EP 535. New Brunswick Canada Duck Hunting, Eh?

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I’m in New Brunswick. If you’re like my buddy Greg Mooley, you’re probably wondering, where the heck is New Brunswick? He and his wife’s like, Ram, you invited me to Brunswick to come hunt. Where the heck is it? And she goes, well, I don’t know, where is he? And he’s in Canada. Where? It must be in Canada. It is. It’s in eastern Canada. It’s what they call Maritime Canada. I’m here with my buddies, Matt Wilson and Stephen Margeson.

Stephen Margeson: Margeson. Yep

Ramsey Russell: Margeson.

Stephen Margeson: Yep. You got her.

Ramsey Russell: We’ve been hunting for a few days. We had a great time. I’m talking black ducks, mallards, and Canada geese. I’m sure you all got something else besides that. What else would you all have besides those three great species?

Stephen Margeson: We kind of get a little bit of everything. Having the St. John River down through here, we sometimes get random little divers around. We get what, Pintails.

Matt Wilson: Teal, pintails. We get a lot more pintails. It used to be that if we saw a pintail, we would be losing it. But now they’re fairly steady.

Ramsey Russell: You all target those, or just, I mean, I would target nothing but the black ducks and the mallards.

Stephen Margeson: Usually, we get a lot of those when we’re hunting the water, little ponds. Like we’re gonna hunt tomorrow. That’s where we see the random stuff show up most of the time.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Stephen Margeson: The fields, it seems to be black ducks and mallards for the most part.

Matt Wilson: But we do like when we get a chance to shoot ducks, which is, like, early in the season. Well, it seems like every other grain field we get into has ducks. And we shot a lot of ducks this year, but when there’s ducks in the field, if we can get after them, we do. But like 98% of what we do is dry land.

Stephen Margeson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: How’d you two meet? How did you all meet? How long have you all known each other?

Stephen Margeson: It’ll be 15 or more years now.

Matt Wilson: Yeah, the youth hunt, I think. And I don’t even know how I came across you there.

Stephen Margeson: Yeah, it must have just been local word of mouth.

Matt Wilson: I probably picked you up off the street or something.

Stephen Margeson: Well, I was friends with Henson.

Ramsey Russell: Hitchhiking.

Stephen Margeson: Yeah. He could have been.

Matt Wilson: Could have been bad character when he was younger. He’s getting old now.

Stephen Margeson: Yeah. A lot of people Matt knew, and I hung out with, were the same age. So I think somehow through our friends, we kind of hooked up and went on a youth hunt.

Ramsey Russell: Were you all both youth?

Stephen Margeson: No, he was. What are you, eight years, six years older than me?

Matt Wilson: Oh. How old are you?

Stephen Margeson: 32.

Matt Wilson: Yeah, I’m 39.

Stephen Margeson: Yeah, you’re getting old.

Matt Wilson: So are you. You’re looking older than I am.

Stephen Margeson: It’s been a rough month.

Matt Wilson: I’m looking way better than you.

Ramsey Russell: It’s been a long month. How long have you all been going at duck season?

Matt Wilson: 40 days.

Stephen Margeson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: When did your season start?

Stephen Margeson: Well, we have an early season in September for 15 days, and we usually only get out on a hunt or two. And then we got a two-week break, and we start October 1st usually.

Ramsey Russell: What’s the difference in the two seasons?

Stephen Margeson: The birds do not cooperate in early season.

Ramsey Russell: Really? Its gonna be young and dumb.

Matt Wilson: Well, that’s for our resident, like, breeding population because they want to try to clean up on them. So our limit has been extended again. It’s 10, but it’s tropical, right? And they’re not super social.

Ramsey Russell: Is it geese only?

Matt Wilson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Matt Wilson: Yeah, Canada geese only, actually, specifically.

Ramsey Russell: Resident Canada.

Matt Wilson: We’ve had other geese show up, you know, snows, things like that, but it’s not for them. It’s for Canada geese specifically.

Ramsey Russell: And then the season kicks off October 1st, and that’s game on. Like what we’ve been doing.

Stephen Margeson: Yeah, we got a two-week break. Moose season’s in there. They kind of shut the whole province down from season for five days.

Ramsey Russell: You all got a lot of moose up here?

Stephen Margeson: A couple.

Matt Wilson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Is that a big deal?

Stephen Margeson: It’s a big thing.

Matt Wilson: What this province thrives on like it. It’s like Christmas. People get real pumped for moose.

Ramsey Russell: Do they let school out early?

Stephen Margeson: You’re allowed to take work off whether you have vacation days or not.

Ramsey Russell: Are you kidding?

Stephen Margeson: Yeah, I work at a plant, and the manager found out I had moose season or got drawn and didn’t want to take it off. He gave him the week off, no questions asked. “You go hunt. Come work when you can work. And if you can’t, well, we’ll see you next week.”

Ramsey Russell: So residents have to draw for moose?

Stephen Margeson: Yeah.

Matt Wilson: And it’s hard to get a tag.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Stephen Margeson: I’ve got 10 years in, and I haven’t been drawn myself.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Matt Wilson: Yeah. We got a better draw system now. It’s been flawed in the past, but our natural resource minister, Mike Holland, made some good changes that way. So now we have the pool system. After, you know, what is it, 20 years, you’re guaranteed.

Ramsey Russell: They’ll give you one for being steady at it.

Matt Wilson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: How do you hunt moose up here? Because it’s dog-hair-thick habitat. I’m assuming they stay in the woods. I haven’t seen one outside the woods.

Matt Wilson: Spot and stalk mostly, calling them.

Stephen Margeson: If the weather’s right, it’s a really fine window. They are super responsive to calling, and you get in the right area, you call a big bull out. A lot of guys do it that way. But some years it’s tropical, some years it’s a little cooler. So it’s kind of hit and miss.

Ramsey Russell: What do you call tropical? I’m from Mississippi. I’m just curious.

Stephen Margeson: You probably need a sweater.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Matt Wilson: Yeah, it’s warm in September. For us, anything over 25 degrees and one moose season, the year that I got mine, it was like 38 the first day. Like you could boil an egg, you know. And how do you shoot a moose when it’s that warm, right?

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Matt Wilson: You don’t. Unless you shoot it on the back of your truck.

Ramsey Russell: Get him loaded up.

Matt Wilson: Get him out somewhere.

Ramsey Russell: “New Brunswick’s tidal marshes are a hidden gem. The ducks here dance with the tides, and the cold air sharpens every moment. It’s hunting at its purest.”

Ramsey Russell: Wow. What was it like growing up in New Brunswick? Beyond the moose. I mean, really and truly, it’s like the province time forgot. We’re getting, I mean, for example, Craig and I both, it’s the craziest thing. I’ve never seen an iPhone lose track of time. Like up here, I’m bouncing around. I’ve got my alarm set for three different time’s tomorrow morning just to be damn sure it goes off on time. I look at my watch, it’s on time. I look, it’s earlier.

Matt Wilson: Yeah.

Stephen Margeson: “New Brunswick’s ducks don’t care about borders—they just follow the cold. We hunt them where the tides and the wind conspire.”

Stephen Margeson: So we get a lot of dead spots. And where we are here, I think we’re eight or ten miles from Houlton, Maine. So really a lot of the territory we hunt is bordered up. There are fields that we hunt. The end of the field is America. Like if they soar over the border.

Ramsey Russell: Well, we were looking today over that marsh, Matt, and you said, “What right there?” I mean, mountain range right there is Maine. There’s nowhere from here.

Matt Wilson: Yeah. I mean, a lot of the farm ground here starts on the Maine side basically, and then it crosses over into Canada. And in this province, the majority of the farm ground is here.

Ramsey Russell: It is. You showed me that today on a map.

Matt Wilson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Most of the agriculture in New Brunswick is in this part of New Brunswick.

Matt Wilson: Yep. Right in western New Brunswick, yeah. So it runs basically from Woodstock all the way to Grand Falls. There is some farm ground above that, like Edmundston, St. Andre, and some out towards the middle of the province and Sussex, new Brunswick has a pretty rich dairy history.

Ramsey Russell: As I head east towards Prince Edward Island, it’s going to be just more forested.

Matt Wilson: Hmm.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Matt Wilson: It’s going to be a boring drive through the woods. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Stephen Margeson: Up and down and a lot of woods.

Matt Wilson: Yeah. There’s nothing to look at.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Why do you think it is most people don’t know where New Brunswick is?

Matt Wilson: Good question.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, we’ve talked about that since I’ve been here. Greg didn’t know where it was. I am looking at a map.
Stephen Margeson: As far as the hunting and fishing industry, back before the salmon dried up, that’s the only reason people really came here, salmon fishing.
Matt Wilson: Post-war, it was busy here. People would jump on the trains, and the outfitting industry was busy, like they wrote books about it, Men of the Autumn Woods.
Ramsey Russell: For Atlantic salmon, moose, towards that.
Matt Wilson: Caribou, we used to have caribou here.
Ramsey Russell: Really caribou here?
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Well, I know Quebec had a lot of caribou. Woodland caribou I guess.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Stephen Margeson: They got the last eastern herd still, I think, is alive, but I don’t think there’s very many.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I suppose hunting over here.

Matt Wilson: Yeah. It was busy here. People would come up. And even, you know, into the early 1970s and stuff, the outfitting industry, certainly down towards the lakes, was busy. East Grand and North Lake, there were three or four different camps down there. You could shoot two deer. It was busy for big game. And that’s mostly what people come here forest bears. But as far as anything else, I mean, it’s not a big province. The Maritimes really aren’t that populated.
Ramsey Russell: 850,000 people in the entire province.

Matt Wilson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: That’s about one-third or less the population of the entire state of Mississippi, which is a small state. We got US cities with way more people. You all probably got Canadian cities with way more people.
Matt Wilson: You probably have cities that have a bigger population than all of Canada, to be quite honest.
Ramsey Russell: That’s true.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: So, what was it like growing up here in this rural community? I mean, you told me the other day right here, this local town has got about 10,000, which seems big to me, about like my hometown in Mississippi. What you all do growing up? What did you guys do growing up around here?
Stephen Margeson: I hunted, but not waterfowl. It would have been, you know, partridge, a lot of ruffed grouse. We were big into that.
Ramsey Russell: You got a bunch of ruffed grouse, woodcock.

Matt Wilson: Spruce grouse.

Ramsey Russell: Spruce grouse.
Stephen Margeson: That’s what I did primarily growing up, whitetail hunting with my old man. A lot of trapping, that’s kind of fallen out around here lately because of the price of fur.
Ramsey Russell: That was a big thing.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: What about you, Matt?
Matt Wilson: That’s what I did. I hunted waterfowl to start with. My grandfather took me partridge hunting. We just call them partridges, ruffed grouse. But yeah, I hunted a lot of waterfowl, especially as I got older. But that was always my thing.
Ramsey Russell: But that’s a seasonal thing. What else would a young guy do in a very remote, wooded province?
Stephen Margeson: A lot of time in the woods, we growing up.
Ramsey Russell: Shooting BB guns?
Matt Wilson: Yep.
Stephen Margeson: Yep.
Matt Wilson: Stuff outside. If you don’t do stuff outside here, like if you don’t have a side-by-side or a snowmobile or things like that, or you don’t trap or fish, we ice fish a lot here. Like, if you’re not doing stuff outside, there’s not a whole heck of a lot to do. But it is a good province for that stuff.
Ramsey Russell: Did either one of you all have any family or friends in forestry, logging?
Matt Wilson: Yep, my family.

Ramsey Russell: “Sink boxes in the Maritimes demand respect. You’re not just hunting—you’re part of the rhythm of the coast.”

Ramsey Russell: There’s a big timber industry here. I was shocked. And here’s the deal. New Brunswick is in what they call Maritime Canada, and I’m thinking oceanic, oceanfront, lobster, things of that nature. And so I was shocked coming over from Quebec when I started getting into the Adirondack Mountain-type situations and forestry. And I mean, the only water I’ve seen has been the rivers, the streams, no ocean. Why “Maritime”? Why do they call this a maritime state? What does that even mean?
Matt Wilson: I think that’s why it is, just because of the oceans and just because, you know, when you think about Nova Scotia and PEI, you know that their communities and towns and cities are based off of the water. Right?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Stephen Margeson: And the eastern side of the province is completely different. If you drove down, you drove down the western side of the province next to Maine. If you would have driven the coast, you wouldn’t believe it’s the same province.
Ramsey Russell: What the AT trail?

Matt Wilson: The Adirondack Trail.

Ramsey Russell: It comes through here?
Matt Wilson: Yeah, we saw it. Well, it was hard to see.
Ramsey Russell: Appalachian Trail.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, Sorry. Yeah, the Appalachian trail.
Ramsey Russell: Runs through the Adirondacks in New York. But it’s also Tide Mountain. On a clear day, we can see it from that hilltop we were on today.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy. So, it’s not oceanfront property up here, is what I’m trying to say. I guess I was expecting all oceanfront property. And it’s not. It’s anything but. It’s like being in the Catskill Mountains or being in West Virginia or something.
Matt Wilson: And that’s why it’s so different here because, like, when we talked about today. So you’ve started out west and then worked your way back here, like out there, it’s very flat. There’s not a lot of stuff in your way, grid roads. Same thing when you start coming east to Manitoba and Ontario. Very much that way. But when you get here, it’s very hilly. There are no grid roads, you know, you have to use hills to find your birds. A lot of times, you’re higher. Like tomorrow, we’re going to be in elevation a lot higher than where our birds are sitting. They’re going to have to fly uphill to us to get into where we are.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Matt Wilson: No different than the birds we hunted today. We were at one of the highest elevation points here. They had to fly uphill the whole way, and that’s why they were so low when they came over the trees.
Ramsey Russell: That’s what makes it so weird about hunting in New Brunswick. We’re hunting in cornfields and different agriculture and stuff like that. But there’s enough water and enough agriculture to attract them. But it just is way different than hardly anywhere else I’ve hunted. Way different anywhere I’ve hunted in Canada. Way different.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. Even when, like I said, when Sean Stahl was up here, he’s like, “I’ve hunted a lot of places for Canada geese, and I’ve never seen anything like this. These are mountain geese.
Ramsey Russell: Mountain geese. Yeah.
Matt Wilson: The geese are flying up hills to you. And our fields are small, they’re odd-shaped. Some of them are bigger, but you know, it’s very unique, for sure.
Stephen Margeson: It makes scouting difficult with the hills because where you watch them roost and where they fly to, sometimes you might have to drive the opposite direction for 20 minutes to get to where they’re going.
Matt Wilson: Right. They fly behind a hill, and if you don’t know how to get up on another one and see where they’re going or head that direction or get somebody in that area, you’re done. Like, if you could scout here, and this is a real thing, like, if you learn how to scout here, any place else you could go and freelance and scout.
Ramsey Russell: Well, you told me today, number one rule is you got to know where the high points are. You got to know where the vantage points are.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: So you get up and look down and watch the, and high points we looked at today. Matt, god, dog, son. You can see everywhere.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You can see Maine over there.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. We’ve got several of those around the area that we know where we can go if we need to get up on and look down on fields or whatever we need to do to see birds come. And even still, lots of times, you lose them. Right?
Stephen Margeson: Yeah. That’s why the glass is so important, that we use the binoculars because, like, we can’t just drive around and look anywhere. So we got to pick one point, and it might be a half-hour drive. We’re looking where the geese are landing.
Matt Wilson: And, like, 10x42s, you know, they don’t always work, like, you could use something a little bigger, really.
Ramsey Russell: To your point, we were up on a high hill today, and he showed me a dammed marsh down here, a lake. Amazing how much water they can hold with a tiny little dam.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And I said, let’s go down there and take a look at it. Twenty minutes freaking later, I just said it right at the bottom of the hill, five minutes away. It was 20 or 30 minutes later before we pulled up to it.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Stephen Margeson: And not a straight line. There’s nothing that runs northeast-southwest here.
Matt Wilson: No. A couple of crossroads to get over there. Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: What are you all’s earliest hunting memories? That’s what I want to know. You talk about growing up, you’re hunting outside. There’s a rural community. Who were, you all’s respective influences on introducing you to hunting, and how did you learn to hunt? What were you chasing initially? Like, who were you hunting with, and how were you hunting?
Stephen Margeson: Well, my old man, my father. My whole family, from my great-grandfather, probably even before that, were in daily guiding, salmon, deer. When I was born and got old enough to start going out, Dad would take me out every weekend he got. We’d be out deer hunting, beating the woods, doing things, building fires, drinking from streams. Anything we could do. Some of my earliest memories are actually out tramping around the hardwood ridge with my old man. We’d stop, have a fire, a little bit of tea, and a little hot chocolate for me.
Ramsey Russell: Hunting big game in upland birds. When did you get introduced to water fowling, Matt and Stephen?
Stephen Margeson: Yeah. It would have been in my early teens. I hunted once or twice with my dad upriver. They had no idea what they were doing. They just knew there was corn and geese. So they were kind of figuring it out. You know, we might have shot a couple over the year. I got invited with Matt to the youth hunt that he hosted for, I think, a couple of years. Didn’t you?
Matt Wilson: We did it several years, yeah.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah. And then we got into that there. And then I really didn’t touch it again for 10 years. I was whitetail hunting. I was going to Alberta with my dad and my brother. You know, I went out there buck hunting and stuff like that. Did a little bit around here, ruffled grouse. And then I just got invited to a hunt, and it just clicked. It was just something for me that felt like something I should be doing every day.
Matt Wilson: Tell the real story about why we started hunting together.
Stephen Margeson: Well, we kind of started running into each other a lot.
Ramsey Russell: You got the bug and started encroaching on his territory?
Stephen Margeson: Yeah, I work a weird shift. I don’t go into work until the afternoon, 4 p.m. to midnight, 4 to 1 a.m., so I’ve got every morning to scout or hunt. There’s not many people that can get up every day at 6 a.m. and be out on the roads for three hours. I got no kids.
Matt Wilson: Most people have a real job.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah, most people have a real job. You know, I got a nice union job. I’ve been at it 15 years, so I can kind of push the limits a little bit. And me and Matt were running into each other all the time, and eventually, I just kind of hassled him enough that he invited us along and realized me and my buddy Brad weren’t, you know, just shitheads. Excuse my language. But, you know, we were out actually trying to put in the work and figure it out. And we didn’t have anybody in the waterfowl area that knew what they were doing. We were kind of using YouTube videos, fail, fail, fail, setting up, trying to do it right, but ultimately kind of lost a little bit.
Ramsey Russell: There are 850,000 people in Brunswick. How many are waterfowl hunters? I haven’t seen any other groups. I’ve heard about them. You talked about it. You said, you act like they’re here, but I ain’t seen none. If we’d been in the Deep South, we’d have passed by 50 trucks up and down that river today, at least, pulling boats, pulling blinds. I ain’t seen a one.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, there’s a bunch here.

Ramsey Russell: What’s a bunch?
Stephen Margeson: Like a dozen in our county.

Stephen Margeson: A dozen groups.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. A dozen groups, yeah. Like you go down the southern part of the province, and there would be a lot more water hunters, like duck hunters.
Ramsey Russell: Getting out in the water, the lakes, the boats, things like that.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, things like that.
Ramsey Russell: What about you, Matt? What are your earliest introductions to waterfowl hunting? Who took you? How’d you get into it?
Matt Wilson: My dad took me, actually. He kind of started the same way that Steve’s father did. I remember my first time was across the road here. And I remember just being a young kid, like grade one or maybe kindergarten, and him taking me out. He had a whole bunch of silhouettes, well, I say a whole bunch, probably a dozen, silhouette decoys. Him and his buddies would go out, and at that time, there were a store.
Ramsey Russell: Were they store-bought or handmade?
Matt Wilson: Oh, they made them by hand. Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Still got them?
Matt Wilson: Yeah. They had straight necks, and they had wing nuts on them, so you could just move the head up or down, like wherever you wanted. Then you’d tighten the wing nut. They were pretty neat. So they would set them out, and we would just hide in a rock pile because there were still lots of rock piles at the time or we would just lay underneath burlap. And, you know, if they got a goose, it was a huge deal. Right. And once in a while, they would get a few. Right. And none of them knew what they were doing. They had, like, army surplus clothes.

Ramsey Russell: That’s how we all grew up back in the day.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. So that kind of gave me the bug. As I got older, Dad was busy, and some of his friends got busy too, working or moved away or whatnot. So I didn’t go with him as much. My grandfather would take my brother and me out hunting, like grouse, you know, things like that. Grant never. He was a huge outdoorsman guide. Worked for a lot of different outfitters and stuff. He was a customs officer as well. But he kept that going. But I had that bug, like I don’t ever remember a time when I didn’t want to hunt waterfowl. A few other people took me and mentored me over the years in this area specifically, too. So, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: How did you go from those introductions too, not much later, but later, the duck calling and the goose calling and the trip to Stuttgart, the trip to the world and the competition calling?
Matt Wilson: I was always just engulfed in.
Ramsey Russell: Are you competitive?
Matt Wilson: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. I was always just so involved in that and just always wanted to be doing something that had to do with it right. So I ended up getting a duck call. Dad always had some Fawkes calls.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Wow.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Fawkes in New Brunswick. That’s amazing.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, the walnut ones.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. I’ll never forget that, smells pretty nostalgic, those walnut wood calls. And I used to mess with them. Then I ended up getting my own duck call. We were talking about Phil Robertson. Well, we were over across one day at Walmart, and I saw this VHS tape. It was Phil Robertson on the front, and I thought it was a hunting movie. But it wasn’t. It was The Art of Commanding Ducks. So the whole thing was how to blow a duck call. And I was like, “I thought this was a hunting movie.”
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Matt Wilson: Anyway, I started calling, and I dragged that thing with me everywhere. Then I bought a Olt A-50 goose call, the one that Rowan was running in that video the other day.
Ramsey Russell: The flute?
Matt Wilson: The flute, yeah. And I messed with that for years. My first short reed was a Zink SR1. Before he even had a website. That was my first short reed.

Ramsey Russell: Tell the story you told me the other day about meeting Butch Richenbach.
Matt Wilson: Oh, yeah. So the first time I won the national was 2007. I went down, it was just a short trip, and I didn’t really get to see the stuff I wanted to see. I just kind of got down there late, called in the Worlds the next day, then we had to fly out. I said, if I ever win again, I’m going to go down early because I want to. Butch was there, and I had met him, but he was so busy because it was the Worlds weekend. So I said, I’m going to go down early. So, 2013, I think, was the next time I won. I went down a week early and said I’ll go into the shop and see if I can get some mentorship. There was nothing going on down there on that Monday, the week before. So I went in. “Mr. Butch,” I said. “Hey Butch, Matt Wilson from Canada. I won the national championship. I’m here to call in the Worlds using one of your calls.” I said, “I wondered if you could give me some help.” He said, “Yeah, you be here at this time every day.” He said, “I’ll give you a lesson.”

Ramsey Russell: Really?
Matt Wilson: Yep. And I said, I’ll be here.
Ramsey Russell: That’s kind of guy he was.
Matt Wilson: Yep, 100%. So I went down there, and he’d tell you too. And that’s exactly what I needed. He’d be like, “Okay, blow a hail call.” I’d start to blow like a little warm-up, and he’d say, “Nope, don’t do that. What are you doing that for? I said blow a hail call.” So you’d have to bang just blow a hail call, right. That took sort of that anxiousness out of building yourself up to do it. I learned just the little things. He’d stop you and say, “No, do it like this.” After that week, it was like I just went leaps and bounds having his tutelage. I was there every morning, and he helped me out for like an hour.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of people tell stories like that.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. He sat with me a long time. I owe all of my success after that to him because I just learned so much. There was nobody around here to help me.

Ramsey Russell: Right.
Matt Wilson: I didn’t know. It wasn’t a thing. Like, people, there were no big competitions even across the country. You know, there were only a couple in the whole country.

Ramsey Russell: Well, there’s waterfowl hunting here. There are waterfowl hunters here, a whopping 12 groups. But there’s not the culture like down in Arkansas or the Deep South.
Matt Wilson: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: The culture is more fishing and woods and moose and bear, isn’t it?
Matt Wilson: Yeah, and there’s some culture for waterfowl, but it’s mostly coastal. It’s not here.

Stephen Margeson: Sea ducks.

Matt Wilson: Sea ducks or marshes. It’s not the agricultural field hunting. When I was a kid, like, we would have seen a quarter of the geese we saw today all season. There wasn’t a huge migration coming through here. But yeah, the contest calling really put me ahead in the industry. Working with Butch, every time I went down, I worked with Butch. And in 16, I actually made it through the first round, which was crazy. Nobody had ever done that. When they came back, they always cut the field in half after the first round. I’m pretty sure my number was 63. She said, “If I call your number, you made it through.” So she’s going through and getting up there, and I’m just talking because I’m not going to be called, right? I’m the Canadian, you don’t make it through. And, 61, 62, 63, I was like, pretty sure she just said my number. So I went up there. I said, “Did you say that if you call that number, you made it through to the second round?” And she’s like, “Yeah.” I said, “Did you call this number?” She looked at it and said, “Yep, I did.”

Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Matt Wilson: I said, “Holy shit.” I could have just packed my stuff up and gone home right there.

Ramsey Russell: Just happy to be there.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, I was just happy to compete with those guys, right.

Ramsey Russell: How did you go from duck calling into goose calling? Same thing, you’ve got plaques downstairs with goose calling too.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. I always really enjoyed it. Ducks have a vocabulary, but nothing like geese. I’ve always really enjoyed messing around with geese. We have a lot of geese around here. If I had to choose, Canada geese are what I would want to go after.

Ramsey Russell: I was going to ask you all, are you duck hunters or goose hunters?
Matt Wilson: Yeah, I’m a goose hunter.

Ramsey Russell: You’re the goose hunter.

Matt Wilson: Yeah, I love shooting ducks.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah, same here. I love shooting ducks, but it’s the geese that keep me going every day. It’s what I’m looking for.

Ramsey Russell: That’s you’re bread and butter isn’t it?
Stephen Margeson: Yeah. The duck hunts are bonuses. We don’t look for them, we don’t plan for them, we don’t say we’re hunting ducks. When we find them, we hunt them, and we get on them.

Matt Wilson: Like, when those two came over the trees today and their feet were down and their tongues were out, and they were heck up and then giving those train notes coming over the trees, I’m like, that’s what we’re here for.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what you’re here for.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I do like to shoot Canada geese. As a southern duck hunter, I do come to Canada to shoot geese, migrator geese. But damn, you all got black ducks. I like a black duck. I don’t know why, but I like black ducks. You all have got a bunch of black ducks around here, more than I’ve seen hardly anywhere.

Matt Wilson: That’s definitely my favorite duck.

Ramsey Russell: Why do you think that is? Just because you grew up shooting it?

Matt Wilson: Yeah, it’s the first duck I ever shot. It’s very unique for the rest of the world, but for us, it’s like our thing, here in the Atlantic Coast and the Atlantic Flyway, the smallest flyway of them all. That’s one thing we have in a good population.

Stephen Margeson: Thriving.

Matt Wilson: Yeah. I mean, a thriving population now because we can shoot six of them. That’s very unique to our area.
Stephen Margeson: And a lot of guys that come here from other parts, that’s just like yourself. That’s what they come here for.
Ramsey Russell: Boy, I told Matt, I just want to shoot black duck.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I’ve shot everything else. I want to shoot black duck. Yeah, I mean, you can tell.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And I can say the very first trigger pull both mornings was black duck.
Matt Wilson: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: And that just made my day.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, me too.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it made my day. How did you go from getting into the vocalizations of goose calls? You love the goose call. You make your own call. Your son Rowan, 17 years old, high school senior, blows a great goose call. He’s a great goose caller. He had somebody to teach him.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, he did.
Ramsey Russell: And it was funny seeing those old videos last night of him about as tall as this table, little long blonde hair out there blowing that goose flute.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You know, he cut his teeth on it.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: He must have started going to the blind with you when he was 3, 4, 5 years old.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. He was actually in a chair in the car, like, months old. We would take turns sitting with him in the car.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Matt Wilson: Yeah. You could watch our YouTube channel and watch the kid grow up over the years. He’s been such a big part of it.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, that’s his thing.
Ramsey Russell: And he loves it just like you do.
Matt Wilson: He does, yeah. The youngest there. What were you calling her? Ellie May.
Ramsey Russell: Ellie May, yeah.
Matt Wilson: She loves it too. She likes to go.
Ramsey Russell: So she said that’s what her papa called her.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. Ellie May.
Ramsey Russell: I couldn’t hear exactly, bad hearing, how she was pronouncing her name. So I just called her Ellie May.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Is she liked it?
Matt Wilson: Fair enough. Yeah, she did.

Ramsey Russell: She liked that. Talk more about the local area, the ducks, the geese, the habitat. What characterizes this part differently? Gosh, I mean, it’s hard to describe. You talk about the range rows and wide-open habitat and wall-to-wall habitat out in western Canada, but it’s a very unique and surprisingly productive waterfowl area through here. I mean, for example, the St. John River, femoral artery of New Brunswick. Certainty of your duck hunt?
Matt Wilson: Definitely.
Ramsey Russell: And every time we drive by it, its miles and miles, miles and miles and miles of ducks and geese sitting on the shore.
Stephen Margeson: Well, what ruined our salmon fishery in the 1970s, early 1980s, when they put the dams in. They basically put, I believe there are three dams between us, and there’s one above us.
Ramsey Russell: Like hydroelectric dams?

Stephen Margeson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Stephen Margeson: So they took something that was basically a brook, well, not really a brook, but you could walk across it anywhere. And now we’ve got a couple hundred-foot headpond every 80, 100 miles. So it just allows there to be so much more water here now than what there used to be. And I feel like that’s a big part of why it holds our birds now.
Ramsey Russell: Do some of the old-timers say that because of those dams, you all gained more waterfowl?
Matt Wilson: Never really like that. I think personally what I think it is, I think it has to do with our crop rotation now. When I was a kid here, the only people that had corn were the dairy farmers. And it was silage corn. Nobody. We planted potatoes and grain. It was a two or three, and there, I think it was a three-crop rotation. And one of them was clover. So it was grain, potatoes, clover. There was no corn, no soybeans, no peas.
Ramsey Russell: A lot of corn here.
Matt Wilson: And now there’s a lot of corn here.
Ramsey Russell: And I was surprised to hear you all say, I think yesterday we kind of set up, there were ducks and geese hitting that field. The geese were concentrating on one place, ducks on the other. We went for the ducks. And I thought I heard you all say something about the geese maybe flying over the corn into some potatoes. And I was shocked to learn that a goose will eat potatoes. How does a goose eat a potato?
Matt Wilson: We find them in them all year, or, like, early when, you know, just like those potatoes you did here just a few minutes ago. Like, the potatoes are hard. So we would love to get the reason behind, to figure out the reason behind why they’re in there. I mean, we have our theories, but later in the year, once they frost up, like now, they’ve been frosted quite a few times, been below zero several times at night, then they get all mushy, and the geese can get into them. So if they’re scarred up at all, they can work their beak in there, and now it’s just like somebody takes a spoon.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Matt Wilson: Yes.
Stephen Margeson: Just like a potato skinny daughter at the restaurant at times just hollowed right out.
Ramsey Russell: Well, it must be the new shoot or something earlier in the year before it gets mushy like that.
Matt Wilson: There’s little things on the vines that look like tomatoes, and we think they’re eating them.
Stephen Margeson: And some of the farmers will plant winter wheat or some kind of something afterwards, like a winter crop.
Ramsey Russell: It might just be little bitty potatoes before they, whatever what they do.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, yeah. We’re not sure. We would love more specific studies on the geese that come through this area because it’s changed. Again, growing up, we didn’t have the geese that we shot here. They were pterodactyls, like huge. We never ever shot little geese. And now we have that medium-sized, atypical, high-flying, vertical Canada goose like you would shoot in Ontario. And that’s what migrates through for us. And besides that, we have a lot of geese coming from Greenland, like over across the pond, even farther, Sweden, you know.
Ramsey Russell: Well, we saw a specklebelly. That could be one of Greenland speckledbellies.
Matt Wilson: Mm.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, you’ve talked about pink-footed goose, maybe a barnacle goose. Brant. You all seen Brant?
Matt Wilson: Yeah, we’ve had Brant here. Yeah. Just one day scouting two years ago, standing in the ditch.
Stephen Margeson: Well, where’d you shoot those three that are hanging on your wall?
Matt Wilson: Rhode Island.
Stephen Margeson: Oh, Rhode Island. Okay. It wasn’t up here.
Matt Wilson: No, but we have had Brant here.
Ramsey Russell: No fence in the sky.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, that’s right. We’ve shot barnacles here. There’s every year now, there are collared geese that come from over there. Sweden, Finland.
Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy. Talk about the St. John River just a little bit because that is a major landform. The world’s longest wooden covered bridge goes over the St. John River. That’s crazy. But at the same time, you made a comment today, Matt, we were stopping and looking at all those ducks and geese, and you said, oh, somebody will burn your truck if you hunt out there. But it’s like it’s almost taboo to go out there and hunt that river because it’s just like an unwritten rule that it’s a safe haven to hold these birds for as long as humanly possible. We’ve always been that way.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. As a general rule, we just never hunt the river. Like later in the year, when the season’s almost done and the geese are mostly gone and there’s just ducks on the river, guys will hunt the river. And we know because that’s the only place to go, right? They’re not going out to fields. Most of the stuff is plowed. But yeah, as a general rule, like right now, nobody would be, or should be, hunting that river. You know, that’s our lifeline. Once we start shooting that up, I mean, and it wouldn’t make sense anyway. I mean, yes, they’re there, but there’s a reason why they’re there. Nobody’s shooting them. That’s their safe place, right? That’s what holds them there. There’s tons of fields here you can go to.

Ramsey Russell: All they’re doing is drinking and loafing there.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I mean, they’re going off into all these fields to eat. We’ve seen just tons of them everywhere.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: So, like the one in town here, I mean, it’s in town limits. You know, we have a bylaw for that, and you couldn’t get far enough away from houses. So, some of our roosts are protected like that. But there has been, in the past, people, like we talked about before, people from out of town would come in, shoot a roost. I mean, they don’t care, right?
Stephen Margeson: They’re not up in the middle of the river, blasting at them.
Matt Wilson: They’re not from here.
Ramsey Russell: They’re from around here.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Do the black ducks migrate to New Brunswick, or do they breed here?
Matt Wilson: A little bit of both.

Matt Wilson: “A good blind here isn’t just a shelter—it’s a story. Every scrape, every crack, tells of hunts past and ducks that slipped through.”

Matt Wilson: See, we talked about water earlier and what makes this area sort of unique. So, when you look at that water map that Ducks Unlimited puts out about, you know, your breeding areas and how much moisture is there, water, whatever. You look out west, and if it hasn’t rained, generally it hasn’t been very good. But when you look at our side of the country, it’s always pretty good because it’s, you know, that deep, dark, sort of wet deciduous forest here. So, we have a lot of what they would call in other places muskegs, like bogs.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: Where black ducks love to nest and breed, whatnot. And we generally always have water here.
Stephen Margeson: Even there because all the DU, I assume it was DU, put all those dams in everywhere, all those places. All summer long, even though we had no water in the river, I fished them with my boat. There was lots of water. The water was cold. Fish were still active. So, those dams they put in are lifesavers. They hold piles of ducks.
Ramsey Russell: I’ve heard there are 13 mallard-like subspecies worldwide. Black duck, of course, is one of five here in North America. And I’ve always heard that at some point in time in history, it kind of broke off the mallard proper and began to breed and habituate these dark forest areas. And that’s why it took on that darker coloration, just as a means of protection. And it makes sense, having been here now, because it’s a dark sullen area and environment.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You know, even the rock shores are dark.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah. Beaver ponds, everything just etched.
Ramsey Russell: It’s just dark.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. It’s because we have so much softwood. Like, when you travel, you don’t have to go very far from here down into New England, and it’s all hardwoods. But here, it’s mostly softwoods.
Ramsey Russell: Right.
Matt Wilson: Spruce, fir, tamarack, like a little bit of pine.
Ramsey Russell: I did talk about that tamarack because, you know, being from the Deep South, we’ve got conifers, evergreen trees. But up here, you’ve got a conifer that looks like a Christmas tree, looks like the fir, but it starts throwing fall foliage this time of year. That’s just weird for a southerner to see a Christmas tree that isn’t beetle-damaged, just getting fall foliage. That’s crazy.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Real interesting habitat up here. You all talk about the sea ducks. Do you all chase sea ducks?
Stephen Margeson: We will later in the season. We get a lot of them that I don’t know.
Ramsey Russell: Where do you go from here to get into sea ducks? What kind of sea ducks and how do you hunt them?
Matt Wilson: St. Andrews, which is about two and a half hours or so from here.
Ramsey Russell: That’s a lot different than geese and black ducks and mallards in a cornfield.
Matt Wilson: But you could do it all in one day. Like, if you hunted in a cornfield here in the morning, you could get in the vehicle and travel down and hit the salt and hunt sea ducks for the afternoon.
Ramsey Russell: Just hunt it from the shore, hunt it with the tides?
Matt Wilson: You could hunt them out of the boat or whatnot. It can be dangerous some places. I mean, the tide is like 30 ft.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah. We got some of the highest tides in the world here.
Ramsey Russell: That’s like a St. Lawrence River?

Stephen Margeson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It’s crazy.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world.
Ramsey Russell: It does, yeah. That’s north of here.
Matt Wilson: South.
Ramsey Russell: South of here, Okay.
Matt Wilson: Southwest, down. So actually, it’s basically directly south. So that’s where we go. And we go after mostly white-winged scoter. We have all the scoters, but mostly white wings. There are some surf, some black scoters, a lot of old squaw. Some eiders depend. There are eiders around, but you just have to know our coastline.
Ramsey Russell: They’re real specific to certain habitats.
Matt Wilson: They are, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You know, all those sea ducks are.

Matt Wilson: Definitely.

Ramsey Russell: They don’t just go out anywhere in the saltwater. They know exactly where those shoals are, the water depths, the mollusk composition. It’s amazing how specific they are to whatever’s on the bottom of the ocean.
Stephen Margeson: Going back to the hydroelectric dams, later in the year when our river freezes up, we like to hunt the spillways a lot of times too, late in the season, and you get a lot of weird stuff kind of hanging around.
Ramsey Russell: Goldeneyes I guess.

Matt Wilson: A lot of goldeneyes late in the year. Yeah, we’ll go south of here, down below the last dam, the Mactaquac dam. We’ll hunt down around that area and hunt whistlers down there. That whole river system from basically Mactaquac all the way down to where it runs into the actual ocean. There’s a lot of people that hunt whistlers late in the year down there. Occasionally, you’ll get a Barrow’s come through there too.
Stephen Margeson: It’s too quick to use a dog. So, we have to run a boat. But we hunt shoreline.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Yesterday morning, it was 25 degrees Fahrenheit, minus 4 or 5 Celsius. It’s pretty darn cold. How much longer before the black ducks and the mallards and the Canada geese blow out of here and fly further south down the Atlantic Flyway?
Stephen Margeson: If we don’t get snow, we could hunt them until December.
Ramsey Russell: Really. There’s enough open water with these river systems. Season ends in December, don’t hang around unless there’s snow cover.
Matt Wilson: Our duck season actually this year got extended. So, we have a 107-day duck season. It goes till January 15th. That’s in our zone. The province is broken into two zones. Zone one is the coastal zone, and it opens 15 days later. So, once our season closes January 15th, their season still has 15 days. You could go to the end of January there. And then we have our February season. So, it’s a super long season. Our ducks will stay damn near all year in the lagoons, especially. There will be a population of ducks that hang in there. We hunt mostly ducks late in the year when the geese go. Once it starts to freeze up.
Ramsey Russell: If I took the quickest route, according to Siri, down to the Maine border, how far am I from the US sitting right here?
Matt Wilson: Oh, geez.
Stephen Margeson: Five minutes.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. Ten minutes.
Ramsey Russell: Five minutes, ten minutes?
Stephen Margeson: I think it’s ten miles to Houlton, Maine, from here.
Ramsey Russell: Ten miles?
Matt Wilson: We measure things in time, but that’s good.

Stephen Margeson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I am gonna ask you about that. Everything over here is measured in time, not distance.

Stephen Margeson: Because it’s not straight.
Ramsey Russell: So, about 10 minutes.
Matt Wilson: That’s right.
Ramsey Russell: Ten minutes down the road?
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Unless you’re late for the hunt like I was yesterday, and then you cut that about a third.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: But it blows my mind that 10 minutes down the road from here, I cross an international boundary, and a limit on black ducks is two.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Right here, it’s six. How often do you all shoot six black ducks, if you wanted to?
Matt Wilson: Last year we had more black ducks than mallards, or it was close. Now this year, I don’t think we’ve seen them all yet. I feel like there are different migrations of birds. And right now, in the river today, there were a lot of drake mallards. Once we start getting what I would consider that last migration of birds, where you’re seeing a lot of drakes, 50% of them will be black ducks. And we shoot a lot of blacks. But you can pick them out for sure.

Ramsey Russell: These are real black ducks.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah, dark.
Ramsey Russell: You know, I’ve been looking at the ones we’ve shot, and they are absolute pure rub. Rippy, I’d call it. Just absolute pure black duck. Now, the first day we were scouting, there was a little stock tank right there on a field we were looking at full of geese. Matt, there was a black duck, and there’s a beautiful black duck-mallard hybrid. And right behind it was a blonde mallard. That’s great. You know, and I stick to my guns. I believe that blonde mallard has got some game farm genetics in it.
Matt Wilson: Probably. Yeah, because we’ve seen, I don’t know, we’ve shot three here now. We’ve had some weird stuff come through this area for sure. But yeah, I mean, you and I were locked onto that hybrid, watching it, and through the binoculars, all of a sudden, in swims a blonde mallard.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You all start in early September, go all the way through December. And you all stay to your guns. You all just stay at it.
Stephen Margeson: If there’s birds here, you’re gonna find us wherever they are.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, we’re not too keen on, we’re not quitters.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: You know, like we’re talking about this week. Saturday is our last day of guiding, so that’s 40 days in straight. And it’s hard when you’re in, like, people would say, “Man, must be nice to get some rest.” Well, maybe, but like this, we wait all year for this, right? And when it’s on, and we know that it’s just a matter of weather, you know, we could be froze up tomorrow. Like, we’re not ever super keen on slacking off the throttle.
Stephen Margeson: Us being stretched east to west, you guys at least have the option to easily travel and chase the migration south as it goes. Whereas once its south, it’s kind of a big deal for us to hunt across the border, you know.

Matt Wilson: We’re in another country.
Ramsey Russell: You talk about given distances in times. And I’ve noticed since I’ve been here that St. John River, it’s like you all’s compass.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.

Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Every direction is relative to this St. John River.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.

Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: What are some examples of that? Upriver, downriver?
Stephen Margeson: Yeah. Basically, we always, no matter where we are, because we hunt both sides of the river, and it zigzags kind of north to south.
Ramsey Russell: I picking up the lingo.
Stephen Margeson: Over crosses across the border. Yeah.

Matt Wilson:  We have our own lingo in Carlton County.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Do you really?
Matt Wilson: We have an encyclopedia.
Stephen Margeson: So we just always need to know where the river is for our direction because the roads around here. You travel these roads for a lot of years, and you still find roads that you’re wondering where they go.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, but everything is mostly like up or downriver. Yep.
Ramsey Russell: What do you all do when you’re not duck hunting and guiding duck hunts? What do you do then? I mean, how do you spend the rest of your life? I’ll start with you, Stephen. What is your said you got a union job. What do you do?
Stephen Margeson: Right after high school, me and my girlfriend, we started at Old Dutch Snack Foods, a potato chip plant. Basically been there 15 years.
Ramsey Russell: Potato chip?
Stephen Margeson: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: You make potato chips?
Stephen Margeson: Yep, we make them and distribute them. We’re an American company, but we distribute.
Ramsey Russell: What kind of potato chips do you make?
Stephen Margeson: Everything. If you’ve eaten Walmart chips, they’re probably ours. If you’ve eaten, you know, all of our brands up here are all us. Basically, any private label’s made by us.
Ramsey Russell: You make potato chips?
Stephen Margeson: Yep. We get them in, we order them. A lot of these farmers grow potatoes for us. We slice them, dice them, package them, and distribute them wherever they need to go, North America, South America.
Ramsey Russell: Drop them in hot grease.
Stephen Margeson: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Stephen Margeson: We’ve got two fry rooms that are as big as Olympic swimming pools, basically.
Ramsey Russell: Are you kidding? A fryer as big as an Olympic swimming pools?
Stephen Margeson: Yeah. Massive.
Ramsey Russell: How many pounds of potato chips?
Stephen Margeson: 4,000 an hour to 6,000 pounds.

Ramsey Russell: 4,000 pounds?

Stephen Margeson: Depending on what the fryer’s set at.
Ramsey Russell: At 2 tons an hour.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah. Thirty machines it feeds, and we can have two people on a machine packing those out.
Ramsey Russell: Had I known this, I’d have to get a tour of your potato chip plant. I’ve never been to a potato chip plant. That’s crazy.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah, it’s pretty, it’s changed a lot. When I started there, everything was manual. Fifteen years ago, everything was knobs and settings and stuff. Now it’s all digital. It’s all automated.

Ramsey Russell: Push a button, walk away.

Stephen Margeson: Yeah, Let it go.

Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy. What flavor do you all make?
Stephen Margeson: Everything. Barbecue. Ketchup is one a lot of guys don’t hear about, but it’s super popular.
Ramsey Russell: That’s a Canadian, that’s an over crowd thing.
Stephen Margeson: If anybody gets the option, try some ketchup chips. There, you know, to die for.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I like French fries and ketchup.
Stephen Margeson: Yep, exactly. And then so I do that most of the year, and then I started doing ski patrol at our local ski hill, just my off days in the wintertime. Winter’s a little slow, and I can’t handle sitting home too long with nothing to do. And then spring comes around, and I bear guide. We’ve got some guys that come up and do traditional bow hunting, all Americans. And I’ve just been getting into that the last three years.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. What’s a big bear up here?
Stephen Margeson: The biggest spring bear we got, now mind you, our guys are sitting 15 to 20 yards from these bears. So the big bears, it takes a lot more to get on them. But we’re shooting 350-pound, 400-pound bears. That’s a big spring bear.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Stephen Margeson: The biggest one I think last year shot was 355.
Ramsey Russell: I kind of fell down a rabbit hole briefly, eating bear. I like to eat bear venison.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Are the spring bears good to eat?
Stephen Margeson: Yep. The last few winters have been so easy on them that when we’re killing them in the spring, they still got inches of fat from the winter.
Ramsey Russell: Really? You brought some lard so we could cook the other night. And you do your own pig, have you tried bears grease?
Stephen Margeson: We haven’t yet, but I’ve been wanting to the last couple years. I keep meaning to do it, keep meaning to save it, but it just always slips my mind. But we save all the fat off our pig just for that reason.
Ramsey Russell: If I work at a potato chip plant, is that all I can eat?
Stephen Margeson: Basically, unfortunately.
Ramsey Russell: You know, like I just hear the story of these high school kids that get a job working at Baskin Robbins, and they say eat all you want because sooner or later you don’t want to eat no more.
Stephen Margeson: 100%. So that’s how it is there. Everybody gets in the first month, you’re hand over fist, and then after that, you don’t even want to look at them.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Stephen Margeson: And I’ve been there long enough now that I turn my nose up.
Ramsey Russell: It’s just a product. Don’t eat it.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah, exactly.
Ramsey Russell: If you were going to eat potato chips, what would be your favorite flavor? Ketchup?
Stephen Margeson: Honestly, salt, fresh right out of the fryer.
Ramsey Russell: Oh boy.
Stephen Margeson: So hot you can hardly touch it.
Ramsey Russell: That’s what I like. That’s my favorite. Just like the thin or Pringles, Salt flavored.
Stephen Margeson: Yep. Hasn’t been stale, hasn’t been in the air, fresh.
Ramsey Russell: How long does a potato chip last in a sack?
Stephen Margeson: Well, depending on where we’re sending it, surprisingly enough, depending on what country it goes to, it can go from 90 days to 120 to 150 days. It’s really weird that way. You know, we send stuff to resorts in South America and stuff. We send it over to Europe, all over America, and just depending on their own regulations on their FDA or whatever they’ve got, it can go 90 days, plus or minus.
Ramsey Russell: I’ve met a lot of people throughout my travels around the world that do a lot of different things, but you’re the first potato chip maker I’ve ever made.
Stephen Margeson: And I’ve done all the jobs there. I started working night shift making the potato chips, and now I’m just shipping out and doing logistical stuff now in the shipping department.
Ramsey Russell: I guess that doesn’t cramp your duck hunting style.
Stephen Margeson: They’re really good. Luckily, all my bosses are hunters, but not waterfowl hunters.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Stephen Margeson: So we’ve got an unwritten rule where you need your time off to air hunt or moose hunt. I’ll cover you, you cover me. You know, we’ll make sure everything, wheels keep spinning.

Ramsey Russell: That’s good. What about you, Matt? What do you do when you’re not busy? You run a guide service? Seasonal guide service. You hunt a lot yourself. What do you do the rest of the year?

Matt Wilson: Train dogs. I run a dog training business called Maritime Dog Training, and a small part of that is training hunting dogs. Really, what I do mostly is train obedience, all levels. Like, you know, starting out in basics and advanced levels.

Ramsey Russell: I think that’s genius. I know a lot of dog trainers back home. Char, dog trainers, several others. That’s a hard job.

Matt Wilson: Definitely.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of work, a lot of time, and, you know, a lot of clients that don’t want you. I mean, you train the dog, but now you’ve got a lot of operator error. But all of a sudden, I mean, I told you this on the phone the other day. I think it’s genius because a duck hunter that has a dog like Char or Memphis or one of these dogs over here, most guys want to know how to handle and work their dogs. Most dog owners don’t, most housewives and soccer moms, they’ve got a dog, and the dog kind of runs the house, not the other way around.

Matt Wilson: Well. When you’re doing lessons, number one, your dog doesn’t have to be a lab or a retriever of any sort. Like, you’re coming and doing obedience lessons just because you want your dog to be a good citizen, which everybody should do. So, we’re going to teach your dog to sit, how to have good leash manners, heel, stay, come when you’re called, things like that. If you can teach somebody’s dog to come when they’re called, that is a game changer for 98% of people. And that’s all they’re looking for. But if you bring Char to me, well, that’s just the most minute thing you need her to do, come when called. There are umpteen other things we have to teach this dog in basic retriever training. The lessons in obedience, service dog training, therapy dog training, and behavior modification just blew up my range.

Ramsey Russell: How did you get into that line of work?

Matt Wilson: Honestly from waterfowl hunting. Always having dogs around. I’ve always been really into dogs. We always had dogs growing up, and I always messed around with them. What really got me into it was when I got Otter, which would have been 12 years ago. That was my first. I had dogs in high school that were my own, but Otter was like my first real serious.

Ramsey Russell: Finished dog

Matt Wilson: Finished dog. Yep. I learned a lot from her, and we had a lot of success. Otter was a two-time Grand Master Hunter and had some field trial points. She ran a couple of nationals, and yeah, things just took off from there. I was a pipe fitter and a plumber, and like we talked about with business, you’ve got to take the leap, take the chance, and take the risk. I was laid off one winter, and I’d been thinking about it a lot. I was like, you know what I’m gonna start a business.

Ramsey Russell: For some people, it’s hard working for somebody else. For me, it’s just hard working for somebody else.

Matt Wilson: Sure, yeah. Yeah, I wouldn’t go back. I wouldn’t have it any other way. And there is no body in my family that have a business on.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve never worked for anybody else. And I did it from age 15 to 42. I’ve never worked for anybody else. That for whatever reason, I gave it my all.

Matt Wilson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: But when you’re on your own, you give it your all and then some.

Matt Wilson: Yeah, you have to.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Matt Wilson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You know, working for myself just inspires me to work harder.

Matt Wilson: Yeah. When you own your own business, nobody’s going to be standing there telling you to get out of bed. You can lay in bed if you want, if you want to be lazy. But your paycheck will reflect that. I’ve got three kids here, and their happiness and the way this house runs is based on whether I want to be lazy and not bring in any money or do the job that I should be doing.

Ramsey Russell: So, you’ll train a few retrievers. But you train just a lot of dogs how to sit, how to come to their name. I’ve had one dog in my life. It was my son’s dog, his first dog that was given to him, that wouldn’t come. At three months old, you’d call it. It wouldn’t come to you. That dog found another home.

Matt Wilson: Yeah. Just real independent.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, something.

Matt Wilson: And you know what I find nowadays with people and their dogs is people aren’t getting dogs based on their breeding. They’re getting dogs based on what they look like. A lot of people are overdogged. We have a lot of German shepherds around here, which is not a dog that’s any sort of a joke. It’s a working dog. People buy working-line or working-breed dogs. And you know, hey, I have this dog. It’s crazy around the house. All it wants to do is retrieve. Well, it’s a lab, you know, that’s what they want to do.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what they do.

Matt Wilson: His job is to pick up whatever’s on the ground and bring it to you. You throw it, the dog will die to do that. You know, it’s a shepherd. It’s constantly on guard. It can’t sit down, it’s whining. That’s because it needs a job. Right. Like, it’s not a pork chop. It’s not meant to lay on.

Ramsey Russell: Is it harder training a working breed, a German shepherd, a border collie? Is it easier to train a working breed than a non-working breed like a Pekingese or a cockatoo?

Matt Wilson: Yeah, 100%. Because they have that want and will to learn.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: You know, they come from a long line of dogs that want to learn. When we buy our dogs, like all three of us here have they come from royal bloodlines. They come from a long line of dogs that were not only healthy but wanted to pick up ducks. Right. That’s what we want, a dog to do that job. Well, everybody else’s dog has genetics of some sort from working lines. Some of them are just way watered down. I mean, if you have a doodle of some sort, depending on what it’s bred with, and there’s a lot of them, there are probably no bloodlines in there.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: But there might be, you never know. But certainly, a working-line dog is way easier for me, even if they’re a lot. Like when I got Tank, I was way over dogged to go from Otter to him. Like, it was like driving a Camry to driving a Ferrari. Right?
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: I just didn’t have the skills.
Ramsey Russell: He is a Tank too.
Matt Wilson: He is, yeah. He’s an animal.
Ramsey Russell: He’s a powerhouse out there getting those geese.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You told me a great story today. We went to town to get steaks, and you pointed to a house and said they had a big yellow lab the size of a sofa. Tell me that story. That was a great story. They’re not bringing it to you to get trained. You remember telling that story?
Matt Wilson: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Why do they bring you that dog every summer?
Matt Wilson: Well, you know, and I’ve said this to people in the past, sometimes people, they’ve had a dog here, and they’re wondering whether they want to send the dog back because they miss the dog. And I’m like, what would the dog want? Well, he’d probably want to go to camp. And these people sent the dog back not because they needed him to learn anymore. They knew that he enjoyed it. They knew he enjoyed his time with me and enjoyed his time at camp. Right? It was like him going to camp and playing with the other dogs because he’s in a single-dog home. But when he comes here, he’s here for a month, maybe two, and he’s with six or eight other dogs every day, right outside, ripping around and playing. He’s just loving his life. And they can see that. So they do that for him. Right. Send him to camp.
Ramsey Russell: Are there breeds you just shy away from, Say, “Nope.”
Matt Wilson: Malinois. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a working dog, but a serious working dog.

Matt Wilson: I try to work with them, but man, the people while the people see them on Instagram.
Ramsey Russell: They’ve already been trained, or they’ve already got something going on. I mean, like, if you took one as a puppy, don’t you think you could.
Matt Wilson: Oh, yeah. I’d love to have one as a puppy.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I’ve seen they’re brilliant, extremely athletic.
Matt Wilson: Oh, they’re extremely, they’re way more intelligent most of the time than people give them credit for. The problem is when I get them, it’s behavior modification.
Ramsey Russell: They’ve got a bad habit already.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. And they work with their mouth. They’re quick. Almost everyone I’ve had has bitten their owner several times right in front of me. Even with the muzzle on, they’re scary. They’re just on another level, Ramsey. When you get around them, the energy in the room is not the same.
Ramsey Russell: Very few people are really a good home to have a Milionis as a pet.
Matt Wilson: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: They’re probably just on the job for safety and protection and professional work.
Stephen Margeson: They weren’t bred for the couch.
Matt Wilson: No, It’s a full-time job when you have one of those. Yeah. And any of the smaller breeds, like the toy breeds and stuff, I don’t have much luck with those.
Ramsey Russell: No, Isn’t much you can do with them. They’re just made to pet and feed, smooch around and stuff like that.
Matt Wilson: They’re not ever on a leash. When they want to go somewhere, they just carry them.
Ramsey Russell: I want to change the subject. I hunted with some young men out in Manitoba, young guns. And I just fell off into a conversation with them about Canada versus the United States. We’ve talked a little bit about a cultural difference, a waterfowl cultural difference here versus, say, down there in Arkansas. Like, I noticed you all have got American shotgun brands, American sponsors for your YouTube and stuff. You’ve got American blinds, American decoys. Is it better? Why is it better? Is it not as available here? Why is it not available here? Just trying to fall into. How would you compare? Because you all both get the Internet, you all  both see television, you all  both traveled, you all  both got friends and had clients come up. I’m trying to just establish a difference in the gear level and around the Hunting culture in Canada, New Brunswick versus.
Stephen Margeson: The border makes it hard. So we basically, my understanding, we’ve got to deal with brokers. We can’t just deal with a company directly here.
Ramsey Russell: You can’t just order from Cabela’s?
Stephen Margeson: You can. Cabela’s Canada. You’ve got to make sure it’s a Canadian one, and it’s all Canadian stuff. That’s pretty simple. But even what they carry here compared to what you guys carry over there is so small. And if I order something to the border and I pay $500 for it over there, I’m going to pay $250 at the border in taxes and duties to bring it across. So we’re still dealing with the brokers who bring it in bulk, but their prices are so inflated, and their selection is narrow. You know, like the Mojo you’ve got out there, I don’t even know where I’d go to buy one.
Matt Wilson: I don’t even know if we could get one here, to be honest.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Really. You like a mojo mallards?
Stephen Margeson: I love motion decoys all that stuff.
Matt Wilson: It’s a nice decoy. I’ve never seen one.
Stephen Margeson: I’m hunting over baby mallards.

Ramsey Russell: There also great decoys too.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, that’s what we have a lot of because, you know, Cabela’s always has them on for 100 bucks. Guys, we’ve had a set there for like 12 years. One of the sets. They just can’t kill.
Ramsey Russell: You take care of your gear?
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Stephen Margeson: It goes in every night. It’s in the warmth. The batteries are being charged, kept warm. I don’t leave it beat around the trailer or anything.
Matt Wilson: You’re right. We look after our gear. We use Tanglefree blinds. We want everybody to be comfortable. We want everybody to be safe.
Ramsey Russell: Those are nice blinds. I found that blind to be extremely comfortable, especially with that little flip-up lid you had today in the rain. A little lid above you. It was nice and it’s hidden.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Stephen Margeson: And we can communicate. You know, all of us have hunted a few times, but a lot of times we get new hunters. They’re not really sure what’s going on. It’s nice to look at them, talk to them, explain what’s going on, tell them they’re coming from here, coming from there.
Matt Wilson: You don’t have to worry about that top cover. That’s the thing with this whole panel blind craze that I can’t figure out. It’s not a new thing. Like Sean says, it’s not an evolution, it’s a revolution. Like, now we’re going back to panel blinds. Well, any box blind that you have as a duck blind always has a lid. But none of the blinds that we sell have lids on them. They’re starting to now. But like these panel blinds from Tanglefree with the lids on, like today, we weren’t getting rained on.
Stephen Margeson: Out of the wind.
Matt Wilson: We had top cover because that’s where they get you, right. They look down in on you. We’re just always looking for the best gear. There’s not a lot of availability here in Canada at times.

Stephen Margeson: “Winter in the Maritimes? That’s when the real magic happens. The ducks are here, and the world feels untouched.”

Ramsey Russell: If you all did have more availability, if you could wave a magic wand and get Cabela’s CA to stock something different than what they do, what would it be? What would you borrow from the American culture without having to pay all that duty over here?
Stephen Margeson: I mean, the ammo we shoot has been great. Kent is what we shoot. It works flawlessly. But our ammo market is kind of narrow here. Like, I’ve got no issues with Kent, but if I wanted to go buy something else, I might have some Remington, you know, some Winchester. Like, there’s very limited. And when you go to a store, you’ve got to choose from BB or fours or maybe even number sixes. There’s not, like, there’s every selection. You know, you might go there, and there might only be three-inch, might only be two-and-three-quarter. You’re kind of really limited on that, especially locally.
Ramsey Russell: You don’t have a lot of product selection.
Stephen Margeson: No.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. And that’s what I was going to say, product selection. Like, when you look at, we’ll say, for instance, Max Prairie Wings. Like, if we’re talking about Mojos, there’s four or five different brands of those.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Matt Wilson: You know what I mean? And that’s the big thing about in the States, like panel blinds. There’s several different brands of those to look at, right. Like, we just don’t have the selection up here whatsoever at all with any of that stuff. You know, firearms are a little bit better. We’ve got a good presence for that. But you’re right. Ammo, we don’t have a lot. We kind of get what’s left over.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah, you show up. This is what I’ve got. This is what I got to shoot.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Just take it or leave it.
Matt Wilson: Sort of, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. We’re recording this on election night, and that one thing that has shocked me for the last seven or eight weeks that I’ve been in Canada is how many conversations in a duck blind with Canadians like yourselves, the topic of the American election has come up.
Stephen Margeson: It affects us. Like I said, we’re 10 miles from the border or less than 10 miles from the border. What happens down there affects us greatly. And a lot of times, we’re a reflection of what’s going to happen down there.
Ramsey Russell: I would say you two guys know more about, could make a more informed decision on the American election than a lot of folks that voted today in America. You know, we were talking about the real. You see these films on social media where they come up, say, “Who are you voting for?” “I’m voting for Harris.” “Oh, you like Harris” “Oh, yeah, I like Harris.” “You like her policy about building the wall?” They’ll name a Trump policy. Like, “Yeah, yeah, I’m all for that.” They don’t even know what she’s for.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, it’s crazy, right. And there’s always going to be a percentage of that. And a lot of that makes you, it truly makes you wonder, like, if they even stopped and thought about it.
Stephen Margeson: I think most people see the headlines, and that’s what they read. Whatever the headline is posted.

Ramsey Russell: Fake News

Stephen Margeson: That’s it.
Matt Wilson: Or my granddaddy, you know, they voted this way, and we’re going to vote that way.
Ramsey Russell: You know, who would you all vote for if you all were.
Stephen Margeson: Oh, have no choice to go but Trump.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Stephen Margeson: What else would you do?
Ramsey Russell: What do you like about Trump versus as a Canadian.
Stephen Margeson: Pro business. Coming from a country that basically has everything, the natural resources here, why are we struggling? We got all the minerals, we got all the water, we got all the Lumber.
Ramsey Russell: Got all the oil. Got all the gas.
Stephen Margeson: And we’re struggling here. We are paying $1.82 a liter. I don’t know what that is. $8 a gallon.
Ramsey Russell: It’s just crazy. It’s expensive.
Stephen Margeson: For oil the refinery is an hour south of us.
Matt Wilson: And I couldn’t agree with you more, Steve. That’s my thing. He’s a businessman. That’s the way your country’s got to be run. You know, if he’s gonna slam tariffs on people like, “Hey, you want to build your vehicles in Mexico? No problem. Go ahead. But there’s gonna be a 200% tariff when you try to bring it back in, and it’s not gonna be worth it.” So, you do it here, you do it in Detroit, you create jobs, and you bring our communities back up, and we rebuild this country the way it’s supposed to be. And here, it’s no different. Like, we’re talking about our natural resources. Like, right now, we pay a carbon tax.
Stephen Margeson: That doesn’t go back into helping the environment.
Matt Wilson: They’re literally taking money from you, and then they’re repackaging it and saying, “There you go. We’re gonna actually give you a rebate.”

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Well, how does that even make sense? You’re taking our money, and it’s not cleaning up that. We’re net zero on carbon.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: But there’s been a lot of that stuff, like, so many opportunities, even in this province with the refinery going down, like, should have built a new refinery.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: “The First Nations’ knowledge here is unmatched. They’ve read these waters for centuries, and we’re still learning from them.”

Ramsey Russell: It’s an international border that separates our two countries, but it really kind of sort of ain’t. I mean, it strikes me, the parallels. You all got a different form of government than we do, but the parallels, you all have got a lot of woke issues.
Matt Wilson: Oh, man.
Ramsey Russell: And your prime minister, I think you all call your president but, I mean, you all have got a lot of woke, like, right, boy, right there on the cusp of the pandemic boom, he called a special session and started banning all kinds of guns while they weren’t in order, while they weren’t in session, you know, and you all are dealing with a lot of crazy issues. And you said something yesterday, Stephen, that made me look at Greg and say, “Well, that’s encouraging.” I mean, you all got some very conservative provinces. British Columbia is historically a kind of West Coast province, and it’s one conservative.
Stephen Margeson: It has zero seats last year, and I think it was up to 34 or 36. Just because peoples see.
Ramsey Russell: It’s like the silent majority starting to wake up, going, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. This ain’t good.”
Stephen Margeson: Well, our last election. One and a half million. Our country’s small. One and a half million in the States doesn’t sound like a lot, but the popular vote went conservative. A million and a half people. That’s a big population.
Ramsey Russell: That’s the silent majority drawing a line in the sand.
Stephen Margeson: But by the time the votes are counted, I think it’s in Manitoba or right there, Ontario somewhere. It doesn’t matter what the rest of the country votes.
Ramsey Russell: It’s Ontario.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Ottawa and Toronto.
Stephen Margeson: It doesn’t matter. Montreal, Quebec City, Halifax.
Ramsey Russell: Are your officials elected on sheer popular vote?
Stephen Margeson: No, not popular vote at all. It’s just however, you know, if you get the most votes in your riding, you’re in.
Ramsey Russell: Well, that’s what I call popular vote.
Stephen Margeson: Well, nobody gets to vote. I don’t get to vote for Trudeau. I don’t get to vote for Pierre. You’ve actually got to be.
Matt Wilson: You got to vote for your MLA.
Ramsey Russell: You vote within your party. That’s all very interesting, very, very interesting
Stephen Margeson: The popular vote, that’s what he actually got in on. That was one of his original things, was he was going to redo our election platform. But I think when he got in, he realized, “I wouldn’t have been elected if it was done this way,” and he wouldn’t stay elected if it was done this way, if there was a popular vote.
Matt Wilson: And there’s been a lot of stuff. We talked about a little bit today, the truckers’ rally that came up through and him calling the state of emergency. Like nobody.
Ramsey Russell: They weren’t just civil disobedience.
Matt Wilson: They weren’t burning buildings down. They were just there.
Ramsey Russell: They’re burning cities.
Stephen Margeson: No, they were having fun, playing music, driving trucks. Yeah. They shut the city down. They didn’t want to work. They didn’t agree with what was going on.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What was going on?
Stephen Margeson: The regulations around Covid were getting a little extreme. They were trying to force people to stay home. They were trying to tell you, “You can’t go to work today. You can’t run your business.” Really extreme. And a lot of people were going without. Businesses that were struggling were going under, we lost.
Matt Wilson: A ton of businesses.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah, and over. Just because they told you, “You couldn’t go to work,” you know?
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I bet they went to work. I bet they got their paycheck.
Stephen Margeson: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: They got to stay home, same as ours.
Matt Wilson: Well, and people. And like we said today, people. It got to the point where people that supported that GoFundMe page had their accounts, their bank accounts, frozen.

Stephen Margeson: Without any criminal process.
Ramsey Russell: They supported the trucker movement, and their accounts were frozen?
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: By the government?
Matt Wilson: Absolutely.
Ramsey Russell: What was that other thing? Some kind of corruption charge or investigation? And they said, no, we’re not going to send you.
Stephen Margeson: Right now, Actually, I believe our parliament’s been down for the last month. There was an issue with the 400 or a bunch of money anyway, that they’ve been funneling into their own pockets. The RCMP wanted to investigate. They refused to give the information. And now the House has just been shut down. They’re not doing anything. They’re just arguing.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: Imagine, like, how does that make any sense? No, no, just. Yeah, we’re just gonna.
Stephen Margeson: They gave them the information. It was all redacted.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Stephen Margeson: All blacked out.

Matt Wilson: No.
Ramsey Russell: No, that’s why it’s all going. That’s why it’s all starting to swing conservative. I mean, my fingers are crossed that we get an adult in the White House this term. Four more years.
Stephen Margeson: Hard decisions and hard conversations need to be had. But we’re at a point right now where we can’t have a conversation. If we don’t agree on the same thing, we can’t sit down and have that conversation for some reason.
Matt Wilson: No, there’s. Yeah, you’re absolutely right, Steve. It can’t be that way. You know, you’re some sort of, you’re labeled.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Then it might be by design. United we stand, divided we fall. You know, I’m saying. It could be by design.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Because there’s no bipartisan, there’s no crossover, there’s no solutions. It’s just mired down in politics.
Stephen Margeson: I’m 32, and that’s not how I was brought up in school. I was brought up in, you got somebody you got a disagreement with, you should sit down and talk it out.
Matt Wilson: You communicate.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: And I mean, as much as I, you know, we’re all sitting here talking about Trump and this election, as much as I sit and think it seems like a pretty clear-cut decision, I can’t help but think that the last one I felt the same way about, you know, and then it was kind of like, “Oh, no, you didn’t win.”
Ramsey Russell: Who do you all think is gonna win, from outside looking in, based on your media?
Stephen Margeson: If you just believe the news and all you read is CNN or, you know, I’d say it’s gonna be Harris. But when you actually get looking into any social media, any of that stuff, the bodies on the floor behind Trump, the people are there.
Ramsey Russell: Joe freaking Rogan
Matt Wilson: Hey, I was just gonna say you get people like Elon Musk.
Stephen Margeson: Ask the most socially liberal people. Well, not Elon, but Joe is super socially liberal.
Matt Wilson: They both were.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. I mean that. It doesn’t get, I don’t care what singer you bring up on stage. They’re not Joe Rogan and Elon Musk.
Ramsey Russell: By the time this podcast airs, we’ll have a new president. Let’s. I hope it airs, and we’re all happy because it’s the right man for the job. I swear I do. What is poutine?
Stephen Margeson: Canadian delicacy.
Ramsey Russell: That’s a big deal because you see it throughout Canada. But from Oh, man, from Quebec east, it’s a big freaking deal.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Stephen Margeson: We’ve got whole restaurants here that specialize in it or hamburger.
Matt Wilson: Poutineries.
Stephen Margeson: Poutineries. They’ll add anything to those. And actually, your version of the poutine the other night was the first time I’ve ever had that. I’ve never had any new geez
Ramsey Russell: I just made it on the fly.
Stephen Margeson: Yep. It was delicious cheese and its gravy. Goose gravy. Canadian goose. It was delicious.
Ramsey Russell: It is French fries and dark gravy with cheese curds. That’s what classical poutine is.
Matt Wilson: Any sort of gravy. It can be turkey or beef. And a lot of places like turkey or beef gravy.
Ramsey Russell: I can see that. Well up here the restaurant we ate at today, it was kind of a light gravy like that. Yesterday the duck blind, you know, the dogs were bringing in some young Canada geese and some corn-fed black duck and battered. I’m like, I told Greg, I said, “We gotta chicken fry these and make a chicken-fried goose poutine.”
Stephen Margeson: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: I thought it turned out for a first try, I think it turned out.
Matt Wilson: You did a hell of a job. I’ve never eaten goose like that.
Ramsey Russell: Really?  Little girl was eating it. She liked it.
Matt Wilson: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: She got a little piece of star and I looked over. She had a big piece.
Matt Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen Margeson: And like I said, I thought I did the most with the geese than anybody we hang out with. I’ll do sausage. I’ll do summer sausage. I’ll do burger. I’ll do all kinds of stuff, like grinding it.
Ramsey Russell: I think burger’s a good use for it with a lot of geez.
Stephen Margeson: It’s my favorite. Just literally dice it up, throw it in a slow cooker, pressure can it, just like that whole. And then when you’re ready, maybe some onions in there with it. And then you just throw it out on your stove, warm it up, and it just falls right apart.
Matt Wilson: That’s a big thing here. A lot of people bottle meat.
Ramsey Russell: What do you do with it then?
Stephen Margeson: Store it on the shelf.
Ramsey Russell: But after you heat it up, what do you do with it?
Stephen Margeson: A lot of times, potatoes and vegetables.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, it’s like a stew.
Stephen Margeson: It’s like a stew.
Ramsey Russell: Stew.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Speaking of stew, you know, I come up here thinking I knew everything. I said, “We’re gonna eat the Brunswick stew.” And you go, “What the heck is the Brunswick stew?” I’m like, we’re in the Brunswick. So I Google it, and it’s like, it was invented in Brunswick, Georgia.
Stephen Margeson: It’s like Canada.
Matt Wilson: I just drew a blank. I was catching flies. I’m like, “I’ve never heard of that, man. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Stephen Margeson: Somebody asked me about Canadian bacon. I was like, baloney.
Ramsey Russell: I heard Canadian bacon called something else recently, Pea meal.

Stephen Margeson: I never heard of it.

Ramsey Russell: Over in Ontario. I’m like, “What the heck is this?” “Canadian bacon.”
Stephen Margeson: Yeah. Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Why don’t you just say Canadian bacon?
Stephen Margeson: I just call it bacon.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Matt Wilson: I don’t. Yeah, back bacon is what I always thought was Canadian. Yeah. I don’t know.

Ramsey Russell: Had a real good time hunting with you guys. I truly did. It was a bucket list trip for me to come and immerse myself in a totally different form of Canada than I have been involved with, and it was totally different. Real eye-opener. And I hope. I really believe that a lot of folks listening may wonder where the heck New Brunswick is, but I think they need to pull out a map, look at it, and find their way up here. I think it just has a lot of unique hunting opportunities offered. Not the least of which is black duck. I mean, I think if guys want to shoot black ducks, coming to Maritime Canada, New Brunswick being one of those provinces, got a limit of six. What a great place to come and do it.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. It’s our thing for sure.
Ramsey Russell: And how can folks connect with you, Matt?
Matt Wilson: Instagram, Facebook, you know, and be Goose Man or Waterfowl East is our landing business page. And we have a TV show on Wild TV if you watch that, Waterfowl East.
Stephen Margeson: Canadian Streaming, you know, it’s our hunting channel. Your guys Outdoor Channel.
Matt Wilson: But YouTube, Waterfowl East.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, I’ve enjoyed it and I really appreciate you all. What’s the plan? Tomorrow morning we’re gonna hunt in the rain, sounds like. And I’m gonna shed my wet gear, and down the road I go heading to Fredericton. Meet up with Inukshuk, I know, you know.
Matt Wilson: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: And you feed your dogs Inukshuk. How long have you fed Inukshuk?
Matt Wilson: I would say it’s over. We were trying to think of it the last time I was down there. It’s over 10 years. I’d say 12 years.
Ramsey Russell: It’s amazing.
Matt Wilson: Yeah, yeah, It’s unreal.
Ramsey Russell: In the U.S. market, it’s really amazing how many trainers and people feed it, but it’s still one of them “if you know, you know” type products.
Matt Wilson: Yep. It’s catching on big time. It’s unlike any other product because it goes from 26-16, 30-25, and then the 32-32. And at first, that was kind of by design for sled dogs.
Ramsey Russell: And the quality local-sourced fish-based ingredients. But all that great omega fatty acids and proteins and fats.
Matt Wilson: They’re such a good company. They’re such good people too. The Coreys are, you know, Emily and her dad, Lee, and the boys, they’re all just salt-of-the-earth good people, you know. And that’s rare nowadays to find a company in general, but a pet food company that you can say, well, it isn’t owned by 25 other companies and a bunch of people.
Ramsey Russell: Shareholders.
Matt Wilson: Shareholders, that’s right. Like these people have their own mill. They care about what goes in there, you know. They’re accountable.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. So good stuff. What are we doing in the morning?
Stephen Margeson: Near where we set up the first day, we got a little pond. It’s probably like 25 feet around, like straight across.
Matt Wilson: A little fish pond.
Ramsey Russell: She’s across it.
Stephen Margeson: Yeah. Apparently, there’s 20-inch rainbow in there.
Ramsey Russell: What?
Stephen Margeson: That’s what the guy told me after we were done. I wish he would have told me that first. Maybe I’ll bring a fishing rod. But it’s just a small little, it’s right on the edge of some cornfields. There’s some woods there. It’s just a little honey hole between the river and the corn.
Ramsey Russell: Probably a little drinking pond. They’ll come off the river.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Get them a little bite, give them a little drink of water, and go feed. And probably later in the day, after I’m gone, they’ll probably come back, get a little drink, and go back to the river.
Matt Wilson: They love here. I don’t know if it’s like this other places, but here they love to go water to water. Like, there’s a pond next to the field where they’re feeding. Even the other day with Sean, they came out, swirled around the field, bunked in the water, came from the river, swirled the field into a beaver pond, then came out.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. That’s what we’re going to do.
Matt Wilson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Mallards, black ducks.

Matt Wilson: Yep.

Stephen Margeson: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Did you see some black ducks?

Matt Wilson: Yep.
Stephen Margeson: Yep. There’s a couple in the pond. There’s quite a few in the river. The river’s just over the hill.
Ramsey Russell: He’s all me into it.
Stephen Margeson: Yep. Should be a fun shoot.

Matt Wilson: That’d be a great day.
Ramsey Russell: Thank you all very much. Folks, you all been listening, my buddies up here in the Brunswick. Matt Wilson, Stephen Margeson. Great place nobody’s ever heard of New Brunswick. Go look it up on a map. It’s a really cool place. It’s a different take on Canada. Black ducks, mallards, Canada geese, that’s the reason to come. And I didn’t even get into the whole story we did with your buddy over there at Moonshine Creek. Add that to your list to stop at too. See you next time.