EP 440. Reinvented in the Wild West
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The quote above door reads, “Back to the New West. The Wild West I leave to you.” While many people have traveled since forever to Cody, Wyoming, to discover the Wild West, many came to disappear or to be reinvented. From the Buffalo Bill Center of the Wild West, Mckracken Research Library, Eric Rossborough provides entertaining accounts of some colorful personalities that did just that, explaining why back in the day locals never asked new folks’ names or origins. An amazing storyteller, Rossborough’s character descriptions will have you at times laughing out loud and at other times shaking your head in disbelief.
Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I’m in Minnesota, sitting under the ground in a big old blind. This is great. The temperature read 12° and all the locals call it fresh. That’s about 10:00 we’re in the blind, we’re waiting on geese. And I guess that’s what you do late season. It’s ten days from the season ending, and it’s a waiting game. I got a question. First question I got for Duncan Abram, today’s guest. How much of your life do you spend waiting on geese, Duncan?
Duncan Abram: More than I care to admit. It gets late in the year, and sometimes the geese don’t want to come out until afternoon. Sometimes they come out in the morning and we’re lucky and get them. But a lot of times later in the year, they do like to wade.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: And they like to make you wait. And we like to get out, right away in the morning, and we don’t want to miss it. And if you ain’t here, you ain’t getting them.
Ramsey Russell: Are the geese flying one a day right now. And is that a function of temperature? Because 12° this morning, now we’re sitting in a 12 foot by 50 foot pit blind, biggest pit blind I’ve ever been in. And properties name your club is defined around these pit blinds. And it’s a toasty 45, 50 plus degrees. I climbed out the hole in the top, go relieve myself a little while ago, and it’s much colder still outside, it’s cold outside. To a southern boy, it’s cold. But to hear you boys describe the air as fresh, I mean, how cold is it? I mean, 12° is pretty dang cold, Duncan.
Duncan Abram: It’s cold, but I mean, we’re bracing ourselves for, it’s going to get a lot colder here.
Ramsey Russell: What are your winters like up here? This part of Minnesota?
Duncan Abram: Cold. It gets cold, it gets white.
Ramsey Russell: 12° is fresh.
Duncan Abram: 12° ain’t bad.
Ramsey Russell: Because it’s still double digits.
Duncan Abram: That’s right. And there ain’t a lot for wind today. So that helps quite a bit, you throw a 20 miles an hour wind into this 12° and you don’t want to be outside.
Ramsey Russell: What do you do in this part of the world? Goose season is going to close in 10 days. You got 10 more days of goose hunting, it’s over. Maybe jump around down south like you talking about, do some stuff. But what do you do in the wintertime up here when it’s that cold?
Duncan Abram: Ice fish.
Ramsey Russell: Ice fish.
Duncan Abram: Yes, sir. We got basically enclosed trailers that lower down to the ice, and we sit inside those with heaters and catch fish.
Ramsey Russell: Catch fish. All right. That’s a northern thing. Just like, how do you say, I’m not in the south without saying I’m not in the south? I was in Wisconsin yesterday at a hotel, and they had these signs, hotel signs everywhere, pasted up, saying, please no ice hockey inside the hotel, talking to all these teenager guest kids, I’m like, that is definitely not something you don’t see in the south is please don’t play hockey in the middle of the hall. Are you a hockey guy? Do you grow up playing hockey?
Duncan Abram: I grew up playing hockey, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Everybody does.
Duncan Abram: Everybody does. It’s a great sport. It’s a little rough around the edges, I guess, you could say, in today’s world, but a lot of kids grow up playing hockey, it’s a great team building sport, and you really got to work at it to get good at it.
Ramsey Russell: It’s cold.
Duncan Abram: It is cold. It is cold. But when you’re playing hockey, you’re on ice, but you’re not cold because you’re moving, you’re doing everything else. I mean, you’re keeping your body warm just with activity when you’re playing hockey.
Ramsey Russell: Before we started recording, because we’re playing a waiting game on his geese right now. You told me that just a few days ago, it was 12:30 in the afternoon before you killed your first couple of geese.
Duncan Abram: Yes, sir.
Ramsey Russell: What’s got the geese sitting? I mean, I’m looking out in this field. There’s corn everywhere, there’s soya beans behind us, it’s a cold day, they got to be hungry. What’s got them sitting? I mean, is it a function of weather? Is it a function of what? I mean, why are the geese just sitting right now?
Duncan Abram: That’s kind of a debate that’s had – I mean, I think it’s a function of both. On one hand, you got them trying to keep water open, if they’re in a lake or somewhere with stagnant water, that they’ve got to keep it open. And another aspect to it is pressure. We’re in an area with a lot of goose hunters, and the more pressure they get, I mean, they figure out when they go to eat, somebody’s going to shoot at them while they’re going to go out to eat less.
Ramsey Russell: Right.
Duncan Abram: And, there’s times when it gets real cold where it seems like they don’t want to fly out until 10 minutes before shooting is over.
Ramsey Russell: Where is there open water, Duncan? Because I am seeing, since I’ve been here, I’m already seeing fishing tents out on the ice. I mean, the lakes are frozen. I haven’t seen open water yet since I got into Minnesota. And where’s the open water? Where are these geese sitting?
Duncan Abram: Rivers right now. Okay, the rivers are still open, and historically –
Ramsey Russell: And they freeze over, too?
Duncan Abram: Most of the rivers will freeze, other than, the real fast water won’t freeze, but they don’t want to sit in that fast water anyway. And that’s when they typically will leave. Or, like in Fergus Falls here, we used to have a power plant that cooled their generator in the river, and that would keep the river open. They had 65° hot tub to sit in all winter long. So I mean, we would winter a lot of geese that. I mean, they wouldn’t leave until, I’ve seen them seen them stick around through February before. We lost our power plant, now they’ve gone solar.
Ramsey Russell: Come on.
Duncan Abram: So we’re kind of in a transition period.
Ramsey Russell: Woke ass green energy.
Duncan Abram: Yes, sir.
Ramsey Russell: Is affecting the goose hunting now.
Duncan Abram: It is. So we’re in a kind of a transition period where we don’t really know what’s going to happen. Our goose hunting in Fergus is kind of changing as we know it.
Ramsey Russell: And Fergus Falls has always been like a goose epicenter.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: In a state that has a legit, all in goose hunting culture. When you grew up, you’re in your mid 40s, when you were growing up, was goose hunting a big deal, like with your dad’s generation, your granddad’s generation, your contemporaries, was goose hunting a real big deal?
Duncan Abram: I don’t know if it was quite the big deal it is now, but I wasn’t necessarily into goose hunting like I am now either. So I wasn’t really immersed in the culture back then. I didn’t get into it until I was, like, late high school young adult. That’s kind of when I started really getting into hunting and finding it. I, basically found hunting and realized it’s something I absolutely love to do and don’t want to live without. And that’s when I really dove in. But I did a small amounting amount of hunting when I was a kid. Grandpa would take me out to some cornfields out around Glendalough State park, it’s called, which used to be a big game refuge, and it would hold 20,000-30,000 geese.
Ramsey Russell: You were telling me about that refuge last night. Who owned that refuge? What was some of the history there?
Duncan Abram: It was the newspaper down from the cities owned it, and it was basically their own little private retreat.
Ramsey Russell: Back when newspaper owners were a big deal.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. And when they got rid of it, it turned into just a state game refuge where they fed ducks and geese, and it would just hold massive amounts of ducks and geese.
Ramsey Russell: Do you think back when the newspaper owners, I guess the tribune, when they own that property, were they waterfowl hunters themselves?
Duncan Abram: Oh, yeah. They would do hunt. They’d hunt back there.
Ramsey Russell: Who were some of the dignitaries and stuff that showed up to hunt with him back in those days, if you’ve heard off.
Duncan Abram: They’ve hosted, I’m pretty sure Eisenhower was up there, Nixon, I think Kennedy came once. I know an old guy that used to live across the gravel road from Glendalough. Guy, I’d known him since I was a little kid. He was one of my grandpa’s good friends. And he used to tell me a story about when he was 5 years old, didn’t have any shoes, running around out in the yard. And all of a sudden, 6 big black trucks come, or big black cars come rolling down the road, and they stopped out in front of his house, and the last car rolled the window down, and he said it was President Eisenhower. Yeah. And so, I mean, it used to be a pretty big deal, and now it’s a state park, which is cool because a lot of people get to enjoy it now that really never did back then. But it doesn’t hold the birds like it used to. They’re not back there feeding them.
Ramsey Russell: So your granddad used to carry you out there when you were young, man?
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Did he goose hunt?
Duncan Abram: Absolutely.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. He was a big goose and duck hunter. He grew up down in the cities, and he was a cop in south St. Paul. When he retired, he moved up here because he lived and died fishing and hunting. And that’s kind of what lit the fire in me to do it. He was probably one of the biggest influences in my life.
Ramsey Russell: Did you hunt and fish with him at all?
Duncan Abram: I fished a lot with him.
Ramsey Russell: See, my granddad was kind of my waterfowl influence. It seemed like very parallel to what you’re saying. And he aged out of waterfowl hunting before I came along. I mean, I can remember him going, but before I was old enough to go with him, he just aged out, hung up his waders and that was that, but we fished some.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. Grandpa and I, we used to fish a lot. He had a cabin on Silver Lake, which is over by battle lake, and we used to fish off the dock every day in the summer.
Ramsey Russell: What would you catch?
Duncan Abram: Walleyes, crappies, sunfish, bass, all of them. And it was some of the most phenomenal fishing you’ve ever seen off a dock before. I mean, it was great. And I used to spend summers up here with them, with grandma and grandpa. And so the hunting end of it, like, I didn’t get to enjoy all that much because I was back at school doing all that, but there was a couple times where I got to come up in the fall and grandpa take me out goose hunting along the edge of Glendalough, which is very similar to what we’re doing over here in Fergus Falls. You’re hunting the edge of a refuge. You’re not necessarily where the birds want to be, but you’re under them.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s running traffic. How far are we from the birds we’re waiting on right now?
Duncan Abram: We’re about 2.5 miles from the river on the edge of town, and probably 3 miles from the river in town where they’re sitting.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: So, I mean, they’ll come out west here.
Ramsey Russell: And what’s good to me is the wind is blowing out of the north?
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: So it’s blowing from us to them.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: So it’s a good chance they’ll take off into the wind and come this way sooner or later.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. And so, with Fergus here, the west side is generally the predominant flight there. Most of the birds will go west most of the time. Not saying you can’t kill them on the other sides of town, it’s actually sometimes easier on the other sides of town. You’ll see less geese, but they’ll be a lot more playful.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: Because there won’t be so many in the air. And I mean, we all know a goose’s favorite thing to do in the world is follow another goose.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Duncan Abram: They want nothing more than to see one flying and get behind it. But with just the sheer volume that fly out here, we generally can get some to commit and come in and get them.
Ramsey Russell: How did you get into waterfowl hunting? If your granddad, who was a big influence, kind of aged out like mine did. How did you get into it?
Duncan Abram: Well, I mean, it started with grandpa, it started with him. And from there, like in high school, some buddies would go out, and we’d go out and try and shoot ducks. Probably weren’t that good at it. Probably did more looking around for them than we did killing them.
Ramsey Russell: It’s a learning curve.
Duncan Abram: Oh, 100%.
Ramsey Russell: Lifetime learning curve.
Duncan Abram: 100%. I’ve still got more to learn than I care to admit. And in my eyes, that’s what makes a waterfowler successful, is knowing that they don’t know it all.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Duncan Abram: You have to go into every hunt, willing to learn something. And to me, a successful hunt is when I learn something, it’s not 50 geese laying on the ground. What did I learn today? That, to me, makes a successful hunt? Versus, I mean, granted, piles are nice, everybody loves to shoot them, but when you learn something. To me, that’s far more valuable than any pile of birds.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I feel like I learn something every time. I mean, just learn something about people, learn something about areas, learn something about birds, I don’t know, it’s a lifetime learning curve. I don’t know, it’s not like learning to write your name or learning to write to ABCs and then, okay, I don’t need to improve on that, I know that, this is different. There’s all kinds of different scenarios and different situations and factors beyond your control that are always – I think the birds themselves kind of change. Based on weather patterns, based on hunting pressure, based on crop. I mean, just a million different reasons that birds are different. Hunt to hunt year to year.
Duncan Abram: Absolutely. I mean, I agree with that wholeheartedly. These birds are getting smarter, they’re getting tougher to kill. So, I mean, we got to do the same. We got to get smarter and learn what’s going to work, it worked yesterday, but it’s not going to work anymore because they’ve figured it out. So, that’s where the learning comes in, and the learning something every day, you have to evolve with them. Otherwise you’re going to get left behind and you’re going to be left in the dust, kind of.
Ramsey Russell: When you first got started hunting and started that learning curve process, who you hunting with mostly?
Duncan Abram: Mostly buddies.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Did anybody know how to call, or did you all have to all figure it out together?
Duncan Abram: We all kind of figured it out together. Some of them never figured it out. And when I learned, it was before the days of YouTube and everything else. So it was, you took your call, you went down to the park, and you sat and talked with them.
Ramsey Russell: Who influenced your calling? Just live geese or were there any calling back in the day?
Duncan Abram: Live geese, 100% live geese.
Ramsey Russell: What influenced your decision on which goose calls to try?
Duncan Abram: Basically trying them out. I mean, goose calls are very similar from one to the next. There’s not a whole lot of differences. If you can blow this goose call, you can blow that goose call.
Ramsey Russell: Right.
Duncan Abram: The subtleties and the differences are just kind of which one fits your style, your hands, how much air you use. It’s the subtleties to me that make a goose call better or worse. And what makes a goose call better for me isn’t necessarily going to make it better for you. It might make it worse for you where it’s so much about feel with calls.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: That you got to try them and find which one feels the best to you.
Ramsey Russell: I think duck calls could fall in that same category. They’re all little musical instruments with different little subtleties.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Like, however I blow, I can blow one duck call, I can blow another, but I might like the sound of one. I might like the sound of one better than the other.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. And, yeah, same with goose calls. I mean, you get little different pitches and tones and stuff like that. And which one sounds best to you is the one you’re going to go with.
Ramsey Russell: Minnesota is the land of 10,000 likes and has a long and storied duck hunting history. A lot of ducks, a lot of divers, a lot of puddle ducks, at least historically they did, and goose. How did you start off in ducks but then fall into – I mean, obviously, you identify as a goose hunter, a goose guide. I mean, I know you still shoot ducks, but you’re a goose guy. How did you transition from a teenager, going out with your buddies and learning everything and ducks to here I am all these years later, you’re a goose guy? You’re all in on Canada geese now, how did that evolve?
Duncan Abram: Well, it kind of came from the lack of ducks in Minnesota there for a while, I guess you’d say. I mean, we’d go out scouting, we learned real fast. Scouting is the key.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.
Duncan Abram: With any game you’re going to pursue, scouting is above and beyond one of the most important things you can do. And we’d go out scout, and we’d find maybe 3 ducks somewhere, but we’d pass 15 goose feeds on the way. Well, I mean, we got smart in a hurry. Maybe we should try and shoot these geese and if we want to go out and shoot, or we can put a boat in the water and go sit there all day and get wet and come home with nothing. So we just kind of started goose hunting, and one thing led to another, and the next thing you know we’re here.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. How many decoys did we put out today?
Duncan Abram: We put maybe 150 out.
Ramsey Russell: How many will you put out?
Duncan Abram: On the right day, we’ll put upwards of a thousand out if we feel it’s necessary. When you were a young man for you could afford 150 full bodies, and how many were you putting out when you first broke off into goose hunting?
Duncan Abram: When I started, I had a dozen.
Ramsey Russell: A dozen.
Duncan Abram: I started with a dozen. Shells. Really cheap plastic shells. You fold them in half, they’d break in half. And when we got one dozen of those, we thought we had the world in the palm of our hand.
Ramsey Russell: You all were killing geese over them?
Duncan Abram: Oh, yeah. And I mean nowadays if you were to put those out, the geese would laugh at you. And that’s just the evolution of geese and goose hunting. I mean there’s so many goose hunters first off, in Minnesota there’s a lot of goose hunters here and beyond that, there’s a lot of really good goose hunters here.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah.
Duncan Abram: I would be surprised if anywhere in the US has more better goose hunters than there are in Minnesota.
Ramsey Russell: I would be surprised. I would agree with that.
Duncan Abram: And that makes you have to stay on your toes and stay ahead of that curve to be successful killing these geese.
Ramsey Russell: That’s a good point. That’s a real good point. Like right now, your season starts around September 1st, is that ducks and geese or just geese?
Duncan Abram: No. September 1st, that’s our resident goose season. And that runs the first 3 weeks of September.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Duncan Abram: And then duck opens like, about that weekend, usually like the 3rd, 4th weekend and September duck opens.
Ramsey Russell: It ended when this past weekend?
Duncan Abram: No, it ended, it was right around Thanksgiving is when it ends. We get a 60 day season here.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. Starts late September and approximately with a split or so –
Duncan Abram: 2nd, 3rd week in November.
Ramsey Russell: End around thanksgiving. But your goose season, you get the early goose, I guess, for resident birds. And it starts in September 1st and runs until Christmas.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Like when was it officially end? The day or two before Christmas?
Duncan Abram: So the north zone ends, I believe the 22nd December this year. And then the central and the south zone run another 5 days because we have a 5 day split in those zones. There’s no split in the north zone.
Ramsey Russell: A lot of season, a lot of these.
Duncan Abram: It’s a long time. And these birds that stay here, they get smart.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: Like, the resident Fergus falls geese, they’re next to impossible to kill outside of the first week of the season. And unless there’s a blizzard.
Ramsey Russell: Because of hunting pressure.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: They figure out the game.
Duncan Abram: They get it figured out right away. They fly out that first week, and wherever they go, there’s somebody shooting at them.
Ramsey Russell: Well, how important are moat migrators? I’ve heard that’s a big deal up here. The moat migrators, the birds start breeding, and a lot of the not breeding birds or the ganders fly back up somewhere to go moat, and then they come back in and boy, it’s supposed to be a game changer. Is that a big deal?
What Are Moat Migrators and How Do They Impact Hunting?
Everybody in Minnesota goes on the September north wind days because you’ll get huge flocks of migrating geese. And they are stupid. They like to play, they like lots of calling, they come down beautifully.
Duncan Abram: It is a big deal. In September, if you’re not hunting on a north wind day, you’re not real serious about it. Everybody in Minnesota goes on the September north wind days because you’ll get huge flocks of migrating geese. And they are stupid. They like to play, they like lots of calling, they come down beautifully. I mean, they almost come down vertical, they drop those wings and when they commit, they’re coming to the lids.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. Coming to the lids?
Duncan Abram: Yes, sir. Yeah, you wait for those moat migrators. You wait to hear their toenails scratching the lids before you shoot them, because when they commit, they do not let off, and they come the whole way.
Ramsey Russell: And what time of year is that?
Duncan Abram: September.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. That’s September. And like you’re saying that’s your non-breeding, 1 or 2 year old geese that have made their first migration, they come back, mom and dad go to their nesting pond and start nesting, and all the non-breeders will go north. So they’re not competing for food and everything else with mom and dad and the babies. And then in September, when the time is right, they come back and join back up with their flocks and that’s when we’re waiting for them.
Ramsey Russell: That sounds pretty amazing. When we were walking, we parked about 4 miles away at the local Walmart and walked back and had plenty of time to talk and visit this morning. And I asked you when the peak time was. What is peak? Because you all are running a commercial service here at Pitt property.
Duncan Abram: Yes, sir.
Ramsey Russell: When is the peak time? I’m here because I just generously, you all invited me to stop over. I was passing through because Fergus Falls, this stretch through Minnesota going from Mississippi to a lot of places, I go out west or up north, I come right through here. And I said, yeah, I’ll catch a day one day. And I did. And glad to be here, but I know we’re playing a long waiting game right now. When does it, like, just snap? It’s like, wow, this is, if I could pick a week, this is the week. Would it be in September when you’ve got moat migrators coming in, or would it be a different time of year?
Duncan Abram: It would be more so, I would say the middle of November.
Ramsey Russell: What’s happening then?
Duncan Abram: We get our first big push from Winnipeg.
Ramsey Russell: That’s Char dog.
Duncan Abram: The Winnipeg, that were their first stop. And when they leave Winnipeg, they leave in full force, and they usually come here.
Ramsey Russell: How do you know they’re Winnipeg Birds?
Duncan Abram: Bands.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. Must be a lot of those –
Duncan Abram: They band a lot of birds in Winnipeg.
Ramsey Russell: They banded a lot of birds, they’ve got that real distinct band, that rivet band.
Duncan Abram: Yes, sir.
Ramsey Russell: You all pick up rivet bands?
Duncan Abram: Yeah, it. The rivets are slowing down now. They quit doing them. And what that was, they were just studying the difference between your normal aluminum bands and a steel band. They’re actually not made out of those materials, but that’s what everybody calls them.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: And they were testing the longevity on those. And the rivet band was just the constant.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.
Duncan Abram: They’re not getting that one off. Where the regular bands they can get off. Yeah, they get out of them. And the test or the study was to see which one holds on better. And it’s the little steel bands. Those are the ones that won, because that’s what we’ve been shooting more of the last couple years.
Ramsey Russell: What’s it like up here? If I’d been here a month ago, what would have been like in mid-November? What’s going on then? It’s like you catch a cold front, you get a lot of these migrators from Canada.
Duncan Abram: Yep. And, I mean, town fills up.
Ramsey Russell: Whether you’re hunting ducks or anything migratory. New is good.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: There’s nothing like a new bird.
Duncan Abram: Nothing like it. They’re dumb. They don’t know the lay of the land. They come out and they’re hungry and they want to die.
Ramsey Russell: Does it necessarily run on a front, or does it got, like, it’s something you can time?
Duncan Abram: No.
Ramsey Russell: As a calendar migration?
Duncan Abram: I would say no. I would say it’s definitely more weather driven. Because there’s been years where we wait for them. You watch the weather, and we watch the weather in Winnipeg religiously before the birds get here because that when their temps start to drop, that’s when we’re going to get them.
Ramsey Russell: I’m trying to think of how far we are from Winnipeg. It’s not about a day’s drive, 8-10 hours?
Duncan Abram: Something like that. I don’t think it’s even that far.
Ramsey Russell: How far away from North Dakota border? Oh, in a truck, 3 hours?
Duncan Abram: No, from the northern border?
Ramsey Russell: No, I mean from here, if I drove way –
Duncan Abram: From here, we could be in North Dakota in 25 minutes.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, we’re right there.
Duncan Abram: Yeah, we’re right on the border.
Ramsey Russell: Well, once you get on the border, you take a right, head north, you’re basically in Winnipeg.
Duncan Abram: Then we’re 3 hour from the border, I think.
Ramsey Russell: So we’re real close.
Duncan Abram: Once you get on 29.
Ramsey Russell: A goose could light up, could let off in the morning, the front hit, he decided it’s time to fly to Minnesota.
Duncan Abram: He’s here by night.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah. Or by lunch.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: If he took off at daylight.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Fly straight, he’s here by lunch.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. The day when they come into town, you’ll be out hunting, and you’ll see that first big 200, 300 bird flock way up high, and you know it’s on.
Ramsey Russell: Can you call them down that high?
Duncan Abram: Oh, yeah. When those migrating geese, they’re tired, they’re hungry, they’re thirsty, they’re pretty dumb.
Ramsey Russell: From a sheer tactic standpoint, if you think you got a lot of new birds coming today, is that the day you put out the massive spread that they can see from a mile away?
Duncan Abram: Yeah. We’ll put the bigger migrator spreads out, cover as much area as we can so they can see us from way up. You’re just looking for the visibility at that point.
Ramsey Russell: That’s real interesting to me. Well, you play such a waiting game, and I’ll be honest with you, even though all the locals describe, this double digit teen temperature as fresh, pretty damn cold. I was glad to know we weren’t going to hunt out of an A frame or a layout. And I do like hunting out of a layout. I love hunting out of a layout. I’ll be honest, I love hunting out of a backboard a layout, but not when I’m playing all day waiting game.
Duncan Abram: It’s not fun.
Ramsey Russell: And, no, I don’t like it at all. I mean, I’d just be honest with you.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: It would be miserable to me, laying on frozen ground, waiting 5, 6, 7, 8 hours just to even see it. We ain’t seen a goose. Now charged down up in her crow nest, I know she ain’t seeing anything, she was looking out while we started recording. Now she’s laying down, which tells me that there ain’t nothing out there flying. Because, she can hear. She can hear a bird. She’ll hear a honk or hear wing beats, and if all of a sudden she goes from a laying down position to poking her head out, I’m going to push pause. I think there’s a goose coming in, and she’s on the lookout for us. But anyway, so we step off into this massive blind that I learned last night meeting with you and Pete Krogh. That’s a big deal. These blinds are a big draw for a lot of your hunters, which really is a – I know you get folks from, you all were saying last night, you get folks from far south as Arkansas, California, Maryland. But lot of commuting market. A lot of guys that can take off work at lunch and be over here tonight and spend the next day or 3 goose hunting. They want this massive pit blind experience you all have got.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. It kind of evolved from, like you were saying, you love layout hunting, well, that’s how we used to do it. And December was typically our favorite time to goose hunt up here. And a day like today, we would be out in layout blinds, and we’d lay there all day waiting for them, absolutely frozen to the core. I mean, there was days where, when they finally decided to come out, we were so cold that we couldn’t call, your calls are frozen, your guns frozen, they come out and you don’t get them because everything, including yourself, is frozen. So these pits kind of evolved from that. It’s like, well, we have to be able to sit out here and still be able to get them when it’s time to get them.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: And pits aren’t necessarily a new thing, but these bigger pits, we kind of –
Ramsey Russell: I mean, this pit right here is, I’m going to say, guess, 700 to 800 sqft.
Duncan Abram: Yeah, I believe this pit is 12 by 54 I believe it is. Don’t quote me on that. But it’s right in that area. And we used to have smaller pits where it’s just a place to sit down and you’re confined to the two people next to you.
Ramsey Russell: We’ve got a generator about, what, 100 yards away?
Duncan Abram: It’s probably 200 yards away.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Crank up a couple generators, we slide the stair cover over, walk down a flight of stairs, it’s lit. 2 minutes later, you got 2 or 3 heaters lit.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And it’s nice.
Duncan Abram: It’s comfortable.
Ramsey Russell: And you got a freaking griddle over here. I mean, climb up a couple of steps. I’ve got this beautiful flight deck up here where I can slide and slide, I can crack and look up other. And it’s laid out perfectly.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I bet it gets lively when you got 10 or 12 people sitting in here.
Duncan Abram: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I bet it’s a party going.
Duncan Abram: Oh, yeah. And that’s kind of, what we were after when we decided to start making our pits big like this. You get more of that social aspect out of hunting that you really don’t get in too many other hunting experiences. You get 10 buddies together, you can go and goose on all day long in comfort. You have food, you have everything you need, but you still get to talk to everybody that you’re there with and you’re sharing the hunt with, versus being confined to just a shooting deck where you’ve got the guy on your left and the guy on your right and which is fine, but you don’t necessarily get to talk to the guy on the other end of the pit.
Ramsey Russell: I bet you have heard some stories in here. I mean, because every duck blind I’m in, I hear some stories now. Most of them can’t be repeated in light of day. And here’s what I’m getting at, is we all live in a social world now. I mean, we’re all got jobs and bosses and wives and barking dogs and crying kids and bills to pay. And it’s getting pretty tough in the year 2023 to find somewhere outside the purview of woke ass socially correct. I mean, the far left still hasn’t found a way to insinuate themselves in a goose blind, is what I’m trying to say. I can come here and I can talk about what I want to talk about and say bad words and chew tobacco and spit and talk to my buddies. You know what I’m saying? I mean, it’s that place where a guy can still be a guy.
Duncan Abram: Absolutely. I mean, you get a lot of locker room conversations down there.
Ramsey Russell: Exactly.
Duncan Abram: A lot of them. And most of them, like you say, can’t be repeated on the air. There’s a lot of words said, a lot of things talked about that aren’t necessarily socially acceptable, but here they are.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Duncan Abram: Nothing’s off limits in the goose pit.
Ramsey Russell: I guess, goose camp, duck camp has always been that way.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Did you all borrow this idea for a big, comfortable pit? I think Pete was telling me last night that it was kind of borrowed from some of the big blinds down south where, Arkansas duck hunting, Mississippi duck hunting, Tennessee duck hunting, the real deep south type stuff is all about big pits and social experiences and I mean, I’ve seen blinds this big built into trees, but I’ve never been in. And I’ve been in some pit blinds similar to this, but not as big.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: This is big. How important is it to what you all are doing? Delivering you all service and marketing and people showing up, stuff like that?
Duncan Abram: Very important. We get a fair amount of people that they’re more interested in getting in the pit and having that social aspect to the hunt than stacking up a pile of geese.
Ramsey Russell: Geese are just an add on. If the geese show up, then great –
Duncan Abram: That’s a bonus.
Ramsey Russell: We’re going to have a good time.
Duncan Abram: Yeah 100%. And that’s what we were after when we started building these. It wasn’t to sell a bunch of hunts. Because we built our first big one before we were really guiding, and we built it, and it was just such a great time and such a great experience that we kind of felt like we needed to share it with people.
Ramsey Russell: We were talking about, I think we’re talking a little bit about this morning in the grocery store, which we’ll get to, but who is Pete Krogh, and how do you all know each other, and how did all this start?
Duncan Abram: Well, I met Pete probably about 10 years ago, I suppose. He’s from Fergus over here, I’m from battle lake, 20 minutes down the road, and we met through a mutual buddy of ours through goose hunting, and started goose hunting together and hit it off great. And we’ve been great friends ever since. And when Pete started pit properties, I came on as the guide, and we’ve been -Yeah, I mean, it’s exploded from there, but, yeah, we started out just as hunting buddies.
Ramsey Russell: Did you ever dream, when you all posted a video one time, that’s how you flew up on my radar, was a video I saw on social media that got a lot of views. How many views did that video get? Because it was a party going on down here now. There are folks standing here, folks standing here, folks at the griddle, folks doing this, folks doing that everything but a big screen TV, which I’m really kind of surprised you ain’t got in here.
Duncan Abram: We got in one of our other pit, we got a TV.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. A Saturday hunt during football season, I see where that’d be pretty popular.
Duncan Abram: Which is actually easier now with all the streaming and everything else that when we started, we had a TV in one in our first big pit, but you couldn’t get any channels, you couldn’t stream, you couldn’t connect your phone to the TV. So it wasn’t that big of a deal where, it’s probably a little cooler now that you can put the football games on and watch football where you’re hunting. And, I mean, people love that.
Ramsey Russell: But did you tell me that video got something like 50 million views?
Duncan Abram: Across all platforms, I would guess that’s probably about where it was. I mean, I don’t know for sure, because it got shared so many times, and the shares got views. And I think on my social media stuff alone, it was at probably 15 million views between my platforms. And then another guy shared, I know another guy got, I think he got maybe 20 million views out of it. It blew up.
Ramsey Russell: Just a picture of a party in a pit blind.
Duncan Abram: Yeah, people downstairs having fun and decoys.
Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that crazy?
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: So what do you do when you’re not doing this?
Duncan Abram: Think about doing it, a lot of the time, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You’re here from September 1st until basically Christmas. And then I know you were talking earlier this morning about chasing birds south. And, I mean, so you’re at it for seven, eight months. And did you tell me you worked down in South Dakota?
Duncan Abram: Yeah, I worked down in South Dakota for a while, doing some ranching on a family whose farm I hunted for years. And it was getting time to go snow goose hunting, and I called him up and asked them, hey, are the geese there yet? And his reply was, I have no idea. I haven’t been out of the barn in 36 hours, we got 400 bred heifers that are going. And I ain’t been outside. And great family, they always been absolutely phenomenal to me, the Simons from Groton. And I just said, well, do you need some help? I can come out and play a little bit. I don’t necessarily know exactly what I’m doing calving cows, but I’ve been around enough farms, and I’ve worked some dairies when I was younger, I know about cows. And he said, absolutely. And I came out, and they kind of didn’t let me go home.
Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, that worked out good.
Duncan Abram: It worked out great.
Ramsey Russell: Till your kids grew up.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. The kids started getting a little older, and then when COVID hit, that was kind of the end of me going out there. I had to come home and play school teacher for the kids, and it just never panned out to get back out there. And because it is hard working 3 hours away from your family.
Ramsey Russell: Sure.
Duncan Abram: You miss the wife, you miss the kids. I mean, I love it, and I cherish my time in South Dakota, but I don’t necessarily care for working on the road.
Ramsey Russell: How old are your children?
Duncan Abram: 11 and 13.
Ramsey Russell: That’s a busy age. They’re probably in that hockey age now.
Duncan Abram: They’re at that age. But our town doesn’t have hockey.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Duncan Abram: Believe it or not, a Minnesota town without hockey.
Ramsey Russell: Unless you go to local hotel.
Duncan Abram: Yeah, they keep real busy. They’re great kids. I love them to death. But they’re definitely their own kids. They have their own likes and wants and needs. My oldest likes to go hunting, but hates to get up early, so ask him if he wants to go, and his reply, generally is, what time do we got to get up?
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: And if it’s before 07:00 or 08:00 he don’t want to go.
Ramsey Russell: Well, on a day like today, if he could catch a ride, he hadn’t missed nothing. It’s 10:00 or 11:00 right?
Duncan Abram: Right.
Ramsey Russell: He gets that driver’s license, he can come whooping up about 10:00. Get some honey buns and –
Duncan Abram: Well, I don’t know about that, I’m going to need him to set decoys for me when he gets that age.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: I ain’t getting no younger.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right. But you get to, I guess being a local guide like this, you do get to go home at night.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You can go home, spend time with a family, eat dinner with the family if you want to.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Help the kids with their homework.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. Sometimes it’s a little later when I get home, but generally, I’m home in time to at least see the kids before bedtime.
Ramsey Russell: Well, like yesterday, how long did you all hunt yesterday? You had a group yesterday, you all hunted?
Duncan Abram: I had a group yesterday.
Ramsey Russell: And you all got up at 05:00 left at 06:00? Well, I’m guessing.
Duncan Abram: No, yesterday we were actually hunting up by morehead, so on those days, I got up at 02:45 yesterday.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, my gosh.
Duncan Abram: I was out the door by 03:45. I need an hour in the morning just to get my hat, get squared away, and be ready for the day. We left at 03:45, and I got back, I don’t know what time did I get into the lodge last night, 07:00 and 08:00, something like that. So that’s a typical day this time of year. We sit all day, we don’t want to miss the geese.
Ramsey Russell: So, we ain’t sitting all day today, hate to tell you, we might, but I doubt it. You know what got me is you said we were talking about that when we were sitting at the coffee pot last night, like, oh, yeah, I get up an hour ahead and we’ll be out the door at 06:00, and you got to make a few stops along the way. And I got up at 05:00 05:15 and brushed my teeth and got a cup of coffee, and I’m like, well, I guess he’s sleeping in. I look at my watch, it was 05:30, I’m like, I did something else, it was 05:40. I’m like, I wonder if I go wake this guy up. And I walked out to my truck to get something, man, you were sitting there, you’d been in your truck, the heat was running, the lights were on, there wasn’t no frost on your windshield, and you were sitting there working. And I’m like, knock, knock, I’m just here catching up. You got to wet to your truck.
Duncan Abram: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You must have been there half hour.
Duncan Abram: No, I was only there about 5 minutes. But I got up, got dressed, and I didn’t see you anywhere. So I figured I’d go out to the truck and get a couple things done quick.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. This late in the game, do you even have to find yourself having to set an alarm clock? I really don’t.
Duncan Abram: I set one.
Ramsey Russell: I set one, but normally I’ll wake up before then.
Duncan Abram: Yeah, generally I’m up before my alarm clock. I mean, within 5, 10 minutes of it, I’ll wake up. If it’s not 2 hours before.
Ramsey Russell: I travel and hunt a lot, you hunt a lot, and people say, well, how do you do it? I’m like, I go to bed early, generally, last night being exception, we stayed up till 10:00, and I’m usually in bed way for that. And if I need to, I take a nap.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I mean, I don’t push myself that like that. I don’t have to, I don’t live on 2 hours of sleep, not for extended periods.
Duncan Abram: Right.
Ramsey Russell: I play a long game, you have to play a long game.
Duncan Abram: It works out a lot better if you can do it. There’s times where we don’t necessarily have that luxury. I mean, we want to kill geese more than anything. And there’s times where we have to get out of the pit to do that. And when we do, it’s generally the workload, doubles, you got blinds to grass, you got hides to make, forts to build.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: You got to get out, you got to scout them, you got to find them, you got to get on the land. So there are definitely times in the season where we’re playing the long game. We’re acting like it’s a short game.
The Waiting Game: Patience in Waterfowl Hunting.
Like, how do you know they’re still geese here? I mean, maybe they’re all gone. I don’t know where they go, but maybe they are all gone, or because I haven’t seen any open water. So you’re playing this waiting game, but like, we’re here, I’m going with the flow, I told you, no pressure at all.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. You playing this long waiting game, the later it goes, the longer the wait, likely. And I had a lot of questions for you this morning. Like, how do you know they’re still geese here? I mean, maybe they’re all gone. I don’t know where they go, but maybe they are all gone, or because I haven’t seen any open water. So you’re playing this waiting game, but like, we’re here, I’m going with the flow, I told you, no pressure at all. But what do you do when you got, every single day, you got a pit full of guys that paid a little money to be here and yeah, they’re here for the experience, but they want to pull triggers. How do you entertain them during the long wait? When you don’t see a goose, see a goose until 12:30, you’ve been here since 05:00. How do you entertain them? How do you keep the ball going?
Duncan Abram: Well, I mean, we cook a lot of food.
Ramsey Russell: Cook a lot of.
Duncan Abram: I make a big breakfast.
Ramsey Russell: Are you pretty good cook?
Duncan Abram: I do all right. I know my way around the kitchen. I had some cooking jobs when I was younger and kind of learned a lot of things about cooking. So, I mean, yeah, I can whip pretty good breakfast up.
Ramsey Russell: You’re ready to cook breakfast at about 08:00 this morning, like, no. Because if I eat breakfast and once it settles in, it’s gone. I ain’t got nothing to look forward to, I’m going to be ready to go.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I’ll be honest with you. Just me and you talking. I ain’t got crowd folks socialized with, and I’m like, so I want something to look forward to.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And this morning, we got up, grab a trailer. You said, I got to stop at Walmart, and you walk, you hit about two or three spots, I mean, you just knew exactly where you were going and you grab. Was that a pretty typical breakfast?
Duncan Abram: No.
Ramsey Russell: Last night you asked me, would you eat pancakes, no, I don’t eat pancakes.
Duncan Abram: I make a lot of pancakes. People tend to really like them. I’ll put stuff in them. A lot of chocolate chips, peanut butter. Stuff like that.
Ramsey Russell: Well, talk about some pancakes. Give me some of these ideas of all these different varieties of pancakes. Sound like Baskin Robbins of pancake world. I’ve never heard of putting peanut butter and chocolate chips.
Duncan Abram: Oh, absolutely.
Ramsey Russell: I mean, I’ve heard chocolate chip, but not butter part.
Duncan Abram: Yeah, you have the peanut butter and –
Ramsey Russell: You got to mix it into batter?
Duncan Abram: No, I just sprinkle them on top before I flip them. And you basically got yourself Reese’s peanut butter cup pancake. And I don’t know about you, but I tend to, I can have a sweet tooth and I love Reese’s.
Ramsey Russell: Have you got a sweet tooth?
Duncan Abram: A little bit.
Ramsey Russell: I was going to drive over tomorrow, and you’re like, oh, by the way, and you gave me the direction of someplace that’s got some of the most amazing cinnamon rolls or pastries or donuts or something I’d ever heard.
Duncan Abram: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I ain’t got a sweet tooth, so I skipped it, but it sounded pretty amazing.
Duncan Abram: It’s a gas station along the interstate, just between St. Cloud and the cities. And they make donuts the size of your head.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Duncan Abram: And they sell loaves of different flavors of bread, which those loaves, they make some really killer pancakes, not pancakes. Excuse me. French toast.
Ramsey Russell: I’ll have the diabetes with a side of sugar coma. Please.
Duncan Abram: Yeah, that’s what happens.
Ramsey Russell: Is that your specialty? Is Reese’s pancakes or do you cook other varieties of pancakes?
Duncan Abram: I’ll play around sometimes with other things, but I mean, that’s kind of –
Ramsey Russell: Pancakes are like a crowd pleaser.
Duncan Abram: That’s kind of what people, they like them. They’ve seen them in the videos and they want to come and eat the pancakes.
Ramsey Russell: You ever fry bacon?
Duncan Abram: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: How many pounds of bacon a year do you fry a year?
Duncan Abram: I couldn’t say, but I usually do about 6lbs a day.
Ramsey Russell: I’m going to tell you what you do. You stop and get some of those donuts or some honey buns, you got all that bacon grease sitting on a griddle, fry them things up with bacon grease.
Duncan Abram: That’s a good idea.
Ramsey Russell: I bet that they won’t last long. That sugar kind of caramelizes, that burns but gets right.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I’ve had that before.
Duncan Abram: Now you got me wanting to go to the store and get some honey buns.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. This morning you picked up a couple of rib eyes.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You’re like, what do you think? I said, yeah. Ribeyes and a dozen eggs. I think that’s enough for two of us.
Duncan Abram: We should be all right.
Ramsey Russell: If you had to guess from September to Christmas, how many pancakes do you cook in a scene? How many pounds of bacon, how many eggs? Just guess. I mean, it’s got to be a phenomenal amount of numbers.
Duncan Abram: I would have to guess, a couple hundred pounds of bacon.
Ramsey Russell: A couple hundred pounds. 3 pounds a day.
Duncan Abram: 6 pounds a day.
Ramsey Russell: 6 pounds a day.
Duncan Abram: 6 pounds a day. 5 to 6 days a week. I’ll make, I don’t know. I generally make way too many pancakes to the point where there’s generally probably 10, 15 of them left over.
Ramsey Russell: That’s like a whole box. You like a box at Crispy’s pancake mix?
Duncan Abram: The big boxes will usually last me two days. But, yeah, I’m probably making, I don’t know, 30 to 40 to 50, maybe pancakes a day sometimes.
Ramsey Russell: At least 5 gallons of maple syrup.
Duncan Abram: Oh, we go through syrup. We go through a lot of syrup.
Ramsey Russell: Lots of butter.
Duncan Abram: Yeah, lots of butter. Hash browns, eggs. I don’t know how many eggs I’ll cook a year.
Ramsey Russell: Guess, a thousand?
Duncan Abram: Oh, yeah. Oh, a couple thousand, probably.
Ramsey Russell: You’re kind of getting up there in Waffle house range.
Duncan Abram: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Was that one of your cooking jobs when you was on Waffle House or I hop.
Duncan Abram: Nope, we don’t have waffles house up here.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, shame on you all.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. So, I don’t know how to make grits, so you’re going to have to go to the waffle house for that. But I can –
Ramsey Russell: Waffle house doesn’t make good grits, but go ahead.
Duncan Abram: Okay. Well, that’s the only place I’ve ever seen him or had them.
Ramsey Russell: You get down south.
Duncan Abram: I get down south some, but not enough, which I’d like to change. I love it down there. And the older I get, the more I want to go down there this time of year once it starts getting cold –
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, you do.
Duncan Abram: It wouldn’t be bad to not be in these sub zero arctic temperatures.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I understand that.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: To me, this stretch of Minnesota, especially in the fall, September, October, it’s one of the most beautiful parts of America. I mean, it’s just every time I drive through here in September, October, I just think, man, it’s like little house on a prairie, it’s just gorgeous. It’s just rolling hills and just lush and it’s amazing prairie out here in this part of Minnesota. And there’s a lot of places up north, Canada and out west that, man, when I drive through, I’m like, God, it’s so beautiful, I can live here. Then I find out it gets -50 ° I’m like, no, I could live here, like a vacation here. I couldn’t live here. Then a lot of people from up here couldn’t move down south and say, no, they couldn’t handle it. 113 ° heat index for long.
Duncan Abram: See, that’s where you’re going to lose me with the south. I don’t like those hot temperatures.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, you all have snakes and stuff up here.
Duncan Abram: Garter snakes.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: Nothing to worry about. Not a big fan of snakes either. So that’s kind of why I like, when I’m going down south, I like it to be a little cooler to where the snakes are gone and they’ve crawled back to hell.
Ramsey Russell: Well, that’s why you could be a snowbird. And when it gets bad up here, you could just go on back down south.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And I’m at the point, born and raised in the deep south, I don’t spend a terrible amount of time in the deep south when it’s hot and miserable no more. I mean, it’s duck season somewhere.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: But now my idea, my perfect duck hunting weather, and I know. Sounds like a wimp to a lot of hardcore Nordic ancestry. People from up north, man, give me a 50° day, 30° to 50° and I’m happy. And I’ve killed a lot, I’ve killed enough ducks in 75° to 80° that I’m happy there, too, and it doesn’t have to be everywhere in the world, doesn’t have to be fresh, let alone cold. It can be better than that.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: How do your goose hunting tactics, speaking of this, how do your goose hunting tactics and the geese themselves change from September to now? I know they longer waits, but I’ve heard a lot of Yankees, my Yankee buddies up here call these birds the bullies. Bullies because they get so thick and their down is so thick and you got to be able to penetrate them feathers.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And it’s kind of weird because now they’re less susceptible to just give it up, scratch the lids.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. I mean, your resident birds are definitely, they’ve been here hunted since September 1st. They’re a lot harder to kill. But your big geese are generally more playful that, your big 12, 13 pound geese. They’re a lot more playful than then, say, those 8 pound interiors that come down from Canada. They get smart faster and they will ruin the big flocks for you. Like, just the other day, we had had a great line coming in, 15 big slobs just crawling to the hole. There was 4 little geese on the backside at about 80 yards, those 4 little geese, they kicked on the afterburners, got out front and pulled them all away.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Sons of bitch.
Duncan Abram: To me, I’d much rather hunt those big, dumb geese than the little interiors, they’re a lot harder and a lot less susceptible to coming into your plastic toy decoys.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. It’s just interesting to me, I’ve just got this fascination with big Canada geese, and we have Canada geese down south, but they’re all resident birds, and I’ve just got this fascination with geese. I love shooting big Canada geese, I love shooting dark geese, I just think they’re – you started describing those moat migrators locking up out and just coming in with their wings locked and their neck got that bow in it, their big paddles are dragging behind them like rudders. I don’t think, there’s hardly anything more spectacular on earth.
Duncan Abram: I agree. 100% that’s why we do what we do.
Choosing the Canada Goose Hunt: A Passionate Decision.
I was talking with some buddies out in Toronto that suggested we go shoot layout boats for long tails. I’m like, please, no, I’m coming to shoot Canada geese. I want to shoot Canada geese, I don’t want to shoot sea ducks, I want to shoot Canada geese, please. Yeah, okay. I’m like please. Even if they’re stale and they’re wonky and everything else, I’d rather go after the Canada geese.
Ramsey Russell: I was talking with some buddies out in Toronto that suggested we go shoot layout boats for long tails. I’m like, please, no, I’m coming to shoot Canada geese. I want to shoot Canada geese, I don’t want to shoot sea ducks, I want to shoot Canada geese, please. Yeah, okay. I’m like please. Even if they’re stale and they’re wonky and everything else, I’d rather go after the Canada geese. It’s just me, that’s just what makes, that’s my happy place up north, where you all still get these migrations. But now, here’s the deal. We talked about this a little bit last night, so expound on it if you can, but all these truly giant, the giant Canada geese were thought to be extinct back in the 60s. Here we are talking about fresh weather being in the teens, versus downright cold being at -40 or whatever it gets. And I was just shocked to learn years ago that the true giants that are what constitute all the resident geese all over, the northern hemisphere now. And I don’t mean just, I don’t mean just from Maryland to wherever, I’m talking big, giant park geese that are everywhere, to include the Netherlands and Sweden and just all over the northern hemisphere, even down in Australia now, they originated from a flock thought to be extinct until one day somebody, “discovered” about 60 birds, or 60 pairs in Rochester, Minnesota. And these birds were coming out of Manitoba, wintering in Rochester, Minnesota, which is – where’s Rochester from here?
Duncan Abram: It’s about 4 or 5 hours south of here down the interstate.
Ramsey Russell: But it still gets damn cold.
Duncan Abram: Oh yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Like minus deep snow and all that stuff.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. Not quite like up here, but they still – I mean it’s Minnesota.
Ramsey Russell: Those birds were toughing it out back in the days.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that crazy?
Duncan Abram: Yeah. And Rochester, they used to have kind of the same thing we have here. They had their power plant down there that was keeping water open, cooling their generator.
Ramsey Russell: All that stuff would not have existed back in the 40s and 50s and 60s, those birds were still wintering. They were in Rochester. I mean, that was their southern terminus of their wintering grounds, that was cold.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Winters coming. Cold is where those birds wintered.
Duncan Abram: Yeah, these geese, they tolerate the cold really well. I mean, like we were kind of talking about how our typical last push is like big lake and river geese. Like there’s still plenty of geese around Minnesota on rivers that are perfectly content to sit in 33° water and come out and eat every day. And I mean, as long as that water stays open, they’ll kind of stick around until it gets really cold.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: Like sub zero stuff, then they might push out.
Ramsey Russell: Push out where? They’re not like they’re flying down to Texas.
Duncan Abram: No, Iowa, Missouri. I mean, they’ll only go as far as they have to.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: Yeah, as long as they have open water and they can get it food, they’ll really weather some cold temperatures.
Ramsey Russell: Tough resilient birds. You were telling me, it’s about the time of year our season ends or this season ends up here, you’re going to go down to Arkansas and do some guiding. But then you were saying earlier that you’re kind of getting to a stage in life, you’d like to go and sample some of the hunting opportunities that you’ve never seen before. What are some of your dream trips? What are some of the places you’ve seen or been exposed to or heard about that you’d like to go on before?
Duncan Abram: Well, I definitely like to get out and hunt Montana in that region is, I’ve seen some really cool hunts out there. The backdrops are gorgeous. I mean, sea duck hunting, brants.
Ramsey Russell: Have you ever hunted sea ducks?
Duncan Abram: Never.
Ramsey Russell: There ain’t no sea ducks here.
Duncan Abram: No. You’ll get a scoters to fly through on some of the big lakes late once in a while. But I, personally, I’ve never shot one. Really, the things I want to go do are just the things I haven’t done.
Ramsey Russell: Like what? Sea ducks, hunting with a mountain backdrop. I mean, here’s kind of what I’m begging at is that as somebody has been around the world, it blows my mind how diverse hunting between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico is right here in America. Unbelievable. 58 subspecies of birds. All these little nooks and crannies like Minnesota goose hunting, Mississippi, whatever duck hunting, Arkansas flooded timber, hunting little skinny ponds out west hunting, hunting oceans or massive lakes. I mean, it’s just crazy how much hunting opportunity there is right here within a couple days drive where we’re sitting. It’s unbelievable. I mean, really and truly, you could. You could travel the world, and there’s a lot of cool stuff to see, I promise you, the world’s a lot bigger in our backyard, but America is a whole lot bigger than our backyard. I mean, it’s unbelievable. It’s almost endless.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Because I can say, okay, I’ve been to Oregon now, and I’ve shot some geese, I’ve shot some wigeons, kind of on the coastal areas. I’ve shot mallards, but I ain’t seen Oregon. There’s still places. I’ve spent 15, 16 days in California. I still ain’t seen all of California. You know what I’m saying? For me, it gets to be a matter of time and money. You know what I’m saying? Not places I ain’t near about scratching surface. I finally knocked off Pennsylvania. I ain’t seen Pennsylvania. You know what I’m saying? It’s like you could almost spend a season in every little geography and species I’m talking about before you really kind of seen it.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that crazy?
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I mean, America is extremely diverse. And then you go just a little bit beyond that and say, okay, North America to include Mexico all the way up into Canada, I mean, that is just massive, the opportunities there are. And here in a Minnesota pit blind, Reese’s pancakes or steak and eggs versus somewhere else, it’s pierogies or tacos or burritos or lobster or oysters, it’s crazy. And for a guy like me, I’m in hog heaven, I’m telling you right now. Somebody asked me last night, we stayed up till way past my bedtime talking, John was asking, I said, dude, it’s the people and the place. I mean, the waterfowl are the constant that pull it together. But it’s not the end all, be all. It’s beyond that. It’s what drives people like yourself, Duncan or people like me, or people like the next guy I’m going to hunt with that pulls us together. And then what their slice of heaven really looks like is what never ceases to amaze me.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. That’s the biggest draw for me. I mean, I honestly could care less if I never pulled the trigger again. It’s not about pulling the trigger to me anymore. I won’t lie, there was a time when it was all about pulling the trigger and how many we killed –
Ramsey Russell: But now you’ve elevated beyond that. You’re kind of in the hospitality side of things.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And you do find, it sounds like a profound sense of enjoyment on connecting the client to the bird.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: As much as you do pull the trigger yourself.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. I would much rather watch somebody else shoot a goose than me.
Ramsey Russell: But you loaded your gun this morning.
Duncan Abram: Well, it’s just me and you here. I wouldn’t mind shooting one off the end of your barrel.
Ramsey Russell: I used to have old buddy Mr. Ian, I always told him, I said, you shoot a lot better than we shoot the same bird. And that actually come out of his mouth first, I don’t know what he meant to say, but it haunted him for the next 30 years, I can tell you that. And no, it’s just amazing. I’ve had a good time so far. I’ve had a really good time just visiting with you and eating and getting to see this thing. I was going to ask you this, as a guy that goes at Canada’s resident and migrator Canadas for, I mean, September to Christmas, basically. September 1st to Christmas. How many bands do you all run across again? We were talking about leg bands earlier, but how many leg bands would you expect to encounter over the course of the season? Because they band a lot more Canada geese than they do a lot of other duck spaces.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. You’d see a lot of Canada geese get banded on a good year, we shoot anywhere 50 plus. On slow year, like, I think, I don’t know if I’ve shot 10 this year.
Ramsey Russell: Crazy.
Duncan Abram: I mean, a lot depends on the flocks that come in. I mean, there’s times where you’ll wipe out a 10 pack and they’ll all be banded or –
Ramsey Russell: There’s almost like a lull in banding because during the pandemic, nobody could get into Canada. I mean, a lot of the banding effort kind of went by the wayside temporarily. That’s a 2 year deficit. That’s a 2 year little slug of birds coming through that mostly have been banded. So a lot of bands I put my hands on the past few years weren’t not banded. Well, let me put this, they were banded before pandemic.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: So they’re older bands.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And kind of harder to come by. And how important is bands? We were talking about this a little bit last night. How important are bands to people?
Duncan Abram: People love bands.
Ramsey Russell: People love bands.
Duncan Abram: They love bands. Some people love them a little too much sometimes.
Ramsey Russell: Well, it makes my harp skip a beat when I pick up a banded bird.
Duncan Abram: I still get the butterflies, too.
Ramsey Russell: I don’t know why.
Duncan Abram: It’s a bird that’s been caught.
Ramsey Russell: We’re drawn to wild birds and wild places, this beautiful, magnificent creature. And the truth of the matter is, most of the birds you kill are not banded, and they’ve never been touched by anybody since the hand of God when you pick them up.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: But a banded bird, he’s been alien abducted and all kind of things done to him, but I still like to shoot them.
Duncan Abram: I think it’s the trophy aspect, if you want to call it that. Like, you’re getting something. Like, you shoot a goose, you eat it, it’s gone.
Ramsey Russell: Like a cool coda ring in a cracker jack box.
Duncan Abram: Right. It’s like a box of cereal with a toy inside, basically.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: You’re always going to get the box that has the toy.
Ramsey Russell: That’s the boxes I went for when I was a kid.
Duncan Abram: That’s right.
Ramsey Russell: You told me a story about a recent band, you all kill. Tell that story about that band that guys first goose.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. We were working a flock of geese and one broke out and landed in the decoys, and he was just standing there. We finished working the flock. The flock didn’t cooperate and flew off. And I told my guys, I said, hey, there’s a goose out in the decoys, somebody want to go shoot it? And I had 4 guys racing to get out of the pit, and I poked my head up, and I looked and I seen it was banded. So I kind of stopped them all, and I asked, is there anybody here that’s never shot a goose before? And one guy on the other end raised his hand. He’s like, I never have. I’m like, well, go shoot that goose. And the other 4 guys kind of followed him out there to back him up.
Ramsey Russell: We need 6 semi-automatic guns to kill a goose.
Duncan Abram: The guy that had never shot the goose, he had a double barrel, and he got out there, he took one shot, and the goose was flying away. And 10 shots rang out, the other 3 guys, they emptied their guns, he took his last shot, and the bird fell. I still couldn’t say who shot it. But the guy that had never shot the goose –
Ramsey Russell: May have died of a heart attack.
Duncan Abram: They might have scared it to death. They certainly might have. And they shot it, and I looked, and we had more geese coming, so I kind of told them to, everybody get back in, we’ll get them later. And they all jumped in, we worked, shot a couple more geese, had a little lull. I went out and got it and brought it back in, and I was kind of hiding the band under my hand, and I reached down and shook the guy’s hand, congratulated him on his first goose, and handed it to him. And he was pretty excited. He saw that band, and he was pretty excited. And I think, everybody else was a little jealous, maybe. We heard more than one, that’s how it always goes. The first guy gets first goose is banded, and it’s like, yeah, in a perfect world, that’s how it always goes.
Ramsey Russell: That’s how it goes, isn’t it?
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
New Hunter’s Incredible First Banded Bird: A Hottentot Teal.
8.5 billion human beings on God’s earth. And for her first banded waterfowl, shot a hottentot teal. One person out of 8 billion have ever shot a hottentot teal banded as their first band. I mean, you’re talking about luck. I don’t have that kind of luck, dude.
Ramsey Russell: I’d rather be lucky than good. And I was telling you a story, I’ve got a friend down in Texas, and she’s relatively new to hunting, and I mean relatively new. She may have killed, I don’t know, 50, 100 ducks in her life, I don’t know. And she wanted to go to Africa and she came down to Africa with us this year. 8.5 billion human beings on God’s earth. And for her first banded waterfowl, shot a hottentot teal. One person out of 8 billion have ever shot a hottentot teal banded as their first band. I mean, you’re talking about luck. I don’t have that kind of luck, dude. I could fall in a swimming pool full of freaking delicious honey buns and come out sucking my thumb. I mean, that’s my luck. You know what I’m saying? Yeah, I don’t have that kind of luck. But it is something amazing about that, isn’t it, that I want a band, but I don’t know why I want a band, it’s just something about it. My grandfather, and I’ve told this story a million times, Duncan, I can remember being tall enough just to kind of look down the kitchen sink, over the counter when he was cleaning his mallards from Arkansas back in the 70s, when they banded birds, a lot of banding activities on the wintering ground, a lot of banding activities on the other end the flyway. And they shot bands, pretty regularly. And I can remember seeing, like, he whole picked his birds, and he was processing them, and then he’d cut off the feet and do this and do that and save the gizzards, save the liver, save the giblets, he called them. And I remember seeing a metal something on a duck’s foot, and I asked him what that was, and he said, government tag. And he threw it away because it was on the foot, he threw it away with all the stuff he threw away off that duck, it just went trash. He didn’t care. He cared nothing about that piece of metal. And I’m thinking, gosh, would I love to have all the leg bands he must have collected if he’d just taken off putting in a cigar box, how cool would that be to have all those bands?
Duncan Abram: 100%.
Ramsey Russell: He didn’t call them in, he didn’t keep them. He didn’t put them on a lanyard. His lanyard was literally a piece of white nylon survey line.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: That held one duck call, and it’s still on that duck call in my cabinet right now. I mean, it meant nothing to him, that kind of stuff. But now how times have changed. I’ve heard of fist fight over that stuff.
Duncan Abram: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen friendships ruined over them. I mean, I think back then, it was a lot more about going out and getting food. Like, they obviously loved to duck hunt and loved everything that, the sights and the sounds and the smells and everything that goes with it, but it was more, I think, of a utilitarian thing. Like, they’re going out killing their food.
Ramsey Russell: The generation was just practical.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And I know that they’re bound to have enjoyed going to hunting camp. Like, for example, my grandfather, they didn’t bring babies, they didn’t bring children yet they about 15, 16 years old.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You’re invited into that camp because they did men things. I mean, they cooked and they drank and they played cards and that was their politically incorrect world.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And that’s just how they were in that generation. And you’re right, they plucked the ducks and cooked the ducks and brought the ducks home and made meals with them. Back in those days, he had those, they sold milk in wax cardboard, half gallons that never got thrown away in that generation, that was like before Tupperware. That’s what you froze stuff in. And he had shells full of frozen wild game and milk cartons or something. He’d cook with wild game and put up in milk cartons, that’s just how they lived, man.
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: It was a whole different world back then, wasn’t it?
Duncan Abram: Yes, it was.
Ramsey Russell: Have you seen a lot of changes here since you started goose hunting? What are some of the changes you’ve seen? Like, you talked about some of the hot water, the power plants that kind of put Fergus falls on the map and made it such a goose mecca. Are you seeing declines in geese? Are you seeing declines in hunter participation?
Duncan Abram: I’m not really seeing a decline in hunter participation necessarily.
Ramsey Russell: As many hunters there were.
Duncan Abram: I know, hunter numbers are dropping as a whole, but I think when you’re in an area that’s very waterfowl rich, you’re not seeing that decline. It’s the opposite of anything. People are getting smarter there with social media and the Internet. There’s no, secret spots anymore or secret areas anymore. Like, everybody knows where the concentrations of birds are and go. And that’s like, with concentrated waterfowl, you’re going to find concentrated hunters.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Is access a problem in Minnesota?
Duncan Abram: Not yet, I wouldn’t say. It can be tougher, but I mean, you can still knock on a door around here and hunt somebody’s property.
Ramsey Russell: Not the farms you all got locked up, I’m guessing.
Duncan Abram: No. When we’re putting these in, we’re generally paying the farmer to do so. So you’re not going to be able to knock on our farmer’s doors and come out and sit in our pits. But they might let you sit in a different field, you never know. You just got to get out there and knock on doors, really.
Ramsey Russell: Do you have any favorite waterfowl recipes?
Duncan Abram: My favorite way to cook a goose is probably in the crock pot or the pressure cooker.
Ramsey Russell: How do you cook it? Talk about one of your favorite recipes. If you were going to go home on a cold day and turn on the Super bowl and cook a crock pot goose, what are you going to put in there? How you going to cook that goose?
Duncan Abram: I’m probably going to dump a beer or two in it, some water, some beef base, about whatever seasoning I find in the cupboard, and I’m going to let that thing cook for a day.
Ramsey Russell: Fall off the bone.
Duncan Abram: You take a tongue and try and grab a breast out of that crock pot, you ain’t getting but a little chunk of meat.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What do you kind of just layl it out onto some rice or potatoes?
Duncan Abram: Rice, potatoes, make some gravy with it. It’s just like a beef roast.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it really is.
Duncan Abram: I mean, and then when I do that, I’ll make enough to where there’s plenty of leftovers, and then I’ll pull it and make barbecues.
Ramsey Russell: I think pot roast geese is good. It’s like, there’s a big recipe back home called Mississippi pot roast, and what do you put in there? You put a carton of beef or chicken broth. Beef usually calls for a stick of butter, I put two pepper scenery peppers and powdered ranch dress.
Duncan Abram: Okay.
Ramsey Russell: I put two them, put in a crock pot, and forget about it, and it cooks down. I’ve done it with a lot of wild game. I was out in extreme eastern Montana with some friends of mine, Chad and Tanya and Tanya had cooked it that used that recipe with speckled bellies, and it was so good we ate the whole pot, and I started doing it with Canada geese, and it really cooks down good. And if you want to, you can kind of, because those breasts still stay kind of chunky, you can shred them breast. And my wife will use that recipe and make, like, a philly cheese sandwich with it. Like, put it on a hoagie bun and load it up like that, it’s a good way to eat it, man.
Duncan Abram: And if you play around, there’s a million different ways to eat it. I mean, a goose you can pretty much substitute for beef, and I mean, you’re getting a comparable product.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Duncan Abram: As long as you don’t overcook it.
Ramsey Russell: As long as you don’t overcook it.
Duncan Abram: You don’t want to take a goose past medium rare anywhere other than a crock pot.
Ramsey Russell: I would say that about all waterfowl.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. I mean, you can slap a goose breast on the grill and cook it and eat it, but if it’s past medium rare, you might as well put your boot on the grill because it’s going to taste about the same.
Ramsey Russell: Well, speaking of food, I think it’s about time we’re getting on that home stretch for about that 12:30 or 01:00 flight. I think we got to maybe time to eat a little something. You talking about all these recipes you cook getting, this griddle hot in here? I’m thinking about that right now. I bet Char wakes up when we do that.
Duncan Abram: I bet she does.
Ramsey Russell: Duncan, thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate being here. It’s a heck of a setup you all run. Heck of an operation you all run. How can people connect with you on social media?
Duncan Abram: Pit properties has sites on all the different social medias. Get ahold of Peter, he kind of does all the booking stuff. Yeah, get ahold of us and come on out and enjoy what we have to offer.
Ramsey Russell: One good thing I’ll say to anybody that even considering coming up here for a late season pit properties hunt is if it’s cold outside, putting out them decoys, you may need a layer or two, but once you climb off on this blind, it’s pretty tolerable. This is as comfortable as I’ve ever duck hunted.
Duncan Abram: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Or goose hunted.
Duncan Abram: And if you’re coming out to hunt, we generally don’t make you put decoys out.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Duncan Abram: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, I’m special.
Duncan Abram: Yeah. Well, you know what you’re doing. I know you really want to be involved in the whole.
Ramsey Russell: I do want to be involved. Last thing I’m going to do is sit around my hands in my pocket while decoy are being thrown.
Duncan Abram: But, yeah, generally when you show up for one of our hunts, everything’s ready to go, we give you a ride out, and you crawl into the blind, and we’re –
Ramsey Russell: Walking down the flight of stairs, you already smell coffee brew?
Duncan Abram: Yeah. We’re hunting, we’re cooking breakfast, it’s go time. There ain’t no setting up for the customers.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Thank you, Duncan. And folks, thank you all for listening to the episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. See you next time.
[End of Audio]
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