EP 588. Taking Ownership in Arkansas Public Land Hunting

“But think about this, we don’t own that public land. We can’t manage the water, we can’t decide when it comes on, when it comes off. We have no say, really direct say in timber policies or when the place is open, when it’s closed, when we can hunt it, when we can’t.”

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Here’s an interesting thought. You think about this, we in America are blessed, and I do mean blessed with an abundance of public lands managed by state and federal agencies, more so than I’ve ever seen anywhere else on God’s earth, have we got public lands that we all go out and enjoy. But think about this, we don’t own that public land. We can’t manage the water, we can’t decide when it comes on, when it comes off. We have no say, really direct say in timber policies or when the place is open, when it’s closed, when we can hunt it, when we can’t. But we can take ownership, a sense of ownership in making the place better, making the place better now for ourselves, making the place better for the people that come behind us, the future generations. And leading me down this conversation today, taking me on a fast paced tour through Arkansas Public Timber. And taking ownership on that Arkansas Public Timber is Mr. Ich Stewart, who founded the Public Timber Project. Ich, how the heck are you today?

Ich Stewart: I’m doing good, buddy. Thanks for having me.

Ramsey Russell: I’m glad to have you, man. I mean, that’s a real interesting project you came up with. I keep up with you there in social media and having visited with you last week, I’m very excited for this morning’s conversation. But I always like to start like this. Introduce yourself, Ich. Where are you from and what do you do?

Ich Stewart: Well, my family lives in Glenwood, Arkansas. My father’s got a place in the country just down the road from us and my wife and me have a farm here in the Ouachita Mountains in southwest Arkansas. My family’s been in Arkansas for a long time, both on my father’s side, my mother’s side, my father’s side of my family is all from northeast Arkansas. Mama, she was born in Paragould, my grandpa was from Walnut Ridge, so up in that Black River country and that’s kind of where the Stewarts are from. Been there forever. Dad was born and raised there. My mother’s family’s from kind of further down around Traskwood and kind of in the hills, getting closer to where we live here Glenwood. And I grew up throughout the whole Midwest, lived in Missouri a lot as a kid and my dad worked for Cuddy Farms when I was growing up and they moved him a couple of times. So we ended up leaving Arkansas and Missouri and the Ozarks and moving up to Iowa and Minnesota when I was a young kid. Of course, that was death for me, leaving the woods and the deer woods and turkey woods and duck woods, but I discovered waterfowl hunting in the cattail marshes and the goose hunting in the corn fields of Iowa. And I tell you, Iowa wasn’t so bad once I figured out the bird hunting up there. And I still got some good friends up in northwest Iowa and try to make it up there every year or so and hunt. And of course the hunting up there is not what it used to be, but there’s still some great public land hunting all throughout Iowa, it’s just folks that know, know Iowa is a great spot. Got done with high school and I got involved with the US Forest Service. I started fighting forest fires when I was a young man, didn’t have a lot of direction in my life and didn’t really have a plan for my life, but I knew I couldn’t work in an office. And so I got a job running a chainsaw on a hotshot crew fighting fires out west and that was pretty fun. Got laid off in time for hunting season most years so I could kind of spend the whole year outside running around. And it was just enough of a real job that I could kind of fake it as a grown up. It wasn’t year round employment back in the old days, fighting fire seasonally, but it was just enough of a real job. People, the grownups in my life, left me alone like I actually was doing something with myself. And years into that, that seasonal pattern of fighting fires on a hotshot crew every year turned into a fire management job and turned into a career with prescribed fire and fire management and managing public lands with the US Forest Service and that took me all over the US. I lived all over the place working for the Forest Service. I worked, I think 11 different national forests all throughout Montana and Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, spent a lot of time in California and Oregon and Washington. And I was 20 year retirement for folks that are interested in a career in the outdoors, fire management is. And I had an opportunity to take a job back here back home in Arkansas, kind of one of those curious non producer jobs. I wasn’t in the field anymore, but I was in a pretty cool role and able to help manage the prescribed fire program on all our federal lands here in Arkansas and Oklahoma and was part of a great team there and worked in that position for a few years and I retired, buddy. It’s been pushed probably 5 years now since I retired. So I retired kind of young and we’re set up here in Arkansas for me. I got just enough money I can crappie fish and turkey hunt, deer hunt and duck hunt about as much as my family will let me. So I’m pretty blessed. But kind of a long path and made our way back home here to Arkansas and like my dad’s in his late 70s and a native Arkansas lives right down the road, he’s my hunting and fishing buddy and we got family all over the state. So my roots run pretty deep here in Arkansas.

Ramsey Russell: When is the first time you hunted Arkansas public land?

“I probably couldn’t put a first memory on it, but I was one of those kids that, it’s probably bad parenting now, but they trusted me with a firearm at an extremely young age. I must have shown enough, safe firearm handling skills that my dad and my grandpa let me take to the field with the 22 and we were into small game hunting. I mean, my family, we didn’t have a lot of money, I wouldn’t say we were white trash, but we were just poor country folks, we didn’t have a whole lot of money.”

Ich Stewart: My grandpa and my dad, I was raised small game hunting with my grandpa and my dad from a very young age. I probably couldn’t put a first memory on it, but I was one of those kids that, it’s probably bad parenting now, but they trusted me with a firearm at an extremely young age. I must have shown enough, safe firearm handling skills that my dad and my grandpa let me take to the field with the 22 and we were into small game hunting. I mean, my family, we didn’t have a lot of money, I wouldn’t say we were white trash, but we were just poor country folks, we didn’t have a whole lot of money. But we had a couple of 22s and a couple of shotguns and we had some traps and we had some fishing gear and that was that. We spent all of our free time hunting and fishing. And my first real memories of squirrel hunting and rabbit hunting with my grandpa and my dad, the duck hunting thing didn’t really capture my heart and imagination until probably junior high. And that’s really when it grabbed me. And unfortunately, that’s about the time my life that we left this part of the world and started traveling from my dad’s work. And so about the time I really was old enough to fall in love with duck hunting, the flooded timber of Arkansas was already in the rear view mirror. And it was just constantly like, this is where I want to get, I want to get back to where family’s at in Arkansas on the good hunting, but I fell in love with duck hunting and northern Iowa and southern Minnesota on the prairie up there, very different environment.

Ramsey Russell: How long ago did you crawl off into Arkansas public timber woods?

Ich Stewart: Boy, it’s been a passion of mine my whole adult life, coming back here to hunt. And then when I was able to relocate back here full time for work, I was at that point in my career where I worked for the federal government. And one of the perks of their huge inefficiencies, they give long term employees lots of time off. I mean, we get lots of vacation time and you all would bank it throughout the year. And I could take a good month and a half off during duck hunting season once we got back here. So I started, as soon as we came back here, it was public land bound every duck season that was the focus of the whole year, work, save up my vacation time and then hunt the public woods as much as I can. And that was always really the focus. I do some private land hunting for sure, I’ve leased some stuff. And yeah, so that was when we came back and I really was able to jump in head first, that’s just been an incredible journey for me. This was sort of like a lifetime dream to get back home to Arkansas and just worked out, that I was young enough and able to retire young enough and spend my time out in the field hunting ducks and training dogs.

Ramsey Russell: Tell me a little bit about growing up. Who were your mentors? Who were your influences? You started hunting when you were a little boy, who are some of the men that indoctrinated you into hunting?

“And I’ll tell you, when you have an outdoorsman and they trap on top of hunting and fishing, the wealth of knowledge that individual gains over a lifetime is huge. And so that trapping perspective was part of my childhood growing up, and which meant that every truck drive into town meant you were going to stop a couple times to look at tracks off on the side or look at the ditch or look at the culvert, see what was walking underneath it. So we were poor, but we were outdoor rich as a family, I would say.”

Ich Stewart: Yeah, I was blessed that, I was one of those kids that grew up in an outdoor family. We didn’t have a lot of money, we’re pretty poor. But we always had enough money for some ammunition, some shotgun shells and 22s, and some fish and tackle and my dad hunted and fished and trapped. And my first real mentor was my father. Growing up, I thought he was God’s gift to the outdoors. He still is a great woodsman and a great outdoorsman and we did everything. We were one of them families that we small game hunted, we squirrel hunted, we rabbit hunted, that was a big push in our family. I mean, we were probably more into small game hunting and then of course, deer hunting than anything and we turkey hunted, dad turkey hunted. Dad made box calls, we had a neighbor down the road that made box calls. I’ve got some of them old box calls, they don’t sound so great, they’re not that fancy, but they killed turkeys back in the day. And the whole year, it seemed like it was focused around hunting, fishing and trapping. And my grandpa was a real lover of the outdoors. Grandpa, a Walnut Ridge boy and had a lot of love for the Black River and all things Arkansas and Missouri. And he loved this whole part of the world and loved to hunt and fish. And I had some uncles that were real accomplished outdoorsmen too. My Uncle Dean was a huge influence in my life. Again, he was just a great woodsman. Dean, he wasn’t a great woodsman, and probably in today’s context of, I don’t know how many social media followers my Uncle Dean would have had, but he’s one of them guys when you get out in the woods and walked around, I mean, he understood animal behavior, he just was really comfortable with the woods. And when you heard a sound in the background, he knew what animal was making that sound. And now it was low tech and high knowledge back then it felt like, that whole generation of mentors, they knew so much. And of course, most of these guys that I grew up with were trappers as well. And we’ve lost our trapping tradition for the most part in the US but it used to be – when I was a kid, if you were a duck hunter, you probably were a trapper as well. And if you did anything, you probably in the outdoors, trapping more likely was going to be part of the equation. And I tell you, when you have an outdoorsman and they trap on top of hunting and fishing, the wealth of knowledge that individual gains over a lifetime is huge. And so that trapping perspective was part of my childhood growing up, and which meant that every truck drive into town meant you were going to stop a couple times to look at tracks off on the side or look at the ditch or look at the culvert, see what was walking underneath it. So we were poor, but we were outdoor rich as a family, I would say. My uncles and my dad and my grandpa.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of the fondest memories you’ve got of hunting with those men? Your uncle, your dad, your granddad.

Ich Stewart: My favorite memories as a kid growing up was squirrel hunting, small game hunting in the Ozark Mountains in the wintertime, dust of snow. And I remember being as cold as I could possibly be as a kid. Of course, I didn’t have Sitka and Shin gear and Drake gear, I didn’t have Gore Tex or Thinsulate even. It was blue jeans and probably sneakers, white cotton tube socks and maybe a jacket. And my dad, my uncles they were kind of mean compared to the way men are today. They didn’t really tolerate me complaining about my hands being cold and numb or my legs being too short to keep up, there was really no room for complaining. And of course, nobody blamed the gear back then because there wasn’t any gear. My dad did almost all of his hunting and fishing and trapping and Levi 501 jeans and red wing boots, just uninsulated cheap stuff. But those are my favorite early memories of squirrel hunting and rabbit hunting up in the mountains with my dad, my uncles and I just remember being cold and wet a lot and not understanding how was it that these older guys were so much tougher than me, they just seemed impervious to the weather. They just weren’t sitting around, they were smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee the whole time, that’s what they were doing.

Ramsey Russell: They were coming from a different fabric back in those days.

Ich Stewart: That lit a fire in me when I was a young kid that I wanted to be, I kind of wanted to be tough like those guys when I grew up, I wanted to be a tough, I guess today’s word would be resilient, right? I wanted to be a tough, resilient outdoorsman. So pretty cool. And there was just a huge emphasis on respect. Respect for nature, respect for the game that we were pursuing. I mean, we hunted fish and trapped all throughout the whole year, but there never felt like there was disrespect towards, there was always a priority that, how one should go about taking life and just how beautiful it all is. And there was always times to pause and reflect it, just the beauty of it all. And so I really, I still share that today with my father. He’s to the point now where he’s so old that, shooting a duck with a shotgun’s not really a priority for him anymore. But watching the sunrise and watching God’s creation in the morning, that’s what fires him up. Just being there. I’m just coming to duck camp and not even going hunting with us in the morning. Just being at duck camp and walking out, outside smoking a cigarette and watching the sun come up in the morning, that does it for him. So, he’s still a mentor to me to help guide me down this path.

Ramsey Russell: When you got into duck hunting up in Iowa, who coached you along on that, Ich? Did you kind of teach yourself? Were you with some high school buddies or was your dad and some of these men involved?

Ich Stewart: No. My first duck hunting experience with my dad and he had a trapping partner back then, a guy named Orv Sangle. I don’t even know if Orv still alive, I hope he is. Orv Sangle was probably one of the greatest all around woodsman, outdoorsman I ever hunted with growing up. And Orv was a northwest Iowa, southwest Minnesota machine, coyote hunter, waterfowl hunter, bow hunter, wildlife fisherman, you name it, Orv was a stud man. And him and my dad got to be really tight. They both worked for Cuddy Farms and became good hunting and fishing buddies. And I spent a lot of time tagging along with my dad and Orv. And that terrain and country was new to my dad as well. Dad was out of sorts. Dad’s a woods kid, he liked being in the woods and so he was a little out of his element when we moved up there as well. And Orv Sangle really took us under his belt. And Orv was cool. Orv was one of those old school natural mouth callers, he could call geese and ducks just with his mouth and well, he could do it better than you could with a game call. And that did it for me, going goose hunting and duck hunting with Orv and how knowledgeable he was of waterfowl and how he could talk to waterfowl with just his mouth. I mean, that just lit a fire in me. I didn’t even know that, I’d never even heard of that before in my life. And you hear about it now a little bit more, I think Shin gear did a thing on Realfoot lake and some of the old callers on Realfoot Lake and it talks about a little bit, but that used to be a thing that existed in the US a little bit more. You’d travel around enough, you’d run to these old boys living out in the woods that just figured out how to make all the sounds with their mouth. And I’ll tell you, to a young man who’s in love with the outdoors, that kind of stuff just, boy, it lights a fire in you. Then you realize that, man, you could spend your whole life chasing ducks and geese and never figure it all out. Because I’m almost 50 and I still can’t call them with my mouth.

Ramsey Russell: It sounds like a lot of your influences were true woodsmen.

Ich Stewart: I think I’m really blessed. I think that’s correct. I did have a lot of guys that were probably outdoorsmen first, they probably didn’t call, I don’t think any of them called themselves duck hunters. They didn’t label themselves as duck hunters, they were just outdoorsmen. They hunted and fish and trapped and spent all their time outside that they could and they were good at it. Again, I think about Orv Sangle and my dad – Well, I’ll tell you a quick story about how much culture changes in duck hunting, and I’m not that old, you’re older than me, bud.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you.

Ich Stewart: Yeah. Well, I remember when I was still pretty young, I had a couple part time jobs and I wanted fancier gear and I saved up and I bought a new shotgun and I bought a Browning, the coat was called the Browning Waterfowler and it was hooded and Gore Tex and it had some Thinsulate insulation and it was the first camo waterproof duck hunting coat any of us in my family or friends had ever had or seen. And my dad and his buddies gave me such a hard time for being a pretty boy with my camo coat, none of them had, nobody was hunting with that kind of, waterproof, insulated camo jackets weren’t a thing yet. And I had to have the cool gear and they harassed me like crazy. And I think about that all the time because I look out at the boat ramps, now during duck season, myself included, I’ll make fun of myself. And I tell you what, we are all have turned into the biggest group of prima donna fashionistas you’ve ever seen. We’re so into our clothes, how we look, and our waders and jackets and hats and making sure that the hat matches the waders, and it’s silly to me. I mean, like I said, I’m just as bad, I’m sure you are, too. We all are now.

“Well, that system, that Browning system you’re talking about, way back in the day, 25, 30 years ago, was a nice setup, I mean, it really was cutting edge. Matter of fact, this past weekend, it was raining and we were at camp, and my youngest son, now grown man, he walked out of the room wearing the shell of my old Browning coat, you know what I’m saying?”

Ramsey Russell: Well, that system, that Browning system you’re talking about, way back in the day, 25, 30 years ago, was a nice setup, I mean, it really was cutting edge. Matter of fact, this past weekend, it was raining and we were at camp, and my youngest son, now grown man, he walked out of the room wearing the shell of my old Browning coat, you know what I’m saying? Just to go out and fish around the lake with. It was in the closet hanging up still. I don’t throw away nothing, I tuck it away somewhere, somebody will need it one day. You were talking about all this hunting and fishing, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, was that all on public land?

Ich Stewart: Oh, boy, Just about. A lot of it was. Of course, I’m just old enough that I can remember back when you could still knock on doors through a lot of these states.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Ich Stewart: Missouri, Iowa, even Arkansas, if you were friends with the right family and you knew the farmers, that was still a possibility, and if you did good by a farmer, you could continue to get permission. The waterfowl pressure was just so different back then. We had more birds, they were more spread out. I can’t quote the numbers, but it sure seems like, according to my memories, that there were a lot of less pressure on public lands, but we did a lot of it on public.

Ramsey Russell: There was a lot more habitat, a lot more places to hunt in the sense of access, like you talked about. I can remember those days of knocking on doors, I mean, in the early 90s, late 80s in places. You know what I’m saying? And I still to this day hunt a lot of public land. But I imagine a lot of the public land woes and the backlash and the conflicts we see in public lands as expressed in social media as being – because they say, “they” say that hunters are declining, but it seems like increasingly there’s more of us crowded around boat ramps and duck holes and deer stands in different areas, and I just imagine this as being like high school chemistry example of a higher concentrate. Fewer hunters are more highly concentrate steeled in an even more shrinking landscape. You know what I’m saying? It’s so much less area that us less hunters are crowding each other as compared to back in those days in the 70s, 80s, 90s, even of that. And the reason I brought up and asked was it public land is you used the word describing your people as, they showed a lot of respect for the resource. What was their regard towards the properties they were hunting? The public lands, it wasn’t theirs, they didn’t have a personal ownership in it. You talking about your uncle, knew those woods like the back of his hand. How did he treat and regard or show respect for that land he was hunting?

Ich Stewart: Boy, how did he show it? When I think back, of course we lost my uncle Dean many years ago, it was a huge loss in our family, everybody loved Dean. I think back in terms of, he was a huge mentor, I want to be able to hunt like Dean when I grew up. I mean, as a deer hunter, Dean was unmatch much as a deer hunter. He thought like a deer. And I got a great memory of being a young guy and Dean, there was a family down the road that didn’t have any food to eat and there wasn’t a man in the house and it was a mama raising a bunch of kids and they were poor, I mean poor, they were starving. And Dean would find families like that, he’d go shoot a doe or 2 and take it to him, go bring them a dough so they had some meat to eat, which is just cool as heck. You talk about old school, taking a doe to a family that don’t have any food. But Dean and my dad, my grandpa, we hunted for food. So there’s been right there, when you’re taking that game home to eat it and you’re excited while you’re hunting, thinking about the meal you’re going to make later, there’s this connection to the game you’re chasing and what’s going to be on your plate later that evening. I think that just builds in a different kind of relationship with wildlife because I don’t be disrespectful to that duck, because that’s our supper. You know what I mean?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Ich Stewart: Like, don’t play with your food kind of thing.

Ramsey Russell: Did they ever express any animosity or animus towards the state or federal government that owned the land they were hunting in terms of management or in terms of anything?

Ich Stewart: I don’t remember any of that growing up. I don’t remember any discussions about that, whatsoever. I mean, I’ve got a long line of military service in my family and I think, that was the golden age where we trusted our government.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Ich Stewart: And wildlife populations were booming. So for the most part back in my childhood, I don’t really remember a lot of grievances towards, the state wildlife agencies and the federal wildlife agencies because we were dealing with a huge abundance of wildlife still. And as a waterfowl hunter, I grew up in some great eras, in terms of goose hunting and my focus is primarily duck hunt now, I’m a sick in the head duck hunter now. But there was a big period in my life growing up, we’re chasing big honkers was that may have eclipsed my love of duck hunting. And we had just an incredible period in American history in the 80s and 90s of our goose populations and so many towns and regions throughout the Midwest that were defined by the goose hunting and the goose hunting industry and good luck finding big, huge migrations of big honkers in Iowa and Minnesota and South Dakota anymore, those days have come and gone. And southern Illinois, the legacy it had with goose hunting, it’s come and gone.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Ich Stewart: And with it, a lot of history has left too. But we had such an abundance, I just figured whoever’s in charge must be doing it right because we’ve got lots of birds. The sky is black, then there’s nothing to complain about.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Ich Stewart: And I think people start complaining when they start seeing those numbers disappear, when they start seeing negative changes, that’s when we start going, okay, what’s up? Who’s in charge? What’s happened here? This isn’t like it used to be. But we didn’t have a lot of that growing up. I think we were just too focused on the task at hand most of the time.

Ramsey Russell: You grew up hunting small game on public land and deer with some men that seem to appreciate this public resource as a source of food and good times with their family, memories, stories. And now you are yourself again, an Arkansas public timber hunter for ducks, your passion. How have things changed between then and now?

Ich Stewart: Well, I think we see a lot of changes. Here in Arkansas on public land, we’re seeing a lot of changes. And I’ll speak from the perspective of the Public Timber Project. Of course the Public Timber Project, it’s not just me, buddy, it’s not just Ich. The project is a bunch of fellas and our perspectives are many. You’ve got myself that comes from an Arkansas family and comes from here, but spent a lot of my adult life outside of Arkansas moving around seeing hunting and fishing issues all across the country. We’ve got members of the Public Timber Project core group members that were born and raised in Arkansas and never left and they’ve been chasing ducks on public timber their whole life and so they’ve got that perspective. We’ve got a couple core members of the project that are waterfowl guides that do the whole Canada to Arkansas and chase the snows all the way back to Canada guide season. Two really good buddies, two of my best hunting buddies and two really involved members that are, one of them is a resident of Arkansas and one of them, Blake is Wisconsin resident but he probably hunts ducks in Arkansas more days than most residents do. And so we’ve got a pretty good mix. The Public Timber Project is probably a, I love it. I think we’ve got an awesome mix of local resident duck hunters and non-resident duck hunters and folks with the perspective of the rest of the country. It’s easy to get sucked into what’s happening with duck hunting here in Arkansas, but you’ve got to put it in the context of the way the whole country’s changing and all of our neighboring states and all throughout the Midwest and the other flyways. And so it’s pretty neat that we’ve got so many guys from so many different perspectives that are involved with this because I think it keeps things clean on our end at least when we’re talking about how things have changed, it keeps us from going down the rabbit hole of, well, it’s the resident’s fault or it’s the non-resident’s fault, that’s not the case from our perspective. We don’t see things in that black and white sort of sort of way. But a couple big things we’re seeing change. One, we were talking earlier, buddy, that I think, yeah, according to the statistics, the duck numbers are down, but that being said, if you were to have pulled up to Ashbaugh boat ramp up on the Black River, Dave Donaldson for opener this last year, there was a thousand trucks in line at that boat ramp. A thousand. The line of trucks went back a mile and a half from the boat ramp. And of course this isn’t new, this last year, but we’ve got so many dedicated duck hunters that love Arkansas, some of those folks, that line started a week before opener. People were in line, hanging out in their trucks, in line, saving their place to get their boat in a week before the season kicked off. So, that’s different. The only time I think, when I was a kid you heard of that many people showing up in one spot was a rock concert or something, but a thousand trucks at a boat ramp. Well, and when I was a kid growing up, if my dad, my uncle and me had gone duck hunting, we pulled down an Ashbaugh and saw a thousand trucks, we wouldn’t have gotten in line behind them, we would have gone someplace else, we wouldn’t have even considered participating in that, that would have been madness, that would have been the way I grew up, that’d be the last place I’d want to hunt that day is the place with a thousand. But so we’re seeing this spike in really intense pressure on really localized, focused areas. And I think we understand pretty well, at least we’re having productive discussions to help understand why we saw that this last year. There’s some big obvious ones. One, Dave Donaldson tends to have water early season. Last couple of years they’ve had water and held water early season and a lot of places throughout the state other than Dave didn’t have the water. So duck hunters are going to go where they can launch a boat. So we’re starting to see some of those changes, we’re seeing some weather changes that are probably forcing pressure. We’re seeing regulatory changes. Arkansas’s, most of our neighboring states are and have making regulatory changes in regards to non-residents. Mississippi made some big changes here. Was it this year, last year on their non-resident turkey hunting regulation? Yeah, that tripped a lot of us here in Arkansas up. We want to come over and shoot your turkeys over there in Mississippi and that you made it a little harder this year for us. But we’re seeing these changes, in regards to hunting and fishing and duck hunting in particular all around Arkansas. And Arkansas is kind of slow to catch up on that. So if your neighboring states are restricting non-resident hunters more and more and Arkansas is still fairly open to the non-residents, well, where do you think they’re going to come to?

Ramsey Russell: Well, now wait a minute. It was at least 5 years ago, I’m guessing, that the state of Arkansas began to mitigate non-residents on public land by cutting them down what is 30 days, no more than 5 consecutive days. And I mean, trying to afford the locals opportunities, but at the same time to manage those thousand truck lines. And I don’t have an opinion on it. I don’t really, truly have an opinion on what a state does to manage their resources, I don’t. It just is what it is. But I’m saying, this is not Arkansas, Mississippi, I’m hearing reports out west, everybody is scrambling, trying to, even across the border to the north, Manitoba to begin to somehow manage or mitigate hunting pressure from other folks.

Ich Stewart: Oh yeah. We’ve seen some changes. You mentioned that, how they change the number of days non-residents get hunt. But there’s a lot folks that, I’ll just say that we’re not seeing that making a huge impact here, what changes we’ve seen, if anything, the opposite. We’re seeing increased pressure in spite of those regulatory changes from years past.

Ramsey Russell: What’s driving that?

Ich Stewart: I don’t know if I can say, I’m not an expert on the industry and not an expert on duck hunting, but I know what me and my friends are seeing, what’s driving it? Go back a little bit to your earlier question on what we’re seeing changing on public, that’s one big change we talked about, those high concentrations of duck hunters in specific areas, that’s a change. The demographic of the hunters you’re seeing are changing too. And this is a big one for us here at the Public Timber Project. I don’t have research and any statistics to back this up, this is just personal observation, but it’s a shared perspective across the state, lots of folks are seeing the same things that you’re not seeing the old timers at the boat ramps anymore. There’s that older age group of duck hunters that I think we’ve really lost on public land in Arkansas, they’re not putting up with it anymore. They’re not going to put up with all the aggression and the intimidation and the crowds. So we’re losing them. We’re also losing a lot of our youth hunters, dads, parents and uncles and grandparents, they’re a lot less inclined to take a kid hunting for their first, hey, you’ve got a kid, let’s say you’ve got a son and he really interested in going duck hunting and you don’t have a whole lot of money, so hunting private’s not really an option for you. And you’re thinking, well, let’s go grab the boat and decoys and I’ll take you hunting, and you pull up the boat ramp and there’s 400 trucks and trailers there, and everyone’s acting like a bunch of heathens, that’s a limiting factor, that’s going to keep that hunt from happening more than likely. And so we’re seeing fewer and fewer old timers, and we’re seeing fewer and fewer kids in the woods and that’s an issue. That’s an access issue that we’re seeing here in Arkansas that’s changing because duck hunting culture’s changing. And that’s a big one, that’s a sad one to see.

Ramsey Russell: Duck hunting culture’s changing. And I mean, you’re losing the older hunters, and thereby you’re kind of sort of losing the old ways and the old approaches of hunting. For example, we had a mutual friend of ours, Bryce Decker on here not too long ago in an episode called Shooting the Raft. And he described a lot of the competitiveness, a lot of the aggression, a lot of the crowds, a lot of the pressure, and he drew contrast between his hunting experiences on Arkansas public today versus his hunting experiences then, when he was being mentored by those grown men, that yesteryear generation and it’s very discouraging to him. I mean, just their approach to it, busting the ducks out, and to hopefully come back, and just some of the different ways they hunted. And I’m always careful, Ich, I can remember being that younger man, being criticized by my daddy and my granddaddy about my long hair, my music ways, and some of the things I did, they did not. And so, I understand generations evolve and I respect that, every generation has got to find their own way. But as an older guy, I do miss the quieter times. The more civility out there, then what I see. And I am a public land hunter and a lot of places around the country, and so I just see it as just a totally different game. Back in the day hunting public land in Mississippi, me and a buddy could get there early, hoof it through the woods, get to a spot, hang a flashlight and have a place to ourselves. And now, according to some of the younger guys that are out there hunting some of those same spots, you better have a crowd of 15 or 20. Somebody better be willing to strip down to their tidy whities and ball up their fist and get after it if you’re going to have that hole by yourself. And I mean, that’s just unimaginable to me to have to fight, physically fight. I saw there was a video going around social media this year of two young guys waist deep water, swinging fist over a duck hole, that just doesn’t make sense to me, man.

Ich Stewart: Yeah. Well, it’s sad. That video that you’re talking about, I don’t know if those 2 poor young guys –

Ramsey Russell: I felt bad for both of them, I sure did.

Ich Stewart: Well, I mean, they were a couple young guys that, I’ll say this, I’ve not done, there’s nothing those guys did in that video that I didn’t do as a kid someplace, maybe not in a duck hole, but I was an idiot when I was a kid, but there wasn’t 10 people with cameras videoing me, put me on social media. But regardless, that video this last winter, I think it’s unfortunate because that video and videos like it has become too big a part of what people think about when they think about hunting ducks on public land in Arkansas. And not just Arkansas, around the country.

Ramsey Russell: Public land.

Ich Stewart: Yes, public land. That video sort of like this is in a sense that was the perfect video because this is how people perceive us too often. And unfortunately, I think it’s also the way Arkansas Game & Fishing Commission views public land hunters in Arkansas. They look at videos like that and they must think to themselves and well, I kind of know what they think of us from some extent, I’ve got a lot of friends. I used to work as partners with the commission before I retired. And I’ve got a lot of buddies that are still part of the commission, that work on the commission. I’ve got a lot of good friends that sit on the advisory council and some dear friends that used to sit on the advisory council. And I ask all these folks, hey, what is the commission’s opinion of us public land guys? And across the boards, what I hear is they don’t have the best opinion. They see videos like that fight in the hole, and they see videos of the boat racing and all the pressure and the intimidation, and that ends up becoming our identity, whether we like it or not, that’s how people view us. And we’re trying to change that. That’s part of what Public Timber Project is about, we need to change that.

Ramsey Russell: Exactly. Because when I see videos like that, like what you’re talking about, it’s disturbing. But it’s like this, it’s like if I catch a fever, it ain’t the fever, maybe I got the flu, that’s what I need to be worried about. It’s not the symptom, right? When I see something like that going on, to me, it’s the symptom of a deeper root cause. And that’s what excites me about this conversation about the Public Timber Project. About a group of men, a grassroots movement, older and younger, locking together to try to do something, to change something and that’s what excites me about this. Where did the idea for this project come about?

Ich Stewart: Well, I’ll tell you, it started years ago, brainstorming with a couple of really good duck hunting buddies of mine. And like everybody across the country that’s involved with the waterfowl world, there’s 2 things every duck hunter in the world hates and it’s the way things are and change. We’re all stuck complaining about the way things are, but none of us want to change at all. And because so many of us are just stuck in our ways or through misguided teachings and knowledge, think that the way we do things today is the tradition of duck hunting, we got to be careful when we talk about our traditions that we know what the heck we’re even talking about. But me and my buddies, like so many groups and crews and camps around the state of Arkansas, we spend a lot of time, we did spend a lot of time complaining about things, complaining about the commission, complaining about this and complaining about that. And we started brainstorming on how could a regular duck hunter, and that’s all I am, buddy. I’m not a pro caller, I’m not a guide, I’m not some guy, I’m not some professional dog trainer, I’m just your average, everyday public land duck hunter, that’s all I am. Most of us that are part of the project, we’re just average hunters. We’re not celebrities in the industry. But how can the everyday duck hunter change things? And what would happen if we stopped complaining about all the problems in duck hunting and started trying to change things? And that sort of headed us, it started us down a pathway of brainstorming of what would that look like? What would it look like to start a movement in Arkansas to change the culture of duck hunting? Now, I’m not in control of the commission, I’m not in control of the larger duck hunting industry. I can’t change social media and all the negative effects it’s having. But what if we could take social media and the modern duck hunting world, which has turned into an online community. I mean, duck hunting is an online social media based community really these days. Everybody that’s in duck hunting has a strong social media presence, and we’ve seen this formula birthed over the last, I don’t know how many years, buddy, where with some effort and a little bit of talent, you can start a social media presence and film your duck hunts on public land. And if you kill enough ducks, you might just get sponsored.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, boy. Sign me up.

Ich Stewart: Yeah. And so you see the birth of social media and kill culture, just start to take over where it’s just the log shots and the dead log, the dead duck picks on everyone’s social media. And it seems like everybody’s competing to get more followers and then boom, maybe get some sponsorships? So the idea was, well, how could we use social media for something positive in duck hunting, other than fame and fortune? How can we use social media and maybe come up with an idea that would start trending and could maybe change the way we see public land duck hunting and public land use and what our role should be on it? And finally, my buddy Jonathan came up with the idea that we should start at the boat ramps because our duck hunts as public land duck hunters, our hunts begin and end at the boat ramp, so let’s start at the boat ramp. What can we do right at the boat ramp? What difference can we make at the boat ramp? And that’s where we came about the whole plan of let’s start cleaning up boat ramps. Let’s start getting organizing duck hunters to go around and do boat ramp cleanups. And we started just cleaning up boat ramps and parking areas, places where duck hunters were parking and socializing and hanging out, waiting for 4 o’ clock and hanging out, post hunt and seeing, we’re not going to lecture, we’re not going to tell everybody all the bad things they’re doing or the good things, we’re just going to shut up and show up and pick up garbage at public land boat ramps. And our hope initially was that if we advertised them and pushed our cleanups on social media, that we could get public land duck hunters to show up and help out. We’d tell them the time and place and then while they were there, while we were cleaning together, we could have conversations with them. We could get to know these hunters, where are they from? What areas do they hunt? What are the issues they’re seeing? Who were their mentors? Some of the same questions you’re asking me. And we could start to maybe get our finger on the pulse of the public duck hunting community here in Arkansas and we could start pushing folks in a positive direction. And we didn’t really know if it would work, but we started over in Clarendon on the White River and Clarendon, Arkansas. We did a cleanup last fall, that was our first cleanup project. And we made a couple videos and tried to introduce the project to the public. And after that, we got enough good feedback that we just continued on. And so we kind of just decided, the old adage, buddy, that if you want to change the world, start by making your bed in the morning. And so we thought, boy, if we want to change duck hunting culture, let’s start at the boat ramp. Because there’s lots of bigger discussions about responsible use of social media and shot chasing and sky busting birds and overcrowding the woods and all those sorts of things, mutual respect, there’s lots of other rabbit holes that we would love to see change, but it has to start somewhere, right? And man, it’d be easy for me to get on and just lecture people on social media and say, hey, this is what’s wrong with duck hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Please don’t. There’s enough of that right now. But it’s divisive. That kind of rhetoric is divisive.

Ich Stewart: So what would it look like for us to kind of shut up and show up and what kind of momentum could we get if that’s what we started doing? So we started organizing more cleanups, and lo and behold, I’ll be honest, the first couple cleanups was, me and the guys that started this thing, and maybe we could get our dads or our wives to come out with this and help us pick up, but not a lot of people were showing up at first. And then that slowly started to change. And we did a cleanup at Rainy Break, which is one of those sweet little spots in Arkansas, doesn’t get a lot of ducks, can’t hunt it a lot of the year, but it’s got a loyal group of followers. And a gentleman named Blakely showed up to the cleanup and was passionate, he was a young duck hunter and kind of exactly the kind of guy we were hoping to connect with. And Blakely ended up becoming, I mean, he’s pretty much the heart and soul of the project now. That first meeting, he cleaned up, and we cleaned up pretty much all of Rainy Break. Blakely said, hey, I want to be more involved after this, how can I get more involved with you all? And so we brought him on board, and it just is slowly built from there, it’s slowly grown. Every cleanup we do, we’re bringing more folks on. A couple of my buddies that are local guides here in Arkansas, they found out about it, and they’re regulars at our cleanups. And we’ve got some high school kids that are following us and showing up to our cleanups. And so it’s been a real mix of folks. And once you’ve got them there, once we’re doing, once we’re at the river or once we’re at the boat ramp picking up garbage, the discussions that inspires are really the heart and soul of the Public Timber Project. It’s building this community of folks that are willing to show up on a Saturday morning, get out of bed, do their part, pick up. That’s where you can start talking about other issues on public land. And the interesting thing that happened with everybody that’s been involved with the cleanup is how participating in the cleanup has changed them as a duck hunter. And this isn’t something we knew was going to happen, but it’s been kind of magic. Because you talk about ownership, I’m going to tell you something. If you keep your local boat ramp clean, if you’re a guy like me who hunts, I’m blessed, I get a hunt a lot, I probably hunt more than I should in terms of the pressure I’m putting on wildlife, but I hunt a lot, right? And I’ve got my favorite spots, there’s probably 4 or 5 boat ramps that I spend 90% of my time hunting at. And I try to keep them clean. And I’ve organized cleanups there through the Public Timber Project. But I keep them clean just every day while I’m down there hunting. And because of that investment, I tell you what, when you show up at the boat ramp and you see somebody empty all the empty shotgun holes out of their boat and throw them right out into the parking lot at the boat ramp, why take that personal, right? Because I cleaned that boat ramp, and I’m going to be way more inclined to walk over and talk to that young guy and be like, what are you doing? Pick up your garbage, this isn’t just yours, this belongs to everybody. And if you keep the boat ramp clean, then you might be a little bit more inclined to pick up all your holes in your hole that you’re hunting for the day, and you’re also probably going to be a little bit more inclined to be kind and considerate, respectful to everybody when you’re in the woods, it’s got to start someplace. And so we’ve been observing with these young guys, especially, who were showing up to these cleanups, just the switch that occurs inside of them. There’s like a little switch that gets flipped in their heads when they start participating.

Ramsey Russell: It’s because they are taking ownership. Now, they have personally invested themselves into this project and to that public land. Ich, any aspect of your life, but especially duck hunting, it’s got to be give and take. You can’t just take, you’ve got to also give. Would you agree with that?

Ich Stewart: Well, yeah, I wouldn’t just agree with that, I would say that that concept of giving more than we take – if we want to talk about old school and traditions, which any of us that live in the south and duck hunt, that’s half the marketing that these companies are selling to us is the old school and the tradition.

Ramsey Russell: But it’s more in the camo pattern.

Ich Stewart: But it’s more than an old retro mossy oak camo pattern, because our history as waterfowlers is a history of giving more than we take. We would not have duck hunting, if our ancestors, our forefathers, hadn’t paused. At the turn of the century, around 1900, market hunters were wiping out species and we were fixing to wipe out waterfowl as a whole. Women’s fashion and market hunting, we just about ended the whole dang thing. And lovers of wildlife and the conservation movement was born back then. I mean, duck hunters were the first conservationists. I know it’s turned into a 4 letter word in today’s politics, but duck hunters were the first environmentalists. We started this whole thing about clean air, clean water, clean public lands and caring for wildlife. And that’s a history that continued on all through the 80s. Here in Arkansas, I’m a Cache River guy, the Cache River is my favorite place in the world. I have an irrational love affair with the Cache River. Now I don’t say that to advertise folks to come shoot ducks in the Cache River, because I’ll tell you that the duck hunting on the Cache river is not what it used to be, it’s tough and we typically have low water for a lot of the year and it’s a rough river, even when conditions are ideal. But it wasn’t that long ago, I’m talking 30 years ago, 35 years ago, the Cache River was under attack. Army Corps of Engineers wanted to straighten and dredge the Cache River to produce more profitable farmland and save all the farms. And of course, most folks in duck hunting are familiar with Rex Hancock and his fight to save the Cache River. Of course, it wasn’t just Rex, there’s a lot of men and women across Arkansas that got involved. But then again, this is from 1900 until the 80s, these were redneck duck hunters, public land duck hunters, guys just like you and me, Ramsey, that put their own opinions aside and organized and fought and saved the Cache River. Most of our WMAs in Arkansas and throughout the country, so much of our public lands that we hunt, especially the public lands that we duck hunt, our marshes, our GTRs, our flooded areas, our bottomlands, what’s the expression? That’s a face only a mother could love. Well, so many of these places, they didn’t have a lot of cultural value, they didn’t have a lot of appeal to the greater population. But to duck hunters, these places were our entire world and we fought hard and saved them and we almost lost them. We almost lost our ducks 100 years ago. And it’s been an uphill fight since then to save and preserve all of our public lands. Cache River National Wildlife Refuge here in Arkansas, what did it come about in 1986, 1985, something like that? It was finally formed, I think I’m probably within a year or two of getting those facts straight. That was us, that was us coming together and saving that place. And I’ve got drawn up here, if you’ll allow me to read something on this podcast because I just think it’s true.

Ramsey Russell: Please do, yes.

Ich Stewart: And it’s such an inspiration behind the Public Timber Project. I’m going to read to everybody the conservation pledge, the Save the Cache River Basin conservation pledge that was sent out to folks by Rex Hancock. This was in our lives, man. You and me were kids when this was happening. The conservation pledge. I give my pledge as an American to save and faithfully defend from waste the natural resources of my country. Its air, soil and minerals, its forests, waters and wildlife. That was a pledge that Rex Hancock was able to get tens of thousands of duck hunters to take in the 80s. And as a result of that, the Cache River was saved and that inspired so many other projects across Arkansas. So many of our places were safe because folks stepped up and did the right thing. I look at this pledge right here and I go, well, this is it. How did we lose this? How did we lose this on public land? This conservation pledge that the priority when I go duck hunting is not me getting pictures on Instagram and killing a full limit of ducks, my number one priority is what I give back. And so this idea that we have to give more than we take, it seems to me, and I’m not the smartest guy in the world, there’s one of my dogs shaking in the background. But this seems to be a defining attribute to what it means to be a duck hunter historically, this was kind of who we were and who we used to be. And I just think, boy, maybe it’s time to bring back some of those old time duck hunting ethics. Maybe we’re at a time in history we’re given a check to duck and hey, I love Ducks Unlimited and Delta Waterfowl, don’t get me wrong, great organizations, both of which are really supportive of the Public Timber Project. We’ve gotten a ton of support from DU and Delta with what we started. But given those organizations check, that ain’t enough. If you just mail them a check and then you just act like a heathen throughout the rest of the year, that ain’t going to cut it. That’s like going to church on Sunday and then being an idiot on Monday.

“You can’t throw $20 bill in the offering plate and call yourself a Christian, it’s bigger than that. It’s an ethos, it’s a lifestyle.”

Ramsey Russell: You can’t throw $20 bill in the offering plate and call yourself a Christian, it’s bigger than that. It’s an ethos, it’s a lifestyle.

“I think that’s the wrong strategy and complaining about a broken agency also is the wrong strategy, that ain’t going to fix nothing that are sitting around complaining about it. So I think it’s time for us to start looking at what grassroots action looks like in duck hunting and that brings us back to our little project.”

Ich Stewart: Exactly. So there’s a lot of things in duck hunting that concern me and that you and me could talk about but I’m not in control of it. I ain’t in control of the weather unfortunately, I can’t make Missouri freeze solid every winter, I’ve been praying for it, but God don’t listen to me. I’m not in control of the duck numbers, duck production, prairie pothole region, I’m not in control of that. I’m not in control of the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission, they don’t listen to me unfortunately. They’re yet to partner with the public timber project and take our perspectives into account. And I got to tell you, having spent a career working for the feds and in land management, Ramsey, my faith in land management agencies is very low. I think that’s a bad place for us to. And if we’re sitting around waiting for the Game & Fish Commission here in Arkansas and the Fish & Wildlife Service to save us from ourselves, I think it’s going to be a long disappointing wait. I think that’s the wrong strategy and complaining about a broken agency also is the wrong strategy, that ain’t going to fix nothing that are sitting around complaining about it. So I think it’s time for us to start looking at what grassroots action looks like in duck hunting and that brings us back to our little project.

Ramsey Russell: You talk about old school, being more in the camo pattern and it is. You talk about some of those old ethos using Rex Hancock as an example, boy, what a great example. I wish I’d known the man, I can tell you that. What a leader, what a legacy to do something like that. But I’ll make it personal about this old school. We talk about old school is cool, but so much of the grassroots movement, when you start trying to change a hunting culture, it’s bigger than, you know this and I know this, we’ve talked about this before Ich, is it’s bigger than cleaning up boat ramps. I mean, for example, what if you could institute a movement, a grassroots movement that affected our approach to duck hunting? For example, I just got to tell the story since you mentioned this particular place, but one of the most defining relationships I ever had, one of my most defining mentors in duck hunting and the lesson he taught me very early on and I was a grown man now, I had shot ducks in central Mississippi and jump shooting and pass shooting and all that kind of behavior down in Texas. But I’d never really hunted ducks until I fell in with some boys in Arkansas public. And the same problem, some of the same problems you see today existed then. You had to get there earlier or get beat to the hole. It wasn’t 70 people coming behind you, but it was somebody, especially if you’d had a good shoot there. And Mr. Boyd, he knew those woods like the back of his hand like your uncle. He squirrel hunted barefoot little boy his whole life in those woods. He knew just where we needed to get out. We’re out there with just flashlights, maybe a Q-beam among the 14ft little flat bottom John boats and 5 horse motors crawling through the woods, where to get out, where to drag the boat, where the thickets were. I mean, he just knew where we were going and if we had a good, if we left at 4 in the morning to have a good shoot and had a good shoot, we had to leave at 3 or 2 the next morning. There were mornings I slept on the floor after we put out decoys, looking at the stars, you know what I’m saying, until shooting time. And I never will forget one of the first times we’ve had and this story truly defined my approach. And the world’s a whole lot bigger than our backyard and they hunt ducks a million different ways around the world. But this defines my relationship with duck hunting was a flock of birds pitching over the trees and coming in and basically landing in our laps and me cutting loose. And he was a very fatherly figure. Reminded me of Andy Griffith. His hair slicked back with Brio cream to hold the works, you know? And he said, now, boy, don’t shoot till I call the shots. And yes, sir, Mr. Boyd. And there directly another flock come in, and I cut loose again. And this time he was a little more stern, like Andy done broke a window with his baseball, right? And he explained to me very respectfully in a way that I’ve remembered, he explained to me, son, he said, anybody can shoot a duck in the span of this hole, that’s not the game, the game is owning them. I said, sir? He said, we call them in, we’re in the right place, we got the decoys out, we got the wind right, we’re calling these ducks and we’re negotiating and we’re talking to them, they’re talking back. And they come in and they land and we’ve won. That’s the moment we win. We win when they hit the water and they land. And then the way they play their game is a duck would get up and somebody shoot, they’d all get up, we’d pick a drake and we were done. But his game was not killing ducks, his game was owning those ducks. Man, that’s old school. I hunted with an old man one time, one morning this guy was 90 something years old, had hunted a Mississippi public land since before the dam, since before the river, since it was a wild break and loaded with ducks and rat mazes full of trails going through it and people would get lost and spend the night in the woods. And I take him out there to hunt, my light went out, he could see by starlight, knew just how to get through the thicket to where I wanted to be that morning, we set up and I was done, and he hadn’t fired a shot. Man shows up, 90 something years old with a single shot Sears and Roebuck shotgun. And I said, well, you better shoot, whatever. And he’s like, son, I ain’t never shot a flying duck in my life, and I’m not going to start this morning. That’s old school. Same principal. He wanted to own those ducks. He said the reason he got those decoys, swimming is so the ducks will land amongst them and I don’t have to lead them as far. You see what I’m saying? How cool would that be in public land if instead of out of desperation or lost art form, killing a duck because you can or you can shoot at them or try and maybe get it, if we all tried to collectively own those ducks, instead of shooting them on the swing and shooting them on the spin and shooting tree topping them.

Ich Stewart: I talked a little bit earlier about, getting these young guys to show up to our cleanups, so we’ve got their ear right there, right? We can start talking to them and maybe have an influence on them. And maybe if they seem cool enough and safe enough, we might invite them to come hunting with us. And we’ve got a bunch of great success stories this last year of meeting young guys. And that’s the number one thing that we’re trying to teach. If we can get people’s attention at the boat ramps with the garbage. The next place I tend to go and all of us tend to go is talking to them about how they manage their hole in the timber down here and how they manage those ducks. Because I just really believe that that idea of owning the ducks, other way to talk about it is finishing birds, finishing that bird. I tell guys when I go hunting, I want to see, I’m not just duck hunting, I want to see greenhead mallards break through the treetops and land at the water at my feet, that is the goal. That’s what I’m out there for. That’s the great show. That’s what Arkansas GTRs and old cypress, flooded timber, that’s what these places have to offer. I think that’s the magic of Arkansas, really. It’s not just killing a bunch of ducks, it’s watching mallards work timber and break through the branches and finish and land at your feet. And you got to leave the gun hanging on your tree a little bit longer, it takes some discipline, but it takes an older mentor to walk you through that process and just to calm your nerves and get you just to be steady. Get your dog, you got to train your dog to be steady, well, we got to train ourselves to be steady, too. Leave the gun hanging, watch the birds land. And once that starts, what I think a lot of guys find out is that it’s immediately it stops being about killing the ducks. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love shooting birds and I love watching my dogs and I’ve got 4 awesome dogs, I love training dogs, I love everything about the dogs, that’s part of how I live my duck hunting passion throughout the whole year is working dogs and training dogs. And my dogs don’t get to work if we don’t shoot birds. But you have a couple experiences if you’re a young guy and you’re only thing you know about duck hunting is what you’ve watched on all the YouTube duck hunting channels, good luck finding any videos that show guys finishing birds, you just don’t see it. And I’m not going to name names, but you can look at all the most popular duck hunting channels out there on YouTube and according to my dad, they’re all sky busting, every one of them sky busted, nobody has the patience to let those birds hit the water. And here’s the cool thing about, you talk about owning the ducks, finishing birds in the woods, once you commit down that path of, I’m not just a duck hunter, but I want to finish birds, that’s my goal every day, that changes a lot of things. It automatically fixes a lot of the problems we’re seeing on public land. For one, if my goal is to finish birds, I’m probably not going to set up 20 yards off another group of guys and crowd them, I’m not going to do that. Because experience has taught me if I want to finish those birds the way, if I want to work them right and see them finish and land right in my decoy spread right at my feet, that’s not going to work, if there’s another group of guys 20 yards off of me sky busting with their guns and hail calling to every group that comes by on a really loud cut down, that’s just not going to work. So you find yourself separating yourself from other groups. You start finding places to hunt where you’re not crowding the woods as much. Sky busting is another big issue. You sky bust a bunch of ducks on public land, what are you doing? Well, everyone around you that’s got a group of birds that’s working, those birds are done. If a group of guys 50 yards off to the side of me is sky busting and I’ve got a bunch of really nervous mallards and they’re circling my hole and looking at me and they’re trying to make up their mind on whether or not it’s safe to land. And suddenly they hear a big volley of shooting. Well, they’re going to take off. You see that every single morning, right? That disturbance that kicks them off. And so you’re wrecking it for the next guy too, sky busting, you’re wrecking it for the guy hunting next to you as well. So when you commit to finishing birds, boy, it pretty much eliminates the sky busting, the treetop shooting that we see here. You’re going to start finding places that are more remote and far further away from other groups of people because you need that settled quiet woods, right? You want the woods to be quiet. Birds don’t finish when the woods are busy and noisy. And so it starts making you think about everything else. You start heading down that rabbit hole and before you know it, you’re evaluating every part of your duck hunting, from the boat you run to how loud you are in the morning, waiting for the shooting hours to start. You start evaluating your disturbance as a hunter as a whole. You start thinking about moving around the duck woods more like a turkey hunter moves around the woods. And probably the best piece of advice we try to give guys that say, man, I’d love to be able to finish birds like you guys and get birds to land right at your feet and swim around. Well, maybe, I think the majority, at least here in the south, buddy, the majority of duck hunters are also, most of them also turkey hunt, wouldn’t you say?

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Ich Stewart: And it gets me how all winter I can watch these guys and gals in the public land duck woods and they are as loud as they can be, and they get to the hole and they got all their lights on, their boats on and they’ve got music playing and again, nothing against turtle box, I’ve got one, but I don’t take it duck hunting with me, I don’t take it out woods. And we just make so much noise when we’re duck hunting, and here a couple months later when it’s turkey hunting season, we don’t even slam a truck door when we park it, do we? Suddenly we’re just whisper quiet. And so I think there’s a lot we can learn from our turkey hunting when it comes to how to duck hunt in the public land woods, it’s a huge thing if we all start to become more aware of the noise we’re making in our disturbance.

Ramsey Russell: Dude, now do people really take turtle box and blare it in the early mornings?

Ich Stewart: Oh, we see it.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, we’ve all seen the videos of very conspicuous groups of hunters that crank up a loud motor and turn on a bunch of lights and look like Kid Rock and perform and rolling down a river through the wood. But I mean, are they really booming on the boxes too?

Ich Stewart: Yeah, Heck yeah. There’s plenty of places just about any morning of the season here in Arkansas and probably throughout the country where in them hours waiting for shooting light to come around, it’s a party. Headlamps, boat lights, the whole thing. And I’m going to tell you something, if you want to do one small practice that will transform, I think the respect you give to that hole is, 4 o’ clock’s kind of the magic time here in Arkansas for public land. Most spots, you can’t head out to your hole till 4 o’. Clock and every place is different, where that starting line is at, it’s different from place to place. But typically if you’ve got a good boat and you leave at 4, most guys are getting to their hole by, 04:15, maybe 04:30. So most of us have a long wait every morning in the dark in our hole waiting for shooting light. Just sit in your boat, turn off all your lights, turn off your headlamp, put your phone away, turn off your boat lights, turn off your turtle box, lay in your boat and look up at the night sky. And what you will see in them hours is ducks. You’re going to see ducks nonstop in them hours from – well, on a full moon night, as everybody knows, they’re moving more and more and more at night time these days, the ducks are moving at night, they’re becoming more and more nocturnal. But you want to see a good show and you want to see a lot of mallards flying really low right at the treetops, go into our timber here in Arkansas and Lay in your boat for an hour or two in the morning, totally quiet. Put your phone away, turn your lights off, and stare up at the treetops and tell me how many ducks you see. And you know when it’s a light night out, you can see them really clearly. And those ducks are flying the woods and they’re looking down, right? Now you’re going to tell me those ducks aren’t the same ducks we’re hunting once the light comes up, once the shooting time starts? It’s the same ducks. So we’re educating those ducks in the dark. It’s not like suddenly, it’s 06:45 now it’s time to hide and be quiet, that don’t make any sense. So those are some things we’re seeing, you talk about change on public land, that’s a big change. It used to be, at least the guys who taught me how to duck hunt, you get to your hole and you sit there and you’re quiet, most time you freeze your butt off.

Ramsey Russell: Well, man, it’s kind of the whole purpose of going to nature to hunt, to interact with ducks, to shoot duck, to hunt ducks, I love your contract between turkey hunting and duck hunting, I mean, it’s spot on, but there’s a time and a place for everything. I mean, for example, right now I’ve got some ribs smoking on my little old pellet smoker on the backyard, and my secret ingredient is when as soon as we get done and can’t hear it over the audio, I’m going to go turn on my turtle box. I like to serenade my pork ribs with a little BB King and that’s just my secret ingredient. But I don’t want to go to the woods and feel like I’m at a party. I want to go to the solitude, to the wildness, I want to hunt wild ducks in wild places. Ducks wants to be in wild places and that’s what I’m going to try to emulate.

Ich Stewart: Yeah. Again, I’ll make sure I throw this out there, I’m not on here trying to pretend to be a duck hunting expert, but I’m pretty sure from all the things I read and listen to, there’s a couple big key factors that ducks need. They need water and they need food and they need a lack of pressure. They need open water, food and they need to feel safe. Well, I’m not control of the water, I’m not control of the food, I’m not control of the regulations, but I am in control of the kind of pressure I create when I go into the woods. And so we’ve got a lot of duck hunters right now. I mean, we’ve got a lot of duck hunters out there hunting public land in Arkansas and all across the country. What if we all, on top of the garbage started really thinking about our footprint in the woods, what kind of noise we’re making? Are we running our boats up and down these rivers just because it’s a new boat and it’s fun to run it? How is that impacting the duck hunting? We get to the hole early in the morning, what are we doing? How are we treating that hole? How are we behaving? Are our lights on when they don’t need to be? Are we making more noise than we need to be? What if we just sat quiet? What if we started approaching duck hunting like turkey hunting on public land? What would that change? What if we started committing ourselves to finishing groups and not just needing a limit? The one big shift with that is we’ve stopped talking about how many ducks we’ve killed and instead we talk about how many birds we finished. I’m going to tell you, it’s a powerful – it seems like it’s semantics, but it’s a powerful shift in the mindset of a duck hunter. Because I’m going to tell you something, if Arkansas were to say, hey, Ich, you can’t shoot 6 ducks a day no more, we’re lowering the limit down to 2 ducks a day. Well, the only person who gets to be upset about that is my dogs because that’s not going to change my day one bit. I can still finish 150 mallards right at my feet, if I’m a good enough duck hunter, it only means I can only shoot my gun twice. But that doesn’t affect what it is I’m going out there to do one bit. And I’m not going out there just to kill ducks, I’m going out there because I want to see the show. It’s the greatest show in the on God’s green earth is watching those ducks finishing the trees and land at my feet, that gets me going the whole year. It don’t matter how many of them I kill. So we shift how we talk about it. Doesn’t matter how many I killed, let me tell you how many I finished. In my group, we may have only shot 7, 8 ducks, but we finished 2 groups of, 3 dozen to 50 birds, first light this morning and they came in perfect and they were swimming right at our footsteps and I had a mallard swim right up to my dog on his dog stand and my dog didn’t move and it was awesome. And then we clapped our hands and they swam off into the woods, and that’s as old school as it gets. You want to talk to me about your cut down calls and your bottomland original, you want to go old school, let’s talk about finishing birds in the woods. Let’s talk about being quiet in the woods and being a woodsman, bringing back some of those old values. That’s what I think is cool. That’s the part of duck hunting that I’m in love with. I love that, it’s not killing, I’m not in love with killing them, I’ve done that, I got that out of my system.

Ramsey Russell: You’ve got this grassroots movement, the Public Timber Project. Tell me about some of the people that began to show up and about some of the conversations you all are having.

Ich Stewart: Boy, I tell you, it’s been neat. I’ll share with you probably a story about a couple of the folks that are involved now. One group and 2 groups of people that are involved that we’re probably the most excited about. Our supporters are about as diverse as you can get. I think our oldest member is 78 years old and our youngest members are in high school. And we’ve got guys that are millionaires and that hunt the private clubs, but also still love public land. And we’ve got guys that are just broke, poor as they can be, just salt of the earth, rural country boys that can barely afford gas in their truck to get to a cleanup. So we definitely kind of run the gamut there all over the place. But we had a young guy, I’m not going to mention his last name because this is the Internet and he’s still a high schooler, but I’ll mention his first name, John. He’s a senior this year and he reached out to us on social media this last winter and said, hey, I hunt that St. Francis country over in eastern Arkansas and there’s a bunch of boat ramps over there that I hunt at a lot and they’re in pretty rough shape. Would you all be interested in coming over and helping do a cleanup project over where I hunt? And I tell you, none of us with the Public Timber Project really were that familiar, St. Francis just wasn’t in an area I hunt, I just don’t go really go over there. And we had an incredible cleanup with a high school senior that reached out, that cared about his local duck hunting woods enough. And we filled a couple trucks full of garbage, and we cleaned all day, I think we cleaned 6 boat ramps up and down the St. Francis and a couple of parking areas at in between. And we formed a partnership with that young man, and we’ve been doing everything we can to support him as a duck hunter. I know he’s looking for a new boat right now, looking at buying his first duck boat. And I mean, how cool is that to be working with a young guy who’s just caught the bug and is looking at buying his first boat. And he came to our last cleanup we had up on Dave Donaldson, and he brought another high school senior with him. So talk about getting us fired up when we start seeing high school boys. And I don’t know about you, but when I was a senior in high school, driving all across my home state and picking up garbage was the last thing you could have probably convinced me to do, I was chasing beer and girls, probably. I was thinking about myself. So that’s a really inspiring piece of the Public Timber Project, is seeing these young guys just think this is awesome and get involved, and somehow they see it, they understand it makes perfect sense to them. They see the connection between doing their part locally and the bigger picture. And then I’ll tell you, another unofficial partnership that’s come about that’s just about as cool as it could be is Delta Waterfowl. And we don’t have a formal partnership with Delta Waterfowl nationally, but locally, we have had so much support from all of our local Delta Waterfowl chapters. Matter of fact, we’ve had chapters in Alabama and Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri and Texas and Arkansas all participate in cleanups on their own as part of the Public Timber Project. So one of the things we started this last year is, was trying to encourage folks to do cleanups on their own. We realize that folks may not all be able to travel to our organized cleanups, but how cool would it be if they just cleaned up on their own when they go duck hunting on the weekends? And so what we encourage folks to do is do a local cleanup, tell us a little bit about yourself and where you duck hunt and do a local cleanup project at your local boat ramp. Send us a cool picture we can put on social media and then we like to send those folks prizes. We’ve got some pretty cool hats and some stickers people can put on their boats and their motors. And we got a couple other little fun little prizes we mail out to folks as a thank you for being part of everything. And none of that merchandise is for sale. You can’t go onto a website or go onto our Instagram and buy our hats, you’ve got to pick up garbage if you want a Public Timber Project hat. And that really took off. I couldn’t tell you how many folks you can go on to our Instagram page and see all the cleanups that have happened all across the South. But so many of them have come from Delta waterfowl chapters. And it’s just really cool to see this larger group of folks, the Delta waterfowl folks, I’m a member of Delta, such a cool organization. But to see these local chapters support this project and do cleanups on their own has just been, it’s just one of those things that started happening this last winter that made us realize that, hey, this is a good idea, we need to keep doing this, this is working. Because we’re influencing a large conservation organization from the bottom up. And that’s pretty neat to see that influence, to see it catch on.

Ramsey Russell: Well, you need a demographic that has already volunteered their time and money to make the duck hunting world a better place, this is just another opportunity to do so.

Ich Stewart: It’s great. If you’re looking for a way to get kids involved into and to show your involvement in the off season and you’re part of a local DU or Delta chapter, do a cleanup with us, let us know, and let us know in advance and we’ll help you advertise and if we can, as many of us will show up and help out in person as we can. And so those sort of collaborative cleanups are pretty darn exciting if you ask me. That’s really starting to see some momentum build. And it caused this to really jump state lines. What started off as really Arkansas focused is, man, we’ve got supporters all across the South. And coming up here in another month or two, we’re planning our first organized cleanup project over in your home state. We’re going to come over and do some cleaning up in Mississippi, and we’ve got some really good dear friends that are our duck hunting buddies and dog training buddies of mine from the Oxford, Mississippi area. And so they just reached out and said, hey, Ich, we want to do an organized Public Timber Project cleanup on all of our lakes around here. So we’re going to be looking at, Sardis and Enid and all those big lakes that get a lot of pressure and they’re not necessarily even duck hunting lakes but they get a lot of pressure from the crappie fishermen.

Ramsey Russell: Oh you better believe it.

Ich Stewart: We could, us as sportsmen can show up. And the other thing we started doing, we’ve done 2 of them so far and our cleanup to Mississippi will be the same as we’ve been doing boat runs. And we did one on the Cache River that was our first boat run river cleanup where we weren’t just focused at the boat ramp and talk about a good time. It’s the end of duck season, we’re all jonesing to get back out in the duck woods, show up to one of our river runs, bring your duck boat, bring your waders, bring your dog, bring a couple dockings, couple bumpers so we can play with dogs and meet a bunch of other great like minded duck hunters that care about their local public lands. And we typically will start off by doing a little cleanup right there at the boat ramp and then we’ll throw our boats in the water and we’ll run the river and we’ve got safety in numbers in case somebody has problems with the boat and see how much garbage we can pull out of the woods back on the river. And just a really fun event. It sounds like, oh, picking up trash, that sounds like a lot of work, I’m telling you man, you want to have a good time and meet some really just awesome dudes that love duck hunting. And the guys that we’re attracting with these river runs are top notch. I mean, we’re really getting some great duck hunters, some guys with reputations in the state and reputations in those local areas, that is to say that the folks that are getting involved are the guys that are great mentors, really accomplished, competent, knowledgeable duck hunters are showing up to these things as well. So it’s a really a fun community that’s been born out of this whole thing. And it’s not Arkansas, it’s the whole US. It’s just that Positive Fishing Power gentleman that runs that Positive Fishing Power Instagram page did a cleanup in Missouri just a couple days ago and sent it to us and he put a post on there, said it’s not just in Arkansas anymore, it’s moved north into Missouri. So we’re really seeing this push, all across the South. Minnesota has done some cleanups as well. And we love that as Arkansas duck hunters because we know these are also the folks that come here as non-residents and hunt Arkansas as non-residents. So we’re seeing a lot of support by non-resident duck hunters with this project to the point now where we may have more non-resident support than we do resident support, which is kind of interesting.

Ramsey Russell: Good stuff, Ich. How can listeners help? How can they support this movement?

Ich Stewart: Well, I’d say a couple of things. One is, go do a local cleanup. Go to your local boat ramp, creek, river, it’s about turkey season here in Arkansas, I know it’s turkey season other places, do a cleanup while you’re out turkey hunting. Do a cleanup around your truck, where you park it, send it in to us. Let’s start filling Instagram with pictures of sportsmen doing good things and not just pictures of sportsman’s showing off the newest, latest, cool clothing and hats and showing pictures of dead critters, let’s start to shift it there. But send us a picture, that’d be a great, easy way to get involved. Pick up some garbage or get creative. Find some other good deed you can do on public lands. Take a picture of it, send it to us, we’ll post it, we’ll send you a hat for it. The other thing you could do if you want to support us, is show up to one of our organized cleanups. We would love to see you at our next big cleanup. And if you have an area that’s in need of a large organized group of folks to get it cleaned up, let us know, tell us where you live. Be just exactly like that high school senior that reached out to us about the St. Francis, that wasn’t even on our radar until somebody contacted us and said, hey, here’s an area a lot of folks duck hunt that’s really trashed. And so you could contact us that way and give us an idea for a new cleanup. On another note, we are a non-profit here in Arkansas, so if somebody does want to give us money, we are open to small donations. But I’ll tell you, we don’t really need a lot of money. A $50, $100 donation goes a long ways with us. Basically, I need enough money to buy ball caps, get them embroidered, buy some stickers and to buy garbage bags, that’s all the money’s going towards. So we’re not looking for any large donations but a small amount of money, 50 bucks, 100 bucks, somebody shows up to a cleanup and gives us 20 bucks that actually goes a long way that buys a bunch of hats, so they could help out that way. Think about what it means to be old school things. Think about our traditions. What are the traditions that you want to embrace and embody? Practice self-respect to fellow hunters. You want to be part of the Public Timber Project? Be the nicest guy on the public land. Be the nicest guy at the boat ramp. Be the guy that brings a first aid kit and a tow strap in his duck boat, not for himself, but for that stranger he runs into out in the woods. Be that guy. Find ways to get the old timers and the kids back out in the woods, that’s some every crew of duck hunters, every duck camp that hunts public can make that a priority for this next year. How many kids and old farts can we take duck hunting this year? How can we get those folks back in the woods? If a group of duck hunters approaches an older man or a young kid who’s intimidated by what they’re seeing on public land and a group of guys says, hey, why don’t you come hunt with us? We’ll take you duck hunting. That’s a way you could support us.

Ramsey Russell: Good stuff, Ich. How can everybody connect with you?

Ich Stewart: Well, boy, the easiest way would be to contact us on Instagram. The Public Timber Project is our name, pretty easy to find us. You can also email us. Our email address is publictimberproject@gmail.com and yeah, if you want to talk to me in person, reach out on Instagram and we can start a conversation. I’ll be glad to give you my phone number and we can take it from there, but those are probably the easiest ones right there.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed this conversation. It gives me hope for the future Ich. And there’s so much negativity, forget the world at large, I’m just talking about in duck hunting today, this gives me a lot of hope. Thank you so much.

Ich Stewart: I appreciate the support. We’ll take all support we can get. We can turn things around, I believe it, if we want it to be turned around, but we’re going to have to do it ourselves.

Ramsey Russell: Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. You don’t like where public land duck hunting is today? Do something. Show up, take ownership. See you next time.

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