EP 537. Prince Edward Island Duck Hunting

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where I am concluding a six-province swing on the North American Waterfowl Tour 2024. I am in a bucket-list destination known as Prince Edward Island, which is way out on the east coast. You got to cross an 8-mile bridge, and what’s so funny is I heard about this. I heard there were people that are scared of bridges. They would drive my truck across the bridge, and I said, no, I don’t need that. Apparently, you all ain’t been from Manchac down to New Orleans across that 27 mile bridge. But it’s a paradise. It’s idyllic, beautiful rolling hills, neat farms, just picturesque landscapes surrounded on all sides by bays and oceans and straightaways. It’s just, it’s been incredible. And you know, anybody that really, truly knows me knows that I have got this thing for black ducks. I love black ducks. And there are black ducks at Prince Edward Island, making my visit over here all possible. Thanks to Captain Jeff Pitt Boss for the introductions, is my buddy Jeff Woody Wood. You know, when Jeff sent me your message, when he sent me your address, your contact information, Woody, all it said was Woody Wood. I’m like. And I asked him, I said, is that really his name? That’s kind of an odd name. He said his name’s Jeff. How you doing?

Jeff: I’m good, Ramsey. How are you?

Ramsey Russell: Good. I’ve had a great time. Can you tell?

Jeff: I think so, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Had a real good time. Born and raised here, were you?

Jeff: I was, yep. Yep. Never lived anywhere else.

Ramsey Russell: Never lived anywhere else. What was it like growing up on Prince Edward Island?

Jeff: I couldn’t think of a better place to live. Just the quality of life, the slow pace.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff: Yeah, I mean, you didn’t have to lock your doors, didn’t have to lock your car growing up at least, now it’s changed, you know. There’s twice as many people as there were when I was a kid growing up.

Ramsey Russell: It hasn’t changed for me. I mean, I haven’t locked my door, my car door, I don’t think, since I’ve been in Canada. And I’ve told everybody every place I’ve been, if you need to move my truck, the keys are in it. And the cottage keys, we’re staying at this wonderful fifth-generation campground. And I mean, the keys are right there on the coffee table, right exactly where they were when I walked in. I don’t lock a door here. I don’t feel the need to. It feels like I’ve always described Canada as compared to a lot of the major U.S. cities, especially, as kind of like Mayberry RFD. It’s almost like, and I don’t mean this in an antiquated or bad way, I mean it’s just like sitting back into a golden age where people are friendly. The only non-friendly person, and she wasn’t mean at all, she just wasn’t a talker, was a lady we went and bought shellfish from yesterday. She wasn’t terribly friendly, but everybody else was just friendly as can be.

Jeff: Yeah, I think we’re a friendly bunch.

Ramsey Russell: “You all are a friendly bunch. What did a young Woody do for fun growing up here in P.E.I.?”

Ramsey Russell: You all are a friendly bunch. What did a young Woody do for fun growing up here in P.E.I? When you were a child, when you were a teenager, what did you do? How’d you entertain yourself out here?

Jeff: I played a lot of golf at one point in time.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeff: Yep. Yeah, a lot of golf. But I’ve been hunting and fishing since I was, I mean, I don’t know how old I was when I started fishing, probably 5 or 6. And I was 12 when I started hunting, actually taking a gun and firing it. I’d go with my father before that, and he’d give me a gun, but no shells.

Ramsey Russell: Is that 12-year-old minimum age rule to hunt in Canada always existed for as long as you can remember?

Jeff: Here, yeah. Newfoundland, I think it was at least 14, maybe even 16, but they’ve dropped that down some from what I understand. But here on the island, as long as I can remember, it’s been 12.

Ramsey Russell: That’s interesting.

Jeff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It’s interesting, I guess. But you all have to have hunter safety.

Jeff: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: When did you take hunter safety?

Jeff: I would taken hunter safety in high school. So I would have been, I don’t know, 1985, 1986, somewhere around there.

Ramsey Russell: About the same time I did in high school. Of course, now, when my little old high school, it was mandatory. Half the year was driver’s ed and half the year was hunter’s ed. So everybody in my class went to Coach Roy and got driver’s ed half a year and hunter’s ed the other half. We all went to the shooting range with little .22s, all got our certifications, then it was a pass-or-fail grade.

Jeff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: That’s interesting. It sure helped my GPA, I’ll tell you that. What was it like, though, I mean, I’m trying to get like. You played golf. How did you get into playing golf? I mean, you got all these waterways, all this fishing, all these woods and farm ground to play around on.

Jeff: Yeah, my father played golf, and then I had friends that played, so we just grew up at the golf course.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff: In the summer, you go down there, you know, get there at 7 o’clock, play a round of golf, go look for golf balls, sell the golf balls, buy yourself an order of fries, maybe go out and play another 18.

Ramsey Russell: I get it. You went out. So you turn, you go out to the blind with your daddy, your granddaddy. When you’re a young man, finally it’s time to shoot. What are some of your earliest memories of waterfowl hunting on PEI? Do you remember your first duck?

Jeff: My memory of my first duck. I don’t know that it was my first duck, but it was a goldeneye.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeff: Yeah. And I was shooting a 20 gauge, and they lit in, and Dad said, now stand up and just pick out one bird and put your bead on that one bird and pull the trigger. And both barrels went off, and I went arse over teakettle. I thought I must have picked up his 12 gauge. I didn’t know what was going on, and I don’t even know if I killed it.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, my gosh.

Jeff: My memory’s not great, but that’s the first recollection I have of actually shooting a duck.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Where’d you go from there?

Jeff: Well, Dad didn’t hunt a lot of decoy hunting. Dad would jump shoot birds.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Walk some of these creeks and stuff like.

Jeff: And marshes, and then sit by a big pothole at dark and wait to see if something came in.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff: But the pond and the family’s property, we would go there. And I can remember, I’d be 14 or 15, and, you know, you just want to shoot whatever comes in. But Dad would always say, now, hold on, you know, just wait. There should be some blue wings coming. And of course, we liked to eat the blue wings.

Ramsey Russell: So you all do get some blue wings through here?

Jeff: Yeah, early. They relieve before our season starts.

Ramsey Russell: The same in Mississippi, and that’s halfway across the continent from here. All the way across the continent from here. When did you start breaking out on your own and hunting more like what you hunt now?

Jeff: I would say I think I was 16, and I think it was 16 that you could go on your own, but maybe like someone 18 had to be on your license as your guardian or your mentor or something to that effect. We’d set up for an hour and then, okay, let’s go find some birds and crawl on them. And I’m just. I’m too old and fat for that now, so.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I think you’ve probably changed into a different phase of hunter, too. We were all like that at one time. Anything we had to do. But now, at least for me, it’s become more about the process. And I want to say art form, but that’s a bad word. It’s more about the process, the ritual of duck hunting. I want to own the ducks. I want. I want them to present themselves.

Jeff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: “I want the whole thing. I want to set up where the ducks want to be and put the decoys like they like them and get them in there and kill them.”

Ramsey Russell: You know, that’s what I want. I want the whole thing. I want to set up where the ducks want to be and put the decoys like they like them and get them in there and kill them. I mean, I can leave, you’re saying this, I can leave with a bunch of ducks or no ducks. I mean, I don’t care. It’s all the same. But I think that’s more a function of age, too.
Jeff: I think so. I think there are phases, but I don’t think everyone goes through the same phases, or they may not go through them in the same sequence. I know people my age that still love to shoot a limit every time they go. Whereas myself, I’ll go and not even fire a shot. It doesn’t bother me.
Ramsey Russell: I’m gonna shoot a limit given a chance, now don’t take me wrong, but it’s not the end-all-be-all if I don’t. Like today, it just wasn’t meant to be. Went to a great spot, a spot you’ve hunted a lot of times. It was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. And I learned, very importantly, that you all’s weathermen are no more accurate than my own. The wind was completely opposite of what they predicted. And we shot a duck. One duck.
Jeff: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: But what did I tell you about shooting that one duck? I said if we got to shoot just one duck that was a dandy.
Jeff: Oh, yeah. Beautiful hybrid.
Ramsey Russell: Beautiful hybrid. And I’ve never shot a North American hybrid before, and it was a dandy hybrid. Did your granddaddy hunt?
Jeff: He did. He hunted until he was, he died when he was 99. I can remember him. He was 94. I can remember he’d go down to the pond on the family farm, and he would sit on his tractor, and if they flew close enough, he’d take a crack at them.
Ramsey Russell: He would pass shoot them, too.
Jeff: Yeah. At that point in time, he just couldn’t really do much more than just drive down in the tractor.
Ramsey Russell: But did he ever tell you any stories about back in the day?
Jeff: Oh, yeah. He told me stories about shooting Brant back when we had Brant. He told me stories of shooting, they shot a great blue heron.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Jeff: And his buddy would use the fat from that to grease down his gun.
Ramsey Russell: You are kidding.
Jeff: No.
Ramsey Russell: Never heard that.
Jeff: No, I hadn’t either.
Ramsey Russell: What was a blue heron? I’m assuming it was not protected.
Jeff: I think it was at the time.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. But they used the fat rendered down from the blue heron to rub down his gun?
Jeff: Yeah, that’s what I remember him telling me.
Ramsey Russell: Did he tell you anything else about techniques or how times had changed or how they hunted back in the old days? Like back home. A lot of old-timers, man, back in the day, clouds of ducks would be coming in. I mean, did he ever elaborate on any of these stories?
Jeff: Not that I remember. Just that, you know, the Brant stopped coming. Well, the Brant stopped coming because the eelgrass died off. But as you’ve seen, we’ve got plenty of eelgrass.
Ramsey Russell: You all got eelgrass now?
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I can’t believe the Brant aren’t coming back because that is such a staple of their diet on both coasts. That is their food staple, eelgrass. And I know that further down the eastern shore, they’re eating swamp lettuce and baseball field turf and everything else, but you would think that, you would just think that they would, given the opportunity, come back through and avail themselves of it. Like I’ve heard, for example, it’s been hypothesized that a lot of the Pacific Flyway Brant are holding up at Izembek now because it’s the largest eelgrass bed in the world. That’s their food source. And it takes something serious to push them out of there. They want to be there, and they’re going wherever they can find it, all the way down to Mexico, where they can find beds of eelgrass. So it’s just odd to me that you all don’t have Brant.
Jeff: Well, especially because they do come back in through here in the spring. Not in big numbers, but you might see a flock of 25 or 30 Brant in the spring. So I would think they would find those eelgrass beds. I’ve always hoped that they might start hitting them again heading south. But they just don’t seem to do it.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, wouldn’t that be something? I know you said your daddy would rather pass shoot, but you did tell me a story this morning in the blind about some old decoys. Tell me that story.
Jeff: So I’ve got a picture of my grandfather with, I don’t know, there are six or eight full-body Brant decoys. They’d be floating decoys. And then I don’t know, again, six or eight silhouettes. I asked Dad several times, you know, whatever became of these decoys? Because it would mean the world to me to have one. And when the Brant stopped coming, it was just a block of wood at that point and probably ended up in the wood stove.
Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that something? On a cold night, might as well burn it. Brant don’t come down anymore. Wouldn’t that be a treasure to have?
Jeff: Oh, whatever.
Ramsey Russell: Are there any decoy carvers on the island that you’re aware of? Is it one of those historical areas where you’ve heard stories of old historical decoy carvers?
Jeff: Yeah, there’s a book that I have, and I was going to show you that yesterday and I never thought of it.
Ramsey Russell: Look at it tonight.
Jeff: Yeah, for sure. I think it’s called The Decoys of the Maritime Provinces or Maritime Canada. Like John Ramsey, Roy Mills, oh, there’s one from Summer side that I’m just not remembering. But there were some well-known carvers in the day. Now there’s not. I carve a little bit myself, not as much as I used to. A good buddy of mine, Lock Jones, excuse me, he carves. Outside of that, I can’t really think of anyone carving working decoys.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’m sure they did. It must have been a big thing. You know, I know that the seafood, I’m going to ask you a little bit more about that in a minute, but I know that the seafood industry is big here, but just leading into, segwaying into the topic of island life, I just can’t imagine that waterfowl, that there’s not some form of history, just cultural relation to the waterfowl that come through here. There’s gotta be.
Jeff: Yeah, there would be somewhat. There are just so few hunters now compared to what there were. It just seems to be a dying sport here.
Ramsey Russell: Do you think a lot more people hunted back in your daddy and granddaddy’s time?
Jeff: Yeah, maybe not my grandfather’s time. Well, probably, actually. I mean, back then, probably everybody hunted, you know, anyone that was a farmer because they were providing for the table. Now it’s more of a sport than a way of providing nutrition for your family.
Ramsey Russell: How big is Prince Edward Island, and how many people live here?
Jeff: If you drove from tip to tip, I’m guessing it would take you three to three and a half hours.
Ramsey Russell: A couple hundred miles?
Jeff: Yeah, I guess. And I think the population’s around 175,000 now.
Ramsey Russell: I read yesterday on the Internet it’s the 140th biggest island in the world and about the fourth or fifth largest in Canada, you know. But it’s still an island. Gotta come eight miles or so across that bridge, across that strait to get here. And then we get, we’re back up against the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Is that what they call it?
Jeff: Gulf of St. Lawrence is on the north side, and then the Northumberland Strait is on the south side.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, I see. I see. That’s all just pretty much the Atlantic Ocean.
Jeff: Yeah. Basically, you have to go out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and then in between Cape Breton and Newfoundland to truly get into the Atlantic.
Ramsey Russell: You’ve been around other parts of Canada in your lifetime?
Jeff: I have, yep.

Ramsey Russell: How would you characterize island life as compared to other parts of Canada?
Jeff: It’s definitely more laid back than any place that I’ve been, west of New Brunswick. The Maritimes, you know, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, are a lot like here. And I mean, I guess too, like BC, I’ve only been to Vancouver, like the bigger center. So that’s a much different way of life in the bigger centers than it is here.
Ramsey Russell: It surprised me because the habitat, even though we’re eight miles away from mainland Canada, it still surprises me you all don’t have moose and deer.
Jeff: Yeah. And there was.
Ramsey Russell: Or bear.
Jeff: Yeah. The last bear, I think, was shot in the ’30s.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: So there were historically deer and moose here. They just got hunted out back at the turn of the century.
Jeff: Yeah. Deer for sure. I’m not certain about moose. And I think there was caribou.
Ramsey Russell: It sure makes chasing your tail lights in the morning, going down these bobbing and weaving, dark roads, sure makes me relax a little bit. I’m not worried about some big critter stepping out.
Jeff: No.
Ramsey Russell: I worry about that in New Brunswick.
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: They got lot of moose, a lot of bears.
Jeff: Yeah. When you get on the other side of that bridge, you have to be aware of that.
Ramsey Russell: Tell me. Do you know much about the history of Prince Edward Island? I’m always intrigued. Got a lot of ducks here. Got a lot of seafood here. And somewhere back in you all, in Canadian history, the English displaced the French. It was a war of some sort. And somehow or other, I think somebody told me they brought in the Scottish, but they got rid of the French, took them south, dropped a lot of them off down Louisiana, where they thrived with the seafood and the waterfowl and everything else. And a lot of them old timers, like Dale Borland and his bunch, they still speak it, old French. You know what I’m saying? I mean, that’s where the Cajun. I have driven here on the island and over New Brunswick, and I’ve seen stores and shops named Acadia or Acadian.
Jeff: Acadia.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What was history like here?
Jeff: You touched on a lot of it. I mean, you know, the French were still called Acadians, and that’s, I think, my understanding is that’s where Cajun came from, is from the word Acadian.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What happened that they got rid of them?
Jeff: You know what, Ramsey, Honestly, I’m not sure.
Ramsey Russell: Change of the subject. I know driving around the island here, it’s fairly quiet right now, but the population surges during tourist season. Am I right? It’s a big tourist industry. I mean, there’s a lot of cottages. There’s a lot of vacant cottages right now, like summer homes, people comes here. Where a lot of the tourists come from?
Jeff: All over, I mean, there’s a lot from Ontario and Quebec, a lot from the New England states, but yeah, you’ll see license plates from all over North America here in the summertime.
Ramsey Russell: All over?

Jeff:  Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Is it hard getting around then?
Jeff: It’s definitely different. Yeah. You definitely notice the traffic. I mean, if we went through Cavendish, which we haven’t, but if you drove through Cavendish right now, it’s a ghost town. And in the summer, it’s anything.
Ramsey Russell: Your first duck. Your first duck was a goldeneye. When did you start getting into the black duck?
Jeff: Oh, very soon after. I mean, it’s not all we had, but it was definitely the number one duck.
Ramsey Russell: That’s the bread-and-butter duck.
Jeff: It certainly was, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I mean, some of the places we’ve been driving around, taking some videos, looking around, scouting, and that seems to be the foremost predominant species.
Jeff: Yeah, it probably still is. But the mallard’s a close second. We’ve got an awful lot of mallards now.
Ramsey Russell: You were in your 50s. How old were you when you started seeing, Let me ask a question. How old were you when you killed your first black duck? How old were you when you killed your first mallard?
Jeff: I’m gonna guess I was probably 12 or 13 when I shot my first black, and I was 18 when I shot my first mallard.
Ramsey Russell: Okay, but was that a prize?
Jeff: Oh, yeah. It was a big deal.
Ramsey Russell: When did, and where in the timeline of your life, did mallards become more predominant? Like, I’ve just heard that it could have been as recently as 30 or 40 years ago that mallards kind of became a thing up here.

Jeff: “I shot a mallard, and I’d seen them, but, I mean, they were rare. Like you had to scan through a big flock of blacks to see if you could see a mallard.”

Jeff: Well, and even then, they weren’t much of a thing. Like, so it was 1986 when I shot my first mallard, and I’d seen them, but, I mean, they were rare. Like you had to scan through a big flock of blacks to see if you could see a mallard. And now there’s places you go, and a buddy and I, we hunted a field not too far from here, and I forget, it was the first week, second week of the season, and we shot 12 ducks. Well, all 12 were mallards.
Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable.

Jeff: “We hunted a field not too far from here… all 12 were mallards.”

Jeff: Where we hunted yesterday morning, we hunted that opening day, and we shot 11 ducks. And I think at least nine of them were mallards.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’ve seen quite a few mallards here, no doubt. But some of the places you hunt, it may be still not mostly black ducks.
Jeff: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: Like yesterday afternoon, for example.
Jeff: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: All we saw were black ducks.
Jeff: And if you went out here behind you in Brackley Bay, you’ll shoot the odd mallard. There’s probably more. It’s probably getting to where there’s more every year. But it’s a black duck.
Ramsey Russell: Are they still coastal marsh bay? I get, I just think of them as, I mean, because this is marsh out here. It’s tidal estuary, in and out, tidal fluctuations. And I think of them as having evolved in that environment. Even though they will get inland, go up creeks, lay up in the trees. You know, I think of them like that and I think Nova Scotia reminds me of that. Would you rather shoot a black duck or a mallard now that you’ve had all these years under your belt?
Jeff: Oh, I’d rather shoot a mallard.
Ramsey Russell: Why?
Jeff: I like eating them better.
Ramsey Russell: Really? Let me tell you what. Now, I plucked some of these ducks yesterday, and some of them were so fat. Especially those black ducks were so fat. They were as fat, if not fatter, than the mallards. I mean, it was crazy.
Jeff: They have a different diet. You’ll shoot them in the fields and you think, okay, well, it should be good eating birds shot in the cornfield. It may have just come from the salt marsh, eating snails. They’ll eat anything that moves and a lot of stuff that doesn’t.
Ramsey Russell: You all think the mallards will eat that too?
Jeff: They will, but not, I don’t think.

Ramsey Russell: Not much.

Jeff: No, no. I’ve shot mallards out in the main river from where we were today. I pulled down there one day, and it was just a skim of slush on the river because it had gotten cold enough to semi-freeze it. And I could see the mallards picking at something. They’re going through the slush, and they’re picking, and they’re obviously eating, you know. So I thought, okay, I’m going to set up here, tomorrow. There’s going to warm up a little bit. That slush will melt down. And sure enough, it had. But on the shore, there was a bunch of slush built up, and there was the silversides that I had mentioned to you earlier in the day, and the silversides were, that they must have died or they were trapped in that slush, and the mallards were just picking them off. It’s just a free meal, you know, so they’re just being opportunistic.
Ramsey Russell: They like their protein too.
Jeff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: They sure do. They like it. How long did it take for the mallards to move in before you started picking up on hybrids?

Jeff: Not very long and it was a concern when they first, like when the mallard numbers really started increasing, people were scared that that was gonna be the end of the black duck. To me, it almost seemed like once the mallards got established well enough, they had enough of their own species to breed with, and they kind of stick to themselves. They overlap somewhat. But, you know, on that Southwest River, you can go up one run, and it’s full of black ducks and maybe a couple of mallards. And then you go to the next run, and it’s full of mallards and maybe a couple of black ducks.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I think we are definitely New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, probably Newfoundland. All of Maritime Canada is kind of the nexus of American black ducks. It’s a wonder they aren’t called Canada black ducks. And it really is, we are in the nexus. I think most of them breed here, and I’ve heard of them ranging. I’ve shot them in the state of Mississippi, Arkansas. You still pick some up, but with the warmer winters, not as often, you know what I’m saying? But they’ve got a pretty big winter range. But this is it. And you told me something the other night that surprised me. You banded Canadian Wildlife Services. There are black ducks that either live here year-round or this is their wintering ground right here.
Jeff: Yeah, I don’t think they live here year-round. I think they’ll winter here.
Ramsey Russell: Some major coming from somewhere up north.
Jeff: Yeah, Labrador.
Ramsey Russell: Labrador. Okay.
Jeff: Yeah. I sent you that picture of the map. We put a backpack on a black duck hen last year, and she went, I can’t remember exactly what the, There was a community that I’m familiar with, but she went well up into Labrador, and that’s where she nested. And now she’s back in Charlottetown, where I banded her.
Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable. But there are some that just aren’t going to go any further south. What are your winters like then?
Jeff: They’re not as bad as they used to be.
Ramsey Russell: Nobody’s winter is in North America, maybe the world, but the Northern Hemisphere. But still, you all get winter more than we do in the Deep South, it seems. I mean, how cold does it get here in the wintertime?
Jeff: We’ll get days where it’s -20 Celsius.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeff: And then if you add the wind chill on that’s, I can handle -20 if there’s no wind. But when you get some wind, it’s pretty nasty.
Ramsey Russell: So a lot of the areas we’re hunting now will freeze.
Jeff: Yeah. But at the top of a lot of those systems will stay open, you know, enough that the birds can congregate there. And if there’s not enough snow cover, there are so many fields, agricultural fields, for them to go to feed in.
Ramsey Russell: You know, we’ve hunted corn, we’ve hunted wheat. You say there’s barley here. How long in your hunting career have those agricultural fields remained a constant? Or have you begun hunting more agriculture? Is there more agriculture now than then? Is the hunting more in those agricultural fields than it was when you were growing up?
Jeff: I don’t think there are any more agricultural fields, but the crops have certainly changed. There’s so much more corn than there ever was. The area where we hunted this morning and where we’re going tomorrow, there’s just so much corn up there. So that’s an area where it used to hold a lot of geese. And then they left that area, and now they’re back. And it’s just because of the corn.
Ramsey Russell: Is it cutting it for silage?
Jeff: They cut it for silage. They cut what they call cob meal, where they take just the cob, but the whole cob.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeff: And then they’ve got grain corn, which obviously they strip. All they want is the kernels.
Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that something?
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Not many soybeans up here. A few.
Jeff: There’s some, yeah. I can remember I was guiding in the early 1990s, and we had some soybean, and the geese were just starting to find the soybean. It wasn’t really the crop you really wanted to hunt, but they were just starting to go to it, and they will. They’ll go to it. I’ve got a soybean field that I was hoping would have been cut while you were here, and it isn’t but once it gets cut, I’ll get geese out of it.
Ramsey Russell: Is there any truth in the matter that ducks will hit barley more than they hit wheat?
Jeff: That’s what people say. I mean, I’ve had people say they won’t go in wheat.
Ramsey Russell: We proved them wrong on that.
Jeff: Yeah, I’ve shot ducks and geese in wheat. So barley, I think they prefer over the wheat.
Ramsey Russell: Why do you think that is?
Jeff: I remember somebody telling me that the stubble is.
Ramsey Russell: They cut it shorter.
Jeff: Well, the barley is cut shorter, and the wheat stubble is stiffer.
Ramsey Russell: Oh really?
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: That’s interesting. I haven’t notably, I haven’t seen any barley since I’ve been here. Have we been through by any or seen any? I haven’t seen any.
Jeff: We would have driven past some, but a lot of it gets seeded out, and then it just grows up green, so you wouldn’t recognize it as a barley field. That could be barley right there, right out the window here.
Ramsey Russell: Have we hunted any areas that you grew up hunting?
Jeff: Yeah, basically the area that we’ve hunted is the area that I would have hunted since I was probably 18. I’d head up that way.
Ramsey Russell: Its stomping ground.
Jeff: Yeah, kind of. It’s a bit of a drive from Charlottetown, but you have to get at least 20 minutes out of Charlottetown pretty much to get to anything. So what’s another 20?
Ramsey Russell: No, it’s nothing. There’s nothing. I’ve been getting up here 15, 20 minutes early, meeting you down at the quick stop, get a cup of coffee, and we drive 15 minutes more over there. And I’ll be honest with you may cut so far now, tomorrow may be different, but I don’t think so. If everything comes together like we’ve got planned. But it’s been very easy hunting.
Jeff: Yeah. So far, what we’ve been doing, it’s not very physically demanding.

Ramsey Russell: Out this window here. I’m gonna guess 3/4 of a mile off of this marsh. I can see the blind. And one of the locals told me it’s one of the best blinds in the area. And I’m thinking how do you all get there? He said they walk. Pulling a boat full of decoys.
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: On how hard the bottom is between here and there.
Jeff: That’s a good bottom up there.

Ramsey Russell: Is it?

Jeff: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: It’s still a three-quarter mile walk pulling stuff.
Jeff: Yep. Yeah. That’s a bit of an exercise. Yeah. And it can be a very good blind on certain days. You just need that certain weather.

Ramsey Russell: “One thing I’ve noticed since I’ve been here, we’re hunting creeks. But they’re all tidal influenced.”

Ramsey Russell: One thing I’ve noticed since I’ve been here, we’re hunting creeks. But they’re all tidal influenced. Like I felt like we were a pretty good ways from the open water, the ocean, the Gulf this morning, and still, there was all that sea lettuce in there. And you were reading the tide charts, expecting fluctuations.
Jeff: Yeah. The north side doesn’t get nearly the fluctuation as the south side of the island.
Ramsey Russell: How challenging is it, playing with the tides? Like, for example, the same old timer, the character, told me. He said, man’s best blind over there. He said, but tomorrow be where the flip’s going to be blowing. He put it in metric, I’ll put it. And it’s going to be blowing 25, 30 miles an hour. He said it’ll push water, and it’ll be all underwater. How much does that play into your strategy in hunting here on Prince Edward Island? Knowing those tides, knowing what the wind’s going to do, the weather’s going to do, it’s going to push the ducks around.

Jeff: Yeah. You have to know that for sure. I find the tides on the north side are a little more predictable. The south side, around Charlottetown, has a nine-foot fluctuation. And they kind of predict the tides like they predict the weather around here sometimes, too. You know, you’re supposed to have two feet of water, and you get there, and there’s nothing. So that can mess you up. It doesn’t mess you up as much on the north side because it’s like a three-foot tide at the biggest, 3.3 feet would be as big as the tide as you’ll see.

Ramsey Russell: If we’d hunted this blind this morning, it probably would have been pretty good, the direction of the wind. Tomorrow, the wind’s going to be different, going to be blowing harder. Just going to push a wall of water, put this thing underwater over there. Where are the ducks going to go then, and why?

Jeff: They just go further up into the marsh, where the grass that’s not always flooded gets flooded. And I believe it just floats up seeds that they don’t get to without those big tides.

Ramsey Russell: It’s amazing how those ducks know that, isn’t it?

Jeff: It is, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I wonder all the time what they’re seeing from the air. I mean, they don’t know what the tide table’s going to be doing in the morning. They just get up, and wherever they’re rooted, they start flying, and I guess they just see something.

Jeff: “The tide’s up, we’re moving in towards the road that cuts through the national park. And if you’re out at Robbie’s blind, an eagle will come and bump them, and they’ll just twirl around and go right back in.”

Jeff: Yeah. I just think they inherently know. The tide’s up, we’re moving in towards the, So they’ll push back towards the road that cuts through the national park. And if you’re out at Robbie’s blind, which I have been in that same type of situation. An eagle will come and bump them, and they’ll just twirl around and go right back in. They just want to be up where that food’s floating that they don’t normally get up.

Ramsey Russell: Yesterday, we hunted with father-and-son team Ben and Lanny. Ben kept saying, and it was wigging me out, I mean, was it “banded”? Is it “bandit”? And then this morning, I shot a hybrid I’m proud to have. It’s a beautiful bird. And I asked you a question this morning. I said, which is most rarer, a hybrid black duck, where you’ve got a preponderance of mallards and black ducks up in this area, I mean, a bunch of each, or a band? Which would be rarer?

Jeff: The hybrid that looks like the one you shot would be. I’ve shot fewer of those than I’ve shot banded ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy.

Jeff: Now, you’ll shoot all kinds of banded, or sorry, all kinds of hybrid blacks, that the normal person would just call a black duck. But because I’ve banded ducks for CWS (Canadian Wildlife Service), you know, they’ve given me literature to show me what their criteria is for a hybrid black.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of those criteria?

Jeff: The biggest thing, Ramsey, is the speculum and that white.

Ramsey Russell: Double white wing bars.

Jeff: Yeah. Well, it doesn’t even have to, like the exterior, it doesn’t have to be white. But if the interior bar has any white in it.

Ramsey Russell: The top bar, I call it.

Jeff: Yeah, the top bar.

Ramsey Russell: Any white whatsoever.

Jeff: If there’s any white, it’s hybrid. I’ve handled birds that had no white in that speculum and looked almost like what you shot today. I’ve taken a picture, and there it gets a bit gray because, you know, one guy might, like a wildlife technician, might say, “Well, that’s a hybrid.” And then the biologist says, “No, no white in the upper bar. It’s not.”

Ramsey Russell: You’re born and raised around black ducks. You’ve been handling them your entire duck hunting life. And as a bird bander. I’ve shot plenty of black ducks around, and most of the black ducks I’ve shot have a faint fringing on the bottom part of the secondaries. And I’ve had people say, “Nope, it’s got mallard in it.”

Jeff: No, Not according to,

Ramsey Russell: The standard.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I mean, because they are a mallard-like duck, you would expect them to express some mallard-like characteristics. For example, Philip Rescues was on here, and he was telling a story about over in Hawaii shooting. The state was over-culling one of the legions or Hawaiian ducks. One because they had some green in the head. He went over and did some, they sent a bunch of the dead birds they were culling out to him, and they were pure legion, or whichever species it was, because it’s mallard-like ducks. It’s okay for especially the young birds to get a little green in their head. I’ve shot Mexican mallards down in Sonora, kind of like that hybrid today. They’ll start to get a little curl in the back end, 100% Mexican duck. But they are mallard-like subspecies. What are some of the other diagnostics of a hybrid versus a black duck?

Jeff: Well, like that one you shot today, if you look at the underwing, the underwing of a mallard is pretty much all.

Ramsey Russell: All white.

Jeff: All white. So if it’s got.

Ramsey Russell: Drake especially.

Jeff: Yeah. And I just can’t think of what the exact criteria is, but if there’s, I don’t know, let’s just say 13 brown feathers or dark feathers.

Ramsey Russell: Little brown spots at the top of the wing line?

Jeff: Yep. And just in that area.

Ramsey Russell: Above the bone. Yeah.

Jeff: Yeah. That’s one thing you use to say, okay, that’s not just an immature mallard drak, that’s a hybrid.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. You know, honestly, when that flock, the way the wind was blowing, I felt fortunate they did it because the birds would have had to come off the big water, come way down into the narrowing creek below a turn, hook up, and come in. If they wanted to, they could do it. Most of the ducks we saw this morning kind of came and hid. Looked at us, faded into the wind, and landed on that big water over there. And when these birds did it, those two had broken down well within killing range. I shot at that duck as a mallard. I saw, obviously in hand, it had a very dark belly. His chest was darker, and he was a big bird. But I shot him at about a drake. And it wasn’t until the dog brought him up I realized it was a hybrid with, you know, the gleaming green on the top of his crown and the dark belly, some contrast. And you showed me something else, how on the back of his rump or underside of his rump, he had mallard vermiculation.

Jeff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You could see mallard clearly, but you could see black duck clearly also.

Jeff: Yeah. It was a great example of, you know, just a 50-50 almost split between a black and a mallard because, again, so many of our blacks will have, a lot of people see green in the head or green in the rump of a black duck, oh, it’s a hybrid. Not necessarily. That speculum is what’s going to be the criteria. If I’m banding ducks, that speculum is what we go by.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what you go by. How many bands do you all shoot in the course of a year?

Jeff: Oh, it varies.

Ramsey Russell: You got a 107-day season.

Jeff: We do now. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What was it historically?

Jeff: Growing up it always opened the first Monday in October and closed the second Saturday in December, which was 10 weeks. And we didn’t have Sundays. So, you had 60 days hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Jeff: Now we’ve got an early goose season, first of September 15, then the regular duck season, or the regular season, opens October 1st. Geese close December 31st, and ducks go until January 15th. And we have Sundays. So, like I said to you, it, this is the glory days, if you will.

Ramsey Russell: Good old days are now.

Jeff: Yeah, exactly.

Ramsey Russell: They really are in a lot of ways. The good old days are now. Could you always shoot six black ducks?

Jeff: No, it was always four growing up. And then when they extended the season, they wanted to keep things harvest neutral.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Jeff: So, in doing that, they said for geese, November 15th, it goes from five to three. Ducks December 1st goes from, at that time it went from four to two. And there was a two-year period that we had the four to two. And then the last few years, it’s been six, and then it would drop to four. But they looked at the harvest, and we’re just not having a neat effect. We’re not reaching the numbers that they would allow under the moderate.

Ramsey Russell: It’s probably because of the declining hunter numbers.

Jeff: Yeah, for sure.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a very balanced part of the equation.

Jeff: And most guys here hunt geese.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, you said that and you said, well, the goose season’s open now, and most of the water fowlers are, by God, chasing geese. Like these two old-timers, they ain’t fooling with those ducks. They’re going after the geese. And they got into them good yesterday.

Jeff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And tomorrow they got a great field. He was telling me about it. Oh boy, they’re excited for those geese. What about your people did? Did your dad and grandfather favour geese over ducks?

Jeff: No, they were more duck hunters. Yeah. You know, Dad was like me. He’d go on a goose hunt if the opportunity was there, but he didn’t chase them, if he will.

Ramsey Russell: I had asked you about bands. Just average. I mean, I know there’s no hard and fast. It’s a numbers thing. But, I mean, what would be an average year of shooting bands up here for your team? Two or three, five or ten?

Jeff: It depends on what you would call my team, I guess, if you include.

Ramsey Russell: Your blind, your effort.

Jeff: Oh. So, if you looked, if you took Ben and I and maybe one or two other buddies, three or four, maybe.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Jeff: Duck bands. Like, I shot two goose bands in the early goose season, and then I shot, I was in on one duck band so far this year.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. So far this year? We got one more day. Where do most of the goose and duck bands originate? In New Brunswick. Matt told me that a lot of the bands would come out of Maine, and I, lightning struck twice one morning, and the adult, and I’d have called them both adults. The certificates both said juveniles. I disagree, having held those birds in hand. They were just banded this year. But who am I? I’m not a biologist. But one of the birds had come from Maine, and one had come from near Fredericton, right up the river to where we were hunting. And I’m just curious, where do a lot of your birds come from?

Jeff: A lot of the goose bands we get are banded here.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Jeff: Because they band the local geese.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Jeff: I help them with that some, and that’s done usually the end of June, early July. I think last year they handled in the vicinity of 900 to a 100 geese.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Jeff: So, you know, maybe last year there was a lot of recaptures. Maybe 50% to 60% were recaptures.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Jeff: But there’s, you know, at the end of their stay here, there’s at least 950 geese walking around with bands on their legs.

Ramsey Russell: I know you told me you had killed one of your own bands before.

Jeff: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Where do the other bands typically come from?

Jeff: I get a lot of guys here that’ll send me a text and, you know, “I shot one of your birds,” because they know that the area that I band, and they know where they reported and it says it was banded. You know, three miles south of South Rushtiko or whatever, you know.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. So, much of the, most of the island bird recoveries are island-banded birds.

Jeff: Yeah. And then there’s a lot from Newfoundland.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Jeff: A lot of duck bands. We get the odd. As far as the goose bands, they’re starting to band them again up in Labrador. So, you get the odd Labrador band and the very odd one from the States, not many.

Ramsey Russell: Not many.

Jeff: And same as the ducks. The guys, we told you yesterday that one that I shot from that was banded in New York. That’s the only duck band that I’ve shot, that was the only band that I’ve shot that was banded outside of Canada.

Ramsey Russell: When Matt Wilson said a lot of those birds came from Maine, I just suspected they were probably more migrator types.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s what I stuck too.

Ramsey Russell: You know, and that’s a very interesting phenomenon. Beside black ducks and mallards, tell me about some of the other species. One bird you told me about I found very interesting. What are some of the other species that you target over the course of a year?

Jeff: I’ll target anything that’s a little bit different. I’ve shot Eurasian wigeon, one Eurasian wigeon.

Ramsey Russell: Deal. That was a stoic.

Jeff: Oh, yeah, it was. I’ve seen Eurasian teal here. I’ve killed over 20 different species of ducks on the island, and there’s some that I haven’t killed here that you could. But there’s, we’ve got all three species of scoter, all three species of merganser. We’ve got ringnecks, the odd redhead.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve seen about, I think yesterday, I would say I saw all three species of merganser. I know, I saw some hooded.

Jeff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Sitting out there, and as we were hunting near that bay, we were on the field hunting. We had a red branch. You come through that creek line over there and saw some commons out on the water.

Jeff: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jeff: Yep. Yeah. So we’re lucky.

Ramsey Russell: Is anybody target those.

Jeff: You know what, like later on when things freeze up, there’ll be guys because they’re fun to shoot.
Ramsey Russell: They are.
Jeff: And the dog club will take them for training, or certain dog owners might take them for training. But I don’t know, in Newfoundland they’ll pick them and bottle them, and they’ll target mergansers for the oven.
Speaker_A: For meat.

Jeff: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve heard of that. You know, and I’ve seen some old, we were talking about old decoys a little while ago, I’ve seen some of them older decoys, merganser decoys, with old horse mane, or you know, like a paintbrush mane. And so you figured folks were targeting them back then. I just can’t imagine eating a merganser.
Jeff: No, I’m with you.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I don’t see it happening.

Jeff: No.

Ramsey Russell: Talk a little bit. We got a 107-day season. They just touched it. Kind of walk me through the ebb and flow of your season up here. How does, it start with blue wings, I guess, early geese. And then what is the normal progression? Like, it’s very, to me, it’s perfect weather out here right now.
Jeff: Yeah. You’ve had some good weather, for sure. Early in the season, you’ll get local black ducks. You know, I mean, you get local birds. You’ll shoot a lot of immatures. There’ll be blue wings, green wings, wigeon, gadwall, pintail, mallards, blacks. And then the divers. And there’s ring necks around early in the season, right from the get-go. And then as the season progresses, it always seems to be around the third week of October, you’ll see a push of hooded mergansers come through. It’s a little later than, you know, the goldeneyes. The mergansers come. The red-breasted mergansers come. You’ll see big bunches of red-breasted out in the bay. And that’s hens and their broods, is what I can figure. But yeah, just as the season progresses, we’ll get influxes of birds. But I would say by, I’d say December 1st, I don’t think we’re gonna get a whole lot more new birds coming in after that. It just kind of depends on what weather they’re having up in Labrador.
Ramsey Russell: How unusual was that flock of green wings we saw yesterday out of that area?
Jeff: That’s a lot of green wings for that area.
Ramsey Russell: A lot of green. I’d have gotten excited in Mississippi if I’d seen that many green wings. Yeah, a bunch of them.
Jeff: Yeah. And there was a lot there last year too. And I don’t know if it’s because there’s so much corn in that area, and they’ve found it, and now they’re, you know, they’re just coming back year after year. And, you know, the duck will go into a tiny little field that no one’s even looking at.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Jeff: And most guys are looking for geese. So if the ducks are sneaking into these little fields, they can go unscathed.
Ramsey Russell: You think those green wings are dry feed like that?
Jeff: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Really? Have you shot them in a dry field hunting?

Jeff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Really?
Jeff: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: Interesting. Over corn?
Jeff: Corn and then grain.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. I had no idea.
Jeff: I don’t think I’ve shot any in a bean field, but yeah, definitely corn.
Ramsey Russell: We were talking about some of the species. You shot a Eurasian widgeon. We had a conversation the other night about some of the interesting species that are coming kind of like over from Greenland.
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: What are some of those species you’ve seen or encountered or killed?
Jeff: Well, I’ve killed the lessers, what we call the lesser Canadas, but I’ve encountered barnacle goose, pink-footed geese, white-fronted/slash speckle belly.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jeff: I think some of our snows might come from there as well.
Ramsey Russell: Probably.
Jeff: There was a bean goose shot here last year, I believe it was. That’d be about it, I guess.
Ramsey Russell: As far as I feel from home being this far up in the northeast, above Maine, above everything else I’ve ever been to, I was looking at a map how far we were from here to Greenland, and we’re about as far from here to Greenland as we are from here to Mississippi. About the halfway point, you know, so to me, it’s just interesting. There’s no fence in the sky, and there’s no telling what will blow in, you know, because you all are close enough to get that kind of stuff.
Jeff: Yeah. And I sent you a map of a goose they banded here this past spring that nested in Greenland. And Ted Burney with Canadian Wildlife Service, when he held that bird in his hand, he felt that that was one of the subspecies, like the lesser subspecies. And he thought, you know, I’m going to put a radio tracker on this. It’s a solar-powered neck collar, and it’s got a nano tag on the back as well. And he thought, you know, it’ll be interesting to see if I’m right, but I feel that this bird’s going to nest in Greenland, which it did. And well, well up, like at least halfway up the country.
Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy.
Jeff: It was. When you looked at it on the map, it just blew me away. It was very, very interesting I found.
Ramsey Russell: You all take black duck for granted up here. I’m sorry, you do? I love them. Do you also take the abundance of seafood for granted, or that, I mean, because, man, you all have got seafood. This is a seafood nirvana up here. And I’m a shellfish guy. Do you take that for granted, or is that, like, a staple of your diet?
Jeff: Yeah, that’s hard to answer, really, I don’t think we take it for granted because it’s seasonal.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeff: You know, like, there’s two different lobster seasons that open in the first, the first of May and close. Like, there’s the spring season, first of May until July 1st, I think it is, and then there’s August 26th until October, whatever. So there’s two different seasons. The second season, typically, the lobsters aren’t as good. So, you know, I’ll have my fill of lobster May, June, and then won’t eat much until the next year, you know, so you build up a desire for it and can’t wait for the season to open again.
Ramsey Russell: Are oysters available year-round?
Jeff: Not quite, no. Yeah, I’m not exactly sure, Ramsay, if they harvest them through the ice or not. I don’t think they do. They’ll harvest mussels through the ice. If the bays freeze up, they’ll harvest the mussels through the ice. But as far as the oysters go, they drop them, no, they sink them to the bottom, I think, and then just leave them.
Ramsey Russell: I see.
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: So last night we had some blue mussels, and you were telling me some astounding amount of commercial blue mussel production that Prince Edward Island produces worldwide.
Jeff: Yeah, I’ve been told it’s something like 80%.
Ramsey Russell: 80%?
Jeff: And for a small little island like this, it’s pretty impressive.
Ramsey Russell: Very impressive. And they were very, very good. And I was just about filling up on them, and you throttled me back, said you’d made some chowder. Man, I’ve had some chowder before. You know, what I’m saying? I’ve had chowder. I’m dead serious when I say this. Yours was the best chowder I have ever, ever had. I ate two bowls of it. Even though I couldn’t possibly, shouldn’t have eaten that much, I couldn’t. It was so meaty and so thick and so rich. It was amazing. Tell me how you make that chowder.
Jeff: I start off with a roux, which is, for those that don’t know, is melted butter and an equal part of flour.
Ramsey Russell: So if I say a cup of butter. Cup of flour.
Jeff: Yeah. Half a cup of each.
Ramsey Russell: Half a cup of each, Okay.
Jeff: Cook that for a couple of minutes. Cook the starch out of the flour, is what I was told.
Ramsey Russell: But you don’t cook it very dark.
Jeff: No, not dark at all. It’s a very light roux.
Ramsey Russell: Put it on medium heat, maybe?
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Stir it for a little bit.
Jeff: Yeah. Medium to medium-low. And keep stirring it. Keep working it.

Ramsey Russell: You say for a little bit. How many? Five, ten minutes?
Jeff: Yeah, no more than probably five, I’d say. Before I even add the flour, so sorry, I’ll melt the half a cup of butter, put in onion, chopped-up onion, celery, and then.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeff: Let them get soft. Then put in your flour.
Ramsey Russell: Then start mixing it together.
Jeff: Mix it together. Let your roux cook for a couple of minutes. You can cook it longer if you want. It’s just gonna be a darker roux and a darker chowder. And then I’ll add, like last night, I had bar clams that I dug myself and bottled. And so I was.
Ramsey Russell: What were they?
Jeff: Bar clams. They’re bar clams. They’re kind of like. yeah, B-A-R. And they’re like, they look like a quahog, but they’re bigger. And they’ve got a sack or a belly, and you want to get rid of that. So when you steam them, you shuck them out, get rid of the belly, and then I would just put them in the juice that is the result of them having been steamed.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeff: And then freeze them. And those ones, I actually did a bath, they call it. So then you submerse the jars, Mason jars, you put the lids on, but not tight. Submerse them in a pot, I think I boiled them for like two hours. And then it just softens that meat up.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeff: Otherwise, it can be pretty chewy. So I had a bottle of bar clams. I had a bottle of mussels from a previous, you know, previous feed of mussels. And then I think all I had put in besides that was some bay scallops.
Ramsey Russell: It was bar clams and those big blue mussels.
Jeff: Blue mussels.
Ramsey Russell: Big bar clams. That’s it.
Jeff: And then some scallops.
Ramsey Russell: Some scallops. Did you cook all of those shellfish first? Okay, so you gave the bath to the bar clams. For the blue mussels, you steamed them, I’m guessing, like we did last night.
Jeff: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: Put a little water, a little celery, a little onion, steam it till they’re done, they crack open beautifully, and you’ll save, like whatever was left over last night. You’ll can in the juice?
Jeff: Yeah, that’s ready for my next chowder. Okay, so there’s the bottle. I’ve got a 500-milliliter Mason jar, and it was almost full of mussels. And then I just fill that with the juice that was left from steaming them, and then that. So that’ll go in as well.
Ramsey Russell: You’ll put the, yeah. Okay. The clam juice. Add that to it and then some milk?
Jeff: Yeah, probably. I’d say yesterday’s might have been two cups of milk. Not a whole lot.
Ramsey Russell: I see it.
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Sounds very simple to make.
Jeff: It is. Yeah, It is. And it turned out. and then I added, you know, just some seasoning to taste, a little bit of Lawry’s seasoned salt, some pepper, and that’s it. There’s enough salt in the butter itself.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeff: And even the juice from the clams, right. They’re gonna. they’re coming out of the saltwater, so there’s gonna be salt in that.
Ramsey Russell: I had already dug in when you offered it up. I said no. I mean, believe it or not, I didn’t eat it. But you normally top it with bacon crumbles?
Jeff: Yeah, I started out with that chowder yesterday, I cooked three strips of thick bacon just to get some bacon fat in there. And I really believe that adds, you know, there’s a smokiness.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, I guarantee you it does.
Jeff: Yep. So I didn’t always do that, but I do now.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Wow, man. That has got to be for just being outside. And the wind, the blustery wind. And it’s cold, man. To come in and crowd up on some of that chowder like that with a couple of cold beers. That just hit the spot.
Jeff: Yeah. Oh, it did for sure.

Ramsey Russell: Best chowder I’ve ever had. I want to back up and talk about hunting techniques just a little bit because yesterday was the most interesting start. It’s like, right about the time you think you’ve seen and done it all in the duck hunting world, and I’ve seen and done a lot. We started yesterday morning driving up to a beach and wading through shin-deep drifts of eelgrass, grabbing it up and putting it in croaker sacks. Then we went out to the field. We put three mojos. You didn’t have a full-body or silhouette decoy at all. And we put out about two dozen double big clumpy handfuls of wet eelgrass, like little lamp piles all over that spread. That was a very interesting start. Where did a technique like that originate? I mean, how long have you practiced that?

Jeff: I’ve been doing that as long as I’ve hunted fields.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeff: Yeah, just everyone growing up, you just knew that that was a way to attract black ducks. People will do it, you know. That field we were in yesterday, I could go and put 30 or 40 clumps of seaweed in just to attract the ducks to the field. But they seem to like it. To me, there’s like a texture, there’s a depth to that seaweed. And it looks just like, from a distance, if you just glanced, you’d think it was a bunch of black ducks with their heads down, feeding.

Ramsey Russell: What got me was piled up on the tailgate that wet eelgrass. It looked, the colour matched a black duck to a tee. That dark, rich brown. It was perfect. It’d dry out a little bit out in the fields, but somebody asked me, “Did it work?” I’m like, hell, yeah, it worked. Then we went back out to finish our limit yesterday, and we put out some full-body, fully flocked black ducks and some of your silhouettes and clumps of seaweed. You saved a sack of seaweed just to go out and measure it up. That was amazing. It was unbelievable. It’s too simple. It’s too easy, Woody.

Jeff: Yeah, well, and it’s a cheap decoy.

Ramsey Russell: And I’ve driven by some of these fields. You could have been somebody else. You see where they did that. I mean, could you just walk away from it when you’re done. But you were telling me people will go out in some of these fields and use that practice and put out a little spread of seaweed just to attract ducks.

Jeff: Yep. Just to get them going to your field. And then, okay, now we’ll go hunt it.

Ramsey Russell: You’ve done that your whole hunting career.

Jeff: As long as I’ve hunted fields. I didn’t hunt fields much earlier on. I just didn’t have access to them. Dad never leased fields. But once I started getting some fields that I could hunt on my own, just through permission or maybe leasing the field, we wouldn’t always do it, but some fields, you know, let’s go throw two dozen clumps in there and see what happens.

Ramsey Russell: As you walk out through some of these grain fields, there’s a lot of waste out there. Have you ever had fields that have an abundance of waste grain, but the ducks, for whatever reason, because they’re feeding elsewhere, they’re not in that field. And you go out and stake out some of these little piles. Have you ever just seen where they’ll start coming in and feeding, and boom, I’m gonna hit them?

Jeff: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It’s kind of jump-starts it.

Jeff: Yeah. It draws birds. Yep, for sure.

Ramsey Russell: That’s amazing. That is utterly amazing. How did you get into decoy carving? You’ve got a full range of decoys. You’ve got some silhouettes, you’ve got all kinds of floaters. I saw a Eurasian widgeon. You’ve got some crab pot, crab buoy, lobster buoy type decoys for sea ducks. How did you get into decoy carving?

Jeff: I had a buddy that had some BSC as they would call it in the carving world. And that’s black shit cork because it is just shit to work with.

Ramsey Russell: It is. But boy, I love the finished product.

Jeff: Yeah, I do too.

Ramsey Russell: I love those dimples and stuff.

Jeff: Yeah. The texture from it.

Ramsey Russell: But it’s a mess. Oh, gosh.

Jeff: Yeah, it’s just hateful to work with. So this guy gave me some cork, and it was back in the time when decoys were, they were all the same, right. One pose and that was it. And I thought, I want an animated spread. I want something more than just 12 ducks looking straight ahead. So I started then. And at one time, I sold all my plastic decoys. I thought, that’s it. I’m only gonna hunt over what I carve. Well, as I got older, and those decoys didn’t get any lighter, I thought, then they started coming out with flocked decoys and five different head positions. So I delved back into the plastic world. But I still, you know, I try to get, at least once or twice a year, I try to get out on a cork/cedar rig. So yeah, I enjoyed it for a while. Now, I don’t know, it just feels. I always had to be in the mood to carve, you know. I had to want to do it. If I’m going someplace, you know, I went to Cold Bay, and I carved a brant.

Ramsey Russell: That was a good-looking brant. Talk about that brant decoy. Most travelled, unshot-over decoy I’ve ever heard of.

Jeff: It may hold that. It may hold the Guinness record for that, Ramsey. Yeah, I carved, I don’t know what year that was that I carved that, but I took it to Cold Bay. Never even shouldered the gun at a brant. And that wasn’t anyone’s fault, just the weather and just the situation, right. Then I went down to Maryland and hunted with Jeff Coates, and Jeff told me there weren’t a lot of brant around, and I said, I don’t care. We’ll go. We’ll try it. You know, I can’t shoot one if I don’t try it. And we had a pair coming real nice, all the way across the bay, about 70 yards. I’m like, my heart’s pounding. And all of a sudden, they just veered right, and off they went.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Jeff: And you know, that was the difference between it happening or not. You know, just another 30 yards and its like, they’re there. So anyways, I come home again, having not shot a brant over the decoy. Then I went down to, not Cold Bay, down to Massachusetts, Cape Cod.

Ramsey Russell: Cape Cod.

Jeff: With a guy named Cullen Lundholm. Great guy. So I took it down there and then finally, you know, got the monkey off my back, and we shot three days of limits of brant down there.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, good.

Jeff: Yeah. So yeah, I calculated that it was over 10,000 miles that it had travelled before I even fired at a brant over it. So yeah, I was pretty happy.

Ramsey Russell: With all those lobster buoy decoys you’ve got, you must do some sea duck hunting.

Jeff: I do. I’ve been known to hunt anything, you know, like whether it’s scoters.

Ramsey Russell: And you all got Barrow’s goldeneye up here.

Jeff: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Limit one.

Jeff: Limit one, possession one.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff: So, you know, if you were to come up and want to shoot a Barrow’s, you shoot one the first day and you’re not happy with it.

Ramsey Russell: Too bad.

Jeff: Eat it, I guess. Do something. Figure something out if you want to try to shoot another one, but your possession is one. It used to be six. Used to be able to shoot six, and your possession was 12. And I just don’t think they had really done much work on, you know, looking at the population or knowing what the population was. And all of a sudden, it went from six to one.

Ramsey Russell: Was there something going on with their habitat? I was surprised to learn that goldeneyes are cavity nesters. I don’t know why that surprised me, but it does. That just shocked me, to be honest with you.

Jeff: Yeah, everybody just thinks of a wood duck typically, right. As a cavity nester. But there’s, like, hooded mergansers, bufflehead, goldeneyes, both species.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Whistling ducks.

Jeff: Yeah. Yep.

Ramsey Russell: You know, release the black-bellied whistling duck.

Jeff: Yeah. And I think the Barrows are, you know, harlequin. I don’t think they sexually mature until they’re two or three years old, and they don’t re-nest. And, you know, their habitat is being lost. The only reason we can even shoot Barrow’s here is because of the common. If we didn’t have common goldeneyes, we wouldn’t be able to shoot Barrow’s because they’re listed as a species of special concern, which is what a harlequin is on the East Coast. So you used to be able to hunt harlequin.

Ramsey Russell: Do you see harlequin when you’re out there hunting?

Jeff: I have. You know, if you want to see a harlequin tomorrow, I could take you there to see. But the point being they are here on the island, typically at one tip of the island or the other. Like when Jeff and Karen were here last year. She’d been to East Point but not up to North Cape, which is the western north tip at the western end. So we pulled up into the parking lot there, and I get out and approached the bank, and I was like, I just saw them, you know, and I knew immediately what they were. And it looked to me like there was about 40 in the flock. And I came rushing back. Jeff thought it was a king eider. He thought he must have seen a king eider just because he could tell that I was pumped, you know. And it turned out there was at least 30. I never really got a solid count on how many were there. And mostly drakes, but just as pretty as could be. Like, you know, and it was this time of year, but they’re all coloured up.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of people want to shoot Harlequin. They should want to shoot Harlequin. They’re a beautiful bird. Barrow’s Goldeneyes. I’ve shot them in Alaska. I’ve shot them around Puget Sound. Beautiful bird. But you asked me about that. I said, nah, I want to go shoot run-of-the-mill black ducks. I say mallards. That’s just me. I just feel like they’re a lot more special bird. I don’t want to eat a Barrow. I don’t want to mount any more of them.
Jeff: Yeah, why bother?
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Just want to appreciate them for what they are. We talked about the season. How many hunters? If there’s 190,000 people on Prince Edward Island, how many duck hunters are there? What’s the competition like?
Jeff: The numbers are small, but at the same time, like the 2022, I believe it was CWS, had it that around 1,062 migratory licenses were sold here.
Ramsey Russell: Was that resident only or resident and non-resident?
Jeff: No, that was resident.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeff: Yep. But it seems that the people that hunt, hunt, you know, they’re out there. They’re avid, they’re at it quite a bit, and it’s not a big province, you know. So there is competition, especially in the goose world, you know, to try to find a field. If you moved here from away, as we like to say, and you’re a hunter and you want to get out goose hunting, it’s going to be quite a challenge for you to find a field. And then the water isn’t as bad because, as I said to you earlier today, if there’s lots of geese, that’s what people are chasing. And it takes the pressure off the ducks.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Jeff: So for a guy like me that chases the ducks, it’s great.
Ramsey Russell: Sure.
Jeff: You can find birds that are not being bothered.
Ramsey Russell: Do you have a hard time finding hunting buddies?
Jeff: Not really, no. You know, Ben and I hunt quite a bit together. And Lanny, he comes with us as much as he can. He’s not happy when he doesn’t get to come. But no, I probably have more people that I could hunt with than I don’t, just because I like to keep it to a small bunch, you know.
Ramsey Russell: Sure. So I do too. What, you told a great story about Ben and Lanny last night. I thought it was just great. You all have known each other and hunted together a long time.
Jeff: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: And then life and family got busy for Ben. They kind of faded out of it. Then what?
Jeff: Well, then Lanny came along, and he got some interest. He wanted to go.
Ramsey Russell: Lanny is a little boy. Lanny’s how old? Eight?
Jeff: He’s 10 now. Yeah, but he was 5, I think, when he first came with us.
Ramsey Russell: How do you think he got a passion for that?
Jeff: I don’t really know because it’s like Ben wasn’t hunting a whole lot at that point in time. And I don’t know if he just saw some of the mounts and was intrigued by those.
Ramsey Russell: That little boy was ate up with it.

Jeff: Oh, he is, and it’s great.
Ramsey Russell: He’s got eagle eyes. You and I might be sitting there talking or doing something and take our eye off the ball, and he’ll make a motion and say, it’s over there, it’s over there, it’s over there. And I can’t see it yet.
Jeff: Oh, no. It’s usually a couple of minutes at least before I see it. I just say, I believe you, buddy, but I can’t see with these old eyes.
Ramsey Russell: And he’s all up in the middle of it, picking up decoys, putting out decoys, the whole ball of wax. He is all up in it. And to me, that’s exciting to see.
Jeff: I love it. Yeah, I love seeing him be that enthusiastic and being in the middle of it. You know, a lot of kids would twiddle their thumbs or not be picking up decoys, not be setting out decoys. But no, he wants to be part of the whole experience.
Ramsey Russell: The little Irvin Quick Stops are open around 5 o’clock when I get there in the morning for a cup of coffee. I haven’t seen any other hunters come through. There’s no other hunters. I mean, there’s people going to work or doing something, but no other hunters out milling around. We saw a hunter this morning, he was across the creek where we were. He threw his decoys out, he faded in the shadows, he sat for an hour, picked his decoys back up, motored off. I don’t see any hunting pressure at all here. Some hunt pressure comes down south.
Jeff: Oh yeah, no, I can well imagine. I’ve seen videos of the craziness with the boats going.

Ramsey Russell: Everybody’s saying that, yeah.
Jeff: Yeah. No, it’s more, a lot of it is just things not being accessible because so many fields are taken up by people that have had them for years. You know, if I had a field and I wasn’t going to get it again, well then one of the boys would know and they’d grab it up. But there is, I don’t know, the pressure, I’m sure, isn’t what it is down where you’re at because again I don’t know what the percentage is. It’s maybe like 1% of people. Less than 1% of the people hunt here.
Ramsey Russell: It’s very small. The last numbers I heard, and I believe to be true, in terms of water fowling, North American water fowlers number 1.1 to 1.2 million, of which Canada has about 125,000 and the United States has about 900,000. And Canada’s a big country.
Jeff: Oh yeah.
Ramsey Russell: It would take me longer, well, I’ll put it this way, to drive from here to Calgary, Alberta, which is where I left western Canada and started heading towards here 10 days ago, by comparison, I could drive from here to Mississippi and probably halfway back. That’s how big a stretch it is across Canada. And, you know, you all got relatively fewer hunters. And how many non-residents even come to this part of Canada? Because, like, Maritime Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, there just seems to be off. You say Canada, going duck hunting, Canada. Everybody thinks western Canada. They don’t think here in the Maritime Provinces.
Jeff: Yeah. We get a lot of guys from Newfoundland. Newfoundland doesn’t get a lot of geese, right. Like Labrador, they would, but it’s just the nesting geese and the tundra and whatnot. So the outfitters here, I know we get a lot of Newfoundlanders. And when I used to guide 30, 35 years ago, there were a lot of people from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, areas that just don’t have geese. So this was the closest destination for them, basically.
Ramsey Russell: But what about United States hunters? Very few, I’d guess.
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Fewer than 100 a year.
Jeff: Oh, I would guess, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Way fewer.
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I bet if you took all four Maritime or Atlantic provinces of Canada, and added it up, it might be as many as 100 U.S. water fowlers. Certainly no more than 200.
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy.
Jeff: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: Because the hunting is amazing. Unpressured black ducks, you know, and a lot of cool stuff. Good food.
Jeff: Yeah. No one tries to sell a black duck hunt.
Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy.
Jeff: The outfitters here, its goose hunting.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeff: And, in fact, I work for one, just Hunter’s Chance. I just started guiding for him a little bit this year because he’s been good to me in the patch. He’s let me hunt some of the fields. So he called me this summer, and he said, I got a couple of groups, you know, that they might want to do a duck hunt. Would you be interested in guiding. So I told him yes. And I’ve only guided for geese so far, but they just don’t offer duck hunting. And I don’t know why. Because, again, you know, the amount of Americans that would love to come up and shoot six black ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Oh.
Jeff: Just to know that they can.
Ramsey Russell: I’m raising both my hands. Sure.
Jeff: Yeah. You know, knowing that that is an option and a possibility, especially when the limit was one all throughout the Atlantic Flyway through the States. You tell people you could shoot six here, and their heads would nearly explode.
Ramsey Russell: Well, now it’s two. But still, it’s three times more over here.
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And these are what I’d call pure rube rippies, you know, except for the odd hybrid. But, I mean, the black ducks I’m putting my hands on are absolutely pure strain, red-legged black ducks. Just beautiful, beautiful birds. And it’s just crazy to me. I was hunting with some young men out in western Manitoba, young guns, man. Great, great hunters, good kids. But it’s a different mindset than what you and I have. A different approach to duck hunting. For example, one of them talked about his dad being back in it and having a couple of dozen old-timey shells. He described, you know, the kind of hollow shells you put on the stick. And I asked him, you know, why wouldn’t he go out there and hunt with them. And it just doesn’t give them the advantages they want, man. They want the latest, greatest. That’s that young mind-set. And here we are weeks later, I’m over here on Prince Edward Island, and we’re putting out double handfuls of eelgrass. And that first black duck to come in, yesterday morning we were kind of yammering at some going-away ducks out front, and I just, something caught my eye like a seagull catches your eye, this morning. Something caught my eye, and that son of a gun was 10 feet off the deck coming in hard. He was coming in hard to that decoy, a big adult black duck. And that just, to me, it’s amazing to have done that.
Jeff: Yeah. And I think just the fact that we were hunting over the seaweed too just made it that much cooler.
Ramsey Russell: That’s what I’m saying. I mean, here we are hunting with the most primitive form of decoy I’ve ever hunted with, seaweed. And the black duck came in, mallards came in, didn’t give it a second thought. The pintail, didn’t give it a second thought, came in. You know, that’s just, that’s amazing. I mean, at the end of the day, we’re not hunting up lease up here. We’re not, even down south, those birds are stale. Sometimes when they’ve been in the Deep South too long, they’re over-pressured. But at the end of the day, we’re hunting an animal that lives and survives on instinct that has a brain the size of a lentil. You know, he doesn’t have cognitive functions. He just eats, water, sex, nesting. I mean, that’s it. You know what I’m saying? And the fact that we can go out in the year 2024 and put double handfuls of seaweed out in a wheat field and kill wild ducks, it just, to me, it reinforces my belief that waterfowl hunting is a fundamental sport, first and foremost a fundamental sport. It doesn’t have to be technologically or over-technologically thought out. Stick to the basics.
Jeff: Yeah, I’ll give you a good example of that too. This was three or four years ago, last day of the season, we’re hunting ducks. We’ve got, I don’t know, 96, 100 full-body duck decoys out, and 72 are fully flocked black ducks. The other 24 are painted mallards. And it’s a sunny day, and I’m kind of thinking, the guy that brought the mallards, I’m thinking, why are we putting those out? Everything else is flocked. And now here we got these painted ones. And, you know, anyways, throughout the day a red-tailed hawk comes along. We’re watching it, and all of a sudden, it comes down, hammers one of the decoys, golly, hammered a painted decoy. So if the painted decoy is going to fool the eyes of a hawk that proved right. That proved to me the flocking isn’t for the birds.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right, for us.
Jeff: Exactly. Yet I still use, still buy flock decoys.

Ramsey Russell: Of course.

Jeff: Because it’s the latest and greatest. But it just, it showed me, like, you obviously don’t need what you think you need.
Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that crazy?
Jeff: Yeah, it was cool. I wish I had it on film.
Ramsey Russell: How has habitat and hunting itself changed in your 30-some-odd-year career here on PEI? And here’s what I’m getting at. When I go to western Canada, the breeding grounds, the prairies, the parklands, especially with the drought, I see changes. I see less bush, more grain going out to the horizon, bigger fields. I see, with this drought going on, I see dirt pans, I see tiles going in, draining of wetlands, conversions that we’ll never get back. No matter how much snow falls, we’ll never get those wetlands back. And still a lot of ducks relative to other parts of the world. But nonetheless, I see changes. And when I come over here, it feels timeless. It just feels timeless. But what do I know? I’ve been here for two days. So someone like yourself that’s lived here, hunted here three decades or more, how has the habitat and how has the hunting changed?
Jeff: I would say the biggest change to the habitat would just be the additional corn that’s grown.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeff: You know, there’s just so much feed for them now. There’s a lot of geese that don’t leave here.
Ramsey Russell: But you’re on an island. At some point in time, it’s finite. You can only go so far into the tidal zone before you can’t farm. I mean, you’re on an island. It’s finite.
Jeff: Yeah. It’s just that there was never, like, corn is such a big draw for the waterfowl. And 30 years ago, there wasn’t much corn around, you know, if you were lucky to have some cornfields. But now there’s so much corn grown, and the weather, the winters just don’t freeze up like they did. We don’t get the snow cover that we used to get. Like me as a bander, it’s a challenge because the birds, if they can get feed in a field, they’ll eat everything around my trap, but they won’t go in the trap. They’ll get everything cleaned up around it, and then they can go hit a silage pile. They can go hit a cornfield. Even if we get a snowstorm, 95% of the time, it comes with wind. So all the snow blows into the hedgerows, and the middle of the fields are wide open, so they still have a source. They’ve got bean fields, they’ve got cornfields, they’ve got grain fields. They’ve got something else to survive off of. So that’s made a change. And then as far as habitat, we don’t get affected really by drought or too much rain. It’s more of, everyone wants to live near the water. So you get a house across the river from where we were today. There’s a boat launch. Well, the guy that owned the field to the left of the boat launch all of a sudden decided he’s going to subdivide. So now he’s got a road going up. I would say there’s four or five lots there. The end lot is the one that’s sold and has a house on it now. So now you got to be 200 meters away from that. So you’ve just lost 400 meters of shoreline because it’s 200 meters on either side. So once those other four lots sell, he’s only going to expand that up further through the field so that eventually that whole river will be gone. Will be lost due to houses going up.

Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that crazy? Well, you know, right up the road here, as I was driving back to camp after lunch today, there’s a slough. Boy, I was thinking, man, if that was my backyard, it is, you could walk across the black ducks in that body of water right up here. Just look at it on your way out. But to your point, there’s houses all around it too. There’s nowhere there you can shoot without being 200 meters from a dwelling. And like somebody told me in New Brunswick, we looked at a little pond that had a black duck hybrid like the one we shot this morning, beautiful, and a blonde mallard. Just a little dugout, just a little stock tank, and it was 100 meters from a house. He said, “No, can’t hunt it. It’s 100 meters from a house.” What if that’s my house? It still can hunt it.
Jeff: Here you can, with permission.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeff: Yeah, if you own this cottage and there were geese in that field, and you didn’t mind hunting, you could say, “Oh yeah, go ahead.”
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeff: So it’s without permission you can’t. You have to be more than 200 meters.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeff: And for a few years, it wasn’t. It was always “occupied dwelling.” Then one year, the summary came out, and somehow “occupied,” that word, was left out. So now it’s just a “dwelling,” which makes it that much harder because there are cottages. We wouldn’t go, well, no, we couldn’t go where we’re going tomorrow if that “occupied” word was left out because it’s a dwelling, and we’re going to be less than 200 meters from that cottage.
Ramsey Russell: But it’s unoccupied.
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Because it’s a summer cottage, and it’s now wintertime.
Jeff: Yeah. So with that word “occupied” in, we’re good. But if it just said “dwelling,” which it did for two or three years, and I think it was just an administrative error that that word got left out, there’s that much more land, like water and fields and whatever, that you can’t hunt because of these summer homes, cottages. But again, they’ve put “dwelling, occupied” back in.
Ramsey Russell: Why do you think there’s such a decline in hunter participation in Canada generally and Prince Edward Island specifically? Because don’t be surprised, you know. My buddies in Manitoba, they know they’re never gonna see Ramsay Russell pull up in a U-Haul van and say, “Howdy, neighbor,” because it gets -50. Yeah, you all got some pretty mild, temperate winters up here relative to Canada. And boy, if I were ever gonna move to Canada, this is it because there’s so much opportunity, as we, for reasons we’ve described. But why the decline in hunters in Canada, and specifically on Prince Edward Island?
Jeff: I think part of it really is it’s just not easy to get into it. You have to get your hunter safety. You have to get your FAC in order to purchase a firearm. Firearms are expensive. Ammunition is expensive. Decoys are expensive. You know, so unless your father was into it, there’s a lot of deterrents for people that weren’t born into a hunting family.
Ramsey Russell: We got cost barriers.
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I mean, do you think that having a later start at 12 years old has something to do with it?
Jeff: No, I don’t. I think just finding access to, like everything has just become more difficult. You know, when I was a kid, you’d be driving down the road, you’d see a grain field that you thought there might be some grouse in, and you’d just go. And you’d walk the edge of the grain field. You didn’t worry about asking anyone permission. And if you did, the house was right there, like the farm. There was a farmhouse. They owned 150, 200 acres. And you’d walk up to the farmhouse and, you know, “Do you mind if I walk your field?” And you’d get a yes or no. Most times, you’d get a yes. Now, I’ve got a website that I can go to that’ll show me, well, it’s supposed to show who owns the property, but it just doesn’t get updated like it once did. But there was a field that I wanted to hunt, and the people lived in Colorado. Well, I tracked them down, and I forget exactly how I got their number, but I did, and I phoned them. And I forget if it was the wife or the husband, but they said, “I need to talk it over with my spouse.” And by the time I finally get back to them and they get back to me, they’re like, “Nah, no, we really don’t want anybody hunting our field.”
Ramsey Russell: Well, I’d have bet my favorite ball cap that was going to be the answer coming out of Colorado.
Jeff: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. They’re probably neither one from Colorado. They just live in Colorado. And it’s funny because I was just fixing to ask you, is it a function of changing social mores and values or change in demographics, you know, because it is a vacation destination.
Jeff: Yeah. Oh, and there’s a lot of land here owned by people from away. if you’re not born in PEI, you’re from away.
Ramsey Russell: Hawaii?
Jeff: From away.

Ramsey Russell: Away Okay.

Jeff: That’s one of our expressions. It’s, you know, “Oh, he’s from away.” Or, you know, because you weren’t born on, your parents might be from PEI, but you weren’t born here. You’re from away.

Ramsey Russell: That reminds me of a Southernism. It’s like there’s two ways. You know, a guy like you comes down to hunt with me, there’s two ways, you know, and one’s good and one’s bad. “Where you from?” That’s good. “You ain’t from around here, are you?” That’s bad. You done messed up somehow, Woody. Somebody asks, “You ain’t from around here, are you?”
Jeff: I’ll keep that in mind when I’m down south.
Ramsey Russell: Speaking of that, last question. You’ve been around. You’ve been out to Alaska, you and Ben, you all have been some places. You shot some species. But where on your bucket list, you shared with me yesterday, where on your bucket list would you like to go? Would you like to become immersed in a duck hunting culture?
Jeff: Oh, I’d love to go to Louisiana.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeff: And just to hunt and the food and anything I’ve seen, the people just look like good people.
Ramsey Russell: They are good people.
Jeff: And maybe that’s because they came from up here, many of them.
Ramsey Russell: You know, we were talking about this yesterday in a blind when you said Louisiana, and I’m like, man, I see a lot of similarities between that Mayberry RFD version of Canada and south of I-10, Louisiana. They call them coon asses, call them Cajuns. Unlike a lot of labels, you know, they wear those names with pride.
Jeff: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. They don’t get offended at that. But, you know, it’s like, I always talk about the Cajun Navy, where you watch the hurricane or flood or something happen down there. They ain’t waiting on FEMA, by God, the locals are going out and helping their neighbors. And I’ve just seen them just to be, my experience is from east side of Louisiana to the west side, south of I-10. It is the most gracious and hospitable and inviting and friendly people. You know, it’s like I have literally walked into duck camps or clubs or something and just felt like I had a family reunion all of a sudden. You know what I’m saying? It’s just like, they’re good people.
Jeff: You feel welcome.

Ramsey Russell: Great hunting. And just, boy, they got some good food. I mean, yeah. So, I can see that. I can see that. I mean, I feel like, I feel like it’s going to be, on the one hand, way different than what we’ve experienced in the last couple of days, but on the other hand, very familiar. Very familiar to you. I really feel like you’re going to see what I’m talking about when you do that. We’ve reached out to a couple of people, and I don’t think you’re going to have any problem getting an invite to come down there and experience the deep south of Louisiana. But you know, I’m going to tell you now, we go out here around some of these tidally influenced rivers and creeks. That’s way different than hunting alligator-infested cypress breaks.

Jeff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You ain’t scared of snakes or alligators, are you?

Jeff: I’m not real fond of snakes.

Ramsey Russell: Do you all have any around here?

Jeff: Just, we’ve got three different species. There’s garter snakes. A three-foot garter snake would be a big garter snake.

Ramsey Russell: Those are pets.

Jeff: Okay, well, we got three different species of pets then.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Jeff: Garter snake, garter snake. There’s a green snake that I’ve never seen.

Ramsey Russell: Grass snake.

Jeff: Yeah. And then red-bellied.

Ramsey Russell: But they’re mud snakes.

Jeff: They’re tiny little things.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Jeff: Yeah. Look like I had a pair of sneakers that are boots and then the shoelace was the same size basically as these little snakes.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable.

Jeff: Yeah. At first, I thought it was a baby garter snake, but it was October, or September, and I thought, well, it can’t be just a baby. Like, that thing would be bigger. It didn’t look like a garter either. But we don’t. Yeah, I’m not, I’m not scared of them. But let’s put it this way, I don’t want a water moccasin slithering up my back.

Ramsey Russell: Well, go during the wintertime.

Jeff: No, I want to shoot a prime blue-wing.

Ramsey Russell: Born and raised in the Deep South. You know, I’m not. Snakes don’t bother me until they get the jump on me. And I’m thinking, I was hunting with Dale Borderland and my buddy Damian one time. We were blue-winged teal hunting at a fish farm. And it was just a step out of the water up into a platform blind. It was totally enshrouded with fronds. I’d been carrying on, sitting there talking, waiting for it to get light and everything else. It got light. I’m sitting there, and about that time, I saw this flicker. It was about a six-foot water snake, big as my arm. Not a cottonmouth, a water snake, eyeball level. And you want to talk about somebody hollering and running in place. It got the jump on me. And the more I flailed around in the blind, it was trying to get out. It didn’t know what was going on, but it knew something. It was trying to go. If I’d known it was that scared, I’d have relaxed, grabbed that snake, and thrown it down that end. I was trying to make friends, not enemies.

Jeff: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: But anyway, I’d love to get you down to that part of the world with some friends and share some time with you down there. And Woody, this has been everything I have ever dreamed of as an immersive experience here in Prince Edward Island. I have loved every minute. And I’m excited about tomorrow morning.

Jeff: I am, too.

Ramsey Russell: We’ve driven by there a few days, and there’s a pile of black ducks, some mallards, some gadwalls, but there are a pile of black ducks. I think tomorrow, if the weatherman’s right and the wind hits right, we’re going to be on them.

Jeff: I think so. Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Anyway, thank you very much, Woody. Folks, thank you all for listening. This episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast with my buddy Jeff Woody Wood here on Prince Edward Island. See you next time.