EP 582. Practicing the Art of Species-Specific Duck Whistles

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. We’re in today’s studio all the way from down in Florida is Mr. Shannon Kelly, who makes some pretty darn incredible duck calls. His duck calls are for pintails, wigeon, and whistling ducks. His expertise has been featured on various platforms. You can see him on Instagram. You can listen to my buddy over at the Filthy Spoon podcast where he was recently interviewed, and I want to do a deep dive into Shannon Kelly Game Calls, into the craftsmanship and the inspiration that went behind a regular duck hunter from Florida entering the outdoor space and dominating his style of call. Shannon, how the heck are you?

Shannon Kelly: I’m doing very well, and I want to thank you. I really appreciate you having me on the show. I’m flattered, and I appreciate it a lot.

Ramsey Russell:  Man, I’m proud to have you. Out of the blue, you sent me one of your pintail whistles. It was different than a lot of the pintail whistles I’d ever blown. A lot of them are configurations of literally whistles. Yours has got a bead in it. It looks like if Dr. Spock had a big old guitar pick, that’s what it looks like.

Shannon Kelly: There we go. This is it right here.

Ramsey Russell: But it was full proof. It was easy to blow, and I loved it. I just wanted to have you come on and tell your story today. Shannon, who are you and where are you from?

“He was what we would consider a white Jamaican, similar to how you have a white Australian or white South African, and Americanized, American educated. But he was one of six fanatical waterfowl hunters down in the Caribbean.”

Shannon Kelly: My name’s Shan Kelly, and the last name is Kelly. It’s Irish. My mom is from Canada. She grew up on a small farm in Canada, and they come from a hunting family. She met my dad when he was a student at Fordham University. Some people might know that name. That’s where Donald Trump went to school for a couple of years. Our family, his side of the family, they were all British, in the service and the regiments. They served all around the world. We could go back hundreds of years. They were from Ireland when Ireland was part of the UK, and he served in India, Africa, and St. Kitts. Eventually, he was a garrison commander for the West Indian British Regiment in Jamaica. He was what we would consider a white Jamaican, similar to how you have a white Australian or white South African, and Americanized, American educated. But he was one of six fanatical waterfowl hunters down in the Caribbean. He liked to travel around, wingshoot, and duck hunt. The story behind him is that there were no seasons or limits. You could just go out and shoot whatever you wanted. They had everything down there, but no greenhead mallards or ringnecks.

Ramsey Russell: What species was he mostly killing down there?

Shannon Kelly: Mostly blue-winged teal, lots of them. Some hybrids too, pintails, and lots of wigeon. They get a lot of wigeon down the Caribbean basin. I don’t know what it’s like nowadays, but I know a lot of people contact me out of Cuba. There were a lot of blue wings down in Cuba. I’ve met duck hunters from around the world. All those islands down there, if you have mangrove marshes, you’re going to have blue-winged teal and green-winged teal. It’s pretty easy going. It’s not cold weather, it’s warm weather hunting. The biggest problem is acquiring decoys and ammunition. He was a scholar too. He improvised scull boats and was just a fanatical, really great guy.

“Did he ever talk about seeing or hunting any white-cheek pintail or any of those Cuban whistling ducks down in that part of the world?”

Ramsey Russell: Did he ever talk about seeing or hunting any white-cheek pintail or any of those Cuban whistling ducks down in that part of the world?

Shannon Kelly: They have another species of whistling duck down there. It’s big like an Egyptian goose. You’re not allowed to shoot them down there, but I know that there’s a couple hundred of them left. I’ve looked on the maps and they do have them. From the bags that the guys in Cuba show me, they do have fulvous tree ducks and black-bellies in Cuba. They definitely have blue-winged teal. I think they have mottled ducks too, from what I can understand.

Ramsey Russell: Wow, that’s a pretty interesting environment. Where in Canada is your mother’s side of the family from?

Shannon Kelly: She’s from Ontario. Her father was from England.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll be darn. Man, what a small world. So how did you all end up down in Florida?

Shannon Kelly: There was a lot of political upheaval. If you see what happened in Venezuela with the socialist takeover, there was a lot of politics going down at that time. My grandfather was well-to-do and very disliked by the left leaners, very outspoken. It was just time to go. You had to walk away from everything. Some of the stuff took hundreds of years to acquire. They were part of the establishment. He had estates and property, and we had to walk away from it. It was sad. Very sad. It was really tough. My dad didn’t want to go. He was spearfishing and wing shooting and hated to go. But it was time to go. When the commies take over, it’s time to get out. We got up here in 1976 and basically had lost everything. We had nothing to our names. We went from driving nice cars and going on nice vacations to scraping by. That lasted for a couple of years, but we still managed to get some good duck hunts in. The duck hunting at the time was pretty good. I would consider it excellent until about six to seven years ago. We started to see a decline like everybody else has seen.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely. A little background, I was asking about that whistling duck, and I just looked it up. I’ve never seen one in the wild. It’s the West Indian whistling duck, also known as the Caribbean whistling duck or the Cuban whistling duck. It’s the largest of the whistling ducks, 22 inches long. It has a mottled brown body with pale white face and throat, no black belly like the black-bellied whistling duck, but a high-pitched whistle. It’s a nocturnal feeder, prefers coastal mangroves, brackish ponds, and freshwater wetlands. Its range is native to the Bahamas, Cuba, Cayman Islands, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and other parts of the Greater and Lesser Antilles. It’s threatened due to habitat loss, hunting, and predation. Protected in several countries. Wow. Just to see something like that would be kind of cool. I was somewhere a few years ago, in town of all places, walked into an office, and the man had in his office these old 70s, 60s, 50s duck stamps, Ducks Unlimited prints, as I recall. Among them was a Cuban whistling duck. That’s the closest I’ve ever been to seeing one. I just thought it was interesting that your dad grew up among all that. So, he was a big duck hunter. You grew up in Florida. What are your origins in duck hunting? Did he take his little boy Shannon duck hunting?

Shannon Kelly: Oh yeah. I was always present. I loved duck hunting. Some other kids might be into baseball. Me, I just wanted to duck hunt. First, it was duck hunting and wing shooting. First, the old pellet gun in the duck boat to finish off that bird. Then it got to pot shooting. Then I was an accomplished wing shooter by the time I was 8, 9, 10 years old. I think I was telling Jonathan this, the first duck I ever shot, my dad got down low in an improvised boat they made for sculling. Got it. The first duck I ever killed, I was probably about 7 or 8.

Ramsey Russell: What kind of duck was it?

Shannon Kelly: It was a hen canvasback.

Ramsey Russell: Are you kidding? Wow.

Shannon Kelly: I tell people after that point, I was ruined.

Ramsey Russell: I bet you were.

Shannon Kelly: They put up a pretty good fight too. They don’t want to go down. You had to put a half a box of .410 shells in there to get it off. After that, the two species very common down here were blue-winged teal and the ringneck. That’s about 80% of the diet for duck hunting. South Florida has more variety than anybody else, and I’ll go into that.

Ramsey Russell: Now, where do you live, and what are you considering South Florida? How far south do I go to be in South Florida?

Shannon Kelly: I’m below Lake Okeechobee. I’m down in West Palm Beach, in Palm Beach County. Trump is probably about 15 miles behind me. The best duck shooting in the state of Florida, probably on the east coast, southeast coast of the United States, is probably right within a 30-minute drive of me right now. It was incredibly good for a long time, but now things are changing just like everywhere else.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Shannon Kelly: We used to hunt there, and then we started gravitating to Merritt Island. This is common knowledge, but Merritt Island, where they launch the space shuttle and do all the space missions, in the 1980s was unbelievable. There’s just no way to describe how good it was. The variety, you could shoot redheads, divers, pintail, wigeon. It was just really good. I was in my early teens and had really good youth hunting, layout hunting. Just a really good time. It was kind of like a mini Chesapeake Bay over there, a real eastern bay culture to it.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve not done a lot of Florida duck hunting. I’ve done very little. We hunted shallow water, kind of flooded pasture, very shallow, ankle-deep. We were targeting the mottled duck, the Florida mottled duck. Then we went out to some bigger, deeper water with a lot of hydrilla. Not too much, but a lot. You see these little dots in the stratosphere, and you start hearing, and here come the ringnecks. Without putting on the brakes, they rove over the decoys and are gone. It was quick shooting, like ringnecks. What are a lot of the habitat types that you all were hunting? And what are some of the habitat types that a lot of the species are associated with? You were talking about a high species diversity in parts of Florida. What kind of habitat are they associated with mostly?

“I tell people if I’d been old enough to be at the Battle of Gettysburg, that’s what it sounded like. As soon as shooting started, it was a roar. My dad used to say any executive from Winchester or Remington, if they heard it, their hearts would jump in glee.”

Shannon Kelly: It’ll vary quite a bit. If you get up to northern Florida by Volusia, you’re going to get a lot of cypress swamps. You’re going to get lakes that used to have hydrilla. Now hydrilla is invasive, but the ducks love it. The invertebrates in there are a gift from heaven for anglers and ducks. It’s really thick. You need an airboat or a long-tail to get over it when it gets thick, but the ducks love it. So many ringneck ducks, so many. Every duck loves it. The mottleds love it, the pintails, the wigeon, the teal, especially the blue-winged teal. They love hydrilla. As you get down to Lake Okeechobee, you start to get sawgrass with submerged aquatic vegetation and cattails. As you get below that into the Everglades, it’s been taken over by cattails. We have a large sugarcane growing operation, like what Louisiana used to have way back in the day. That’s where I hear a lot of the fulvous originally came from. They grow wild rice in the lay fields, and that brings in swarms of ducks. The water coming off cow fields and agriculture from sugarcane was going to Lake Okeechobee. It came out very nutrient-rich, dumping hydroponic, nutrient-rich water into the Everglades. It killed off the sawgrass and allowed cattails to take over, really changing the Everglades. The South Florida Water Management District created several stormwater treatment areas. In the beginning, they were straight hydrilla, and the duck hunting was world-class. It was hard to imagine. I tell people if I’d been old enough to be at the Battle of Gettysburg, that’s what it sounded like. As soon as shooting started, it was a roar. My dad used to say any executive from Winchester or Remington, if they heard it, their hearts would jump in glee. The amount of ammunition was something else, thousands of shots going off simultaneously. You could see the flames coming out of barrels even from a quarter mile away. Seeing 500,000 birds flying around was unbelievable. The STAs were really good. They came online about 20–25 years ago. It’s similar to the managed hunts in California where you draw a permit, show up in the morning, line up, and it’s first come, first served. Some permit holders wouldn’t show, and there was an on-the-spot lotto, so you’d almost always get in. Even if you didn’t, replacements came out, and you were in the game. You’d do a quick limit in 30 minutes and come back out. I think what really changed Florida was after Hurricane Wilma and Katrina hit Louisiana. Many marshes there declined, and simultaneously we started to get a lot of wigeon, pintail, and even gadwall, something we rarely saw in Florida. It got really good, and at that point, the STAs became the crown jewel of Florida hunting. It became very hard to get permits, people applied all the time. Then about 10 years ago, the state of Florida started cracking down on hydrilla spraying, spending millions of dollars, which we can’t get them to stop. Because of boat traffic, spraying, and STAs being closed to boats, the STAs got crowded with ducks, and permits became hard to get. Then with the nesting decline in the prairie pothole region, things have taken a downturn. I hope it comes back, but I don’t know.

“What are some of your fondest memories hunting with your dad? What was you all were targeting ducks, and then tell me about the turkey.”

Ramsey Russell: What are some of your fondest memories hunting with your dad? What was you all were targeting ducks, and then tell me about the turkey.

Shannon Kelly: He loved wigeon. He absolutely loved wigeon. That was his favorite.

Ramsey Russell: So you all would go out, scout, and target wigeon? That was your bread-and-butter duck?

Shannon Kelly: Oh, yeah. We had large sets, big groups of us, eight or nine. My dad had a lot of friends, like a magnet. He was a musician, and people loved him. It was nothing to get 300–400 wigeon decoys together, put them in a big open slough, set up a big palmetto blind with retrievers, and pull down big flocks of wigeon heading out to the launch pads at Cape Canaveral. And the pintail—there were lots of pintail, which I loved. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I love watching pintail fly.

Ramsey Russell: When you were hunting with your dad chasing those wigeon and pintail, what calls did you all use in the absence of Shannon Kelly game calls?

Shannon Kelly: We’d use wing setters, whatever wigeon call we could get. What was critical was we had six to eight guys really turning up the volume. It was loud, raucous calling. Even if the calling wasn’t that accurate, it’s like having four or five people talking at the same time. You can’t focus on what’s being said, but you know something’s going on. That, with a really good large traffic-running spread.

Ramsey Russell: Big spread, like what was it, 120–200 decoys?

Shannon Kelly: Oh, yeah. We’d finish shooting, and two hours later, we were still picking up decoys. Felt like a donkey dragging stuff out of there, but it was good times. Things are always changing. If you see an opportunity, don’t miss a quality hunt with your family, because you never know. Sometimes it gets better, but often it doesn’t. Maybe the season has two or three days left, go out and do it, have a good time.

Ramsey Russell: Tell me more about your dad and the five or six other men you all hunted with, their influence and mentorship.

Shannon Kelly: My dad was an incredibly good shot. He traveled and did a lot of wingshooting, destination hunts throughout Central America. He went to El Salvador, Nicaragua, on white-wing dove shoots, shooting 300–400 doves a day. He loved shooting. One favorite was the ballpay pigeon, a giant pigeon with a white cape on its head. He liked wigeon quite a bit. He was well-read, well-educated guy, and a musician.

Ramsey Russell: You said Musician, like what kind of Musician?

Shannon Kelly: He played piano, classically trained in piano and violin. He used to get in trouble, his grandfather thought he was studying for an exam, but he was out playing in a rock and roll band. He could play “Great Balls of Fire” and make your eyes pop out. He could walk up to a piano after 10 years and play it note for note. He spoke several languages but lost his car keys every day. He was really kind and helped a lot of people. My grandfather, too, helped a lot, paying for people’s education without them knowing it. Pay for kids to go to school, just really good guy.

Ramsey Russell: Are you musically inclined, Shannon?

Shannon Kelly: Not so much. In middle school, they made us take band class. I did clarinet and oboe, but that teaches a lot. You could learn about an instrument. And a duck call or turkey call is no different, it’s just another musical instrument. There’s a skill curve, a learning curve. Once you learn to sound like the real thing, you can flaunt it. Calling is big.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, how did you learn to make calls and what inspired you to make calls? Well, how long ago did you start?
Shannon Kelly: Oh, I started when I was probably 12 or 13. I was just copycat my dad, because we were so broke, we didn’t have any money. I mean, we were turkey hunting. And if $20 is a lot of money for a Lynch box call, he would just go get one and he would look at it and he says, I can make this better. And next thing you know, everybody had a box call, a pot call, tube call, wing call. He had any kind of imaginable duck call you could make. And I started making turkey calls. And me and him had a very good turkey call company. That’s probably about 35 years ago. We had Oscilla Game Calls, and we made a lot of turkey. We did the whole thing like everybody did, entering contests and taking out ads in the back of magazines and doing mail order like everybody else did back then.

Ramsey Russell: I got a text this morning from my son. He finally scored a turkey. He’s hard at it. I don’t know where he gets it, but he is mad at turkeys, but he is really good off in the woods hunting them. Me personally, I wouldn’t walk to the end of my mailbox turkey hunting. It just doesn’t do it for me, but that’s me. So I’ve kind of steered this conversation in my wheelhouse, which is waterfowl. That’s the calls I know. But now tell me more about you and your dad. You all were turkey hunters. Is that really you all’s wheelhouse, turkey hunting?

Shannon Kelly: No, for me and both of us, we were very serious waterfowl before turkey. Then he got into turkey and I got into turkey. But I always liked to duck hunt. Turkey hunting is good because duck season is over, go turkey hunt and vice versa. Some guys may go try duck hunting because they’ve never tried it before. But I just love duck hunting. I love it. And I also love turkey hunting. Being a manufacturer, a business owner like he was later on in the years, I got into trying to help other people make calls because the world was changing. About 20 years ago, things started changing with the big box stores taking over and the little small guys, like Lynch box calls or some of the other companies that were big, were kind of declining. There were a lot of mom-and-pop guys making turkey calls and duck calls. I decided to create a forum board for turkey hunting to help call makers. That’s another story right there. But the duck calls for me started probably about 15 years ago when I really wanted a really good pintail call that sounded very good. I noticed that a lot of the pintail calls, and I researched it. I talked to some of the manufacturers that were making them, like Murillo down in Brazil. You had to use a Google translator with the guy. He speaks zero English, he speaks Portuguese. They have little jungle birds down there. It seems like they were geared up for a lot of the jungle birds they have down there. He makes about 40 different kinds of whistles. He made a little roller. You’ve probably seen them before. When you blow into them, they cycle over about eight times. I talked to him.

Ramsey Russell: Would that have been that little brown call?
Shannon Kelly: Yeah, it’s a little brown one.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’ve got one somewhere.
Shannon Kelly: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Or had one.
Shannon Kelly: Yeah, it’s like a jungle bird. It looks like a guinea hen fowl or like a pintail, like a pheasant. I watched the videos, the guy calling it, changing notes. That’s why they have the little holes in there. The California hunters take the call, they close the holes, and they put it like this and hold it like that. They kind of improvised, used it for pintails. But the sound is off a little bit. It’s like playing a musical instrument. There’s a lot going on at the same time, so it’s hard to get it functioning. I started messing with that and it was incredibly hard, really hard to figure out the design on them and how whistles work. I had to pick it up and put it down several times. My dad being in the steel manufacturing business, I was trained how to weld and operate machinery from a very early age. No stranger to mills and lathes and all that stuff. Probably about seven, eight years ago, picking it up and putting it down, I said, you know what, I’m going to make a black-bellied whistling duck call. Because they were starting to really take over here in South Florida. There were a lot of them.

Ramsey Russell: Which one did you start with? The pintail call?
Shannon Kelly: I started with the pintail call, but that’s not the first design I had.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Shannon Kelly: The first one I brought to market was this little small call. That is the black-bellied duck call.
Ramsey Russell: It looks like it’s predicated on the shotgun shell brass calls I’ve seen south of the equator.
Shannon Kelly: Yeah, we have a lot of Venezuelans also in Florida, and a lot of the guys were hunting ducks down in Venezuela. These little 12-gauge shotgun shell hulls, they’re shaved, they take two and shave them together. It makes a decent sound. These ones, because I had the machinery and stuff like that to make them similar to how guys make precision acrylic duck calls, I was able to really dial it in. Basically like what people do, tuning these little rice rocket engines to get the most horsepower out of them. I was able to, a thousandth of an inch at a time, with polished surfaces and exact internal dimensions and razor edges, really dial in the design. That came out and honestly, I just made it for myself. I said I want to do some of these black-bellied calls. You’d whistle to them and they respond back. They’ll call back like caller ID. They’ll just keep on going. So I came out with this call and thought, just a handful of them, enough to buy a couple cases of ammo and call it a day. But when it came out, it was an absolute smash hit. I could not make them fast enough. Every weekend, any day off from work possible, I was making these things year-round. It was very successful. The guys were really having good success with it because it was really designed, spinning them. The birds had never really been hunted with a call before to this manner, so the response was very good. We have a lot of black-bellies in Florida and the range is spreading up, so that did good for a while.

“I’ve always said and believe that more or less the mallard duck in North America wrote the playbook of how we approach duck hunting day in, day out. I’ve had whistles, your whistles and precursors before that, several of the ones you’ve named already and lots of others. I’ve kept them on there.”

Ramsey Russell: Shannon, there’s a lot of places in the world that using an e-collar for ducks is legal. It’s legal in a lot of places. I grew up hunting mallards, mallard call, mallard decoys, blowing at mallards. I’ve always said and believe that more or less the mallard duck in North America wrote the playbook of how we approach duck hunting day in, day out. I’ve had whistles, your whistles and precursors before that, several of the ones you’ve named already and lots of others. I’ve kept them on there. When I go to Mexico or go to places that’s real heavy to whistling type ducks, I whistle at them with much more variable results than blowing them out or calling them out. In some of those countries that you can use an e-collar, it’s been my observation that wigeons, pintails, and whistling ducks are extremely susceptible to calling when it sounds like them. Not when it whistles and it kind of sort of sounds like them, but when they identify, whoa, that’s a whistler, or that’s a pintail, man, those hook up and come in better than mallards on average. I’m just saying they do. I can see where if you developed a whistle call for black-bellied whistlers in a state that has a lot of them, once somebody gained proficiency in mimicking that species, they would be susceptible. Whistling ducks down in Mexico, the pichiguilas, we hunt black bellies mostly. We yammer at them, we call, and I’m just whistling. My ear is so bad I can’t tell if the guy is doing any better than me. They’ll hook up enough to come in. So I can’t imagine if you’re sounding more exactly like them and talking to them and learning their language. They’re going to decoy. Those whistling ducks will decoy very well if they hear what they want to hear that sounds like them.

Shannon Kelly: That is exactly true. The response. And I don’t want to make it seem  like a Billy Mays appetite, but once you get the sound dialed in. And what helped me was I had high quality. You know, things have changed. People have high quality recordings now, video and sound recording. Once you get the sound dialed in, it was game on. The reaction was unbelievable with the black bellies. They would turn around, they would come in. You ever see snow geese? They come down like that. They were doing that. It’s the interaction that you have. Shooting something, that’s fun. But when you are fooling them and you’re calling to them, you get that interaction with them.

Ramsey Russell: That’s the whole essence of duck hunting, that relationship and negotiation with wild birds. I don’t have the ears to blow a whistling duck call. Even with my Tetraxan, with my hearing impairment, I can’t fully hear their articulations. But let’s take a time right now. Blow that whistling duck call. Let’s hear it, and tell us what you’re doing.

Shannon Kelly: Blow the black belly. I’m going to point away from the screen because we’re very close contact. I learned a long time ago that when you’re recording yourself calling, try to be outside and at least 20 foot away from the recording device. If you record yourself as you’re walking to and from a recording device, the sound is going to change. So 20 foot or more. I’m just going to point it away. That’s a fulvous, and this is a black belly.

Ramsey Russell: I could actually hear that.

Shannon Kelly: Yeah, that’s it right there. I see a lot of people doing demos online and they’re inside their house or inside their trucks. Step outside, like 20 foot away, and you’ll sound like a different caller, you’ll sound like a different guy.

Ramsey Russell: Shannon, you made that call just now. What it sounded like when you’re actually calling the ducks, are you just constantly doing the same thing?

Shannon Kelly: Brainwash mode with black bellies.

Ramsey Russell: Meaning what? It’s constant, incessant.

Shannon Kelly: Nonstop. Once you sound good, you flaunt it. People ask what I’m doing, I say just trust me. Get down, cover up. Keep calling. They’ll call back. Once they call back to you, keep going. They may be passing you. Keep calling the black bellies. Sometimes they’ll go 600–700 yards that way and it’s not looking good over there. That group is back there on the clump behind. They’ll circle around, they’ll come back. Many instances of guys shooting and dropping half the flock and then they’ll circle out to 300. You call again, they turn around, come back.

Ramsey Russell: They know whistling ducks kind of work high. Over those marshes, they’re high, they’re looking straight down. When we’ve hunted white-faced whistlers in Uruguay and parts of Argentina, I’ve literally been on whistling duck hunts for white-faced. You had to be as camouflaged as a South Louisiana spec hunter. Because they’re looking down for that sound coming up and you had to be invisible. But once a whistling duck, black-bellied, fulvous, or white-faced, once they gets over the decoys, Lord help them. They’re all neck and wings with short stubby wings. They don’t maneuver quick like a green-wing teal high-tailing out of there. They’re kind of stuck.

Shannon Kelly: They’re in a tough position once they’re within range. My experience, the fulvous are a little bit smarter than the black bellies. From when I was 7 or 8 years old, there were quite a few in Lake Okeechobee. They always did the same thing. They flew in a very pronounced formation like a goose, always outside shotgun range. They like to fly nice and high up. They won’t go any lower than 40 yards but most of the time very high. They’re smart. They know where they’re going, they know where they’re coming from, they know where they’re going. Once you get them to commit, it’s a game of trickery. You’re making a sales pitch on them. They’re vocal. Keep throwing it at them. You’ve got nothing to lose if they’re not coming directly at you. Keep belting it out at them and give them your best sales pitch and they’ll come in.

Ramsey Russell: What are you saying or doing into your call when you’re calling to black bellies and fulvous?

Shannon Kelly: Like you mentioned your son is a turkey hunter. The saying when they used to make owl calls is who cooks for you all for owl call.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Shannon Kelly: For black belly it’s like, who the heck do you think you are? That’s it.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, okay.

Shannon Kelly: Now when you get black bellies, they really don’t. They will swim, but they like water about yay high. Okay. They’ll set up in there or on clumps. And you can get an area about the size of a truck bed. And there could be as many as 60, 150 birds in a small area like that. And when they get clumped up like that, you start doing this. They’ll get this kind of little spacing sound. It’s kind of like they’re feeding and you’ll have 40 or 50 of them like that in a group. They’ll do that on the ground. Sometimes you get them like that, sometimes they get tired and they’re in the air and they’re calling around, and instead of them go. And then sometimes they get really tight and they’re like. And that’s when you know they’ve had enough.

Ramsey Russell: Really? Wow

Shannon Kelly: You just see one lone black belly come, that’s it. Just keep calling. He’s done for.
Ramsey Russell: He’s coming in.
Shannon Kelly: Yeah, he’s desperate. So, but the fulvous is a two-note and it’s just like that. Two notes just like that, a little bit raspier, and just blow that at them. And they’re a little bit smarter though, a little bit smarter.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. So you started with the pintail. You went first into production with the whistling ducks we just talked about, and then the wigeon or back to the pintail.
Shannon Kelly: Then I said, this is unbelievable. I mean, and the thing was, it’s not really a money-making thing. It was really making a lot of people happy. And although I’m getting paid at a reasonable rate for my time and effort, you’re making a lot of people happy. And wigeon was really my dad’s favorite, and I love hunting wigeon also.
Ramsey Russell: Was your dad around during this process?
Shannon Kelly: No, my dad’s been gone a long time.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Shannon Kelly: He’s been gone 27, 28 years now. There are many stories I could tell, but at this time I said, let me try to do a wigeon call. I started working on it and it’s like a lot of people are doing six-in-one calls, which are like a compromise. And I don’t want to get into it because there are a lot of people that make them and they love them, but a six-in-one call sounds like a six-in-one call. I wanted to make a wigeon call that was dedicated to sound like a wigeon. There are a lot of guys very dedicated to making mallard and goose calls, and they’re extremely good at what they do. There are so many of them, it’s refined down to an art form now. And there really wasn’t much, if I wanted to buy a wigeon call that sounded really good, you’d keep shopping because not much attention is paid to it. It’s all laser-focused on mallard calls.
Ramsey Russell: Until I saw yours, I had never seen a wigeon call. A specific wigeon call?
Shannon Kelly: Yeah, not much. And I wish somebody had done it before I went to the trouble of doing it. So the manufacturing process, I had learned a lot from making black belly calls about the dimensions, and it’s like a musical instrument. I started taking on the wigeon call and slowly, as you can see, it’s a bigger hole.
Ramsey Russell: The wigeon’s a bigger hole.
Shannon Kelly: Yeah, the wigeon’s a bigger duck too.
Ramsey Russell: Bigger diameter.
Shannon Kelly: Okay, I see that. Bigger volume and such. But to engineer the call, the wigeon is a weird duck because it can call while it’s flying and on the ground. It’s a very vocal bird and it has a wheeze to it. That was the hard part to figure out and engineer. A lot of trial and error. Mind you, I could have been making turkey calls the whole time. They get mad, they get pissy. “Can you get me a call, please?” I’m like, no, sorry, I’m all out. And I was working on it, working on it. I spent months and months working on it, picking it up, putting it down, and finally I came out with the wigeon call. So here’s one right here, here’s a wigeon call right here, and Coke bottle.
Ramsey Russell: Let’s hear it.
Shannon Kelly: So I’ll see if I can turn on.
Ramsey Russell: What are you saying into that call, Shannon?
Shannon Kelly: It’s what. So I could play. What I do a lot of times when I’m running calls. So that’s a real wigeon right there. Can you hear that?
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Shannon Kelly: What I usually do a lot of times when I’m tuning calls is I will listen to wigeon and pintail, black belly calls at the same time. When I’m messing with them, tuning them, even final tuning to this day, I’ll put a recording on, listen to it, okay it’s set, it’s good. I’ll tune a call that way. And when I was engineering the calls, I would listen to recordings and run through programs that got the graphs and charts to make sure I had it right. I’ve even listened to ultra slow-motion pintail. I would take pintail calling and listen in ultra slow motion just to figure out what is really making this thing tick. That’s how I broke the code on the pintail call, which was the hardest one of all to figure out.
Ramsey Russell: Really? Well, let’s hear it now.
Shannon Kelly: This is a pintail call right here. And of course, there are no holes to keep closed, and if you notice it is bigger, it has a bigger sound, but here we go.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And what’s your technique for using it when they’re coming in? But I think like, if you’re working pintail, are you just steadily doing the same thing until they finish?

Shannon Kelly: If they’re coming straight to you, do nothing.
Ramsey Russell: Get your hands on your guns.
Shannon Kelly: If they’re not doing that and you sound exactly like a pintail, you have good pintail decoys, you’re in an area far away from other people that are going to menace you, then just play. Just do that. One thing I did learn from high-quality pintail recordings is that you can have a flock of 70 or 80 pintails and one will be facing this way, one that way, and they sound at different volumes depending on where it is in space. So here’s some right here. So that’s something right there.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Shannon Kelly: But that’s  one thing I realized is that if I put my finger over this, I can turn the volume like you do on a car stereo. You can turn it up, turn it down, make the effect of just one bird or eight or nine on the water that are really vocal. That adds a whole new dimension to pintail calling. I think it sounds very accurate and it took a long time to figure out how to make that too. That was really a headache.
Ramsey Russell: Shannon, could you elaborate on the process and materials you’ve used to ensure that your calls authentically replicate the sounds of these different species?
Shannon Kelly: Well, I machine everything I do. I do it completely, considered a vertical manufacturing process. I do everything in-house. For the wigeons, I buy the acrylic rod and then I machine it down myself. I didn’t want to run through the risks that a lot of callmakers had, where they hired employees or outsourced the CNC work to do it, and then the next thing you know, you’ve trained your competition. That’s happened a lot. I had learned that through helping hundreds of turkey call makers over the years. One guy comes out with a certain pot call, and next year you’ve got eight guys doing the same thing. There’s no honor between them. The tolerances are extremely close on it, similar to a mallard call with the tone board. The manufacturing of the pintail call was very complicated because most cast rod acrylic comes in at a maximum diameter of inch and a half, where my pintail call was two and a quarter inches wide. So in order to come up with a synthetic polymer like what I have, I had to do in-house polymerization. How people buy rod that solely manufacture polymer, I had to do that in-house. I went to extra precautions of patents and making sure trade secrets and stuff like that. It’s a clever design, not to blow my own horn, but it’s a clever manufacturing process. It is time-consuming and you can be off by just a hair and the call is going in the garbage bin.
Ramsey Russell: Dumb question, and I’ve spent my whole life asking them. But how did you know that you needed a two and a quarter-inch diameter instead of an inch and a half? I mean, heck, I can make it work with what. How did you even get there?

Shannon Kelly: Well, you ever see a trombone, and the guy changes the different lines like that. Well, I knew that a lot of the pintail calls that were out there were too high in pitch. I had to come down there, so it was extra volume. I had to make it bigger. It was like a race car that has an improved intake and exhaust and displacement to get more horsepower, more volume, In my case, I had to make it bigger. What I learned by playing pintails in very slow motion is that when the trill is, it’s rolling over two times. That’s what it sounds like under ultra-slow motion. So I had to engineer the call so that it rolled over, it did the trill two times, versus if you blow one of the samba calls or Brazilian calls. If you blow it hard, or a whistle, it’ll roll over eight or nine times. It’d be a long blast. So I had to engineer that. It was tricky and a lot of trial and error. I didn’t know if I was going to figure it out, and I invested a lot of my time, which is money.

Ramsey Russell: Sure.

Shannon Kelly: When I came out with it and I first got the first couple prototypes out, I took them up to Saskatchewan in North Dakota, and we had good luck with them. Then I said, this is a good call. Let me continue to work on this a little bit more. Then I came out with the final design, which is foolproof. I’ve been at trade shows where little kids come up, they’re three years old, and they pick it up and blow on it. I knew it was foolproof. The only thing with the pintail call is that you have to keep the guts dry. If you get water into it, I made some tweaks to the design. You just put your finger over the hole like this and blow it out, and the moisture will come out. Other than that, it sounds just like a pintail. It’s easy to use, and I price it so it’s reasonable, so somebody can afford it.

Ramsey Russell: Just a sidestep. Talking about getting that little bubble dirty, that little bead dirty inside there. I called you up because mine started acting funny, and I made the transition. I cannot believe I have been dipping snuff since high school, and just on a lark, I put in one of them little nicotine pouches back in November, and I haven’t had a can of snuff since. I eat these little pouches, and I enjoy it. They last a whole lot longer than tobacco. Customs don’t stop you and give you a hard time because you’re importing tobacco into their country. Now I can’t wait till the upcoming duck season when I don’t have to get that crap out from under my reeds, out of my barrel, and out of my guts. I feel like my duck call is going to improve.

Shannon Kelly: Helping you.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Shannon Kelly: Ducks made you go cold turkey.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, I didn’t quit for the ducks, but I think that’s going to be an interesting perk. I like those pouches. It’s pick one, anyone. I just like that. I guess I’ve built up a tolerance to nicotine because I like the heavy hitters. A lot of times somebody will say, let me try one. I’ll give them one, and about five minutes into it, when that nicotine surges, they spit it out, and their head’s spinning.

Shannon Kelly: No, I can’t. My dad was a smoker.

Ramsey Russell: Mine too.

Shannon Kelly: He couldn’t quit. He tried very hard. Anything you get into, any type of call is going to hinder the reed, mallard call, or even my call. But you clear it out, it’s easy, and you’re up and going. I have refined the design. There have been a few refinements. I’m not the type of person with the mentality good is good enough. Once you think you’re on top of this mountain, there’s another mountain. Let me work on that too. You have to keep refining the design. You don’t want to be complacent. You don’t want to be a one-trick pony.

Ramsey Russell: I agree. How has hunter feedback influenced the evolution of Shannon Kelly Game Calls, particularly for these species?

Shannon Kelly: Well, the black belly right out of the gate was pretty good. It was a well-designed call. If you make a couple thousand calls, you’re always going to have that freak call that makes you wonder, why does this one sound so good? You have to take it back apart and figure out why this one sounds so much better. That’s been happening my whole life. You’ll make a bunch of calls, and feedback from hunters comes in. The duck call business is an odd business. You have different groups of guys. You can have guys that are like me and I assume you, that don’t really care about the color as long as it works and pulls in ducks. Then you have people that like colors. They have to have them.

Ramsey Russell: Sounds like a bass fisherman.

Shannon Kelly: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: They gotta have trays full of all the different colors.

Shannon Kelly: Yes. You gotta make them happy. If you don’t, you gotta be cautious, somebody else will. Somebody will come along and say, I can make a jade widget. Shannon won’t make one, but I will. You have to watch any potential rivals. Custom call building is filled with that. There are a lot of guys making calls that sound very good, with quality sound. And there are people building lookers. They’ll build a call. There’s a well-known goose call maker, I won’t drop his name, but he’s got no guts in the engine. You want to make a call that sounds good, and if you want to expand your market share, you make one that looks nice and will match the other hunters.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s talk about the guy that is choosing function over form. I don’t care what color my calls are, particularly if I’m looking at a dozen calls and I can pick a flavor, I might pick one. But most of the calls I’ve got, it doesn’t matter. I’m looking for the sound. I’m looking for performance. Let me ask you this. I would imagine that 50 states from, let’s say, Maryland to California, Maryland to Oregon, and from prairie Canada down to south Louisiana, we’ve got all this country up here. I would guess that a lot of your whistling duck calls would be limited to Florida to Texas. Do you see any clump distribution or demand for these different species?

Shannon Kelly: Oh yeah, my wife gets annoyed. I ask which call, which color sold first, where they go to, because you have to watch your customers. You want to know your customers. You want your finger on the pulse. Black belly calls, Florida is my number one customer. But over the past couple years, we’ll go into black bellies and I’ll talk about widget and pinto. The black bellies, when I came out with that call about seven, eight seasons ago, it was mainly a South Florida thing, Lake Okeechobee area and down south. What happened is these black bellies started to expand their range. They started nest grounding. I call them the snow goose of the South. These birds are like alien from the movie Aliens. They breed like crazy. They’ll have multiple nests a year. It’s amazing. Sometimes they’re tiny, hardly bigger than a blue-winged teal, and they’re dropping a full clutch of 12 eggs. They breed. I watched the addresses I was sending them to. They started creeping up through Central Florida and North Florida. I’ve seen black belly ducks right on the borderline of Georgia and Florida. I sold a lot in Florida, big business and then get into Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and especially Texas. Sometimes I’ll call up the customers, ask how’s it looking, how’s your season going. Are they there all year long or do they move down south to Mexico? Oh no, they’re here all year long.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Shannon Kelly: The climate is changing.

Ramsey Russell: We’ve got warmer winters. Several years ago, we had this conversation on a podcast about black bellied whistling ducks expanding their range. A friend of mine, an older gentleman, recalls the first black bellied whistlers he saw down in southeast Texas was in the mid-1980s. Now, since we’ve talked about it on this podcast, I’ve had pictures sent to me from Delaware, from Ohio. A biologist in Canada told me about a rumored pair of breeding whistling ducks in Ontario. These winters are getting warm, and these birds are aggressive, and they’re expanding their range. I wish the fulvous would also. I can say that, who knows, in another 10–15 years, you’re liable to be selling them through the Atlantic and Mississippi flyways.

“The ducks are spreading in the range. It is warmer than it is normally. I hate to say, the farmers will tell you straight up, they’re not getting the winters they used to in the Midwest.”

Shannon Kelly: Yeah. And let me tell you, they are extremely good eating and they are so much fun to hunt. Now I do one thing that, I remember when I was old enough, I remember when it snowed in Fort Lauderdale in 1977. Okay, we’ll never see that again. But the weather is getting warmer. We got boa snakes, we got iguanas in Florida. We never had them here. They would have been here a million years ago if it was the case. The ducks are spreading in the range. It is warmer than it is normally. I hate to say, the farmers will tell you straight up, they’re not getting the winters they used to in the Midwest. But one thing that I did key on is a couple of my customers in Texas, they are on the grain barges that come down through the Midwest that have corn on them and there’ll be swarms of black bellies on top of them. Like you ever see the big piles of corn that they have up in the grain silos up there. But I think that they may be on those grain barges following them up north of the Mississippi and that might be helping them spread in range. From what I can tell you, the black bellies have spread thoroughly throughout the state of Florida, except for maybe in the Panhandle, and they are in Texas and they are not migrating south like they used to. From what I can tell, it’s just anecdotal, but I do believe that they have them in Cuba. I’ve seen some pictures. They’re not very clear pictures. I believe that the fulvous tree ducks that we did get prior to the turn of the century, 1880, from what I hear in the documents, is that the fulvous did show up in Louisiana first.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, they’re marsh birds, those fulvous whistlers that I know because I’ve shot them in Africa, I’ve shot them by gazillions in South America and I’ve shot them in North America. But it’s always in association with marsh or with rice, which is a hemi-marsh, it’s an artificial marsh we create. Those are the conditions it wants. Like you were talking earlier about the hydrilla and some of the marshes I’ve seen down in northern Argentina where we beat the brakes off fulvous. It’s not hydrilla, but it’s something like that. And they can’t quite walk on it because rails can walk on it, they can’t, but they love it. They’re going to get in it, they’re going to sit in it, they’re going to just hop over a foot and they’re feeding and they’re eating and they’re sheltered and they love that type habitat. That is their habitat. And when you see them, really, you do see them sitting on the water, fulvous and black bellies and white face, but really what they like to do is stand and roost on the edges with the long legs. Their body’s not even wet. They’re up to about knee deep and they’re just sitting there on the edges, dense, standing like real dense, tight to each other. Yeah, they drift on the edges of that water.

Shannon Kelly: Exactly. One of the common agriculture practices down in Palm Beach, Broward, Collier, Henry Counties where the sugarcane operations are, is the sugarcane companies got into the practice of growing not just rice, but wild rice on their lay fields to increase the soil quality. Ducks love rice. So they’re in there. You would shoot them in the stas, they’d be in transit from those areas and they’d be just full of rice. The bellies are just absolutely full of rice. The stas that we hunt are old sugarcane fields. And when they dig out the sugarcane fields like any other field, they put ditches in there and they take the soil and they put it to the side. So right at the side of the ditch as it gets really thick, you can’t move around in there. That’s where the black bellies and fulvous are, right up against the edge of that along with the gators. They like that area. They don’t really like to swim around, but they do like to stand in shallow water just like a goose. They act like a goose.

Ramsey Russell: Well, you know Dendrocygna, which is the genus of whistling ducks, is tree goose. They’re normally a cavity nester and part of their genus is comprised of the word goose because they are a very goose-like looking duck.

Shannon Kelly: Yeah, both sexes are alike. You can’t tell a hen from a drake black belly. I’ve seen some, they must have been 8 or 9-year-old black bellies. They were really big, but other than that I can’t sets them out. I know with Canadas you get a big bull Canada, you can probably tell a difference, much bigger. And then the rice that they started growing in the sugarcane fields brought in a lot of wigeon and pintail also and it was really great for a couple of years there.

Ramsey Russell: Shannon, in what ways do you now see your specialized Shannon Kelly game calls contributing to conservation efforts and promoting ethical hunting practices?

Shannon Kelly: Species specific calls. We had an idea here, what we’re going to do is produce a GPS tracking collar from Brad Cohen.

Ramsey Russell: Where do you get that? Did he send you that?

Shannon Kelly: Yeah, I’ve got a couple of them. This is a real one right here. If anybody’s seen it, this is cutting-edge conservation right here. The information that gets out of this is cutting edge. This is better than a million duck bands. This will tell you where they’re feeding, where they’re flying back.

Ramsey Russell: Those geo trackers, Shannon, have revolutionized what we’re learning and knowing about ducks. I even saw recently where some of them, they’re using really small ones now that they’re implanting. I saw them implanted into scalps to where not only can they tell the movements, where the bird’s going, but they can tell what he’s doing. Okay, he’s sleeping or he’s underwater feeding. So they begin to model what his day looks like, how many days he spends feeding or moving or migrating or preening and that’s crazy.

Shannon Kelly: It’s crazy. So what I did is I approached a couple people and Brad was really enthusiastic about it. What we’re going to do, this is the prototype for it and you notice it is the same color. What I’m going to do is make a series of these. This will be a limited edition of these.

Ramsey Russell: I’m not recording video, but folks, what he’s doing is he’s holding up a GPS backpack and one of his pintail calls. And they’re the same exact brown color.
Shannon Kelly: Yeah, the same brownish-red color. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to sell those, and all the funds are going to go towards trying to purchase more backpacks for ducks. So we’re going to do that. And if it does well, we’re going to continue to do it. I would encourage other call makers to do it. And the money generated, these backpacks are like a Benelli. They’re expensive, really expensive.
Ramsey Russell: But somebody told me, you’re talking about it being the cost of a nice Benelli. They are $1500–$2000.
Shannon Kelly: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Plus a subscription. But if we don’t do it, who’s going to?
Ramsey Russell: Right. One of the biggest bottlenecks in wildlife research, waterfowl research, is funding. So what you’ve done is taken this great pintail call of yours, made it look like one of these GPS backpacks, and you’re going to give a portion of sales to the Cohen Lab, Cohen Wildlife Lab, to fund research.
Shannon Kelly: Yeah, we’re going to do a small run, and 100% of all the funding is going to go to getting some backpacks. And if it does well, then we’re going to continue to do it. It’ll come with a collector case and stuff like that. Some people are call collecting big.
Ramsey Russell: Shannon, have you talked to Dr. Cohen? Will we be able to see that this is a Shannon Kelly game call bird in the air?
Shannon Kelly: I don’t know. That’s up to him. I’m not looking for any recognition. All I want to do is, I just came up with idea hey, I can do something and I can get hunters to pay for it. Everybody likes, bands, and I shot some just like everybody else. But the tracking, if you see what’s going on today with the way things are changing so quickly, even government funding, it’s a big crisis.
Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable. It is.
Shannon Kelly:  Incredible. The amount, I mean, I always knew they were ripping us off, but I never, in my wildest imagination would think that people have the nerve to steal that amount of money, into the trillions of dollars. And now everybody’s got to pay for it. They basically tipped the apple cart on government spending, and now we’ve got to put it back together again. Meanwhile, who’s going to pay? Are we going to have biologists anymore?
Ramsey Russell: I hate a thief. I hate them in any shape, form, and fashion, especially ones that are already overpaid to help this country run. But my goodness, waterfowl conservation, the research dollars we need to conserve and research waterfowl, migratory birds, and habitat are minuscule compared to the trillions of dollars needed to run this country legitimately. That’s the low-hanging fruit they cut.
Shannon Kelly: Oh yeah, and of course we’ll get caught up with that too. From what Brad told me and what other people have told me, they expect funding cuts to come up now to fix it, because they’re basically bankrupting the customers and the country. There’s an invisible Lamborghini sitting in every driveway in this country of debt that your kids and grandkids are going to be paying to get this right. Meanwhile, regular folks got to suffer.
Ramsey Russell: In the meanwhile, to build on what you just said, what we can do is exactly these kinds of initiatives and volunteerism. If you don’t do it, who is? If we don’t do it, who is? We can’t rely on an elected official to do it.
Shannon Kelly: No. We’re going to do a run with this, and if it works well, we’ll expand it and hopefully maybe get some more guys to help these people out. Because I saw, just like you, I saw 50 ducks, and I’ve seen a couple of the other banding programs. I do know a few biologists and some people that work for some of these fine organizations. The programs that they’re doing are critical. We need the information now. We need to understand what is going on before it’s too late. Because by the time we figure out how to fix the problem, the opportunity to fix it may be long gone.
Ramsey Russell: When will these special-run pintail calls be available?
Shannon Kelly: Probably in about two weeks. I’m going to start doing them. Right now, I kind of got swamped with turkey call orders. I had to make a couple to keep people quiet because they were freaking out. So I have to make some turkey calls and wrap that up this week. I’m actually going to go turkey hunting. And then when I come back, I’ve got to start stocking up duck calls. They do move pretty good.
Ramsey Russell: They move. You’ve already talked about ensuring quality control. You’re a one-man artist.
Shannon Kelly: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: You’re not turning them out on machines, not running them through a factory, not going to China. You don’t have a shop full of people doing this stuff. It’s Shannon Kelly in all four hours, because you’ve got a real job too, turning out these calls. And I’ve heard lots of people say, man, what kind of call is that? And I tell them. They go, I call that guy, he’s always sold out. Which is a compliment.
Shannon Kelly: It’s the biggest compliment. You want to take care of your customers. You don’t want to rip them off. I know I make a couple of very good species-specific calls, but I’m not going to take advantage of people. I’m going to charge a fair price. The best compliment you can get, and your best salesman, is your product and your customers. If your customers are out there, and I sold to a lot of guys, and they’re out there showing the call, that is the best advertisement. You don’t need marketing when you have people singing the praises of your product and trusting their friends and family to share it. That’s the best compliment, when their brother calls you up, hey, can you hook me up? I am a small operation, and by doing so, I can make a high-quality call that sounds exactly like a pintail, black-belly, or wigeon at basically half the price of a premium mallard call. I am probably going to hire some nephews. They want to help me with some stuff here a little bit, and I can trust them to help me with packaging and stuff like that. I am retiring from UPS after 34 years. I retire in four weeks.
Ramsey Russell: Congratulations.
Shannon Kelly: Oh yeah, I can’t wait. My boss called me up this morning, congratulated me. He thought I was retired today. But I’ve used up every sick day, option day, vacation day. And I’ll be able to try to keep pace. I typically make them all week long and then list them up on Sundays, and I sell them directly on the website and they go like that. As far as the limited edition, we’re going to get going with that probably before Delta, probably before the Delta Expo.
Ramsey Russell: Are you going to be at Delta Waterfowl Expo?
Shannon Kelly: Oh yeah, I got a booth there. I couldn’t get in last year because I was too busy and I didn’t have product to go. I did make it to Calusa, which was great. The California Duck Hunters, those guys are fantastic.
Ramsey Russell: You dang right. They sure are.
Shannon Kelly: I was impressed. I couldn’t believe it. I was just like, wow. Anyway, I’m going to be at Delta, and I’m also going to be at Dive Bomb Squad Fest. And then I’m going to be back. I’ve got to talk to Kittles. I’m going to try to go back to Calusa again, but I’ve got to make calls.
Ramsey Russell: We’ve already talked about how important this is with any species of bird call. Proper technique is key to their success. What educational outreach do you have for customers? How can I learn from you on how to effectively use these species-specific calls?
Shannon Kelly: I have a number of Facebook and Instagram videos. If you look me up on Instagram, I’m Shannon JJ Kelly. Facebook, SJ Kelly. There are a couple other Shannon Kellys, and I’m not going to get into that, but SJ Kelly on Facebook. You can find me on YouTube also. I would make more videos, but the problem is as I make more videos, I get more requests, hey, you got calls? Then I start to answer hundreds of messages, sorry, I’m out. So you kind of have to throttle the videos. But this year I should have more calls available by hunting season, and I’m going to have a stockpile ready for Delta also. I’ve never been, I’m kind of excited to go. I don’t know what.

Ramsey Russell: It’s an awesome event. I went initially just to walk around and see people. It’s all duck hunters. Everybody on the floor is a duck hunter. Everybody coming in to see the exhibitors are duck hunters. It’s like a big family reunion. The same could be said about Ducks Unlimited Expo, which this year is going to be held a week later in Memphis. Inside, not outside, in August. It’s going to be a double whammy, nine-day stretch of this going on. One time I just walked the floor, and as I was leaving, I could hardly get out because I was so engaged talking to so many people I don’t ever get to see. I told Nita, let’s buy a booth and support these guys. What else have I got to do in August but sit in the air conditioning and talk to duck hunters? Let’s plan on going and grabbing dinner with some folks too. Shannon, you’re going to be in hog heaven. So many people that you’ve talked to on social media are going to be there, and you’ll get to start putting names with faces, shaking hands, breaking bread and getting personal with folks. That’s what’s so awesome about this event.

Shannon Kelly: I’m looking forward to it. I’m going to be on a week stretch. I’ll be leaving home because I got Dive Bombs the weekend before. I don’t know what to expect. I think it’s going to be good, but Delta is the one I’m really interested in. We’ll definitely meet up for sure.

Ramsey Russell: Except for the fact you’ve got to make calls when you get done, to get from Oklahoma City to Florida, you’re going to go right through Memphis. You might as well stop by Dux, at least walk the floor, come stand in my booth if you want to.

Shannon Kelly: I might have to do that. I want to stop by and check out the Nash Buckingham exhibit they have there. I love Nash Buckingham.

Ramsey Russell: You definitely want to see that. It’s amazing.

Shannon Kelly: Ahead of his time. The guy was ahead of his time. It was a good thing for people like that back then. There’s probably a call for people like that today that will think forward, not reactionary, but predict what is going to change in hunting and address it beforehand.

Ramsey Russell: It’s been years since I read all the Nash Buckingham stories. They were hunting on Beaver Dam in northwest Mississippi. I’ve got some friends that still hunt down on what they call the southern trails. One of my favorite stories of Nash Buckingham in the context of this podcast, apparently when you got of age, 21 or 22, you no longer could hunt on your daddy’s membership. The last time he went on, he told a story about he and another member going out. There were a lot of ducks, and everything was going good. They had a self-imposed pre-migratory bird treaty limit of 50 ducks daily. They could have just shot everything, but this gentleman had a 50-duck daily. He shot two mallards, two greenheads right off the bat. There were so many pintails flying that morning, he stuck with them and finished his 50-bird limit on the last hunt at Beaver Dam with two mallards and 48 pintails, all drakes. Can you imagine? That’s insane.

Shannon Kelly:  For one guy, there was some good pintail hunting in living memory back in the day, but it’s gone. What’s going to bring those good old days back or hang on to what we’ve got now is research and organization with our groups. It’s important.

Ramsey Russell: I want to ask you one more question. I get bringing people into your shop and educating your competition. I told you get that. You learned bore diameters, specifics, angles, and everything that goes into making a black-bellied sound different than a fulva, different from a wigeon, and developing the perfect pintail call, I get that, some things are best earned. But the question is, there are a lot of young people, like yourself, passionate about duck hunting, that want to be involved in the outdoor world. What fatherly advice or professional advice would you give to someone young and interested in crafting their own game calls, whether ducks, geese, turkeys, or elk? What advice would you give young people?

Shannon Kelly: What I can tell anybody that wants to get in the game call business is there’s nothing stopping you from doing it. What you want to do. There’s a lot of marketing out there, but you want to get yourself in the position. It’s not an overnight experience. It could take many years, and you may fall flat on your face, but you want to let your work talk for you. You don’t want to get into the traps of badmouthing other people. You can be inspired by other people, but at the end of the day, every piece of work you put out with your signature is your reputation. You want that call to do all the talking. There are many engineers on game calls out there, especially mallard hen calls. There are so many artists. But I would say just try to do the best you can. I think now with a lot of the equipment that they have, CNC computerized, the tolerances you can get are very tight. But try to be original, do your own thing, and let your work speak for itself. Quality work. You could be making boots, belts, cars, or cleaning windows. People will pay for quality. There will always be people who copy and are not quite as good, but I would go for quality over quantity, which is a business model some others have where they make as much as possible. Just let your calls do the talking and try to help people out.

Ramsey Russell: You demonstrated today with the whistling ducks, the different notes they make in different situations. You know a whole lot about those species. As you go along in life, every day you learn something new if you want to. It’s a learning process. There’s no substitute for experience. Experience comes from intimate knowledge of the subject matter. Can you think of any species out there, that are underrepresented in the call world?

Shannon Kelly: All of them. Every single last species except for mallard hens right now. You’re out there and you meet a lot of hunters. You meet thousands of hunters all the time. I’ve met guys in California that had top-of-the-line calls tuned to sound like a gadwall. I think the mallard drake I have, I always working on something. I have a mallard drake prototype in the works that I think would interest a lot of people. It’s a hard call to do, and a lot of people are working on it. A lot of people have mallard drake calls, but I’m working on one. I also want to work on a blue-winged teal and come up with one that’s got that real nasally rasp. As far as divers, they do that grunt, the burr. There are a couple guys making that. But right now, if you were to make duck calls and wanted to do well, concentrate on what is neglected. I think the mallard drake is where there’s room. It’s so popular, and the sounds they make are probably similar to the hen chatter. There are a lot of quality recordings on their drakes out there.

Ramsey Russell: Shannon, I appreciate you coming on today. I’ve really enjoyed our visit. I always enjoy it. I learned a lot, and it was a very interesting podcast. How can people connect with you, Shannon?

Shannon Kelly: Okay, yeah. Once again, I want to thank you for having me. I’m really honored, and I feel privileged to be here. If you want to reach me, my website is ShannonKellyGameCalls.com. On Instagram, you can find me at Shannon J. Kelly. Same thing on TikTok. On Facebook, it’s SJ Kelly. When I make calls, the best I can do is get them up on the site when I know what I’ll have. Usually, that’s Sunday afternoons at 5 p.m. Pacific, which is 7 Central and 8 Eastern. A lot of my customers are on the West Coast, so that works well. Then on Monday, I box them all up and ship them out. If you like the call, keep it. If you don’t, send it back, I want to make sure you’re happy. That’s the most important thing, that you’re happy and you’re safe. That’s about all.

Ramsey Russell: I believe they’re going to like the call. I love mine. I will Say that. I’ll say this too. One thing. I had no idea. You got the call, they came in. I’ll tell you a nice touch, Shannon. I’m going to tell you. And you got the whistle on your neck right now. The same thing. You put those little crab pot. So it comes in this little. I got the call bag right here on my. It’s just like a little sunglass sleeve. You drop your call down in it. And I can drop that in my bag to keep it clean. If I’m hunting somewhere, I need the call. I pull it out, I clip it onto my lander or clip it onto my jacket. I mean, it’s a very nice and convenient package is what I’m trying to say. It’s not just the whistle. The way you attach. Isn’t that what that little crab pot boot. What do you call them, little clips?

Shannon Kelly: Well, people call them tuna clips or something like that. The originals were doctory long lines. If you’ve done long line hunting for diver ducks, you usually have a bigger version of this. And they’re a really good clip. You can take it and you can attach to this. You can put it onto your thing. The thing about it is that money doesn’t grow on trees, okay? And the calls, although I try to make them as affordable as possible, you don’t want to lose your money at the bot. I don’t know how many calls are laying in the marsh across this country. Okay. But you can clip it on there. You won’t lose it. Okay. Now for my time and effort, I see a lot of other call makers will do a gift box and stuff like that, which, you know, once you get the call, if you’re a hunter, you’re gonna catch that it’s gonna sit in the shelf forever, never be seen again. Unless you’re in one of these called trader collector types. But the clip for a little bit of effort on my part, I think that the hunter values that, that’s quality right there. That adds value to the product and it’s useful. You know, you’re not going to lose your call. Although people do lose their calls. Regards to that. They’ll drop them, you know, whatever. But the clip is thoughtful and every call that I make comes with a clip. Well, like while I have and I’ll a lanyard drop.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you, Shannon. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Today you’ve been listening to my buddy Shannon Kelly of Shannon Kelly Game Calls, where he specializes in pintails, wigeon, black-bellied whistlers, and fulvous whistlers. Thank you all for listening to this episode and we’ll see you next time.