EP 550. “Shooting the Raft” and Arkansas Public Land Hunting

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where we’re going into the Arkansas public woods with a buddy of mine, Mr. Bryce Decker. Bryce, how the heck are you?

Bryce Decker: I’m doing pretty good, sir. How you doing today?

Ramsey Russell: Man, I’m doing good. You know, I’m gonna credit my son Forrest bumping me to actually get you on here finally. We talked about it, of course. I met you over there at the Delta Waterfowl Expo. We had a wonderful time at dinner that night. You was in and out of the booth. Boy, I just had a good time meeting you and learning a little bit about you. You also make a duck call, don’t you?

Bryce Decker: Yes, sir, I make a couple of them.

Ramsey Russell: What do you make?

Bryce Decker: I got, I’m known for my cut downs. I do a couple different flavors of them in several different materials. And then I got my start modifying old keyhole PS O. Then I’ve got a standard J-frame call that’s a real loud and aggressive, real versatile call that I do also. And it’s called a Tyrant.

Ramsey Russell: Huh? Tyrant.

Bryce Decker: Yes, sir.

“I mean, it’s something about those cutdown calls. I mean, that’s Arkansas, isn’t it? That’s kind of where that cutdown cut its teeth, isn’t it?”

Ramsey Russell: Heck yeah, man. So, I mean, it’s something about those cutdown calls. I mean, that’s Arkansas, isn’t it? That’s kind of where that cutdown cut its teeth, isn’t it?

“I’d like to say that they were made famous in the hardwood bottoms of Arkansas. Yes, sir.”

Bryce Decker: I’d like to say that they were made famous in the hardwood bottoms of Arkansas. Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: Where do you think they originated?

Bryce Decker: I’d say they probably originated up there in Illinois where they were made. And then it just kind of, as people got them over the years, they kind of played with them and messed with them. You know, nothing’s ever good enough out of the box for us as hunters. So we always got to mess with stuff, and people just kind of tinkered on them and messed with them and started cutting them down and figured out that they could get that particular sound out of them, and it just kind of went from there.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I knew that olt come from up there in Illinois. Man, hey, if anybody listening knows better, let me know. I would have guessed that the olt made its way down into Arkansas, and then somebody down there cut it, and that’s where the cutdown come. I don’t know, it just, it seems like that’s where it originated though. It was right there in your neck of the woods in Arkansas.

Bryce Decker: I think Dave Jackson’s took over all the Olt tooling and equipment stuff. He operates under DJ Calls now. He’s got a call modelled after a real old cut that was made popular up there in Illinois, called a Quincy cut. So I don’t know if that predated or post-dated the cuts that you hear of here in Arkansas and even in northern Louisiana.

Ramsey Russell: What is it about a cutdown call that makes it so popular among some people as compared to a J-frame call like I blow?

Bryce Decker: I would say in the woods, usually there’s other people around you if you’re in a good spot or a good hole, and having a really loud, powerful call kind of gives you an advantage over other people. And if you’re party hunting with a bunch of people and you can kind of throw a wall of sound out, it’s kind of hard for other people with regular calls to call against, and it’s kind of hard for the ducks to pick up on anything else when they’re working to a bunch of guys on a bunch of really loud calls.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I say, they do sound ducky, don’t they?

Bryce Decker: Yes, sir, they do. Very, very ducky. They sound like a duck even at full. That was always what I said about them that made them really special was, you know, they don’t ring out on top like a standard call, and they maintain a good, realistic, loud, powerful tone, even at full volume, without squealing out or ringing out on top.

Ramsey Russell: Well, let, listen here. We’re recording the week before Christmas. So the Arkansas duck season has been open, it’s about midway through, I’m gonna guess. You know, it’s been open about a month, less a split. How’s you all season going so far? Good, bad, different, what?

Bryce Decker: It’s a, I would say it’s probably a typical season. It might be a little slower than normal right now.

Ramsey Russell: Those December doldrums.

Bryce Decker: Yeah. I usually like December, but it’s been a little bit slow here the last little bit for me. But, you know, we kill them on the first few days of the season, and then we usually kill them a day or two after the first split comes back in, and then the rest of the time it’s pretty much a grind. Especially here, you know, the last 10 or so years, I think we got a lot of pressure that we used to not have, so we don’t have the consistent hunting like we used to have.

Ramsey Russell: Where are you from, born and raised? And how did you get into duck hunting?

Bryce Decker: I was born in Hope, and that just happened to be, that’s in southwest Arkansas, that just happened to be where my dad was working at the time. I was raised up in Pocahontas, Arkansas, and grew up hunting the Black River Bottoms with my folks, my grandpa, and his brothers, some of their friends. And they started taking me in the woods whenever I was about six years old. And back then, I’d just been an extra limit. But I went, and they enjoyed, you know, they’d drag us kids out to the woods just to watch, and I guess not really torturous, but it was hard on us. We didn’t have the gear and the equipment and the technology that we have today, so it was hard on us. But a lot of us younger kids, we liked to go, and we were blessed to have folks that drag us in there with them.

Ramsey Russell: Well, heck yeah. What gear did you not have then? Because you’re a young man now, Bryce.

Bryce Decker: I’m only 39 now, and whenever I first started, we didn’t even have neoprene waders, so we had canvas waders and the three- and four-ply waders. And the old Red Ball hip boots were still being worn by some of the old guys. And the first thing I had was a pair of Hodgman canvas waders and an old, I believe, Stearns float coat. And between those two things, it was the most miserable two pieces of hunting equipment you could possibly wear. They were terrible.

Ramsey Russell: You just reminded me, the very first pair of hip boots I ever had, the first legit, and I was proud of them, some guns hip boots I ever had were Hodgmans.

Bryce Decker: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And it was a, they were warm. The thing I would say about them though is, if you had to walk more than the length of, say, a hall in your house, your socks gonna end up in the toe box. You know, the socks weren’t on your feet by the time you got where you was going, it just walked them all out. I’d be barefooted with a pair of socks down the toe box by the time I had to walk anywhere. But my feet didn’t get cold, I’ll tell you that. They were good and insulated.

Bryce Decker: I think they were wool or felt-lined back then.

Ramsey Russell: Something like that.

Bryce Decker: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. But, boy, they would sure, you didn’t want to walk far in them because they would sure take your socks off for you.

Bryce Decker: No. And those old canvas waders, the colder it got, the stiffer they got. So they were pretty rough at times.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What are some of your earliest memories going with your people?

Bryce Decker: We hunted, the main thing was just the feeling of it all.

Ramsey Russell: Like how many people was in your team, could be you and your daddy and your brother and your uncle? How many people was in your team?

Bryce Decker: I was raised by my grandpa, so all my hunting was with my grandpa and his brothers. Me and my father have never had a whole lot to do with each other, so it was always my grandpa and his brothers and their friends. He just started taking me in there. I just remember waking up one morning, he said, “Let’s get ready.” Had a stack of clothes there he put on me. None of them fit me. He bundled me up, put me in a jeep, and we took off to the river. He put me down the front of the boat and told me to lay down and be still.

Ramsey Russell: How big a boat was it? Tell me about this duck boat of your granddad’s.

Bryce Decker: I’ve still got it, and I still use it. It’s a 1442 Monarch. I want to say it’s probably a 1978 model. It’s a riveted, just a little flimsy john boat. It’s tough as nails for being as flimsy as it is. And I’ve got an old two-cylinder 30-horse Yamaha-made Mariner from the early 1990s on it. And it has been the most reliable duck boat probably in the state record.

Ramsey Russell: What kind of outboard he had on it when you went with him?

Bryce Decker: I think they used to use them old. Back then, I think he probably had a 20-horse Mercury on it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. God dog, that is a classic boat right there.

Bryce Decker: Oh yeah. Flat bottom.

Ramsey Russell: 1442.

Bryce Decker: 1442. It’s a little feller, but it gets around pretty good. It’s easy to drag over levees. It’ll haul two guys and all the gear you need. And right now, it’ll haul me, my boy, and my little girl. I’ll have to upgrade before too long when they get a little bigger, but so far I would like to know how many ducks that thing’s hauled out of the woods.

Ramsey Russell: That ain’t no telling. Tell me, so your granddaddy throws you in a boat, says sit down, don’t move, here we go. And was it just you and him, or did he meet a bunch of other people?

Bryce Decker: We would usually meet up with his older brother and some of their buddies. There was a factory here in town called Waterloo. They made toolboxes and stuff like that. And that was the big industry here in town at the time. So they’d have some of the Waterloo guys and some of the farmers, and they’d get together and hunt. And it kind of depended on how good we were doing. If there was a lot of ducks around, we’d hunt a few more people. There might be six or seven or eight of them. Nothing like you see today. Heck, today you’ll see 30, 40 people in a hole. I was in a hole a couple years back and 110 people ended up showing up.

Ramsey Russell: Come on, 110 people?

Bryce Decker: 110 people. Yes, sir. So it’s a lot different back then, but it’d be mainly family and friends. And it was more about the experience than the pictures and attention and everything. It was just a whole other environment. It seemed a lot more real. It was just real.

Ramsey Russell: When would this have been? If you’re 39 now, how old would you have been when your granddaddy woke you up that morning and took you duck hunting that first time?

Bryce Decker: I believe I was six years old, so that would have been in 1991.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, 1991. And still, back in those days, I mean, like what time of day, what time of morning did he wake you up? Was it two in the morning? Was it six in the morning? How early a start were you all getting on the crowd? Now, I started duck hunting back on Arkansas public back in those same days. And if we got up at 4 in the morning, got to a duck hole, had a good shoot, that necessarily 110% implied that the following morning Mr. Bowles was going to rally the troops an hour earlier. And if we had a good shoot that morning, an hour earlier. Just because, you know, if folks heard the shooting out in the woods, they might try to find your spot and beat you to it. But I mean, seriously, that’s kind of what we’re going to talk a lot about ,  is then versus now. But back in those days, back in those good old days, when you were going back with your granddaddy and his brothers and friends, how early were they getting up and beating it out to the woods?

Bryce Decker: We were very fortunate. I guess it depends on who you’d ask nowadays. Some people didn’t like that we had it set up like we did. But I consider it to be a huge blessing that in my neck of the woods, we could leave out permanent decoy spreads on public ground all season. So we had four, five, six places that we’d go depending on the conditions, and we had decoys in all those spots. And it was still technically first come, first serve, even though you can’t tell anybody no, like “we’ve got it.” It’s a weird set of rules we operate by, but usually we’d go in there and not have to worry about it. The guys that hunted 400 yards east of us, they’d hunt that spot every day. When there were ducks in that block of woods, we’d hunt the same hole. And everybody just kind of kept to their spots. You still had guys back then, too, and they were real notorious for hunting the same spots. You just kind of didn’t move around a whole lot, didn’t step on anybody’s toes. Everybody was real tight-lipped but still yet pretty cordial. Any kind of differences or arguments that people had were settled with a duck call instead of at the boat ramp. There was just an unwritten set of rules that people went by. And a lot of it was centered around respect of the resource, respect of the woods, good woodsmanship, respect of the ducks,  sort of, I would call it, an odd form of sustainable duck hunting. Not so much that you see on private ground or anything, but everybody seemed to work together pretty good to where everyone could kill a few ducks really consistently. And we weren’t running everything up out of the woods, pushing ducks out. And it was a lot more consistent day to day.

Ramsey Russell: It doesn’t sound like that. Even if, excuse me, even if there were some, because back in the days duck guides could hunt on Arkansas public.

Bryce Decker: Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: But it sounds, you know, as you describe it, 30 years ago, back when you was a child or growing up with your granddaddy, there was plenty of room for everybody.

Bryce Decker: There was, but then again, you didn’t have the mind-set that you had to kill 75 ducks a day and post them on Facebook or you were an inferior duck hunter. Some days you got them, some days you didn’t. You hunted the same spots to the extent of, you know, you might have had 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 spots to hunt depending on conditions, water levels, weather, whatever. But everybody tended to stick to their own spots. You didn’t have people chasing ducks all over the place. There were always pockets of ducks or rafts of ducks, like I like to call them,  just large concentrations of ducks using a small area. And there would be little rafts of ducks here and there all through the woods, just because everybody was in the same spots every day. And you didn’t have people meandering through the woods aimlessly and mindlessly all day, every day, keeping all these ducks pushed out of the woods.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, that’s interesting. Tell me about your granddaddy. What did you learn? What are some of your fondest memories back in those good old days, hunting with him as a young man? What kind of man was he? How did he pack for the duck blind? What kind of call did he blow?

Bryce Decker: He actually, surprisingly, blew one of the softest, mellowest duck calls known to man. He blew a yellow wedge Mallard Tone. And his older brother blew a Haydel and an old wood Echo. And then we had another guy that hunted with us. He was a police officer here in Pocahontas, Cicero Jones. And he blew an Olt for a while, and then he ended up switching to a DR-85 later on when he got older. But there was a good mix of calls that I hunted around.

Ramsey Russell: Well, those calls them men blew didn’t take a lot of lung, like an average cut down?

Bryce Decker: No. And even from what I remember, the cut downs back then weren’t modified and manipulated to the point they are today. They just tinkered with them to make them sound a little bit better than they did out of the box. A lot of those PSOs were pretty rough out of the box. So they tinkered with them enough to get them where they could kill ducks with them, and that was about it. And there’s still some old men in the woods that hunt an Olt, and they’re pretty hard blowing. They’re pretty aggressive. What you would think of today when you think of a cut down?

Ramsey Russell: So we know what kind of boat, what kind of calls they used, what kind of camo did they wear? What kind of shotguns did they shoot? What kind of decoy did they pitch?

Bryce Decker: We didn’t use a whole lot of decoys back then. And it wasn’t too long before I come along that they wasn’t using decoys at all.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Bryce Decker: They just walked off out in the woods and kicked water and called. I think G&H was pretty early on and Flambeau was pretty early on. That was about all you had whenever I was a kid.

Ramsey Russell: That’s about all you had. It wasn’t much more.

Bryce Decker: Nope. And they would use some of them. A couple dozen of them. We’d have them, couple dozen, whatever they had in every hole that we had decoys in. And then flat bottom john boats were pretty common Monarchs. I think there were some old Duracrafts around. Some of the guys on the other side of the river that ran the river a lot had old Lunds and old V-hulls with big motors on them. But as far as over here on my side of the river, there’s a lot of flat bottoms.

Ramsey Russell: You remember what kind of shotguns they used?

Bryce Decker: 870s. I know my grandpa always carried an old 1148 Remington. And that was my first gun. It was an old 12-gauge 1148. There were some A5s, 1100s, 1187s, 870s. You didn’t see many Italian gas guns back then.

Ramsey Russell: Now what was the name of some of their duck holes, they called them?

Bryce Decker: The hole, I probably hunted in the most as a kid.

Ramsey Russell: Probably known only to you all, you know. But yeah.

Bryce Decker: There’s a hole in a little set of woods right off a river that’s called Broke Leg Hole. And I probably hunted it the most with them. We’d run down river and pull over the levee or walk off from the levee. And they called it Broke Leg Hole. Used to, the game and fish would let us go in there and keep our boat runs maintained and maintain the holes and everything. You could cut out buck brush and smartweed and kind of keep the place clean and manageable. And they were in there cutting some stuff out one day, and they were cutting a big old dead stob that was on the edge of the hole. And it fell. The top of it broke and fell out and landed on Cicero Jones and broke his leg. And they had to haul him out of the woods. And he made a full recovery. Everything ended up being okay. But from then on, they called that Broke Leg Hole. And there’s still quite a few people that hunt that block of woods that still refer to it as Broke Leg Hole.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, I tell you what, that reminds me of a spot we had on the Mississippi River about that same time we called Broke Foot. And when the river was real high on the Greenville stage, we kept noticing ducks pitching back off in these big willow trees. And it’s just one of them deals you had to get to. We hunted the outside and killed them, but we wanted to get up into them. And boy, the foot of my outboard, we was walking those trees, just climbing that boat up and hacking and getting and running over them big willow trees and everything else best we could to cut up in there. And we finally got out that day after shooting a bunch of duck. We got out back onto the water and my outboard was running funny. When I got to the ramp trailer, I realized that foot was smooth, son. There was no kind of nothing on that foot of that motor no more. We done tore it all off and we called it Broke Foot. But boy, it was worth every bit of it. I’m gonna tell you what, I still got that outboard too. It was worth every bit getting up in there.

Bryce Decker: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And what was so weird is up inside there, just imagine three or four acres of nothing but floats some just logs and woods and sticks and driftwood and everything. Well, hardly no open water at all. And them ducks were coming in and just landing all up in there. And I went back in there one day long after the, you know, back in the spring, late early summer, after the water had come down. I walked up in because I was gonna mark that son of a gumball. I was going to figure out a way to get in there when the river got back high again. And I never did find that hole. And I just, I really think that what happened is it was just a solid willow thicket. I think what happened is somehow or other it just, everything conspired. So much of that driftwood got in there, just kind of pushed all them trees apart enough for an opening. You know what I’m saying?

Bryce Decker: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It was weird because I walked all over that sandbar when the water got off it looking and I couldn’t find that opening. And I was walking transects like a forester, son.

Bryce Decker: I tried finding a hole the other day that my grandpa and them used to hunt a lot before this particular set of woods got real, real, real popular. And I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t. There were so many blowdowns back there and the boat run had changed so much. I don’t move around a whole lot. I’m still kind of stuck in my ways. I still try, and I’ll move around a little bit if I have to, but I try to hunt the same five, ten spots that I can kill ducks in pretty consistently. But I tried and tried and tried to find this old hole and I just, it’s still there. I know people still hunt it. I couldn’t find it. And I’m not real reliant on ONX or GPS or anything. I try to use my, what’s in my little brain as much as I can. And it sure did let me down trying to find that hole the other day. I could not find it to save my life.

Ramsey Russell: Bryce, you get back up in there where your granddaddy. What are some of your fondest memories of just growing up hunting with that generation? Like, you got to remember something about him one particular morning or something that those guys would do that people don’t do anymore. I bet they hated steel shot when it came down the pipe.

Bryce Decker: They weren’t a fan of steel shot. They were not a fan of steel shot. They missed their old lead number fives and sixes. But just, man, every day was so, it was so majestic with them. You know, they were older than me. My grandpa raised me, so he was my hero. He was six foot six, just a big old guy, about 250 pounds. And of course I just idolized everything he did. But they weren’t just super good duck callers. They weren’t like a lot of people you hear in Arkansas bottoms that are real methodical and philosophical with their duck call. They were more conditions hunters. But just the way he was and the way he brought me up was what was so special about it. Everything was just centered around the kids. When we were there, they’d hold us up by our wader straps, make sure we wasn’t falling in. They’d pack food and little charcoal cook stoves in for us, and they tried to make us as comfortable as they could, despite us wearing third-generation hand-me-downs and being cold and miserable the whole time. And it wasn’t just, there wasn’t as much mean-spiritedness in it as there is now. Everything was kind of family and friend-oriented. And I know it wasn’t like that in a lot of places in the state, but up here it was.

Ramsey Russell: What would they cook on that stove if they had to pack in for you all?
Bryce Decker: It was a little metal stove that they had welded up themselves, and they’d put charcoal in it, and they’d cook biscuits and put a cast iron skillet in there and make sausage and gravy and eggs and bacon and whatever else we had.
Ramsey Russell: Did they always kill a limit?
Bryce Decker: No. And that was another thing.
Ramsey Russell: Did they beat up on themselves and get mad at everybody next to them when they didn’t kill a limit?
Bryce Decker: I’ve been on several hunts where ducks would really start using a set of woods. This is just the mentality that they had. And ducks would start pouring into one set of woods, and we might be two or three or four ducks shy, and they’d say, boys, let’s go. Let’s pack up and go and let these ducks fill these woods up, and we’ll come back on in the morning. And when you have a sustainable mindset, and I know that’s hard to do on public ground nowadays, you can kill ducks almost every day, you know, weather permitting. And it’s just taken such a hard turn away from that now. I think a lot of modern duck hunters practice their methods in a way that is leaning on the edge of being very unsustainable. It’s just hyper-aggressive with no regard towards respecting the resource or conservation or anything. How many can I kill and that’s all I’m worried about.
Ramsey Russell: What would have happened if 50 or 60 or 70 more people had come into the Broke Leg Hole while your people were there hunting?
Bryce Decker: It wouldn’t have been very friendly. They would have asked them to leave. And I don’t think back then it would have happened because people had better etiquette than that. But if it did, they wouldn’t have had it. They’d have said no. And it would end up, someone would end up calling the game wardens, and the game wardens would have had to come in there and settle it because people didn’t see eye to eye. And I don’t mean to sound like a broken record or like a grumpy old pawpaw.
Ramsey Russell: But everything was different back then, at the same time.
Bryce Decker: It was, everything was. That’s not just in the woods. Our society was different back then.
Ramsey Russell: What were some of the reasons that generation, the boys you hunted with, what were some of the reasons they felt like you all might hit a slow stretch? Where were the ducks? Where the hell were the ducks? Why weren’t the ducks coming? Why weren’t they killing ducks? What were some of their conspiracies or some of their thoughts and some of their conversations about the lack of ducks on certain days or certain stretches?
Bryce Decker: I remember them telling me that they went on a, and this was before I ever started hunting, they went 11 days in a row coming down river, getting out, walking down one of the levees, and then skirting off out in the woods a little ways and standing there for 11 days in a row and never seeing a duck.
Ramsey Russell: And everybody killed too many. Done killed them all. All them guys up north putting them flooded duck, flooded corn fields.
Bryce Decker: My folks didn’t go that deep into the rabbit hole. But a lot of our stuff is dependent on the water levels. And even if we got a lot of water, what will happen is, and I don’t know if they even knew this back then or if this is just kind of something that you hear of nowadays, but a lot of times when the Cache River and the White River get up too, it pulls ducks off of us. Which there was no communication between people now. Now, you know, we can kind of confirm that. I can call some buddies, because everybody knows everybody now. I can call somebody, say, hey, you all doing any good down on White River? Yeah, well, we’re not doing nothing. So it just kind of tells you that when the water starts getting up in the White or on the Cache, as it goes up, we lose more and more and more ducks.
Ramsey Russell: Ducks worldwide like new water. They like new water because it, because especially when you talk about that kind of habitat over there in the flood plains, you know, new water is new seed, new invertebrates. Like we were talking earlier today, kind of pregame, and I was telling you about having a background in forestry and wildlife, you know, specifically bottomland hardwood silviculture. And in addition to the acorns, in terms of food source, you know, those flooded bottoms have invertebrates, and the invertebrate is real good the first 30 days. But after 30 days of flooded, it just is nonexistent. But I don’t know how ducks know that 20 miles away or 400 miles away that there’s new food to exploit today.That’s why they’ve been around after millions of years. They know that stuff. You know, one time I was in Australia, and we flew into Melbourne, which is in one province, and went way down to southern Australia province because of one of the ducks in Victoria. And we shot duck for three or four days. And I got up one morning, and my hosts were all sitting around the table just having coffee and conferring about the game plan. And they said, look, we’re going to go out. Well, we ain’t gonna be long because we gotta come back, repack, and we are driving 500 miles north. I said, why? And they said, well, it rained. It rained a lot. And we feel like all the ducks gonna be gone. All the ducks gonna be gone. I said, how in the heck does a duck know it rained 500 miles from here? And they said, well, they do. You’ll see. And we went out and did not see a duck. Came back, packed, drove 500 miles, and we was back in them, son. How little ducks knew? But you’re right. You know, new water, when fresh water jumps out of banks, them birds know. They freaking know there’s new habitat somewhere, and it pulls them in. That’s how they live. That’s how they make their living. But your people seemed smart enough to kind of understand the ebbs and flows of why they may be leaning up in their fate next to their favorite tree for 11 days straight and there not be ducks like normal.
Bryce Decker: I was never once told that you’re supposed to kill ducks every day. It comes and goes. It ebbs and flows. You’re just not supposed to kill them every day. That’s killing, not hunting. And it seems like everybody tries to stay on them. We talked earlier about shooting the raft and busting the raft. Everybody today, that seems to be a very common tactic. And 30 years ago, that style of hunting was a huge slap in the face to all the guys that did grind it out in the same spots and knew that if they pushed these ducks out of the woods, it would be bad. If it got bad, then it was because the conditions were just bad. It wasn’t because everybody and their brother was pushing ducks out of the woods and trying to stay right on top of the roost every day and killing, wanting to kill 90 or 100 ducks every day. It was because there just wasn’t ducks around. They were somewhere else. It was bad weather. It was too windy. It was too cloudy. It was storming. You know, there was always an environmental reason why people weren’t killing ducks then.

Ramsey Russell: What did hunting pressure seem like back in the woods when you all was hunting Broke Leg?
Bryce Decker: If there was 10 trucks at the boat ramp, my folks would have been throwing a fit. And now there’s 200.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. 200 trucks.
Bryce Decker: I believe there was over 200 trucks at one of the ramps opening day this year.
Ramsey Russell: You know, it’s funny you say it, because somebody told me that the opener this year in Arkansas, two or three days before the season opened, their trucks began to park and camp out on the side of the road.
Bryce Decker: Yeah. The Game and Fish Commission is trying to put a stop to that. There’s no sense of it. The same old holes that kill them every opening day, kill them every year. The same old places that kill ducks. It’s the same old shooting holes that’s always been good, are still good. There’s really no need. Once you’ve figured out a few little things and a few little patterns, there’s no need to be in them woods all the time and camping out at ramps and just putting even more pressure on the place. There’s no need of it. The same places always shoot ducks depending on the wind, the weather, the water, and the conditions.
Ramsey Russell: Do you remember your first duck, Bryce?
Bryce Decker: I do. My first few ducks were from a really good water swat.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Bryce Decker: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: They lighted them into the hole and told the kid to shoot?
Bryce Decker: They worked and lit a big group right outside of the hole and on our end. And my grandpa handed me that 11-48, turned me around and hung onto my wader straps. It was about up to my chest, so I was almost floating. And he had a hold of me and said, “All right, line up a couple of them heads and pull the trigger.” And I did. And I think I killed, I don’t know. There was three or four laying there dead. And boy, that was it. That was it.
Ramsey Russell: Was he proud of you?
Bryce Decker: He was. And he grabbed that gun from me real quick after he seen me do that, so I wouldn’t keep shooting too.
Ramsey Russell: You look back all these years, and if there was one thing your granddaddy taught you about duck hunting or about anything else in the duck woods, what would it have been? What was the one indelible life lesson your granddaddy or his friend imparted on you as a human being and as a duck hunter?
Bryce Decker: Probably to respect the resource. I mean, the Good Lord gave us these woods, the Good Lord gave us these ducks. The Good Lord gave us the ability to go in there and hunt them and to interact with these wild animals. And for us to completely wrap ourselves up with just destroying and killing and going in there like we do would have been a slap in the face to them. I think we should respect this resource more. And a lot of people do. A lot of the old heads that used to, and I used to be aggressive too, whenever I was a kid. We’re all young and full of moxie. But he would have wanted people to just respect the resource, respect the fact that the Good Lord has blessed us with such an amazing place and amazing places all over the state, all over the country, and all over the world.
Ramsey Russell: Well, did he say that? Did he say that verbatim? Is that something you all talked about while you all were sitting in the boat or something you all talked about while you all were plucking ducks? I mean,  how did those life lessons come to you?
Bryce Decker: Not in particular, but it was just the way that they carried themselves. Like I was saying earlier, you know, if they saw a big group of ducks piling into the woods at 9 or 10 o’clock, and we only lacked two or three ducks, instead of shooting and running that whole raft off, that whole big wad of ducks off, we’d pack up and go. We’d show up to the boat ramp shy a few ducks, so that way we could do it again in the morning. We didn’t just take everything that we could possibly take in the time that we had. It was their actions that spoke, and a lot of these rules and these customs and habits are unspoken, and there was just such a different mentality among the men back then than there is now.
Ramsey Russell: Was that generation, were they Greenhead purists?
Bryce Decker: Yeah, mainly, yeah, they were.
Ramsey Russell: They targeted Greenhead, didn’t they?
Bryce Decker: Yep. Yep, they did.
Ramsey Russell: They ever shoot hens?
Bryce Decker: Very rarely. If we were shooting into a big wad that came in, you know, there’d be a few hens get killed from time to time, but they tried not to.
Ramsey Russell: What about wood ducks? I was talking to somebody recently that was telling me that, and I remembered a very few times wood ducks back in the same period of time that you was a little boy hunting with your granddaddy. I was hunting Arkansas public too, with a great group of men and boys that I would consider influencers in my life. I don’t mean this modern-day influencer. I mean people that profoundly influenced the direction of my life took in duck hunting. And if wood ducks came by, they got it. We cracked at them. I mean, you know, who wouldn’t? But somebody was telling me just the other day that there’s like this unwritten taboo that as crowded as them woods are today, you don’t shoot at wood ducks. Boy, that’s a no-no.
Bryce Decker: It was a no-no back then.
Ramsey Russell: It was? Okay, so that’s a long, just like shooting Greenheads. That’s a long-standing etiquette of sorts in Arkansas public, don’t shoot at wood ducks.
Bryce Decker: Well, what happens is that your wood duck flight and your prime mallard flight happen real early most the time, right at the same time. So whenever you’re pop-shooting, first of all, you’re not decoying wood ducks. You’re not calling wood ducks. You’re being an opportunist. When this is all public ground speaking. I’m not speaking on anything else. You’re being an opportunist, and you’re shooting these woodies buzzing the trees. And every time you pull the trigger on a woody, you are blowing someone else’s group of ducks out of the woods. And back in a day people would cooperate to an extent. If we were in a hole and the Hoggard boys were out there 400 yards working a group of ducks and we saw them on the swing and we didn’t have nothing going on, we’d shut up and let them have their ducks. And then if the same thing happened later on with us later on in the day, they’d shut up and they’d let us have our ducks and of course it wasn’t always like that, but a lot of times it was. And yeah, shooting a wood duck early in the morning, which is typically the only time you see them here in my part of the woods, you’re more than likely messing up a group of big ducks somewhere for somebody.
Ramsey Russell: I gotta tell this story. I was a hunter, but I was new to duck hunting. Really real, what we think of as duck hunting, what everybody listening thinks of as duck hunting. When I went with my buddy, one of my fraternity brothers, over to Arkansas, the limit was two. So it’d been the mid to late 1990s. And we fell in with the, you know, they were the patriarch. He was former chief of police, West Helena, Arkansas, and he was the ringleader of the bunch. We stayed in a little old cabin that had a watermark halfway up, four foot on the walls on the inside, the watermark from flooding and whatnot. But we stayed there and got up in the morning, off we go to the woods. And man, that old man knew the back of them woods. He described to me, because I asked him one time how he knew the woods so well. It was big Arkansas public, federal and state. And he’d been hunting, you know, born and raised right there. He squirrel hunted barefoot as a little boy, squirrel hunting since he was a child. And you know, he knew just when to slow down the boats and we had to get out and walk it across the ridge and get back in. I mean, he just knew his way through all them thickets to get back to whatever little duck hole he thought we was going to try that morning. But anyway, we got in there the first morning. Daylight come and went. I didn’t even own a duck call. Them boys were calling and there directly a flock of mallards pitched in. And I’ll never, ever, ever forget it. It was the first time in my life, and I ain’t never forgotten it, when the ducks worked once or twice and just pitched over the side into the wind and come spilling in the hole like somebody was tossing Yahtzee dice on the table. And up I come, boy. And he was such a nice guy, Mr. Boyd was. He’s like, “Now, son, we don’t shoot till I call the shot.” “Yes, sir. Yes, sir, Mr. Boyd.” And there directly, sometime in the morning, the next body came in, and I up and boomed again. And this time, boy, he got stern. It was like Opie done messed up. He got that real, real stern, serious Andy Griffith look about him. And more than just telling me, you know, I was a grown man technically, but more than just being ugly, I was sitting in his boat and the water’s too deep to get out. He explained why I didn’t shoot. And the way he explained it was it was a tight hole. I mean, I’m gonna say it was 25 yards, maybe 30 yards across. And he said, “Son, Ray Charles can shoot a duck in this duck hole.” He said, “You close your eyes and pull the trigger when the ducks come in like that and kill a duck.” He said, “That ain’t the game. We want to own them. You hear us calling, and you watch them. You just watch and watch those beautiful birds come in and watch them light and watch them flapping, listen to them quack and watch them splash. And we want them to land because when they’re landed, we own them. And that is the essence of what we do.” And then what they would do is, you know, when the bird got up to fly or when he called a child’s name or a young guy’s name, and somebody got the first crack, and somebody moved, and up the ducks go, and we all picked the drakes and boom, boom, boom, ba-boom, and we got them. And I’ve just never forgotten, they wanted to own those ducks. And, you know, back in those days, you could. Can you still do that kind of stuff? Or are the woods so crowded you can’t do that anymore?

Bryce Decker: You can do it at times, but it’s few and far between. It used to be a man every couple days. Used to, you’d land just a group of hundreds.

Ramsey Russell: Fill the duck hole up, they still come.

Bryce Decker: Fill it up, they’re swimming around you. I’ve seen them knock people’s hats off. I’ve seen them land in a boat. I’ve seen them hit tree limbs. I’ve seen them hurt or cripple themselves coming into the woods before, and you don’t see it much anymore. You work a lot of smaller groups, ones and twos. Right now, it’s just. It’s absolutely dead. You’re lucky if you put down a group of six or seven right now. But it just, putting big groups down used to be the norm. That was why you went. Whether you came to the ramp with full limits or not was kind of irrelevant. I mean, they wanted to eat them. They wanted to make, you know, kill enough ducks every year to make pillows and feather beds. And, you know, they utilized a lot of the duck back then, but it was about calling those ducks to the water. And it was about. It was almost a religious experience to them. They were interacting with something wild. They were communicating with them. They were putting them down in the water. You know, the water fowling is a hostile environment. And we’re not probably naturally supposed to be waist-deep in water in the middle of December out in the bottoms like that just, humans ain’t supposed to be there, and we are. So it’s such a magical and wonderful experience and such a blessing from God to be able to do this. And they. It was just about the interaction and about the experience and being there with those ducks and the interaction with them.

Ramsey Russell: Ironically, I can remember. I guess I hunted with him, Boyd, about three or four years before we just fell out of everybody’s orbit. But I never will forget that first morning. And I never will forget the very last flock of ducks ever on that third or fourth year. I hunted with them boys the very first. And then my buddy’s daddy passed that year. But I never will forget. The wind had slightly shifted, and it was again a tight hole. The wind had slightly shifted, and we were close enough to a limit. It just wasn’t worth getting out and moving the decoys, right? And a flock of mallards come working around. And I had a duck call by then, but I wasn’t blowing, not with him been around and we worked and worked and worked and they came in. They kind of tried to pitch over but got back up. We called them back, pitched over, because the wind was wrong where the decoys were. And finally, on about the third or fourth pass, they got downwind of us and fell in through the treetops, but not in the hole, and then came out of the trees and coasted across our decoy hole, across our hole, eyeball level. We’re all sitting in John boats, water too deep to get out, and they’re eyeball level. And some of them kind of pitched and fluttered like moths by light. And some of them kind of went. And some of them landed maybe, but the rest of them didn’t. And after a spell, they just picked up and evaporated just where they came from. And you could have heard a pin drop. And we all started looking at each other and laughing, it’s like it was so beautiful with all the sunshine out hitting all them birds and that live spectacle in front of us that nobody, the boys like Mr. Boyd that’s supposed to say, “Take them”, never did. And the boys like me never shot, never jumped ranks. We all just watched. And that was the last flock of ducks that I ever shared with them guys. And it was so beautiful, but nobody ever fired a shot. We may have left with a duck or two shy of the limit, but it didn’t matter.

Bryce Decker: Sometimes you don’t need to shoot. Sometimes it ain’t about that at all, man.

Ramsey Russell: It was just something. There’ve been flocks that were so spellbinding that we just enjoyed it.

Bryce Decker: It can be spiritual. It should be a spiritual experience at times. It should be a big deal, and more people should have opportunities to see it and experience it. I feel so sorry for some of these younger guys and some of these other fellows because they’re not ever going to experience the magic of it.

Ramsey Russell: When did things change from the good old days? Let me put this kind of on a timeline. Like, I’m assuming your granddad’s not still around, or is he?

Bryce Decker: No, sir, he ain’t. None of the old men that I hunted with are alive.

Ramsey Russell: Did they age out before they passed?

Bryce Decker: Yeah, they did. There were still some guys that I knew and hunted with regularly that kept hunting after my folks all aged out. But yeah, all the people that I was in the woods with regularly, they all just got too old to go.

Ramsey Russell: What was it about your granddad? He just quit going? Did his health fail? Did he just not care no more? Was it just too much work for an old guy?

Bryce Decker: It was hard on him. It got hard on all of them. We went from hunting the woods a lot to the river a lot.

Ramsey Russell: What happened up in the woods?

Bryce Decker: It was just harder for them to go to the woods than it was to just drive down there and set up in an eddy in a river. So, you know, they’d have to get down there and pull over the levee or if we had slough boats on the other side of the levee, we had to haul all of our gear up that steep, slippery bank. They all smoked them big 2-foot long Winston cigarettes, so they all had emphysema and everything else. And it just got hard on them, man. And so we got to where we hunted the river a lot. We’d go way downriver and hunt an eddy that they used to have a houseboat in. We’d hunt that eddy. We’d throw out, back when we could leave decoys out, we left decoys in. That’s one of the places we left decoys in. And we’d go down there, and they’d park the boat and either stay in the boat or they’d get out and stand by a tree on a riverbank. And a lot of times they’d never even leave the boat. They’d cover it up with burlap and tie both ends off to a tree out there and hide the best they could. And that’s how they hunted when they got older.

Ramsey Russell: Bryce, Is that part of the reason they quit throwing decoys? They didn’t feel like pulling them in? Or they just realized they didn’t need them?

Bryce Decker: Well, we could leave decoys out all season then.

Ramsey Russell: okay.

Bryce Decker: And they would leave them. One of those places that we would leave decoys at all season was in a big eddy way downriver from where we put in. But that just happened to be the place that they went to the most after they quit being able to go to the woods so much. It was real handy just to go downriver and not have to do anything, get out of your boat or stay in your boat and kill ducks and drive back to the boat ramp.

Ramsey Russell: When did those good old days you describe, hunting with your granddaddy and all, when and how is it different now? When did it start to change? When did things change?

Bryce Decker: I’d say the biggest change was when Robo Duck came around.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Bryce Decker: I would say so in my neck of the woods.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve heard that before. But as a fan, I mean, no doubt about it, I love them. But honestly, what is it about the Mojo that puts us on a timeline? Was it the decoy itself? Or did it just create some form of access to where non-woodsmen, let’s say, could go in and hunt a marginal spot and kill them? I mean, what specifically was it about?

Bryce Decker: There were multiple things. After everybody saw how effective they were, especially the first year, it brought a lot of people into the woods that otherwise probably would have never even been duck hunters. They’re like, “Man, we can get one of these deals and go out there and set it up and just murder ducks.” And the first year, it was just unreal. It was absolutely unreal how ducks responded to it. And there were comments made by some of the older guys. “You know, this is a game changer. Ain’t gonna be good.”

Ramsey Russell: But it really wasn’t so much the technology as it was that the technology gave a lot of people that weren’t really in the woods and didn’t know how to get around the woods and didn’t know how to call ducks in the woods, it all of a sudden gave them a fast pass to success.

Bryce Decker: It did. And in turn, it brought more people into the sport, which is a good thing.

Ramsey Russell: Well, more people into the woods, it sounds like.

Bryce Decker: And it did. And, you know, to the detriment of the ducks. But it made your average Joe able to really kill them. And it made it to where you didn’t have to know the woods as good. You didn’t have to be. All this technology, which is good, I utilize a lot of it myself. But it has really taken over what used to be just common sense, woodsman skills, things you would learn through trials and tribulations and hardships out in the woods. You used to have to be tough to be a waterfowler. It used to hurt. You know, being a duck hunter hurt. It wasn’t fun a lot of the times. So there was a certain caliber of guy that was out there all the time. And now it’s easy. You can buy a butane heater to take with you. You can cook out there. You’ve got the latest and greatest clothes. You never have to worry about getting cold. If you do, you can click a button and turn on your battery-powered jacket and gloves. And you know, we’re spoiled. And it’s good. I’m getting old. I enjoy a lot of my modern conveniences. I’m becoming one of the older guys in the woods these days. There’s not any 60 or 70-year-old guys in there anymore. An old man’s 40 to 50 nowadays.

Ramsey Russell: Well, Is that period of time in the, I guess, late 1990s, early 2000s, when the spinning wing decoy became prevalent, is that, if you had to look at the timeline between, let’s just say the mid-1980s and then the 1990s, when you come along, your granddaddy’s out there, then bam, all of a sudden something changed. You know, you’re describing back in those good old days, your granddaddy had three or four holes. Some of the folk men he knew at the boat ramp, them five or six, seven, eight, nine other cars had their own duck holes, outfitters had their own holes. And everybody just went to their spot, they went to their corner of the woods. Is that when the shit hit the fan, so to speak, was about, was when this, on a timeline, around 2000, when the spinning wing technology came out. Is that when you would say all of a sudden instead of seeing 10 trucks, you saw 20, 30, 40, 50?

Bryce Decker: I would say the robo duck. Yeah, it did that. And then again in probably 2010, whenever, 10, 11, 12, right in there. I’m terrible with dates. The Game and Fish Commission kind of blanket ruled all the WMAs in Arkansas, and they made everybody a 4 a.m. take off. Nobody was allowed to leave decoys out. They destroyed all the blinds on the public land, so no one could have blinds anymore. In the couple places they allowed that before, like they pretty much just centralized all the rules and regulations to apply to everybody. And of course, there were a lot of people at the time that didn’t live up here, or you know, non-locals to these WMAs, like the Big Lake guys had their blinds, and all the non-locals were unhappy that they could kind of claim stake to a place through that blind. And they were kind of unhappy that we could claim stake to a place through the use of leaving our decoys out all season. But you know, that’s what made those places special. And I went over to Big Lake and hunted some, and hunted the blinds when no one was in them. And yeah, it was not cool. And we’d go in and have nowhere to go because all the normal guys were in their blinds. But when you got in there, man, it was such an experience, and everybody should still be able to go up there and sit in one of them big, nice blinds and be able to kill a few ducks out of it. That was so special. And some of the things that we had here were so special. And it might have been an inconvenience for people who weren’t local, but there were a lot more ducks in the woods. Everybody killed more ducks consistently.

Ramsey Russell: Sound like there was a lot more ducks in the woods, but it sounds like there was a lot fewer people in the woods.

Bryce Decker: Yeah, I mean, you can either have one or the other. You can have a bunch of people in the woods, or you can have a bunch of ducks in the woods. You can’t have both. We as hunters should be treating our public ground like the owners, since we are the owners of this ground. We should be treating it like, in my opinion, like these big private landowners treat their woods. We should try to have a low impact. We should try to have a small footprint. We should try to maximize opportunities for ourselves and our fellow man, because we’re all out there together. We’ve all been gifted and blessed with these spots. We should all take care of them. We should all respect them and try to hunt them and operate within them sustainably. And that’s my biggest message. If I’m never known for anything else in life, I want people to know that I wanted to see a return to public land stewardship.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I’ve often said that, and believe that the best future for hunting lies in its past.

Bryce Decker: It does.

Ramsey Russell: And I just returned from a pretty epic trip over in the United Kingdom. And to put it in perspective, the United Kingdom is comprised of England, Wales, Scotland, and part of Ireland. And the entire United Kingdom is twice the size of Mississippi. And it was mind-blowing. And I’m still not far enough away from it. A lot of stuff I’ve seen and experienced and thought about and talked about with folks has kind of bloomed, kind of taken root. I’m still in the let-it-sink-in phase. But you know, I met with a game manager, biologist over there that described not as a landscape, but as a manscape. He said, literally, for thousands of years people have inhabited the United Kingdom, and every square foot’s been touched and changed, every square foot of it. And still, it is a lot of private land. It’s very, very little public land. It’s what they call the foreshore, which is kind of between the marsh and the water itself. It’s the tidal land, that’s kind of what all the public, so it’s a lot of private land type stuff. Yeah. But we just had some real good conversations over there about changes, and about hunting pressure, and some different stuff like that that just really, in light of a lot of this conversation here. But like, for example, they don’t have bag limits. They don’t have shooting hours. And you would think that there are people going to the blind, I mean, you would think, being from America and talking about a lot of the stuff we’re talking about tonight, people go to their blind and shoot every duck on Earth. But they don’t. It’s like they abide. But the biggest change I saw is that, given the opportunity, there’s no bag limits. There’s no species limits. You can shoot all the mallards and all the pintails and all the gadwalls and all the green wings and all the widgeons and all the anything else you need, because there’s no bag limits. And yet men will go out and shoot two or three or four birds and pick up and go to eat breakfast and not even think about it.

Bryce Decker: Wouldn’t it be nice if the average American hunter was that responsible?

Ramsey Russell: We were hunting one evening, we were moonlighting geese. And we set the date for that trip based on full moon so that we could go out and, what they call flighting under moonlight, shoot geese under moonlight. And we got out there, and there were some game farm mallards around. They let us shoot a few of them. And then we waited and waited, a couple hours go by and boy, let me tell you what, son, that’s real damp. It’s a real damp, real damp air. And you put a 15-, 20-mile-an-hour breeze like you want to making birds behave, it was cold. I’m sitting there two hours into it, the moon’s getting higher and higher, and I’m thinking to myself, this ain’t gonna work. And I’ll be doggone if once the first bunch of geese come into the decoys, 20 minutes later, we had four, five or six apiece, you know, and was picking up. And I remember asking, talking to some of the hosts about it, well, why do you stop at this number, if it’s no bag limit? And they just kind of said, “Well, it’s enough, isn’t it?” I go, yeah, plenty. But I’m just curious. I mean, you can shoot all you want to. Why stop at four or five, you know? And if you didn’t get your limit, they were still backing out at 9 o’clock at night. And why then? And it’s like, “Well, why not? We gave it a try.”

Bryce Decker: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And I mean, you see how different that is.

Bryce Decker: That’s impressive that they have real different.

Ramsey Russell: Real different because what they said is, you know, and I kept hearing this theme over and over and over a period of eight days, whether I’m deer hunting or, because over there, shooting some of those deer, they got no bag limit. You shoot all the little muntjacs and all the little Chinese water deer all you want. All you want, shoot them all, nobody gonna stop you. It’s on private land now. But the current thing was, because we’re the custodians, they have given us, the hunter, the custodial responsibility to do the right thing. And we do. Oh my God. I mean, it’s like, yeah, you know, it is impressive. And we know. And I got asked a lot. We did go on a driven woodcock shoot, which was the funnest thing I’d never heard of. I mean, it was the highlight of my trip. I never saw that coming. And some of the boys out there were wearing kind of the short woollen, what they call plus-fours, kind of like short pants that come about 4 inches below your knee and you pull a big wool sock on, put on a rubber boot. And some of them were wearing ties with like a woollen blazer that was very, it looked stylish, buddy. And they looked sharper than the last wedding or funeral I went to, I can tell you. We got a discussion about it one time because they, man, they didn’t mind me coming in with my old Tom Betby wax cotton. My old 20-something-year-old wax cotton pants, which they were impressed with. But it really was, it’s not about putting on airs. Number one, that outfit they’re wearing is extremely well suited for the hunt we were doing. I’m not talking about the tie, talking about the length of them pants with them rubber boots. Because one thing is we did have to walk through some deep mud and water to get to some of these fields. And it’s like, you know, man, below my knee on my pants was just muddy nasty, that needed brushing off and cleaning before I packed them back up. They didn’t get nothing wet but the dirt. It had a lot more movement. They were warm when it rained because of the wool they were wearing, yada yada. But in terms of the dressy appearance. One of them kind of described it, you know, the decorum is just, it is a formal occasion of sorts, because it’s a respect for the hunt. It’s a respect for our host. It’s a respect for the resource. I’m like, God dawg, man. I mean, that’s just, it ain’t like you’re just getting dressed up because you can. It’s like this show of respect. And I was reminded of looking at some pictures of old Nash Buckingham, the venerable old Deep South duck hunter, Nash Buckingham. And if you look at some of those photos at Beaver Dam Club that he was hunting back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, when he was in college or high school or whatever, if you look at those photos of them sitting at Beaver Dam Lodge, every single one of them is wearing a tie. Isn’t that funny? I’m getting along this line of respect. So along them lines, you know, people are different, people dress different, whatever. I’m not trying to get into that. I’m just saying, you know, throughout this conversation, you have brought up the word respect, respect, you know, and you got respect for others, self-respect, respect for the resource, respect for the land, respect for the management. And I do see as I get older and become more and more like that grumpy old man that was my grandfather with a grandkid with long hair and listening to that old heavy rock music, stuff like that, that Lawrence Welk, I mean, I do. I perceive a growing lack of respect for self, for others, for land, for resources. The older I get, I see that in a younger generation that I don’t feel like has always existed.

Bryce Decker: Everybody needs to be able to enjoy these resources that we have. Everybody needs to be able to witness the things that I was blessed enough to witness whenever I was a child and growing up. And I still see amazing things today. We still do good. Arkansas still has probably the best duck hunt in the world.

Ramsey Russell: Arkansas, statistically, Arkansas still kills half the number of ducks killed in the entire Mississippi Flyway.

Bryce Decker: So with all that said, you know, it could be with just a few little steps and just a few little adjustments, things that everybody could do on their own, man, everybody could. And it breaks my heart that a lot of these younger guys are using methods that are, they’re fun. I used to do it, you know, but it’s so aggressive, and it’s so disrespectful to the resource, shooting raft ducks and shooting freeze ducks.

Ramsey Russell: And before we get into that, I’m going to ask you this question. Have you ever seen the boat race? Everybody, even the folks over in England, every country I’ve ever been to, let me say this again, every single country outside of America I’ve ever been to, every single country on Earth has seen on YouTube the boat races. And you all know what I mean. Have you ever seen or experienced that?

Bryce Decker: Oh yeah, I have. The Game and Fish has pretty much cut that out. They’ve installed buoys and kind of, and gates and everything for people to go through one at a time. And they’ll stage another officer down, you know, on down the levee or on down the ditch or whatever and make sure you’re not passing each other. And even, I would say, a lot of hunters on their own have kind of adopted a more safety-first mind-set than they used to have. It’s not near as, as far as the boat racing and stuff goes, it’s not near as cutthroat. But, you know, we get a lot of campers, people camping on the riverbanks, people camping at the boat ramps and stuff like that. And that kind of, as silly as it is, it kind of cuts down on all the aggressiveness at 4 a.m. because there’s already people there. They’ve already been in line.

Ramsey Russell: Have you ever seen dog cussing’s or fistfights or cut tires or anything like that?

Bryce Decker: All of the above, man. I’ve seen it all. I’ve been here my whole life. I’ve seen it all.

Ramsey Russell: You didn’t see that back in your granddaddy’s day.

Bryce Decker: Yeah, well, you didn’t see the petty stuff. And back then, you know, there wasn’t Facebook and Instagram, and you didn’t know everybody in the woods. You did know the people that had their decoys out all the time. Like, you knew the local people. You knew the people from Pocahontas or Noble or Corning or wherever it may be here in my area, Paragould. And if you had tissue, it might spill over to business. You know, you might have someone say, “Hey, you know, if you all keep shooting my swing ducks, I ain’t gonna never, I’ll never sell you a car again.” Or, “I’ll fire you. I’ll fire your nephew from the farm,” or whatever it would have been. You know, everybody knew each other personally, locally, and there wasn’t a lot of out-of-town and out-of-state riffraff, which is a whole another topic.

Ramsey Russell: Well, that was gonna be another question though. A lot of these problems you’re seeing, a lot of this Arkansas public land, these changes. How many folks you say in a duck hole? 110 folks in a duck hole?

Bryce Decker: There was that. Yeah, I was in a hole a couple years back. 110 people walked into it to try to hunt.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. 110 people in a duck hole. 200 trucks at the boat ramp. Folks camping out, I know they just trying to get there early. But you know, to somebody that’s got to drive two or three or four hours to get there too, I mean, I can understand camping out. I sleep in my truck all the time. But are a lot of these problems you’re seeing, are they being generated by out-of-state hunters or in-state hunters?

Bryce Decker: It’s just a culture thing at this point.

Ramsey Russell: It’s all the same.

Bryce Decker: Well, I mean, as far as you got to think of our history here, and I’m not out to insult anyone. I’m not out to make anybody mad or anything. I am out to make people think. And if I can do that, then I’ll consider coming here to be a victory, if I can just get people to think. I would say to a degree, people brought it because none of us ever really went down and hunted Biomeda or any of these other WMA’s that had different rules. We just hunted here. And your people at Big Lake, for the most part, they hunted there. And your people at Bayameda, they typically hunted there. They might go up to White River or wherever else, but like, people just didn’t travel around near as much. You’d have a few out-of-staters from here and there. When everybody started mingling amongst each other and the social media came about and everybody started kind of popularizing the techniques that were made popular by people that made a living at duck hunting. Your average Joe was using these aggressive techniques that were kind of formed by people who depended on duck hunting for a living. That’s when it started kind of crumbling. We got a lot of resources in the state, we got a lot of ducks in the state, but we don’t have enough to sustain everybody hunting like that. We just don’t. And the more people that come and the more people that don’t respect the resource and the more people that try to stay on the raft, the more people that shoot and bust the raft scouting.

Ramsey Russell: You keep talking about shoot the raft, shoot the raft.

Bryce Decker: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: What is shooting the raft? That’s a term I’m not familiar with. Let’s get into. What is shoot the raft?

Bryce Decker: Shoot the raft would be to hunt right in the middle of where you know a large concentration of ducks is using. Busting the raft is when you’re, you.

Ramsey Russell: Got a multi-thousand-acre WMA and them ducks are rafted somewhere for some reason.

Bryce Decker: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: I mean the number one thing in duck hunting is be where the ducks want to be now Bryce, what are we talking about here?

Bryce Decker: Well, that’s fine and dandy if you do it responsibly. But do you think that, how many of these private club owners are going to go hunt in the middle of the rest area every day or gonna hunt? And how many of these private guys are gonna hunt their own land where they go set up right in the middle exactly where every duck on that property wants to be? None of them, because they know it’s not sustainable.

Ramsey Russell: Now just the same thing is what I see too often times, on social media where somebody, and they’re never quiet. They’re always whooping and hollering like they just won the lottery. But they in a boat usually with a loud, loud, loud non-outboard motor on back and they usually got lights out front and they whooping through the woods or whooping through the field. And every duck in the universe is getting up in front of and they filming it. Is that what you talking about going just plowing through that isolated raft of birds?

Bryce Decker: Yeah, that’s what we would call busting the raft. And shooting the raft is actually hunting right in the middle of all that and spooking them all off. Yeah, it’s the same concept. If you’re hunting an area that ducks are really wanting to use in large concentrations, the only logical thing to do would be to hunt away from those ducks enough to where they’ll stay in the area. But you can still kill some and you can do it day in and day out, but no one has the self-control or the discipline to do that anymore. And it’s feast or famine hunting. You’re either going to kill them in 30–45 minutes first thing in the morning or you’re not going to fire a shot. It’s tough hunting like that. But everybody wants to be known for duck hunting. Everybody wants to get the attention on social media and, whether we admit it or not, a lot of that attention-seeking and wanting to get good stuff on film and wanting to make a name for yourself and wanting to compete with all these other people that we see, it drives a lot of this. And selling stuff. If you’re in the hunting industry, I’m in the hunting industry selling stuff. You want to get good footage, and I struggle with that. I try not. I don’t post any hunts.

Ramsey Russell: I noticed that.

Bryce Decker: I try not to post a whole lot of hunting pictures unless it’s. I like posting hunting pictures of the hunt. My friends, my dog when I had him, my children, my friends, my family, the beauty. But as far as just posting a bunch of piles of dead ducks, I’m not super big on that. I got to let people know I kill a few from time to time to be able to sell a product, but I try not to sell out my principles for it and the things that I was taught for money. Landing these big groups of ducks and being able to experience that with my friends and my family and being blessed with the area that I’m in is a lot more important to me than a dollar bill will ever be.

Ramsey Russell: A lot of questions I got right here. We’re talking about shoot giraffe. And the back in your granddaddy’s era. You talking about the WMAs would let them go in and do a little light management around their spots?

Bryce Decker: Yeah, they still do.

Ramsey Russell: How has WMA management changed at all then and now?

Bryce Decker: Yeah, we duck hunters are can be a rowdy bunch. And I think we’ve just caused such a ruckus at times and been irresponsible with the resource enough to where the Game and Fish is kind of trying to take over everything. They would go up there and mulch the runs, and they would do this and that, and everybody complained about that.

Ramsey Russell: Well, if there wasn’t all them rules and there wasn’t all them changes and the WMA managers weren’t trying to be quote a daddy unquote to a bunch of unruly children, I guess them boat races would still be around. I guess it could be completely out of control if the states weren’t trying to be some form of police measure and keep some sanity about it.

Bryce Decker: If we don’t regulate ourselves, then the government is going to come in and do it for us. And the bad thing about that is that none of the people that are going to force regulations on us are in these woods, are seeing what we’re seeing, are experiencing what we’re experiencing. They’re not as knowledgeable about it as we are, and they really don’t take care of this land and these resources like we should. It’s our land. We pay for it. We should respect it. We should take care of it because the government is not very efficient or thorough when it comes to doing things like this, especially as of late. We should, as public land hunters who have our money and our time invested in this, be the primary stewards of this land. And we’re not doing a very good job of it at this point.

Ramsey Russell: You said, you’ve seen some fights before with the boat ramp. You ever had to be in one or get out of one.

Bryce Decker: I’m pretty fortunate. I’m a fairly large guy. I try to get along with everybody. I’m very opinionated and I like to talk about things, but I don’t have any ill will towards anyone. I genuinely love people and care about people, and I want everybody to enjoy the best of this duck hunting that we have. I don’t wish people to go hunting and not fire a shot. I don’t wish harm on anyone. And I didn’t always feel exactly like this. We were all young and full of moxie at one point. But the older I get, the more passionate I get about it. Everyone that’s out here, instead of fighting and fussing and trying to outdo each other, we should all work together and make this good for our children, our grandchildren, and cooperate with each other. Show some respect to the resource. You cannot just go into these woods every day trying to kill everything in sight and then just leave it for a year to be forgotten. You’ve got to take care of this stuff. You’ve got to stay off the raft a little bit. We keep talking about the raft. Stay off the raft and don’t push these ducks out. Don’t set up, and then you’ve got your normal etiquette. Don’t set up too close to people, don’t sky bust, don’t shoot swing ducks, this, that, and the other. But at this point, I would say everything is pretty manageable in these woods, except for the pressure. That’s where it’s out of hand these days. Everything else is pretty doable.

Ramsey Russell: Are the woods open all season long, every day?

Bryce Decker: We have splits. We’ll have about an 8 or 9 day split there at the first of season after 10 days or so.

Ramsey Russell: If on all 60 days that the Arkansas duck season is open, those woods are open until about 2 o’clock or something?

Bryce Decker: You got to be done and off the water. You’re supposed to be done and off the water at noon.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, circle back and talk about this 110-man shoot you went on. Tell me. I want to hear blow-for-blow. Who was first in the hole? Were you the first in the hole?

Bryce Decker: My group of guys was.

Ramsey Russell: What time you all get there. If you can open up at 4 o’clock, about what time did you all come rolling in?

Bryce Decker: I don’t know when the first person was on the bank, but I showed up after time to run in. We had a guy run in for everybody, and he got there first. He was standing by a tree. And then here comes some other cat from another direction and got out in the middle hole and threw a decoy out. Said, oh, we were here first. You got to have a decoy out. You got to have a decoy out or whatever it was. And it’s such a long and miserable, muddy, stobby, nasty walk back here. Once you get there, you really don’t want to have to walk back out. So basically, everybody that walked in just refused to leave. They’re like, no, we’re not walking back out. There’s nowhere else to go. Which there probably wasn’t in that area. There’s only so many holes.

Ramsey Russell: That wasn’t like the first time you’ve had to share a duck hole, is it?

Bryce Decker: No, I’ve shared a duck hole a bunch, but that was by far the most ridiculous hunt I’ve ever been on.

Ramsey Russell: Was it opening day?

Bryce Decker: It was an opener. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Well, tell me. I want to hear this. I want to hear it described. I want to hear what it’s like, you and your four or five or whatever buddies, you all are in a duck hole. Here comes another group. What’s it like to share a duck hole with 10 or 15 other people? And what’s it like sharing a duck hole with 110 people? Tell me about this now, Bryce. How the heck do you hide 110 people?

Bryce Decker: You don’t. Man, I hunt a lot by myself, and I typically don’t hunt over three or four people. I got one other buddy that goes a lot, my buddy Anthony and his son Drew, and then my son Lucas, and my little girl Audrey will go some if it’s not too cold. And man, a lot of times it’s just us four. And it’s hard to stay under enough ducks nowadays to kill four limits of ducks consistently. But that just ended up kind of being how it is with our little hunting crew. I’ll hunt with other people some. And every now and then we’ll all get, four or five groups of guys together for a really good opening day hunt and try to really shoot them real good one day. A lot of times we don’t even go back the second day, but we try to go on one good hunt. Everybody that knows each other kind of gets together and does one big party hunt.

Ramsey Russell: There’s 110 people in the hole.

Bryce Decker: Yeah, 110 people.

Ramsey Russell: Who calls a shot?

Bryce Decker: Well, we all got together that morning and one of the guys that I was buddies with, he agreed,

Ramsey Russell: I’ve been to college classes and church congregations that weren’t 110 people in attendance. How do you organize and talk to 110 people?

Bryce Decker: What we ended up doing is setting some people out back of the hole on logs. And of course, you just, you can’t hide everybody. So just sit there and be as still as they could. And what we were gonna do is, since we technically got in there first, we were gonna shoot first and then drop back and let some other guys come up front, shoot, and then drop back and just kind of rotate people in. And man, it ended up where people kind of intentionally sabotaged the hunt. There were foul attitudes there after all that. Everyone that came in after.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, I can’t imagine.
Bryce Decker: So, it was so bad that most of us, by 30 minutes or so into it, we knew it was ridiculous. We were standing on the front of our trees. I had carried in a seat with me. I put it up. I was sitting on a seat like I might as well just chill. There ain’t no need of taking this thing serious at all. We’re not gonna, it ain’t gonna happen.
Ramsey Russell: How many ducks do you think you all killed? I ended up, saw opener, the most long-awaited day of the season, and he was sharing it with 109 other people.
Bryce Decker: There wasn’t 100, I wouldn’t say there wasn’t 100 ducks killed that day. So not even a duck a person.
Ramsey Russell: And then I’ve heard these stories where a big group, 50, 60, 100 people, get in, they shoot this hole, and then for the next week my Internet feed is proliferated with this mountain of greenheads, hens on the bottom always. And those seven guys, and those seven guys, and those ten guys, and those five. And everybody just rotates in and takes turns.
Bryce Decker: Yeah, that happens a lot. The opening day and the opening of the second split. And it could be argued that I participated in it. I don’t think it’s a good way to hunt. It’s definitely not a sustainable way to hunt.
Ramsey Russell: Was there any Instagram celebrities on that 110-man shoot?
Bryce Decker: Not that I know of. We’ve got a couple people roaming around here a lot that are YouTube celebrities that like to push bad ethics and irresponsible behavior at times. But I ain’t a name dropper, so we won’t go there.
Ramsey Russell: But they out there.
Bryce Decker: Yeah, they are.
Ramsey Russell: I’ve said this, and I’m not faulting or saying nothing about nobody. I’m just saying, as an old timer myself, much closer to your granddaddy’s age than yours, I just, if it comes down to me sharing a duck hole with a circus of 100-something other people, I just yell calf rope. I’ll, by God, go to Walmart, buy me a golf club, start putting.
Bryce Decker: It ripped me for the rest of the season.
Ramsey Russell: I guess it did.
Bryce Decker: Yeah. And I understand it’s kind of a double-edged sword. Sometimes it’s nice to go in there with a bunch of your buddies and have you a real good hunt and make a big old mess. But at the same time, you can’t do that every day, and everybody doesn’t need to do that. And it’s hypocritical for me to sit here and criticize it when I’ve done it myself. But you just can’t do that every day.
Ramsey Russell: You got 110 people. When you do get a duck to break off or five ducks break off, let’s just say the biggest flock that broke off and came in anywhere near that duck hole that day was seven or eight ducks, how many people shot? How many volleys would you say there was?
Bryce Decker: I mean, you’d have 15, 20 people at the front of the line every time.
Ramsey Russell: So, 60 shots a duck.
Bryce Decker: I mean, you can do the math on that if you want to.
Ramsey Russell: That’s a bunch.
Bryce Decker: It was silly, man. It was pure silliness. It’s silly enough when you’ve got 20 or 30 in there. It’s not uncommon for it to happen on an opener or later on. And I’ve participated in it myself a few times. I’ve participated in all of it a few times. But I think there’s a certain way we should behave and act and respect these woods to be sustainable, even though I have also done things in a manner of which I criticize. I think that gives me even more right to speak on it because I’ve experienced it.
Ramsey Russell: What are some of the things you would, what are some of your suggestions for getting back to the good old days on Arkansas public?
Bryce Decker: The first thing would be for all of us guys that hunt it to get together and just do a gentleman’s on how to manage pressure. We’ve got to start treating these woods like they’re ours, which they are. We pay for them. We’ve got to start treating these ducks like a manageable resource, because they are. There’s a lot of people that manage the resource and manage it very well. And just because we’re on public ground doesn’t mean that we can’t do that. If we would stay off the raft, stay out of the woods in the evenings, let these ducks come in here and rest, you’re not gonna have them if they can’t rest. That’s the only way to get ducks to use places, give them a place where they’re not getting their asses shot off every day. So either the Game or Fish is gonna have to put more rest areas in, or we’re gonna have to say, hey, let’s stick to, one solution would be to stick to established holes. Hunt. There’s plenty of them. They’re everywhere up here. So hunt a hole. Make the best of it. Don’t run around between daylight and 9 or 10 o’clock ruining everybody else’s hunt. Stay put unless it’s an emergency. Come in quiet. We used to come in with the lights off if the moon was out enough. If we did have to go to a place and put decoys out, we weren’t beating and banging on everything. We were being quiet. Everybody needs to try to reduce their footprint and have a lower impact and think ahead. It sounds to me like the British were responsible with their resource and they thought ahead. If we do hunt this way, then we can hunt this way for a long time. Or you can kill everything right now and it’s gonna suck later. Make a choice.

“They can get hold of me on Facebook by my name, or they can get on there and look up Black River Duck Calls, or you can get on my website, blackriverduckcalls.net. I’m pretty easy to get ahold of.”

Ramsey Russell: Yep, there were a lot of surprising, some big surprises over there compared to here. I was shocked. I’m not used to being surprised anymore.
Bryce Decker: Well, and it’s the American way now. Look at the direction our culture’s going. Instant gratification, now, now, now, more, more, more. We’re wasteful, we’re gluttonous. That’s just the direction we’re going as a society. And I would like for duck hunters to set the example, and we probably won’t, but I at least want to get people thinking. And if I can do that, then, man, I’ve done something.
Ramsey Russell: To think about today, what’s the main reason, do you think, for today’s behavior? I mean, everything you’re saying as a suggestion seems pretty common sense. What’s the holdup?
Bryce Decker: Competition amongst each other. Imitation. People are just, what was it? I got a buddy, oh, Alex Maurice. He says imitation is the thief of joy. I believe that pair.
Ramsey Russell: I’ve heard it, compare.
Bryce Decker: Comparison is the thief of joy. Yes, sir. Thank you for correcting. That’s exactly what he says. And we compare ourselves to each other so much on social media and compare ourselves to standards that are unrealistic. You’ve got all these big companies and all these, duck hunting has become so commercialized that there’s a standard out there that you have to just go, go, go, kill everything. Everybody’s got to have log shots every day. And there’s just so much comparison and so much emulation of what we see, of these big giant piles of ducks and geese and just shooting and banging on them every day, that we’ve lost sight of being responsible stewards of the land that we’ve been blessed with. And we’re just not taking care of things. We’re not looking into the future. We’re not being responsible and we’re not educating people. We’re not talking about it enough. I’m guilty of not taking people like I should. I should be taking a new group of people in every day and going through these conversations with people, and I don’t. But we gotta come together at least a little.

Ramsey Russell: Think if we had fewer duck hunters on the landscape. I know a lot of folks, I hear a lot of voices out of Arkansas. Not picking on nobody, just saying. But I hear a lot of voices out of Arkansas, a lot of voices everywhere saying we need less hunters. Do we need less hunters? Is that what’s going to fix the problem if we have less hunters? And if we have less hunters, who the heck is going to foot the bill for all this conservation?

Bryce Decker: If we’re not responsible, that’s the only solution, in my opinion. If we can act right and treat these woods like they’re special and treat these ducks like what they are, they’re a blessing from the Lord, and we should respect them. And we should take just what we need, and we should be ethical in the way we treat them. And we should be godly in our own principles towards each other. We should respect each other and help each other out and just try to be better with each other, with the resource, with all of it. If we don’t, it’s going to be done for us, and none of us are going to like how that’s done. So I think we should do it ourselves. Self-governance is the best governance. And I’m all about us just talking about it, being open, debating it. If we disagree, let’s disagree, man. But let’s do something. Let’s just not keep going down this path. Because anyone that’s been in these woods for a long time sees the same things I’m seeing. And a lot of these old heads that used to promote this hyper-aggressive style and shooting rafts and all this, they’re not even in the woods anymore. They pooped where they eat so much, they’re gone. So, something’s got to give.

Ramsey Russell: You learned how to hunt under your granddaddy. Your granddaddy, that generation taught you how to hunt. Do you think there’s a lack of that kind of mentoring? Is that where a lot of this is coming from?

“There’s people nowadays that live out there in these woods for 60 days. They’re in there every evening scouting. They’re at the boat ramp every night sleeping. And it’s different.”

Bryce Decker: Well, this could go back to our robo duck discussion, because we talked about how so many new hunters were able to just come to the woods and start killing ducks. And they never really learned woodsmanship. All they learned was get under as many ducks as you can and shoot as many ducks as you can with as many people as you can, and then put it on social media. That’s all they know. They haven’t been taught, blowing all these ducks out of these woods ain’t gonna be good for your hunting in the morning, buddy. You going in here and shooting right in the middle of this raft of ducks, you’re only gonna do this today. Like, it ain’t gonna happen tomorrow, because everything in here is gonna be gone. And when you’ve got people that constantly stay on that raft, after just a little bit, those ducks, they go somewhere where they won’t get shot. So, like, you’ve got a whole group, a whole generation of people who learned how to hunt via technology, and not dad, and not pawpaw, and not someone that had experience, someone that was a true woodsman, someone that was a true wolf.

Ramsey Russell: Like a bunch of Internet orphans that just learned off Instagram how to hunt.

Bryce Decker: It’s like a bunch of Instagram hunters learned how to hunt from other Instagram hunters. And that’s it, man.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Bryce Decker: And the clout chasing is a big problem. And we’re all guilty of it to some degree, myself included. Everybody wants to be known as a duck killer. And everybody to see what they do and what they’ve got and how good their duck call sounds or how good their new hunting jacket keeps them warm or how fast the new boat is. Like, we’re all consumers. We’re all guilty of it.

Ramsey Russell: Interesting. Very, very interesting. Boy, this has all been a good topic. Bryce, and I appreciate you coming on board and sharing your thoughts. I do think that collectively we need to work together. I hear so many conspiracies online and being espoused about broken science, broken models, broken this, broken that, or baiting up north, or God Almighty, the litany goes on, why we don’t have ducks like we think we should, or we don’t have ducks like our granddaddy did. But I really think, whether we’re talking public land or private, I really think that if you go and look in the mirror, that has a lot to do with the answer of the controllable. There’s a lot of uncontrollable warm winters, changing landscapes, drought and low productivity. But I think a lot of the problem that we hunters in America are facing today can be fixed. I think the man in the mirror would be a good start at fixing it.

Bryce Decker: It would. And it would be great if we could all just apply good principles to our hunts and try to get along and not be so spiteful and competitive.

Ramsey Russell: It’s hard not to, though, man.We all got finite time. I was going to ask you, I just wondered this out loud, how many days a week did your granddaddy hunt?

Bryce Decker: They would try to arrange time off when they could. They didn’t hunt like people do now. There’s these kids nowadays, and there’s people my age that’ll take… They’ve got their whole life based around this. Back then, it was a “you went when you could.” If you had vacation time, you took it, and if you didn’t, you didn’t. There’s people nowadays that live out there in these woods for 60 days. They’re in there every evening scouting. They’re at the boat ramp every night sleeping. And it’s different.

Ramsey Russell: It is different. Thank you very much, Bryce. How can folks connect with you on Instagram or social media?

Bryce Decker: I don’t have an Instagram. Second time of me getting hacked, I abandoned Instagram totally. They can get hold of me on Facebook by my name, or they can get on there and look up Black River Duck Calls, or you can get on my website, blackriverduckcalls.net. I’m pretty easy to get ahold of.

“And this conversation makes me believe that the future of hunting lies in its past more so than in more of the same.”

Ramsey Russell: Thank you, Bryce. I really appreciate the conversation. We all in the same boat together. We got to get along. We got to work together on this thing. We got to get back to our roots. And I mean not our individual roots, I mean our collective roots. And this conversation makes me believe that the future of hunting lies in its past more so than in more of the same. Anyway, Bryce, thank you very much. I wish you a good end to the remainder of the season. And folks, thank you all for listening this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere Podcast, been talking to my buddy Bryce Decker up in Arkansas. We’ve been talking about shooting the raft and more on Arkansas public duck land. See you next time.