EP 542. They Really Hunt Coots in Louisiana?! And Much More

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today we’re going south of I-10, Louisiana, to talk to my longtime buddy, Mr. Roland Cortez. Roland, how the heck are you?
Roland Cortez: I’m doing good, Ramsay. How about you?

Ramsey Russell: “The Louisiana wetlands are a hidden gem. They challenge you to adapt, whether you’re hunting coots or teal. It’s pure waterfowling.”

Ramsey Russell: Man, I’m doing good. I’m glad. You know, we talked about doing this forever, and finally, the stars aligned. Here we are on the phone with each other, gonna have a great podcast. You all’s duck season is underway. We’re recording this in mid to late November. How’s the early season down in Louisiana?
Roland Cortez: It’s been fair, Ramsey. Man, we just haven’t had any weather here. I call this time of year, you know, blue-winged teal season 2.0 because that’s kind of what it’s been lately, you know, lots of teal, blue and green wings.
Ramsey Russell: I ain’t nothing wrong with that, though, is it? I heard blue wings are the new season for Louisiana.
Roland Cortez: Well, I mean, we’ll take them if they keep coming.
Ramsey Russell: What other species are you all killing this early time of year? Green wings, blue wings. I would guess you killed a few pintail, a few gadwall.
Roland Cortez: Yeah, we’ve been shooting pintails, gadwalls. We shot quite a bit of redheads today moving through, and we even shot a couple wigeon here now, but it’s mostly been blue and green-winged teal.
Ramsey Russell: What about the speckled bellies?
Roland Cortez: We did shoot a few speckled bellies this morning. Like I said, even the speckled bellies, we don’t quite have the numbers yet. So speckled bellies have been a little, I guess, being a little hard-headed there with this warm weather we’ve been having. We’re hoping with this front coming in later this week that the speckled belly hunting will pick up.
Ramsey Russell: Supposed to be a front coming. I just yesterday interviewed The Fowl Mike Schumer, who’s got a model for predicting, and he says right around Thanksgiving, there’s a front coming and that a lot of us Southern boys ought to see a positive change. You know, it can’t come soon enough, can it?
Roland Cortez: No, not at all. Because, like I said, where I’m at here, you know, we shoot a lot of ducks and a lot of specks here. And we just don’t have a lot, at this time. I think the migration’s, you know, a week or too late.

Ramsey Russell: Roland, you and I hunted together many years ago. I came down there and don’t remember the nature of it all. They were just building that lodge. It’s probably been built and moved into since then, but they were just building that magnificent lodge. And I seem to remember Redbone was in the blind with us. I want to talk about a speck caller, that would have been Mr. Redbone. What kind of call do you blow? And I want to get into this speck caller stuff with you.
Roland Cortez: I blow a Riceland and a Redbone.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Roland Cortez: You know, speckled belly hunting, it just kind of depends on the day which call I blow. But, you know, when you think about speck calling and speck calls, that’s what comes to mind. You know, Bill Daniels, Nathan Wright. When you think of these big-bore speck calls, which are dominating the speck calling scene these days.
Ramsey Russell: What about back in the old days? What’d you blow?
Roland Cortez: Man, you know, we blew a Shanghai, and then we blew them P.S. Olt predator calls that were modified.
Ramsey Russell: Really. So where did you grow up, Roland?
Roland Cortez: I grew up about four miles out of a town called, well, I’m going four miles outside of Thibodaux, Louisiana, which the town that I’m from is called Chackbay, Louisiana, which is about four miles outside of Thibodaux.
Ramsey Russell: And that’s south of I-10, it sounds like.
Roland Cortez: Yes, sir, it’s south of I-10 and just a little bit north of Highway 90.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. What was it like growing up down there?
Roland Cortez: Man, You know, growing up, it was just God’s country. You hunted, you fished, you could go anywhere you wanted at the time, man, it was just a great place to grow up as a kid, you know.
Ramsey Russell: What did you do for fun down there in little old, outside of the major metropolis of Thibodaux? What did a young, barefoot little boy, Roland Cortez, do to entertain himself, when it was during the season?
Roland Cortez: We ran them swamps down there, we climbed trees, we played hide-and-go-seek, you know, and man, when we wasn’t doing that, we were catching bass and crappie and perch and stuff like that, you know, in the bayou, you know, right by my house.
Ramsey Russell: Really. How did you get started duck hunting?
Roland Cortez: My family was in the commercial fishing business and hunting fishing alligators, trapping muskrat, nutria, raccoons, doing stuff like that during the winter. And my uncles hunted a bunch, my dad hunted. But my dad worked more than my uncles did. My uncles were seasonal workers, so they hunted more than my dad did. So I learned a lot of my duck hunting skills from them, hunting ducks in that flooded swamp at the time, and in that freshwater marsh that we had in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I grew up.
Ramsey Russell: What was it like back then? Like that swamp, I’m imagining cypress trees, tupelo gums, a lot of duckweed, stuff like that. Is that the kind of stuff you grew up hunting?
Roland Cortez: Pretty much, man. You know, we had blinds built up in the cypress trees with cypress and moss hanging from it, and we shot lots of mallard ducks in them days in that swamp.
Ramsey Russell: When would this have been, back in the what, 1970s or 1980s?
Roland Cortez: Well, for me, it would have been early 1980s, all the way till right about the mid-1990s, you know, kind of when that Salvinia came into the swamp and, you know, the mallards just didn’t come anymore.
Ramsey Russell: Man, I’ve heard that throughout South Louisiana. But that Salvinia coming in, that just, what, shut it down, isn’t it?
Roland Cortez: Yes, it shut everything down. You know, my grandpa passed away in 2000, and that’s exactly what he said before he passed away. He said, man, he said, son, these ducks are not going to come no more because this stuff is coming in. It’s going to kill the swamp and smother the aquatic vegetation and the duckweed that they ate. And sure enough, it wasn’t long after he said that, that the mallards just didn’t come in. The swamp grew up, and there’s no more ducks down there.
Ramsey Russell: Did your uncles and daddy and granddaddy tell you stories about when they were your age as a young man, about what it was like hunting down there?
Roland Cortez: My grandpa was a commercial fisherman. He duck hunted a lot. Back then, there’s a big lake around our house called Lake Des Allemands. You may have heard of it. Lots of redheads, lots of canvasbacks. And back then, I don’t quite remember, they didn’t talk much about the limit, you know, they just talked about the ducks they shot. They shot a lot of divers, dogrees, redheads, scaup, ducks like that. And they didn’t really progress to shooting the puddle ducks until we started hunting the lease we had in the swamp, and that’s when we went to shooting mallards and stuff like that.
Ramsey Russell: How old would you have been when you started going to the swamp with them? And how old were you when you killed your first duck? Do you even remember your first bird?
Roland Cortez: Yes, and I do. It was probably 1984. I had a .410 crack barrel. It was a Stevens .410 crack barrel that my dad gave me that his dad had. Single shot. My uncles put me by a log. They went somewhere else. I had a pair of mallards come through the trees, and I pulled the trigger. Boom. I killed one. I hurried up and reloaded and tried to shoot the other one, but I didn’t get that one. So I ended up with a drake mallard.

Ramsey Russell: That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good today. I guess, they just expected that of a little boy that grew up like it.
Roland Cortez: Yeah, I mean, all of us did that. You know, all my friends that grew up around me. I mean, we all did that. You know, we all started kind of the same way, shooting ducks in that swamp.
Ramsey Russell: Tell me some stories about your uncles, your daddy, and your granddaddy. What are some of the fondest memories you have of sharing time with them in the blind? What are some of the life lessons they taught you there in that duck blind?
Roland Cortez: You know, number one is respect what you shoot. If you kill it, make sure you eat it. Be respectful to other hunters and give back to the environment or the habitat that you hunt. And you’re gonna laugh, Ramsay, but my fondest memory with my dad is that, where I’m from, coots, or “poodoo,” as we call them, are a very delicacy. You know, people love to hunt these things. I grew up shooting coots as a kid. So my fondest memory with my dad is paddling in a pirogue, shooting coots while he paddles, with my .410.
Ramsey Russell: Hey, I’ve heard that so much, especially down in you all’s neck of the woods. I was a full-grown man in a foreign country way on the other side of the world, closer to Iran than any other country. And the last time I was there, a few years ago, Roland, we never hunted at night or in the afternoons, we go out in the morning, stay about lunch, come back, and usually our body clock’s messed up. We go to sleep, skin birds if we’re going to skin birds, and do some stuff. And man, they come knocking on the door and said, let’s go. We went out that evening as we’re getting ready to launch a boat. The guides, he said, the translator said, “Want you all to shoot the black birds.” And I’m looking in the air, you know, for red-winged blackbirds or something, right. And I go, “What blackbirds?” He said, “What, the black ones?” And I go, “Well, you gotta point them out. I don’t want to be just shooting.” And that’s what they pointed to was them coots. I said, “You gotta be kidding me.” They said, “No, no, no, that’s why we’re here. They want you all to experience real Azeri duck hunting.” And not only did we go out at the crack, I mean, just doggone sun, 30 minutes before the sun was gone, did they take us out. Most of them guns had little flashlights on the barrel and a string that would come back. So if I’m holding the fore stock of that gun, that little string is on my index finger, and I can pull it and turn that light on, pull it and turn it off. So we did it. We shot some and came back. And I just said, I just don’t believe it because their favorite ducks are, in rank order, their top three ducks they want to eat are coot, mallard, and green-winged teal. That’s what they want to eat. That’s what they choose to kill. And I respectfully called bullshit. Now, I know there’s a lot of Cajuns down there that eat coot, grew up eating coot. Most of the time, bro, I hear about them eating the gizzards, and I just kindly call bullshit on it. And we got back, and they kept about three or four of them birds and gave them to a cook there at this nice hotel we were staying at. And man, he was proud. He knew what they were. He beamed when he got them. And I just can’t believe I was well into my 50s when I realized just how good they were to eat. They ate triple helpings. It was so good.
Roland Cortez: Yeah, and very good table fare.
Ramsey Russell: I’m assuming you all still hunt them down there?
Roland Cortez: Well, we still do the coot shoot. Just finished up, you know, with it being opening up on Saturday. Every year, they have a lot of people come from all over to the coot shoot, so it’s pretty popular, man.

Ramsey Russell: “Coot hunting in Louisiana’s marshes isn’t just about the hunt—it’s about understanding the ecosystem’s delicate balance. Those birds are survivors.”

Ramsey Russell: Talk about, what the heck’s a coot shoot?
Roland Cortez: A coot shoot is when people come in pull camp boats, and everybody comes to a lake around my house that holds a lot of coots, and they just party down and have fun, shooting coots as a group. And there’s people that come from everywhere to shoot these birds.
Ramsey Russell: Like, when you say everywhere, you mean everywhere in Louisiana? Everywhere south of I-10? Everywhere in the world?
Roland Cortez: I mean, they’ve got guys that come from Alabama, Texas, just to come to this coot shoot.
Ramsey Russell: So everybody goes out and has a coot shoot, then what? what are you all doing with them coots? Are you all keeping the breast meat, the leg bones? Are you skinning them whole? Keeping them together?
Roland Cortez: Most of the time, Ramsay, we skin them whole. We’re keeping the gizzards, the hearts, and the livers. And we prepare them for a big ol’ cookout with, you know, everybody that comes. I mean, most of the time, we’ve got four or five different black pots going, you know, onions and bell peppers and celery and just everything. Man, you know, everybody just cooking a big pile for everybody to eat.
Ramsey Russell: So when you cook, or when your dad and your granddad and when you all cook your family recipe for coot, how specifically are you going to cook that? I need to know this now. I’m all in. I just added, right about the time I think I’ve seen it done at all, booyah! I just added Louisiana coot shoot with my buddy Roland Cortez to my bucket list. So how are we gonna cook these coots and giblets, when I come down there?
Roland Cortez: I’m gonna find me about a 7- or 8-quart, you know, black iron pot. I’m gonna put a little grease in there. I’m gonna cut my coots up into quarters, and I’m gonna smother them down with some onions, some bell peppers, a little bit of green onions, some celery. You know, cook them down until they get nice and tender. And most of the time, we serve them, the coot will make a gravy at the bottom, and we’ll serve it over some type of fresh rice and maybe a little tater salad or piece of bread with it. It’s some fine eating, man. And that’s what I tell everybody. Everybody talks bad about coots, but to me, it’s the finest bird that flies to eat.
Ramsey Russell: Well, you all had that coot shoot last week. But how was their migration doing? Are they weather-dependent?
Roland Cortez: Not much. They’re more full-moon dependent. But a little bit of weather does help. I mean, they did good, but it wasn’t as good as it’s been in years past. You know, a lot of times, Ramsay, they’ll cover the lake, man. There’ll be thousands and thousands of these birds. They’ll blacken the sky when a boat passes. And it hasn’t been like that on this lake. So we had a bad grass kill a few years back. Then, I don’t know if you ever heard of apple snails, and they kind of ate a lot of the coontail and hyacinth that grow up in there that coots like to eat. So the population has not been that abundant because of the lack of food and habitat for them there.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, yeah. Wow, it’s so weird that we go down talking about the apple snails and talking about the giant salvinia. We go down to Argentina, and we get off in those wild marshes, you know, and it is thousands upon thousands of acres of giant salvinia, which is like a golf ball-sized piece of duckweed just as far as you can see. The coots and a little rail-like bird can walk on that stuff, it’s so thick. And when the wind blows, it’ll shift around and push around. And then the apple snails, man, I’ll be walking in the marsh and come up on a stop or come up on a fence post, and there will be a knee-high pile of apple snail shells under it because they got a snail kite down there. And that bird, it looks like a hawk, and he don’t eat nothing but them apple snails. And what blows my mind is how that’s where that giant salvinia and that apple snail evolved. That’s where it grew up. And all the ducks don’t bother them a bit. We kill gazillions of, but then you move them same plants into a foreign environment like Louisiana, and it shuts everything down, ruins it. Isn’t that weird how the world works like that?

Roland Cortez: It is weird.

Ramsey Russell: You know, it just is crazy. I guess you could make changes up again. I guess you could make some good gumbo with coot if you wanted to, couldn’t you?

Roland Cortez: You can. But if you’re going to make a gumbo with it, I prefer to use, just the breast and to give it, debone it. In the leg of a coot, they got what in French we call a zotet, which is a pointy bone in that leg. And you don’t want to get that stuck in your throat, man. So you got to make sure if you do make a gumbo with it, you debone all the meat on it.

Ramsey Russell: Really? Well now, this sounds like a real serious deal. You ain’t just goofing off, man. You’re talking real serious Southern Louisiana lifestyle going out on these coot shoots. This is a big freaking deal, an annual coot shoot. But if you had your druthers, would you go out and shoot coot instead of ducks?

Roland Cortez: I would because, you know, like I said, I grew up doing it. So, I mean, I love shooting coots with my family, man. It’s fun. You know, you have a competition, who can hoot more than the next person, you know, or who can shoot their limit.

Ramsey Russell: If you all out there hunting this morning and some coots went by, do you all shoot them?

Roland Cortez: Oh, for sure. Well, the clients may not shoot them, but I’ll shoot them.

Ramsey Russell: I just never will forget many years ago in a Delta Waterfowl magazine, they had done like a little survey, asked a bunch of biologists or whatnot around the country, and they had two little call-out windows. One of them was the most overrated duck species, the top five most overrated ducks, and mallard was number one. What everybody said was the most overrated. And then the next one says the most underrated waterfowl or whatever they called it, and the number one most underrated species queried on everybody that was surveyed was the coot. You know, so, I mean, it is a lot to that. What beyond the coot? What about other birds? Like you read, you see a lot of these birds on the hunting regulations, but very few people hunt them, Roland. What about gallinules and mud hens and things of that nature? Do you chase them, too?

Roland Cortez: Yeah, up in September, you know, we shoot gallinules. We shoot clappers and sora rails around the house, too. You know, they’re pretty plentiful there, too. Their season opens in September along with teal season, and then we’ll shoot them into the regular winter season, too. And rails have more of a white, you know, texture of the meat. I find it more like a pheasant color, you know, when you clean a pheasant. But I find they’re a better-tasting bird almost than a coot, and it’s hard to beat the coot. But them rails, man, they’re pretty good.

Ramsey Russell: “Marsh management here is critical. Without it, these coot populations—and the entire ecosystem—would collapse.”

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I’ve only hunted them one time over two days. And we went down to coastal Georgia, and the boys I hunted with had talked and talked and talked about clapper rail hunting. But they wanted the right tide. They said, man, if a tide ain’t high, it’s a wild goose chase. And I got down there, and the tide was high, and we push-poled around through them grass flats. And they’d get up, I was in the bow of the boat, and somebody would push pole, and up that bird come. Not terribly hard to shoot. You’re right about them being a lighter meat. I remember they weren’t as light as a pheasant, but they were much lighter than a duck or, for that matter, a coot or even a dove. They were lighter meat. I think I made like a chicken and dumpling with them. I think that’s how I cooked those birds when I brought them back. I may have thrown them in a gumbo, but I think I used them in like a chicken and dumpling type situation, and they were fine.

Roland Cortez: There’s one that is called a purple gallinule.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve seen them, yeah.

Roland Cortez: That’s the prettiest one out there. One of these days, I’m going to shoot one and get it mounted.

Ramsey Russell: I can’t believe you hadn’t already. I see them. I think they’re gorgeous, but they fly through terribly early.

Roland Cortez: It’s a beautiful bird.

Ramsey Russell: It really is. Do you see many of them down there where you hunt?

Roland Cortez: Not, I mean, down south where I’m from, we see many, but up where we hunt at here now. I mean, you see like some sora rails, the little bitty ones up in the ditches around here, but nah, there’s not many rails up here.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Where do you hunt now? I mean, after your childhood swamp grew up, it got infested with giant salvinia. I heard the same thing. You know, Warren Coco was talking years ago about the fabled Mariposa Swamp. Same freaking thing happened down to it. I guess it’s happening everywhere down in coastal Louisiana with that giant salvinia. Where’d you go next? Where’d you and your family start hunting next?

Roland Cortez: So right about that time, you know, would have been in high school, getting a truck, getting a driver’s license. And we started hunting south of Houma, hunting the brackish water to saltwater marsh. So there opened up a whole new Broadway of ducks for us, pintail, gray ducks, wigeon, you know, a bunch more, a bunch of divers. So it kind of opened us up to some different birds to shoot that we didn’t shoot in a swamp, you know?

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Roland Cortez: And I pretty much stayed there hunting that type of marsh, saltwater, the brackish. And we shot a lot of ducks there until I started right about ’95, I started guiding, and I then I started just hunting everywhere but home.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s funny how it works like that. Now, go through high school when you all was getting into the puddle duck change gears entirely. Were you still running, was your still main hunting group still your uncles, your daddy, and whatnot?

Roland Cortez: Well, right about that time, you know, that’s when we went 30 and 3, and a lot of my uncles, you know, they still shot ducks, but they started deer hunting more. But then mid-1990s, we went from 30 and 3 to 40 and 4, then to 50 and 5, and then 60 and 6 afterward today, they still hunted some ducks, but they weren’t willing to travel or leave home to shoot ducks. So they kind of just stuck with the deer hunting there. And my friends, we duck hunted a bunch, and we just started going around hunting south of Morgan City, Atchafalaya River, we’d go down to Venice. We started traveling more shooting ducks, but it was mostly with my friends, and all did that.

Ramsey Russell: If you had to pick a Louisiana habitat that you hunt or have hunted, what would be your favorite of the habitat type?

Roland Cortez: Would be that flooded swamp.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Roland Cortez: There’s nothing like watching mallards float through a cypress swamp with moss hanging from it. You know, the water green with duckweed. Man, there’s just something about that.

Ramsey Russell: I agree. You know, I love to hunt. I have shot and will continue to shoot flooded agriculture because the ducks will go in there, and you can kill them. But it’s probably one of my least favorite. Just the aura of it versus, I love marsh. I love kind of those wild cattail marshes or tules and different stuff like that. And I think that true flooded green timber, and I’ve shot in a lot of different parts of the world, is pretty magical. It doesn’t matter, if you’re in Australia or Arkansas or Oklahoma, wherever you’re in some seasonally inundated acorn trees or something like that. It’s just really nice. Every time I climb off into a cypress break, I just tell myself, “I think this is my favorite. I think it’s my favorite.” I don’t know why. It’s just something. Especially in early morning, the sun ain’t quite up yet, you’re going in, you got those giant cypresses and all that moss hanging off of it. It feels kind of like stepping in a big church, you know, before everybody starts piling in. I don’t know, it’s just something nice about it that I’ve always enjoyed about hunting cypress.

Roland Cortez: The smell of that cypress, man, just in the air in the morning. The squeal of a wood duck, you know, passing by, maybe a squirrel barking. There’s just something about hunting a cypress swamp.

Ramsey Russell: I agree. And I wonder, do you think maybe it’s just because that’s your earliest recollections? You know, it’s kind of like they say, if your first brand of truck is a Chevrolet, you’ll probably be a Chevy man the rest of your life. If your first shotgun is a pick-a-brand, you’ll probably have a fondness for that. I wonder sometimes if that’s carryover from my upbringing to what you know. But I sure like hunting in cypress.

Roland Cortez: Yeah, me too. Its home.

Ramsey Russell: You hear so much about, right about that era, right about those late 1980s, the mallards just quit coming to that part of Louisiana, and it’s unbelievable. Like I was hunting and talking to somebody kind of on the east side of New Orleans over there, you know, out in that marsh. And man, they used to kill mallards there growing up, called them French ducks. That was a big deal way down south, even far south as Venice. That was a big deal not too long ago, getting mallards. And to hear people say it now, you know, you got to get pretty much up in north Louisiana to get into any mallards to speak of anymore.

Roland Cortez: And that’s what the old folks would say, that’s what they called them, French ducks. They called them canards, in French. And that’s what the old man said. You know, man, mallards were pretty much king back then because they all pretty much owned, everybody had swamp that had mallards in there back then.

Ramsey Russell: Do you speak French?

Roland Cortez: I can understand French more than I can speak it. I kind of didn’t pick it up from my parents as I should have to pass it on, so I can’t speak it fluently.

Ramsey Russell: Your daddy and granddaddy probably spoke it pretty fluently.

Roland Cortez: Oh, they’re all. My dad speaks French very fluently. They hold many conversations in Cajun French.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Roland Cortez: When all my uncles and all get together, that’s all they speak in Cajun French. So you either have to understand it or speak it, or if not, you’re gonna be left out.

Ramsey Russell: It’s interesting you bring that up, because this fall, you know, little tour I do, for the first time ever, I went into New Brunswick and into Prince Edward Island. I’ve been to Quebec, which is French, and been in Nova Scotia and all those four provinces along with another one, the Maritime Provinces, the Atlantic Provinces. And I still don’t fully understand it. I ain’t read a history book on it or something. But at some point in time, the French and the English got into it. I mean, you know, the French been over here forever, trapping and doing all that kind of stuff. And then come the English with their colonial empire. And they got into a pretty big row, and the British won, at least for the time being. And they somehow deported a lot of French. I think they dropped them off, somebody told me they dropped them off in parts of the Carolinas. And then I guess the rowdier bunch, they took way on around the curve and dropped them off somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico, which is down in Louisiana. And so somebody was telling me the other day they were from, I think, Prince Edward Island, and some of them old timers now, when you get this part of Maritime Canada I’m telling you about, especially Quebec, you go into Quebec, any restaurant in Quebec, and they’re going to come at you speaking French till you say, “Huh?” And then they’ll start talking kind of broken English. But man, that’s like their provincial language is French. That’s their primary language. And anybody wants to do business around that part of the world better have their stuff translated to French. But somebody was telling me they went to France to do some business, and the French just told them to speak English because they couldn’t understand the version of French. They were speaking French Canadian. And that’s why I can’t imagine if some folks out the bayou went over to France. They probably tell them, “Just go ahead and speak English, sir. We can’t understand it.”

Roland Cortez: Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.

Ramsey Russell: “Coots get overlooked, but they’re a testament to the resilience of coastal ecosystems. They thrive where others can’t.”

Ramsey Russell: But anyway, it’s funny how things go like that, you know, and it’s interesting to me. You can’t be no more environmentally different from, let’s just say, New Brunswick or Prince Edward Island than South Louisiana. I mean, we’re talking mountains and pine trees and rocky shores and stuff like that. It’s kind of like Maine, but at the same time, it’s a lot of seafood and a lot of hunting, a lot of animals, a lot of birds, a lot of fish. And so it’s funny how, it really to be so different because of the people and the origins of those people, it’s a lot of similarity. You get what I’m saying?
Roland Cortez: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And I need to ask them if they shoot coot. So you get into duck guiding. Talk about that. What made you want to get into being a duck guide?
Roland Cortez: Man, I was just looking to hunt every day, and that’s kind of what got me into duck guiding.

Ramsey Russell: How that work out?

Roland Cortez: I got to hunt every day. I didn’t make a whole bunch of money doing it, but I got to hunt every day.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, well, you know, we got to make a living, but we also got to make a life.
Roland Cortez: That’s right.
Ramsey Russell: You know, and if you like what you’re doing and you’re good at what you’re doing, the rest will kind of sort of take care of itself, won’t it?
Roland Cortez: Yeah. I started there. I worked for a private club for a long time, and then I kind of started working for commercial, and it’s led me to where I’m at today. And I think I’ve been guiding for almost 30 years now.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. Is that all you do, Roland? You’re a guide?
Roland Cortez: No, I have a real job. I mean, I have a job when it’s not duck season. I work in the petrochemical, I work in chemical plants along the Mississippi River.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. I’d have thought it was something to do with energy, if I had to guess. That’s a big industry down in that neck of the woods.
Roland Cortez: It is. From New Orleans to Baton Rouge, I mean, there’s numerous plants up and down that river.
Ramsey Russell: And you’ve been doing that for 30 years too?
Roland Cortez: Yeah, I’ve been doing that since, yeah, about that long too.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. You know, a lot of people reach out to me. It’s crazy, and I’m not telling nobody don’t reach out to me for this very reason. But I’ve had a lot of people send me resumes or introduce themselves in emails. Maybe they got a four-year college degree, maybe they’re leaving, getting an MBA, and they want to be in the duck guide business. And I’m like, why do you want to do this? But Roland, if somebody’s been around it and been doing it, hunting their whole life and been in this guide business. What did you think it was going to be, and what’s the reality? In other words, everybody wants to be a duck guide until it’s time to do real duck guide stuff.
Roland Cortez: That’s right.
Ramsey Russell: How do you reconcile them two?
Roland Cortez: Everybody thinks duck guiding is about killing ducks. It’s not all about killing ducks. You know, you’re handling people every day, and it’s not always cut out to be, at the end of the day, because, you know, people come to you, they want to shoot ducks every day, and you have to produce every day.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. How do you produce every day?
Roland Cortez: It’s hard.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Roland Cortez: You know, we’re dealing with a bird, you know, Mother Nature, and sometimes she doesn’t play nice.
Ramsey Russell: No. And increasingly, you know, call it what you want about these warmer winters, but, well, it’s warmer winters. You know, it’s just warmer winters. Like I say, we’re recording mid-November. I’ve been throughout Canada and on down south, and I’ve seen a little spit of snow one time, and my windows have been frosted up maybe three times. You know, this fall, it’s just warm. And it worries me that it’s gonna be as warm as last year. And we know what a lot of these birds do in warm weather.
Roland Cortez: Yeah. And like I said, it’s not normal here, what we have now. But, we keep hoping that the best is yet to come with some cooler weather, for sure.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Have you got any advice to anybody listening that wants to be a duck guide? What would you tell anybody listening who wants to be a duck guide?
Roland Cortez: It’s a good life. If you want to do it, you’ve got the knack to do it, you’re a people’s person, man, chase it. I mean, that’s what I did, Russell. I mean, I wanted to be a duck guide bad. And I wanted to be able to shoot ducks every day. I wanted to be able to travel the world. It’s been, I’ve been blessed with it because it’s been good to me.
Ramsey Russell: Yes. Yeah. What are your favorite species to hunt as a person? Now, you’re talking about coots. And as a duck guide?

Roland Cortez: “Growing up here, coots were part of our winter meals. They’re tough birds, but hunting them taught me patience.”

Roland Cortez: If I had to choose a duck to shoot every day, it would be a widgeon or a pintail. And that’s pretty much my two favorite ducks, even though I can only shoot one pintail. It’s an elegant duck. It kind of looks like one of them saber jets. When those things come in, man, just big long neck, long tail, they bow up nice and pretty. And sometimes those pintails will make you pull your hair out. But when they do it right.
Ramsey Russell: Well see, that’s kind of what I’m leading up into. What are some of your tricks of the trade for getting widgeon and pintail? Like, say to me, if I was going to be a duck guide, I’d want to be in mallard country or blue-winged teal country. You know, because on the one hand, mallards wrote the rule book. I can quack to them, I can talk to them, I can understand them. Their inclination is to decoy, and all birds are decoy. But I mean, come on now. A gadwall, a pintail, a widgeon, we can yammer at them with a mallard call all we want to. They’re coming in, or they’re not. You know, they get a little stubborn sometimes like that. And so, what are some of your tricks? A lifetime of duck hunting down there in Louisiana, which ain’t got just a little hunting pressure. There are a lot of folks like yourself down there chasing these birds. What are some of your tricks of the trade for getting some of these pintails, for example, into the decoys?
Roland Cortez: You know, pintails, like I said, sometimes they can be very stubborn, especially when you try to work them with a call. All of our hunting out here is done in agricultural fields. So big sheet water. We put big decoy spreads for them. We prefer to use more, white-colored decoys, pintails, lots of spoonbills. We don’t use minimalism in our spread anymore. But we use mallard calls to break them. And then after that, we’ll use pintail whistles to try to finish them off.
Ramsey Russell: Have you got a pintail whistle?
Roland Cortez: There’s a guy out of Florida. He makes the most realistic pintail call out there today.
Ramsey Russell: Who is he? I’m trying to think.
Roland Cortez: Shannon Kelly’s his name.

Ramsey Russell: What’s his name?

Roland Cortez: Shannon Kelly.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right, Shannon Kelly. I’ve talked to him about getting on this podcast. Shannon Kelly duck whistles. That’s right.
Roland Cortez: He makes the most realistic pintail I’ve ever heard in my life, and it works deadly on pintails.
Ramsey Russell: He sent me one I haven’t used yet. I can’t wait to. It’s a different-shaped pintail whistle. It looks like something that would be on Star Trek, to be honest with you.
Roland Cortez: That’s right.
Ramsey Russell: But boy, when you blow it, it blows. It blows easy. It blows good, and it’s got that deep, you know what I’m saying? Not real high, trilly, but a deep sound that I know is gonna carry a good long distance.
Roland Cortez: Works very well. Like I said, it’s the one I’ve had, you know, and it’s killed many pintails since he made it for me.

Ramsey Russell: Did you find him on Instagram like I did? Because I gonna say of anybody listening? He’s on Instagram.
Roland Cortez: I found him on Instagram, and he poked. The first time I saw this whistle, I’m like, man, this thing sounds like a pintail. Because he was using actual pintail sounds, and he was doing his. And I’m like, man, that’s the most realistic pintail whistle I ever saw. So I reached out to him, talked to him a little bit, and man, next thing I bought one from him. And I’ve got his widgeon. He’s got a widgeon whistle.
Ramsey Russell: Well, I was just fixing to ask you about that widgeon whistle. What’d you think about it?
Roland Cortez: That too is the most realistic call. I mean, it sounds exactly like a widgeon.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. That’s the one that looks a little bit like a shotgun shell with the center punched out?
Roland Cortez: That’s right. Its round and it’s got a hole in the middle. Instead of blowing out, you suck into it.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Wow. Oh, really? Now see, I didn’t look that close.
Roland Cortez: And then he makes a black-bellied whistling duck call too.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Do you all shoot a lot of whistling ducks down there still?
Roland Cortez: Down south we do, but they still shoot a lot of whistlers. And man, their population has boomed in the last 10 years. They’re everywhere down there.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I know that black-bellied whistling duck population has exploded. In fact, there, you know, anytime we do a podcast like this, I get updates. So anybody listening, tell me where, how far north you’ve seen black-bellied whistling ducks? I have heard of them in Delaware, Ohio. I’ve heard of one confirmed nesting in Ontario, Canada. Their population is exploding, but a lot of them beat it back down south with the first frost. But then I hear rumors that in you all’s neck of the woods, there are places, the more you get over in southwest Louisiana, the more you’re liable to shoot some whistling ducks throughout the season. But what about the fulvous? Have you ever shot fulvous whistlers down there?
Roland Cortez: I’ve never shot a fulvous on the eastern side of the state. Now, when we go out in Kaplan, that area, there’s a lot more fulvous there, and that’s kind of where we shoot. I’ve never shot a fulvous on that end.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What about gadwall calling? How do you call to gadwall?
Roland Cortez: Either I’m going to use a mallard call, and tap into it, or I’ll buy a specific call. You know, Duck Commander makes probably one of the best gadwall calls that I’ve ever heard. And I’ve been having one since Phil came out with it, I think in 1996. And it’s still chugging along, calling in gadwalls.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Do you hunt mostly rice or beans or what?
Roland Cortez: Right now, we’re kind of turning the farm more over to moist soil. We do hunt rice here and beans here. But my field, particularly this year, has been CRP WRP inroads for the last two years. So it’s all moist soil.
Ramsey Russell: Everybody listening knows I’m a fan of moist soil. Hey, birds that go to agriculture, we all know that they’ll eat rice and corn and soybeans and everything else out there. But you know, I think a lot of these delta soils were originally in some form of moist soil that sustained them for millions of years before row crop agriculture. And I think they still want it at times.
Roland Cortez: Oh, they love it. I mean, we have about 800 acres of refuge that’s all moist soil. And you ought to see, it’s like short oak trees in it. And you ought to see the ducks in there. There’s thousands of them in there right now. There’s thousands of wood ducks in it.
Ramsey Russell: Do you manage for that moist soil, or do you just put water in, water out?
Roland Cortez: They manage hard here. You know, we’ll dry it up as quick as possible. We’ll leave some for the ducks returning north for them to stop here. But yeah, they manage it here. They’ll pull the water off, pull the water on, and let the grasses grow. Like my field was completely dry. We flooded it for teal season, and it’s had water ever since. And we have, man, the aquatics in there are, you ought to see this field right now, man, it’s so beautiful. Just native grass aquatics in there. I’d rather hunt that than agriculture.
Ramsey Russell: Why?
Roland Cortez: I just find that the ducks tend to go there all, you know, anytime. It’s natural for them to feed in this stuff.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right. What about speckled bellies? Are they getting easier or harder to hunt these days?
Roland Cortez: Speckled bellies are getting harder. There’s more pressure on them speckled bellies than ever before.
Ramsey Russell: We started off talking about Riceland calls, Redbone calls, and whatnot like that versus the Chiang Kai. And you know, I ain’t gonna lie to you. My speckled belly repertoire is lala, I mean, just a lala. And boy, these guys, they’ll tell you that don’t work no more, Ramsey. You got to get down on it. You got to get that ground growl going, or these birds won’t respond. Have you seen that too?
Roland Cortez: Yeah, I’d rather hunt speckled bellies pretty much than anything else. And man, these last 10 years, I’ve really focused my whole learning on learning how to blow a speck call correctly. So I had to start from scratch, you know, going from that puff air, which you said, you know, lala to using sustained air. And you have to sound like a speck these days down in Louisiana to kill them.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s something I really need to do. I don’t even know where to start though. I really. I’ve got some nice speck calls, and I’ve got some nice goose calls. I’d like to increase my goose hunt calling ability, specks, Canada. I really would. Man, to hear these guys like, like Bill or Nathan or whomever get on those speck calls. It’s unbelievable. I’d love to be half that good.
Roland Cortez: When you hunt with these caliber of callers, it’s unreal what they can make a speck do.
Ramsey Russell: What do you think it? I mean, but seriously now, we’re talking about the same bird with a speckled-bellied goose today that’s got a brain the size of a black-eyed pea, maybe a little bit bigger, butter bean. Same as they did 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 years ago. Why is their language changing? Is it hunting pressure?
Roland Cortez: Pretty much hunting pressure. You know, you get to some parts of the flyway, people are not that keen on blowing a speck call, man. And these birds get smart to spreads, to calling, to blinds, to everything. And you know what? I think at one point in time, Louisiana wintered 88% of the white-front population. And now we’re only wintering, I think, 17% to 18%. So we’re getting less birds down south, less juvenile birds. And the birds that we do get, they got an education before we get here.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, they really started converting more into agriculture. And with these warmer winters and agriculture clear on up into Illinois now, they don’t have to migrate south if they don’t want to. They just don’t have to. You know, we talk about a lot of these changes. The mallards used to come, the specks used to come, you know, the number of ducks used to come, blah, blah, blah. All the changes. What is driving all that, Roland? Somebody that’s been hunting for as long as you have down in Louisiana, what is driving your thoughts, the changes? I don’t think its heated ponds up in Missouri. I don’t believe that one damn bit.
Roland Cortez: There’s a lot of ramble about flooded corn and heated ponds. But to me, we’re losing a football field of coast a day or an hour ago. The habitat in Louisiana has changed so much over the years that we can’t sustain an ample amount of ducks down here anymore. I think the ducks come, but they leave quickly.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Or they go nocturnal, or they roost offshore, way offshore or something.
Roland Cortez: You know, back when we were hunting Venice and south of Morgan City a lot, the Chapel River, we always noticed that in the morning, the ducks would head offshore. You’ve got rafts and rafts of ducks 15 miles in the Gulf of Mexico off the mouth of the river.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Roland Cortez: People say, “Man, what they’re doing out there? They’re not eating.” Said, “No, they’re not eating. They hide and try to stay away from the boogeyman.”
Ramsey Russell: They ain’t getting shot at, what they’re doing.
Roland Cortez: Right. And you know, we talked to a lot of these boats coming in. “Hey, man, you know, on the CB, you all seen any ducks?” “Oh yeah, I probably seen a couple thousand, 15 miles off of such and such pass.” You know, them ducks are evading hunting pressure. The ducks still come, they’re just hiding from everybody.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. You know, there are changes, there’s not as many ducks. Nonetheless, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service harvest data, the states of California, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and for some reason Minnesota, those five states kill half the ducks in the United States of America. Those five states killed almost five million ducks in the 2021-2022 season. Can you imagine? Like to hear folks say down in Louisiana, “There ain’t no ducks no more,” and they’re still one of the top five killing states in America. Can you imagine what it was like back during your granddaddy’s time, Roland?
Roland Cortez: My grandpa said when he was a kid, and they’d go out, the ducks would blacken the sky. They’d go out there and shoot however many they wanted to carry out.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Roland Cortez: It just to think about it today. I mean, it’s not like that. You know, my kids are not see it. Their kids are not going to see it. You kind of wonder what everything’s going to be like in another 20 years with this duck population.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. You know, I was talking to some biologists one time about why those five states kill so many. And Minnesota, to me, is real interesting. I think their state slogan is “The Land of 10,000 Lakes.” So they’ve got a lot of lakes, a lot of water, a lot of marsh, a lot of submerged aquatics, all that good stuff. But the other four states, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, California, have a lot of rice. But now in the instance of Louisiana, I’m saying and kind of asking at the same time, Roland, if you’ve seen these changes in your lifetime. A lot of that rice ground has been converted to sugarcane. A lot of the stuff that’s still in rice, they’re double cropping it, which is good because they’re putting water on it more. But then they’re triple cropping it with crawfish. And if you’re gonna grow crawfish and you got ducks and geese around, you better, goddang, put a propane cannon on it. We all know ducks and geese don’t like propane cannons. So even if the habitat’s there, it may not be accessible for waterfowl to hold them and make them feel comfortable. Have you seen changes like that in your lifetime?
Roland Cortez: Yes, I’ve seen it. And you know, I’ve not just seen it here in Louisiana, but I’ve seen the change in Arkansas too. I spent 15 years guiding in Arkansas, and I’ve seen the mallard change there as well. You know, I’ve seen the mallards leave in the numbers they once were, with speckle-bellies taking over the fields in Arkansas. So I’ve seen it in Louisiana, and I’ve seen it in Arkansas. And you kind of wonder if everybody else is seeing it too.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I think everybody’s seeing it. No doubt everybody’s seeing it. So many people seeing it and doing it that last year or two, some of the government agencies did a research project. They went through 60 years of banding data, which is to say the entire band data set since they’ve been banding ducks in the United States, and they proved through harvest records that mallards, especially are overwintering further north than they historically did. And to put it on a map, I think they said five or six hundred miles further north, which from the Mississippi Delta would put it somewhere around St. Louis, you know, right up there at that great confluence. You know, talking to Mike Schumer the other day, Foul Weather podcast, they called it. You know, when I asked him to draw a line between north of that being colder and south of that being warmer, he said, “Man, that thermocline is right about through the middle of Missouri.” And so, you know, you talk to a lot of these old-timers, talk to folks in the know, and they say, “Well, the ducks are hanging up there in Missouri.” So now it’s kind of back, whether you’re looking at a forecast model or you’re looking at band harvest data, it all supports the fact that the birds are further north than historically. They call it what you will, but let’s face it, man, we ain’t getting the winters we used to.
Roland Cortez: Well that’s a fact.

Ramsey Russell: I hate the term “global warming” because that’s a blue-state acronym word. But it is what it is. We’re just not getting the winters. You know what I’m saying? Well, I can remember, but it’s been a while, since I had to stomp ice or break ice in the great state of Mississippi to go duck hunting. A couple of years ago, it hit. It blew everybody’s mind. Year before last, boy, if you had open water when it was zero degrees, you were killing ducks. But breaking ice or running over ice or circling your boat in ice used to be an every-duck-season kind of thing, and it just ain’t there no more.

Roland Cortez: That’s pretty much it. I mean, here we have a couple of freezes a year up here, you know, and as I said, we’re not far from Monroe. We’ve been lucky the last two years. We had this big polar vortex come through and freeze us up and push all kinds of ducks from the north. But, man, besides that, you know, we don’t break ice as much here anymore either.

Ramsey Russell: But, you know, it also seemed like we’d hit them big polar vortexes back, say, 10, 15 years ago, and it seemed like a big front would go. And then when the weather broke and it kind of moderated, you still had ducks around. And now it seems, it’s like they’re hooked to a conveyor belt. The minute the cold starts drifting back north, the ducks are sticking right there on it, going right back with them like a yo-yo. That’s what it seems like to me.

Roland Cortez: I’ve noticed a lot. You know, as a kid, I can remember the ducks would hang around. You know, it would stay cold. The ducks come, then they would stay all year. But, man, right now, you get a cold front come in, it’s cold for three days, and then it warms back up. The ducks head back north. They didn’t do that back when I was a kid, as far as I can remember.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, so far, Roland, we’ve talked about hunting pressure, habitat changes, climatic weather changes, and stuff like that, but nonetheless, I know you go at it hard. You’ve got some children yourself now, you’re not the kid in the blind. You’ve got kids. How old are your kids?

Roland Cortez: My kids run from, you know, my girls are 29 and 26. And my boys are in their early 20s. They grew up, I took my boys hunting pretty much. My girls really didn’t hunt that much. But, you know, my oldest son, he hunted a bunch with me growing up, and he got to see some good stuff. But I don’t think he’s going to see what I saw growing up as a kid.

Ramsey Russell: I see both my little boys, who are in their 20s also. They don’t have the duck hunting that they remember 20 years ago when they had little youth shotguns, and we were going out all the time. They don’t see it no more. But nonetheless, do you have grandkids yet? Or are you borrowing kids for teal season? I know you take a lot of kids.

Roland Cortez: I’ve got grandkids, they’re just not quite old enough yet to hunt.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What made me ask that question is, I know you go at it hard, and I saw you post a lot during Blue Wing teal season. I’ve had people tell me anymore, for reasons we’ve talked about earlier today, the changes and everything else, you know, it’s like I know a lot of people down in your neck of the woods pretty much schedule, if they get two weeks’ leave, they try to schedule it mostly around Blue Wing teal season because they feel like the Blue Wings are coming.

Roland Cortez: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you can guarantee that in the 16 days that we get, if you hunt them every day, you’re going to kill them. I mean, it’s more stable than the regular duck season for sure.

Ramsey Russell: Well, what’s it like taking kids out today, like 8, 9, 10 years old, and introducing them to hunting, knowing it wasn’t as good as when you were their age, knowing it wasn’t as good as when your daddy was their age, knowing it wasn’t as good as when your granddaddy was their age. What’s that experience like today?

Roland Cortez: To keep them intrigued with the hunting aspect of it, you know, there’s so much else going on in the world. Technology has definitely caught up to everybody today, especially with kids, man. It’s just about keeping them occupied with the hunting part of it. And teal season is the perfect time to bring new hunters in because most of the time, it’s pretty fast. You may have to deal with some mosquitoes in the morning, but it’s pretty fast hunting. It doesn’t last that long. A kid’s attention span is pretty limited, so you can go in there, shoot them, and get out pretty fast.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. You know, something else I think when we start talking about young people or new hunters about Blue Wing is, let’s face it, duck hunting is kind of an expensive pursuit. If you were starting right now, wanting to go duck hunting, and you had to buy everything you needed, waders, shotgun, shells, blah, blah, blah, boy, that’s a lick. You know what I’m saying? Starting from scratch. But Blue Wing really, it really ain’t quite that. I mean, a pair of rubber boots, hip boots, or, Lord have mercy, you could go barefooted with tennis shoes. I’ve seen people do it. And a sack of decoys, don’t matter what kind. I mean, it’s really a pretty low entry to getting started Blue Wing teal hunting. You know, they don’t seem, you know, be hidden if you can. But it’s not like hunting speckle bellies, man. I’m gonna tell you what, I have never been so well-hidden in my life. I feel like, I don’t know, I feel like a Vietnam sniper. I’m so well-hidden when I’ve spec hunted down in south Louisiana. I mean, I can’t see. I gotta turn on my phone to see something in that blind. It’s so shadowed out, I’m so hidden. But Blue Wing ain’t quite like that. You know what I’m saying? The birds are coming with a little bit of motion or some kind of quack or noise. They’re going to come into the decoys and give you a look most times if you’re anywhere near where they want to be.

Roland Cortez: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: And they do eat good.

Roland Cortez: “The Louisiana marshes change every year. You’ve got to read the water, the wind, and the birds. It’s never the same twice.”

Roland Cortez: They eat good. It’s easy shooting for these kids. I had the opportunity during the season to take some young guys, two young kids from Nashville with their father. Man, they did it all when they were with us. They hunted in the morning, went bow fishing at night, and even went alligator hunting. I mean, these boys had the trip of a lifetime. Their dad really showed them the real Louisiana experience.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, boy, I tell you what. I was hunting up in Prince Edward Island with my buddy Woody. We got to talking, and he’d been around. He’d been off Prince Edward Island. He’s been out to Alaska and different parts of the world. But he told me, “Man, I really want that south Louisiana experience I hear so much about.” And, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, the ducks, the geese, whatever. But it was everything else. It was the food and the alligators and the scenery. You know, it’s just something unique unto itself about where you grew up and where you hunt, Roland. It’s like a world unto itself in the United States of America.

Roland Cortez: And that’s what I tell everybody. You know, I was blessed, man, to grow up in south Louisiana. You know, everything’s there, Sportsman’s Paradise, man. Anything you can imagine, you can pretty much do down there.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Roland Cortez: And as many people as I’ve met through hunting, everybody wants to come to Louisiana to do that Louisiana experience. You know, alligator hunting, catching redfish, catching speckled trout, gigging frogs, crawfishing, and bow fishing. I mean, anything imaginable. People, man, that’s all they want to talk about. “Man, where are you from?” I said, “Man, I’m from south Louisiana.” I said, “I’m a pure coon ass.” And that was it, you know. That sparks their interest, and they start talking, “Man, I need to come on down there.” And I said, “You all come and visit me. I’m always down there during the spring and the summer.”
Ramsey Russell: That’s one thing I’ve always loved about a coon ass. They wear that title like a badge of honor. You know, there’s a lot of labels on folks, especially blue-state type stuff. People start getting real sensitive or offended. Coon asses don’t get offended about that, do they?
Roland Cortez: No. I mean, and, you know, everybody asks, “What’s a coon ass?” I say, “A coon ass is a mixture of everything.” You know, my ancestors were Spanish. My ancestors came from Spain and Mexico. Back in the early 1700s, my great-great-great-grandfather sailed from Spain, Hernandez Cortez. He ended up in New Orleans and traveled up and down the Mississippi River until he settled where my family’s from. So, a coon ass is pretty much a mixture of everybody, everything.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. We talked a lot about changes, a lot about differences, now then. If I asked you to say that, I can’t believe we used to fill in the blank. What would come to mind?
Roland Cortez: Let me see.
Ramsey Russell: We’ve talked about a lot of it already. I can’t believe we used to break ice. I can’t believe we used to kill all them specks, can’t believe we used to shoot mallards down here.
Roland Cortez: Yeah, I can’t believe they’re still coming.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I can’t believe we used to walk two miles into a field or a duck hole or pirogue. Now we just drive a buggy. And, you know, you talk about a lot of these technological changes. I see a lot of upside to it. Yeah, the internet changed the world, I get it. Yeah, we’re disturbing a lot of areas going in with loud motors, but, boy, I’ll say some of the fun technological changes. You know, I can remember, matter of fact, I hunt with some close friends of mine. We call them the Newfies. They’re from Nova Scotia. We go out west and chase snow geese. And they’re old school, buddy. We’re using old socks and backboards and things like that, and I absolutely love it. And they still run the wires out to the speakers, you know, when the e-caller started. Man, that is 20, 30-year-old technology. And nowadays, you got that great big old turtle box, and you link two of them together. You walk out, and you’re listening to music while you’re setting up, listening to music when you’re picking up. And Bluetooth snow goose calls, whatever you want. Run a couple of channels at one time over two speakers. It’s just easy, you know. Or On X maps or Boss shot shells, golly, man. Surely you remember when the first iterations of steel shot came out. And I remember cutting a shell open one time and wondering why they weren’t patterning, what it looked like on the inside. And they were all stuck together with rust, you know what I’m saying? I mean, there’s been a lot of technological advances that have kind of kept us in the game. Even though the world’s changing, there’s enough technological changes kind of helping us along too, you know what I’m saying? That’s my point. I can’t believe some of the stuff we used to do versus how we do it now. And it ain’t all bad.
Roland Cortez: It’s not. You know, it’s made hunting a lot easier for everybody, though. Very seldom do you see people using pirogues to duck hunt anymore, which I used to kind of like, those early morning paddles in the dark, you know, hearing the birds take off, hearing all the ducks make noise at night. Now all you hear is mud motors till daylight.
Ramsey Russell: Well, I tell you, we talk about hunting pressure, but, you know, I consider that disturbance being the same. And on the one hand, you can probably access a lot more world now than you could when everybody was just using pirogues. But on the other hand, I went and hunted Delta Marsh a few years ago. And if you look at a map and you find Lake Manitoba, which is like a great lake in Canada, that son of a gun is as big as the state of Mississippi sitting up there. Okay, you’ll see a little lake down on kind of the south end of it. That’s Delta Marsh. And for as long as anybody can remember, since time immemorial, motorized vehicles of any shape, form, or fashion have been prohibited during the duck season. So you gotta get in that canoe with all your gear, you and your buddy, if you’re lucky, and paddle 45 minutes to an hour wherever you go. And you know, that’ll wake you up now. But on the other hand, you ain’t cold when you get there either. And it blew my mind, Roland, just out there in that marsh having a conversation. Two men, you know, 10 feet apart in a canoe, paddling, huffing and puffing, paddling, talking above the wind to each other. And when you round the curve, there’s a flock of scaup or a flock of redheads or a flock of canvasbacks that don’t look like they were shot from a cannon getting away from you. All they do is swim out ahead of you and disappear into the grass. I’m thinking, man, boy, you know, and then when you get where you’re going, they’re still on the water. They just got to get up, fly around some. That makes it kind of nice.
Roland Cortez: It was nice. And like I said, when we started hunting that brackish water, saltwater marsh, that’s what we did. You know, we would take an outboard and then paddle into our pond. And that’s what everybody did until, you know, the mud motors started to take over. And now, and I had them too. I’m guilty of it too. I had a mud motor too. Made it easier for me to get to places I never could get before. But I love them days of just paddling that pirogue in the dark, listening to the birds make noise at night and watching that full moon and all that good stuff, man. It was some good times growing up, sure.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Roland, do you think you’ll ever, I mean, you’ve been going at it, I’m guessing 40 years maybe. I mean, from the time you were a little boy with that break-action single-shot .410 hunting mallards down in the swamp with your people to growing up and duck guiding. Now you’ve been at it a good long time. Do you think you’ll ever, I mean, the hunt we talked about maybe ain’t as good as it was when you grew up or when your dad or when your granddad grew up, but you ain’t aged out. You ain’t quit yet. You think it’ll ever get so bad you will?
Roland Cortez: No, man. I’m a duck man through and through. I’m gonna hunt until I can’t hunt no more.

Ramsey Russell: Amen.

Roland Cortez: I mean, ducks are in my blood, and I’m gonna hunt them no matter what. As long as there’s a season, I’m going to hunt.

Ramsey Russell: Me too. And I’m fearful. After being up in Canada this fall, I’m fearful that it’s going to get worse before it gets better. You know, you mentioned earlier about the 3-and-30 and the 4-and-45 type seasons. I’m fearful that if we don’t get snowfall up to the rooflines in Canada, that we’re heading for a restrictive season. It’s just so dry up there in the production grounds. I can’t imagine it. And what’s carrying us so far is just the fact that the Dakotas on this side of the border got enough precipitation to kind of buoy the numbers. But it’s dry, dry, dry, dry, dry. And I’ve wondered to myself, and that’s why I asked you the question, Roland. Am I going to start deer hunting? And I just don’t think I will. I think I’ll go out and go through the motions and go through the motions of duck hunting just because it’s what I like to do, just to be out there. If I can’t shoot but two ducks for 30 days, I think I’ll still do it. I think I’ll go out and wait it out and enjoy it for what it is and what it ain’t, because I’m a duck hunter.

Roland Cortez: That’s right. Myself, I mean, I’ve been through it, and I’m going to keep on doing it. And we talked about that this morning. You know, the guy was asking me what I think. I said, man, there has to come a point where we have to say, man, that the ducks are getting less and less every year. I mean, through production. I mean, well, somebody needs to step in and do something, sure.

Ramsey Russell: All we can do. But, you know, I think, that we 900,000 duck hunters in the United States of America are doing everything with our time and money that we can. You know, we are blessed beyond measure as compared to every other country on God’s earth with hunters that will put their time and their money into it with NGO organizations like Delta Waterfowl and Ducks Unlimited and others, and with state agencies that still mostly pay attention to the needs of hunters and to the value that hunting brings to their budgets, and to federal agencies. There’s nothing else like the North American model on earth. And so we’ve got it going. But, you know, like you were talking about guiding, you know, you control the controllable, and there’s some things you can’t control. And wet water is one of them. We’ve got to have water, we’ve got to have grasslands, we’ve got to have habitat, and lots of it to produce lots of baby ducks to fly south. And until those stars line up, all we can do is hold the fort and keep doing what we do, you know, or quit and go play golf. But that don’t sound fun to me.

Roland Cortez: Oh, no.

Ramsey Russell: Well, let’s end it on this note right here. What’s the remainder of the season look like for you? What are you hoping for, from here?

Roland Cortez: Well, I’m hoping that, you know, we get a few more ducks here, and I think it’ll pick up as the season progresses. You know, green-wing teal are pretty much our number one duck here on this place, and we’re not at full capacity on green-wing teal yet. I feel optimistic that the best is yet to come. So we’re gonna hold the fort, and we’re gonna keep on going at it every day until they show up.

Ramsey Russell: Besides coot, what is your favorite duck to eat? How do you cook it?

Roland Cortez: Green-wing teal would be my duck of choice. I’d like to have six of them plucked with the gizzard, the heart, the liver, and smother them down in a gravy with some onions and a little rice. Kind of pretty much the same way that I did them coots and put a little garlic in there to give them a little taste to it. I’ll cook them until I can pull that leg off, and then they’ll be done.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, make a gravy.

Roland Cortez: That’s right. Make a gravy. I grew up, like I said, I was blessed, man. I had a family that hunted and we cooked, and so I’ve got to taste some very fine cuisine with the, as a child.

Ramsey Russell: My buddy Chris Michael down southwest Louisiana called it stinking the pot.

Roland Cortez: That’s right. Stinks in the pot.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And hey, Boy, does he know how to do it good. But anyway, I have, sure, go ahead.

Roland Cortez: Chris is good, man. He’s a real fine cook.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, he’s as good as it gets. He sure is, man. Roland, I really appreciate catching up. We appreciate hearing your story, and thank you very much for coming on. I encourage everybody listening to go out and shoot a coot.

Roland Cortez: That’s right. Make me proud.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you very much, Roland. It’s good to hear from you.

Roland Cortez: Man, thank you. It’s been an honor. I’ve been wanting to get on your podcast for a long time, and you made my day when you said I can come on. So I appreciate you and everything you do out there. I listen to your podcasts every time they come out.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you very much. And folks thank you all for listening to the episode of Mojo Duck Season Somewhere podcast. My buddy, Roland Cortez, coot killer extraordinaire, but also one heck of a duck hunter. See you next time.