EP 546. A Lifetime Hunting Virginia’s Eastern Shore

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today we’re going to go way out on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Joining me today is Mr. Arthur Leonard. Arthur, how the heck are you? Long time no see.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, long time’s right. It’s a beautiful day here on the shore. Actually, the name Chincoteague goes back to the Native Americans, which means “beautiful land across the water.”

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Arthur Leonard: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It really is a beautiful land. You know, I was telling somebody the other day, one of the most indelible memories, and there were many. We crammed a lot, Art. We crammed a lot of stuff in just a very short 48-hour period. But there was one morning we had walked in, it was cloudy, but there were clouds up against the sun. Then the sun, the clouds got behind. It was in that golden hour, and to look out and see all of that marsh grass, Spartina, I think they called it, just lit up like a gold brick. It was unbelievable.

Arthur Leonard: That’s my view every morning, Ramsay. I get to see the sunrise over the ocean every day. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Ramsey Russell: I think of the Eastern Shore as kind of being offset from mainland Virginia, but Chincoteague is offset unto itself.

Arthur Leonard: We are. We’re the largest inhabited island in the state of Argentina. And it’s strange, we’ve only got 3,200 year-round residents, but we are the largest inhabited island. We are also the top tax income base for our county that we live in. So Chincoteague has a lot going on.

Ramsey Russell: That got a lot to do with tourism and stuff like that.

Arthur Leonard: It does. Tourism is not a new thing around here. I mean, it’s been going on since the early 1960s. Even before then, we used to have limited tourism. We had more hunters and fishermen than we did tourists back before the 1960s. Yeah, we used to be a mecca for hunters and fishermen. They would travel throughout the East Coast to come down here. We were well known for our big game. So it’s amazing what time will do to you.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, well, talk about it. Were you born and raised on Chincoteague?

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, I was born on the same farm I live on today, back in the 1960s.

Ramsey Russell: At the end of the road, son. I found that out.

Arthur Leonard: At the very end of the road. Yeah. I mean, I went away to school and came back home and was fortunate enough to have enough property up here to build my house. And this is where they’ll bury me, right here on the farm. I don’t plan to go anywhere else. I mean, I’ve been to a lot of places in the world, but nothing like home.

Ramsey Russell: How big is Chincoteague Island? It’s not very big.

Arthur Leonard: We’re seven miles long and about a mile and a half wide. The funny thing is, back in colonial times, we were a barrier island. If you know what barrier islands are, we were exposed to the Atlantic Ocean. We had direct ocean waves roll up on our shores. And then, the island to our east is an island that grows due to a geological feature called the longshore current, which brings sand and silt from as far away as Long Island, New York. It picks up the sand along the route and then deposits it on the southern end of Assateague Island. So now we’re protected somewhat from the storms. But back in the colonial days, we were just buried, we were right on the barrier of the ocean.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. That’s a lot of changes, isn’t it?

Arthur Leonard: Yes, it is. And my family has been here since those early days.

Ramsey Russell: How early?

Arthur Leonard: We weren’t the first settlers to the island, but we were the help that came afterward. The settlement of the island goes back pre-colonial times. I mean, the first settlers came in 1650.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Arthur Leonard: Which is not long after Jamestown. And they liked settling on Chincoteague because they were cattle farmers. And you didn’t have to have a fence on the island to graze your cattle. That way, you didn’t have to pay taxes to the Crown. So they were getting around the taxman even back then.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Arthur Leonard: My family was the help that came over afterward. The first settlers came in 1650, and my family came over in 1670. So we’ve been here for quite a while. We actually have written history that goes back to a magazine called Scribner’s, and it was pre-Civil War. And I want to say he was my great-great-great-grandfather. He was a feature of the article, and he was a cattle farmer. Raised horses and ponies, and, of course, cattle. But he lived on this same farm that we’re living on now, even back then.

Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy. What was it like for you growing up on Chincoteague?

Arthur Leonard: A popular TV show back in the 1960s was Lassie.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I remember that.

Arthur Leonard: My early years were just like Lassie. You know, I had a trusty Chesapeake Bay retriever, and that dog and I would go everywhere. It was a wide-open exploration of this salt marsh, and it was a phenomenal childhood. I stayed here till I was maybe 8 or 9, and then my father built the motel, the Refuge Inn, in the early 1970s, and we moved over there. But growing up on the farm is the way for a kid to be raised. I mean, it was wide open. The only thing you had to worry about was the dinner bell.

Ramsey Russell: What was that Chesapeake Bay retriever’s name?

Arthur Leonard: Pepper.

Ramsey Russell: Pepper. Was he a duck dog or just a dog?

Arthur Leonard: He was actually, in today’s terms, a rescue. The wildlife refuge manager had him, and something happened, and the refuge manager didn’t want the dog anymore. So my dad took him, and we had him for the rest of his life.

Ramsey Russell: Was he smart like Lassie? Did he bail you out of some jams as a little boy? Lassie was always rescuing that kid he was with.

Arthur Leonard: No, she never went and got Mom or Dad when I was stuck in the mud. But she stood by me. She wouldn’t leave me. She was a heck of a dog.

Ramsey Russell: You didn’t get stuck in the mud much, did you? Ain’t no mud on Chincoteague.

Arthur Leonard: Every day I got stuck in the mud. That taught me how to walk through it.

Ramsey Russell: I’m gonna tell you what I learned a lot in a little bit of time. We were getting off with our headlamps on. We parked the boats, got out, loaded the sled. We were gonna walk about a half mile through all that sandy Spartina.

Arthur Leonard: Watch out for the holes.

Ramsey Russell: Well, that’s what somebody said, “Don’t step in any puddles.” And I’m thinking, well, I got these waders on. I stepped into a puddle accidentally, and I was looking left and stepped right, went up clear to my thighs. I mean, those little puddles, big as a square foot, just big as a pizza, could be up to your waist. I couldn’t believe that. I learned a lot, like, don’t step in puddles.

Arthur Leonard: Watch where you’re walking.

Ramsey Russell: It may look like you can see the bottom, but that ain’t the bottom. The bottom may be China.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Has it always been that way?

Arthur Leonard: As long as I’ve been around it.

Ramsey Russell: When did you get your first boat? Like, I’m just wondering, a little boy growing up on that island out there, I mean, because you all got boats galore. There’s boats everywhere. Everywhere you look, there are boats of all shapes, forms, and sizes. Like I remember being a little boy in Mississippi, just grabbing my pellet rifle and disappearing for a day? But I didn’t have all that in my backyard. Did you just go jump into a skiff and take off?

Arthur Leonard: Well, I didn’t just jump into a skiff. I had a few lessons first. You had like an 8-horsepower Sea King on the back of a 14-foot boat, and you had to learn how to untie the lines, start the motor, tie it back up. And that was one of the things that I had trouble with, tying it back up. But it didn’t take long for me to learn the knots. So I would say I was probably 8 or 9 when Dad finally turned me loose, and I could go on my own. And I was going up and down the bay when I was 10. I knew it like the back of my hand. And back in those days, there were no cell phones, no nothing. If you broke down, you were on your own. You had a pole, and you had to push your way home.

Ramsey Russell: People were cut from a different fabric back then.

Arthur Leonard: But yeah, you learned how to do things. It was, you know, the school of hard knocks. You either learned it or suffered the consequences.

Ramsey Russell: How did you get into duck hunting? I know you’re a big duck hunter now.

Arthur Leonard: Oh, yeah, I’m addicted to duck hunting. I guess it started with my father. He was somewhat of a duck hunter. He would bring birds home and lay them out on the garage floor, and I would pick them up and look at the feathers. Back in those days, he was still hunting over wooden decoys. So I would go down to the dock, follow him, and dig through the piles of wooden decoys. The shapes and colors of them fascinated me.

Ramsey Russell: Did he carve decoys himself?

Arthur Leonard: No. He was actually a damage control man who worked over at NASA, and he never had an artistic or craftsman bone in his body. He was big into horses while growing up. If they lost him, all you had to do was find a herd of ponies, and that’s where my dad would be.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Arthur Leonard: Yeah. But he was never interested in the decoys. They were just a tool that he used for hunting.

Ramsey Russell: What kind of ducks was he bringing in back then?

Arthur Leonard: A lot of black ducks, bluebills or scaup. You’d get a smattering of other puddle ducks, pintails, widgeon. Actually, here we call them bald crown.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Arthur Leonard: So we get gadwall, bald crown, just a smattering of the puddle ducks. And then, of course, we had the divers. Our main bird, which most of the locals don’t shoot anymore, is buffleheads.

Ramsey Russell: Oh my gosh.

Arthur Leonard: A plethora of buffleheads.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve never seen so many buffleheads in my life as what you all have out there on that water.

Arthur Leonard: I go to some of these shows, and people say how much of a trophy buffleheads are, and I’m like, holy cow, they’ve never been to the island because we got so many of them.

Ramsey Russell: Well, you know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure ever what you used to. We were out there trying to check the bucket list so I could say I have shot birds in Virginia, and we could have gone out on any given day and shot buffleheads, it looked like. I mean, they were all out there. I’ve never seen anything like it. But I wanted one of those black ducks.

Arthur Leonard: And you got one.

Ramsey Russell: I did. You know, I got to wondering. We were hunting mid-November, and there had not been a lot of weather up north. Are those birds, are they like photo-period migrators, or do you all have a breeding population, do you feel like?

Arthur Leonard: It’s funny. The black ducks, there are two separate subspecies. We have the local black ducks whose feet are a pale orange, and they’re a smaller size.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Arthur Leonard: Then, as the weather gets colder, we call them Jersey red legs.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

“Market hunters used to hollow decoys to hide extra birds. Tom Reed was the most inventive.”

Arthur Leonard: Their plumage is much darker, much more darker, and their feet are bright red. Their body size is larger. It’s amazing.

Ramsey Russell: Those local birds never leave. You think they’re year-round residents right there in coastal Virginia?

Arthur Leonard: They nest right here in the marshes, and it’s not very many of them, but it’s enough that you can shoot black ducks in the early season. Actually, during teal season when black ducks are closed, you’ll have black ducks come to your decoys too. So yeah, they’re year-round residents.

Ramsey Russell: Did your granddad hunt too, or just your dad? Do you remember your granddaddy?

Arthur Leonard: Unfortunately, he died long before I had any interactions with him. He died in the 1940s as a young man. Now, I do know that my dad’s uncles hunted, so I’m gonna think that my grandfather probably hunted too. They used to hunt from a houseboat. They would take this houseboat out in the bay and stay for a week or two in the houseboat. They had a little skiff that they would pull behind them, and they would use that houseboat as a home base. And I’ve heard many stories about them going up in the bay and watching clouds of redheads fly by them. So I know there was a lot of hunting going on back then too.

Ramsey Russell: You were a little boy, and you’d watch your daddy come in with all that and go through all his decoys and look at all his ducks. A lot of black ducks and stuff like that. When did you actually start hunting?

Arthur Leonard: We were on the farm. He had a special little pond, and in that pond was primarily a dusk spot. You didn’t go there until almost the sun was down. This was back in the days when outlawing was still not as frowned upon as it is these days. So I would get off school, and then we would go after school to this little pond. I want to say, I was maybe six or seven when he took me and gave me a little .410. I would do the standard thing, wait for them to pitch and then shoot them when they were sitting still, that kind of stuff. But he didn’t take me out in the boat until a year or two later because it’s a little bit different atmosphere. You’re out in the wet and the cold and all that kind of stuff. So I want to say I was probably eight when I got to go out in the marshes and do all that kind of stuff.

Ramsey Russell: What was that like, Art?

Arthur Leonard: Oh, it was phenomenal.

Ramsey Russell: You all would go out of that same boat ramp? We were going out of the same boat house?

Arthur Leonard: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That’s been the only boat ramp I’ve ever known. And the funny thing is, Ramsey, back in those days, I don’t know why, but the migration was different. We had rafts and rafts of bluebills back then, and one morning in particular, I was 10 years old. I can remember this like yesterday. We were staying at one of the clubhouses up the bay that my dad belonged to. It was cold and rough, and, you know, the older men were like, “Nah, we don’t want to go today. We’re just going to sit here by the fire.” And a friend of my father said, “Come on, I’ll take you.” It was one of those banner days. This was back in the 1970s, so it was a point system, and pintails and bluebills were 10-point ducks. You could shoot 10. If you wanted to, you could shoot 10 pintails. We shot bluebills like it was the olden days. When I first got there, I was excited to shoot anything. So the first bird that flew in was a bufflehead. That was 25 points. And my dad’s friend said, “Don’t shoot any more of them. They’re too much.” So the rest of the morning, we shot bluebills. It was amazing. You know how bluebills, when they come in and set. This old guy had learned that the birds on the water would sit still, and he would take his gun barrel and kind of shake it, and the birds that were flying would flare. Once we had the birds that flared, we’d shoot the birds on the water, and the birds that had flared would circle back around and come back into us again. Oh, it burned in my memory, and it also helped support this addiction that I have.

Ramsey Russell: Were you all hunting out of the same type of wooden blinds that I saw so many of over there? There’s a type of blind, and I mean, I’m gonna say every 200 yards down every shoreline, there’s a blind, but it’s a very certain type of blind design.

Arthur Leonard: This was a point blind that had four stakes to make your corners and then bushes that you hid behind. But you were still standing in the mud. There was no floor, and you were sitting on a bucket in the mud. The reason they did it that way was because of the storms. If you were to build a substantial structure, the storms that would come up would wash it away. So they built structures that they didn’t care about washing away or that the tide would wash through and not tear up. The blind laws in our two counties were written, I want to say, in the 1850s, and they do not pertain to any blinds in these two counties. The state laws don’t. So you’ll see blinds everywhere.

Ramsey Russell: So Virginia had a set of blind laws on public land.

Arthur Leonard: Correct.

Ramsey Russell: But for whatever reason, they don’t apply out in your neck of the woods on Chincoteague.

Arthur Leonard: And sometimes that’s a blessing, and sometimes it’s a curse.

Ramsey Russell: How so?

Arthur Leonard: Well, it’s public land, and with public land comes freedom.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Arthur Leonard: So you’re free to put one anywhere you want. Unfortunately, sometimes that puts you too close to another hunter. I used to say we had a gentleman’s agreement, if you put your blind too close to another gentleman, he would come down and burn it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Arthur Leonard: The gentleman’s agreement doesn’t hold today. It’s strange. We had a friend of mine the other year get written a ticket for impeding a hunt, and all he was doing was brushing his own duck blind that he had taken time to go build. A visitor had come in a grass boat and was hunting, I want to say, 50 yards or so from his blind. He was just out there working on it, but this guy called the state game warden, and because he was making noise and moving around, he was impeding this man’s hunt. So it’s a blessing and a curse.

Ramsey Russell: Like setting up a blind 50 yards away from where somebody’s working on a duck blind would make you liable or something?

Arthur Leonard: Yeah. We’ve had people tie up to our duck blinds in hunting boats, and there’s nothing you can do. It’s a blessing and a curse. The people that do that just don’t seem to understand that you’ve put all the time and money into building this blind. Just because it’s legal that you can do it, it doesn’t make it ethical.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Arthur Leonard: So you’ve got to bite your tongue a lot of times. We’ve had a lot of arguments between visitors and locals. They just don’t understand the way we work.

Ramsey Russell: But it’s a big bay. It seems like there’s plenty of room for a lot of people out there.

Arthur Leonard: It is, but it’s just like fishing. When you’re fishing, guaranteed somebody’s going to ride right up on you and try to fish your spot. It’s the same way with duck hunting programs. Their study, they don’t want to go scout it. They see a blind and think, “Well, somebody else has already built a blind here. There must be ducks. I’ll just go tie up to his spot.” It tests your fortitude.

Ramsey Russell: I heard that. Do you still remember your first-ever duck?

Arthur Leonard: I do. It was a black duck in that pond my dad used to take me to when I was little. The way the blind was set up, the birds sailed over your head and pitched in the pond, so they never really saw you, and you didn’t see them. You sat down, stayed quiet until you heard their wings over top of your head. When they pitched in the decoys, that’s when you shot them. It was strange, not like we hunt today, but it was great for a 7-year-old with a .410.

Ramsey Russell: Outside of your daddy, who were some of your other hunting influences? There had to have been a whole lot of characters around that part.

Arthur Leonard: There was a whole group of gentlemen.

Ramsey Russell: There still is. I met a bunch of you all.

Arthur Leonard: Oh yeah. Yeah, you met some good characters. But there was a whole group of men who were outdoorsmen. They were all veterans. They had that outdoorsy feel to them. They lived their life up the bay, clamming, oystering, hunting, fishing. You learned from them just by being with them, you would learn things. They were all willing to teach you whatever you wanted to learn. They didn’t mind taking you, and boy, they had a good time whenever they were together. It was a party. It was a phenomenal upbringing. I am very fortunate that my boys kind of had the same upbringing. This clubs that we had the dinner in the other night are grandfathered in. The National Park Service in the 1960s acquired that land. So you’re not allowed to build anything new in the park.

Ramsey Russell: Did they condemn that land to take it?

Arthur Leonard: Some of it. They didn’t really condemn it. They took it by eminent domain, so they paid the owners.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what I think about eminent domain. I call that condemning because you’re kind of voluntold that you’re selling your property. They’ve got to pay you, but they’re taking it whether it’s for sale or not. So I call that condemnation.

Arthur Leonard: The north is unique because we’re in two states. The Virginia portion of Assateague was bought by the federal government with duck stamp money in the early 1940s. In the middle of World War II, they used that duck stamp money because this was a critical wintering area for the greater snow geese. And back in the 1940s, snow geese were an endangered species. So they bought the Virginia portion of it in the 1940s. The Maryland portion of Assateague was actually already being developed. They had a road, and they had a lot of private landowners on the island. Then we had a very bad storm in March of 1962 that really damaged the Assateague portion of Maryland. The developers saw an opportunity to get money out of it, so they pursued the government to buy the remaining tracts of land. They took that opportunity to, like you say, voluntold the landowners, “Okay, we’re buying a lot of this island. We’re taking yours also.” The people that already had houses there were given a lease. They didn’t just throw them off. So if you had a house up there, you were given a 25-year lease, and then you had to abandon your house. So it was still being used. Back when I was coming up, there were still a lot of houses, and there were a lot of clubs, duck clubs up there that were for hire. They would take people out to their clubs for a week for pay. There’s one in Virginia that was called the Pope’s Island Club, and I think they had records back to the 1870s or 1880s.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, it was the high heel people would go to those. It was phenomenal.

Ramsey Russell: That club we ate dinner at is a house on stilts just out in the middle.

Arthur Leonard: Right.

Ramsey Russell: You say it got grandfathered. So it’s grandfathered forever?

Arthur Leonard: Grandfathered for as long as the original family owns it.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. But if they ever sell it, no grandfathering?

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, they can’t sell it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Arthur Leonard: And if a storm comes up and tears some of it up, you can rebuild it as long as it’s the original owners. And it’s got to be passed down through family.

Ramsey Russell: What an interesting camp that is. I mean, it’s just like a little house island. He told me that his grandparents had brought in that room where the kitchen is, and it was originally a chicken house, like a chicken coop.

Arthur Leonard: I don’t doubt it. They used to move a lot by boats up here.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And boy, did we eat. That was one of the best meals I’ve ever had anywhere, anytime.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah. That boy is simply amazing for what he can do.

Ramsey Russell: He really is. We’ll talk about that after a while. You were talking about the snow geese. I didn’t see any snow geese, but we had walked in that one morning, like I said, a half-mile through the Spartina to get to this pond. And there came the discussion that that pond and several others in the area were actually created by snow geese back in the day. How did that work?

Arthur Leonard: Well, snow geese by nature are grubbers.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Arthur Leonard: So they actually walk along, and they don’t just nibble off the plant. They will dig down in the earth and get the root. When you have flocks of snow geese, they will eat that marsh completely up and create these shallow depressions. Then they get filled up with rainwater, and of course, the plants don’t come back, so it remains a pond. I’ve been told that’s part of the problem with snow geese these days. They are doing the same thing to their nesting area up in the tundra. Where they used to nest around a watering hole, now they’re having to move further and further away because they’ve destroyed the nesting habitat. And the tundra grows back so slowly that it can’t recover. So the snow geese are eating themselves out of habitat.

Ramsey Russell: Do you all ever see snow geese or hunt them these days?

Arthur Leonard: Back in the early 1970s, when I was starting to hunt, snow geese were one step above a brickbat. Because they hadn’t been hunted, they had just started being hunted back in the 1970s. So they would fly out at first light right at the treetop level and just get wailed on. But then they learned. They would take off from the wildlife refuge and circle and circle and circle till you could barely see them. Then they would go over to the farm fields. I think the snow geese have followed the Canadians, they’ve learned that the agricultural fields are easier pickings than the salt marsh. So these days, they’ve changed their migration, and they’re actually short-stopping into Pennsylvania and Delaware, so they don’t come down. But it’ll be later in the year. We used to see flocks of thousands and thousands of them in the morning, you could nearly set your watch by them. At 7 o’clock, they would fly. But that’s changed.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. You’ve got a lot of point blinds and blinds you were showing me just right there in your backyard, practically speaking. I mean, walking distance or certainly within minutes of your boathouse. Talk about some of those blinds. I saw blinds everywhere and said something to somebody, and they were saying, well, you know, depends on the wind. It depends on the tide. It depends on the time of year.

Arthur Leonard: Yep, it sure does. So you got to have all your bases covered because you could have a blind, like where we were hunting combo that first day, that’s good until it gets cold, and then that pond freezes up.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Arthur Leonard: So you can’t hunt it when it gets cold. You’ve got to move out to the saltwater. And the wind is a big factor. If you don’t have a blind set up for the right wind, you’re not going to do any good. So you got to cover all your bases. You got to have multiple blinds in multiple spots so you can hunt the right wind. Out on the lake where you can build one blind and hunt it no matter what wind. A lot of changing conditions. The tides play a big part of it, especially for Brandt and whatnot. They are harvested when the tide is outgoing because you’re exposing their food source. So you got to have a spot that is accessible at high tide. Then the tide goes out, you do your hunting, tide starts coming back in, you leave. So there’s a lot to it.

Ramsey Russell: How many blinds do you all have? How many blinds do the average locals have to cover all those bases?

Arthur Leonard: Well, I’m not the average local. Most of them will have five or six different blinds. They’ll have a blind on a pond, then they’ll have a blind out on the water. You know, they’ll have a spot where they can go take their kids and shoot dippers. But personally, I’ve got probably 12 or 15 blinds that I can choose from, and that’s still not enough. We have one local guide that advertises he has a hundred blinds you can choose from. Again, it goes back to there being no state laws as far as how many you can build.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I just wonder how many you felt like you needed to cover all the bases.

Arthur Leonard: Right. You want to try to put them in different spots and different coves or over on the islands. You once try because you never know, I mean, there might be a spot that doesn’t have a blind that the birds love or a food source you haven’t discovered yet. You can put a new blind somewhere and have a phenomenal season.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of the types of hunting you do? Like, we did a walk-in, and you said you didn’t really do that anymore. You did boat blind hunting.

Arthur Leonard: That’s for those walk-in hunts are for young men. I’ve gotten to the stage where I like what I call my retirement hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Arthur Leonard: I like to drive up in a boat, step from the boat to the blind, and relax. I’ve gone through the stages of wanting to shoot every duck that was flying. When you’re young, that’s the way you are, you want to shoot the last duck going. But as you get older, you don’t care about shooting ducks. You just care about the experience, being able to pass it on to the younger generation. That’s where I’m at.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, talk about some of the key species during your duck season, from start to finish. And which of those species do you most chase, which one you after the most?

Arthur Leonard: If I had to categorize them, I would say the biggest species I’m after is a black duck.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Arthur Leonard: Those black ducks are so unique. I had friends come from Michigan one year, and they were just astounded at how many black ducks we have. I mean, they see them, but they don’t get very many. And we were having flocks of 25 fly into us. So black ducks are a big species for us. And then, of course, the most elegant bird is a pintail.

Ramsey Russell: Do you all get a lot of pintails?

“Atlantic brant… beautiful on the wing. As table fare, they can be good or trash.”

Arthur Leonard: It varies according to the weather. We get pintails, and you can specifically go out and hunt for them, but they’re one of those extras in your bag most days to have pintails. And we also get the whole range of puddle ducks. We see a few teal, a lot of gadwalls, and some mallards. But black ducks are our main bag. Another species that I like to target, and they’re kind of a harder bird to hunt, when you have to hunt them, you have to be right place at right time or brant. Atlantic brant are a beautiful bird on the wing. As table fare, they can be good or they can be trash.

Ramsey Russell: How do you know? Like, Pacific brant are very good because they’ve got a lot of eelgrass. A lot of the eelgrass on the Atlantic Flyway is gone, and they’re eating sea lettuce or something else. Is there any telltale sign for you? Pick a brant up and go, “Okay, this is going to be worth eating.”

Arthur Leonard: Well, you can open up their bill and smell it. You can just smell that sea lettuce they’ve been eating lettuce. You can also look at their back end, and if they have a green circle around their anus, they’re not any good because they’ve been eating that sea lettuce, and it just destroys their meat.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Arthur Leonard: But they’re still fun to shoot. They’re a flock bird, so they come in big flocks, and it’s just amazing when you have a flock of 200 or 300 birds come to you. When people haven’t seen that many birds in their lifetime and then here they are in their decoys, it’s a great thing. It’s a good feeling.

Ramsey Russell: I would think you could probably set up on those brant and those black ducks on the same set, the same point maybe.

Arthur Leonard: In certain places, you can. My main brant blind is out on a very shallow area, and black ducks will come out there, too, to eat that eelgrass.

Ramsey Russell: So there still is a little bit of eelgrass around Chincoteague?

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, there’s still a little bit of eelgrass growing out here.

Ramsey Russell: How important are freshwater inlets to some of your hunt sets for brant and puddle ducks?

Arthur Leonard: Well, I don’t think fresh water is as important for brant as it is for black ducks because brant are a sea goose. They’re used to the salt, so they don’t have to come to freshwater.

Ramsey Russell: Do you shoot many bands on the brant or black ducks, for that matter?

Arthur Leonard: It’s funny. I’ve shot a few. A friend of mine used to use my blind. He’s from Maryland, and he would always come down to Virginia because we have hunting in Virginia on Sundays. He would guide in Maryland from Monday to Saturday and then take brant parties in Virginia on Sunday. One particular day, I hadn’t shot a brant with a band on it before this, and he had a guy that was in advertising and had never been duck hunting a day in his life. They had a brant flock come in. This guy shoots one time, knocks down a bird, and it’s banded. I was like, “That doesn’t make sense. I’ve used that blind hundreds of times and never shot a banded bird out of it. This guy comes once, fires one shot, and kills a brant.”

Ramsey Russell: I hate that kind of luck. I hate beginners’ luck like that.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah. After that day, I’ve shot a few more out there, and I’ve shot some brant that were banded. I actually shot a brant one time that had been banded for so long, you couldn’t even read the numbers anymore.

Ramsey Russell: Where do a lot of band recoveries originate? Where were they banded?

Arthur Leonard: Way up in Canada. I forget the exact name.

Ramsey Russell: Nunavut, probably.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah. It’s way up in Canada. Our black ducks get banded in New Brunswick.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, really? That makes sense.

Arthur Leonard: Yep. A lot of our black ducks get banded in New Brunswick.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve seen black ducks on the marshes up in New Jersey. Saw a bunch in Prince Edward Island, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen black ducks like I saw in New Brunswick down the St. John’s River, just miles upon miles of hundreds, if not thousands of them standing in shallow water. I’ve never seen so many black ducks in my life.

Arthur Leonard: Yep. It’s amazing.

“Those guys take them for granted. They shoot them because that’s what they see a lot of.”

Ramsey Russell: And those guys take them for granted. They shoot them because that’s what they see a lot of. I’m like, that’s what I’m there for.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Do you all shoot any mallards out there on Chincoteague at all?

Arthur Leonard: A few. There used to be two farms on the mainland that were RSAs, and they would release mallards. Those released mallards would come over here and mix in with the wild birds. So we shot more mallards back when they had those RSAs. These days, mallards are an extra in your bag. They’re not something we go out for, but we do shoot them.

Ramsey Russell: Do you chase buffleheads or what did I hear, those red-breasted mergansers called shell crackers or shell ducks. Do you ever go out to chase those?

Arthur Leonard: Personally, no.

Ramsey Russell: Scoters? I mean, there’s a lot of scoters out there. There are very few places on Earth where you can go and, within a quarter mile, hunt scoters or hunt black ducks. I mean, that’s just crazy, the diversity in such a short area because of the habitat types.

Arthur Leonard: Right. The scoters in the bay are after the mussels. We have clams and whatnot up in the bay, and the scoters come off the ocean to get those mussels. We also have long-tailed ducks up there.

Ramsey Russell: I saw them too.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, you can shoot scoters and long tails in the morning and then move a couple hundred yards and be shooting pintails and black ducks in the afternoon. You don’t see that in a lot of places.

Ramsey Russell: Every morning I was there, there was a lot of boat traffic, but it wasn’t so much hunters as it was fishermen.

Arthur Leonard: Most of that boat traffic we saw was aqua culturists.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Arthur Leonard: Those are guys that are going out and planting the clams and the oysters. That’s been a boom business here for the past 20 years, aquaculture.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, it’s a very, very labor-intensive job. But I think they’re getting the kinks worked out of it. It takes from when you plant the seed to when you harvest, it can take over a year for the clams to grow out to where you can actually harvest them and eat them.

Ramsey Russell: How important are shellfish to the Chincoteague economy?

Arthur Leonard: That’s what our sole economy used to be before tourism came in the 1960s, was aquaculture. Of course, we had some finfish in there too, but mostly clams and oysters. Actually, a little bit of interesting history. Back in the Civil War, the island of Chincoteague took a vote and did not secede with the rest of the state.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, because at the time our economy was shellfish. And all of our shellfish got sent north to the markets in Philadelphia and New York. So they didn’t want to cut off their nose, so they decided to stay with the Union. And it was funny. Right after the vote, the most prominent man on the island had a very large flagpole.

Ramsey Russell: Who was he?

Arthur Leonard: John Wilton was his name. His family were actually the original settlers of the island. It was two brothers that came over. One of them took the south end, one of them took the north end. But in the Civil War, the Wiltons had the big general store. So that’s where you went and bought everything because you were on an island, and if you didn’t buy it from the Wilton store, you had to go by boat to the mainland and then try to buy it. So you bought everything through the Wilton store. And he had an extra-large flagpole erected, and he put the Union flag up on that flagpole. And the rest of the Eastern Shore didn’t like that too much. They still don’t like us for certain things.

Ramsey Russell: Well, if I’m not mistaken, the Confederate capital was in Virginia.

Arthur Leonard: Richmond.

Ramsey Russell: Richmond, Virginia. But out there on Chincoteague, I mean, that must have been awkward.

Arthur Leonard: And we weren’t the only island that stayed with the North, with the Union. Tangier Island voted to stay with the North. They’re over in the Chesapeake. And so did an island south of here called Hog Island. They voted not to secede. The Eastern Shore duck hunting was not in the fight very long because the Union troops, in the beginning of the war, just sort of drove down the peninsula and took control of it early on. They had little bands of disruptors or skirmishes along the way, but it wasn’t a long fight.

Ramsey Russell: And that’s something.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, a lot of history.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of history right there. Chincoteague just jumps out at me as one of the cradles of, I mean, you go back to the 1600s, duck hunting there has existed for a long time. I wonder if there was a lot of market hunting back in the day.

Arthur Leonard: Oh, yeah, we had a lot of market hunting going on. I mean, if you have settlers in 1650 and 1670, they had to see a lot of waterfowl. And of course, that was a food source for them, so they took it. And in those days, they did things for the market. And of course, when they shipped oysters, they were going to ship ducks too. So we would ship ducks out by the barrel full. And that’s how some of those birds got their names. You know, that’s how a canvasback got its name, because they would ship ducks up north in canvasbacks. And on the outside, they said, “Ship our canvases back.”

Ramsey Russell: Oh, really?

Arthur Leonard: That’s how those birds got their names.

“Canvasback got its name from shipping ducks in canvas bags. Never heard that story before?”

Ramsey Russell: I’ve never heard that story.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, but we had a big culture of market hunting. And then around the turn of the century, that created a lot of outlaws. When the federal government in 1918 passed the Migratory Bird Act, those guys had been supporting their families shooting birds, so naturally, they weren’t going to stop. And they had creative ways to get around the game wardens. One man in particular that lived about a mile from where I am today was very inventive.

Ramsey Russell: What was his name?

Arthur Leonard: His name was Tom Reed, and he was a very well-known outlaw. I want to say he started his hunting probably right around the turn of the century. So he had a lot of years of hunting before it was illegal to shoot birds for market. And he just continued to do it even after the game laws changed. Most of the fellows, when they would shoot a bird, they would put it in a sack with a brick. And when the game warden got after them, they would throw the sack overboard, and the brick would take it to the bottom. Therefore, they didn’t have any more birds. Well, he said, “I’d worked too hard to collect those birds. I wasn’t just gonna throw them away.” So what he did was he had a line attached to the bow of his boat. He would make sure the game warden saw him throw that bag overboard. The game warden would stop and look for the bag. Meanwhile, he was going home with his ducks. He was also very ingenious with decoys. He found these balsa life rafts washed up, and he said they were a light wood. He came upon the idea to take them to a local decoy carver and ordered geese. He said, “I need something that’s got some size to it. The birds are going to see these larger birds and attract more.” But what he didn’t tell the carver was that after the carver had made them, he took them home and hollowed them out. He would attach a little bottom board to them. Each duck he shot, he would shove into that goose and then close the bottom board. He would keep his legal limit in the blind with him and then have 25 or 30 more out in the decoys in the bottoms of those goose decoys. It was amazing what ingenious ideas he came up with to escape the game wardens. He said the end of those goose decoys came one day when a game warden had a Chesapeake Bay retriever that could smell the dead birds out in the goose decoys. He kept going out to the edge of the marsh and standing there, trying to get the attention of the game warden to go out and look at the goose decoys. But Mr. Reed would take a dead bird and throw it behind the blind so the dog would go get the dead bird and bring it back. He said that was the last day he used those goose decoys because he knew that dog was gonna find them eventually.

Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy. Talking about decoys, you do a little decoy carving yourself, don’t you?

Arthur Leonard: Oh, that’s all part of the addiction.

Ramsey Russell: How long ago did you start that?

Arthur Leonard: Well, I collected decoys before I started making them. When my dad started putting away his wooden decoys because plastic decoys were cheaper and lighter to put in the boat, he started putting them away. So I would take his wooden decoys and put them in my room. So I was collecting them long before I carved them. And for years, I would go to the, you know, Chincoteague is blessed in the fact that we had a lot of local carvers.

Ramsey Russell: I was going to ask you that. Who are some of the historical carvers?

Arthur Leonard: Well, we had three main carvers that were well known, and they supplied hunt clubs up and down the East Coast, some even out in the Midwest. They were Ira Hudson, Doug Jester, and Miles Hancock. Those three men produced hundreds of thousands of decoys. So we have a lot of decoys on Chincoteague.

Ramsey Russell: Was your dad hunting over Ira Hudson decoys?

Arthur Leonard: Yes, he was.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Unbelievable

Arthur Leonard: Believe it or not, my great-grandfather lived right across the street from Ira Hudson’s house. So they knew each other very well. And of course, my dad knew him. I mean, he would go to his shop and buy decoys to hunt up. Back then, they were a tool. They’d cost you like $12 a dozen. They were cheap.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Arthur Leonard: And these days, they’re thousands of dollars apiece. So it’s amazing.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Arthur Leonard: And I would get the auction catalogs from the big auction houses, and I would show my dad. I’d say, “Look, Dad, look how much these things that you used to take out and shoot, step on, and break the bills off of, so look how much money these things will bringing these days.” He would just shake his head. He said, “I never thought I’d see the day that those things would be worth that much money.”

Ramsey Russell: He didn’t burn a bunch of them? You didn’t catch beforehand? A lot of them guys back in the day, when plastic came out, started burning all the wooden ones.

Arthur Leonard: No, he never did burn them. No, I do have a story about that. My wife’s grandfather was a working waterman, and they had these boats they called “down the bay boats.” They would actually stay on these boats for weeks at a time collecting clams and oysters. And they would go into these old abandoned clubhouses down the bay and get the decoys out of their sheds because the decoys were light and dry. They would chop them up and use them for kindling. Now, the amount of money that those guys burned up is crazy. So, yeah, that’s a true story. I mean, from the horse’s mouth, I got that. They would go in and chop up these birds. And I was like, “Arthur, you can’t realize what you were doing.” He said, “No, because they were just abandoned. Nobody cared about them then. They weren’t worth any money. We just chopped them up and used them for kindling.”

Ramsey Russell: Most of those old carvers, those old historic carvers, they were more watermen, watermen in general, meaning their income was related to the water but was more seasonal. If ducks, if geese, if fish, if clams, if oysters, they just went with the different seasons.

“I started carving because a friend told me, ‘You buy so many decoys, learn to make your own.’”

Arthur Leonard: Yep. And they would make the birds when the other things were out of season. You would go from whatever was migrating through at the time. So when the fish started to migrate out of our island, that’s when they would start making decoys. After a while, though, that decoy making turned into their profession. Like Ira Hudson, he wasn’t so much of a waterman, but he was a boat builder. That was his occupation, boat builder, and decoy carving was secondary. Eventually, he got so many orders for decoys, he kind of switched and became a professional decoy maker. That’s all he did to make decoys.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. species-wise, what species were most of those regional carvers making Black ducks?

Arthur Leonard: A lot of black ducks, a lot of buffleheads, a lot of redheads, and bluebills. But they carved a lot of everything that was flying, pintails, widgeon, gadwall, geese. They carved a lot of geese and a lot of brant, a few swans, because we do have swans in the area, but most of the time, they were too big, too heavy for people to lug back and forth. So they didn’t hunt them. They would use them for confidence, but they didn’t actually hunt them. Those guys had a production going, and everything was done by hand. I still make everything by hand. I use a band saw to rough the bird out.

Ramsey Russell: When and why did you get started with your own decoy carving? Because now, look, I show up, we’re waiting on Barefoot Brian to show up, and you say, well, let me show you something. And you’ve got all these little boathouses and storage sheds, I’m gonna say a half dozen of them, and every one of them is slap full to the brim with decoys. Most of them you carved.

Arthur Leonard: A couple sheds that I have a lot of birds in them. But, you know, I started carving when a friend of mine, I was buying birds at the time, collecting them, said, “You know what? You’re buying so many birds, you need to start learning how to do this. Then you wouldn’t have to buy so many.” So he cut a block out and carved half of it, then turned it over to me. He said, “All right, try to match it up. See if you can carve it the way I did.” And that’s what started my carving career. That was probably 50 years ago.

Ramsey Russell: 50 years ago you started carving?

Arthur Leonard: Well, probably 40, 45 at least. I was riding a bicycle. I wasn’t driving yet, so it’s been a long time.

Ramsey Russell: Have you still got your first decoy?

Arthur Leonard: I do. I gave my first decoy to my parents, and when they passed, they passed it back to me. I’ve given it to my son. So, yeah, I’ve got my first bird.

Ramsey Russell: What was it, a black duck?

Arthur Leonard: No, it was a goldeneye.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Arthur Leonard: Yeah. Back in my teenage years, I was crazy for, we call them bullheads.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Arthur Leonard: But, yeah, I was crazy for bullheads. They’re just such a beautiful bird with that striking green head and the way they fly. You can hear them from a long distance, whistling. Yeah, the bullheads were my favorite bird back in the day.

Ramsey Russell: Did you teach yourself to carve completely, or did you have some influences and help from other people?

Arthur Leonard: No, I had a lot of friends along the way that helped me. That’s one of the good things about the island, we had so many people carving decoys, and everybody on the island was willing to teach you. All you had to do was ask. I had a couple of friends who were carving, they’re still carving today, and they would show you whatever you wanted to learn. If you were having a difficult time with a particular technique, you’d go to their shop and say, “Hey, how do you do this?” And they would show you the way they did it. It was just handed down. A good friend of mine was Reggie Burch. He was the one who got me started carving. My first bird was worked in his shop. And then, after a while, we just sat there and bounced ideas off each other, how to do it one way or another, what was better. It turned into probably a 15- or 20-year friendship where I would go use his shop to carve.

Ramsey Russell: Would you say your decoys are Chincoteague-inspired, or are they your own pattern, just out-of-the-box completely?

Arthur Leonard: Well, I do draw my own patterns, but they still have a Chincoteague style.

Ramsey Russell: What would be a Chincoteague style?

Arthur Leonard: Well, it would be chopped out with a hatchet. Once you band saw a bird out, then you use a hatchet on the chopping block to round it up. Then you use either a spokeshave or a drawknife to take the edges off. We also use a locally grown wood, which you don’t see in a lot of other areas of the country.
Ramsey Russell: What do you call that?

Arthur Leonard: Its local name is cottonwood, but it’s not the cottonwood that you see out in the West.

Ramsey Russell: Royal Paulownia.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, This tree is called Royal Paulownia, and it was an import during colonial times. People would buy china, and they would use the blooms and the seed pods from this Royal Paulownia tree to pack their china. And, of course, what happens to packing peanuts when you get them, these days they go everywhere. And it was the same way with the seed pods for those Paulownia trees. The wood is very light, it’s very easy to work with your hand tools, and it makes great hunting decoys. So that’s one of the characteristics of a Chincoteague bird.

Ramsey Russell: You had to be one of your pintail that’s got a very unique flat spot on its head.

Arthur Leonard: That came to me because I was looking at birds that were carved a little bit north of here over on the Bayside. The Ward brothers are a very well-known carving partnership. These two brothers over in Crisfield, Maryland, were carving birds back in the 30s. That style they do, their pintails have a flat head. So I took that flat head and just made some changes to it, kind of made it my own. The way I carve my birds gives them an angry look, almost like a drill instructor, you know?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Arthur Leonard: They have that flat top and they have the evil eye about them. So yeah, that’s one of my styles.

Ramsey Russell: Arthur, you got kind of a decoy fetish now, I’ll tell you, because not only do you have a lot of wooden decoys that you’ve carved that others have carved, you’ve got every make, model, and serial number of modern-day plastic, foam, whatever incarnation of decoy ever invented. Did anybody ever tell you you’ve got a problem?

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, my wife. Every day my wife tells me that.

Ramsey Russell: My wife has asked me before, “How many decoys do you need?” I’m like, “All of them. I need all of them, baby.”

Arthur Leonard: That’s true. Luckily for my kids, I have that, because now they don’t have to ask for decoys. They’ve got sheds full of them they can use.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Arthur Leonard: And it’s great because you see different materials that have been used, different paint jobs, and it’s all fun. Lately, I’ve known a lot of the people that have made the masters for those molds, so it’s a good way to help support them. Also, you get a good-looking bird in return. It used to be back in the day you had two choices of decoys, you either had Carry-Lites or Flambeaus, neither of which were very artistic.

Ramsey Russell: But I sure killed a lot of ducks over both of them, I tell you.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, they definitely worked. But in the past probably 15 or 20 years, the manufacturers have started going to the carvers and getting the carvers to make the molds for them.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Arthur Leonard: Our decoys have gotten so much better in the past 20 years. I’ve got a really close friend that worked with Fred Zink in making the Avian-X birds, and let me tell you, that guy’s world-class.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, no doubt.
Arthur Leonard: Those guys are phenomenal.

Ramsey Russell: I believe his first incarnation of a decoy was the Greenhead Gear decoy. I think that’s right.

Arthur Leonard: Correct. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And you know, it’s interesting because now, in the day and age of all these high-definition, realistic detail-type plastic-manufactured decoys, they get lost in the noise. But when they hit the market, there was, like you said, Carry-Lite and G&H, Flambeau, and then here came this super realistic-looking decoy, and it really changed the duck hunting decoy market forevermore because everybody started stepping up their game.

Arthur Leonard: Nowadays, you have like Dive Bomb, Tanglefree. They’re going to all these world champions.

Ramsey Russell: I saw you even had some of those Heyday foam decoys out there. I didn’t see a brand that you didn’t have.

Arthur Leonard: I’ve got most of them. Got most of them.

Ramsey Russell: Well, what constitutes an old-school wooden decoy hunt to Arthur versus just going out and running the latest, greatest plastics?

Arthur Leonard: Well, when I was guiding, I kind of got away from using my hand-carved birds because they got shot a lot. Sometimes, the people hunting with you, they didn’t treat them the best. You’d worked on this bird for hours, trying to get it done, then they would step on it, break the bill off, or whatnot so, I put all them away and started making a very utilitarian bird out of an old crab pot float. Let me tell you, those things were indestructible. They had a three-quarter plywood head and keel, and the rest of it was a crab pot buoy. You could run over them with a boat, shoot them, whatever, you couldn’t tear them up. So I used them when I was guiding and over time got away from using my birds to hunt over. Plus, in those 20 years, the birds started getting better. You can go out and get the oversized Avian-X black ducks that are flocked. And let me tell you, if you get those, there’s no need to take your handmade birds out there because those birds are top of the line.

Ramsey Russell: Would you ever take your birds out for posterity?

Arthur Leonard: If I had my own birds, yes. But hand-carved birds are so valuable that most of the time when you make them, they’re sold, so you don’t get a chance to take them.

Ramsey Russell: You sell all yours, I see, yeah.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah. I don’t sell all of them, but it’s hard to hold on to them when somebody’s there with money. You can take one hunting decoy and buy dozens of the plastic ones. So what would you rather do? Have that one bird that you made 20 or 30 other decoys? I’d rather have those 20 or 30 decoys because I can make more.

Ramsey Russell: What kind of boat is that you run? Because that is the most hardcore, utilitarian, one-stop-shop boat I’ve ever been in.

Arthur Leonard: It’s a 30-year-old Carolina Skiff V model.

Ramsey Russell: And it’s a big boat.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, its 19 feet long, 80 inches wide, and built like a tank.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable.

Arthur Leonard: Heavily constructed. I run a 115 Mercury on the back of it, and it’ll get shallow. That thing only draws like 6 inches of water because it’s so wide, and it’s just been a dependable boat.

Ramsey Russell: But it’s good in the big water too.

Arthur Leonard: Oh yeah, it’s very good in the big water. It’s unsinkable. Back in the days when I got that boat, Carolina Skiffs were a very commercially minded boat. They made a lot of boats for commercial fishermen, so they were built extra strong. The fiberglass was better in them. These days, Carolina Skiffs have moved more towards recreational fishing, so they’re not built as heavy as they were back then.

Ramsey Russell: Well, how have things changed on Chincoteague since you were hunting with your daddy, since you were guiding throughout the years? You can go back before you did historically, because in some respects, it’s like I hunted the marsh up in New Jersey one time. You’re going through Atlantic City, and once you get about a half mile away from the boat ramp, it’s as primitive and remote as if time just stopped. You know, even though you can look across the bay and see Atlantic City with all that development. But what have been some of the changes in terms of access or habitat or anything, or have there been any changes on Chincoteague in your lifetime? What do you worry about?

Arthur Leonard: Well, the biggest thing that I think, I worry about is that modern-day hunters are travelers. And we have a lot of people who will come here once, go with a guide, and think they can come down and go by themselves. Unfortunately, a couple of years ago, we had some teenage boys think they could do that. They got in a 16-foot Jon boat and thought they could go out in the big water. They had overloaded the Jon boat with too many men, and when they left the harbor, they took a washing. Unfortunately, it turned the boat over. Most of them made it, but two of them did not.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Arthur Leonard: So that’s a big tragedy. Those were the only two boys that have been lost, but we’ve had so many people that they have a Jon boat at home, and that’s great for the lakes that they’re on or whatnot. But when they get in this big water, it can change very quickly. Another thing that gets affected here is we have a lot of oyster bars and sandbars. They run aground and don’t understand that they have to get off immediately or the tide will recede, and they’ll be stuck there for the day.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Tourism changed everything. We have to adapt… hunting isn’t more important than local livelihoods.”

Arthur Leonard: So that’s a learning curve. And you have these traveling hunters that don’t understand the culture of the area, and they’ll tie up to your blinds and whatnot. So that’s been a big change. Back in the day, you didn’t have to worry about that. You didn’t have the mobility that people have these days. Back then, when they came down to Chincoteague, they would hire a guide. A guide would have five or six people in his boat, and that was it. These days, some guide services have as many as three or four boats going out with six people each. So that fills up your area with sportsmen, and it’s all about the mighty dollar. It’s not about the tradition of the island. You’re turning it into a tourism factory.

Ramsey Russell: But tourism is so important to Chincoteague. I guess here’s where we’re getting at. Now that you crack at that subject, I’ll go ahead and ask you. You were at one time the mayor of Chincoteague for a period of time.

Arthur Leonard: For another month.

Ramsey Russell: You still are the mayor of Chincoteague. So tourism and the local economy are very important. But on the flip side of that, when we get into duck hunting, hunting pressure is, golly, it’s critical. Hunting pressure is unbelievable from coast to coast, up and down. I mean, anybody I talk to, any local group I’ve fallen in with, they always talk about increased hunting pressure relative to back in the day. As a mayor and as a duck hunter, how do you reconcile the two? Because on one hand, tourism is important. Heck, you own a hotel. But on the other hand, at some point, there’s too much hunting pressure. How do you balance that?

Arthur Leonard: Well, you have to rationalize it. I mean, you have to think to yourself, okay, hunting is very important to me, but is it more important to me personally than it is to the livelihoods of people on the island. And you just have to say, no, it’s not. I can adapt, but I can think of ways that I can still go out and duck hunt and enjoy myself while allowing tourists to come here. You just have to be able to adapt and change. It’s frustrating at times, but you have to realize what your end goal is. And we’re not the only community facing that change. It’s all up and down the East Coast, and I would say the rest of the country too. You hear about Montana and Idaho. I’ve got a good friend who lives in Boise, Idaho, and they gun the Snake River. He describes it as paradise, being able to hunt on Snake River. But now, all the people leaving California have found Boise, Idaho. So, he says it’s just turned into a nightmare. Not necessarily because of more hunters, but the people who bought the land, now do not like hunting in front of their houses. Before, it was all open. I guess in Idaho, you’re allowed to hunt in a boat along the river as long as you don’t step foot on private land. But now, they’re just getting harassed by landowners for hunting in front of their property. It’s happening all over the country.

Ramsey Russell: We driving around Chincoteague. And this is coming to the heart of the matter I was going to ask. Driving around Chincoteague, boy, there are a lot of beautiful homes. But a lot of those homes I drove by look like tourist homes or second homes. And as mayor, we had this conversation about space. When we go back to Ira Hudson’s day, let alone when you were a boy and your daddy was hunting, but now in the year 2024, there’s been a shift in the type of people that live on the island. They’re no longer water people, they’re just vacationers or second-home owners. How is that value system changing, and how is that affecting duck hunting on Chincoteague?

Arthur Leonard: Well, duck hunting doesn’t affect us too badly. Most of the properties here are summertime rentals. From June until the end of August, when kids are out of school, that’s when the majority of people visit the island. So during hunting season, it doesn’t really affect us too much.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Arthur Leonard: It does affect the local economy and the local people because nowadays, younger people can’t afford to find a place on the island. All the property is way out of their price range. And if they don’t have a family member with land or access to a house, they can’t find a place to live. So they end up living off the island. They might still work on the island, but they can’t afford to live here. That’s hard on people. But you can’t really restrict it too much. That’s another internal debate you have with yourself. Do you restrict the number of people who can buy real estate here, or do you allow the free market to take the opportunity. We’ve had a lot of discussions with the council about providing low-income housing on the island. The only problem is finding property to put that housing on. We’re limited by the land mass we have, and you can’t make new land, so it’s difficult.

Ramsey Russell: Do you feel like you still see as many ducks now as 10 years ago, 20 years ago?

Arthur Leonard: No. And that’s a sore subject. Back in the day, the wildlife refuge was more about attracting waterfowl than it is today. And I think it’s service-wide. I think the Fish and Wildlife Service has changed a little bit from what they used to be. They’re having staff shortages, their goals have changed a little bit. In this area they shifted from waterfowl as a goal to say, shorebirds. And the habitats for each of those different species are different. So, like, some of the impoundments that they used to flood for waterfowl, they keep dry so that shorebirds can utilize them.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Arthur Leonard: So that’s affected the waterfowl in this area because if they come down the Atlantic Flyway, they get here and it’s a dry field, they’re not going to stay. They’re going to keep on going south until they can find water, and fresh water, not salt water, they want fresh water. I’ve got a friend that’s got the impoundment system on the eastern shore is very big. DU has done a phenomenal job working with the farmers and making these impoundments so they can provide fresh water for the migrating birds. But it’s all on private land, so it’s not open to hunting for the general public. And holy smokes, what a difference. If you manage that impoundment right, the birds are going to find you and utilize it. And it’s amazing the number of birds they get in those freshwater impoundments.

Ramsey Russell: You know, we talk about Fish and Wildlife, Art, and I was surprised to learn recently that endangered species, which is also under Fish Wildlife purview, has five times the budget that migratory birds do. When you think migratory birds, don’t think just ducks and geese, because that’s a very small part of their migratory bird budget, which is predominantly things like cormorants, shorebirds, and neotropical migratory birds. To your point, very little of the Fish and Wildlife budget today is dedicated to ducks and geese.

Arthur Leonard: Ducks and Geese, right. When their primary species was snow geese, they would actually have farm fields that they would plant for the snow geese over on Assateague. Now, the one problem they ran into is when you plant corn, you also have other species that eat corn. And the biggest species that ate corn was our wild pony herd. They had trouble keeping our ponies out of their corn.

Ramsey Russell: Well, real quick, since I forgot to bring that up earlier, talk about the wild ponies. I mean, all the billboards, God, that’s a big freaking deal out there. Where did these wild ponies come from? Heck, your daddy used to go out and fool around.

Arthur Leonard: Yeah, that was my passion, decoys. His passion was ponies. And that’s the whole reason why he bought the land we’re sitting on, so he could have land for his ponies. So thank you, ponies. But the whole story of the ponies, we’re not unique in the fact that we have ponies out on these barrier islands. There are a bunch of different areas that have wild ponies, starting up in Canada. Out on Sable Island, which is 400 miles off the coast, they have a herd of wild ponies. Come on down the coast, you have ponies on Assateague. You used to have ponies on Hog Island, which was a settlement. Their ponies were brought by the settlers. Then you have all the horses down on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Then you have some in South Carolina and also Georgia. They have little herds of these wild ponies. And there are a lot of legends about how they actually came to be here. The one main legend for our ponies is that they were brought here by the Spanish, not brought here so much as they were shipwrecked here. And there are documented records. The county south of the county we’re currently located in has the longest court records in the country. And there are court records that go back and document Spanish shipwrecks here. And part of their cargo was horses, so it makes sense. But they’ve been here for 400-plus years, and they’ve adapted their diets to this salt marsh life. And they’ve done really well.

Ramsey Russell: We’d be out there riding around and see herds of them.

Arthur Leonard: Right. These days, the pony herd is owned and managed by the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company.

Ramsey Russell: I was just fixing to say, thank you for bringing that up. Because now, for those of you all listening, I was on a volunteer fire department that had a very small footprint. I drove by the Chincoteague VFD station. It was bigger than some fire stations I’ve seen in downtown New York City. That thing was humongous and state-of-the-art.

Arthur Leonard: Oh, yeah. Our ponies these days are the official state pony for the state of Virginia. That got taken place a couple of years ago. But our ponies are well known because of a couple of children’s stories. Back in the 40s, we had an author named Marguerite Henry write a famous children’s story named Misty. And this Misty book was picked up by a lot of elementary schools in the country. And we still, to this day, have older ladies bringing in their original copy of Misty. And this is on their bucket list, they had to come to Chincoteague Island to see these wild ponies that were like Misty. What most people don’t know is most of the Misty book was fiction. But there was actually a pony named Misty. She was not born over on Assateague. She was born on Chincoteague. And the author of the book bought Misty from a local cattleman and then took her back to Illinois to live. So Misty had the life. I mean, she would go in the author’s house, and she was a very well-taken-care-of pony. But she made Chincoteague ponies very, very famous. And the big claim to fame with these ponies is, yes, they’re born out in the wild, but every year we have a roundup in July and we sell off the offspring. So you can take one of these little foals home and raise it. Most of the other wild pony herds in the country, you can’t do that. So that makes us unique in the fact that we have these roundups and sell the offspring. And part of that is driven by the federal government because we have private livestock on federal land, and we have to have a grazing permit. So, within the grazing permit, they tell us where we can keep them. They also tell us our population. And we have to keep our population under 150 adults. So, if you have 150 adults, they’re breeding adults. So, naturally, every year you’re going to have 60 to 80 foals. You’ve got to do something with them. Might as well sell them and raise money for the fire company. And it’s very lucrative. And just in my lifetime, it’s gone from, you could go buy a foal, when I started doing it, for under a hundred dollars and take it home. These days, you can put an extra zero or two behind that if you plan on buying one.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Arthur Leonard: We actually had the record this year. One brought $50,000 for a pony.

Ramsey Russell: I wonder how many ponies go home and get named Misty.

Arthur Leonard: I would say it’s a fair share. You know, to me, a pony’s a pony. The names are just for the people. They don’t care what their name is. But a lot of ponies get taken off this island, and they make great riding pets for kids. They’re right at the breaking point of that 13.2-hand, 14-hand height. So they will ride an adult, but they’re better suited for kids to ride. And there’s just something magical when you see a kid that saved all his money through the year because he’s going to try to buy a pony. And he comes down here and doesn’t quite have enough money, and then you’ll see people in the crowd start handing money up to them, pulling money together to buy their dream. It’s just a magical thing.

Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy. So what’s the rest of your duck season look like, Art? I mean, where from now, this episode won’t air till January, the first week of January. Where will you be in the first week of January? What’ll be going on?

Arthur Leonard: Well, by the first week in January, hopefully, we’ll have some weather up north that’ll push more birds down here. But January is our season. I mean, yes, we can hunt in November, October, but our season is January. That’s your make-or-break. Because most of the states north of us by January are locked up, either frozen or whatnot. And we see a big push of birds in the middle of December and January. So January is our prime time.

Ramsey Russell: And what will your typical January look like?

Arthur Leonard: You’ll have days in January when the temperature will be down below freezing. And then you also have days when our temperatures are in the 60s. In January.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Is that when your brant will be down? That’s when you’ll be hard and heavy on the black ducks?

Arthur Leonard: Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, as a hunter, you want it cold, blowing northwest here, which is something else that I learned. Different parts of the country, you want a different wind. Like up in Ohio and Michigan, they want a south wind. And then here, we want a northwest wind because that northwest wind will push birds. It’ll make birds migrate. And that’s what you want in January. You want that northwest Siberian clipper to come through and freeze their little tail feathers off. Because that’s when they’re, you know, that’s when they’re willing to come to your decoys more.

Ramsey Russell: Billy and Aiden were talking about how there are times that the bay out there will freeze up, or a lot of it will, except for certain pockets. And then it just gets greasy.

Arthur Leonard: It gets crazy because it’s forcing the birds into smaller and smaller areas. And it’s got to be cold. I mean, this is salt water. The temperature’s got to be a lot lower than the normal 32 to freeze this. It’s got to be in the 20s before it’ll start freezing this bay. And it’s cold. It’s hard on everybody. It’s hard on us. It’s hard on the equipment. It’s hard on the shotguns. It’s hard on everything. But that’s what it takes to be a waterfowler. You’ve got to be able to adapt to it. But that’s when it’s magical. Golly day.

Ramsey Russell: Well, Arthur, I’d let it be known that next time I see you, and I will come back out there for the oysters, if nothing else. You know, tonight for supper, I’m eating Chincoteague oyster fritters. And I had never had that until we went out there to dinner that night. And they’re very simple to make. Oh, I’m not going to overcook them. Don’t worry. But, I mean, that’s my supper for tonight. Brian sent me home with a couple of gallons, and I’m determined to eat them all before Thanksgiving here in a few days. But I appreciate you all having me. I think I’m gonna come next time to see you in January. I think that’s when I’m gonna try to rough it out.

Arthur Leonard: If you can do it, that’s when it’s at its best in January.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And maybe we can hammer some of them black ducks, maybe shoot a few brant.

Arthur Leonard: Yes, we can.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Thank you very much Art. But now, if I come up here, I’m gonna want to hunt over some traditional decoys. What do you think about that?

Arthur Leonard: Well, you’ll have to let me know, and I’ll start working on them.

Ramsey Russell: All right, well, we’ll just go wait. Yeah, we’ll go through some of them sheds you got and clean them up.

Arthur Leonard: Oh, yeah, we can do that now.

Ramsey Russell: But seriously, I’ve enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the days I spent out there on Chincoteague with you all. I really appreciate you taking me into the blind and introducing me to real Chincoteague culture, feeding me like a king. I had a really, really good time and look forward to seeing you all again sometime, Art.

Arthur Leonard: It was our pleasure. Like I said, Ramsey, just to have a gentleman with us like you made the day.

Ramsey Russell: I ain’t often been described as a gentleman, but I’ll take it. Folks, you all been listening to my buddy Arthur Leonard on Chincoteague Island. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Ducks season somewhere podcast. See you next time.