EP 543. Decoys Made with “Never Settle” Determination

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Today I’m going all the way out to the West Coast, the state of Oregon, to meet with a legendary decoy maker. You know, I’ve always said and believed that we American water fowlers are a rare breed. Every single aspect of duck hunting and goose hunting has been elevated to an art form. I mean, we are so passionate. Dave Smith founded one of the most realistic craft decoys on Earth. I have myself tried to tell the difference between wild geese and his decoys sitting out there in the snow. Char dog, too. If she didn’t have a nose, she wouldn’t have known the difference. And I’ve always felt that whoever came up and elevated decoys to this level must be passionate about waterfowl. Dave, how the heck are you this morning?
Dave Smith: I’m doing good, thanks so much for having me. I feel like you’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel when you have me.
Ramsey Russell: No way, man.
Dave Smith: Is this a cry for help or something?

Ramsey Russell: “The best decoys don’t just deceive ducks—they deceive time. They carry the soul of the hunter who made them and the waterfowl they lure.”

Ramsey Russell: No, it’s really not. I was actually in Oregon last year and wished I’d had time to get up with you while I was out there. It was just a real quick trip. But I’ve always been super impressed. Now, look, I’m going to say this, Dave, with all full disclosure. I have killed ducks over pop bottles. I still talk to old duck hunters and goose hunters that can remember killing wild Canada geese over tar paper shingles tossed in the snow. I mean, we’re not hunting an animal that’s got this great Albert Einstein cognitive facility about it. You know, they’re instinctual animals. But, nonetheless, ultra-realism is more and more important out there in the water fowling landscape. Everybody wants to have an edge when they hunt because of hunting pressure and stuff. I never will forget the first time I hunted over Dave Smith decoys. It was in about a foot of snow in Wisconsin with a friend of mine we all called Ten Yard Tony. We knocked down a pair of Canada geese, and Char went out and grabbed one of them, came back, and I sent her out on the other one. She stopped, and she looked around. And I started looking around like I didn’t know where it was until it started walking. You know, at 20 yards, I couldn’t tell the real from Memorex. To go back to the 1980s commercial, I couldn’t tell real from Memorex until it started moving. And I just said, you know, whoever came up with these paint schemes and these decoys must be a pretty darn serious goose hunter. And I’m very, very proud to finally have you on here, Dave.
Dave Smith: Well, yeah, good to hear. I’m glad to hear that, and I appreciate that very much. And that is the whole mission. And it could be argued that maybe the world didn’t need an ultra-realistic decoy, but once one idiot made one, then it sort of opened up a can of worms. And it got to the point where, I don’t know, maybe you needed them for the kind of hunting that we like to do.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Dave Smith: So they’re not for everybody. Some people absolutely just love shooting. They’re great at taking tall shots. I’m not. And they really enjoy that part of it. It’s the same with the difference between archery big game hunting and guys that are, you know, consistently making great shots on deer at 700 yards. Both are good. Both are an art form, and both are impressive and stuff like that. But for the kind of hunting that I wanted to do, I mean, like, you know, I was hunting hard in the valley here. And I was buying every decoy that was ever advertised, and I was trying them all. And, you know, I had people telling me, like, well, you know, you’re just trying to get them close enough to take a shot. And I was reading, like, Dennis Hunt books, and it was saying geese hate decoys. The whole goal of decoys is just to lure them into gun range. And I just kind of thought, you know, bullshit. Like, I watched geese land with real geese all the time. And when I was hunting, if six or seven geese, or even four, would land 100 yards off to one side, and the next flock that came in would go land with those real geese, like, every time. And so I just felt like there’s room for some massive improvement. And that the decoy industry had gotten a little bit complacent and just decided that, you know, it doesn’t really matter or whatever like that. And I’m like, well, let’s find out. You know, let’s find out. But I will say, the decoys I was most impressed with at that time, and I still am to this day, are Bigfoots. And I know they are super durable. And that is awesome. But from my standpoint, where I feel like I pay as much attention to nature as I possibly can, Bigfoots are really goosey. And even though the differences are subtle between Bigfoots and some others, they’re significant. And, you know, whoever it was, Art Letterhoff, I guess, is the one who carved them and started that company and stuff like that. I would love to meet that guy.
Ramsey Russell: I would, too.
Dave Smith: Yeah, I feel like he paid a lot of attention. He knows what he’s doing, and those decoys were impressive. But my main problem with Bigfoots was we were hunting lots of little geese. And Bigfoots are just a, you know, a tall, long goose with a long neck. Just a classic honker.
Ramsey Russell: It’s a big, massive decoy. One thing that’s always impressed me about big honker decoys, you drop the back of a trailer, and most Bigfoot decoy owners just pile them in there, just toss them on top of each other. They’ve been rattling up and down, you know, shaking on each other, going up and down gravel, bumpy roads. But when you take them out, you don’t know if they’re brand new or years old. I mean, they’re just bulletproof, big, bulletproof decoys. There’s been a lot of geese killed over them. Dave, I want to turn around off decoys real quick and ask you. Tell me about growing up. Did you grow up in the Willamette Valley out there in Oregon? Is that where you’re born and raised?
Dave Smith: Well, I was actually born in Idaho.
Ramsey Russell: Oh.
Dave Smith: And my dad was in the Air Force. We moved around a little bit. So from Idaho to the East, to the East, Pennsylvania, New York, and then back to Oregon. But that was back to Oregon when I was very young. So I’ve lived here in Hillsboro, Oregon, pretty much my whole life. I’ve watched it grow up like crazy.
Ramsey Russell: What was it like growing up in Oregon? What did you do for fun? What was it like growing up in Oregon?
Dave Smith: Well, so for fun, we ate dirt and mud with spoons, and we made forts out of cardboard boxes. I mean, like, we were dirt poor. And, you know, we just didn’t have, you know, much money and stuff like that. My dad hunted, but it was mostly before I was born. But I could tell my older brother and me, we had the hunter gene in us. We could just tell 100%, even though we weren’t getting exposed to very much hunting. And, you know, we talked about goose hunting, dreamed about goose hunting. And we drew pictures of goose hunting and stuff, all growing up and everything. And what’s crazy is, the only goose that we had in this valley when I was a teenager were dusky Canada geese.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. I did not know that.
Dave Smith: Yeah, that’s really all we had. Just a few Western Canadas, you know, the honkers, just a few of those, and very few cacklers. But mostly, cacklers were a little further south, wintering further south, so we didn’t even see them. Ironically, dusky Canada goose hunting was actually open. You could actually hunt them. When I had no idea what I was doing and was doing this by myself, my brother died when I was 17. He was 19. He was sort of my idol, especially in trapping. He was a really good trapper. I was always trying to be like him and all that stuff. After he died, I think I had this weird, probably dysfunctional determination. But boy, I went after those dusky Canada geese with a passion, with whatever I had, which wasn’t much. I was digging huge pit blinds with a shovel by myself, hauling the dirt away. I was building big wooden pit blinds with swivel chairs and doors on sliding rails that were spring-loaded. You’d push a foot pedal, and they’d come flying open. The decoys I made were just gunny sacks with little wire armatures, foam heads, and spray paint. I did what I had to do. It was miserable because I didn’t know what I was doing, but it lit a fire in me. It was a fun kind of misery.
Ramsey Russell: If your dad had kind of gotten out of hunting before you boys came along, who got you into goose hunting? Who walked you through it? Who introduced you to it?
Dave Smith: I mean, nobody really. Dennis Larson is the one who introduced me to waterfowl hunting, but everything was about duck hunting. What’s ironic is that Dennis imprinted on me early on, just like what you were talking about, he used Purex jugs. He was into numbers for duck decoys, all about numbers, numbers, numbers. We used absolutely anything we could get our hands on for decoys. I think I’m so lazy that’s why I liked Bigfoots, because they’re easy to deal with. I wanted an ultra-realistic decoy too, so I could use fewer of them. Eventually, I started figuring out that small spreads of ultra-realistic decoys were fun and mobile. But yeah, Dennis told me about goose hunting and stuff like that, but at the time he was introducing me to waterfowl hunting, goose hunting was shut down here in the valley because they had identified that the earthquake back in the 1960s in Alaska had a massive detrimental effect on dusky Canada geese. Their numbers weren’t where they should be, so they stopped all hunting. Our goose hunting was over. I mean that was the end of it. It was like this dream of mine was shattered. Amazingly, year after year, geese started wintering here. They started trickling in. Tavernier’s Canadas, lessers, cacklers, and occasional oddballs like specs. We even saw small groups of Vancouver Canadas, duskies, and local honkers. Even Aleutians started showing up. Before we knew it, we had a lot of geese here. The Department of Fish and Wildlife realized they had to open some seasons because the geese were causing a lot of crop damage. A lot of geese that were previously wintering further south, like in the Central Valley of California, for whatever reasons, they changed their patterns like they do. And all suddenly have the geese. Man, I was excited. I was ready to dive in, spending every minute working on my calling, decoys, trying to get permission, reading everything I could. I bugged the heck out of Tim Grounds, Jeff Foiles, Bill Saunders, anybody I could. I’d ask them to come out here and hunt or just share information. I learned a lot from great people like Sean Stahl, Kelly Powers, and others who were open with information. Duck guys are really willing to share lot information. But our geese were different. Our hunting was different. We couldn’t drive out in fields. We also had special regulations. The only way we were allowed to hunt was by proving we wouldn’t shoot a dusky Canada goose. You had to take a class and pass a test to show you knew the differences between geese and wouldn’t shoot a dusky Canada goose. We could only hunt between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. After every hunt, we had to check all our geese at a check station. They’d measure the culmen length, the top of the bill, and the femur length, and check the breast color for value and hue. If you shot a dusky Canada goose, they punched your card, and you were done for the season.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. What happens if you shoot a dusky Canada goose now?
Dave Smith: So now it’s a game violation. So now you could get a ticket for it, but there’s no more check stations and stuff. But I’d give anything for it. I mean, I’d give anything to have check stations again. I mean, we could only hunt on certain days, and you had to go to those check stations. Well, that, you know, as you can imagine, weeded out a lot of people, and it weeded out the people who were less into it. And in Washington State, too, you can. In Washington State, the funniest hunting I’ve ever had in my life, by far, probably the funniest of any kind of hunting, fishing, or trapping I’ve ever had in my life, was about six years in southwest Washington State, where you could only hunt on Wednesdays and Saturdays. There were so many of these hybrid geese around intermixed with the duskies that nobody really wanted to bother hunting. It was really difficult, but what they would do is, so you would know that you weren’t shooting a dusky, they would put white neck collars on them. So now they put a white neck collar and a leg band on the birds you can shoot. And, you know, out of 50 or 60 geese, there might be maybe one. So there were plenty of days where I’d sit out there all day long, and maybe even have several flocks come in, and wouldn’t have a single shooter. But I loved every minute of it. It was the most beautiful areas, you know, just Willapa Bay and those tide flats, and a lot of hard work to get out there. And hardly any competition. And when you shoot a bird, you know, you’d get this great fun and this bird in this beautiful area. But you’d get some bling too, and that was kind of fun. Like, I was loving those neck collars and leg bands. And then, I got to the point where I was having some pretty good success with them, and it was kind of getting the attention even of the people from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the game wardens. Like in Washington State, they have game wardens, whereas in Oregon, we have state police. And so, you know, then I was kind of taking those guys hunting and kind of where I was chipping away at that flock. They really wanted that population. They really wanted those hybrid birds gone. It was considered to be a big mistake. What they did was they tried to supplement the dusky Canada goose population by capturing some duskies when they were wintering here. They come from Alaska, and they clipped their pin feathers and wing feathers, and wanted them to be a resident goose and multiply to supplement the population. Well, what went wrong, of course, was they interbred with Western Canada geese. Now you’ve got this hybrid goose that doesn’t help westerns and it doesn’t help duskies. And at one point, they considered rounding them up in the summer when they’re molting and just killing them all. And I think in Seattle, people freaked out at the idea. Which is fine with me, because what they did even helped. I even volunteered and helped on those. And in those days, we rounded them up with a helicopter, whereas now they do it with a drone. But it was pretty fun, you know, setting this big trap. And I filmed a lot of it. I would hide, crouch down in the bushes and stuff and film the whole process. They’d round these birds up with a helicopter, and then all the ones that were, that were, you know, whiskeys, they called them, a western-dusky cross, they’d put white neck collars on them, so white neck collars, leg bands, and some tarsus bands. And then, you know, winter would come, and it’s like, okay, here we go. Like, I’m gonna go and hunt these birds and have fun. And you know, I had days where I’d get one or two, and a few days where I got three, and I even had a couple of days where I got four in a day. You’d have to sit there all day, all day long, for that to happen. And it’d have to be good conditions, and you’d have to look at a lot of birds and stuff like that. But what it taught me, and what it created in me, was this idea of, it’s like I had no choice at that point. It’s just, you got to get birds close. And you have to land a lot of flocks. Now, I was not shooting them on the ground, I was shooting them in the air. And that was sort of my rule. So, everybody always assumed, when I started getting big piles of neck collars, everyone assumed that’s what you do. You land them, and you get out the binoculars and stuff. I didn’t even bring binoculars. But imagine a big white collar on a medium-sized, super dark goose. It’s pretty easy to see and spot in the air. But I was really, really enjoying that. I was having a lot of fun, and it taught me to be selective. And also, I wanted that hunting to last, and I had it all to myself. So I did not shoot into big flocks. If a big flock came, also in 70, and so that would happen sometimes off the bay. 75 geese would come, and there would be four or five neck collars on there or whatever. And I’d just let them land. And if they would stay there for four hours, so be it, you know. It didn’t matter how bad I had to pee or whatever. And I had plenty of times, I had times where I got inside a layout boat that I had pulled up on a bank, and I had to be in it from before it got light until after it got dark.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Dave Smith: I’ve had that happen two days in a row, and you want to talk about having to pee. Like, and if you think you can pee laying on your side into a cup or something like that when it’s freaking cold outside, I don’t know, I can’t. If someone else can, I salute them.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I want to circle back again and get back into something. And I’m assuming when you were doing all this serious hunting all day and hunting at a higher level than a lot of people, you were hunting over your own decoys. Is that correct?
Dave Smith: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Okay, so I want to go further back. Who is Dave Smith, and how did you get into making these decoys? Now, wait a minute. My buddy Worth Matheson, who introduced us, told me that everything, you know, he described you as an exceptional outdoorsman, that everything you do, you do at your very best, at a very high level. He doesn’t care if you’re goose hunting, bow hunting for big bucks and elk catching smallmouth or largemouth, fly fishing for steelhead, trapping, whatever it is, you go at it as the best. I mean, a little while ago, you were talking about getting started goose hunting and going out as a young man, a teenager with a shovel, digging a full-blown pit with a special spring-loaded pop top and everything else. And I mean, who is this kid? I mean, you said, you grew up kind of poor, kind of simple. And I think we all did. I think back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, we all were. I mean, you know, golly, how did we live through the homemade bike ramps, skateboard ramps, and all the stuff that poor kids do because you don’t have money? We made our own stuff, made our own entertainment. And I really think, I look at, I got a conversation the other day about growing up, quote, poor and not living under a overpass poor, but just middle class poor, you know, And I got one pair of tennis shoes a year and it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what kind of bicycle I had. I had a bicycle, you know, but I think that generation, it just made you into a. It created and shaped us in a great way. It got us outdoors, got us leg trapping, trapping and hunting, and doing things in nature because that’s what we had at our disposal. And some of us went on to do it better. Would that be a fair assumption, that just growing up without an abundance of toys, cars, and rich-boy stuff put you in the outdoors and set you on this path?
Dave Smith: Yeah, I think so. I’m very thankful for that. I’m thankful for my parents and what we did have and stuff like that.
Ramsey Russell: Absolutely.
Dave Smith: What I was exposed to. And then I had an uncle in Idaho who was a phenomenal trapper. He was a great hunter too. But that guy could catch bobcats and coyotes like nobody’s business. And he was my favorite. I hate to say this, he was my favorite relative by far. And he was a logger, and he had a horrible logging accident, a tree fell on his head. I was in Alaska, and I got the phone call. He passed away too. So, I’ve lost some good people. I lost my best friend of 32 years, he died, you know, in his 40s and stuff. And I sometimes think that that might be some of my drive. But I think most of my drive comes from, and this is going to sound, you know, weird and stuff, but I’m just being honest, I think like I don’t have the brains to put that sort of drive toward something like, you know, becoming a CPA or a lawyer and being really successful financially or something like that. I’m just not smart enough to do that stuff. And then, with hunting and fishing, there are so many people who are so much naturally better at that stuff than I am. And I know that. I do think I have some good instincts, and I’m thankful for that. And I just thank God for that. I think I have pretty good instincts. Something tells me, you know, how to hang a tree stand and where to hang a tree stand or where to put the trap to catch a mink and how to put the decoys out and stuff like that. It feels like, as rough as it is for me going through life, navigating through everyday things like, you know, technology stuff and all that, I’m just horrible at that, I do have moments of clarity at times, not always, but when it comes to fishing and hunting or trapping and stuff like that. But I think I know there are so many people who are so much better and figure things out so much faster than me. So, what I do is I make up for it with persistence. And that is one thing that I will say about myself. Even though it’s not a skill and it’s not a God-given talent or anything like that, and it’s not as good as being great, but it does make up for a lot. It makes up for a lot that I lack. I’ll set my mind, and if I can’t do it right, I’ll just keep doing it until it comes together.
Ramsey Russell: It makes perfect sense. I mean, persistence is everything. Tell me more about your uncle. It sounds to me like he was a very influential person in your life. A logger, trapper, what are some of the life lessons he taught you as a youngster?
Dave Smith: Yeah, Jerry Sonnen in Cottonwood, Idaho. And he was just this gentle, like our family was a bunch of dysfunctional drunks. And there’d be these giant arguments in Idaho with everybody drinking like crazy. Not my Uncle Jerry. You know, he was quiet and soft-spoken and extremely intelligent. You could tell something was going on, in his mind. We would steelhead fish and trap together. He taught me a lot. He taught me a lot about just trying to tune in to your instincts and stuff. Yeah, I liked him a lot. And I’m such a kind of shy person and socially awkward that it probably kept me from making a full connection with him that I would have had. You know, I feel like probably by now at this age, I would be able to do that a little better. But at the time, you know, I was fairly young and stuff. And, you know, my own dad, who is still a great inspiration for me in a lot of things, my dad was a great archer, for sure. He was a great archer. But, you know, my dad just kind of didn’t really teach me a ton of things or whatever like that. But my Uncle Jerry, he kind of would go into that kind of teaching mode a little bit. And I didn’t see him all.
Ramsey Russell: What is one of the most indelible moments you remember your uncle teaching you something? Mink trapping out in the woods? Tracking?
Dave Smith: I would say mostly bobcat trapping and the idea of pinch points and funnels and how that applies to absolutely everything. I mean, that applies to fishing, all kinds of hunting and trapping, of course, and stuff. And also the idea that my uncle, he did a lot of blind sets and fewer bait sets. And boy, man, when it comes to trapping, like bottom edge sets for beaver and bottom edge sets for mink, those were what really got me excited about trapping. Anything that requires you to look at the topography and figure out where an animal is going to travel, what will steer it in that direction, and you can do anything to help nudge them a little bit in the right direction. So funnels and pinch points, that concept was probably the number one thing that my uncle introduced me to, and it stuck with me like crazy. My gosh, when it comes to deer hunting and tree stands, that is absolutely everything. But trapping, too, it applies to everything. It even applies to waterfowl. So that would be the answer to that. And then my artistic mentor, by far, was Ron Pittard, a guy in Seaside, Oregon, who made fish replicas. I had heard about this guy, and someone said, “Yeah, he doesn’t have a phone number. If you happen to find him, you have to promise not to tell anyone where he’s located.” Yeah, and it was absolutely true. He was charging like four times more than anyone else. I was trying to find him, trying like crazy to find him, because I just wanted to meet this guy so badly. I finally heard that his wife worked at the Seaside library. So, you know, what I did wasn’t right, but I did what I did. I went in and talked to her and said, “Yeah, I’ve got this fish I need to take to Ron, but I can’t remember how to find him.” She said, “Oh, okay, well, I guess that’d be fine,” and gave me his address. I remember going and knocking on the door and nothing happened. Finally, this big garage door opened, and he had about 20 fish replicas in progress. That was a life-changing moment.
Ramsey Russell: How so?

Ramsey Russell: “Carving a decoy is like hunting itself: it demands precision, respect for the craft, and a refusal to settle for anything less than perfection.”

Dave Smith: They were the most realistic. I mean, to this day, it was a group of coho salmon. And to this day, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better coho salmon. This was a long time ago, so it was in the early 1980s, and to this day, there are some very, very, very good fish replica artists right now.
Ramsey Russell: Was he painting the skins? Was he doing the skins or was he doing replicas?
Dave Smith: He was doing the replicas, and he was kind of getting ahead of that because of catch-and-release seasons were coming and all that stuff. He was doing a lot of salmon and steelhead. People would bring him a fish, and then he’d put it in a sandbox, make a mold of it, cast the fish, and then have the mold in his library. Eventually, he had several hundred molds. So if someone caught a fish, they could release it, knowing that he would have a mold. I was so blown away. Like, he hand-painted every scale four times, which, to this day, nobody does that. He would make tiny sea lice and put them on the fish. He’d make the eyes himself, make the teeth, the gills. He’d hand-carve a whole set of gills for every fish and then do incredible paintings, back ground of underwater scenes behind every one of them. They were just mind-boggling. I’m super lucky, I’ve got one of them. Actually, I’ve got two of them. But for 30 years, I bugged the heck out of him. He was a great friend and taught me a lot about the importance of just trying to do things right and accurately.
Ramsey Russell: Where in the timeline of meeting Ron and becoming friends with this great fish artist. First off, why was it so important for you to meet him? And second, when did you go and make your initial set of Dave Smith Canada Goose decoys?
Dave Smith: Let’s see. I met Ron probably in the early 1980s, and I didn’t make my first goose until, I didn’t start on it until 1998.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Dave Smith: Yeah, and I was dedicated to making fish replicas. He was kind of getting to the point where he wanted to retire. He wanted me to take over his clientele and continue making fish replicas in his same style and methods. He gave me all his molds, and after he passed away, his family, they’ve been incredible. They’ve really supported me and given me all of his stuff. But with fish replicas, you really have to be willing to just do nothing but work. And I was kind of bitten by the bug of hunting and fishing and trapping.
Ramsey Russell: Work can’t get in the way of those hobbies. Work can get in the way of hunting, fishing, and trapping, I’ve heard.
Dave Smith: Yeah, for sure. And so with decoys, it was kind of like, well, I got to the point where I was, you know, loving hunting, especially goose hunting, way more than fishing and way more than trapping and everything like that, and more than big game hunting and all that stuff. So with goose decoys, I think I just was obsessed. At first, I just wanted to make the decoys for my own use. And then, eventually, I started guiding Brad Cochran, and I started guiding myself.
Ramsey Russell: Did you make that first set of decoys? Was the decoy itself your creation, or did you re-appropriate decoys with a more learned paint scheme?
Dave Smith: No, I just started from scratch. I did repaint the best decoys. The ones that I had the most success with in this valley were carry lights, and I repainted them. The reason why I think those worked so well is because they were fat decoys with a fat neck, and they looked more like our birds. Imagine I’m super interested in goose hunting, loving goose hunting, and I want an edge over everyone else. And these geese are tough because of the hours that we have to hunt and also because you have to know what you’re shooting. You can’t just start blazing away at geese. I’m like, I need something. And here I was, you know, I was an industrial sculptor. I was doing clay sculptures with shoes for Nike. I did that for seven years. I did a few seasons of Air Jordans, working with Tinker Hatfield. And I did taxidermy mannequin sculptures for research mannequins and stuff. I knew that I had the ability to do a clay sculpture of a goose that would be the way that I wanted it. And then I got headhunted from Nike to go work for Fila. That was kind of neat because that’s how I met Tim and Hunter Grounds. I was buying calls from them. They saw the Fila logo on, you know, whatever letters or whatever stuff. Hunter was into Fila. It’s kind of like Nike. It’s like sportswear, apparel, and shoes and stuff. Hunter was just like, “Yeah, I want a bunch of Fila stuff. Do you want to do a trade?” Tim was such a great guy. He would just be like, you tell me what you want, and then you just send whatever you can, and stuff like that. Well, he would try to make these trades way in my favor. And here the guy had never met me before in my life. So I tried to one-up him and make things way in Hunter’s favor. I got to the point where I was just like, what I really need is a Taverner’s Canada goose. That was sort of like, and people aren’t too familiar with that goose, but it’s a really cool goose, and it’s pretty rare. That was sort of the goose that ruled the roost over here. If the Tavs liked it, then it was good. The Cacklers trusted the Tavs like crazy. So I was like, that’s what I need. I need a Tav. Well, that was the first sculpture I did. And then, of course, now we call it a lesser because it’s just almost exactly the same thing. But technically, that first sculpture I ever did is technically a Tav.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Dave Smith: If you had ever seen the very first one, like, it’s changed a lot. Some evolution just because of practicality and stuff. But the first one I ever made, for several years, I made the tails and wings separately with flexible resin, and I had slots where they glued in. It was the first decoy that had an actual thin tail with separation in there and pinion feathers that folded across each other and were thin. Then I painted it with this super, super flat paint.
Ramsey Russell: Were you using a lot of your fishing painting techniques? Layers upon layers and feather groups and things of that nature? Very painstaking and detailed. It’s not like a guy like me just hitting it with Krylon spray paint. You’re out there with a brush, really going over these things with fine detail?

Decoy Maker: “I’ve spent decades perfecting the curve of a wood duck’s head. It’s not just about looks—it’s about how it sits in the water, how it moves, how it whispers to the wild flock, ‘This is where you belong.’”

Dave Smith: Yeah. I did a lot of that, but I also, through experimentation, figured out different textures that I could do that would pick up paint, like antiquing methods and angle spraying methods and stuff like that. No one was doing that at the time. Now that’s pretty much the standard way that everyone paints and stuff like that. But the main thing for me was to make poses that would sell, what I’m trying to sell to the birds. I’m not talking to people. The poses needed to be super relaxed, super contented. Stuffers were the best at the time and probably still are to this day. It’s like, how do you beat a stuffer? One of the things with stuffers, though, at least one way I could come closer, is most of the stuffers just looked terrible. They’re in horrible poses, especially feeders and stuff. My hat’s off to anybody who does a really nice mount for a stuffer and takes care of it because it’s difficult. But most of them have been out in the rain, and maybe they didn’t clean and degrease the skin as much as you would if it were a decorative mount. So they’re kind of bleeding oils out and stuff. Since it’s not a live bird that can do feather maintenance, they’re also affected by ultraviolet rays. They turn lighter and more yellow over time and stuff like that. But still, I’ll just tell you, and you know this already, you can’t beat a stuffer. You just can’t beat the real thing.
Ramsey Russell: I’ve hunted over stuffed birds and live decoys, and I agree, nothing like the real thing.
Dave Smith: Well, then, yeah, I take that back. You can’t beat live decoys. Live birds are the very, very best thing. Stuffers are next, then DSDs are next.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s right. Tell me this, your first set, you’re going to go out and make yourself some kick-butt decoys, more durable than a stuffer, more realistic. They don’t fade, yada yada. Our buddy Worth Mathewson, told me he caught wind of them. He laid eyes on them and begged you to make him some. He said this went on for years and years. He said something about a mink-trapping contest you all got into.
Dave Smith: I don’t know anything about that.
Ramsey Russell: But he said he just begged you for some decoys, and finally, you agreed to sell him 12 used Dave Smith decoys from your personal set. You had no commercial interest, so maybe he was the first person you ever sold some to. He said, he went out into some big hunting area, I think it was him and his wife, and they put out those 12 decoys. They shut the entire competition field down. People were coming up to him, saying, “Where did you get those decoys and how can I get some?” Is that pretty much how it went down?
Dave Smith: Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t there, but Worth has told me that. So, you know how I feel about Worth. Worth is one of my great mentors, and he’s one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever met in my life. I absolutely love the guy. And you kind of asked at one point if I would do this podcast, and I think you called the shop and stuff, and they just said no, you know, like, because they know already that my answer is going to be no, because I just don’t really do things like this. And then Worth called me up, and he just said, he’s like, “Dave, I heard that Ramsay Russell asked you to be on the podcast, and you said no.” And I said, “I don’t really remember saying no, but I probably Mike or Scott or somebody at the shop said no.” And Worth said, “You know, I really think that you should do that podcast.” Well, I called you instantly because whatever Worth requests, the answer is going to be yes. If there’s anything I can do for that guy, ever, I’m going to do it. And that was the same with decoys.
Ramsey Russell: Did that have something to do with your feeling guilty about that mink trapping contest?
Dave Smith: No, the mink contest, that was much later, but that was the greatest thing ever, too, yeah at the beginning of the trapping season, we decided we’re gonna have a little gentleman’s bet on who can catch more mink, and he’s in an area that has quite a few mink, quite a few more than me. And I was like, all right. I get too competitive or whatever like that and stuff like that. So I figured out, there’s a place down on the coast that had a mink farm that shut down years ago. And I kind of figured, you know what? Some of those ones have got to be reproducing or living in the wild or something like that. But it would definitely up my odds, and it was great habitat. Well, I went down there and started trapping it, and I was catching these mink they definitely were descendants of a farm mink. They were just awesome. Like, I was getting these big bucks that were like five pounds. Just perfect fur on them and everything. And so, you know, that was the greatest thing. I just told Worth, like, “Yeah, well, you know, maybe next year.”
Ramsey Russell: How did you go from making your own private decoys to commercial decoys? Were people just beating your door down for them?
Dave Smith: Yeah. And I think those situations with Worth that happened in a few other instances where, you know, like, I really didn’t have any intention to sell them, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to sell them because I wanted to be the one that had them. And then I was guiding with them. And guiding was super fun because we were the only ones that had the decoys. I remember us, we printed a brochure one time, and it was really true. I don’t remember the season all that well, but I remember saying the previous year, we limited out with clients every single day except for two days, and we still killed 56 geese in those two days. So that gives you an idea of how the goose hunting was and how the decoys were working. It was pretty awesome, especially when you got to remember that, you know, guys were coming out here from the Midwest and stuff, and they were bringing other decoys and stuff, and nothing was working that well. Just because our geese are kind of different. And I think the finish on our decoys and I mostly lucked into that, but the finish on them helps more than anything. But, you know, if you sell a few to Worth, and then he goes out and just, you know, hands people their asses, and then they’re coming out and asking questions and stuff. And at the beginning, I tried to call them zombies. I wanted to call them Zombie Decoys. The Zombie Decoy Company. And I was just trying to get that to stick and stuff, but everybody talking at the waterfowl festivals, they’re like, have you used Dave’s yet? Have you tried Dave Smith’s decoy? And next thing I know that kind of stuck. And next thing, that’s Dave Smith Decoys. I feel like that sounds kind of arrogant to call the company Dave Smith Decoys, but that sort of happened. That’s my story. I’m sticking to it. I didn’t really mean for it to be called that. Not that Zombie Decoy Company is really much better. But, you know, it got to a point where Fila was relocating. They wanted us to move to either Italy or New York City. And obviously, you know, I wasn’t going to do that. And I had been working on this sculpture, and the first sculpture took me six months to do because I had to redo it, like, 80 times. I wanted to make sure.

Conservationist: “Decoys are more than tools—they’re time capsules. They remind us that hunting is a dance between artistry and nature.”

Ramsey Russell: How many poses do you have?
Dave Smith: Well, so I’m talking about the first sculpture being the first pose. The lesser rester. That one took me forever. That one took me almost six months to do. And then, like, once I got that done, it kind of dawned on me at that point, like, well, yeah, I need a feeder. And then I did a feeder, and then eventually I did an upright. And those were just the three poses. But, you know, making fiberglass molds and buying all the materials and stuff like that, next thing I know, I’ve got a lot of money into this, and now I’m getting laid off. And so then a bunch of people are coming at me saying, like, name your price. We just want some of those decoys. And I was like, well, I’ll just try to recoup my costs. You know, I’ve got a lot of money into molds and all that stuff or whatever, and just if a few people have them, it’ll still be okay. And one thing led to another. The demand just kept increasing and kept increasing. And then all of a sudden, kind of a wonderful thing happened, and I just realized that I really liked all the people that were coming to my decoys. We had a lot in common, and I really liked making the decoys. I loved doing the sculptures, and I loved that the market was wide open. Like, there weren’t any great realistic decoys at the time. And I loved the naysayers, and I still do to this day. I just love it that people would go way out of their way to say, like, you absolutely do not need that. They’ve got a brain the size of a pea and all that stuff or whatever. Those people helped me in a 25-year career more than anything. And to this day, those guys are still helping me like crazy because you need those guys every bit as much as you need the ones that are buying the decoy and all that stuff. And those guys are fun. They’re fun, too. And the funniest thing about them is when they go on a hunt with someone, they find themselves on it. They got invited to go on a hunt, and it’s like they look out at the decoy spread, and it’s all DSDs. And next thing you know, birds are just fogging up their glasses, landing right in their face. And then they’re just like, holy, I cannot believe this. And the next thing you know, they’re turned around. So there’s been a couple of times in my career where that’s happened. Like with geese, that kind of played its way out. And then turkeys. Turkeys were a whole new market where it was exactly the same way. Most people either used crappy decoys or no decoys at all. And, you know, it was a chance to do all over again what we did with geese and with turkeys and stuff. And so it’s kind of fun when you find those markets and all that stuff.
Ramsey Russell: How many species of Canada goose, cackler goose, do you make now? All of them?
Dave Smith: So our original honker, now we call it Giant because it’s a really big decoy. And the reason why we call it a Giant now is because we made a honker. The original goose was a lesser, like a tav lesser. And then the next one that I made was a honker, but it was a really large honker with a pretty smooth texture. And then I decided to make, or we, you know, between me and the people I work with and our customers, kind of listening to what people wanted and stuff like that, what we wanted for our own hunting. Then I made a more life-sized honker with a pretty heavy texture. That was for, you know, just in case you get in a situation where there’s rain and sun and stuff. A heavy texture is really good for that. Then we went through and retextured the lesser with that heavy texture. But amazingly, the Giant is still one of the most popular decoys, especially in the Midwest. People just absolutely love that decoy. At one point when we were done with the honker, my business partner Brad Cochran, he was like, I think we should discontinue the Giant because nobody’s going to want it. And I was like, well, let’s hang on and see. And then it’s like, my gosh, you go to Minnesota Game Fair or something like that, and it’s like everybody just wants Giants. Giants, Giants. It makes a big presence. You can just put out a few of them, and they look really good. They’re not great in rain with sun, but that doesn’t happen that often. And then we also make a cackler. A cackler was a decoy that I really wasn’t bent on making. And most of the reason is, with most of the goose species, they are more likely to trust the next size up. And so there isn’t really a next size below a cackler. And cacklers love to land with any bird bigger than them. The lessers love to land with honkers.
Ramsey Russell: The cackler, you mean true minimas?
Dave Smith: Yeah, true minimas.
Ramsey Russell: Right.
Dave Smith: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Historian: “The old carvers didn’t just carve wood—they carved legacy. Every decoy is a silent witness to a way of life that’s fading, but never forgotten.”

Dave Smith: And we had lots of those here, but they were decoying so good to our lessers, our tav decoy. Like, they love to land with those. When they would see 30 tavs in a field or 30 tav decoys, I mean, they would just be like, all right, well, this is it. This is this place. We know it’s safe, and we know that we can outcompete these slowed-down tavs, you know, when it comes to feeding. We can hopscotch over them and mow through this. Like, whatever goes through their head. They love to land with them. Just like Aleutians. Aleutians in California and southern Oregon, those things love to land with honkers. And they drive them crazy. The honkers hate them and it pushes all the honkers back into golf courses and all that stuff or whatever. But you put out honkers. So I didn’t see a huge need to do cacklers. But we had one of our employees. He had a friend who kept coming into the shop. He kept taking him back there into the inner workings of all that stuff. Come to find out he was fixing to make a decoy. And he was one of the people that wanted a cackler really bad. It wasn’t our employee, but sort of a friend of his and some friends. They ended up making a cackler decoy. And they paid close attention to how we were doing it. We had learned a lot about how to make decoys, and we’d made a lot of expensive mistakes. So there was a lot to learn from us and to give somebody really an advantage and stuff. So that was pretty disappointing. This is another thing. I don’t know if I’m really proud of this or not, but I guess I’m just an evil person. But I remember Brad saying, like, well, we better make a cackler decoy right away then. And I said, no, let’s wait. Let’s wait like six months or a year until they’ve invested way, way, way more into their decoy. And that’s what we did. And their sculpture and pain job luckily left some room for improvement. So I focused really hard to try to make a really accurate cackler and a really accurate paint job. And it just demolished theirs, and they were gone.
Ramsey Russell: You know what gets me, Dave, Even those Arctic goose hunters. There are guys that love to shoot them. I mean, at a glance, you know, all 11 subspecies of black-neck, white-chinstrap Canadas all kind of look alike. Except for size, they all look alike. I mean, you know, but they don’t. They don’t. I mean, you know, they see something way differently among themselves that we cannot or do not see. But you saw it. Not just the size, but the poses, the mannerisms, and the very fine detail that goes into a bigger or smaller Canada goose. Not only the size but the actual detail of the pose and the painting and the tone and the hue that goes into that. And I mean, countless of the stories. I know outfitters, plural, up in Canada and around the United States that run Dave Smith decoys. And we’ll put six or seven little cacklers right there in the hole where they want. They’ve got big middles and littles working the spread, but they’ll put that little species right in the pocket, and that’s exactly where that species is going to hit. They’re not going to just work the whole spread of white-chinstrap decoys. They’re going to fall right on that species of decoy right in front of the clients. And you saw that. What did you see? Was it just from all those days sitting daylight to dark watching these geese? And, I mean, how did you match the color so perfectly?
Dave Smith: Well, yeah, so I noticed some things. Well, first of all, like, I remember a lot of times, I’d be sitting there, and all of a sudden, I’d see a big bird on the tree line flying towards me. Now, a lot of times when I was hunting, I would use a very small spread of decoys, and I would try to get flocks to land. And so then I was using live decoys. And so if I wanted to shoot a neck collar. And again, maybe it’s not every neck collar that I shot was doing a great service. I shot some yellow neck-collar cacklers and all that stuff. And ones where they probably really don’t appreciate you targeting them or whatever. But it’s like I found ways to add additional challenges and stuff like that. So a lot of times I remember sitting there, and I’d have a bunch of live geese in my decoys. And all of a sudden, I’d see a bird coming over, and I’d be like, “Oh, well, that’s a bald eagle.” I could see it from a long way away, and all the birds’ heads go up. And I’m just like, “Okay, it’s a bald eagle, and it’s approaching.” And the next thing you know, all their heads go down, and the bird gets closer and closer and closer. I’m like, “Oh, crap, I can’t believe it. That’s a heron.” You know, that’s a blue heron or a hawk or something like that. Or it would be a bald eagle, and it’d be so far away that I couldn’t see what it was. It just looked like a big bird. And all their heads would go up, and the next thing I know, they’re taking off. And it made me realize that in this world that these geese live in, where they don’t have all these other distractions that we have, like, noticing those little subtle differences. And I know it sounds ridiculous to say that a bald eagle looks like a heron, but, you know, from a good distance away, there is some crossover that’s kind of hard to tell for us and for me, but not for the geese.
Ramsey Russell: Right.
Dave Smith: So they are really, really good at discerning these tiny little subtle differences. And there’s a lot of different ways that they’ve displayed that. And then I do agree they’re a simple critter and stuff like that. Yeah. And I’ve killed lots of geese with the crappiest decoys you’ve ever seen in your life. But all I knew is that I had the ability to make an ultra-realistic decoy. It was more enjoyable for me. I was going to enjoy my time out in the field, and I wouldn’t have to worry about the decoys. Like, I could focus on my hide or my calling because the decoys were taken care of. Like, I knew that wasn’t going to be, if there was some problem, it wasn’t going to be the decoys. But all I knew is that the more realistic the decoy was, the more success I had. They would cooperate better, finish closer, act more excited, and they would be more vocal. And there were just all these subtle differences that I was seeing in these birds that told me I was on the right track.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Dave Smith: And then that got confirmed by 25 years of people buying them, despite them being expensive. And I hate that they’re expensive. I guess the only upside of them being expensive is that fewer people have them, so not everybody has them. But it would be nice if they could be less expensive. But the materials are insanely expensive.
Ramsey Russell: The time, I think, aren’t all of your decoys pretty much hand-painted and hand-touched. I mean, it’s like out on the West Coast, I believe is where craft beer originated. You know, we’ve got all these mass-produced brands that I love to drink, but then came the craft beer movement. And now craft vodka, craft small-scale microbreweries, you know, for bourbon and whiskey and all this good stuff. I guess it’s not surprising that a craft decoy originated out where you are. And also, I’ll say this, Oregon, more than anywhere else I’m aware of, I would say Oregon is unbelievably blessed with a diversity of Canada goose subspecies. It’s really unbelievable just what all you all have. It may have started with just the dusky, but now it’s not last year when I was out there, I had to take that test. I don’t know how I would have passed it had I not just been a nerd that really paid attention to these birds and subspecies and stuff. It was a test that you had to know all these different little birds about. Dave Smith, the Canada goose hunter in Oregon. Run through a lot of the species and stuff like that. What are the primary species you all are targeting? I know that duskies are off now. What are the other primary species you all are targeting, and what goes into targeting or hunting those different subspecies? Or do you just avoid some altogether?
Dave Smith: Yeah. So some of that’s changed and evolved over the years, for sure. And some of them that were here in numbers before maybe aren’t so much, and vice versa and stuff like that. But our littlest goose that’s really all over the valley, the Willamette Valley is the cackler, the B.C. minima. That is the smallest subspecies. It’s about the same size probably as a Hutchie, a Richardson, but it’s much darker with a shorter bill. And probably, if you weighed 100 Hutchies and you weighed 100 cacklers, the cacklers would weigh less and definitely measure out shorter in all the measurements. But it’s pretty close. And you can definitely call a Hutchie a cackler for sure. Like all over the Midwest, or anywhere, people can call those. There are no rules for common names. You could call it, whatever you want. But ours are a cackling goose. It’s technically the real cackler, I guess. And then, we have a few Taverners. We don’t have many. We used to have a lot, but it’s like you don’t see that many anymore. And then our lessers, we used to have a lot of what we called Anchorage lesser. lessers are notorious for being a whole bunch of isolated breeding groups in specific areas. And when that happens, they all start looking alike. So a lesser in one area could look a lot different from a lesser in another area and stuff like that. It makes a nightmare for people trying to classify these. That’s why some people think there should be 23 subspecies.
Ramsey Russell: Somebody proposed over 200 one time.
Dave Smith: Yeah, I get it. And what they’re identifying as an isolated breeding group, especially of lesser is a separate subspecies. But those Anchorage lesser are the ones that we had the most of. But management really tried to pare that flock down because they were all over the airport, and they’re in Wasilla, and they actually got sucked into the jet engine of a plane. The jet went down, and it killed like 17 people. So those are lower in numbers now. And those were really fun to hunt because they had blue neck collars and a lot of tarsus bands and everything like that. And then we have our dusky Canada goose, and that’s kind of like our native classic goose here. And then there’s a few Vancouver Canadas, and you can drive around all day and you’d never see one, but you may have seen one because you’ve got to look really, really carefully. They’re a little bigger than a dusky and have a little longer Coleman length. So if you saw one, you would just go, well, that’s a husky or a dusky. But if you look closer, it could be there. You can find small groups of Vancouver Canadas. And then, of course, we don’t shoot them because you wouldn’t know in flight. And then, our big western Canada goose. And then we get Aleutians just here and there. But if you go a little further south, Southern Oregon and into California, there are some massive mobs of Aleutians. And even right now on our coast, we have a big bunch of Aleutians, right here in northwest Oregon and stuff. But that’s just a super short layover. But Aleutians are kind of different. They’re not real bright. They’re kind of like the sardines of the ocean, you know? They’re just a big flock mentality, and they’ll come and land right beside your blind. But they’re really cool. They’ve got little blue neck collars on them. They’re really short.
Ramsey Russell: I found the Aleutians with the White brothers down in California. And they play an elevated game of goose hunting for both snows and anything they hunt. They are serious couple of guys, man. I enjoyed hunting with, yeah.
Dave Smith: Yeah, I love those guys. I mean, I don’t know if they would agree with this, but I hope I’m not, you know, bragging or taking anything away from them, but I kind of feel like I think like those guys, or we think alike, or Brad and I think like them. And I hope they would allow me to say that. But yeah, they’re kind of doing everything just exactly the way I would do if I lived there and the way I did when we had sort of the heyday, I guess you’d say here.
Ramsey Russell: I had goose-hunted quite a bit with folks until I tele hunted with them boys. And I walked away and called it the White way of goose hunting. You know, like, I called them up, and they, I was on my way down with my buddy John Wills. We were going to hunt with them, and lots of snow geese, lots of Aleutians, I mean, lots. And I said something, and he said, “No, no, we won’t shoot a limit.” I said, “What do you mean?” He goes, “No, you’ll see. You’ll see.” And what he explained was, you know, there were a lot of snow geese, but it’s the only snow geese they’re going to get. So the more they’re harassed, the more wary and harder they become to hunt. So what they do is, gosh, it was something else to have 2,500 or 3,000 snow geese land in our laps and then not a shot fired. And walk clear across the field until a flock of six or seven or five or four kind of wavered in. And that’s how they throttle back. They don’t educate. And the same with the Richardsons. I say Richardsons, when the dadgummit, the white neck-collared Canada geese were working in the big flock, they just stood down. They would not shoot into them. Would not. I mean, we could have been out there and limited in 10 minutes, and we did not. We sat out there till noon and had one of the most amazing goose hunts I’ve ever been a part of, playing it their way. You know, you got to see a lot of birds, you got to be under a lot of birds, you got to be close to a lot of birds, and we shot certain birds. And it really, it really elevated it. The Aleutian is what I’m thinking of. It really elevated it to a whole other level and a mindset of goose hunters that I’d never been around before, you know?
Dave Smith: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Yep.
Dave Smith: Yeah. They’re probably looking for a blue phase Ross, I would guess.
Ramsey Russell: We did kill a blue phase. No, that day John Will killed his first one. Yeah, by being patient. Yeah.
Dave Smith: Yeah. That mentality, it’s a little bit controversial. You know, my gosh, to be honest with you, that’s been 90% of my goose hunting, just doing that. I just really enjoyed getting a big grind going and watching for a neck collar or maybe some kind of anomaly, some kind of different, you know, leucistic bird. Whatever it is, I really enjoyed that part of it. I don’t know how to describe it.
Ramsey Russell: You talk about the controversy, and it was said to me by a biologist one time, indicating controversy over that higher level of hunting. The biologist perceived it as going out, and I’m just throwing this out there, Dave, his take on it from his perspective was going out and perverting the data by targeting bands. Having hunted at that level now, I said, no, I disagree. He said, well, how can it be? I said, they’re not out there targeting bands. It just happens. When you’re standing down and waiting and letting situations arise so that you’re not putting undue pressure on these birds, it just happens. It’s a whole other level of hunting that I wouldn’t translate as band hunting. It’s just a totally different higher-level approach to goose hunting, you know, and bands are just a perk of it. That’s how I thought of it Dave.
Dave Smith: Yeah. I was lucky in that most of my collar hunting, the majority of it, was on those white and that colored whiskeys where it’s like, not only was it okay, I mean, they were actually happy about it because nobody was making any progress on those flocks, and none of the locals wanted to even bother. Why would you go out there, you know, haul a boat out and have to drag it across the tide flat for hundreds of yards and stuff? So I was lucky in that respect. But also, I mean, hunting closer to home, I’d get big grinds of cacklers going. And to be completely honest with you, I mean, I had plenty of days where I got several big grinds of cacklers going and I didn’t fire a shot. I was just looking at groups of three or four or five birds at a time, looking for a neck collar. And everybody thinks that you’re going to see this bright neck collar on this little tiny cackler and stuff. And it really doesn’t look like, you don’t see the color at all. It looks like a little tiny kink in the neck. And almost every time when you sit up and shoot, you kind of ask yourself, what the hell was I shooting at? What did I just see? I don’t remember anything different about that bird, but for some reason I shot. And then you walk out there and pick it up, and holy crap, it’s got a neck collar. I really enjoyed that. And that part is a little bit controversial. I know people that have done it far more than me on those birds or whatever. But, you know, we’ve kind of joked around and said, if you want to keep something nice, don’t put it on the neck of a goose.
Ramsey Russell: Having been around serious hunters like yourselves and others, I believe, even if they put black collars and black leg bands on some of these birds, I believe that just the patience and the time you’re spending under those birds would probably turn up more than the average guy, just on random effect. That’s what I truly believe.
Dave Smith: Yeah. And you know what’s kind of funny about the black neck collars is they show up exactly the same as white. And it’s because, in flight they look like they’re missing a section of their neck or that there’s a kink in their neck or some offset. We’ve shot plenty of all-black neck collars, and they do the same on snows with white collars and stuff like that. The black neck collars that I shot were on whiskeys. They’re a black neck collar because it indicates that it has a radio transmitter and also a Tarsus band, but it was still on a whiskey. I think they sort of didn’t want you to necessarily target those because of the expense of having that radio transmitter. They didn’t want to lose it. But I shot a fair number of them, and I quickly gave every one of them back to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. One thing that’s a little bit sad is, I gave a bunch of radio transmitter collars to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife for them to reuse. Then the main biologist retired, and I’m still in touch with them to this day. He was like, yeah, they’re still sitting in a bag at the office. We’ve never reused them, you know, and I’m like, well, I’d love to get those back if possible, but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. But yeah, it’s not the color that you see. It’s what it does to the feathers of the neck. And that’s just the part of goose hunting that really turned me on. I just really loved it.
Ramsey Russell: For a detailed guy like yourself, you’re gonna see that. For a guy that spends as much time under geese and has seen the nuanced detail among these geese, a guy like yourself is going to see it immediately.
Dave Smith: Yeah, I kind of gravitated to it for sure. And you have to hunt with like-minded people, and it can’t be more than one person. So most of the hunts that I did like that were by myself. And if they were, it was with Brad Cochran. There was a short list of people who could handle that. And you definitely couldn’t bring a dog. That’s for danger. If you’re going to be landing geese all day long, this is not fair to do to a dog. But if it’s with one other person, it’s like, well, that person on the left is going to scan that half of the flock, and I’m going to scan this half of the flock. And you kind of celebrate it when somebody sits up and shoots and you see what they shot, or maybe you get one yourself. Or maybe nobody shoots. What was funny is I was shooting a lot of collars, and I would have people, they send me a text and say, gosh, I sure wish I could get a collar. I want a collar in the worst way. But then they’d send me a text saying they were done by 8:35.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Dave Smith: And I was like, you know, I sat out there all day long and I didn’t fire a shot.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Dave Smith: And you have to be willing to do that. You have to be willing.
Ramsey Russell: Change the subject. What took you so long to make a mallard decoy? I’m sitting here looking over your shoulder, and I see a beautiful Dave Smith mallard decoy. I saw him hit the internet. It’s a beautiful decoy. Why, after all these years, are you just now making a mallard decoy?

Ramsey Russell: “A great decoy isn’t just carved—it’s born from a hunter’s patience and a carver’s obsession. Every chip tells a story of the marsh, the duck, and the hands that shaped it.”

Dave Smith: Yeah, it’s been a long time. When I started making decoys, there was a good friend of mine, Don Guthrie, who was making mallards at the same time. It was Columbia River Decoys, and they were beautiful decoys, and I loved them. It’s really all I hunted over, and I couldn’t. You know, my sweet wife would buy me like six of them for Christmas every Christmas. A lot of times, Don wouldn’t even take money from her, which was great because we didn’t have a lot of money and stuff like that. And so I wanted to make a mallard. I wanted to just make my own mallard and try to make one that would fill a little bit of a different niche than Columbia River Decoys. But I didn’t want to compete with Don, and he had a good thing going. That was fine. Then eventually, Don kind of got bored. He’s a guy that can do a lot of different things, and he moved on from that. Then our friend Mario Friendi kind of took over. So I let several years go by, and finally, I wasn’t seeing any Columbia River Decoys going out the door. They were kind of hard to get. So I finally talked to Mario, and I said, “Mario, we’re getting so many requests for us to make a mallard. How would you feel about me making a mallard?” He said, “I wouldn’t be thrilled about it.” I don’t know exactly how he put it, but he’s a nice enough guy and a good enough friend, where he would have been okay with it. But he made it clear that it wouldn’t have been great. So I was like, “Okay, end of story.” That was that. So I let another decade go by. In that decade, it was kind of the same thing. I didn’t pay too close attention, but Mario was heading up Final Approach, and he’s been really busy with that. They make a bunch of really nice decoys, getting a lot of them carved by some just fabulous, world-champion carvers like Tom Christie and Pat Godden. I kind of felt like Mario would probably be okay, or I just felt like maybe I had waited long enough. I mean, I waited 25 years, you know, and I figured, Okay, that’s long enough. I had been working on sculptures and prototypes, playing around with painting, flocking, and customizing my own decoys. In all that time, I even got to the point where, since our goose hunting has gotten not as fun as it used to be because of no more check stations and all that stuff, I kind of made the comment a few years back that “ducks are the new geese.” I’ve always loved duck hunting and stuff, but I was realizing that I was doing much more duck hunting than goose hunting. I was figuring out some things about ducks where there was room for experimenting, trying different things, and maybe breaking some of the molds of these traditions. There are rules about what you should do or shouldn’t do, and that makes it exciting. I just made the first duck sculpture, and I felt a lot of pressure because there are already some really, really good duck decoy carvers out there. When it comes to goose decoys and turkey decoys or deer decoys, it’s not like there’s a whole lot of those species in carving contests. Everything is ducks. All these world-champion carvers are really, really good at ducks, but they maybe have done a goose here and there. To be honest, a lot of their goose sculptures or carvings have duck attributes to them. But their ducks had a lot of duck attributes. They’re really, really good. I mean, guys like Pat Godden, there’s a reason he’s got the G-O-D in his last name. I don’t want to be blasphemous about that, but that guy is so good. It’s just unbelievable and stuff. So here I am, a guy who’s never done a duck sculpture in my life. When I went to do a turkey sculpture, it was okay. Even if I made a little mistake or fudged something, it’s not like there are a bunch of turkey carvers out there. Not that I did fudge it, but if I wanted to, I probably could a little bit. It’d probably still be okay and wouldn’t get scrutinized. But I knew that a duck would get scrutinized like crazy. So I felt a lot of pressure. I do everything as a clay sculpture. I don’t do wood carvings, and that’s sort of my secret to being able to keep things soft, sexy, and life like and all that stuff.
Ramsey Russell: Does it make it more realistic that way, you believe?
Dave Smith: To me, I think it does. But if you look at guys like Pat Godden, he’s done so many carvings that even though all he can do is subtract material, he can think it through so well. He’s got a great aesthetic eye. Just a few others, I think, can really make a super awesome-looking decoy that’s super effective and everything like that. I wouldn’t be able to do that. If you told me I could only remove material, it would take a giant stroke of luck for me to get it right. I know from my sculptures that there are a hundred times every sculpture where I’ll go. You know what? I removed too much material, and I think it looked better the way I had it a minute ago.” Well, I can just grab some clay and stick it back on. You couldn’t do that in a wood carving. So I have a ton of admiration for those guys. But, like I say, I felt a lot of pressure because I wanted to get the poses right. And also there wasn’t a ton of room for the poses, to make something really different or stand out.
Ramsey Russell: Dave, I’m asking this question, and we’re wrapping up. I’m sitting in a Comfort Inn out in Maryland. They’re fixing to kick the door in if I don’t get out of this room. But I do have a few more questions.
Dave Smith: Okay.
Ramsey Russell: Related to other decoy makers or decoy types that are available out there. What do Dave Smith decoys say about you as a hunter and a human being?
Dave Smith: I don’t know. That’s a tough one. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer that. I don’t know. I think I’m always digging for more. I hate the idea when someone says, this decoy is all you need, or all you need is this to get them in range or if they’re close enough to see those details, it’s time to be shooting. I just call bullshit.
Ramsey Russell: You never settle, do you?
Dave Smith: Never settle, never settle. And I think there’s a little bit of a tradition of that here in Oregon and in the Northwest and stuff like that. It’s kind of, you know, this is where lay-down blinds. You know, Ron Latcha invented the lay-down blind, and Perry North House invented flocking. There’s just a lot of things here in the Northwest. I think it’s a little bit of a contagious attitude. There are a lot of great things invented all over the United States and all over the world, and a lot of stuff that we benefit from like crazy. But yeah, I mean, just never settle for sure. Just keep pushing, keep pushing, and keep pushing.
Ramsey Russell: Thank you very much, Dave. I’ve greatly enjoyed this conversation. It’s glad to finally, quote, meet you. I do hope to get out, and next time I’m in Oregon, and I plan on being there next year, I hope to at least come by your shop and say hello and drink a cup of coffee. Or, if not, come into a duck blind. You know, I’m one of them nuts that are chasing the subs, and I need two subspecies on earth. One is a Dusky Canada, and one’s a Vancouver. And I don’t think I’d know either one of them really if they came and knocked on the door. But I’m after those birds. I know I’m going to have to probably get up north of the border to get after them good. North of the 48 border to get after those birds good. But nonetheless, I have enjoyed hearing, and I knew there was a story. I knew there was a story behind such an elevated level of decoy that really reflected an elevated level of passion for geese and goose hunting. And I greatly appreciate you coming on board today and telling your story.
Dave Smith: Well, thanks for having me, Ramsey. I really appreciate it.
Ramsey Russell: Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. You all have been listening to my friend Dave Smith. Check out Dave Smith Decoys if you’ve lived under a rock and don’t know what they are. And I guess to start the New Year off, we should all never settle for less than our own best. See you next time.