EP 538. Five Generations Island Living

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I am on Prince Edward Island, wrapping up a heck of a stretch and ending on a bucket list hunt myself. Joining me today is Mr. Rob Shaw from Shaw’s Hotel out here on Brackley Beach. Rob, I guess, are we on the west side?

Rob Shaw: North side.

Ramsey Russell: North side. This is the north side of Prince Edward Island.

Rob Shaw: Right.

Ramsey Russell: How long have you lived here?

Rob Shaw: I’ve lived here all my life. I’m 68 years of age, and I was born here. My family has been on this property since 1793.

Ramsey Russell: 1793?

Rob Shaw: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: What the heck brought them here? You told me yesterday you have Scottish origins.

Rob Shaw: That’s correct. We were part of the first group of English immigrants brought to Prince Edward Island because the British government wanted to displace the French who were here before. So, they started bringing settlers from Scotland. My ancestors arrived close to here in 1770. My ancestor, who was on the boat that came in 1770, had two sons. I don’t know how many greats it would be, but he came here and cut out his homestead in the spring of 1793.

Ramsey Russell: That is crazy! Wow, I mean, that is amazing. That’s amazing. What happened? Why did they push the French out? The French must have been a cantankerous bunch.

Rob Shaw: It wasn’t really as much as that.

Ramsey Russell: Just kind of a France vs England type skirmish over territory?

Rob Shaw: They fought for years and years. I mean, Atlantic Canada was mainly a French territory, and the eastern seaboard of the U.S. was a British colony. There used to be raiding parties coming from Atlantic Canada, raiding different towns on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. Between the pressure they were getting from the colonies, the Brits finally decided they wanted to keep this region too. When they won the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and booted the French out of Quebec, they decided to bring settlers and start resettling Atlantic Canada.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. You know, somebody told me one time, and I could be wrong, often wrong, never in doubt, am I. Somebody told me one time that Quebec City is one of the oldest settlements in North America.

Rob Shaw: It is. It goes back about 400 years. Champlain founded Quebec City in the late 1500s. You’re only looking at what, the Mayflower, around 1612, was it?

Ramsey Russell: 1492.

Rob Shaw: Well, not when Columbus came to North America, but really there were a lot of British and French settlers who came to this part of North America.

Ramsey Russell: The French and Spanish were here on North America a long time before Christopher Columbus. I mean, there was actually a settlement down in what is modern-day Texas, two or three hundred years before Christopher Columbus. I knew the French had been up here a long time.

Rob Shaw: Oh, yeah. The French settled in this region in the early 1600s.

Ramsey Russell: So, on Prince Edward Island, the English brought in a lot of Scots to colonize it. Were the French already here too?

Rob Shaw: The French were here, but the Brits brought in the Scots and the Irish. That’s where you got the settlement and the strong Scottish and Irish influence in Atlantic Canada.

Ramsey Russell: You do, don’t you?

Rob Shaw: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: So, those two brothers who got off the ship back in the 1700s. How far long before your family got into the hotel business? Shaw’s Hotel has been here a long time.

Rob Shaw: “My great-grandfather hunted with a muzzleloader. My father with a 12-gauge. I use a bow. The tools change, but the respect for the land stays the same.”

Rob Shaw: The hotel started in 1860, and it happened more by good luck than good management. My great-grandfather had a friend who had a colleague with a daughter who was ill. Her doctor prescribed being close to the moist sea air. We’re on an island, we’re right on the water. Anyone who lives on the coast knows it’s not dry, and the salt’s in the air. So, she was prescribed to be close to the salt air. They asked my great-grandfather if we were interested in taking on boarders. We had just built a new home because we lost our previous home in a fire. We had five rooms in it, and the family moved out into a cottage for the summer. We took her family in that summer of 1860 with the five rooms. We opened it up to any other travelers and started that summer of 1860. 165 summers later, we haven’t missed a summer.

Ramsey Russell: 165 summers later. That’s a good way of putting it. When you talk about taking on boarders, was it mostly labor and business, fishermen, things of that nature border? When did Prince Edward Island become a tourist destination?

Rob Shaw: Back in the early 1860s, that was very much the beginning of tourism in North America. The affluent, who could afford to travel, found saltwater swimming became very trendy.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, it became en vogue. Very therapeutic.

Rob Shaw: Very much so. People would travel on the sailing ships, book passage, and come up on the trade routes from New England, Boston, and New York. They would unpack their steamer trunks and stay for the summer.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Rob Shaw: By the 1890s, there were 10 beach hotels like ours along the shore here. If you couldn’t find a place along the north shore and had to go into our capital city, Charlottetown, you were roughing it. Everybody wanted to be out on the shore.

Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy. So, what was it like growing up here on Prince Edward Island? You’ve been here a long time.

Rob Shaw: I think P.E.I. is a special place. Islanders who grew up here, lived here, it’s in your blood, in your fabric. We have a great lifestyle here. We’re small, we know our neighbors, and we help our neighbors. For example, when Covid hit a few years ago, it was probably my biggest challenge running the hotel. A friend of mine, who worked here as a teenager and is now a lawyer in Charlottetown, started a Facebook page called “Friends of Shaw’s.” Before long, my phone and emails were nonstop with people asking, “What can we do to help?” We opened the hotel that year, basically on volunteer labor from friends and family.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Talk about a sense of community.

Ramsey Russell: “The island’s taught me that sustainability isn’t a buzzword. It’s survival. Every generation leaves a mark, but the best ones leave it lightly.”

Rob Shaw: Yeah, as this lawyer put it, he said, “It was a big part of my life coming up. I remember what it was like as a teenager working here and how much I enjoyed working for you, and your family. It’s important that the hotel continues.” There was a big question mark about what tourism would be like when Covid hit. We were essentially shut off from the rest of Canada at that point.

Ramsey Russell: Well, if you think that was something, you should have been in the international duck hunting business at that time. It was scary.

Rob Shaw: Yeah. Then, to further verify that sense of community, we got hit hard with Hurricane Fiona in September 2022. We woke up that morning to catastrophic damage. We lost the roof off the main inn, had a boathouse disappear, and had water four inches deep in the bottom cottage down here, below us where we are today. Boathouse shuts down by water disappeared.  Probably lost 1,000 trees around the property, electrical damage, etc. That happened on Friday night into Saturday morning. We were only able to open the roads to the highway by Sunday morning. By Monday, around 11 a.m., there were close to 40 people in the yard asking, “What can we do to help?”

Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Rob Shaw: And, you know, my job went from cleanup to logistics, trying to make sure that, they wanted to help. So I had to make sure, okay, this is what I need you guys to do. This is what I need you people to do. And it was tremendous. It was heartwarming to know that, the hotel meant so much to, so many people.
Ramsey Russell: What a great story. I mean, but to have been here since the middle 1800s, there’s probably a lot of people, I never thought about it, there’s probably a lot of people that over the years have worked here.
Rob Shaw: Tremendous amount of people. You run into it all the time. I still run into people that will say to me, and I mean, I’m getting up there, but I run into an older person who said, I remember you when you were that high, when you were running around with your father or your mother around the hotel. And it’s tremendous the number of people you run into who have some kind of connection. I’ll tell you one story. A few years ago, I got a phone call from this lady. She said, my mother is in Alzheimer’s disease. We never knew that she worked at Shaw’s, but in the last couple of months, she started talking about all her times being out at Shaw’s Hotel in the summer when she was 18, 19 years old. Would you mind if we take her out? And so I said, yeah, please, by all means. They phoned and said they were going to come out in the next couple of hours, a couple of days later. And I walked around with the lady, and I showed her. I said, remember, you probably lived up there in those rooms up in the barns. And, you know, she didn’t recollect a lot of it.
Ramsey Russell: I bet she felt it, though.
Rob Shaw: She did, because her daughter phoned me up later on that day and said, that was special. If you could have seen the smiles on my mother’s face, that was the best. I haven’t seen her smile in a long time. So it’s kind of a neat story that you run into something like that.
Ramsey Russell: I asked you the other day. I walked up, introduced myself. You were over here at the kitchen, the main house, I call it. And I looked down and I found a buckeye. And my great granddaddy used to carry a buckeye in his pocket till it was shiny. It was just good. I don’t know why, but he always had a shiny buckeye in his pocket. And I looked around for a buckeye tree, and I couldn’t see one. Where’s the buckeye tree at? You pointed to it. It’s the largest buckeye tree I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know they got that big. I’m a forester. Ours don’t get that big in Mississippi. And I asked you, I said, how old? I wonder who planted that buckeye tree.
Rob Shaw: Well, my dad told me that it was a good-sized tree. He was born in 1903. He remembers that as a little boy. We figure that tree was roughly planted in the 1880s.
Ramsey Russell: 1880’s?

Rob Shaw: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Whoever built the hotel, planted that tree for shade. Isn’t that something?
Rob Shaw: Yeah. And after that hurricane, one of the things, when I walked out that day, I expected it to be down when I saw everything else, but it survived.
Ramsey Russell: It’s the off-season right now. And Rob, I really appreciate you letting me stay here because Jeff, everybody called him Woody, suggested I stay here. Well, pitballs love to stay there. I think you’d enjoy it too. And boy, do I love it. It’s so nice out here. And I called, and somebody answered and said, no, we’re going to be closed at the time, you know, it’s off-season and everything else. And I told Jeff, well, where else should I stay? He said, ah, let me call Rob. He’ll open it up for you. This place must be hopping during busy tourist season.
Rob Shaw: Yes, it is. Our season is mainly July and August. But you know what helped over the years? We have a very good reputation in the marketplace, and its word of mouth. And when you’ve been in business for 160-plus years, there must be some reasons because of that continuity. Our accommodations are comfortable, they’re clean.
Ramsey Russell: Oh my gosh, they are amazing.
Rob Shaw: But you know what? It’s location. You can sit here and look across this field, out over the water, be peaceful. I mean, even how we situated the cottage, you can sit on this deck and you can’t see people on the other deck with some of the greenery in behind it and how we angled them so you’re in a sense of community, but you have lots of privacy too. And it becomes a little community in itself. And I mean, a lot of people have said to us, this is our home away from home.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. And so let me ask you this. Besides the accommodations and whatnot like that, you are 165 years in the hospitality business. What are some of the tenets? I mean, what have you learned in generations of being in this business catering to tourists that are coming to their home away from home? What are some of the foundations of you all’s service?
Rob Shaw: Well, I mean, one of the comments that people will make to us is saying what we love about your place is that you never change. Well, that’s not true. We’re changing continually. But it’s subtle, and it blends in so they never feel that anything shocking comes back in. So it’s like it’s a place that they can come and unpack their bags and feel relaxed. I mean, there are all types of different vacations that you can go on. But what our type of, what we’re selling to the traveler is a place, come back, come here, unpack your bags for a week or 10 days, whatever it may be, and just unwind. We’re in a society today, worldwide, where it’s rush, rush, rush, pressure. And you know what? It’s nice to get away from that for a few days.
Ramsey Russell: It sure is.
Rob Shaw: And so that’s a big part of our success.
Ramsey Russell: The tranquility. I pull in, park right here. I walk in this cabin, I open up my, wow, this is gorgeous. My wife texted me, said, you make it? Yes. I wish you were here. You’d love it. It’s quiet. There’s no external light. There’s no car, there’s no traffic, there’s nothing. It’s serene. I lay my head down, I got the window cracked just a little bit. It’s a very, very warm house. I mean that in a good way. It’s built well. And all I hear is the breeze. And I sleep so well out here. It’s amazing.
Rob Shaw: People will comment on that. To open up the window in the summer with the fresh air, they’ll make a comment saying, the best sleep I had in a long time.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it is. I know it gets. Woody said it gets minus 20 Celsius up here in the wintertime. What are the summertime’s like? What would be the average ambient temperature in summertime?
Rob Shaw: It’s about, well, Fahrenheit-wise, it would be in mid-1970s.
Ramsey Russell: Perfect.
Rob Shaw: It’s on average. I mean, we can get it hotter. I mean, and it being warmer in recent years.
Ramsey Russell: You got a breeze blowing always.
Rob Shaw: Well, that’s just it. You know, people saying, do you have air conditioning in these cottages? I say no, they’re well-insulated, so they’re comfortable. And there’s lots of windows in them, and you get a cross-section of the breeze. And one thing living on the island, living on an island, you’re used to getting a breeze.

Ramsey Russell: Always.

Rob Shaw: Yeah, and I mean, that’s something, you know. There’s nothing like, some fresh air going back instead of an air-conditioned room.

Ramsey Russell: I walked in just now. I came by your shop to introduce myself but also to get an oyster knife, and I couldn’t find an oyster knife. Woody said you’d have one, and he did. He brought me some oysters to eat, and I shucked them yesterday right here on the front porch. They were delicious. Boy, you all got some good seafood right here. You all are blessed with some seafood.

Rob Shaw: We are very fortunate. I mean, our bays right here. Our oysters and our mussels are second to none in the world.

Ramsey Russell: I believe that.

Rob Shaw: I had a guest here a number of years ago, a well-to-do New York businessman. He used to commute from Manhattan to his home every day, and he said, “On Friday afternoon, I used to go into this oyster bar in Grand Central Station in New York City, and I used to treat myself on Friday afternoon to a dozen Malpeque oysters.”

Ramsey Russell: Malpeque oysters.

Rob Shaw: Yeah. Which are synonymous with P.E.I. And he said they were the most expensive, but there was a reason, they were the best.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, they’re very good.

Rob Shaw: “This place is our library. Every tree, every creek, every duck fly tells a story. And we’re just the latest chapter.”

Rob Shaw: And he didn’t realize that Malpeque oysters were from P.E.I. And now when I was in the US Virgin Islands last year, in some of the fine restaurants, they were featuring Prince Edward Island mussels and Prince Edward Island oysters. And, you know, with air travel today, it’s probably one of the biggest things that put P.E.I. further on the international map because of the quality of our seafood.

Ramsey Russell: Shellfish.

Rob Shaw: Yeah. And I asked this one server where Prince Edward Island is, and she said, “It’s just something, it’s part of Maine.” She thought. So anyway, she wasn’t quite sure. But I think it’s the shallow basins, the nutrients in our bays, and the temperature, the contrast between summer and winter in our water temperatures, that make them what they are. The biggest part of our mussels are consumed in the summer. As an islander, this time of year, I don’t want to eat them.

Ramsey Russell: Really? The summertime?

Rob Shaw: Yeah. Because they’re spawning. The meats in them are small. Oh, yeah. You get that same mussel in January or February, and it’s twice as big. It’s meaty, it’s more tasty.

Ramsey Russell: We had some last night that were absolutely delicious. The blue mussels, that’s what we had last night. I’ve got a thing for them. That’s something you’re not gonna get in Mississippi either. We’ve got oysters. I like these cold-water oysters better. I’m gonna be honest with you. I like them much better than Gulf oysters. And we don’t have any clams. We walked in to get mussels. I told the story to Woody, You don’t eat mussels in Mississippi. The freshwater, the warm water, you don’t eat them. I had a college roommate who did it, and I really thought he was gonna die. I thought they were gonna die eating that stuff. They got sick for days. And boy, those blue mussels, he said something like 80% of the cultivated blue mussels worldwide come from right here on P.E.I.

Rob Shaw: Oh, it’s a big industry. If you just travel around the bays, every bay is full of mussel leases.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, crazy.

Rob Shaw: Yeah. And it’s a big employer of P.E.I. And as I said, P.E.I booms in the summer with tourism, and there are a lot of flights in here every day. If we didn’t have oysters and mussels being shipped out on planes every day, we probably wouldn’t have air service in Prince Edward Island.

Ramsey Russell: Can you fly here commercially?

Rob Shaw: Yeah, you can. Air Canada flies in here on a regular basis, and in the summer, there are two or three other airlines that are in here regularly.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll be darned. Well, you know, when I walked into your kitchen yesterday, I don’t know why I’m surprised, but you had five big old Canada geese laying out.

Rob Shaw: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I said, “Whoa, where’d you get that?” You said, “Well, we went hunting this morning.”

Rob Shaw: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And you’re a goose and duck hunter?

Rob Shaw: Yes, I am. My father was a goose hunter, and my grandfather was a great hunter. He loved hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Did you ever get to hunt with them?

Rob Shaw: I hunted with my father. I never got to meet my grandfather. He passed away before I was born. But my dad took me out hunting when I was 10 or 11 years of age, and you know what? I couldn’t get enough of it.

Ramsey Russell: What was it like growing up back in those days, 68 years ago, on P.E.I. hunting with your dad? What are some of your earliest memories?

Rob Shaw: Well, I remember the first day he took me out goose hunting, and he had the patience of, you know, he could wait out anything with a flock of geese swimming into you. Whether we were out just down below us here, just in front of the cottages, we were out in our goose blind, and there were three geese swimming down the shore. They were out in front, and my dad said, “No, we just wait for a few minutes.” And they walked by us in the blind. They were maybe five or six feet away from us at one point. Then they went off to the left. I was anxious trying to get, you know, this was going to be my first goose. But he went over and they went off to the side of the plane. And as I said, my dad had a lot of patience. They were off to the side, and he shot all three of them with one shot.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Rob Shaw: But I did get my first goose later on that day.

Ramsey Russell: That was your first goose. Do you remember your first duck?

Rob Shaw: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I bet it was a black duck.

Rob Shaw: It was a black duck, actually. Yeah. I shot him with a .410.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Rob Shaw: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Flying or swimming?
Rob Shaw: Oh, you’re sitting.
Ramsey Russell: We don’t have to lead them as far when they’re sitting on the water. I know, I ain’t got to tell you that, Rob. You ain’t got to lead a duck near as far when he’s swimming.
Rob Shaw: Yeah, no. As you get back, you know, I love shooting wing shots. You know, I won’t shoot a bird on the water now. I clap my hands, they yell at them and set them to jump. It’s not too hard a shot when they’re just jumping six feet off the water that first shot. But anyway, the second and third, when they hit the wind, it might be a wee bit harder.
Ramsey Russell: How important to your hunting origins and to hunting on Prince Edward Island, as you know it at age 78, are black ducks? It’s a pretty iconic species here.
Rob Shaw: Yeah, I mean, this was the duck we hunted as a youngster, I never seen a mallard. I mean, I seen an odd pintail and teals, but it was black ducks we went out and hunted, and that was the duck we went after all the time, the black duck.
Ramsey Russell: You told me a story yesterday about your first mallard. How old were you when you killed your first mallard?
Rob Shaw: Oh, I guess I would have been close to 30 years of age, maybe a touch older. And I see this mallard flying behind me. It was a long shot, and I winged him, and he fell down in the grass behind the blind. I went out and looked for him. I couldn’t find him. I didn’t have a dog. I looked for him for quite a while and then came back to the blind because the ducks were flying. And then there was a lull. I went back and looked for him again, no luck. Third time I finally found him, but I got him mounted in the house there too.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Rob Shaw: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: That was a real trophy.
Rob Shaw: Oh. Oh, yeah. I mean, and that was, you know, you didn’t see mounts. Now today it’s pretty common. I think I also mentioned yesterday, I guess he was 13- or 14-year-old son, my youngest son. But he turned into an avid hunter. We took him down on a stormy day, and we were just lying in the bay leaves on the edge of the sand dune. The tide was quite high, and we see two mallards come flying towards us. I reached down with my right hand to grab my gun, and my son, who was sitting right beside me, put his left hand on top of mine and said, “Dad, I got this.” And he shot his first mallard. I mean he shot teal ducks and black ducks on it there too. But this was his going to be his first time at getting a shot as a mallard and he shot his first mallet. He actually got both of them.
Ramsey Russell: I asked you just a little while ago, were you a goose hunter or a duck hunter? And you said you hunt them both. You don’t have any preference?
Rob Shaw: No, but I mean, I enjoy a good goose hunt. I enjoy a good duck hunt. But I guess if I had to take one over the other, I think I would take a duck hunt. You get three or four ducks coming over your decoys, and you stand up on them, you don’t know if they’re going straight up, left, or straight at you. With geese, you know, if they come in and you stand on them as they go in, they’re pretty well just flying. You can expect where they go.
Ramsey Russell: They can’t react as quick as a duck.
Rob Shaw: With the duck, It’s anything goes.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Rob Shaw: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I asked Woody the same question. If you’re going out tomorrow, going duck hunting, would you rather shoot black duck or mallards?
Rob Shaw: Black ducks.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Rob Shaw: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. He said mallard, and I said, no, not me. No, I’m with you.
Rob Shaw: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Do you think that, as table fare, they’re comparable to mallards?
Rob Shaw: You get a black duck that’s, you know, early in the season. You can get some black ducks late in the fall, depending on where they’re feeding, where they might be eating little snails and small mussels.
Ramsey Russell: Little strong.
Rob Shaw: They can be fishy.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Rob Shaw: And I mean, usually you can tell by the color of their skin if they’ve been eating on fish for a while.
Ramsey Russell: Yellow.
Rob Shaw: Yeah. I mean, the joke is, when you cook a fishy duck, you throw the duck out in the pan.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Rob Shaw: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You know, I went to pluck a drake black duck yesterday, and he was so fat, the skin just ripped. It was thick fat. Good thick fat. He had a big red leg too. And I hated not to pluck him, but it was just so fat, you know, and he was such a healthy bird. But the skin was just as white as could be.
Rob Shaw: Well, we were breasting out some of those birds yesterday, the geese I talked to you about. And I said we had this little goose, it’s young, so I mean, it’s probably a gosling this year. And I mean, nice white breast on it and no pin feathers on it. I said, I think I’m going to pick this one, Dustin. This one’s good for roasting whole.
Ramsey Russell: Heck, yeah.

Rob Shaw: “You can’t separate hunting from heritage here. It’s how we measure time—by seasons, not calendars.”

Rob Shaw: Yeah. I mean, there’s more work to do something like that. But anyway, we picked him, and he had quite a bit of fat inside him too. So we’re looking forward to whether he takes it home and cooks it or myself. But anyway, it’ll be a good eating bird.
Ramsey Russell: You grew up hunting with your dad. How did he recall duck hunting prior to you coming along, like back in the good old days? What were some of the distinctions between him being a young man born and raised on P.E.I., hunting waterfowl, versus the time you came along? What are some of the traditions and techniques he used?
Rob Shaw: Well, a lot of the hunting early in his days, they used to, it was all on water.
Ramsey Russell: Water.
Rob Shaw: Yeah. I mean, geese never went into the fields here in P.E.I. back then.
Ramsey Russell: There wasn’t much agriculture.
Rob Shaw: Well, they were eating eel grass.
Ramsey Russell: Oh.
Rob Shaw: Yeah.  But one of the neat things he used to tell me about was hunting with live callers.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Rob Shaw: Yeah. He used to hunt with live geese or live ducks, depending on what they were.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Rob Shaw: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: When on the timeline would that have been, and when would it have ended?
Rob Shaw: It would have been roughly when he started hunting, probably in the 1920s, when he was a teenager. And that ended, I think it ended around 1950.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Rob Shaw: But they used to hunt with live callers. There were a couple black ducks, and they used to take two black ducks with them. One was a female, and one was a male, and they would split them apart, put them on one side of the blind or pound each other, and the female, as they say, would never shut up.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Rob Shaw: So when they actually lost, a snowy owl took that black duck. It was almost like a pet to them because they used to open up the little cage they used to transport them down to the blinds, and she would actually climb in herself. She liked to go hunting.
Ramsey Russell: She loved it.
Rob Shaw: Yeah. And unfortunately, she was killed by that snowy owl.
Ramsey Russell: Were they hunting when that snowy owl got her?
Rob Shaw: Yes, they were. And when they noticed the owl, my uncle, who was hunting with my dad that day, was so enraged, seeing the snowy owl, he up and fired two shots. He was a good shot, and the owl wasn’t that far. I mean, the owl was just fluttering in place because he had the duck in his talons, and she was tethered, so he couldn’t get away with her. And so he was just fluttering there. But, as I said, my uncle was so enraged, as he said, missed in place. The owl dropped the duck, but it killed the duck.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Did he ever say how many live decoys they needed? Was it a bunch of them? Was it a few of them?
Rob Shaw: With the ducks, they only would take two, and I think they would take four or five.
Ramsey Russell: And would they mix it in with wooden decoys? I guess.

Rob Shaw: No.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. Just bring a couple of live ducks out there, and that was it.
Rob Shaw: We have seven carved wood goose decoys that we had. We used to have 40 or 50 of these wooden carved goose decoys, but we lost a number of them in a barn fire in 1943. But I still have seven of them. But they wouldn’t eat them, you know. Nothing like live birds to attract some more live birds.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, that’s right. No, nothing will beat that.
Rob Shaw: You know, the field right out here in front of you, a few years ago when COVID was on, this was a grain field. When we were cleaning up from Hurricane Fiona, I put some decoys in here, and I got seven or eight geese coming in for a couple of days. First thing you know, I hit over a thousand because I was so busy trying to clean up. Geese were flying over the hotel or something like that. But I said, I don’t have time to go hunting or, if I shoot a bird, to clean one up. So I joked that year, virtually, I shot hundreds that year because they were flying over the hotel so low.
Ramsey Russell: Berkeley.
Rob Shaw: Yeah. But one day I came out of the hotel and walked across. There they were in the front lawn of the hotel.
Ramsey Russell: Did your dad remember, or did he hunt Brant back in the day they came?
Rob Shaw: He did. And that was one of their most favorite birds to hunt.
Ramsey Russell: When you say goose decoys, were they Canada goose decoys or Brant decoys?
Rob Shaw: I think we have four or five Brant decoys, but we had the same thing carved in them also. And Brant was their preferred one because they enjoyed eating a Brant more so than a goose.
Ramsey Russell: Eelgrass-fed Brant are unbelievable.
Rob Shaw: Yeah. And I came home from college in 1980, and I was out hunting one day by myself, and it was gale-force wind blowing, and this bird came flying at me alone. It came flying low along the water, straight at me. And he was going with the wind, and I up, and I missed him on my first shot. And when he turned and kind of slowed up into the wind some, I shot him on the second one and went out there and said, “Geez, I saw the Brant”, And it was the one and only Brant I ever shot. When I took him home, I said to my aunt and my dad that day, I said, “Guess what I shot today? I shot a Brant.” My aunt said, “You get out there and pick him.” She couldn’t wait because they hadn’t had a Brant for years.
Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable. Did your family have any favorite or go-to recipes for ducks and geese?
Rob Shaw: No, I don’t think they did as much as, it was a tradition. We always had a goose for Christmas that we shot.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Rob Shaw: Yeah. It’s a goose with cranberry, and stuffed it, and, you know, pick out a couple of nice geese that we would roast for Christmas dinner. Or if we had a turkey over Christmas holidays, it would be for New Year’s.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Rob Shaw: It was goose for Christmas.
Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that something?
Rob Shaw: But my son and I have experimented with a lot of goose recipes over the years because, you know, different ways you can do.
Ramsey Russell: What are some of your favorite ways to cook a goose?
Rob Shaw: Well, I think I gave you an example yesterday.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah. Pastrami is amazing.
Rob Shaw: Pastrami. Jeff Wood actually showed me that recipe, and that was quite good. There’s another recipe. I’ve seen it in the Ducks Unlimited magazine that I really like. I brown some garlic up in the oven, and then I took those whole garlic cloves, and I make kind of like a dressing. I will butterfly the goose breast and put the dressing in it. And it has some spices like parsley and some rosemary.

Ramsey Russell: Sage.

Rob Shaw: Yeah. And put them in and put a couple toothpicks in and put a, like a goat desecrate for Philadelphia cream cheese. I like using goat cheese.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.
Rob Shaw: And put them in there and bake them in the oven for an hour, and then slice them up, and it’s good hot and it’s good cold.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Rob Shaw: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: That sounds delicious.
Rob Shaw: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: “There’s a rhythm to island life that’s hard to find elsewhere. Five generations have learned to read the tides, the skies, and the land. That’s wisdom I’d trade any modern gadget for.”

Ramsey Russell: I was driving up just a little while ago and met one of your running buddies, one of your longtime hunting buddies. I think he likes to goose hunt more than ducks the way he acted. And he said you all got a hot goose hunt tomorrow, boy. But I told him about duck hunting. He pointed back over here over my shoulder out the window. He pointed to a blind and said that’s the best duck blind on the island right there. Just go out there and get you one. He said tomorrow, with the wind blowing so hard, it’s not gonna be any good.

Rob Shaw: Well, the tide probably would be too high, you would be flooded out of there. But sometimes you can go up down to the edge of the dune and get into tall grass there. And, you know, you get in there, and the ducks want to tuck in underneath the dune sometimes. But it’s an interesting shoot because, you know, they come in with, you know, it goes to blowing 60 to 70 kilometers an hour tomorrow, 80 kilometers, so that’s 50 miles an hour wind. You shoot one shot at a black duck that’s low over the water, and they throw themselves up in the air. He might be 20 yards away from you. Fire the first shot, I guarantee you he’s close to 50 when you fire the second shot.

Ramsey Russell: I guarantee you he is. What makes this blind back here so good?

Rob Shaw: Excuse me. I think the fact that we control the marsh with our old deed we have. It’s called the law of accretion, and its low watermark.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Rob Shaw: And it’s something that you cannot have today, but because it’s been in the family, this property for 200 plus years. And as I said, it’s a British statute before Canada became a country.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Rob Shaw: It’s grandfathered in. So, if I sold that property to you, it wouldn’t come with that rule.

Ramsey Russell: No?

Rob Shaw: It would revert back to high water marks. So we control, you know, there’s no pressure on it. We hunt it when we want to hunt it. And so, I mean, we can let the ducks get comfortable. So when my son comes home, we’ve been pretty well guaranteed we go out and get a good duck hunt.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I saw you just a little while ago through the window ride down and gander at it. You said there are about 200 black ducks on it right now.

Rob Shaw: Yeah, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Good rested, unpressured ducks.

Rob Shaw: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You talk about hunting and tell me also there’s a refuge somewhere nearby.

Rob Shaw: Well, the property here borders the P.E.I. National Park.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Rob Shaw: Which is basically a protected area. So, you know, all the areas around pretty well that they have up in the marsh and behind them, they’re protected. They can’t, nobody can hunt there. And we bordered our marsh, and our blind borders that park. And, you know, I can be out the door of my home and be in the blind in 10 minutes if I want to be.

Ramsey Russell: Your hunt buddy seems like a character. You got any good stories? Like, I was thinking to myself, I was sitting there talking to him for a few minutes. I could probably hunt with him one time and have a lifetime of stories. Have you got any stories hunting with him? That you can share. We’re a family audience.

Rob Shaw: He is a character. He’ll get out in the blind, and there’d be a story in regards to whether he hunted this field or hunted this pond before. It’s like he has hunted all his life, and he’s an avid hunter. It’s one thing to say about it, it’s entertaining. You know, sometimes you get in the blind, and you’re just quiet.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Rob Shaw: Not when you hunt with Bob. It’s story time.

Ramsey Russell: He’s got stories.

Rob Shaw: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What’s your favorite story?

Rob Shaw: Oh, geez. What would it be?

Ramsey Russell: First one to come to mind that you can say on the air.

Rob Shaw: Oh, I think it’s when he took my son out one time, and he came home, and he said, you know what? I never seen a lad that could get three shots off as quick as he does.

Ramsey Russell: Those young reflexes.

Rob Shaw: Well, I mean, it was. I remember, I know exactly what he dealt with because I had a real good friend. He’s actually passed away now from cancer, but his son and my son were the same age. We used to take them out hunting with us. And we were out shooting one day, and we shot some geese. Bobby and I were out picking them up. And we had just fired at this flock, and we were off to the side of the blind picking up the birds we had shot. And I turned and said, look at this. There were two geese that we probably, you know, young ones that turned around. They were heading straight back for the blind. I wonder if they see them. And we never said it sooner than it came out of my mouth. You seen the two guns come up, and both of them, like, bing, bing, bing. I mean, I think on the second shot or something, they were both falling. I think they both unloaded their guns, whether they knew they hit them or not. But they emptied their guns, and they got the two geese coming by. But they were what, 15, 16 years of age.

Ramsey Russell: You shot black ducks, mallards, and Canada geese. Have you ever shot any unusual species in 68 years of hunting P.E.I.?

Rob Shaw: Well, you know what, I shot a snow goose here when I was 20 years of age.

Ramsey Russell: Not a common species out here?

Rob Shaw: No, not common at all. And then I ended up, over the years, I have shot four snow geese on P.E.I. And I don’t think there’s many islanders who could say they shot four snow geese on P.E.I.

Ramsey Russell: Now, you might be the only one. Do you know whether or not they were, they’re bound to have been the greater, the Atlanticus, the big ones, like coming out of Quebec, off the St. Lawrence River?

Rob Shaw: Yeah. The white ones. Yeah, yeah. Not the bluish ones.

Ramsey Russell: Were they good to eat?

Rob Shaw: Yes, they were. Yeah. I found them a wee bit, and I mean, it might be in the way we cooked them, I found. We bit drier because, I mean, maybe because they were, you know, what they had dieted on. There wasn’t as much fat in them. I mean, you get a wild goose that you shoot in November or something with a layer of fat on it, the moisture on it, that fat going through.

Ramsey Russell: Well, yeah. Well, nowadays, especially over here, your Canadas and your ducks, to include black ducks and even teal, probably are hitting so much grain.

Rob Shaw: Yeah, grain and corn. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And, you know, my experiences with greater snow geese, they like to feed down on the mudflat. Because you all got big tides around here. From here to the St. Lawrence River, I know it varies, but it’s a lot of tidal influence. And on that St. Lawrence River, where it could be up to 24 feet, they’ll get up into pastures and stuff if they have to, but as soon as the tide starts to fall, they get down and start feeding in the mud. Feeding on rhizomes, which may not have a lot of fat. That’s why their faces are so orange because they’re grubbing up on that river bottom, that littoral region, they call it.

Rob Shaw: Yeah. And as I said, it’s not something that you see that’s common here. And you know what, there’s always a few snow geese get mixed in with the flocks. There’s a lot of people who spend a lot of time trying to get a shot at one of them.

Ramsey Russell: Did, your granddad and dad. I mean, you all have been here since the 1700s. Are there a lot of old hunting photos or any memorabilia? I know you said you got a few of those decoys. Any other memorabilia, like the little straps and weights they held their live birds with, or the cages? Anything like that?
Rob Shaw: We had one of the cages still. We lost a lot of that stuff, unfortunately in a fire in the ’40s. I have some old paper goose decoys, you know, that they made.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Rob Shaw: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: They made them?
Rob Shaw: Well, no, no, they were like a cardboard decoy. We don’t hunt with them anymore because, you know, compared to plastic, they’re pretty fragile. But I hunted as a kid with those. The biggest thing that we would have back from what they hunted with would be some of their guns.
Ramsey Russell: Really? What kind? Were they Semiautomatic or side by side?
Rob Shaw: Side by sides.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Rob Shaw: I think its five Greeners. I have a Webley, I have a Scott, and I have a Baker, which is a U.S. gun.
Ramsey Russell: Do you ever take those guns out for posterity?
Rob Shaw: Not since they quit. That’s what I learned to shoot with, you know, and that’s what I shot in my early years.
Ramsey Russell: They’re probably chambered for two and three-quarter inches.
Rob Shaw: Yeah, actually, we have my grandfather’s gun, and it was a Webley. My dad’s brother sent it to Belgium and had new barrels built for it.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Rob Shaw: So it was chambered for shot.
Ramsey Russell: You don’t shoot those guns.
Rob Shaw: No, but that 10-gauge he had chambered for three and a half-inch shells could kill a goose at 100 yards.

Ramsey Russell: “You don’t just hunt here—you become part of the cycle. Your ancestors’ trails are still there, and your descendants will walk them too.”

Ramsey Russell: Oh, I take your word for it. You know, I’ve got something I’m gonna leave you with when we get done with this podcast. I just so happen to have a sack of two and three-quarter inch Boss shot shells, copper-plated, forged. It’s not steel. It’s a bismuth-tin alloy that you can shoot through the most delicate guns. I’m just gonna leave you with some, just in case you decide you want to go out and let the ghost of your ancestors speak on some of these birds. I bet you would enjoy that.
Rob Shaw: I would. Thank you.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’ll be happy to. What have you got set up for tomorrow? Bob was talking pretty hot and heavy about something tomorrow. It made me think maybe I need to go goose hunting instead of ducks.
Rob Shaw: Well, actually, I’m not going to go with Bob tomorrow. My son’s here. We scouted a field with a little pond in the middle of it, and we’ve done this before. There’s some tall grass around the pond, and there were a pile of geese in there today. There are also some ducks going into that pond. So we’re going to go there tomorrow morning because it’s supposed to blow fairly well.
Ramsey Russell: I bet they’d want to get out, get up in that cover, get up out of that wind.
Rob Shaw: Yeah, I mentioned going after ducks to my son. He’s home until Sunday, then he goes back to Nova Scotia. He said, “One thing I can’t hunt over there is geese, but I can go after ducks in the puddles and ponds.” He said he wanted to go, and I said, fine. I was thinking we’d go after some black ducks tomorrow in the storm. He actually came down to see whether you were here, but you missed him yesterday. It was kind of a last-minute thing. By the time it got dark like today, he wanted to see if you wanted to go out for an hour last evening.
Ramsey Russell: I would have.
Rob Shaw: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: We went out there. Next time, because there will be a next time. I don’t know when, but I will be coming back to P.E.I. I really, really like this part of Canada. I really, truly like it.
Rob Shaw: Well, next time, we’ll make sure to line you up with Dustin. He’s a younger generation. Unfortunately, you don’t see that much anymore. With gun laws and access to hunting areas, the younger generation isn’t as involved as it was in my day.
Ramsey Russell: Woody and I talked about this too. How have you seen 68 years of duck hunting up here change? If you started going when you were 10, how have you seen the habitat, landscape, and hunting change in your career here in this part of Canada?
Rob Shaw: Well, the biggest thing is that field hunting became much more dominant. When I was a teenager, when I hunted first, everything was on the water, goose hunting, duck hunting. It was all on the water. Very seldom in this area would you go to a field. That has changed. Geese started hitting the fields first, and then ducks started following the geese. Basically, they changed their diet patterns. They found that if they jumped off the water and flew a couple hundred yards into a barley field, there was an abundance of feed there. That was one of the biggest changes I saw. The other thing is that a lot of places we used to hunt, like jumping ducks, now have so many homes around them. Access to these places is gone. You can’t hunt within so many yards of a house. It’s not public land anymore, and there’s more private land. And because of, you know, squawking that some neighbors might make to a farmer who owns some land, you know, about shots, noise going off or, you know, they’re worried about their dogs or cats running around. Sometimes farmers don’t allow hunting because of negative pressures from non-hunting neighbors who complain about shots. You have seen a change in that too.
Ramsey Russell: But somebody was telling me it’s got to be a shift in demographics or origins from away people, somebody called them. Somebody was telling me just the other day that, pursuant to the pandemic, a lot of foreigners, let’s call them not from P.E.I., started moving out here just to get away from the cities. And we see the same thing in the States. I mean, they’re gobbling up the American West. Maybe city people don’t like to hear the shots or don’t like the, quote, primitive or archaic method of hunting. You know, they’d rather go buy their meat in the grocery.
Rob Shaw: It’s like they want to bring their urban rules to the country.
Ramsey Russell: But they’re coming to the country to get away from the city, to get away from that life.
Rob Shaw: But, you know, what if we took our country rules to the city?
Ramsey Russell: Well, that would change North America if we could implement a country rule in all the cities.
Rob Shaw: This is a funny story. A city councilor in Charlottetown a number of years ago, at a council meeting one night, said, “We got a solution to the raccoon problem in the city. We’ll live-trap them and then release them in the country.”

Ramsey Russell: Thank you.

Rob Shaw: He said this on record, and it was picked up by the newscast and was on the radio the next day. So I phoned up city hall and I asked for this gentleman. I said, “Is he in?” And they said no. So I said, “My name’s Rob Shaw from Shaw’s Hotel, and I have a real raccoon problem, but I got a solution. I’m going to trap them and release them in the city.” He never returned my call.
Ramsey Russell: I bet he didn’t. Do you worry about the future of hunting in this part of the world? I mean, you know, there’s no escaping development and humanity, more people on earth, more people on the landscape. Not everybody thinks like we do. And you know, I worry about it. Having been around the world, places like Australia or Europe, even Argentina, parts of the United States, thank the Lord it got shot down on some of the ballots this past election. But do you ever worry about that?
Rob Shaw: I foresee issues. You know, one of the things that they did with you know, they’re trying to institute gun controls in this country. I’m not against it, but a gun owner who uses a shotgun, is not a waterfowl hunter, is not a threat to society. But you see the powers that be in government who see a gun as a gun, whether it’s an M16 with a cylinder that could fire 50 shots or 60 shots compared to a double-barrel shotgun.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Rob Shaw: So, I mean, they don’t differentiate the difference between them.
Ramsey Russell: Unfortunately, they do not.
Rob Shaw: And as I told our MP when he was voting on this, I said, “I’m not a criminal. There’s nothing wrong with me owning a gun. I need a gun around here. I have a problem with raccoons.”
Ramsey Russell: The raccoons from the city.
Rob Shaw: Yeah. So anyway, there’s a reason you have a gun, and I mean, you use it wisely. You know, my dad told me, he said, “The first thing I tell you about a gun is that this can kill somebody, if you’ve got a problem with it.” So always remember that. You know, it’s like the same thing, where’s your muzzle? If you have a loaded gun, you make sure that muzzle is pointed in a direction that it’s not going to harm anybody if it went off or if you pulled the trigger. You can use it very safely. And I mean, I taught the same thing to my son when he started hunting.
Ramsey Russell: You meet a lot of people throughout the course of your year. 165 years here in the business at the hotel, you all have met a lot of tourists from other places. Have you traveled to other places? Are there other places in Canada or the world that you want to travel to and visit and hunt?
Rob Shaw: A number of years ago, I went with my brother up to James Bay, went goose hunting.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, wow.
Rob Shaw: And that was quite an experience. There were little Canadas that we shot that time. We hunted with Indian guides up in the bay, and we had it on the Flats. And we just got on flyways and had a lot of shooting. And, you know, the Indian guides were live callers. And I remember we had our first evening out hunting. There were actually snow geese that came by. There were four of them, and they swung by about 40 yards, and we shot one each, my brother and I. And our guide kept on calling, and they flew out, oh, 150 yards, 200 yards. And they turned around and came back at us.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.
Rob Shaw: So they came back, and I shot one on my first shot. I was shooting a double barrel, and they were only out about 30, 35 yards. They were closer the second time than they were the first time. My brother missed, and I shot the second one. And I still remember our Indian guide saying, “Pretty good shot for a white man.”
Ramsey Russell: What time of year does that hunt take place?
Rob Shaw: It was in September.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. I may need to get some contact information. That sounds like a hunt I’d like to go on myself.
Rob Shaw: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. What an amazing experience.
Rob Shaw: I actually booked it. We were at the Sportsman Show in Toronto, and they had all kinds of different outfitters.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Rob Shaw: We went up there, and we went up to Timmins, Ontario, and we took a floatplane in from Timmins, Ontario, up to James Bay. I still remember him saying, you know, there was a little twisty river going down. We saw the camp, and I said, “There must be a lake close by that we’ll land on.” All of a sudden, the pilot tipped the plane, and we were landing on this little twisty river.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Rob Shaw: But, I mean, these bush pilots know how to fly a plane.
Ramsey Russell: I guarantee you they do. Rob, thank you so much for a great visit. Thank you so much for your hospitality right here at Shaw’s Hotel. It is a wonderful place, and I do want to come back up here and bring my wife. I think, you know, she’s not a hunter. I think she would just enjoy it. I mean, there are still a lot of shops around town, and it’s a wonderful, wonderful community. And I can see in just the few days I’ve been here, I can feel the sense of community that you described early on.
Rob Shaw: It’s been a wonderful life for me growing up and running the hotel business. And it was a pleasure meeting you and talking to you today. And as I said, I hope our paths cross again in the near future.
Ramsey Russell: I guarantee you they will. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast from the paradise of Prince Edward Island, way out in eastern Canada. See you next time.