EP 566. Building Waterfowl Habitat on Maryland’s Eastern Shore

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where today we’re back on the Eastern Shore talking to my buddy Spencer Water. Spencer, how the heck are you?

Spencer Water: Great, Ramsey. Thanks for having me on.

Ramsey Russell: Man, you were just telling me you all got some real winter weather blowing in. Like finally winter showed up after the season, of course.

Spencer Water: Yeah, well, we did. We’re on our third snowstorm here and in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia on the Delmarva, we’ve had warm winters for probably the last 5 years. So it’s nice to have finally see some winter. We did get some of it during the hunting season which was great. Now hunt season’s over, we’re all ready for it to be 75 so we can get back in the field and get going.

Ramsey Russell: The last time I saw you, Spencer, we were sitting at Mr. Charlie’s and having a sundowner round a campfire and boy, was there a sky full of ducks coming in. Man, was that nice.

Spencer Water: There was, yeah. It’s a fantastic duck watching spot. I think, most of the clients that we manage for nowadays, certainly, they’re interested in hunting they love work their dogs, but man, they’re duck watchers, they just like doing habitat work and having birds on their properties. It’s been a great thing to watch these guys, not need to shoot them every minute, but to have them and different types of ducks and different types of habitats. It’s been a pleasure.

Ramsey Russell: So it’s funny you say that because I’ve always considered myself a bird watcher, only I like to watch them over the top of a shotgun as they crumble and fall. But as we get older, I really do just enjoy seeing that. I mean, God, that was spectacular. As the sun kept setting, just more and more ducks were flocking in and working. There were teal, there were mallards, it was amazing just to sit there. I guess we must have sat there and drank beer for 30 minutes watching the show until the sun went down.

Spencer Water: It’s a great spot, looking westerly, everything’s silhouetted. It’s not a big farm, it’s just one of those places where ducks want to be and that’s the trick anymore is, just finding the farms that are, perhaps along a flyway. They don’t have to be right on the river, they don’t have to be right on the marsh. I mean, it’s just where they want to be in the landscape and that’s a tough thing to do. And we’ve been fortunate over the last 25 years to help some folks find the right properties and then dial them in, as they say to get them set up for hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Where are you from and what do you do, Spencer?

Spencer Water: Yeah, born and raised here on Eastern Shore, Maryland, Mid shore. Went to school for agriculture. I’m an agronomist by training farmer. My wife and I farm and also happen to be a duck hunter. So, once I got out of college, in graduate school, I was working for the Kellogg foundation on an Ag Grant and DU started their private lands restoration in the mid-Atlantic and they were looking for a biologist and was fortunate enough to interview with a bunch of duck biologists. And here I am an ag guy. I don’t know anything about the physiology of a mallard, but I sure know what they eat. And being a duck hunter and somehow became a regional biologist for DU and covering Maryland, darn eastern shore of Virginia. And golly, they were like, putting a fox in a hen house, man, they cut us loose to go out and reach out and help people, purchase farms or manage the farms that they already had. It was a great training ground. I got to go all over the country, all over North America with DU and look at how other folks manage. And it couldn’t have been any better training. I did it for 9.5 years with them and they changed their sort of direction and got out of the restoration sort of game back in the mid-2000s. And it was an opportunity for me to start my business, Orion Land and wildlife management. And 2006, we jumped out and started managing hunting properties on our own. And we’re still doing it, we’re still chasing it.

Ramsey Russell: How long have you been doing that, Spencer?

“Fortunate to have the marshes that we do”

Spencer Water: Yeah, well, we’ve been Orion’s in my 19^th year on my own and been 25 total, if you add in the DU work we did, but it’s a passion that we have able to bring sort of an agronomy background, which is a little different than maybe some management styles, some people are hunting management, it’s a little bit different, we’re food based company whether managing for sika deer or whitetails or turkeys or planting dove fields, it’s all about the food and it’s all about the cover and it’s all about the land. So that’s our base. Got to come from where you’re brought up, and it’s been a super fun experience, met a ton of good people, been on some farms that are just beautiful. We’re not as big as the Midwest. There’s a standing joke I heard one time when I first started with DU, I was at some meeting in the southern regional office down in the middle of duck country, and somebody said, boy, where are you from? And I said, well, from Maryland, I’m from the mid-Atlantic in the Eastern Shore. And they kind of chuckled, all these senior DU guys and they said, yeah, Atlantic Flyway. He said, you got all the hunters and none of the ducks. And I thought, huh, that doesn’t sound quite right. And then get around the country and you see, what’s out there. I mean we do have a lot of people and we’re in between some major cities here and fortunate to have the marshes that we do. And it’s just always stuck with me, how do we manage for real quality waterfowl hunting, 2 hours from Baltimore, two hours from Washington, Richmond, New York, Philadelphia, I mean, we’re stuck right in the middle of all this development. But we’re doing it, we’re doing it every day.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about growing up. Did you grow up right there where you live now?

Spencer Water: Yes, sir. Yeah. Right between the Nanticoke and the Waicomica River, right dead in the middle of the shore. And you got the Chesapeake Bay system to the west, you got a Delaware Bay to the northeast, you got what we call Atlantic coastal bays, which is the Atlantic Ocean 32 miles to the east. So we’re sandwiched right in between all these natural marshes. It’s ag fields, it’s grain production, it’s corn, wheat and soybeans in the middle of a bunch of duck marshes. So, from a duck hunter perspective it’s right. Now if we could just take all the development out of it, that’d be great, but we can’t. So right here is where I started and 1977 was my first year, went and shot 2 Canada geese and I was hooked ever since.

Ramsey Russell: Who took you hunting in 1977?

Spencer Water: Yeah. It was a kind of an adopted uncle. He worked for CMP telephone and he was from northeast Louisiana and got transferred up here and got on with the phone company and he had a daughter who’s about same my age and my parents lived near him, they were just starting their careers in Maryland after graduate school and I see these, he’d have these ducks and geese and he’d have them hung up on his fence when he got back from hunting and I used to go over there and I’ve never done it before, and I was a little kid and I guess once I got to be 11, he said, well, you’re old enough now, I’m going to take you, we’ll see what you can do. And man, it put me in that boat in the dark. And we went out to Fishing Bay Marsh. I managed properties right around the place that I first shot my first Canada goose. It’s pretty crazy to say, but I think about it all the time as I go past that wharf where I first went out 1977. And man, I was hooked. I love the calling, the blinds, the decoys, the dog working, the whole thing. I mean, I was hook, line and sinker, but I don’t think I ever chased a bunny since then, I gave up on rabbit hunting, that’s how I started so with my father. But yeah, and I was fortunate to get to be a kid who was around some really very serious waterfowl hunters. And they kind of let me tag along. They put us to work. We were paint grassing duck blinds for them and so forth. And it was a great way to grow up. And I went to school with these folks, I really did.

Ramsey Russell: Well, tell me about who some of these influencers were. You talking about the guy from northeast Louisiana. Who were the guys that put you to work painting decoys? What were they like? How did you fall into their wheelhouse?

Spencer Water: It was one contact leads to another contact. Started out with Jim, goose hunting and my mother and father knew somebody who was, a friend of theirs, Stanley Morris and Steve Ashcraft, who were duck hunters on the Nanticoke and they had more owned marshes out there. And I think my mother probably lobbied these guys pretty hard and said, hey, can you take my son? He’s really into it. And they said, sure, bring him along. So I fell in with these guys and they were the best of the best in our area, they were strictly marsh hunters, this is no impoundments, this is no field hunting. This is black mud and boats and leaving in the dark and that kind of thing. I mean, that’s the only way in the late 70s that I knew how to go hunt ducks was go get in a boat. And here we are, now we all put our waders on and walk out in 18 inches of flooded corn, it’s a different world now than it was. I never would have envisioned that happening. But hanging around with those dudes and them giving us something to do, like, hey, here’s a blind, this is how we cut grass, this is how we put the grass on. I mean, they just took me to school and I couldn’t thank them enough. And they’re still living, most of them, and they’re still hunting and I still get to pal around with them and talk about how we started, it’s just crazy.

Ramsey Russell: Has it changed so much on the east coast that you have time, now that you’re probably their age now, Spencer, you’re probably those old guys age when they started taking you out as a teenager. And I mean, who among us older guys don’t want to put some teenagers under our wings? So if they can do some of the – we use their strong backs, they can do some of the heavy lifting, you know what I’m saying? I just remember talking to somebody further up the shore from you all up around Havre de Grace that time, they were big in body booting. And he was saying, man, yeah, the old guys just took us and we did all the hard work and man, we were involved. But he said, now I’m the old guy and I don’t have any young guys behind me.

Spencer Water: Well, and that’s the thing. And managing properties for a living, meeting new clients and seeing their youngsters coming up. I mean, it really isn’t as many as I had hoped there would be. You do bump into to some families and some folks that, man, their kids are just lapping it up like a biscuit man. And then another one’s they don’t have the interest in it. So it’s a smidge concerning to see, these farms being so well managed and maybe the kids come on the holidays or they come for a big occasion, a birthday hunt or something like that, but they’re not there like, I wish they were, just chomping at the bit, man, and can’t wait for the season to get here, I’d like to see more of that. I do see some of it and it’s encouraging and inspiring to see it, but not as much as I had hoped. I really was hoping that, a lot of these farms, because the setup of these things it takes resources, it takes time, you got to have a strong commitment for conservation. You’re not just strolling out and finding these farms every day. You really got to hunt for them. And once you find one and once you get it dialed in, who’s going to take it over? I would love it to stay in the family, but who knows whether, maybe when these kids start having kids, we’ll get another generational go round.

Ramsey Russell: Was your dad a farmer also?

“I really thought I would be just straight agriculture, do my hunting on the side as my hobby.”

Spencer Water: No, he wasn’t. My mother and father, both educators, they’re both teachers and coaches. And I lived across the street from a grain farm. And I don’t know what happened. Just sort of waddled over there and that old crotchety farmer was, hey, what are you doing? You want to help me with something? And I just fell right into it and always loved being outside, but never had any of – my father’s father died young. He was a farmer. I didn’t get to meet him, unfortunately, so I missed that generation. But just like farmers do, they’re friendly and they like, a young guy who keeps asking questions about what’s that tractor do, what’s that implement? And why are you doing that? What are you doing this for? Why are you moving these cows around? And that kind of thing. And Jack Townsend was his name, dead and gone now. But he was a very meticulous farmer, everything was neat, man those rows were straight and he worked hard on his weed control and he took care of his equipment, he’s that kind of guy. And I just fell in with him too. So, when you think about, I was super lucky to fall in with a bunch of duck and goose hunters. And then the farmer across the street kind of took me in and I got to do stuff with him and then went to school for ag, and then went to graduate school for ag. And then to bump into DU, it’s a crazy path. I mean, I couldn’t have drawn it up that way. I really thought I would be just straight agriculture, do my hunting on the side as my hobby. But somehow I was able to weave them together into a career.

Ramsey Russell: It surprises me too, that there’s any hunting at all over in that part of the world and that there’s any agriculture.  my in laws lived over on the west side of the bay and it’s just the metropolis. Oh my gosh, man, is that 95? What big interstate is that going into D.C. that fairway area?

Spencer Water: Yes, sir. It runs the middle of the western shore right to the top of the bay and we have Interstate Route 50. But the expansion post pandemic in our area, folks coming out of the city, I’m sure this is all around the country, people leaving the city wanting to get out in the country somewhere they can walk the dog. The housing developments that are springing up in these corn and soybean fields, it’s unbelievable really, how fast it’s happened post pandemic. And we ride around all the time and there’s a new subdivision, it’s got 250 houses in it and a golf course in the middle and man, it’s just steady gobbling up, 500 acres at a crack. And we don’t have that acreage base here. I mean, when you think about it, the Delmarva, 3 states, 14 counties, it’s about 6,000 square miles, that’s not a lot of land. That’s not a lot of room for all those humans. And then for us to be eking out chunks of manageable property, it’s pretty impressive.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t see how you do it, to be honest with you. I mean, it’s one of the whole things not paved or shopping centers or neighborhoods.

Spencer Water: Well, one of the things I think that is going to keep the Delmarva more rural and help sort of stem the tide of the development push is the poultry industry. We have a huge poultry industry with a lot of chickens and we got to grow crops to feed chickens, that’s a fact. Maryland’s a net importer of corn. People don’t know that. You ride up down Eastern Shore, man, it’s all crop fields and so forth, but we can’t grow enough to feed poultry. So feeding that poultry and keeping that industry alive, I think will keep us somewhat rural. Plus, we have some zoning here, being around the bay, that’s keeping stuff in ag. We got some good conservation programs. We got some good easement programs. Maryland department ag has some great farmland preservation stuff to keep these big chunks of farmland farming, which is good, which is good for birds, it’s good for wildlife, it’s good for people. I mean, I see it stay that way, but there’s got to be a balance. But we work really hard on trying to find the right dirt for folks to buy and then manage for –  we do have a pretty strong deer hunting game here. We have sika deer and we have whitetails, so we have two types. And boy, I’ll tell you, people are really serious about their deer hunting. We do manage some properties for deer hunters, mostly waterfowl, everybody likes to put some orange on from a couple times during the year and go get up a tree or get in a shadow hunter or whatever. And look, the sika deer are great to eat, I can’t deny it. I love it. And plus, that’s the other thing that’s going on with the rabbit urbanization on the Delmarva. A lot of places where deer can get – that the hunters can’t get to them, our deer population is way out of control. The deer damage on farmer or my farm, where my wife and I farm, the deer damage, the deer pressure is extreme. So let’s have more deer hunters pull the trigger, let’s not just be bone hunter, let’s start eating some of these rascals. But yeah, they’re fun to manage. It’s a totally different game than waterfowl. We spend most of our time on waterfowl and birds and doves and so forth, but there are some pretty high management to deer farms here in Maryland, Delaware as well.

Ramsey Russell: When you left Ducks Unlimited and got into the Habitat Game, Orion Management and started managing private properties and helping people find these properties, where did you start? How specifically did you get into that? Was it just a phone call from somebody that asked do you want something? He said, oh, here’s an opportunity.

Spencer Water: Well, in 1997, USDA announced the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, it was an enhanced version of CRP. And in CRP there was some cost share for landowners if they wanted to take some marginal crop land and turn it into wetlands. So DU was helping USDA with outreach. So we would go on farms and people say, I’ve heard about doing these moist soil wetlands for ducks. Does my farm qualify? So there I was getting phone calls from people who own poorly drained farmland and we stepped on the ground and helped them put in buffers and plant trees and build wetlands. So we were already helping people dial in their farms from a habitat perspective while I was with DU. And for funding reasons, some funding does dry up from time to time for large non-profits like DU and they shift their focus. And after about 9 years of going on farms every day and helping people get into various government programs or DU had some cost share programs for people that those monies kind of dried up a little bit. So there was this gap of people still wanting to do it and DU was getting out of the restoration sort of activities and getting more into fundraising and advocacy and so forth. And that really wasn’t my background. I’m an agronomist, I’m an ag guy, I’m a duck hunter. So I wanted to still help people. So I left DU, left a great job and learned a ton from those folks, still deal with them every chance I get, still a great organization. And I started my own business doing basically what I was doing for DU, just taking it to another level. We got to focus more on ag, we got to focus more on, not just moist soil wetlands, but also doing plant flood impoundments. And it was just timing. People learned about how these flooded fields could work. Because like I told you, prior in this late 70s and 80s and early 90s, people were still duck hunting in the marsh. They were hunting on the bayshore. They were not hunting in flooded fields in Maryland. Now every now and then you would hear about a person who, hey, have you heard about so and so they diked up a field and it rained hard and it flooded and they shot a bunch of mallards in the middle of a field, it was like unheard of. So nowadays people still hunt the marches, I mean, that’s primarily where folks hunt. And nowadays the percentage of folks that are hunting in shallow water impoundments on poorly drained farmland has gone up unbelievably. I would never have dreamt it would have gotten to this point really, as a duck hunter in Maryland. And now everybody’s got an impoundment, seems like. And that’s where we get back to this, the need for Orion and this how everybody’s starting to specialize and flood different times and plant different crops and so forth. So everybody’s up their game. Everybody has really upped their game in the mid and especially on the Delmarva to start shooting ducks in flooded fields.

Ramsey Russell: Well, as a hunting, would you say that since you started to now, has the hunting improved? Has the duck abundance improved or increased in that naked wood? Because the more habitat you’ve got, it seems like the more waterfowl you would attract and hold.

Spencer Water: Great question. I don’t know that I have a direct answer, I have a sense of that, we seem to be, when I say we, the Delmarva may be holding a few more birds because there’s more habitat, there’s more sheet water habitat. I don’t know that, we’d have to look at the DNR does a midwinter flight, they just did it January 6^th or 7^th this year to see what those numbers are based, how the midwinter flight surveys of waterfowl populations in 2024 would relate to 1978 it’d be interesting, it’d be an interesting comparison for a duck biologist to do that, not an agronomist. But I tend to think that we’re able to hold more birds because we have more habitat now. You get a winter like we are having now where, we’ve had single digits, we’ve had 3 or 4 snowstorms, a lot of these shallow fields are flooded out, it pushes the birds back to the marshes, but as soon as it thaws out, they come back to that sheet water. So I would say that, that we certainly providing more habitat, whether we’re holding more ducks on the Delmarva or not, I don’t know. But certainly there’s a lot more habitat, infield habitat now than what there was. So I would certainly say we got to be holding a few more birds.

Ramsey Russell: How are the marshes holding up? Are they still in the same relative shape? Are you all losing marsh habitat or is the quality declining or is it just pretty steady?

Spencer Water: I wouldn’t say there’s quality decline. I do think the sea level rise is real, it’s well documented. Doesn’t take too many millimeters of sea level rise to change a plant community. And when I say change a plant community in a marsh, I don’t mean going from maybe good to bad, it’s just different plants. And the thing that’s important for duck hunters is, maybe there’s a plant that likes a little deeper water when it’s high tide and the marshes flood. Maybe there’s a plant that needs its feet to be dry during those low tide events. And do those plants provide good forage for waterfowl? So I think it’s just a changing environment. We have two things going on in the Chesapeake and that’s they kind of fight each other. We have sea level rise so the water levels going up and higher tides seems like when I was a kid. And then we also have marsh subsidence which is the ground is actually sort of sinking in these estuarine systems. So the marsh is going down and the tide’s going up, we’re kind of getting it from both sides. And we have seen, I think you could talk to people, different places up and down the bayshore about changes in the marsh community, not that we’re losing it, but that it’s changing. It’s going to all cord grass, which is a great marsh grass that we have native to Maryland. And it, or it may be going more to cattails or it may be going more to spike rush and juncus marshes that provide cover but they don’t provide maybe as much food. And then other places you’ll say, oh man, when I was a kid this was all just big tall marsh grass, now that the tide’s getting over top the marsh, we’re getting more smart weeds, we’re getting more rice cut grass, we’re getting more duck food plants. So I think it’s an ebb and a flow. You could probably get 20 different answers to that. But I don’t think we’re losing as much marshes it is just changing based on subsidence and sea level rise.

Ramsey Russell: Spencer, are you a marsh hunter or a catch your roots or do you hunt these shallow water impoundments?

Spencer Water: Well, I’m a black mud guy. I mean, we were fortunate. We grew up hunting in the rivers and there were no impoundments in this in the late 70s and throughout the 80s until the early 90s. So I’m a marsh guy. We were fortunate enough a bunch of guys went to high school with and somehow found a marsh that was for sale in 1991. And scraped up the money, we were all in graduate school and we didn’t have 2 nickels to rub together, as John Taylor would say. But we found a banker who believed in us and we got a loan and we purchased this marsh 148 acres in the Nanticoke river, which is just, they call it the loneliest river in Maryland, the least developed river system in Maryland and it’s just unbelievable marshes. And we bought this piece of marsh, had no idea what we were doing. And again, I was fortunate to have a friend of mine whose father had spent 60 years on the Nanticoke. He was a trapper, he was a waterman, he was a farmer, and he was a duck hunter. And he helped us figure out how to hunt this marsh. I mean it was a great place for us, but we had never had anything that we needed to manage and we trap muskrats and we burn marsh grass and we got our blinds established and we had to learn the tides and when to hunt, when not to hunt, so forth. So I’m a true marsh guy and it’s where I really like to go. And then here I am in the business of setting up shallow water duck impoundments for people in crop fields. So I enjoy that hunting, it’s a lot different training dogs. My dog, my black labs are like the Charred dog, they’re trained in the mud. I mean, going in a flooded cornfield, they sort of look at me funny. Like, man, what are we doing? What’s going on here? And it’s fun to do and I enjoy doing it. But when we go hunting, my friends and I, we go back to the marsh. I mean, that’s just nothing like it. There’s nothing like putting a boat over and taking a boat ride in the dark and doing it that way, that’s just how I was raised. And that’s sort of my favorite way to do it. And I also love sitting there around a fire pit watching, and birds come to a flooded impoundment. I mean, that’s awesome too.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Spencer Water: So, variety is a spice of life, man. I love it all.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, but if you have your druthers, you’re going to hunt a marsh, that’s your wheelhouse. It’s funny, I’ve heard that, if your first truck was a Chevrolet when you were 15 years old or your first shotgun when you were a child with a Remington, those are probably going to be very important to you the rest of your life. I think it’s just kind of our beginning experiences. And a lot of my early experiences are just kind of crouched down in willow trees and button bushes and shallow water, crotch deep waters. And that’s kind of still what I like to do. I do it all and I like it all, because I like to shoot ducks and I like to see and experience it all. But there’s just something special about going back to your roots. It feels right.

“We started getting in these marshes and like you say, dealing with tides and you got to work the river, I mean, you got to go with her. “

Spencer Water: Well, and I take a lot of current clients. I’ve taken some clients who aren’t marsh hunters and who have farms that we manage and they have different types of habitat, flooded habitat. They got moist soil, they got planted stuff, they got some bottomland flooded, but it’s nothing like – they enjoy seeing it. Like, we started getting in these marshes and like you say, dealing with tides and you got to work the river, I mean, you got to go with her. You can’t force it, I mean, a lot of things you have to worry about and as marsh hunters that you don’t have to worry about in a flooded field situation. But they get a big kick out of it, and I like taking people out there and showing them, kind of how it all started here on the Delmarva, it was all marsh based. I mean, we shot Canada geese in the field and snow geese. That’s what we did. That’s when we field hunted a ton of Canada geese. I mean, this story used to hold quite a few Canadas when I was growing up and goose hunting was a huge industry. I mean, a lot of commercial goose hunting in the late 80s and early 90s, it’s all kind of going by the wayside now. There’s still some good outfitters out there, but not near the geese that we used to have. But that’s the only time we went in a field was to shoot a Canada goose. So duck hunting in the marsh and goose hunting in the fields, that’s how we grew up, that’s how it was around here. And the change to these impoundments, like I say, it’s really something. I mean, it’s a different – I don’t bump into too many people now that they don’t say, hey, we built an impoundment on our family farm this year. These are guys who were just goose hunters, but they had always had a place in the field where the draining wasn’t great or could never really grow the same crop that they could. And they thought, let’s impound this area and leave some corn stand or soybeans or whatever and let’s try to shoot ducks there. I mean, they’ve sort of come around on it, how have they done that? I mean, I think everybody is paying attention. They’re looking at their neighbors, they’re looking at social media. They’re traveling to hunt. I mean, I don’t think I ever heard of a person traveling somewhere to go shoot ducks because we always had ducks here in Maryland in the marshes. But nowadays you can’t talk to anybody who doesn’t say, oh man, I’m going to Kansas or just got back from Oklahoma, or man, I’m going to Texas to chase these lessers, or going to Saskatchewan, going to Alberta. I mean, people are traveling around, they’re seeing different management styles and they’re like, well, I don’t know why we couldn’t do this in Maryland. We got cornfields, we got ducks, so it’s a changing environment. Pretty wild.

“Did you ever cross paths with a guy named John Taylor?”

Ramsey Russell: Speaking of goose hunting out in the field, you’re born and raised right there where you are. Did you ever cross paths with a guy named John Taylor growing up back in those old days?

Spencer Water: Oh, my goodness. Well, we did. We went to different high schools here in my hometown, there’s three high schools, and John went to one and I went to another, but my mother taught at the high school where he went and we always knew each other growing up.  I kid him, he’s a little bit older than I am, but we knew each other in high school. And John was always a serious bow hunter, was just love deer hunting and waterfowl hunting, his dad was a hunter, his uncle was a hunter. John was brought up the right way in the marshes and so we always knew each other, we never really hunted together, but we’d see each other at parties and this and that and the other, football games and so forth and hey, Taylor, what are you doing with them, you shooting any birds, whatever? And you know how life is funny, I moved to his hometown and bought a farm about 800 yards away from Taylor. So when he goes out and starts tuning goose calls, I can stand here in the backyard and hear him blowing routines. So now I can’t get rid of the dude. No, we’ve hunted together over the last 20 years, we’ve been on some great hunts all over the country and he’s a super dude. And I love his goose calls, super unique and handmade, something he made in his little quack, what he calls a quack shack back there at his house. And I was fortunate enough to be around when he was really fine tuning, developing that call, learning from other call makers around the country. And John’s done a great job. He’s super people person. Loves to help folks be better goose callers. That’s all part of it. And he’s been able to come with me, and he loves to farm. He’s pretty good in a tractor. So I get some free labor out of officer Taylor whenever I can, and put him in a machine and he loves it. And we so he’s a good friend and my neighbor, and we’ve been on some great hunts together.

“Everybody wants a good duck hole? Where do you start? What would be my first step in trying to find and create a good duck property?”

Ramsey Russell: Let’s shift gears and to get into a little bit of the habitat and building a great duck property, especially in your neck of the woods. Everybody wants a good duck hole? Where do you start? What would be my first step in trying to find and create a good duck property?

Spencer Water: Well, the old real estate saying, location. We always try to get in between a couple rivers. Now in our country, in our part of the world, we got rivers all over the place. It’s not hard, but I have bumped into, in the last 25 years, we’ve had people who own farms that weren’t, really close to estuarine so systems, but the soils were right, that’s the other thing in our neck of the woods being so close to the ocean, we do have some sandier soils that won’t hold water. So one of the things that if we find a property that has the right soils, meaning you can put water on top of the ground, you can flood, you can hold water. A lot of farms around here are just too sandy, they’re beautiful wildlife farms, great turkey and deer hunting farms, but they wouldn’t make for a good waterfowl farm because you can’t keep water on top of the ground. You can pump it on there, but it’s going to go right into soil. So I would say, location get somewhere where you’re close to one of these rivers or marshes or coastal bays or whatever. Get somewhere close, you don’t have to be waterfront, price tag of waterfront property is crazy everywhere in the world, probably, but certainly here don’t have to be waterfront, just have to be close to it. Have the right soils where you can put some water on top of the ground. And then the other thing that sort of the third leg of the stool if you will, is there water under the ground? Is there groundwater? Because listen, this is one different thing that goes on in the mid-Atlantic that may not go on in some other places in the country where there are lots of ducks and lots of duck operations. We are not backing a gator pump into the Nanticoke river and pumping water into a duck impoundment that is salty, brackish water, we are not doing that. So every bit of water that goes into these impoundments in the mid-Atlantic, for the most part, other than rainwater, obviously, is groundwater that comes from a well. So we have got to drill wells. And some areas of the Delmarva have good groundwater, and some areas do not. So if you buy a farm or have a farm, family farm, and you don’t have irrigation, you don’t have center pivot irrigation, you don’t have water under the ground, you’re going to struggle. So we have to kind of look for dirt. We got to look for a groundwater, and we got to be somewhere close to some type of marsh where there are some ducks. Now, when you put those three filters on top of your land looking for a farm, man, the list goes down pretty quickly. So finding these places is challenging. And you’re competing with pressure for development, pressure for farmers. Farmers want to farm, they don’t want to flood crop land. We’re growing corn, soybeans, beans and wheat, we’re not taking land out so we can shoot some ducks. We want to be able to grow crops, that’s what we do for a living. So, yeah, it’s a tricky set of parameters that we look for. And then, there’s not a whole lot of farms really for sale because people are so fond of them. They’re family properties or they’re involved in big ag, and they’re just not going to sell these, they’re not a lot for sale, I’ll say that. So when you find one, it’s sort of like a diamond in a rough. You just kind got lucky and found somebody who might want to sell. So, it’s a tough look, but there are kind of ways to sift through these pro properties.

Ramsey Russell: Let me say this, how important is duck history? I mean, I can build it and make it better, but is it true? Can I build it and they’ll come? Because like historically, based on this conversation, historically, it was a lot of marsh hunting. Well, now we’re moving off into the landscape and we’re creating ephemeral marshes in some of these heavy clay soils. And does it always mean they’ll come? And what conditions would go into -? Are you just getting lucky? Like, if I go and build it on a property that’s not marsh and it’s going to be dynamite or maybe it’s not. What are some of the factors going into that?

Spencer Water: Yeah, well, that’s the X factor, right? That’s the duck factor. Are they going to show up? I mean, we’ve built them, when I was with DU a bit on farms where they were not really what I call on the X, they weren’t near a refuge, they weren’t close to the bay, they didn’t have estuarine systems close by. But the people were committed to doing it and they did it, they did the restoration, they built the impoundment, they flooded it. They paid attention to what they were planting or moist soil, either one. And the ducks generally show up because they’re over top of us. We are fortunate that we’re not a big area, I guess that these ducks got to come over top of you. And I believe if the habitat’s there and it’s well managed and the water’s there at the right time of year, you know that they’re going to show up. Now are you going to get a few, are you going to get a load of ducks or what’s the recipe for that? And that I cannot answer. So as a manager, what can we do? We can put them on the right dirt, we can build them the right way, we can plant the right things in there and we can have them flooded at the right time. That’s one of the things I think we’re seeing more and more now is we’re flooding earlier and earlier to try to capture some ducks as they stream across the Delmarva. We have a bunch of ducks that are headed south, but they stop off here in November. So we try to pile up some of those November ducks. They’re not our ducks. Those ducks are heading to the Carolinas. They’re heading to South Carolina, Georgia, they’re heading down the coast. And they only hang around with us for about 30 days. So we try to pile those ducks up, more ducks, they bring other ducks. So, then we’ll get a cold front, we’ll get a cold snap and those ducks will bump. They’ll move. Maryland gets its wintering ducks about the first two weeks of December, that’s when we get our wintering ducks or when we’re supposed to. So, if we can pile up a few birds earlier than that, I think it helps farms gather more ducks as they come to town. As our wintering ducks get here, if you’ve already got 400 or 500 ducks using your place, it’s going to be easier for you to catch these new arrivals I think. But as far as, just picking a property and putting an impoundment on it, will duck show up? In my experience and it has nothing to do with my management, it’s just the ground and the birds, I would say, yeah. Now, are you going to set the world on fire? Are you going to have a thousand ducks or you’re just going to have a couple hundred? I don’t know. That’s a hard question to answer, but generally it works. It really does work.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, from being there a few times over in your neck of the woods and from your description, there are a lot of rivers, there are a lot of marsh, a lot of these properties are just an interspersion of these agricultural lands with the rivers. I mean, so it’s a lot of flyaway in there, the ducks are going to kind of sort of fly over. You’re going to have what they need, what they want and management style to keep and hold them.

Spencer Water: It’s just setting the table. And hey, we all like to eat, but the better the table set, the better the food looks and the better the water is, and if the water’s there when they need it, now we’re back on the management side. What can humans do? What can guys do to the better manage your farm? And I just see the level of the game of people who are managing, whether they’re outfitters, we don’t have a lot of outfitters that have a lot of flooded ground, it’s mostly private landowners who are doing this. But the level of management is increasing. People are thinking, people are learning. They are watching other guys with impoundments up around the country. They’re stepping up their game. I love it. I mean, people are really paying attention. We’re thinking about, what corn variety we’re planting, what the ear set height is of a corn we’re plant. I mean, these are crazy things to be talking about when you might want to lower your set on your corn variety so your ducks can get it. And then I got a customer down eastern shore of Virginia who we work really hard with agronomists from decob and Pioneer to find these certain corn varieties with these low lower ear sets. And it was a tough winter and he said that he didn’t like, the low ear set corn because the ducks got 80s corn too fast. He wanted to higher ear set corn to make them fight for it a little longer, to keep them on the farm longer. So just interesting things like that. But now we’ve kind of gone off into the deep end of management, now we’re talking about corn varieties for ducks, it’s crazy. My agronomist buddies, they, they laugh at me and they say man, we’re all thinking about yield and standability and fungicide, use and you’re thinking about which one’s better for ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Okay, so I’ve got those three elements in play. I’ve bought a piece of property. It seems to be in a good area. What now? I bought this piece of property, I want to make it a duck hole right there on the eastern shore. What now? What’s my next step?

Spencer Water: Your next step is finding a contractor. We have a lot of earth moving guys who have become kind of wildlife contractors.  They build impoundments before, they built them for USDA, they built them for Fish and Wildlife service, they’ve built them for DNR and now, so they have some skill. And once you find somebody who can move some dirt, maybe find somebody who’s a designer and knows what they’re doing, who’s handy with a total station or RTK unit and you do some towers depot work. But the thing I like to do with new properties is try to figure out how to fit an impoundment into a piece of property so it looks natural. Just roll in there and a big first field, you come to put a big 10 acre square and dike it up and flood it. Is there a way that we can fit it into the environment to make it look natural to make it look kind of like mother nature put it there. And a lot of these farms lend themselves to that because there are low areas, there are ditched areas, there are corners of fields, there are spots that we – you’re not able to grow crops in because the drainage is poor. So that’s where I go and start from there. So fitting it into the landscape, make your impoundments look as natural as possible. And we don’t want to break the bank, so we don’t want to move more dirt than we have to. So tying it in natural ground, elevation, we do have a little bit of roll in some of our ground and some of our ground is tabletop flat, it’s delta looking stuff. I mean, there’s 2/10 of elevation change in 100 acres. I mean, it’s terribly flat. So you got to put dikes up, you got to move dirt. But I like to always try to start out by fitting it into the landscape. And if you got a dike off a field because you want more flooded habitat, certainly fine to do so. But I want them as natural as possible. So that’s a big thing for us. We use a lot of switchgrass. We kind of try to insulate our impoundments, kind of planting a bunch of oak trees, just making them look, even though they’re man made, making them look as natural as possible. I think you’ve been to a couple farms that we manage and if you’d have seen those farms before we started, there was nothing there. It was crops from one hedgerow to another other. There was no cover, there was no upland cover, there was no trees planted, no hedgerows, no buffers, it was just open farmland. So we kind of try to make it into something that looks natural, that looks like a place a duck or a quail or turkey or sika deer or whitetail would want to hang out. I mean, I don’t think it’s a hard recipe. Now, there’s a lot of heavy lifting to be done to get all that habitat on the ground. It doesn’t happen overnight, it takes time. I tell people, 5 years when I was with DU, they used to always tell us, look, Spencer, you got to ask these landowners to give you at least 2 years. You build the impoundment that first year, the ducks got to figure you out. The landowner’s got to figure out how to manage the impoundment, when to put water on, when to take water off. Give us 2 years. Well, I tell people, you got to give me 5 years because I want to establish your hedgerows and plants, switchgrass and get things grown in. And everybody, most everybody has that longer term vision. Maybe they’re going to leave it to their kids, maybe they have kids, maybe they have friends that have kids, they’re thinking down the road, they’re not like, hey man, I’m going to buy this farm, I’m building impoundments and kill a limited mallards November 15^th, it doesn’t work that way most of the time. Give us a little time to dial this farm in and to let it kind of grow in. That’s the fun part, if you have clients and landowners who have that longer vision. So we’re fortunate that we do.

Ramsey Russell: I tell you what, all that survey and all that, all that dirt moving and all those things I’ve got to do you just talked about, that’ll get in your pocket pretty quick, pretty deep, pretty quick. Are there still any programs out there that will offset whether it’s purchase or habitat development? I know in the past you talk about Ducks Unlimited, some of the partner’s programs, NRCS. Are there any conservation easements? What are some of the opportunities that landowners have to offset some of their expenses?

Spencer Water: Certainly there are and there are lots of tools in that toolbox. DU being probably the first and foremost because they’re building impoundments, wetlands for ducks. I mean, they know what it takes. So DU is certainly a place that I always try to have people start. USDA, NRCS, there is some money in different programs, CRP being the biggest one, now those are all for moist soil. In our states of Maryland, Delaware and Virginia, there’s no cost share for folks to plant and flood. There’s cost share to do moist soil wetlands. And that’s one thing that we haven’t really talked about –

Ramsey Russell: We’re going to, go ahead.

Spencer Water: Key components of any farm that Orion manages is to have to have both. I want you to have moist soil units, maybe those are done with some cost share money from folks or you do them – we build a lot of moist soil units for people who don’t take any cost share, they just want them to be their impoundments. And then we also have planted impoundments on the same farm. Listen, I’ve used the same saying my whole career, it’s getting to be a while now I’ve been saying it, I like to eat steak, I won’t kid you, but I don’t want it every night. There’s going to be a night where I’d like to have a salad or a baked potato or something else. So I want, on farms that we manage to have every type of thing flooded, if they’re into corn one day, great, they want to eat. It’s raining hard, they want to get in a soybean field, they want to eat flooded beans, I want that there too. If they want to go grub around and eat some inverts in a moist soil wetland full of barnyard grass and smart weed, I want to have that on the farm. Because if it’s not there, they’re going somewhere else, they’re going to find it on somebody else’s property. And in Maryland now we’ve got folks that have up their level of game. They have these things on their farm. So, this kind of keeping ducks on your property, we want to do by varying our food sources so there you go. But yeah, there’s absolutely opportunities for folks to get some cost share for moist soil wetland construction. Every state is different, every county seems different, so you need to do your homework, get in there, talk to the NRCS folks, talk to the FSA folks, learn what’s available. Talk to DU, give your local DU biologist a call, get him out there, see what kind of programs they have. We’re fortunate in the mid-Atlantic, we have a very strong DU presence and they’ve raised quite a bit of money to put on the ground, to do on the ground wetland restoration in the mid-Atlantic. So I see DU is probably the first place to start and then move on to NRCS from there. But certainly there’s opportunities for cost share.

Ramsey Russell: That’s good. I mean, it sounds like Ducks Unlimited has a real big program over the Atlantic Flyway, not just in terms of programmatically, but in terms of biologists that will go out and assist private landowners and kind of steer them in a direction.

Spencer Water: Absolutely. They sure do. They have boots on the ground, that’s what we always talked about. DU has been great. DU had on real quickly here, I think it was $8 or $9 out of $10 raise goes on the ground somewhere, if it’s not in Canada or Mexico, it’s here in the continental US and having a DU biologist that you can call to come out and take a look at your property or help you with an existing wetland is, that’s the way we built the program here in the 90s when I was there, was the being able to pick up that phone and get somebody over there to help you, man my water control structure something – I can’t get my board out, give me a trick, when do you think I should draw down, when do you think I should put water on? USDA can certainly help you, but I’d go to the duck guys, so I usually would send people to DU first or a management company like Orion, there are some other management companies around and there are great resource too because they’re actively managing for clients every day. So there’s private sector opportunity, DU opportunity and US Government opportunity.

Ramsey Russell: Are conservation easements still kind of a big thing? Because when you start talking about buying a piece of property and developing it and I want to have it hold for my life, but I might want to be a generational acquisition, those conservation easements not only can be a financial windfall and offset some of my out of pocket expenses, but it protects that property in perpetuity. Do you see much of that in your neck of the woods?

Spencer Water: We do see some, we have some local conservation easement groups. Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, been around forever putting easements on farms. Maryland Environmental Trust, Lower Shore Land Trust, Nature Conservancy, there are easement opportunities through CREP, through WRE, is that the old – people remember WRP now it’s called WRE same program, Wetland Reserve Program. There’s easement opportunities with the federal government. I always caution my clients to redefine print, easements sometimes can make it possible to buy a property just want to go into it knowing every detail. What are the restrictions? Is it a 30 year easement? Is it a perpetual easement? There’s different types of easements and those easements come with different, different amounts of money attached to them. So, we assist folks in that regard. Get your attorney involved, get your broker or your realtor involved. But yeah, there are certainly easement opportunities because we’re surrounded by marshes and along the Atlantic coastal bays, there are certain monies that are still set aside for easements on coastal marshes versus riverine marshes and so forth. So yeah, a lot of opportunities for folks reach out to these NGOs and or your consultants can help you weave through that.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, let’s talk about the habitat elements now, Spencer, that’s the fun stuff. What kind of habitat are we creating or should we create within our impoundments or within our properties? And how does the surrounding landscape influence that decision?

Spencer Water: Yeah, well, I think, my answer is kind – I’ve already sort of given you my best answer and that is to have some different things flooded on your farm. Listen, I get beaten up a little bit by people or say, man, you guys talk this moist soil game, you’re an old DU guy Spencer, you won’t let go of the moist soil deal. It’s flooded corn. I can hold more ducks in flooded corn than I can everything else. Well, I just professionally in my lifetime as being a duck hunter, I got to disagree. Yes, corn is great, flooded corn is awesome. But man, I want a little bit everything. I want moist soil on a farm and I want some flooded corn. And we plant a lot of millet in areas that maybe didn’t have the moist soil. We say it was ground, it was not quite as heavy and it was well managed and we didn’t get the moist soil crops there that we wanted. So we use a lot of millet. And listen, I spoke about this before deer damage is a significant thing, it’s a significant thing for farmers. Well, it’s a really significant thing for guys who own wildlife farms. If you’re not fencing, you’re impounding elements on the eastern shore of Maryland, you’re going to be. Because generally speaking, wildlife farms are not super big, they’re stuck near woods or near the marsh and the deer damages. Now you’re planting corn that you’re trying to grow 200 bushel corn or milo or soybeans and on a farm where you also manage for whitetails and sikas, I mean, that’s a hard thing to do. So, a lot of guys are fencing impoundments, electric fence, solar electric, electric fencing to keep these rascals out. Well, you don’t have to solar fence your millet or your moist soil, so if you think about it, it might be a way not to break the bank. So, yeah, so my answer is the same, different crops flooded. That’s what I’m after, not the same thing. Let’s not just eat cheeseburgers every night, let’s have something different for them. And it seems to help my clients plants maintain ducks on the farm. If they’re not eating corn, they’re in that moist soil, if they’re not in moist soil, they might be in the millet, for whatever reason, whether it’s temperature, whether what’s flooded earlier, a lot of millet and moist soil, we flood super early and we keep it flooded super late to provide spring migration habitat. That was one of the big things when I was with DU. We always wanted folks to keep some water on these moist soil impounds until April 15^th till tax day, right? And you know yourself, I mean, if you’re a farmer and you got to get in there and plant corn that you’re going to flood next fall, that water’s got to come off earlier. So let’s have some different crops flooded on the farm so we can keep some water on there for this spring migration habitat. And it gets back to what we talked about when we started and that is, a lot of my clients are duck watchers, they don’t have to be shooting them every minute, they like to watch them. And in the spring of the year, if you’ve got water in these moist soil units, man, you got ducks on your farm. Because the mid-Atlantic is a super northerly migration stop for all sorts of ducks, different ducks. Like, we get a big pintail influx going north. And if you still got sheet water on your farm, having wigeon and pintails and teal birds on your farm in March is just really cool. It’s after duck season and you still get to watch ducks. So it’s kind of like an additional benefit of providing some duck habitat. People always ask me, do those ducks remember? I don’t know if ducks have memory or not. You’d have to ask a DU guy or a waterfowl biologist. But the farmer, the agronomist says, absolutely they remember. If they’re hanging out on your farm on that northerly migration, I think you got a better chance of maybe capturing a few of those ducks on their southerly migration the next year.

Ramsey Russell: I think they definitely imprint. Yeah, I think imprinting is an absolute fact of life. These ducks, I think they do remember. I don’t know how they remember, but I think they do remember.

Spencer Water: I totally believe it. I have no studies that I can back up with that, but I totally believe it as a manager.

Ramsey Russell: If I’ve got a duck impoundment a couple of miles, few miles from a big marsh that I know the ducks can roost on. How important is it for me to hold ducks on my property? I mean, is there ever a situation, maybe I should just set the table, so to speak, and wait on them to come off some of these other areas they’re using? I mean, we start talking about all the different habitat components that waterfowl needs as part of their life cycle. Do I need all of it or can I have just some of it?

Spencer Water: Well, I think you can have some of it. And listen, I think it – having somewhere for them to go roost, that’s not on you, I always like it. I want them to come there and eat, provide the client with a huntable opportunity or a duck watching opportunity, come and eat and then go, and then go back to the marsh and roost and then come back. That’s kind of how they handle here anyway because we’re surrounded by rivers and marshes. I think, not saying they won’t, overnight on people’s impoundments because they certainly will and then you got to bump them in the morning. But having them leave your farm and go back to marsh to roost I think is the perfect scenario. We’re fortunate enough to have that happen on a lot of farms that we manage. Some farms, they don’t. They come and they spend the night, you got to bump them in the morning. That’s another that we’ve sort of learned in doing this for 25 years is, when do you hunt the ducks that you have using your impoundment? Or a lot of these folks grew up being morning hunters, that’s just what they did. They got up early, they got up in the dark, they got a cup of coffee, they went to a marsh or they went to a field and they went hunting in the morning. Well, what we have done is sort of help some clients see that maybe that’s not the best way to handle your ducks. Maybe we let them, maybe they come in the morning and eat and then go back to the marsh, or maybe you don’t bump them until 1 or 2 o’clock in the afternoon. And you get in, they come back, you have a nice duck shoot, you get out of there before legal and you’re standing back at the barn around the fire pit having a beverage and then here come your ducks. Maybe the afternoon hunting is as a little easier on them. Now I’m not saying that we do that every day, but it’s something that I’ve seen work and it seems to be a little easier on the ducks that are using your farm. Don’t go in there in the dark and bump them and start banging on them. I think, I don’t know, I like to go in the morning, I’m a morning guy, I like mornings. But I like this 2 o’ clock thing, seems to be easier on ducks that you got on the farm.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a great point right there. And it leads me into my last question. You’ve talked about habitat, you talked about location, a lot of these habitat elements and locations and everything else that go into building a great duck property. But how important is hunting pressure? How important is managing hunting pressure in your neck of the woods? Like we were sitting out there with the sundowner, having a couple of beers, watching the ducks fly in, that property wasn’t hunted every day.

Spencer Water: No sir. The pressure is getting to be talked about in every conversation with these clients. When are we going to hunt?  I have always been a weather hunter, so I’m sort of a weather geek. I like hunting when the wind’s going to blow. I like hunting when a front’s coming. I like hunting after a front comes through when the pressures dropping or pressure is rise and quick. Now a lot of folks don’t have that flexibility, their schedules are tight, they’re in and out, they can only hunt a certain day or a certain week and in. But managing the pressure is in every one of our management discussions now, it’s as important as when you flood and when you draw down as important as what you plant and when you plant. We try to say once a week now that’s hard to do because people don’t have -they want to hunt around holidays and hunt when the kids are off school and so forth. And hunting back to back on a smaller property is going to be tough and so we’re trying to hunt the weather days, when it’s going to blow, let’s go. Let’s hunt an afternoon, it’ll be a little easier. Then next week, let’s try them in the morning. Let’s vary when we go, let’s pay attention to Mother Nature. That sounds like second nature to a person who’s grown up as a hunter. But a lot of these clients are relatively new, they’re hunters, but they might not be duck hunters, they might not be impoundment duck hunters. So there’s kind of a recipe for how you handle the ducks. Once you’ve done all this work and invested all this money, bought your farm, built your impoundments, drilled your wells, run your power for AC, heaters, built blinds, you’ve spent all this time and then you’re lucky enough to get a nice bunch of ducks that start to use the farm on a regular basis. And then, we kind of just go in there and put too much pressure on them and they leave. So we try to coach people that, hey, big front coming Wednesday, what you doing Thursday? Could you be there at 1 o’ clock? We try to help with that, it’s not a fee based service, it’s just me just trying to help people kind of manage with the weather. Obviously, outfitters, guys who are taking people for money, they can’t do that, they got to go, I get that. But we’re fortunate we don’t have too many outfitters, fitters that are, that are running big impoundment operations, it’s mostly private landowners who are doing it with friends, family, people they work with, clients and so forth. So yeah, pressure is huge. It’s one of the things that we’re going to talk about more and more and more as more impoundments are built, as people up their game and they get a little more serious on this. Hey, we really had a lot of ducks last year, I want to ramp it up, maybe build a new empowerment, but maybe plant something different. So if you’re managing your pressure, you’re going to be ahead of your neighbor and that’s what we’re after.

Ramsey Russell: Amen. Spencer, how can everybody get in touch with you? How can we connect with you?

Spencer Water: They can reach me on the web, orionwildlife.com go check out our website, phone numbers on their emails on there, text me, call me, got it on me every minute. Once the snow gets off the ground, we’re going to hit the ground running. We got this new projects we coming for people this year, removing some dirt, so 2025 is going to be a good one and super appreciate you having me on here, great to see you and talk with you, as always love to talk about ducks and habitat and we’re here for folks, just give us a shout.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you, Spencer. Folks, thank you all for listening to episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. You all been listening to my buddy Spencer Water out on the eastern shore of Maryland. You all can look him up on orionwildlife.com. See you next time.

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