell: You would had that bed boat out there –

Trent Leen: You would have been decoying all your birds, you would have been out in the middle, it would have been great. So it’s a whole new challenge for you. I enjoy hunting all new areas and just then when you’re hunting a whole new species, that just adds another element to it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, Trent, I enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to coming back. I came here for, besides seeing my friends, I came here for 3 reasons, 3 bucket list species and in 2 days I knocked them off. Tomorrow’s going to be great, we’re just going to go out and have fun. But I am going to come back. Thankfully, you didn’t tell me, I’d have obsessed about it. You told me you kind of, sort of tried to get a buffalo hunt lined up. Have you ever buffalo hunted?

Trent Leen: Yeah, I’ve shot a couple of buffalo now.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about that.

Trent Leen: So really, I’m actually really lucky. A friend of mine’s a traditional owner up here in the Northern Territory, so we can go out and hunt on his land and we butcher the animals up and take the meat back for the community and all that sort of thing. So that’s really good. And, yeah, my first experience buffalo hunting was we were driving around in the UTV, going from Billabong to Billabong, glassing around the Billabong and then we found –

Ramsey Russell: Excuse me, what the heck is a Billabong?

Trent Leen: All right.

Ramsey Russell: I tried to go with it, but I couldn’t figure it out.

Trent Leen: Okay, so just a small wetland. Okay, so small wetland –

Ramsey Russell: Like we hunted today.

Trent Leen: A lot smaller than that. So the body could be anywhere from any 50 meters in diameter, right up to big, sort of bigger sort of areas. But just driving around from them, spot them, then stalk in, try and get the shot and that’s all good. But, of course, when they bolt and then this is the first buffalo you’ve basically even seen, let alone trying to shoot. And then you’re running off after them through saplings that are like, this big. And the first thing they say, if you shoot one, make sure you pick a tree to climb.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

The Surge of Adrenaline: Heart-Pounding Moments.

Just caught it in the front shoulder and it just looked at me and I thought, shit, is it going to charge? And when they look at you, they look through you.

Trent Leen: Because you can hit these things with a 300 wind mag and they’ll just laugh at you and charge you. So here we are running through these small little saplings and all I can think about is, none of these trees are going to hold me. So that was good. The adrenaline was going through the roof on that one and I’m glad I didn’t have to take a shot then, because I don’t think I would have been able to shoulder the gun in the state I was in. But not long after that, spotted another animal stalked into about 75 meters, which was about as far as I was comfortable at the time. Yeah, full broadside shot, really happy with the shot full heart, lung shot. Just caught it in the front shoulder and it just looked at me and I thought, shit, is it going to charge? And when they look at you, they look through you. Oh, yeah, they look through you.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Trent Leen: And I’m cycled the rifle and it’s as quick as that, it’s actually turned and ran.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Trent Leen: And Charlie, who was, who you met today, was with me and he just said, give it another one. So I’ve given another one as it’s running away.

Ramsey Russell: And you were saying Charlie holds, like, the country record for spine shots on these big beasts.

Trent Leen: Yeah. So that’s Charlie’s father.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Okay

Trent Leen: So he’s Charlie junior. So Charlie senior, Charles Whittaker, held the record for spine shooting Buffalo off horseback. So they’re pretty main feet. Obviously, they spine shot him because that was all horse and cart stuff. And the skinners and boners would follow them on the horse and cart and butcher all the animals. So, obviously, if you killed the animal, by the time they got to it. Excuse me. An hour or so later, the meat would have already spoiled in the heat.

Ramsey Russell: Last question I got for you. Next to last question I got for you is way back when, I don’t know when, but at some point, in time in history, Australia banned semi-automatic shotguns and so therefore, everybody here shoots in over and under, except for you. You’re out there clipping away at bam, bam. And I was, talk about how that gun works and what kind of gun that is, it’s not a semi-automatic. It’s something different. I saw that lever on the side of it, but boy, you can rip it off pretty dang quick.

Trent Leen: Yeah. So we’ve had a few new shotguns on the market now, which are a modified. They were based on a semi-automatic, but then that’s been removed and they’re a button or a lever release. The first ones were the Adlers, which was a lever action, not very popular in the shotgun because they’re not so smooth and they’re clunky. And it gave you no advantages because the breach was closed when you fired it, whereas the new sort of, I guess, more modern range is they’re all a button release or a lever release. So me being left handed off go on the button release and the button is where the safety is on and under and over. So that’s where it is. So whether you’re left or right handed, you can operate it quite easily. And, yeah, after the first time I used it, I shot some clays and by the second pad, I didn’t even have to think about pressing the button.

Ramsey Russell: So you put a shell in the pipe and load them up in the magazine. When you pull the trigger the first time, the action stays open till you push the button, bam, it shuts again.

Trent Leen: Correct. So you’re getting the advantages of a gas operated shotgun. But the receiver locks back.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Trent Leen: Then you press the button and it cycles the other shell –

Ramsey Russell: I’ll be dang.

Trent Leen: Shell in. So like up here like shooting those high birds, like on the first day when we’re here, I was knocking myself around with the under and over, shooting high birds, odd angles whereas –

Ramsey Russell: I forgot how much more recall an over and under half, then up, then even a Benelli semi auto. It that really, that action really takes a lot out of it.

Trent Leen: You sort of heard me the first day. I had a smile on me face and I was just ripping them off.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, I know.

Trent Leen: And I didn’t feel it was great.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I tell you what now I just got to give a shot out. I had a great time. We were shooting over and unders I was with a steel shot. And all I can think is, boy, if I had my Benelli with a tight choke and ball shot, shell number 2, copper plated business, I’d be the champion of the wetland.

Trent Leen: We’d love to get some boss down here, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Thank you, Trent, had a good time. Looking forward to tomorrow.

Trent Leen: Cheers, mate.

Ramsey Russell: Mr. Paul Sharp. Good to see you again.

Paul Sharp: As always and good to see you.

Ramsey Russell: Put your mic just a little bit closer for me.

Paul Sharp: We can do that.

Ramsey Russell: Come on.

Paul Sharp: Try that.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, very good. Paul, it’s been a while since I saw you, been since the world shut down. A lot has changed since I saw you last down in South Australia. But not everything’s changed.

Paul Sharp: No, not everything.

Ramsey Russell: It’s good to see you again. Boy, I tell you what, you’re still the camp cook and you still like to shoot ducks, I’m finding out.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. Might be there’s a chance to –

Ramsey Russell: You’re willing to go the distance to do either?

Paul Sharp: Any opportunity, mate and I’m out the door. I’ve warned everybody that’s the way it is.

Ramsey Russell: How long have you been coming up here to Northern Territory?

Paul Sharp: This is only my second time. I came last year –

Ramsey Russell: But not your last.

Paul Sharp: Oh, no. This is now annual trip every year for me, as matter, well, put it this way, I’ll book it every year and the idea is that we go every year.

Ramsey Russell: Every year.

Paul Sharp: Every year.

Ramsey Russell: Why? Just because, it’s a good way to extend your season.

Paul Sharp: Northern Territory, Northern Australia is the last frontier.

Ramsey Russell: It’s really, isn’t it?

Paul Sharp: It’s a stunning place. It’s absolutely wild and we get to bring home the magpie geese and the ducks. And they are absolutely sensational on the table.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll be honest with you. The magpie goose ain’t winning no beauty contest, neither am I, but I was very pleasantly surprised at what great table fare he makes.

Paul Sharp: Stunning.

Ramsey Russell: How would you describe it?

Paul Sharp: Oh, I’d been told about it a lot before we came up here and I’d never really tried it, for some reason, without any tenderization, the breasts are all tender. They’ve got this beautiful, subtle, sweet flavor to them. They eat a lot of mangoes and fruit. They’re funny animal. They’ll dabble in the water, so whatever they’re doing, don’t change the recipe, because it translates into a fine steak on the table.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, we’ve driven by some massive mango plantations and it’s just the rows are lined with them. But then we’ve been hunting out in the wild marsh and you’ve been, as we’re skinning the birds, you show me these different – And I think it could be tubers, but I really think it’s lily pad seed.

Paul Sharp: I recognize –

Ramsey Russell: That’s what I think it is.

Paul Sharp: I’ve got some homework to do. I want to find out, actually.

Ramsey Russell: I saw some art and what made me think of is I saw some artwork the other day at the airport, of all places, painted on the ceiling. Just an elaborate artwork of Northern Territory. It had a lot of magpie geese and they were surrounded by those Yokapin pods.

Paul Sharp: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And the lily pad and I’m thinking that’s got to be a reason.

Paul Sharp: Yeah, well, they’re in there feeding all day long, like in the natural thing there, if you like, where we were down, where you were shooting this morning, you would have seen them all those lily pads when we left and the geese had all settled back in there, they were thick.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah. Inside the lily pad?

Paul Sharp: Inside the lily pads, around the lily pads, in the water, I dare say that as the water recentered –

Ramsey Russell: Well, the lily pads had to be taller than they were.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. And the water would have been higher at one stage, too. So whether they’re chasing them back, eating them out of the mud and that’s the way the lilies grow back with the water.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Paul Sharp: I don’t know.

Ramsey Russell: I think you own to something right there. Talk about last night’s dinner.

Paul Sharp: Ooh. It was a star.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, it’s like we had a 4 course magpie, 3 course magpie goose, one part whistling duck, preceded by 3 or 4 appetizer courses, all magpie goose.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. Well, Glenn had worded me up. He said, you’re going to have to up your game and none of this repeat. We’re going to have to come up with something new. So I thought all right, but what we did so I thought, let’s just have them simply so the first one, all I did was just thin slice the magpie goose breast and just a little bit of chili oil, some oyster sauce, salt and pepper and flash fried it in a pan just till it was rare, took it out and then threw the vegetables in there. Then when they were nice and charred up, like just how you get at a restaurant, Chinese or Asian meal, threw the meat back in and then just served it like that. And you could have eaten the spoon you dipped it in –

Ramsey Russell: Stir fry.

Paul Sharp: Yeah, it was a stir fry.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a simple stir fry.

Paul Sharp: Nothing flash.

Paul Sharp: And I noticed you don’t cook your waterfowl medium rare. You cook them rare and that’s a huge difference.

Paul Sharp: Rare. And then wrap them in tin foil and rest them for a couple of minutes and that’ll just let it cook that little bit further into medium, not all the way and just lets the juices go back through it. And last night, when you had the tomahawks we made, that’s the same thing. Let them rest, slice them up just nice and thin. I think you’d call it quarter inch or something like that and then just a little bit of basic sauce over top, which was pan juices and the juice that ran out of the magpie geese.

Ramsey Russell: Magpie tomahawks, talk about that.

Paul Sharp: Well.

Ramsey Russell: Because you served them and they were magnificent. But then today, you showed us how to actually prepare them.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. You mean like from the bird?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And it would be very easy to do with any goose, any swan, any duck.

Paul Sharp: I reckon it would translate.

Ramsey Russell: It would, talk about how, and where’d you come up with the idea and then talk about how to do it.

Paul Sharp: I got a mate up with us, Jeff and he was annoying the living crap out of saying, we got to watch this video on how to clean these birds, it’s the way to do it. And my other friend, who comes up as his brother, we just, we never watched the video and it drove him nuts. And he explained how to do this and he was losing his temper with it. But anyway, we had to admit it was the best way to clean it I’ve ever seen.

Ramsey Russell: It presents itself nicely.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. And really, all you do is take the wing off at the joint, at the elbow joint, you cut around the base of the neck through the skin and then, like, pulling a sock off a foot, so to speak, you just pull it apart and pull it down so you’re skinning the bird and because they are super tough and it is hot as blazes out there and it’s just too hard to do with fingers. And I pluck most of my birds.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Paul Sharp: I don’t like not plucking them. But, yeah so that’s how you get to the crown of the bird and you’ve got the wing attached at the shoulder. So you didn’t fill it out like you would normally do, like a breast fillet. But make sure you take the wing joint at the –

Ramsey Russell: Pop that joint.

Paul Sharp: Pop the joint, but pop it right on the carcass at the shoulder joint. And then that’s how you get the, in quotes, tomahawk. You got the wing, a nice little thing to hang on to and then you got this lovely big fillet.

Ramsey Russell: And you didn’t spend up. It wasn’t a complicated marinade. It was very simple, you let the meat speak for itself.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. Cut just like a thin slice of the silver off the outside, just on the breast the skin side, salt and pepper and just rubbed it, we use oyster sauce. You have to have it over there. It’s common in –

Ramsey Russell: We do. Yeah, I know what oyster sauce.

Paul Sharp: It’s common. That’s it and I literally just let them sit there for an hour, didn’t tenderize them, didn’t do anything and just put them on the barbecue and cook them through the rare, wrapped them, let the juices go back and then sliced them and served them.

Ramsey Russell: Now, I know the Thai curry goose was a little more involved.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. We were using the legs there. So they’ve, obviously those things can run and that’s about the toughest thing on them. The breasts are not tough at all, like, not one of them was tough. The wings can be a little bit chewy.

Ramsey Russell: They got those long legs for a reason. They probably spend a lot of their lives and they’re not particularly strong flyers. They probably spend a lot of their lives walking and running.

Paul Sharp: And walking through all that lily pad stuff. But, yeah, so I used the legs and the legs were skinned as well. And it was a slow cook, I used a, what I used? Thai green curry. And then I put half a jar of laksa paste, which is like a Malaysian coconut curry thing and lots of coconut milk. And I let that cook for a long time with the legs. And I put in sweet potato.

Ramsey Russell: Pan fried them.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. Browned them first just with salt and pepper.

Ramsey Russell: Pan fried them just to get them going and then put them in a crock pot with each other ingredient.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. And the vegetables weren’t cooked, but the legs were browned in a frying pan and then just let that thing have its head for, I think I cooked it for 4 hours.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Paul Sharp: It could have done with maybe a little bit longer, but most of it was pretty tender.

Ramsey Russell: You make these recipes up yourself?

Paul Sharp: Yeah, wing it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Paul Sharp: But I like that sort of food anyways and my family is the same.

Ramsey Russell: And then the final course we had and at some point in time, you put some cooked rice and over that curry.

Paul Sharp: Yeah, I think it had little –

Ramsey Russell: Kind of like a jambalaya.

Paul Sharp: Yeah, and just let it soak up all that flavor. I was going to cook it separate, but I got lazy. By that time, I think your crack and rum had disappeared or your –

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah. Look, man, I don’t know how I’m going to keep you boys in bourbon. I would have to contract a tanker truck over here or something to, I mean, you all go through bourbon more than anybody I’ve ever seen. You all, like, get bourbon over here?

Paul Sharp: Yeah, we do. It’s actually not my favorite drink, but when it’s free, I’ll drink it, so.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, right.

Paul Sharp: It paid the price.

Ramsey Russell: And then one of the last things you cook that I am definitely going to take home. I’ve never had duck, I’ve never cooked duck this way. You took whole pick whistling ducks and put them in a baking bag.

Paul Sharp: Do you have those oven bags?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, we got oven bags.

Paul Sharp: So, yeah, I love and when Ramsey came out last time I plucked, I said, we’re plucking everything apart from the mountain ducks. We do that similar to magpie geese, they’re too hard. So I plucked them and I thought, we’ve got to do some skin on stuff, because we really do have to do that. It’s the best way to eat them. So in the oven bags, you put a little bit of corn flour, like half a cup or something, some salt and pepper. Shake the bag so it coats all the inside the bag. I then do a better vegetable. Same thing, onion, sweet potato, potato, carrots, celery, trying to think, the bird itself. I just rubbed a little bit of oyster sauce on it just to give it a bit of a sweet taste to it and then wrapped it in streaky bacon and put a skewer through it. And then I just, a little bit of lemonade soft drink. Just like maybe –

Ramsey Russell: Soda pop.

Paul Sharp: Third a cup.

Ramsey Russell: Yes.

Paul Sharp: You call it soda pop.

Ramsey Russell: Give it that little sweetener.

Paul Sharp: Just a little, because I couldn’t find sugar, so I thought, I’m going to have to adapt and you just pop a few holes in and then cook it for maybe an hour and a half, 3 quarts and it just falls off the bone, beautiful.

Ramsey Russell: Well, we all came in starving after the hunt. And quite you walk in and it’s like walking across the moonscape with all them buffalo tracks and everything else and you walk out and on a good hunt like today, you walk out carrying a whole bunch more weight than you walked in with and maybe drink a beer, maybe drink a little water and then come to skinning session.

Paul Sharp: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And I’d never seen, I had never seen geese skinned like you all skinned them yesterday, hanging them by the neck. But it’s very efficient.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. And you can sort of get it at shoulder height and work with your the way it’s easiest to.

Ramsey Russell: Put 3 on a string at one time. You just go lop, lop. Just kind of ring around, oppose and you work 3 of them at one time, you’re done with it. Bam, bring 3 more.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. It would probably be a bit odd around the other parts of the world, waterfowling. But over here, by law, you must throw the carcass out into the open.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve never heard of that.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. So that the raptors could come down and pick them clean. And they are immediately on you as soon as you start.

Ramsey Russell: It’s all right. Now, is that an Australian law or a Northern Territory law?

Paul Sharp: Territory. Yeah, you eating a lot down south of you –

Ramsey Russell: There were eagles and hawks everywhere while we were hunting yesterday and today. So we pull off in the shade and we go down in the woods and I’m thinking, well, I don’t guess the hawks are going to come up in here, as we were turning around to follow you all out, there were already 5 or 3 of them coming, I mean, coming in. They heard the trucks cranking. They’re like, all right, time to go.

Paul Sharp: I don’t know if you saw them yesterday when we drove out in the morning, at the end of the wall, did you see those, that thermal they were in?

Ramsey Russell: No, I did not.

Paul Sharp: There were 20 hawks.

Ramsey Russell: I saw them when we were leaving and they were on another goose cleaning place and it must have been 50 or 60 of these things.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. I’d believe it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Paul Sharp: It’s often you’ll see them like that and they’ll be on the ground everywhere.

Ramsey Russell: Describe magpie goose hunting and whistling duck hunting here versus your native playground down in Southern Australia.

Paul Sharp: Oh, it’s about 100⁰ hotter.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, boy, is it hot.

Paul Sharp: It does not let up either. Where? Well, you’ve shot where I live in that and it’s a moonscape. It’s a partly an estuary. It’s a dead flat beach sort of thing.

Ramsey Russell: Sandy.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. It’s about 8 km long and about 5 km wide. And it holds a lot, but there’s not a stitch of cover. You’ve actually got to get creative. Up here it’s a lot more pass shooting, so what you have to do is find where they’re going. But the other kick to it is that if you’re walking out in the morning, you want to know where you’re going because you don’t want to be walking in any water because you’ll get eaten.

Ramsey Russell: DO you all not have crocs back down south?

Paul Sharp: Nope.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. That’s a Northern Territory sign.

Paul Sharp: Think about the tropics. So they won’t come further down where it gets cold, they just can’t deal with it. And I’m very thankful, we just have to put up with the white pointers.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. With the what?

Paul Sharp: White pointers? Sharks.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, sharks.

Paul Sharp: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I remember fishing with you want me to walk for that? I’m like, no.

Paul Sharp: That’s right. I don’t even think you got it halfway up your gum boot.

Ramsey Russell: No, I got about mid shin and that was it, there can be a little shark come up in here and get you.

Paul Sharp: Yeah, you’re a bit like –

Ramsey Russell: You’re a big diver too. Do you ever encounter sharks? I mean, you do live in shark country. When you go off diving for lobsters and stuff like you do, you get into those, you ever seen those big great whites?

Paul Sharp: Nope. Thank God, don’t want to. There was a woman bit in our hometown not more than a month ago. Yeah, she survived, but there was a large bite to her thigh and the leg and her arm and very lucky.

Ramsey Russell: Trent and I talked all about those big crocs and you all don’t fool with crocs. I mean, I get it. And now you got sharks down the southern end, crocs on the top. And I think 10 of the deadliest snakes on earth live right here in Australia. You’re a paramedic, have you ever had to deal with some of those snake bites?

Paul Sharp: We don’t have the, one of the, well, you can look it up, the Taipans number one. I think his inland cousin is the number one. But it’s, there’s no reported death from it, but the Taipan is all through the scrub where we are. You have to keep an eye out for them. You need to talk to Glenn about his little story and his taipan.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, really? I will.

Paul Sharp: Yeah, I won’t tell you about. Yeah, pick his brains on that.

Ramsey Russell: But are snake bites a big thing in Australia? For your EMT type services?

Paul Sharp: We’re fortunate the long short answer is not really.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Paul Sharp: And the answer to that really is your rattlesnakes have a huge fang, right? It’s got a big retractable fang. Most of our really poisonous snakes have a small head, not much bigger than the end of your thumb and they have tiny little teeth. So a snake bite in Australia won’t look like the old cowboy movies with the 2 puncture marks and out comes the knife and suck the blood out, don’t do that.

Ramsey Russell: More like coral snake or something, little bitty teeth. It’s like bird talking.

Paul Sharp: Yeah, it’s like someone gets, like, rough sandpaper and slaps it across your arm and left with a bunch of scratches. That’s what most of our snake bites look like. So we call those mostly dry bites. But you have to always treat them like they’re the thing. But if you do get envenomated, things move pretty quickly. And most rural places hold antivenom and treatment profiles.

Ramsey Russell: You took old Lavretsky to the hunting hole yesterday. You all were right under those birds to start. And you told us the first night, you said, they’re not flying until late. I mean we only here for a short amount of time, we had a pretty aggressive agenda that we had to collect genetic data. We had to collect our master species. And so we got up crack a dawn and went. We shot a few flying over early at shooting time, whatever time that was 06:00, 06:15 or something. Boy, at 08:00, it’s like every magpie goose, because you had described it as thousands of birds. And before 08:00, I had seen maybe a 100. I’m like big disparity and buddy, let me tell you what, by the time I left, I had seen 1000s. Yeah, they were coming, son.

Paul Sharp: It’s like it flicks a switch and for some reason, the birds are lower and they’re all coming off the east Alligator River floodplain, which I believe is drying up quickly. So they’re retreating to the other water holes like the ones that we go to. So, whether they’re finishing feeding, I couldn’t tell you, but obviously the crops were full of those little nut things or bulbs and you could all the birds are stained up, but that’s just the way they feed. But, yeah, for whatever reason it was and I was told by locals here that just don’t panic. But the hardest thing is trying to wait for the 08:00 when you’ve been standing there since 10 to 6.

Ramsey Russell: The Australians, I know your team. Team follow, I call it. You all are some of the best shots I’ve been around and yesterday proved the point because some of the birds would come in at 30 to 50 meters. Some of the shots were 50 to 70 meters that you all were taking and they were coming down. That was pretty impressive.

Paul Sharp: But that sounds like, how would you ever get those back? But we purposely moved off the edge of the lagoon to where the burnt grass was about 2 inches high and just sat behind patches of scrub and birds would use that. It was hard to pick a flight lane because it was about half a kilometer where the birds would just stream through, as many as you could count when it really switched on and ducks, too. Because Glen was like, we need to get under them, I’m like, I don’t know how to explain this to you, mate, but they’re coming through in a ginormous wave and it’s really hard to pick where they’re going to be. You’re going to have to just come and do it.

Ramsey Russell: Just, yeah, shift. I shifted a little bit and –

Paul Sharp: We all did.

Ramsey Russell: Like, he’d go down. He said, he told me, said, go down there by sharp and get situated by him because you all were just really under a femoral artery. And I was down there 10, 15 minutes when the flight turned on, picked up my limit quickly. Came back and Glenn had shot a limit right where I’ve been standing. So, I mean, once they come, they come.

Paul Sharp: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And what blew me, what kind of put me off to start is they, in the catalogs and the magazines in the air with those big long wings and those long necks. I just had spur wing goose size as a reference.

Paul Sharp: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And they’re half the size. So what appears to be, where it appears to be from perspective, a 100 yard shot on a spur wing was really just 40 yards or 50 yards. It took just a little while.

Paul Sharp: Because I asked you about. What do you think about these? Cause in my head, they look like a spur.

Ramsey Russell: No, they’re much smaller. I would describe it, and this will put it on a reference for a lot of our listeners in the States as a snow goose size goose with a swan like neck and wings.

Paul Sharp: And chicken feet.

Ramsey Russell: And chicken feet. A very interesting bird.

Paul Sharp: Orange chicken feet.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. A dinosaur almost reptilians. I’m saying that for the scientist over here been scolding me about describing them like that.

Paul Sharp: I think he just about fell off his chair then.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. But it was a very interesting hunt. Paul, I’ve enjoyed it. Last question is, tell me about this, we’re all shooting over and under because you all have banned semi automatic. Trent has got an interesting gun with a little thumb button that he can manually shut the action. You’ve got a triple barrel, where the heck did you get a triple barrel shotgun?

Paul Sharp: Well, firstly, I like the third shot for ethical reasons, in case you –

Ramsey Russell: Got a shooter runner.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. And I’d looked at it a few times and it just looked kooky and I didn’t know what to think of it. But I’ll put it up to my shoulder and I like flat shooting guns and it just.

Ramsey Russell: Is that an Australian made gun?

Paul Sharp: No, mate, it’s Turkish. I think it’s an aka three barrel. It’s got a vinyl wrap on it, like, so. It’s camouflage because I shoot a lot of saltwater at home. It just keeps the rust at bay. It doesn’t eject. You have to manually lift the shells out. It never jams.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Paul Sharp: And I can shoot with it.

Ramsey Russell: How do you choke your guns down here?

Paul Sharp: I think it’s modified, improved, modified. All three barrels.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, okay.

Paul Sharp: And the way it shoots is right, left, top. So if you fire the gun, you don’t. You can keep, you can open it, but as soon as you shut it, you have to have the third barrel.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. Repeat the cycle again.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. I’ve never had any problems with and I can shoot with it. I love shooting with it.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, I saw you shoot with it. Dead eye over there.

Paul Sharp: Yeah, I did have fun with it. I’ll call it the part gun because it’s just so outrageous looking.

Ramsey Russell: Your 2^nd year at magpie goose camp up here near Darwin. I don’t think it’s going to be your last because I just don’t think there’s a lot of you all up here. Like, there’s, how many in this house? 10, 10 of us in this house, maybe. And there’s 10 in another house.

Paul Sharp: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: That we rode up on there, on the flight with. And I just, I know these boys well enough, they ain’t going back to no dang KFC, man. They’re not going to let you quit, Paul.

Paul Sharp: No. And as you would know, like, we do all the shootings fine, but we process, everything is a production line. Once we hit the house, everything has to be cleaned, dried, vac-sealed, frozen and then for the trip home, we all pay for extra luggage and we bring everything back with us.

Ramsey Russell: You make a good point. Because a lot of people, myself included, a lot of times, in fact, most times, when we clean birds back home, peel the skin, breast them and I love whole pick mallards. If they’ve been feeding good pintails, wigeons it almost is a sin to breast a teal. Well, I think they’re so delicious,

Paul Sharp: I just about cry every time we pull the skin off a goose, because I’ve had them plucked and they are not, they are outstanding.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I told you, we got these mechanical pluckers last night. You said, I know what a mechanical plucker is, but they, it really don’t even fool with those birds, does it? Those birds are –

Paul Sharp: I can stand corrected, because the lady that came tonight who’s local here says, oh, we just use a plucker. And I just about died.

Ramsey Russell: Really? Well, you need to get a plucker up here.

Paul Sharp: Yeah, I think we’re going to have to, because I can tell you now that I’ve had them. We brined them and had them for Christmas. Christmas in Australia is hot. No, but what I did do is just rub them in soy sauce, bit of salt and pepper and put them over coals. Cooked it slow and then crisped up the skin, medium rare again and then just literally got a cleaver and went, it was spatchcocked, so it hasn’t been deboned. It’s just the spine cut out of it and then just flattened and then just had it on there. I’ll show you pictures of it. I’ll share that with you.

Ramsey Russell: We walked through the local hunt store yesterday and it was impressive. The hunting side was 2/3^rd of the floor space and it was well stocked with a lot of good stuff, whether big game or small game or duck. And the other side was a third of the floor space was freaking cooking stuff.

Paul Sharp: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, it was like a butcher supply shop. It was unbelievable. I bet they got a duck plucker up there and if they don’t, I bet they’ll get one.

Paul Sharp: You would have looked on the wall. So on the wall they had camel, buffalo, you name it.

Ramsey Russell: And you all hunt camel down here, you were tell me last night at dinner.

Paul Sharp: Yeah, we do. And I had we didn’t do it since –

Ramsey Russell: It got one hump or 2 hump.

Paul Sharp: It’s a single. I can’t remember the actual proper name for it.

Ramsey Russell: I can’t either.

Paul Sharp: Anyway, it’s the ones that come out of the middle east, not the ones that come out of China and Mongolia.

Ramsey Russell: And you eat them.

Paul Sharp: They are better than any beef you’ll ever eat. No kidding. When you skin them, because we have to go out in the desert, usually they’ll never seen another human. They’ll have walked in out of middle of nowhere. Their history is, before roads happened, the Afghan camel teams were the way everything was carved around. So when the roads and the trains came, they didn’t have the heart to shoot them. They let them go.

Ramsey Russell: Cutting them loose.

Paul Sharp: So in that short 100 odd year period, there’s over a million. But it’s so remote where they are, you can’t actually do much with them. You can’t shoot them and clean them, hurt them they’re enormous.

Ramsey Russell: Well, how do you hunt? You all go out and just tent camp?

Paul Sharp: Well, we hunted a 6 million acre property at the top of Lake Eyre in South Australia. We do it for 10 days and that might be just 1 or 2 what we call water loops because they drill down into the artesian basin for cattle water. And that comes out so hot and so much pressure it’ll push it kilometers like 50 way and every 5 km they’ll have a trough or a dam and they put the cattle on that. And to muster the cattle they’ll just turn off the troughs one at a time and it’ll bring the cattle in. The camels don’t in winter don’t even need to drink. They’ll just wander the desert. But in summer in 50⁰, they maybe will drink once a week.

Ramsey Russell: And you wait a mile.

Paul Sharp: The only way to do it because they will just wander, is literally driving these huge loops might take one or 2 days to do one loop on one part of the property. And then by the time you come back you’ll see if there’s any tracks in your tracks. You couldn’t get out and stalk them. You die like you could go months and never see one. But when you do see them you’ll come across the biggest mob I think I’ve seen is 50. But then there’s probably about 46 or 8 of us and as soon as we get them, we try and take as many as we can. And like with the geese here, there’s no mucking around. You got to get out there and process everything you can.

Ramsey Russell: It’s not a small animal.

Paul Sharp: I can’t remember. We tried to figure out it’s bigger than a moose.

Ramsey Russell: Bigger than a moose?

Paul Sharp: Bigger than a moose by weight. A lot of bigger than a moose.

Ramsey Russell: And how would you compare to venison?

Paul Sharp: The legs are like what you would expect venison is okay, but they’re 10 more.

Ramsey Russell: They got fat and I wouldn’t say so.

Paul Sharp: This is where it gets a bit weird when you start getting up into the center body of the animal, because they never run or hardly ever. They’re the cool, they’re the king of economy because they’ve got to make sure they – Yeah. They retain all their water. So they get all of the stuff out of what? So that you’d even think, oh, they’d be walking in the sand. Nope. They’re that lazy. They’ll walk up the clay pans. They don’t actually like walking in the sand if they can help it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Paul Sharp: Because it’s too much energy.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Paul Sharp: So in that respect. Yeah, it’s, they’re just such an unusual animal. When you skin the legs, the legs are like venison. When you get up into the back straps and the rib, you start to get see a little bit of fat. The best animal

Ramsey Russell: That’s where they are storing water.

Paul Sharp: Well, yes, the hump is literal. One big fat cap.

Ramsey Russell: What do you do with it? Render it?

Paul Sharp: Yeah. Beautiful, clear fat.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Paul Sharp: Best you’ll ever like. Really good for potatoes and cooking anything, really and we do render it. We take large lumps of it back and render it. If you do happen to come across and we shoot them, we then everybody butchers as much as you can. We pack it in the eskies that we’ve got with us. And it might take us half a day to a day to get back to the station and then hang it all in the cool rooms there, when you get to the back strap and the best one to eat is a dry cow. So no calf at foot or anything like that. And her backstrap will look like wagyu beef with spidered all the way through it, and the tenderloins are better than that.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable.

Paul Sharp: So that because they’re the kings of economy or queens, whatever you want to call it, they’re not tough. These things don’t run.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Wow.

Paul Sharp: They’re outstanding. And all the guys that are on the stations out there, the cattle guys, they’ll eat camel over the beef every single day of the week.

Ramsey Russell: If I come back, will you bring some camel steaks.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. I’ve just started. Well, I’ve had my pilot’s license for a while. We’ve got a gyrocopter now, which is now going to up our game and I’ve got my little light plane, so we’re going to have air support. And because you need it, I could go on and on.

Ramsey Russell: Paul Sharp, the renaissance. You’re a chef, a camel hunter, a goose hunter, a decoy carver, a painter and now a gyrocopter.

Paul Sharp: No, not gyro, I don’t fly the gyro. My friend does. I just got a little light plane.

Ramsey Russell: But you got a little light plane and pilot.

Paul Sharp: Yeah. And a paramedic.

Ramsey Russell: And a paramedic. What next for Paul Sharp.

Paul Sharp: Yeah, diver. This is why, yes, I’m just very irresponsible, Ramsey.

Ramsey Russell: You jump into it full force.

Paul Sharp: Why not, mate? Life’s a living.

Ramsey Russell: We’re going out to eat tonight and somebody said, I said, well, they got steaks. He said, probably got some of these buffaloes. Is that a big thing up here?

Paul Sharp: I think it is. I don’t think it’s a gimmick. I think they eat very well. You might even be able to eat crocodile, mate. Get one back on the duck today.

Ramsey Russell: There we go. Thank you, Paul.

Paul Sharp: You’re welcome, sir.

Ramsey Russell: Mr. Steve Watts. I posted a picture of all those geese we had the other day and I was kind of knelt down between you and your brother and somebody commented, that’s the most Australian man I’ve ever seen in my life. Are you the most Australian man or what?

Steve Watts: No, I don’t think so. I’m just a pretty typical Aussie blake that just likes doing a bit of hunting and working hard and living life.

Ramsey Russell: Last time I was in Australia, we had a wonderful hunt down in South Australia in a fairly unlikely looking place and it was your duck hole?

Steve Watts: Yeah. That’s Beachport. That’s where I live.

Ramsey Russell: It was very shallow, very sandy. There was a little bitty sand spit island with no cover and we put layouts and I’m like, this will never work and it did. I mean, it was amazing. A lot of Australian honkers.

Steve Watts: Yeah, I’ve shot there my whole life, ever since I’ve been a kid. My father used to take me down there.

Ramsey Russell: Was he a duck hunter?

First Shotgun Experience: The Single Barrel Sterling.

We had a single barrel sterling shotgun that used to kick like a mule. It was a terrible thing.

Steve Watts: Yeah. He introduced me to duck hunting just right from the day I could get go with him. He tells a funny story about when I was about 3 or 4 years old, sitting on the drain bank. We used to do a lot of sitting on the drain bank just on dusk, throw a few decoys out in the water and the black duck would just come and pitch in. And you chewed him on the water. So this particular day, because my dad used to cackle, he didn’t have a duck caller, he’d just cackle. So he’d just be cackling, doing that sort of thing, just cool him. And anyway, I’m sitting there with him and so I decided I’d have a bit of a cackle. So I did the big quack, quack and next thing he smacked me under the ear and reckons I scared all the ducks away, so that was me. And then he tells the story about when I was about 10, when I could just start using the sock shotgun. We had a single barrel sterling shotgun that used to kick like a mule. It was a terrible thing. And anyway, the duck, I was walking down the drain and the duck flew up and I picked the gun up, bang, dropped it. And he said, he said to this, like, he’s not with us now, but you could see the smile on my face from 100 meters away, run straight out –

Ramsey Russell: Your first duck, black duck.

Steve Watts: First duck, yeah, first duck I ever shot.

Ramsey Russell: Is that your favorite duck down here?

Steve Watts: Oh, I actually like the teal.

Ramsey Russell: Grey teal.

Steve Watts: Yeah, grey teal.

Ramsey Russell: Because it’s fun to shoot or better to eat.

Steve Watts: Well, yeah, better to eat. Just usually have 2 black ducks, a bit bigger duck, but I do enjoy them as well. But I just prefer the teal.

Ramsey Russell: How long have you been coming up here to the Northern Territories?

Steve Watts: No, this is my first trip.

Ramsey Russell: Your first trip but not your last?

Steve Watts: Oh, I wouldn’t think so. No, it was being really good. Sharpie my, mate, because they all went last year and posted a few videos and stuff that and the fun they had. So I dialed in and booked in straight away for this year’s hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Steve, one of the things I’ve always felt about Australia since the very first time I came is how you got different species, different habitats, different food. I mean, who the heck puts beetroot on a hamburger? But the culture is so familiar. Like, here we are with 10 or 11 guys in this house having a great hunting camp experience and it’s amazing. Has it always been like that for you all?

Steve Watts: Yeah, it’s always been like that for us. Even growing up as kids. Like, you talk about Beachport, Lake George, even when we were teenagers, just got our car licenses and stuff like that with all group of guys and a few girls, head down the lake and get a keg of beer. And that’s the sort of way we, our lifestyle has always been just a communal group that just like going and having a few beers and having a lot of fun.

Ramsey Russell: What do you think about this magpie goose hunting versus hunting down in South Australia? You all decoy them down there. I mean, I’ve hunted with you, it’s decoys and hiding, and down here is try to stay kind of hidden, but taller shots, pass shooting.

Steve Watts: Yeah, no, it’s good.

Ramsey Russell: You’re not scared of those crocodiles, are you? Man, with that big old hat you was wearing in that picture yesterday. I’m like, there’s my crocodile Dundee right there, son.

Steve Watts: I wasn’t really scared of him until seen that video today of the duck eating, the crocodile eating the duck. And I was walking through a lot of that long green grass that we were dropping the geese in and that. And didn’t really give a care in the world. But I went up to a hole today and had a look in it and it was a dirty old muddy hole. And there was no way in the world I was walking in there.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Steve Watts: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Because he could be hiding. We met a park ranger on the way out and I asked him about the signs. They post up signs, haters, crocodiles don’t get the water, don’t do this and that. I said, is it really that bad? And he told about a feet wise, about an 18 foot croc. Trent and I talked about this, wanted the guy in the boat hit the 12 foot, 13 foot boat, hit it, the guy hit it so hard the guy fell back and then he just jumped over the top, grabbed the guy out of the boat and the guy was never seen again.

Steve Watts: As soon as you got in that water, they’ll just grab you and take you and stuff you under a log somewhere.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Steve Watts: Just to tenderize you for a few days and then they’ll come back and –

Ramsey Russell: I guess they’ve been eating people for a long time. I mean there’s no real big game animals around here except the, I don’t see them attacking a buffalo, maybe a calf, but not a big buffalo.

Steve Watts: Yeah, apparently, they do. Like if you go to some of the tours or you go to the farms here, like there’s crocodiles there that are 6 meters long and they probably weigh over a ton.

Ramsey Russell: Close to 20ft.

Steve Watts: Yeah, they would grab anything but 700 kilo buffalo is still no match to a 1 ton crocodile.

Ramsey Russell: Especially when he gets them on his ground down underwater in that mud and all, buffalo’s toast.

Steve Watts: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Crazy. How long are you here for?

Steve Watts: We’re, it was Sunday, so a week in the territory. We don’t normally come up this like, I’ve been to Darwin a couple of times. Usually, we do it during winter because it’s nice and beautiful weather here.

Ramsey Russell: It ain’t now, boy.

Steve Watts: So you get your 30⁰ days and your 18⁰ nights and it’s nice and dry. But this time of the year with the humidity and the heat, although this week has been exceptionally good, I was expecting it to be a lot worse.

Ramsey Russell: But like this morning we got in and got out, I mean, before the sun really got over that tree, you started off sitting under there briefly. I was done on geese and I waited out some of the whistlers and we were back at the truck before. It’s got sure enough hot 95⁰ Fahrenheit hot. And they were saying down here it can still get a lot hotter than what it is. It can get up in the 100s.

Steve Watts: Yeah, well, they said it was over 40 last week so it could be –

Ramsey Russell: That’s 115⁰. Wow, I’m glad I’m not here.

Steve Watts: And throw the humidity on top of it. You would be sitting out there and you’d be just a pool of sweat.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Steve Watts: If you haven’t got any breeze on you or anything like that, it’s just, it kill you.

Ramsey Russell: How do you cook these geese?

Steve Watts: Like I said, this is all new to me. But the way that Paul cooked them the other day, just, even just over the flames, cook a medium rare like that with a bit of marinated. That was really nice.

Ramsey Russell: The thing about the Australian hunters, it’s a big deal about getting all the meat. I mean, you all really do like the waterfowl meat down here. You all don’t just breast them out like we do back home. You all take the whole bird whole picked or the whole skin, legs, wings, everything.

Steve Watts: Well, like I said, bringing brought up with the duck hunting down home, we always plucked every bird. Most of the time we’d roast them, just roast them in a camp oven for 3 or 4 hours till the rest starts falling apart. That’s traditionally the main way that I’ve always eaten them my whole life.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Steve Watts: But I’ve now been introduced to a few different ways of doing it, by cooking it medium rare, cooking it before the tipping point, we call it, before they get tough. So you’ve either got to cook them to death or cook a medium rare. But it’s good to be able to have it in an Asian type way and all that. That’s introduced me and I enjoy my ducks a lot more than I used to.

Ramsey Russell: The ducks are real good to eat, no doubt. But I tell you what, I’ve never had waterfowl as tender as these magpies. It’s perplexing.

Steve Watts: No, it’s amazing, because our big bird at home, like our mountain duck, it’s a lottery to whether or not you get a good one or a bad one.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah. That’s like a big goose. What about the, I am just going to as this, when did they ban to semiautomatic guns here in Australia?

Steve Watts: Well, it was after the Port Arthur massacre.

Ramsey Russell: What year would that have been? The 80s or 90s.

Steve Watts: That must be in the 90s.

Ramsey Russell: So you, did you shoot a semi automatic prior to that, did your dad? Did he have to turn those guns over?

Steve Watts: Yeah. So he had an old, A5 browning automatic.

Ramsey Russell: Golly, really?

Steve Watts: And I had an SKB, I loved it. But full choke, nothing variable. But when they introduced steel shot, we used to shoot a place called Bull Lagoon over near Naracoorte. Massive, big wetland, probably one of the best places I’ve ever shot ducks in. But the steel shot used to blow your guns apart. Just firing pins would break and there’d be all for, always making new firing pins and ejector handles and stuff for it, yeah. And then after we got rid of it, I had to buy myself an under and over. And I actually used to shoot more ducks and used half the shells I normally used to say.

Ramsey Russell: That is a big advantage of an over under. What was it like? Do you remember having to go turn your guns in?

Steve Watts: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What was that like? How was your dad demeanor handing over that away?

Steve Watts: He was very upset but he was at the point where he’d finished shooting.

Ramsey Russell: Tell me about, did they have just like a turn in center?

Steve Watts: No, they offered you really good money for your weapons. So, like, my take, my SKB, I think dad bought that for about $300 and like 20 years later, the government gave us nearly $800 for that gun, so that was why and then you just went out and bought another under and over. So the amount of guns in Australia now is apparently 10 times more than it was when the semi-automatics were around, because everyone went out and bought more and more weapons with the money that the government gave them.

Ramsey Russell: It just think about a gun is, besides the value, I’ve got small beater Benelli’s that, I mean, it’s like they’ve been drugged down every gravel road in the country, but I love those guns. It ain’t the value monetarily. It’s the memories that that old hammer holds. And it’s just, I just can’t imagine the government making me, because they paid you for it. But it wasn’t a volunteer to voluntold, give us your guns.

Steve Watts: I mean, if we, as primary producers, we’re allowed to keep them yet I’ve now got the license that I could have a semi automatic weapon, but with the, just the restrictions on the storage.

Ramsey Russell: Like what?

Steve Watts: You got to have a better gun safe. You’re more unlikely to get inspected to make sure that your storage is correct. All that sort of thing with the government regulations. So if you’re not and I’m not on the farm anymore, so I’ll have to give that up.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Sounds kind of heavy handed.

Steve Watts: But it is. It’s for us law abiding gun owners that just like hunting and stuff like that, it’s devastating. I mean, I had an SKS 7.62 assault rifle that I used to use for hunting other feral animals, pigs and stuff like that. I really enjoyed using that gun. It was such good fun.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Black guns are a big deal back home. I appreciate getting to know you, Steve. I’ve enjoyed sharing camp. I hope we share camp again at some point in time in the future. I can’t bring enough bourbon for you all. And I’m just going to warn you, I brought that one big bottle, like a half gallon of it and it lasted, all about one day. Can you imagine a day?

Steve Watts: Yeah, we had a fair yesterday and that might be one, well, I had a bit of a headache this morning. A bit of a late start.

Ramsey Russell: My wife got to worry that, he’ll bring plenty. Well, I brought all I could bring. And what I learned yesterday is, short of bringing an Exxon tanker full of bourbon, I don’t think I got enough for my Aussie hunter buddies over here.

Steve Watts: That’s all right.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you, Steve.

Steve Watts: All right. Thank you.

Ramsey Russell: And Steve’s older brother, Jeff, who is not the most Australian man, according to Instagram posters that saw the picture, but he was wearing your hat.

Jeff Watts: Yeah, indeed. No, I’m not the most crazy man, but he, Steve stole my hat, so that was a pretty good hat.

Ramsey Russell: Are you as Australian as him?

Jeff Watts: More so.

Ramsey Russell: More so. How so?

Jeff Watts: Well, probably not. No, I don’t.

Ramsey Russell: You don’t drink as much bourbon as him, I can tell you that.

Jeff Watts: No, I don’t drink the bourbon. That stuff’s poison, that’ll kill you. Talk about growing up in the long, talk about growing up duck hunting down here. Cause you and your brother both are longtime duck hunters.

Jeff Watts: Yeah, we’ve been duck hunting since we were 5 or 6, I suppose, sort of right down the bottom of South Australia and hunting waterways and creeks and drains and lakes and such like that, and we would, dad used to bring us boys along, so we did get our gear off and roar out there and pick up his ducks sort of thing in the jocks, so he didn’t have to, I suppose. But we enjoyed ducks, we enjoyed eating ducks. We grew up eating ducks and quail.

Ramsey Russell: What’s one of your favorite ways to eat them? Did your mom cook them?

Jeff Watts: Yeah, indeed. But generally, just roasted them, sort of thing. And that was always pretty good and slow roast them and take quite a while to cook them and that was all pretty good. So I suppose as we progressed over the years, we’ve come up with many different ways to cook them. And you got to be a bit adventurous and sometimes it’s not so good and the dogs get to eat a few. And other times there’s only bones left.

Ramsey Russell: Last night was one of them, only bones left, in fact I got in, I was starving, I made a sandwich with some leftover duck breast. Everybody, yeah, this afternoon, everybody jumped in and I even saw people putting that curry rice on their sandwiches. It’s not a drop left over there.

Jeff Watts: No, cleaned it up. Paul has a very good ability. Anything with game, especially waterfowl, he can just turn it into a 5 star gourmet meal. He’s an amazing cook and he’s taught us a lot about different ways to prepare duck and cook it, mainly duck and certainly now geese. The geese situation is fantastic and pleased to know I taught them a few things about how to cut the geese up that they didn’t know before with making them tomahawks.

Ramsey Russell: You brought that trick?

Jeff Watts: I did. I bought that trick.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a heck of a trick.

Jeff Watts: It is a good trick.

Ramsey Russell: Who invented the way to get the legs off?

Jeff Watts: I’ve seen that of course on YouTube. And this fella, he hunts up here and he’s a Chilean fella and the Chilean people, they’re pretty resourceful. They know what to do. They don’t waste much and the way he was putting it together, it was just fantastic.

Ramsey Russell: So you stepped on the goose and Lavretsky became pro at it. You stepped on the goose, grabbed both feet, stood up, bam, just popped him out of the joint.

Jeff Watts: Pop them straight out.

Ramsey Russell: Peeled it off, boom, it’s done. Ready for the cook. And the tomahawk was probably the best presentation of waterfowl I’ve ever seen.

Jeff Watts: That true. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a great and I think it would be applicable to any waterfowl.

Jeff Watts: Absolutely. Any goose, any large waterfowl, so you can take that left or right side of the breast off with the first bone of the wing and set that up there. And as you notice on the carcass there was very little meat left behind.

Ramsey Russell: That’s important to you all?

Jeff Watts: Oh, yeah. We don’t waste anything. That takes a lot of time and effort to get them there.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff Watts: You want to get the most you can. You’ll be doing just half a job when you can get the whole thing.

Ramsey Russell: How did you fall in with these boys? I know this is you all’s first time up here to goose camp, but not your last. And you and Paul are all from Southern Australia. Did you all meet back when over duck hunting or what?

Jeff Watts: Yeah, over the years and Paul first shifted down to Millicent and got tangled up with my brother Steve, Paul’s a paramedic and Steve had a good mate as a policeman. And policemen and the paramedics always hang together because they’re always involved in industry or whatever they work. And so we got to know Paul and then we just become great friends anyway straight away because we just, we love hunting and gathering, whether it’s fishing or shooting or that sort of thing. So where hardcore hunter gatherers, providers, really, that’s what we are.

Ramsey Russell: I may just be socially adroit, but I’ve never found anywhere other than a duck blinder duck camp that you can connect with people.

Jeff Watts: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Just like coming in here, I knew Paul and Glenn and Trent and I met half dozen or more other people that I’ve hit it off with. We get to know each other sitting around breaking bread and going out hunting and working together and drinking together. To me, it’s just, it’s a wonderful, I mean, where else would you meet somebody and fall in with them, like?

Jeff Watts: Well, hunting, especially waterfowl hunting seems to bring a lot more people together, like, from all serious different walks of life. You’ve got these fellows here in this crew that make 25 or $35,000 a year and there’s men out there that make 350,000. There’s a million dollar men as well. They make a million dollars a year.

Ramsey Russell: But at duck camp, everybody’s equal.

Jeff Watts: Everybody’s equal. Everybody get in and pluck to clean them ducks up. Your turn to wash the dishes, your turn to cook tea, you’ll do all that stuff.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a good point. When you’re sitting there skinning ducks with a man or eating with a man or washing dishes with somebody, it don’t matter.

Jeff Watts: Who cares?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it’s duck camp. That’s a great point, Jeff. I want to ask you a question about your brother. He got a tattoo of a dog’s and the dog’s name is Lucy. Usually tattoos are real personal. And what’s the story on that tattoo with that, well, holding that guy? He’s got a picture of a lab holding a black duck.

Jeff Watts: Yeah, indeed. So Lucy was a pretty good dog and she was really headstrong. She’d always break and draw her out and fetch the duck and bring her back in. She wouldn’t break unless it was a dead one. You’ve seen you whack a couple balto outside that muggle dog, come back here. There’s more ducks coming.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, she wouldn’t come back either.

Jeff Watts: Oh, yeah. No, she’d fetch all the back in –

Ramsey Russell: She wrote the all –

Jeff Watts: She’d be all over the place anyway. But she was so super soft mouthed. Fascinating, one day, she brought back a mouse that she called and she’s got it in her mouth and she’s coming up and she’s wagging her legs and she’s got a wagging and bashing your legs with her tail and she’s got her mouth shut and Lucy, what do you got there? And then, as you can see, this tail hanging out and we opened up a mouth and here’s his very wet, slobbered up mouse sitting there and he didn’t know what to do. So anyway, we grabbed the mouse out and whacked it and fed it to the cat. So that was all pretty good, but, yeah and she was so soft mouthed that you could take her to the chook house and get some eggs and say, here, lucy, now, here, gentle. And she’d bring it all the way back to the house and then you could take it from her again. I got a Labrador that would do the same and she’d bring it back up to the house, but as soon as you got to the back door, she’d spit that egg out on the ground and it would break and then look at you and say, oh, sorry, it’s broken, I’ll clean it up for you. Good on you, you fathead. So we would do that. But anyway, Lucy was pretty good and brother and me, we were, I think it was Easter time last year and we were down near robe and we were hunting quail and we borrowed Paul’s call of thing, we’d set that up and we’re out in the morning, it was just a bit warm and steamy and Lucy was a bit heavy and you couldn’t hold her back. As in overweight and not fit, but wouldn’t just pull up, just, we’re roaring around and she was shooting quite a few quail and it was a lot of fun. And Lucy got a bit hot, too. And then we reckon she got snake bite and we noticed she was a bit wobbly on it and so, whoa, we’ll put a pull of pin here. And I roared back and because she’s too big and heavy to carry anyway, got her to a cattle trough and got her to lay in there and have a bit of a drink for a while and that was okay and then I roared back and got a wheelbarrow, went down the paddock.

Ramsey Russell: She must have been a dog, you had to –

Jeff Watts: Oh, yeah. Like she’s 40, 50 kilo dog.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, my God.

Jeff Watts: Yeah, it’s too heavy. Anyway, because we weren’t, we didn’t, this property was locked and because we parked out on the side of the road.

Ramsey Russell: She must have drank as much beer as he does.

Jeff Watts: Yeah, well, she would have more. Anyway, he drinks so much beer. He got a full box of beer yesterday, 30 cans and this morning there was only 4 left in it. And I think there was 3 or 4 left somewhere else.

Ramsey Russell: That was after he clobbered that Knob Creek bourbon.

Jeff Watts: Yeah, he drank all your good bourbon and he fed you one or 2 cans or someone else and then he drank the lot. No wonder he was as crook as 10 men this morning. He was just really ass and then it caught up with him in the middle of the afternoon. We got home, oh, no and then he had to a dose of short notice, there he was, flat out running to the thunderbox there to empty the show out. He nearly soiled his pants, which I thought was funny. He didn’t, but anyway, he was a bit rue there for a while.

Ramsey Russell: So you went and got a wheelbarrow for a 100 pound lab. Yeah.

Jeff Watts: And then fetched her back to and hosed her down to cool her down, and she seemed to be okay, but she was still really stressed. And then he said, oh, no, I got to take her home, which was unfortunately packed up and disappeared, but she died before he even got home.

Ramsey Russell: How old was she?

Jeff Watts: Oh, she’d have to be 9 or 10.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, it’s tough.

Jeff Watts: Yeah, it was pretty tough.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff Watts: Yeah. And because she was just an amazing dog, how far she would go out of sight on a lake and we go, oh, my God, we’ve lost the dog. We’re going to be in more strife than the early settlers when we get home because we’ve lost a dog. Steve’s wife will just skin us alive. Anyway, and then all of a sudden you see this black thing coming back and then after putting the winds the right way, because you’re not sure and you could hear her and you knew by the sound of that that she had a duck in a mouth.

Ramsey Russell: She had a duck in her mouth.

Jeff Watts: And unbelievable and one of the best dogs I’ve ever seen to hunt a duck that’s wounded and then diving on in a lake in a waterhole and she would just put her head straight down and go in after it and grab it.

Ramsey Russell: Go underwater.

Jeff Watts: Yeah, go underwater. A lot of dogs, like, 80% of dogs won’t do that.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. He drinks that emu beer, too, that nobody wants.

Jeff Watts: Because he’s crazy.

Ramsey Russell: But it ain’t bad.

Jeff Watts: Well, it’s not bad, but he drinks –

Ramsey Russell: You warmed me off of it so bad the other day he couldn’t give me one. Finally –

Jeff Watts: No, that was sharpie for one job. I had a couple. It’s not bad, but it’s not my favorite. And then he drinks West End beer down at my, like, South Australian beer. He drinks that. And the boys down there called the fly tox, which is what you use to spray on a sheep’s ass when it’s got maggots. Fierce. But it’s not bad beer, I don’t mind it. All beer is good. It’s just some beer is better.

Ramsey Russell: I asked you how good these magpie geese were the other day and you said they were good. How good are they?

Jeff Watts: Oh, man, these are that good. You get them lined up and put them and feed them on everybody. It is that good. They would put a horn on a jellyfish. You’d see a jellyfish with the biggest horn in a roger. Yeah, they are damn good.

Ramsey Russell: Jeff, I appreciate you. I’ve enjoyed sharing camp with you. Thank you.

Jeff Watts: Likewise. Okay, thank you.

Ramsey Russell: Dwayne Devonie, crocodile Dundee ain’t got shit on you, son. I’m going to tell you right now. You and that big old red beard and you out there in your camo and every sign on the property says, don’t get in the water. And I wondered yesterday when I first met you, I’m like, who’s this guy and you walk around with a fishing pole. What’s up with that?

Dwayne Devonie: Oh, God. It must have looked real strange. You’ve rocked up to do some shooting and here’s this guy with his fishing rod. So, yeah, I’m, a little bit about me. I’ve been up the territory for about 20, 20 odd years, on and off.

Ramsey Russell: And are you from here?

Dwayne Devonie: I’m from Victoria originally.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Okay, northeast. You moved up here?

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah, I come up here for a shooting.

Ramsey Russell: Are you one of the locals now?

Dwayne Devonie: No, probably not. But I’ve been here long enough to realize that there are things you can do and things you should not do and there is this definite limit of, like, okay, you shouldn’t definitely not be above your knees in an area like that, between your knees and your ankles, you’ve taken a risk, but if you make an educated risk. We shot there all morning. We didn’t see any movement.

Ramsey Russell: Whatever, the 5 or 6 footer. I get 2 meter.

Dwayne Devonie: 2 meters is about where you’re pushing it. Anything under that you should be. You’ll probably get a bite. It probably won’t be great. But, yeah, anything over that’s going to cause you trouble, but you sort of feel a little bit braver with a few fellas with the shotgun around and we don’t, we’re not going to go shooting the crocodile, but just to have that as a backup.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean you got to have got it, shit hit the fan.

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah, definitely. So when I was there in the morning, I’m looking for a few things. I’m looking for crocodile sign when, like, we put decoys out this morning. See me.

Ramsey Russell: What were you looking for?

Dwayne Devonie: Crocodile slides. So where the crocs come out on the bank to sun himself, slide back in bubbles in the water. Generally, when them crocodile move through that swamp, there’s so much oxygen in that mud that as they move that bubbles up.

Ramsey Russell: They don’t swim on the top, they crawl on the bottom.

Crocodiles: The Stealthy Predators of the Water.

If they’re being stealthy, they’ll stay under the water for an hour. They’re an amazing animal. They can drop their heartbeat down to like 3 or 4 beats an hour.

Dwayne Devonie: If they’re being stealthy, they’ll stay under the water for an hour. They’re an amazing animal. They can drop their heartbeat down to like 3 or 4 beats an hour. And they like, I mean an hour for like and stay underwater for an hour. Sorry, I’m not, I’m trying to say. But they can stay under the water for an hour by lowering their heart rate. So that’s how they’re such an advanced predator. These things are, dinosaurs have been here forever and they’ve evolved to sit underwater to try and catch fish predominantly and they’ll sit there underwater with their mouth open and a fish will swim along, hit their body and run up the side of the crocodile until it goes through the mouth. It’s found an open you can get through and that crocodile can sense that vibration all the way through. And it knows when it hits that spot and all it has to do is just a snap. It’s a simply, it’s a set trap, it’s a rabbit trap, it’s a dinosaur rabbit trap.

Ramsey Russell: You’ve been up here for 20 years. Have you had any close calls with crocs?

Dwayne Devonie: I’ve been pretty good. Like, you’ve got to respect them, you’re not being silly. Today we had a pretty cool experience, one that I haven’t seen. Yeah, the boys got a duck that come down and it just made a little bit of distance on it. It wasn’t an instant kill. We were trying to follow up with it with another woundy, with another woundy shot and boom, crocodile jumped out of the water and freaking snatched it and we didn’t have to worry about that either.

Ramsey Russell: That was all she wrote.

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah. Had a free food.

Ramsey Russell: So, like you, we all walked in, set up decoys, hidden in the grass. You’d forgotten shell, so you walked back the truck and next time I saw you, you’re across the water on the levee. And was that the plan all along or did you just say, well, what the heck? I’ll go over here.

Dwayne Devonie: No, it was a bit of an accident, actually. Sort of a list of, had all the gear and I’ve walked out there and I’m like, crap the shells. As I was walking out, I’ve turned around, I’m watching you guys and you see there was a big, like, there was a gap in the hole like in trap.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I did see that.

Dwayne Devonie: All them birds are just boosting out that side. I was like, someone needs to plug that hole and so –

Ramsey Russell: It kept, it was the best thing to do because the birds could raft over against that levee and they just sit there until you went over there and you kept them kind of stirring around.

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah. So I seen them that would, they weren’t quite flying over yourself and Glenn and I was like, oh, if I go over there, make a bit of noise, it might just push their flight –

Paul Sharp: Oh, boy. It worked.

Dwayne Devonie: A couple of degrees. That was awesome and it did. Yeah. It was good, I still got some good shots. You guys got some amazing shooting. I was worried that you were probably thinking to yourself, look at this guy. He set us up in the corner here and he’s gone and taken this prime position.

Ramsey Russell: No, I wasn’t, because there was so much traffic. We were, there was a lily pad clump to the right and left a little grass out front, the birds were rafted out front and they were trading and I knew for as long as they couldn’t see us, which, when that sun got up way over that levee, they could see it. You could see. Cause you know what those birds are doing when they come off the middle of that lake. You would put up 2 groups of 3 magpie goose decoy staked and they saw that one to our right. And every day those mob would come right at it and then they’d get out there, 40 yards. And sometimes if we were looking up, they’d see our faces start to fade. But really and truly, I don’t learn around here, 40 yards that’s a take them shot. If you get a 40 yard shot on magpie goose killing.

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah. In that area, definitely. But it also depends if you can retrieve that bird and that’s important with that system with your crocodiles and particularly up north in the top end here, you want to retrieve your birds, you don’t want to be wasting birds, you don’t want to be feeding crocodiles. You want to have that bird so that it lands in an area where you can retrieve it. And yeah, if you can get it flying in 40 yards towards you, by the time it drops out of the sky, it should be 10 yards, 20 yards, and that’s an easy cast with the fishing rod, hence why I’ve got the fishing rod, that’s my retriever dog. Flick that out there, stick a treble in it, wind it back in.

Ramsey Russell: You’re pretty practiced at that method. I saw that pretty quick.

Dwayne Devonie: I fish a lot. We do a lot of fishing.

Ramsey Russell: Do you really?

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah. Hell yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And fresh waters or offshore.

Dwayne Devonie: I do both. So I fly fish saltwater fish. I’ve been living over on Groote Island, which is on the eastern side of the area. I’ve run a 7 and 7 roster, working a mine and on my 7 days we fish. So I bought a boat 2 years ago. I’ve just clocked up 740 hours on that boat and used 10,000 liters of fuel at roughly 1.2k liters. So that’s only 12,000 km on the ocean in 2 years. So we fish a lot and I’m actually, I’ve got scars all over my hand from some billfish. We had a billfish comp before I got here, so Mrs. and I went and caught a marlin and sailfish and dropped a few marlin and had a few days, so we fish a lot.

Ramsey Russell: Well, those mackerel tacos were amazing yesterday. I don’t know if you call it lunch or just one of about a dozen appetizers that got drug out. They were amazing.

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah. You’re not going to go away from here hungry.

Ramsey Russell: It was you all damn fault.

Dwayne Devonie: For those of you listening, I’ve got a bit of a paunch, I’m well fed, I’d fetch a good price if I was a steer, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: You shot a few of these magpie geese in your time. I saw you, you didn’t shoot many shells this morning, but I saw 2 magnificent doubles. That was very nice doubles you made. They weren’t on the deck. They were a little rangy from the looks of it. Say –

Dwayne Devonie: 45, 50 yards. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it was bam, bam. Yeah.

Dwayne Devonie: It’s good, I’ve just staked.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Dwayne Devonie: You get that reward when you just pull off that great shot and I wasn’t, I didn’t know anyone was watching. I was just like –

Ramsey Russell: Well, I just happened to be looking that way, seeing what those geese were doing when you made the shots. And so you’ve done that a little bit. What, do you also duck on over here or do you just stick with the magpies?

Dwayne Devonie: So when I came up to the Northern Territory, previous to that, I just dam busted as a kid on our property in Victoria, sheep and cattle property, we grew up there. When I left there at 18, 19, came to the Northern Territory for the clay target comp to get a shirt and I made that comp, made the team up here in the Northern Territory, major pastimes, fishing and hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Is that why you moved up here?

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah, for play target shooting comp.

Ramsey Russell: What, did all the crazy, quote grainy drive you out of that part of the world, was that part of it?

Dwayne Devonie: When I was growing up, I didn’t quite fit in Victoria. When I got up here, I found my place.

Ramsey Russell: Found your tribe?

Dwayne Devonie: Well, I found my, yeah, I found my tribe. I found, like, this is where I want to be and 20 years, and the magpie geese from that – Yeah, that’s the main waterfowl that they hunt up here. Hunted those for 10, 15 years, each season get out there, make some real food.

Ramsey Russell: Are you a buffalo hunter, too?

Dwayne Devonie: I’ve shot a few buffalo, but for me, there’s just not the reward in it, like, it’s amazing you go –

Ramsey Russell: You like the bird hunt?

Dwayne Devonie: I love the bird hunt. I’ve always been a wing shooter, love the clay target shooting. Started when I was 9 or 10 at school, actually. Like, we had a school program where we did some clay target shooting in the afternoon.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah. Country school.

Ramsey Russell: That surprised me in this country.

The Evolution of a Hunter: From Clay to Waterfowl.

Starting with clay targets, my interest naturally evolved into waterfowling, driven by an unquenchable thirst for the sport.

Dwayne Devonie: Wednesday afternoon, 02:30 the bus came up. One of our teachers had a firearms license and we had this activity where, for 4 hours jump on the bus, we’re going to the gun club, teach you how to shoot clay targets. Single shot in the shotgun. Keith McKendrick, the coach, was the coach from this little area he’s passed now and I, bless his soul, he’s like, Yeah, this is how you do it. And since then, I just got bitten by the bug. So if it flies, it dies. I just got addicted to that. So I loved it. Jeez, I hate to imagine the amount of shots I’ve fired in the last 30 years, since I was like 42 now. And so waterfowling for me is just, it’s become a passion. It never was I never had anyone that taught me duck hunting. It’s something that I’ve picked up through doing it yourself now day and night the last 10 years, the YouTube, the podcasts, yourself. You don’t know this, but you’ve sat in a dozer with me for many hours, sitting there listening to duck hunt podcasts around the world. I feel like this is just a normal progression. We’re sitting, having a chat about duck shooting and yeah, listening to that, you learn from that, you watch YouTube. And I’ve been lucky enough to go to New Zealand. I’ve done 3 trips to New Zealand.

Ramsey Russell: Well, if you ever make it across a big pond, let me warn you, this one, ever more of a long flight from here to California. But if you ever make it over to our part of the world, I’d love to share a blind with you. I invite you to come over.

Dwayne Devonie: I will definitely be taking you up on that for sure.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I would love to have you. You shared a video with me this morning and I sent it to my wife and kids, and my wife immediately wrote back and said, I’m never going to Australia. We’ve talked about buffaloes, we’ve talked about crocodiles and everything else. But you had an account with that big old snake this morning.

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah. It actually made me jump. I was walking along minded my own business. I saw this, there was a snake, a nice, it was a water python, beautiful yellow belly, but on the top, he’s dark and it looked like a brown snake or a taipan.

Ramsey Russell: Do brown snake get that big?

Dwayne Devonie: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: How big do they get?

Dwayne Devonie: A big brown snake can get up to 2 meters, 6 foot long. It can be as round as your arm. So like it translate –

Ramsey Russell: Extremely venomous.

Dwayne Devonie: Oh, yeah. But the python is not. The python is non venomous and it’s a constrictor, so it’ll grab its prey and wrap it up and choke it. So that fella was actually harmless, but he looked pretty bloody angry in that video.

Ramsey Russell: He did, he was striking at you pretty good.

Dwayne Devonie: He was wound up. So, yeah, I was walking past him and I seen him and I just jumped, and as he jumped, he had a bit of a strike at me. I’m like, holy hell, better get that on video.

Ramsey Russell: Have you ever had any close encounters with the taipans or the brown snakes?

Dwayne Devonie: Touch wood. I have not, certainly seen plenty of snakes, but it’s like you just walk in the bush and you use your ears, you use your eyes, you’re looking for that shiny slither. What do they call them here? Danger noodles or nope ropes and you’re looking for that as you’re walking through and using your ears and your hearing. It’s when you step over an object, like over a log or over something where there could be a snake underneath. That’s where you got to be careful.

Ramsey Russell: You watch where you step in Australia. You just watch where you put your hands.

Dwayne Devonie: I think you’re more dialed in, you’re more aware to your surroundings and if you’re not, you get bitten. If you’re not aware of your surroundings, you get bitten by a crocodile or run over by a buffalo. People happen all the time, get run over by buffalo.

Ramsey Russell: That’s wanting to duck or goose hunt pretty bad now. But you all, I guess you all just get used to it.

Dwayne Devonie: That’s it. That’s life. And I’ve been, I went to Canada for a little bit and I just couldn’t get over bears. I’m like bears and cougars, they scared the crap out of me.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Dwayne Devonie: How do where they are? They could be around the next bend. Here, that crocodile is going to be in the water and it’s not going to be in that shallow water where we’re putting the decoys up. It’s going to be in a deeper water where it can get an ambush or on an area where the pigs have been rooting. There was an area there the pigs had been last night.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Dwayne Devonie: Rooting up the ground and you could see there was fresh mud out in front of where they were and there were some lines through the weeds where those crocodiles had been going through. So I wasn’t going there, but where we were, I felt confident that if there was going to be a crocodile, be a little bit smaller. So it’s just being about aware of your surroundings and picking up on those little cues. So that’s what makes, I guess, hunting for me a little bit easier. Like I’m dialed into that. I’m seeing the little cues, the flutters, the birds where they’re sitting and that makes it a little bit easier.

Ramsey Russell: How long is the duck and goose season here in Northern Territories?

Dwayne Devonie: Yes, so the waterfowl in the Northern Territory starts in September. It’s normally the 2^nd or 3^rd weekend in September and it actually goes through to the first week in January.

Ramsey Russell: We’re, 6 months. We’re sitting in November –

Dwayne Devonie: 4 months. September, October, November, December and the first week. So 4 week, 4 months and a week.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. That’s a long season.

Dwayne Devonie: And that’s 10 ducks and this year 7 geese. That’s a 17 bird bag limit.

Ramsey Russell: And you stick it out.

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah. I am being acclimatized to that sun, it’s bloody hot. 07:30 the sun’s up, it’s humid, it’s hot, it’s not fun.

Ramsey Russell: But it’s downright pleasant before the sun comes up. It’s not cold, but it’s not hot.

Dwayne Devonie: 27⁰, 28⁰.

Ramsey Russell: The sunrises are probably the most spectacular I’ve ever seen on earth and when that fireball sun starts picking over rising, it reminds you, it’s fixing to be a scorcher.

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Is it like that?

Dwayne Devonie: Not all year. No, not at all. And it’s only really – So we have 2 seasons up here in the top end, the dry season and then the wet season and there’s a build up to the wet season. So most of the year, 6 months of the year, we’re 20⁰ at night, 30⁰ at the day tops, beautiful, dry, you walk outside, you hardly get a sweat. Once there’s that change in the sun, the days get longer, it gets hotter, it actually starts evaporating more water up, creating humidity. The humidity creates the storm clouds. The storm clouds rain, it creates more humidity, the next day is hotter. And so it is a buildup to the wet season and it reaches a point where it just rains continuously, and that’s the wet season. So our geese season stops before the wet season starts, essentially, it just gets too wet and flooded. We can’t drive anywhere, it’s too boggy. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You got a heck of a truck, I like that little flatbed Toyota.

Dwayne Devonie: That’s good.

Ramsey Russell: Carries like a good bush truck, isn’t it?

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah. Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: I like the way the panels drop down on all three sides when we try to skin birds and all pile into it like a big old workbench.

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah. Perfect height. Yeah. That was a higher car, actually.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Dwayne Devonie: How good, yeah. There’s a few, like, mines up here, so mine spec and because I was working in a mine, we got a discount through that company. So, yes, it’s pretty fortunate.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve enjoyed hunt we, Dwayne. I really have and thank you for today. I came here for 3 reasons, really. I mean, just besides my friends and all that good stuff, I’d never been to the Northern Territories, but I wanted a magpie goose and those 2 whistlers. And yesterday you went out and put some miles on truck, found the duck the old fashioned way. What was it like yesterday afternoon when you scattered it?

Dwayne Devonie: Yeah, it was great. We got out there in the afternoon and we were just, we took drop the boys off for a crocodile cruise. Actually, they went and checked out the crocodile cruise and after that we called back into the swamp. Yeah, we were there in our civvie clothes too, just some short shorts and a t shirt and we weren’t even going to hunt, but we just sort of snuck in there and had a look. There was a heap of ducks, oh my God, there was 100 black ducks in that pocket where we were.

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Dwayne Devonie: And up the right hand side where those lily pads were, on the other side of that, there’d have been 3000 wood ducks all just lined up that whole side and as we came in and disturbed them, they were just flying out like they were coming in this morning just row after row after row, 100 birds a time. Amazing to see. Where else do you get waterfowl? Well, we don’t get waterfowl diversity that good, many other places in Australia it was great to see.

Ramsey Russell: And I managed to get in there and right off the bat I shot one whistler, a little bit later, shot another. I said, well, with luck I’ll have both whistlers in 2 shots and, well, they turned out to both be red, you come and fished them out? And I had given up. I said, well, maybe tomorrow I’ll get the other one. And, man, wave after wave, all them flocks you saw yesterday started coming back in tall. I loaded back up and right on the deck they come. And that was it, bam, bam, I had both my whizzers, the red and the plumed and I’m very happy and I appreciate you for that.

Dwayne Devonie: No, absolutely. Glenn, as a group of mine, I was really happy to come and give you a hand. Glenn and yourself great mates as well and it was just great to come out there and give my appreciation to you guys for the leadership and the education that you guys are putting out there for me as a young and up and coming duck shooter to carry that on. So I appreciate you as much as you appreciate that. Thank you very much too.

Ramsey Russell: Mr. Jason Ferrugia, man, what a great way to end Northern Territories, Australia hunting this morning. And you describe the whole time we’re driving out, you describe and, oh, it’s this, it’s that, it’s this, there’s trees around, there’s this is that. And I’m imagining some shallow mud, flat and water surrounded by trees. And we go to about 50 acres, I’m going to guess a quarter section of pig rootings and we walk across it and you stop and go, no, this is it. I go, where’s the water? You go, there ain’t no water. How did you find that place?

Jason Ferrugia: Just a lot of research and a lot of time out in the field, getting out there and seeing the flight patterns of the birds and the way they’re feeding and just adjusting my hunting to the way the birds fly daily.

Ramsey Russell: Where were those birds coming from? I mean, there were a lot of birds. Where were they coming from?

Jason Ferrugia: I think at this stage they’re coming from the Adelaide River floodplains, which as the crow flies –

Ramsey Russell: Like the river itself.

Jason Ferrugia: No, behind that are another set of giant floodplains. So that’s for the next 300 km east of where we are is floodplain after floodplain. But the Adelaide River floodplain as the crow flies from where we are is only about 10 km or like 4 or 5 miles. And I think the birds are coming from there and they’re coming from there to feed on that fresh rice stubble.

Ramsey Russell: How long ago was it? And that’s what you explained to me back behind us, like, in front of me for, I guess for eternity, was brush and behind me was grass, with a few clumps of trees. How long ago was it that floodplain was in rice?

Jason Ferrugia: So they had that floodplain in rice. They did a test trial in the early 1970s.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, wow. That long ago?

Jason Ferrugia: That long ago. So they did only 2 seasons and they got completely destroyed by ducks and magpie geese.

Ramsey Russell: Well, see, a lot of those whistling ducks we clean today had for the last couple of days have had rice in their craw. Is that coming from that same resource? It’s just growing wild now.

Jason Ferrugia: Absolutely. It’s just growing as wild rice now and it’ll keep going now. And to be honest with you, I’m surprised that it’s there now, but it’s dry because last year when that was underwater, the rice started blooming. It’s blooming now after that’s all been burnt off. Just recently, there was massive fires there.

Ramsey Russell: Lightning strikes or something.

Jason Ferrugia: Yeah. I’m not sure how they started, but they do burn a lot up here as well, and even the indigenous fellas will burn off country.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jason Ferrugia: And that’s all under traditional owner country there as well. So they do burn off country, but that whole area burnt out, as you can see, like the black ash in the floodplain there. And since that got burnt, the birds just moved into it and its bone dry.

Ramsey Russell: Where those hogs had rooted and rooted, probably eating rice and tubers and sedges and whatnot. It turned up a lot of soil.

Jason Ferrugia: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: And it’s hard baked soil, but nonetheless, all of the whistlers and magpie geese that came over us this morning were landing out, not in the grass, I’m sure they will, but they were landing in those bare areas. And I think they were as those hogs had rooted, I think they were turning up stuff that the ducks will eat.

Jason Ferrugia: Well, absolutely. Because when I went for a walk after we’d bagged on geese, I went for a walk to see those ducks that were a bit further east. I found very fresh scatt and droppings and very fresh diggings and that’s where all the birds were this morning.

Ramsey Russell: That’s it. It’s the most different hunt I’ve ever done. But now we stopped, we got out of the truck, finally, we walked a little bit, we stopped and started watching kind of the flight paths of the birds and they were coming for miles, but they we kind of picked some spots to intercept them and watched Orion rise. And we talked about the funny names you all have for constellations down here. And then we jumped out and started shooting, and I think shooting time this morning was 10 minutes till 06:00, and at 06:25, I was walking to pick up my last magpie goose.

Jason Ferrugia: Yeah, that’s right.

Ramsey Russell: And you couldn’t take your eyes when they failed, I would just stare at it and walk to where I’m going, so I didn’t lose. If I tried to shoot 2 or 3 before I picked him up, chances are he wouldn’t get found.

Jason Ferrugia: Especially in that long grass. It makes it very hard. But like you said, you finished shooting at 06:25 and the big migration flight hadn’t even started yet.

Ramsey Russell: Now, you’re not from Northern Territories. You moved here?

Jason Ferrugia: Yes sir.

Ramsey Russell: Why’d you move here? And when did you move here?

Jason Ferrugia: We moved here straight after the COVID period in January last year, January 2022. We moved here for the hunting opportunities, the fishing opportunities and just to be away from the big cities down south and be closer to nature and to be closer to all this stuff and to bring up my kids in an environment where they can appreciate going out in the field and enjoying what, like the Northern Territories has to offer.

Ramsey Russell: The Northern Territories is the wild west. It is you all were talking about this morning. It’s like I’ve been down to South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria provinces, but I feel like now that I’ve been to Northern Territories, I’ve really seen Australia less than, except Western Australia desert, camel country.

Jason Ferrugia: This is the true Australia, like your postcard image of the Outback Australia and that’s why the number plates reflect that, saying, Outback Australia. This is the true outback and the last sort of gateway to the wild frontier, what we call God’s country, which is, there’s God’s country, we call out here that no one’s still hunted.

Ramsey Russell: What are the Northern Territories? What is their attitude towards hunting versus where you grew up?

Jason Ferrugia: It is so different. It’s very accepting up here. It’s accepting by the media, it’s accepting by the government. It’s accepted by, like, all the mainstream, like kids, adults, women, children. Everybody accepts it. Everybody talks about how they prepare the geese. Everybody talks about how they’ll prepare a buffalo. Everybody talks about the next fish that’s on the bite. It’s the hunting and fishing culture up here is as good as I’ve seen anywhere I’ve traveled to.

Ramsey Russell: I agree. And is it because they’re not city folks, because they live in nature instead of removed from nature. Do you think that might have something to do with it?

Jason Ferrugia: I think it has a lot to do with it because you’re so close to nature here, like, even if you live in a suburb, you’ve got lizards running around, you’ve got snakes in your garden, you’ve got geese flying over your house. I’ve got a pair of Radjah shell ducks or Burdekin ducks, as we call them here, that live in my backyard.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jason Ferrugia: Yeah. A nice, beautiful pair that live with my chooks.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Jason Ferrugia: Like, you’re so close to nature here. Down south there’s a lot of different introduced birds getting around and species and the big concrete jungles of the cities. Here there’s not much like, agriculture or anything that disturbs the land, everything’s wild here.

Ramsey Russell: What’s it like raising your kids here? You told a great story this morning about some family coming up from down south and seeing your 11 year old son. And they said they’ll never forget that image.

Jason Ferrugia: They won’t. My 11 year old son walking out the other day, bare feet, no top on a snake, a black headed python wrapped around his head and he cracking a whip.

Ramsey Russell: Did he catch it?

Jason Ferrugia: No, we actually got that one for him, but we’ve got a children’s python that we caught and that he fell in love with that and we actually lost that as well because it got out of its enclosure.

Ramsey Russell: Well, it’ll show up around your house someday.

Paul Sharp: But we caught it again, we did. It fell out one of the door hinges. So we’ve caught that one again. And he wanted a black headed python that I seen where we hunted today, where we clean those birds.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jason Ferrugia: I seen a black headed python there last year, as wide as the track.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, my God.

Jason Ferrugia: So they grow to 4 meters long.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, my God.

Jason Ferrugia: And so they’re a natural snake for this area, but they are an easily handled snake. And when you handle them a lot, they’re pretty friendly.

Ramsey Russell: What is it with the bull whip? You said it sounds like a rifle shot when it goes off.

Jason Ferrugia: Well, whip cracking is a pretty big thing up here because it’s a big country in western theme up here and a lot of wrangling cattle and all that sort of stuff. But the bullwhip’s just something that when you’re good at it, you can make a shot and you can crack it and it sounds like a rifle going off. And my young fella, he’ll put up most adults, and he cracks that whip like a pro.

Ramsey Russell: It’s rif, I almost said rifle. It’s pass shooting country up here.

Jason Ferrugia: It is.

Ramsey Russell: You were telling me this morning on the ride in back home down south, you had perfected the decoys for bringing them in.

Jason Ferrugia: Calling, bringing them in. I used to have over 150 decoys and I’ve still got about 50 silhouettes that I’d use for different operations, like on open water hunting, swamp hunting. I’d use smaller spreads and all that sort of stuff. I’ve got my teal spreads, my black duck spreads, my mountain duck spreads, all that sort of stuff, I can call all of them. I even use decoys in spots where I know birds wouldn’t decoy as a guide to my hunting range. But I haven’t shot over decoys now in 2 years.

Ramsey Russell: Why?

Jason Ferrugia: Because predominantly crocodiles?

Ramsey Russell: Everybody in this episode mentioned the crocodiles up here.

Jason Ferrugia: Yeah. So predominantly crocodiles and look, I have found that would be excellent for me to decoy, and I’m thinking cheese that –

Ramsey Russell: Well, like that spot we were driving out, man, that looked set up a floater spread out and hiding that grass –

Jason Ferrugia: That lagoon there and the black ducks flying up that lagoon and up that flight lane and those whistlers with a bit of noise to bring them in. And even the geese, I wanted to pitch in there, but I just, yeah, I’ve been really enjoying this past shooting and just putting yourself in a flight lane. And I think it’s one of the toughest forms of duck hunting.

Ramsey Russell: I tell you what I really have learned hunting with you all the last 3 days, that pass shooting is an art form in and of itself. You don’t just go stand willy nilly You put in the time. You put in the boot leather and the gas to go find the flights which was changed time to time.

Jason Ferrugia: They can change daily. Like, even today from yesterday changed. Like where we were, where we actually shot this morning, there was the same amount of ducks that were further east wheeling around us yesterday morning there. So they actually moved on another couple of 100 meters. But that can happen daily and you just keep repositioning yourself and yeah, and you make sure you can’t be seen, as in all hunting. And when they don’t know you’re there, that’s when you get the good hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What was the spot on the way out? You took the scenic route out what was that? I mean we went for almost say a mile, maybe 2 and every 100 yards was a pickup truck or a field truck and people getting out or getting in or cleaning birds and for 2 miles it was just like a massive shooting line, what’s going on there?

Jason Ferrugia: So that’s the main wall, what we call the wall.

Ramsey Russell: A dam.

Jason Ferrugia: Yeah, of Harrison dam. So we were at Harrison dam hunting reserve and that’s the main wall, the eastern edge of the dam itself. So that on the right hand side of that heading west is the main dam or swamp. And those people are just standing in a line on that wall over, like you said, a mile, a mile section and spread out. And they’re getting the birds that are coming from the east heading into the dam, they’re just shooting and pass shooting them as they’re coming over.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Jason Ferrugia: And using big loads.

Ramsey Russell: We were driving up, if we were driving by one car, he had just stepped out, loaded his gun, took a knee and here comes some geese, and I’m thinking, surely he’s not going to shoot at those, he doubled. They were high and far, he doubled on them. You Australian boys especially, you pass shooters, you all shoot pretty good.

Jason Ferrugia: Yeah. Look, you put in the time of the field with your right gun and your right choke configuration and the right loads and you can take those high birds.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I’m impressed all the time, I learned something that’s interesting this morning. Who actually built or made or set aside or bought that land we were hunting?

Jason Ferrugia: So that’s, that land there is government land, but it’s run and taken care of by the Field & Game.

Ramsey Russell: Field & Game Australia, which is not a government entity, it’s a private entity funded by duck hunters.

Jason Ferrugia: Funded by duck hunters.

Ramsey Russell: Is that the only property in northern territories they manage? I mean, I just can’t imagine an NGO back home committing that much money and time to managing that much property, because back home in America public access is becoming a problem. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for somewhere to hunt.

Jason Ferrugia: It’s definitely becoming a problem in most places in Australia, but we’ve got within 20 minutes of Darwin, we’ve got 4 major Field & Game reserves, hunting reserves for the public. Harrison’s dam, where we were this morning, is just one of 4 close by ones. It’s not even the biggest. The biggest is Shoal Bay, which from here, the closest turn off from where we’re sitting right now is 7 minutes. And that goes for 25 km. So 12, 13 miles of swamp.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Jason Ferrugia: And that’s 7 minutes from here –

Ramsey Russell: I mean, because the way you all hunt, there’s a lot of places out there for everybody to hunt.

Jason Ferrugia: Well, they’ve only been to one, the boys that are all here and you guys have only been to one reserve. Like there’s a lot of good country.

Ramsey Russell: Do you feel like in Australia that your public access is limited?

Jason Ferrugia: Oh, I think it is limited.

Ramsey Russell: Like down at Victoria, around the cities.

Jason Ferrugia: It’s definitely limited in Victoria and in the cities to get to good properties, like public properties, you got a 3, 4 hour drive.

Ramsey Russell: I just wonder what you say if you went to Arkansas public land and saw that spectacle. Because –

Jason Ferrugia: I’d love to one day.

Ramsey Russell: Well, the thing about it is, is like Glenn and I years ago walked into a 1000 acre red gum swamp and there were lots of ducks, and we were the only 2 hungry souls in that whole place hunting. And he asked me, he said, how would that compare to back home? I said, well, back home we’d gotten here an hour before dark to get our stake out our spot, and for the next 60 minutes, 70 minutes, 90 minutes, 30 minutes past shooting time, there’d have been people coming in and there’d been somebody behind every tree. And now what’s happening in parts of the states, if you can imagine this, there might be 12 or 15 or 20 or 30 people hunting, walking into the woods together and they walk up on 20 guys and they just join them. Can you imagine being in 50 spots in a little area? I mean –

Jason Ferrugia: I couldn’t imagine.

Ramsey Russell: I think access or crowding is relative to what you know.

Jason Ferrugia: Yeah. I’ve always been the type of hunter, if there’s people here, I’ll go here.

Ramsey Russell: I saw that this morning, because a lot of the people are coming to the wall or coming before the wall or coming to the lake over here, oh, not Jason. In the dark, it didn’t seem that far in the daylight, man, we went a long ways out into the bush.

Jason Ferrugia: Yeah. But away from everyone, because the birds that are coming on us aren’t disturbed like a lot of the other people that are shooting birds. They’re shooting birds that have been shot at maybe 3, 4 times. And they are pretty much sky busting them.

Ramsey Russell: You were calling those at those geese this morning. They sound vaguely like just one syllable of a Canada goose. Do you have success calling them over your –

Jason Ferrugia: Plenty of times, just to turn them just a little bit, just to be coming range.

Ramsey Russell: Just a curiosity.

Jason Ferrugia: So, plenty of times they’ll be flying by just out of range and I’ll just give them a toot and they might just turn, especially if they can’t see it. They know that they can’t see anything. They’ll just turn just to give you that shot.

Ramsey Russell: What do you think would happen? Like, where we were hunting today, looking toward the direction they were coming from, behind us is where, for miles is where they were landing and feeding. What would happen if we had placed 2 dozen silhouettes, big magpie silhouettes behind us a 100 yards, just to make them look at them and pass over? Would that have worked?

Jason Ferrugia: They may have passed over him, but they wouldn’t have stopped on them because they had a one track mind of where they’re going.

Ramsey Russell: Of where they’re going. Well, they sure were, they were the lowest birds we’ve shot this moment since I’ve been here.

Jason Ferrugia: That’s because they’re getting no pressure from where they’re coming from.

Ramsey Russell: What do you think about the whistling ducks as table fair?

Jason Ferrugia: Oh, the whistling ducks. My dad always told me that they are the chicken of the ducks and I never really got to eat them down south, but since I’ve got here, man, they are good.

Ramsey Russell: They are.

Jason Ferrugia: They are and like, we do the legs, we’ll fry the legs like little chicken cutlets and the kids smash them and my kids wouldn’t eat much game when I live down south.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jason Ferrugia: No, but now they fight over it. It’s amazing.

Ramsey Russell: Last topic is I notice because you were talking about it and I noticed we were driving out, you all would stop and pick up trash.

Jason Ferrugia: Yeah. Bad topic. It’s really –

Ramsey Russell: Spent holes, mostly.

Jason Ferrugia: Yeah. People just shoot their shelves or even open boxes and throw their rubbish on the ground. Look, people out there, they just need to clean up their mess because we’ve got these great places that we’re allowed to hunt and you bring it in, you bring it out. Doesn’t matter if it’s a spent shell, a little bit of a can, a bottle, anything. You’ve got to bring your rubbish out. And look, I’ve already pulled out 3 or 4 garbage bag fulls this season. I’m sure by the time the season ends, I’ll probably have 3 or 4 more and by the end of the season, I’ll do a hike, a couple of day hike a couple of mornings and just fill up bags.

Ramsey Russell: There’s a saying in the hiking world, the backpack world, leave only footprints, take only memories.

Jason Ferrugia: That’s it.

Ramsey Russell: And I mean to me, part of the allure of coming somewhere like the Northern Territories is the wildness. And even though there are a lot of people hunting, even though there’s jeep trails cutting through in places, it just feels wild when you get there until you stumble upon 2 boxes of spent holes and that just kind of kills the illusion.

Jason Ferrugia: Absolutely, it does and it makes me sad to see and so I think just some people up here have had it that good for that long and they just don’t care, which is very sad, because –

Ramsey Russell: It doesn’t help that it’s 100⁰. Already get that air conditioning.

Jason Ferrugia: But look the heat. I love the heat out there. So it’s –

Ramsey Russell: Next time I see you, I tell you what I’m going to bring you, Jason, I’m going to bring you some mojo pick sticks.

Jason Ferrugia: Yeah, absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: You don’t even have to bend over, you just sweep it over the ground and that magnet grabs all those primers and you just scrape it off into your bag and roll quick.

Jason Ferrugia: That’s something I want to say for sure.

Ramsey Russell: It’ll make short work of that right there.

Jason Ferrugia: Yeah, definitely.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve sure had a good time hunting with you all. I really appreciate you sharing the hunting hole. It was a, it’s been a great week, period. But I just, that was just such a great ending. Like, I shot my limited geese and then the whistling duck started flying. Shot some whistling ducks kind of before and they came before and then they came after, but I didn’t need a limit, 10 ducks is a lot of ducks.

Jason Ferrugia: It’s a lot of ducks and like, we were content.

Ramsey Russell: Especially when you’re a half mile walk across pig ruts from the truck, but it was, I just enjoyed it so well, the birds presented themselves. I had a good time and I was just kind of done, I got everything I wanted. Thank you very much for that.

Jason Ferrugia: Absolutely. Thank you very much.

Ramsey Russell: And last but not least, wrapping up the magpie goose camp episode is Mr. Glenn Falla. Glenn, you outdid yourself. It was a hell of a week. It seemed like I’ve been here a month. We got so much done. We started down in Victoria province with the scientists, collecting data and sightseeing and doing all kinds of stuff and then we came up here to Northern Territory. This is real Australia stuff up here, now.

Glenn Falla: Now, this is a real outback up here, that’s for sure. It’s a wild west.

Ramsey Russell: It’s the wild west outback, no doubt about it. How long have you been coming up here?

Glenn Falla: This is about my 5^th year in a row for hunting. I’ve been up here before that for other reasons with family and what have you and business brings me up here from time to time.

Ramsey Russell: What do you all do up here besides goose hunt?

Glenn Falla: Well, my wife has family up here, so we’ve come and visited family that are only a couple of suburbs away from here and it’s a great place to bring kids and show them the outback when they’re young. So we did a 6 week tour up here when the kids were young.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What do you like about goose camp versus regular hunting back home?

Glenn Falla: Oh, man, it’s just so different. It’s close to town. It’s early morning, late evenings, the weather is just incredible. You can just about set the clock at this time of year to about a 02:00 in the afternoon downpour. And half an hour later there’s water 4 inches deep on the ground and an hour later, you wouldn’t know whether it rained or not.

Ramsey Russell: It went textbook just like you predicted. Hot in the morning, midday rain, hot again, repeat. Geese in the morning, skinning birds all day, cooking and drinking all night, repeat. I mean, it just goes off of that. It’s like every, it’s like goose camp the world over.

Glenn Falla: Yeah. And look, we’ve got a fair crew of guys up here this week and anybody that doesn’t bag out in the morning, they go out in the evening and make sure they get their bag. We’re pretty determined to gather as much meat as we can to take back to Victoria. So if you haven’t shot your 7 birds in the morning, you go back in the evening and have another go. If you haven’t limited out on ducks, we go back and do that as well. So a lot of the Northern Territory and people up here tell us that we’re some of the hardest hunters that visit each year.

Ramsey Russell: I would agree with that and you all, it’s a meat run for you all. It’s not just sport. I mean, you all really do, it’s a production. Because it’s not just the breast, it’s the breast, the legs and everything on it and all cooked all kind of different which ways.

Glenn Falla: Yeah. And look, everybody, I don’t think there’s a person in camp this week that would disagree. It’s some of the best table meat that you can get.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, you convinced us 4 Americans, I guarantee you. I really, somebody asked me in social media, said, but what about an ill grass fed brand? And I’m going to tell you, that is a fine eating goose. But these taste more like a sandhill crane to me than a typical Canada goose. It’s just, it’s some of the best table fare I’ve ever had in a while and for such a unbecoming beast, such as the magpie goose.

Glenn Falla: The ugliest, prettiest bird in the world and I –

Ramsey Russell: It’s certainly the ugliest but it’s also one of the most interesting. It’s like that funny knob, that bump on the head even when they’re flying, it’s very notable and I find myself admiring them. I mean, what’s not to admire about them? They play the game.

Glenn Falla: There’s a few blokes in this camp that have got a lump on the head, too. But I’ll tell you what, they can cook. We’ve had it how many different ways this week?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Oh, Bubba Gump goose. We’ve had it all and it’s all been excellent.

Glenn Falla: It has.

Ramsey Russell: What about this chicken fried Mississippi stuff?

Glenn Falla: You mean deep fried, I think Ramsey.

Ramsey Russell: It’s chicken frying.

Glenn Falla: No, I think it’s deep fried over here in Australia, mate, there ain’t no chicken involved in that deep frying.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, but this is chicken fried.

Glenn Falla: Well, you might nearly get away with it.

Ramsey Russell: You can deep fry a million different things. Deep fry would be like fish but this is chicken fried.

Glenn Falla: Well, it’s as close to a chicken as what it is to a goose. So I’ll let you get away with that one.

Ramsey Russell: Hey, you got a point there. Lavretsky, who’s going to come up in a future episode, he says that they’re a link, like an important genetic link. I think they’re related to the dinosaurs. He says no to the chickens, to the bird, to the reptiles. But I thought and that’s what I got to explain to him. He’s sitting here, right here working on his science while we’re science project while we do this. But I thought dinosaurs were reptiles, didn’t you?

Glenn Falla: I did, absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. So I’ll get him to clarify that.

Glenn Falla: He’ll be working on birds for a while yet, I think right up until we put him on the plane to go home. It’s been a big task for these birds, they’ve been flood out all week.

Ramsey Russell: I just want to thank you, Glenn, because this was a very ambitious week that we had planned. 3 days down in Victoria around the wetland center and then 3 days up here and there was a lot of moving places. You kept saying, don’t worry, it’s all in hand and it was. It just and it could not have happened without you. You must have been rustling 150 irons in the fire in preparation for us getting up here.

Glenn Falla: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s not over yet, there’s a few more places to move before we get you on the plane. But, look, you always cram everything in that you can and you know the work ethic of the guys that are up here.

Ramsey Russell: I like to sleep on a ride home. It’s a long ride.

Glenn Falla: You can. We won’t tell everybody that you’ve had a nano nap every afternoon.

Ramsey Russell: Well, yeah, you can tell everybody, it’s the truth. I’m going to, not today. I’m going to sleep on that flight home, I hope. Well one of the details I appreciate is every time I come down here, I fall in with team Falla. You know what I’m saying? And it’s just a collection of good, hard hunting Australians. How do you meet all these guys?

Glenn Falla: Oh, man, the same –

Ramsey Russell: Through duck hunt.

Glenn Falla: The same way I met you. Yeah, absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: We met in a duck blind in Arkansas.

Glenn Falla: Yeah. And I’m pretty cautious and what have you about the people that I hang with. But as you can see and each time you come over, there’s a new face or 2 that’s joined us but –

Ramsey Russell: They’re all good, birds of a feather flock together.

Glenn Falla: Absolutely, man. I couldn’t do it without them. And it’s a fantastic team of guys and as you see, they just all kick in and do what they need to do. We’ve got 3 in the kitchen at the moment, you’ve only just washed your hands of kitchen fare as well. You’ve been preparing food for us. So we’ve got a scientist the other end of the table, dissecting birds. The boys have only just finished cleaning this morning’s birds outside and bagging them up, vac sealing them, putting them in the freezer.

Ramsey Russell: Now a swimming pool and cold beer time.

Glenn Falla: You bet.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, Glenn, I appreciate you. It’s been a great trip. You’ve been a tour guide every single step of the way, from walking around. It’s like we just landed, waiting for everybody to come in, drove to the wetland center and 5 minutes later we were walking around. That’s a pretty impressive place you got right there. What’s the purpose of that wetland center?

Glenn Falla: It’s purely around education. It’s recently been turned into our national office for Field & Game Australia, but it was put there for the sole purpose of education of lots of school children, lots of the general public, non hunters. It’s there to expose people to wetland environments that they would not run into if they didn’t come and visit us.

Ramsey Russell: Will the anti hunters ever come and dare darken the doorway and walk around and look and see what the other side is doing?

Glenn Falla: We’ve just about run out of print cartridges, sending invites.

Ramsey Russell: Ignorance is bliss.

Glenn Falla: We believe they will. We’ve had a couple and there’s growing interest and anybody that’s got an open mind might turn up and I’ll tell you what, half a day at the wetland there, with a few of the right people around them, they’ll learn more than what they will 10 years running around with placards or walking around a wetland with a protestors flag or a high vis vest, those types of things.

Ramsey Russell: Feel sorry for them, really. They don’t get to see what we do it’s like each morning we’ve gone out up here, we shot birds. We shot our 7 goose limit, we shot plenty of ducks. And among the most memorable, though, is the amazing bird life up here. Like, just to drive out today, Jason was doing the same thing you were doing. There’s a bird, I mean, naming all these birds are flying. And you better know, you duck id and stuff around here because there’s so much stuff in the sky flying and making doors and looking like that and you better be able to shoot well. It’s a, I mean, I feel like an Australian hunter is one of the best duck hunters on earth.

Glenn Falla: Look, the connection to land. We come out of there this morning and I’m sure you’ve talked to the other boys about various things and you pull up every time you turn another corner there’s something magical to see. You could run the video for weeks here and not get bored. I’m sure you’ve captured a great amount of footage in the last few days, but I’d go out there and have a look every day, if I could and if we’re not doing that, we’re picking up after someone else’s rubbish and making sure that it’s in pristine condition. So you’ve got to wonder who would do it if the hunters weren’t here anymore, if hunting stopped, heaven forbid, who’s going to do all that work.

Ramsey Russell: Would you worry? I know you’re worried about it stopping down in Victoria and Southern Australia, that seems to be the hotbed, because that’s where all the people are, that’s where the city folks are, that’s where the folks removed from nature are, the folks that don’t see what we see when we go out in this wildness. But would the Northern Territories necessarily fall like a domino, right in place, because these people, these are different than folks I saw down in Melbourne. These are different folks.

Glenn Falla: Let’s just say they’re a little more resilient than Victorians.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Glenn Falla: Look, nothing’s out of the question. We’re concerned about everywhere in the world, at the end of the day, we can’t let that first domino fall because you don’t know what’s going to follow. If one domino falls, everybody’s under threat. And it’s not just hunting, it’s fishing. It’s all outdoor activities. We need to band together, all these people that think fishing won’t be attacked in the future. Farming for that matter, anybody that farms animals, anybody that has pets at home, we should all be concerned.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. It’s that radical over here.

Glenn Falla: Absolutely. Ideology has taken over and politics is driving it.

Ramsey Russell: What did you learn this week? I mean, we had a couple of real interesting guests, besides me. We had a couple of real smart people in here. We had some truly smart folks here and you all, I know you all got into a lot of conversations. What did you pick up or what did you gather? Why was this genetic and museum safari important to you as a duck hunter here in Australia?

Glenn Falla: Well, it’s pretty simple. We haven’t given up, it’s as simple as that. We are not laying down, we’re not giving up. The fight continues, the more that we know about the species that we are involved with and the others that benefit from all the work we do around the wetlands. People think that we do what we do to create game birds. Well, you just said it yourself, the birds, the animals, the reptiles, everything else that benefits from it. I mean, yesterday I saw you take one step on dry land and all of a sudden you’re down to your knee and it was a buffalo that had been there before you and created a hole for you.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, boy. Yeah.

Glenn Falla: Everything is just –

Ramsey Russell: I’ve been walking all around that spot and it was dry as a bone. I stepped one, it was like stepping in a big wet fence post hole. Yeah, there’s some pretty brutal mean wildlife around here we’ve talked about. What I asked myself about, okay, there are species over here we cannot collect genetics for because the seeds closed. The freckled duck, the Radjah shelduck, the only shell duck on earth. I need the little green pygmy goose, gazillions of them out there on those wetlands and it’s close, we can’t collect those genetics. But I find myself wondering when I’m talking to the museum curator who talks about future generations, forever generations, having these skins and this material he’s collecting and saving and preserving for educational purposes and for future research. Like, even Lavretsky has gone to the Smithsonian and taken genetics from 150 to 200 year old skins and he’s over here collecting genetics. I mean, I’m sitting there watching this prehistoric freaking magpie goose fly through the air and ask myself, what if that bird holds the key to wildlife conservation? I mean, he’s lived this long. He preceded all the ducks and geeks and swans. What if he holds the code for future conservation or for that matter, cancer or anything? And if it’s closed just because of some radical ideal, well, we all lose.

Glenn Falla: Well, cancel culture as we call it here in Australia.

Ramsey Russell: That’s exactly what it is.

Glenn Falla: It’s not going to teach us anything. It’s not going to help us to preserve all these species that we are so passionate about, it’s the duck hunters, the duck hunting conservationists that are out there. You’ve been hearing and heard from other guys, there’s 4 reserves in this local area that are managed and maintained by parks Northern Territory, along with Field & Game, Field & Game Australia have a hand in all of it and I’d hate to think what the condition of those reserves would be like at the moment if it wasn’t for our volunteers. At the end of the day, the boys have been very busy managing gamba grass here in the Northern Territory in recent years. If it takes over and you haven’t got the feed that is there for all of these birds and we’ve all dissected birds all week long and seen what they’re dining on at the moment, if the gamba grass takes over and that’s what it does, it’s very invasive, it takes over. And there’s no opportunity for those other weeds that have got bobbles and seeds and things that feed these animals. The damn things will starve and we just need to keep working. It’s habitat loss that’s having the impact, it’s not hunters.

Ramsey Russell: But what do the anti hunters do besides disrupt hunts and try to create headlines? I’m asking this very sincerely. I know this for a fact. They don’t talk to people like me, they don’t answer emails, they won’t come on the podcast, they won’t explain their position. They won’t give me the time of day. But do they do anything other than start drama? Are they just a bunch of drama queens or are they really going out and doing anything at all for waterfowl conservation?

Glenn Falla: I wish they were. I really do.

Ramsey Russell: But they’re not.

Glenn Falla: They’re not and we’ve the offers always there, we’ll work with anybody that will work towards a common goal with us. We’re pretty broad shouldered, thick skinned. We’ll work with anybody that’ll work with us to achieve what we are trying to achieve and that is the sustainability of each of us these animals that we’re referring to. And it’s not, as I said, it’s not game birds, it’s 100s of waterfowl birds and it’s lots of other animals around the wetlands as well. Wetlands environments are so important to so many animals. And if they actually got out there and spent some time with us, they’d learn a bit about it.

Ramsey Russell: And as the people in this episode all demonstrated, it’s a personal relationship. It’s like somebody asked me one time, why do I hunt? And I’m like well, I feed my family, I feed my traditions, I feed my soul and that’s all I can say. You know what I’m saying? I’ve got this relationship with this animal, but it is difficult for me to explain to somebody how pulling trigger, killing it, watch it fall from the sky, getting blood on my hands is somehow connects me to that animal and initiates this commitment I’ve got to the perpetuation of that species. That’s a difficult conversation, I can’t explain, but it’s the truth.

Glenn Falla: It absolutely is. And it’s not a thrill kill. We’re out there doing what we do and we love it, but we’ve got the utmost respect for what we’re doing and it’s treated with respect and if people that only just get out there and experience that rather than the media hype that they see.

Ramsey Russell: Change the subject. I had, there are 3 reasons I came down here, besides and those 3 reasons besides seeing yourself and Trent and chef Paul over there, I want those 3 species. There are 3 species up here that I’m not aware can be harvested anywhere else on earth. And that’s the magpie goose, the plumed whistler and the wandering whistler and I scored all 3 of them.

Glenn Falla: Sure did.

Ramsey Russell: They were here. That’s pretty much all there was up here, a few black ducks, that’s about it. I missed my shot at a black duck this morning. I just couldn’t catch up with him.

Glenn Falla: Yeah. Saw a few grey teal, but not too many. Didn’t catch up with him.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, few grey teal and even though they’re protected and I can’t shoot them, I very much enjoyed going out and seeing the Radjah shelduck and the little pygmy goose. I mean, it’s just, at least I got to be in their environment and see them and I’ll take that.

Glenn Falla: Yeah. That little pond that we come past this morning on the way out was just sensational. I could sit there all day if it wasn’t for the heat.

Ramsey Russell: That heat up well. But I will tell you what, hey, look, I’ve enjoyed it, Glenn and I’m sure I’ll be coming back now that the world’s opened up and I’ve had a really good time. We got a lot of important work done, a lot of research work done. But most importantly, I just had a damn good time. Thank you.

Glenn Falla: Glad to hear it.

Ramsey Russell: Thanks to Safari Club International for funding this research and making this project possible. Thank you to our host, Mr. Glenn Falla and company, and I do mean dozens of people that made this happen. Thanks to Field & Game Australia and 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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