EP 603. 25 Years of Mojo—The Decoys That Changed Everything

Boy, we have seen some world together, had some great conversations, and I was surprised to learn that this is the 25th year, a quarter century of MOJO Outdoors

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, got a great episode today. Today’s guest is not a stranger to anybody listening, but he is to me, a longtime friend and hunting buddy and mentor. Boy, we have seen some world together, had some great conversations, and I was surprised to learn that this is the 25^th year, a quarter century of MOJO Outdoors. Terry, a quarter century. Did you look as old back then as you do now? No offense or nothing.

I take no offense at that. Yeah, I was born like this, Ramsey, exactly the same way when I was born

Terry Denmon: I take no offense at that. Yeah, I was born like this, Ramsey, exactly the same way when I was born. But the interesting part of all that is that it just seems like it was the other day, it almost seemed like 25 years.

Ramsey Russell: I know. Come to find out, I mean, just because it’s a quarter century ago, that’s about the time that we got our feet under us with getducks.com I mean, I just didn’t realize that. I mean, because I think a MOJO is having been around since forever. But I mean, 25 years is a long time for any business to kick up and get going.

Terry Denmon: It is. And I would say that most of the duck hunters out there today, just by statistics, probably never hunted without a spinning wing decoy or at least it was available, they knew about it. And I was having a conversation with Chad Belden. You know Chad. Chad, one time, way back in those days and I don’t know what I said, but I could see he got a funny expression on his face. And he said, you don’t get it, Denman. I said, okay, what part of it I don’t get? He said, most of these people out here never hunted without one of these. This was years ago. He said, I’ve never hunted without one. He said, they have seen these spinning wing decoy the first time I started duck hunts. I never thought about that.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, Forrest, 27 years old, my son, heck, you’ve known him since he was a little boy. But I can remember when he was an absolute child. I mean, back in that age when you go to go to preschool or kindergarten and draw stuff with crayons and he drew a duck hunting picture. There were the decoys, there was his daddy, there was a black dog and I mean, this wasn’t Rembrandt now, this was a children’s crayon and right in the middle of them decoys was a spinning wing decoy, think about it, a MOJO decoy. And that was his first impressions of duck hunting. That’s crazy, isn’t it?

Terry Denmon: Yeah, it is.

Ramsey Russell: Terry, 25 years ago, did you ever imagine way back in the beginning, and I’ve heard you say it on other podcasts, you’ve said it on this podcast about getting up with Murray and figuring out the belt configurations and becoming intrigued with it. And I’ll post up the link some of your past podcasts below. But did you ever imagine back in the beginning that MOJO would become a household name in waterfowling?

Terry Denmon: Never.

Ramsey Russell: The most recognized name in decoys.

Terry Denmon: Never give it a thought and still don’t give it as much thought as it deserves. It just seemed like, well, that’s just another part of life, it just don’t seem that way. So I was riding down the road with Steve Bickers one time, you know Steve, in the afternoon after a blue winged teal hunt and we trip passed by Phil and they not blue wing teal hunting at that moment because it’s in the afternoon, but they still got their MOJOs out in front of the blind, they’re blue wing teal MOJO. So go down the road and they shooting doves got and they got MOJO doves out there. And Steve says, how does it feel to ride down the road and see your product out in the field like that? And I said, I never give it a thought. I just never did, you know. And he didn’t say anything else, but he probably said, man, this guy ain’t in tune with reality or something.

Ramsey Russell: But seriously, I mean, was there a moment that you just knew all of a sudden this wasn’t going to be just a fad?

Terry Denmon: Yeah. And I tell you exactly what it was. First time I flipped the switch on one of them things, and I didn’t believe it. I’ll tell you now that this was 1999, we hadn’t made up MOJO Company at that time. Murray just was making some of these for Jeff Simmons, you’ve heard all that story about. My only contribution to it was I came up with the name MOJO and didn’t even know what it meant, didn’t even know what it meant at the time. Well, I got one of them, it’s in the middle of duck season, I take it down to my farm, you’ve been down there, lots of ducks down there. And I put it out and I flipped a switch and I remember this Ramsey, I don’t know how I remember it. And you know how far it is from the highway back to where we duck hunt on my farm, so there’s nobody close by for sure. I remember looking around and seeing if anybody was watching me, but I felt a little stupid about that because that concept is not necessarily intuitive. I flipped that switch and I started wading back to the blind, it was just turning gray, not quite shooting time yet. And I hear mallards, I look around about that 25 or 30 mallard landing right on top of that, I said, wait a minute, must be something to this. But I didn’t believe in them till up to then. So anyway, when that year was over with, I tried to get my buddy Murray, I said, Murray, you need to go in the business of making those things, I mean, that’s going to be a big deal. And he wouldn’t do it. And I told him, every time I see him, I tell him again, and he didn’t want to do it. And so, finally, I told him, if you will go in business, I’ll go in business with you. And he said, I’ll do that. He, like, do business, he’s a typical master tinker, forget the business part of it all. So, yeah, that was my first moment and the first time I turned the thing on.

But the first time I used it, I’d been invited, my buddy, Mr. Ian got drawn to hunt Knoxby Wildlife Refuge, flooded timber

Ramsey Russell: It reminds me the first time I ever used a spinning wing decoy. And it would have been way back in the late, very late 90s. We started hearing about something on the Internet, something coming out of California, some magic decoy that would troll ducks from the Moon to Earth. And all you heard was descriptions, there was no pictures, there was no instructions, there was no nothing. And I was having a conversation, this would have been about 1999, maybe 2000. I was having a conversation with somebody, a buddy of mine named Tim, a preacher of all things, but a tinkerer himself, and described it to him. And a few weeks later, he brought me this, he had taken one of them race car motors, one of them super fast race cars, little mechanical cars you race around. But it had a big joystick with a trigger and everything on it. And I guess it’d run 100 miles an hour and put a plastic decoy on top of it, cut the bottom out, put it on top and put some wings on. And we didn’t know nothing about nothing. The more you pull the trigger, the faster the wings go. And, I mean, it would go. You think that thing’s going to take off like a rocket and go to the moon. And the first time I used it, I’d been invited, my buddy, Mr. Ian got drawn to hunt Knoxby Wildlife Refuge, flooded timber. And not only did we hunt that, we hunted a good shallow hole, we got drawn for. And I put it out. And him and a professor named Eric Dibble, they laughed and they said, that is stupid, that is the goofiest looking thing. This is ridiculous, this is gimmicks gone off the rails. And before we even saw a duck, Terry, I mean, 30 minutes went by, they hadn’t seen a duck, and one of the freaking wings sailed off into outer space. I mean, it was going so fast, it disappeared, would never to be seen again, we never did find that wing. And so it had one old arm kind of waving, like, come on down. And the first bunch of mallards that flew over that duckhole going somewhere else because they were high, they slammed on brakes like a cartoon and descended right on top of that decoy. And that’s when I knew, man, this son of a gun does work. And I don’t know, MOJO existed at that point, this had been about the time Murray called you and said, hey, we got this decoy and all, but that was a real deal, I mean, there’s no doubt about it. Terry, what’s been the biggest lesson running a hunting company in an industry that’s changed so much? What has been some of your takeaway lessons after 25 years? Because you didn’t grow up in the hunting industry.

It’s about treating people like people should be treated. Treating people like you’d like people to treat you

Terry Denmon: I did not. I grew up in the farming industry and my family was farmers and I’ve been associated with farming ever since then. But as in my adult life, I spent my adult life in the engineering world. And that’s what I was doing when I got into MOJO. But what I should have known going in, but it takes you a long time to think about it. It’s pretty much like any other industry, it’s about people, it’s about honesty, it’s about delivering a good product, it’s about standing behind it, it’s about doing what you told somebody you’re going to do and that. Now, once you leave those particular types of concepts and go off naturally depending on what kind of product you make, what line of product you make, that would make some difference. But it was same as when I was in the engineering business. It’s about treating people like people should be treated. Treating people like you’d like people to treat you. So that’s the main factor of any business, if you ask me.

Ramsey Russell: Business and life, I would say. Business and Life. Well, how has Terry Denmon, the hunter, Terry Denmon, the human being changed because of Terry Denmon, the innovator?

Terry Denmon: Well, that’s an interesting question, and I don’t know if I can answer it or not, but I can tell you one thing, Terry Denmon, the hunter, is changed because I don’t get to hunt anymore. I get to go on, but you’re always testing product, you’re filming shows, and whatever. So it’s not hunting, you know that you’ve been with me and I’m not hunting anymore. But it does make you study a lot more and it makes you study your choir, your game a lot more, and you’ll learn a whole lot more about it. Like, I knew how to decoy ducks, back when we got in this in 1999 and year 2000. But I didn’t spend a lot of time studying that, we all did, we worried about, well, the blind was brushed, right? Do we have the decoy set out right? Things like that. But once I got into this, I had to start studying. I said, okay, what does a duck do? What does a duck see? Why does a duck do this and why does a duck do that and when do they do it, and things like that. So I spent tons more time studying those types of things than I did before I got in this business.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I have hunted with you a lot, and I mean, I see your fangs come out when the ducks start coming in. I know you like to shoot ducks just like I do, and I’ve oftentimes said, and I feel like, my personal trajectory as a hunter has changed and evolved, maybe I’ve just done it so much it, it means something different than initially did. But you obviously still enjoy shooting ducks, Terry.

Terry Denmon: You do. And on top of that, you more appreciate the ability to work them than you did back then. Before, and when you’re younger, you know how it is when you’re younger, you just want to kill something. And so all of a sudden you want to see the ducks work. I don’t really care that much about past shooting ducks, I want to see them decoy. And so, that comes from maturity and experience and somewhat, what you and I do, and that’s study how to make ducks do what you want them to do.

Ramsey Russell: Terry, if you could do one thing differently over the last 25 years at MOJO, what would it be? Fewer batteries?

Terry Denmon: Well, yes, it would be to make the product more dependable. And that’s a real challenge because when we came out with the first old MOJO mallard, it had a motor, a heavy duty motor and a heavy duty battery and some wires and a switch, and that was it. But the modern hunter don’t want just that, they want a remote control and towers and things like that. And those products are a challenge in the environment in which we use these products. So if you could make your product more dependable, it really bothers me when people, say they have trouble with one of our products. If you could make that, you make that more dependable, what I was trying to say.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Terry Denmon: Plus, the market will only accept so much for price that you can build anything, build a submarine, but not at the price they want to pay for the product.

Ramsey Russell: That really does drive a lot of what the consumer sees on the store shelf, isn’t it?

Terry Denmon: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, China can build iPhones, nuclear submarine, they can build all this stuff, but the guy that’s going to buy a decoy may not be willing to pay the margin of something that he can hand down to his great, great, great, great grandkids.

Terry Denmon: Yeah. And another layer of that same comment, Ramsey, is that, we sell most of our product through the big box stores, the Amazon, the Bass Pros, the Cabela’s, the Cannabis, all those type people and those buyers that work for those stores, they have some kind of built in thought process that tells them what that product will sell for. And you could take them and you could take a product to them and they say, okay, I like that product, what’s your cost? And they work there said, no, it won’t work for that. And they have proved us wrong many times because we come out with product we just thought was fantastic, and they say it’s, it’s going to retail for $25 more than it should. We say, oh no, this product so good, they going to buy it, don’t matter what, but they won’t. So there’s a built in site there that says they’ll pay this much for a product and they won’t pay anymore.

Ramsey Russell: You all had one product one time, I always remember this, you showed it to me, I’m not going to talk about it because you may beat the system and come out with it one day. But I told you, I said, I want one. He said, I’ll give you a prototype. And I called you up, because teal season was getting there. And I said, man, you said, no, it ain’t going to work for that very reason you just described. And they said, well, we’ll pay you this much for it. You say, well, I got more than that in it. And you go to your people in China and maybe they can make it to hit that margin, maybe they can’t. I mean, it could be like, well, it cost me $50 to make a quality product, well, they’re not going to pay me but $30. So I go to China and say, well, I need to get it done for $25, sure, no problem. And it lasts you 2.5 days. And then everybody hates you because they wasted the money on something that breaks.

Terry Denmon: It’s one of the hardest and most disappointing parts of this business Ramsey, and I know which product you were talking about, it was a fairly complicated product. But to add to that, we have developed a lot of products in the last 25 years that never made the market or made it and didn’t survive. And basically our problem at that time was we were just ahead of our time. We still got a lot of those products, you could sell it today for the same price that, we were trying to sell it for back then, but you couldn’t sell it back then for that price.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Terry Denmon: And so that’s one of our biggest challenges is to bring a product out that does what the market wants it to do for the price that market wants to pay.

Ramsey Russell: That first spinning wing decoy, like we talked about it, sparked an absolute revolution. How has the core MOJO technology since evolved?

Terry Denmon: Well, as you’ve seen these products, Ramsey, we get a little more high tech, if you want to use that term, every year with some products. And you can mold much better back then, you can mold with higher detail and a lot of that comes from the fact that you’ve got better plastic materials to mold with back then. We can paint better, so the product just looks better. And then we’ve done things like our Elite series. We put the motor and all that stuff in a housing, and you hook the wings to the motor in the housing, you can operate it without a decoy body. We do that on TV every now and then just to demonstrate that the body’s not doing anything but making it look like a duck. And then we put a semi flexible body around it and it’s smoother, quieter, faster, longer battery life and things like that. But it’s really just an increase in everything from engineering technology, materials, ability to mold, materials, electronics have come a long way, since that time. And I had an outfitter, you know this outfitter I hunted with you, hunted with him with you, all his guides like to use 4 MOJO out there. Well, you go out there and you start them, they all start at a different time, and they like to use that intermittent button. And so they put it on intermittent and they start at different times. But the first time the geese come and they need to kill the spinning wings, they cut them off, and when you turn them back on, they all exactly synced, and he wanted a solution to that. This old guy, you know this guy, he wanted a solution to that. I said, I don’t know about that, I said, I can see in my mind how you do that, I don’t know if electronics can produce it or not. So we get a hold of some electronics people, they said, oh, yeah, we can do that, it’s no problem, it’s just a randomizer, I’ll go ahead and tell you what it is randomizers. So I about got that thought built for you. And so it would, ever own and off cycle would be different as controlled by a randomizer. So, it never knows which cycle is going to come on the next time. So you could do all those things. Now you couldn’t do them in 1999 or 2000, we didn’t have the capability of doing those types of things, batteries.

Ramsey Russell: So a lot of it is just kind of how technology itself has evolved.

Terry Denmon: Absolutely. Just keeping up with technology is what it is. Nowadays we got lithium ion batteries, and you know what the advantage of lithium ion batteries is?

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable.

Terry Denmon: The most sealed lead acid batteries that we use for a year, we still use a lot of them. They have great battery, but their biggest deficit, and I hope people that don’t know what most people know, but I hope the ones that don’t know, listen to this. If you take a lead acid battery or nickel metal hayride or any of those types of batteries, the minute you put an amp draw on it, the voltage starts going down. Well, on a DC motor, as the voltage go down, the speed goes down, so your wings start slowing down. And that’s probably the most critical thing of operating a spinning wing decoys is keeping your wind speed up enough. But on a lithium ion battery, they will turn at the same speed until they die. And you know that from your drill or from your saw, it don’t ever start slowing down, just runs and in a minute it won’t run again. So, that’s a huge improvement. And of course a company like MOJO, or if you put all the little hunting companies together in the world, they couldn’t develop something like that. So the technology has to develop something like that. I’m told mostly because of the electronic automobiles that that’s what caused us evolution of the lithium ion batteries. But they are huge improvement.

Ramsey Russell: One of the greatest examples of evolving technology, as expressed in a MOJO decoy, is the OG MOJO, the first edition MOJO had those metal wings and if you breathed on them wrong or looked at them wrong, they got a bend in them, versus the new MOJO mallard that I love. I love that MOJO mallard decoy, that new iteration of the MOJO mallard, there is no way, no how nobody is going to outdo that spinning wing decoy, except maybe for you all as You all continue to work you all magic, Terry. But now you got the technology, you all got that wing, you’ve learned in 25 years, the speed that’s needed, you’ve gone back to that black versus white flash. And short of shooting that wing and I’ll be honest with you, one of mine caught a straight BB, it won’t bend. And I mean, that to me, is just how technology has evolved and how you all vision has evolved, it’s just the difference in the first MOJO mallard and this last one. Well, that last one’s bad to the bone.

Terry Denmon: I appreciate you saying that, Ramsey. You know the story? People tell me, bring back that old MOJO mallard. Well, if I’d have made that old MOJO mallard, they wouldn’t have liked it, because it’s like, you think that 1964 Chevrolet was the greatest one ever. Then you go back, get you a 1964 Chevrolet, you’ll see how crude those things really were back in that day. And so I said, well, okay, what we got to do, we got to go back and get the good parts of the original one. And they had the good parts of modern technology to it, and that’s what we attempted to do.

Ramsey Russell: What is the wildest feature, and you were just talking about working with that outfit? I know exactly who you’re talking about to come up with that, I don’t know that speed optimizer or defibrillator or whatever you call that technology for adjusting, randomizing the speed wing. But what’s the wildest feature you all have ever dreamed up? Whether it hit the market or got laughed out of the shop, what is the craziest thing you all have ever dreamed of?

Terry Denmon: Well, this is not the correct answer, but it was the original MOJO mallard what it was. We go to the big DU deal in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, back when DU was going around having a really big deal like the one they had in Memphis. They had one in Oshkosh, we went to the very first one of them. And the spinning wing concept had not gotten to that part of the world any great numbers, because everybody come by would laugh at it and say, would that thing fly? Sure, it flies. And so we’ve been in some other crazy stuff, I can’t figure out exactly, I can’t remember right now exactly what they were. But we’ve never invented anything that people had as harder time relating to as the real, as the original MOJO mallard before they use it one time. Now after they use it one time, they were believers. But I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard similar to the one that you had before. I’ve got stores where people would bring one to a blind and they wouldn’t let them put it out, the first couple years, but once they saw it one time, they said, okay, that’s a good deal.

Ramsey Russell: Speaking of that Ducks Unlimited Expo, we just wrapped up with the Delta Waterfowl next weekend, MOJO will be, getducks will be, we will all be in Memphis, Tennessee, August 1^st 3^rd for the Ducks Unlimited Expo. DUX hitting Memphis like a freight train full of camo calls and everything outdoors. You all come by and see us, mark your calendar, you don’t want to miss it. Terry, hunters have always debated decoy realism versus motion. Where do you think the sweet spot is? And especially in 2025, all these years later.

Terry Denmon: Well, I do not think that making your decoy look exactly like a duck, helps you that much. I’m not saying it don’t help you, but it doesn’t help you that much. I don’t think it helps you any way as nearly as close as motion does. Now, motion can be good or bad, if you can make duck like, motion out in the water, then that’s good, but you got motion in the blind that’s bad. So, that in itself, tells you what motion is doing for them. They say, I don’t know who figured this stuff out, but they say a duck can see motion about 3.5 times better than they can see static objects. So I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know and so do you, that they can see it a whole lot better. So I had a podcast guy, him to, asked me on a podcast a year ago, he kind of approached it in a funny way. He said, I go out in the field and I see them ducks laying on the bank and everything, they dirty, nasty, don’t look too good, you all keep making these decoys get better and better looking. He said, can you explain that to me? And I said, well, it’s going to fall and that old saying says, a duck never bought a decoy, and that’s where it’s going to fall. But I think that’s a good thing, I think your product ought to look as good as it can. And I feel better when I put a good looking decoy out there, as I do when I put a decoy that doesn’t look that good out there. But the fact that you can take black bottles of something, put them out there, the ducks just eat them up, so they don’t look nothing like a duck, well, they look somewhat like a duck, they long and brown, and after that they don’t look anything like a duck. So I don’t think it’s the look that makes as much difference, but I do think the better looking helps it, but I don’t think it will compete with motion.

Ramsey Russell: Well, along that line, after 25 years of fooling around with spinning wing decoys, what’s the biggest misunderstanding duck hunters have about motion decoys today?

Terry Denmon: Well, it would be two things, and one of them you’ve already talked about a little bit, and that’s wing speed. And we try to preach that and we have some success, but we don’t have enough. And you got to make that flash. And you mentioned another point that helped to make that flash that says solid colored wings. One of the worst things we ever did was make those feathered wings, they were popular, people want them, but they cut you flash down, they’re not the right thing to do. So you make them solid wings, black on one side, white on the other, or dark on one side, white on the other, and you keep the speed up. It would depend upon the type of wing material that you’re using and the type of sky conditions you have that day. But the best I can determine the minimum speed that will generate that flash at about 400rpms. And so if you let your wing get down below about 400rpms, you’re not making that flash and a human eye can’t tell that at short range, they can tell it at a half a mile, but you can’t tell it at short range. So, that’s one of the two main things that people misuse on spinning wing decoy. The other one is that, when ducks get pressured, they look at everything. They look that spinning wing decoy and they will, people call it flared off of them, I don’t know if that’s the right term or not, but they don’t want to land on top of them anymore because they seen too many of their brothers and their cousins get killed, landed on top of one of them. And that’s a good thing because if you could suck them in like we did into the year 2000, we’d probably kill too many juvenile ducks. So they take it out or spray it and that’s the wrong thing to do. The highest and best use of a spinning wing decoy is and always has been long range attraction, that means you can attract a duck from 5 miles over there, would never see your spread if you didn’t have a spinning wing before. So if they don’t want to land on top of it, don’t take it out of your spread. Well, put it out of the way, we put them 75 yards behind us on the dry ground. So you get that duck in your vicinity doing that.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Terry Denmon: And then you got to use your duckling skills, see if you get it to land in the decoys.

But nonetheless, to me, it’s all statistical. The more I can pull over my spread, inevitably, the more I’m going to finish, therefore, the more I’m going to kill at the season’s end

Ramsey Russell: That’s what I’ve learned about using spinning wing decoy just to reiterate and follow up with some personal experiences, Terry. Recently hunting out La Paz, Argentina, you’ve been there, pigeon hunting, that’s my favorite day of the week’s pigeons, favorite day of the week, La Paz. And they still use the MOJO pigeon decoys we took down there with the double A batteries. And I have learned don’t go hunting with people that use battery operated MOJOs if you don’t have your own supply of double A batteries. Because I don’t know if there’s such a thing that a MOJO wing is too fast, but I know at some point, and I can see it now, it’s too slow and you might as well not have it out there. And I run out there and put my 4 new batteries in and bam, I’m back in the decoy killing business, that’s just a fact. And I’ve heard and heard, well, it’s losing their effectiveness, they don’t work no more, it flares the ducks. And I’ve got this different feeling about that, I’ve got this different perspective. Back when I used to fly with the federal government and these things were just coming out on the landscape from 500ft to 1,000ft high in a little fixed wing aircraft, you could see these things, I could see these things forever. And you see one way off in your peripheral vision 2 fields over and it catch your eye, and you couldn’t, every time it caught your eye, you’d turn your head and look at it, you could see it forever. So I know those ducks can see it, and it’s totaling them in. But it’s possible, Terry, just to your point, it’s possible that those ducks that are coming in high and working your spread high are only there because of that MOJO decoy, they were going somewhere else, but somehow they saw that flash and it pulled them over. Well, maybe you’re not as well hidden as you need to be, maybe they are a little worried about that flash they’ve seen all over the landscape now, you know what I’m saying? But nonetheless, to me, it’s all statistical. The more I can pull over my spread, inevitably, the more I’m going to finish, therefore, the more I’m going to kill at the season’s end. But also to your point about moving that decoy, we do it all the time, Terry, we’ll hunt together with you, Argentina and wherever else we’re going, Canada, if they’re not finishing like we want them, we change something, instead of just trying to do the same old thing over and over. And I will move it somewhere, although ducks can see it, but they can’t see it on their approach, you know what I’m saying? I can put it behind a tree, put it behind a bush, and they can see it for 360° or 350°, I should say. But on that 5° or 10°, it matters when they get the wind right to fall in, they don’t see it anymore. So it’s working for me. But by the same token, let’s take a static decoy. Down in the Deep South, last few days of the season, most times, those ducks are stale. They are battered. And I don’t put out 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 decoys anymore either, I might put out 1 or 2 or 3, and it don’t look like a pattern. You see what I’m saying? Just because it’s got to look, you got to play that game if you’re going to hunt stale ducks.

Terry Denmon: Yeah, they get to where they pick up on everything. They know what a duck blind looks like by the time they get to Louisiana. They know what a man call or a duck call sounds like, and I think one thing that happens, Ramsey, is when they get fairly close and when they say they flare, they can tell that that flash being given off by the typical spinning wing decoy is more than a duck could do. Duck don’t just sit there and flash its wings at 600rpms for all morning long. So I think they could pick up on that. And that’s a good part of hunting, I don’t have a problem with that, but when we first came out with them, the ducks wanted to land right on top of them. And so it caused people to think about them as a finishing device. And that was never their highest and best use, it was always to attract that duck over there that wasn’t ever going to see your decoy spread, that was always as high as the best use. But it was certainly fun to watch back when they would land right on top of it. Well, now they don’t want to land right on top of it, you just got to change your thinking. Don’t think of them as a finishing device, finish them as a long way of traction device.

Ramsey Russell: Terry, you and I have shared a lot of interesting times in the field, a lot of fun times in the field. I don’t even know how many places we’ve hunted together and where all we’ve been is things we’ve seen and done, but I’ll share something with you. One of the funniest things, one of the most memorable things done involved hunting I’ve ever seen was Mike Morgan. You sent me and Mike Morgan over to hunt in Texas with J.J. Kent and it was a beautiful morning. This episode turned into the Spoon and Crockett episode, but this was not the Spoon and Crockett hunt, this was a mallard, teal, pintail hunt on a little ocean narrow Texas river. And we were set up in panel blinds and the ducks like the wind at our back, the sun at our back, more or less that little stretch of river and the ducks kind of pitching in below us. But then to get the decoys out and up we couldn’t go off there and get the truck. We had to go around the truck and go down this steep bank and then haul the decoys up. And it just so happened there was a strand of barbed wire or something about 2 inches off the ground right at the lip of that trail, that goat trail we had to climb down. And we kept saying, watch your step. Every time you stepped over, you ride a guy behind you. Mike was in front of me and he had just said, don’t forget this wire, and all of a sudden he looked like Charlie Brown. Hand over heel tumbling. Like a bowling ball going down that hill. And it just so happens the timing of it all, when he got to the bottom, he landed on his feet and kept walking, like he hadn’t even spent or done anything. And he didn’t even look up to make sure nobody’s looking, he’s just trying to be cool, like nobody’s seen that just happened. And we were all sitting there just with blank faces thinking, did we just see what we just saw. I’ve never forgot that about Mike. What are some of the -?

Terry Denmon: I never heard that story.

Ramsey Russell: You never heard this story?

Terry Denmon: I never did. I wish it would have been you falling and not Michael.

Ramsey Russell: It could’ve kill me.

Terry Denmon: He could have filmed it if he was doing.

Ramsey Russell: It would have killed me, it didn’t phase him, man. I mean, he landed right on his feet after rolling head over heel like he’s cartwheeling, landed on his feet and kept going like nothing had ever happened. And we all saw it. But anyway, what’s some of the funniest MOJO related field stories you’ve got, whether it happened to you or somebody else.

Terry Denmon: Well, there’s just so many of them you can’t do. But it reminded me of one that happened similar to that. We were blue wing teal hunting and we skidded this little skid blind up into a button willow thicket and it’s before daylight and we getting in there and I had a good friend, he was an engineer too, but not my kind of engineer that like to come go hunting with us. And we called him Magoo because something would always happen to him. You remember the cartoon Magoo? Like, he’d fall off the building, but the airplane fly over, it picks up, it always saved him, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know how this happened, but we got him putting something up in this little skid blind and it’s tight and so he falls and eventually falls in the water and somehow we got a video of that. I don’t know how we did, but on that video, it literally looks like he fell for 30 seconds, I don’t know how that happened, the video just came out, just came out that way. And I saw Mike Morgan do that one time too. We were blue wing teal hunting again and we just went into this place in the coffee weeds. And I know some of your listeners won’t know what coffee weeds are, but they suspend you technically, but that don’t help them any. But they big tall weeds, they grow up fast, and ducks like to hang around them. And so we go in there and I don’t know what Mike did that morning, he’s been the camera man, he’s not hunting. He’s been the cameraman, but we got 2 cameraman, so we got far this on the film, he somehow managed to fall. He managed to get his feet stuck in that mud and I meant he did a wing over and somehow he held that camera up above the water the whole time he was falling in the water.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of the craziest iterations, homemade or shot up or you can’t believe a MOJO still works, MOJO decoys you’ve seen? I mean, I know hunting down there in Las Flores, my gosh, I don’t know how they’re still spinning, let alone total. And you know some of them, they’ve taken full patterns 50 times and they’re still out there going after it. What are some of the craziest things you’ve seen like that?

Terry Denmon: I’ve seen them, I was in Argentina in a different place and hunting on the big river there. And we going down the river and get these two men out of a little concrete block house and get in the boat with them and go down that river and they have two MOJOs but the wings are gone. They made some homemade plastic wings for them and they painted them black with a rose appeal and stuff, that was the crudest thing I ever seen. So I opened one of them up to see, what’s on the inside. And they twist two wires together to make it run. And I left them two brand new MOJOs by the way, when I left there. But you know they wasn’t going to let you’ll get away. But we’ve seen some stuff. We had one sent back to us one time for warranty and it obviously been in a fire and they want this warranted now, okay. One wing was gone, half the body was burned off, all the wires were burnt off and they sent it in for warranty fixing. We fixed it up some way for them, I don’t know. I’m sure they didn’t think that we would fix it and send it too, but we did, we sent it back. So, they take terrible abuse, they really do. And none of us take care of them like we should, I don’t, you don’t, nobody does. You come out after you hunt, you tired, you wet, all that stuff, you throw it in the back of the truck, you throw it on the 4 wheeler, you throw it in the boat, whatever, bend the wings up. So they take terrible abuse. And I’ve seen them tore up at just about every manner that you can tear one of these up.

Ramsey Russell: When you talk about that and it’s the truth, I really truly try to take care of that gear. I really truly do. I do my utmost to do it. And for example, I’m still using the prototype MOJO.

Terry Denmon: Mallard Machine.

Ramsey Russell: The Mallard Machine. It’s like a big duck butt out there in the water, but boy, once it’s hooked up, it’s like there’s a 50lbs catfish pulling it under and it runs random and we took those down and give them to our guide down in New Zealand this year because he’s biggest combatant, he loves the spinning wing decoys. And I sent you some of that footage of the shelducks decoying to it, the black ducks decoying to it, their feral mallards decoying to it. But his biggest problem is like steel placid water. And I took a couple down there and he’s like, man, this is a dream come true. Because with two of those, he could light up that whole pond with a spread and it just really did good. And what was I fixing to say? But it can be broken. I still got the prototype mallard machine, and it works perfectly. You know what I’m saying? But you all put it out to a few people, you were getting some things right, then you got it right, it became more indestructible. I go down to Paraná a couple of weeks ago. Remember, we gave them boys one of those, and little tight potholes, how it just get the water boiling and I can’t believe it. They just tossed it in. They done something, stepped on it, tossed it in a boat, MOJO’s got a hard life, he really does, they got a hard life. Sure enough, they created a leak and cracked the seam and it still works, but when it fills up water, don’t work. And it reminds me of one of the very most interesting products, kind of like a top secret, kind of like an add it to your bag product you ever came up with in Flock of Flickers. And I know guys that will not hunt without them. I had some clients show up down at Las Flores this year with a stash of them. Like, they said, we won’t hunt without them. And they feel like even with the MOJO decoys and everything else, they’ve got something on everybody with them Flock of Flickers. Well, poor little Flock of Flickers, you want to talk about taking a beating? Some of you all, first iteration, everybody. Well, you can’t throw them things in salt water and then throw them in the floorboard of your boat, step on them, and dogs crawling over them and go home and forget about them till tomorrow, we don’t do that with our fishing gear, we don’t do it with anything else that’s got still or ball bearings. If you’re fishing in brackets, marsh and everything else you got to rinse them off and take care of them. And do you ever feel like, Terry, that the expectations on your product is that it should last forever no matter how much abuse?

Terry Denmon: Yeah. And that is a huge problem for us. And if you take, say, our employees, some other people, they’ll kind of say, well, they shouldn’t expect it to do this or shouldn’t have to do this at all. And so I try to tell them, I said, look, that’s a fact of life, that’s what we got to live with, what we got to deal with. We got to make it to where they like it, if you don’t, you’re not going to sell any. Now, the Flock of Flicker concept I always thought was one of the best, and I worked on that for years because if you see a flock of live birds on the water, in the dry fields, landed, it doesn’t matter, it’s just little intermittent flashes. And that’s what they represent is a little intermittent flash. And that’s where the name Flock of Flicker came from, by the way, Mike Morgan came up with that name. But the first ones we had, I don’t think were durable enough. And so we actually took them off the market for a year and totally redid it. Now, the one we got now is a whole lot more durable than that. But they’re a little floating device with a lot of electrical components on the inside. So, they can only take so much abuse. But the ones we got now are a whole lot better. But as a manufacturer and a seller, I can’t sit here and say, well, my customer should think differently. I have to change my business to fit how my customer’s going to think.

Ramsey Russell: Right. Well, I mean, I think you could ask that same question to us a ball pen hammer manufacturer or an anvil manufacturer, at some point, they just ain’t meant to do that, they’re not going to last forever if you do that, that’s just the long and the short of it.

Terry Denmon: Well, yeah, and they cost $20 a piece, so you go to movies, you spend $20, you don’t leave there with nothing.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Terry Denmon: Maybe a memory or something like that. So, you have to be able to accept, if you’re on the other side of the line, you have to be able to accept that you can only get so much for so much money.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Terry, looking back 25 years, how do you think MOJO truly changed duck hunting culture?

Terry Denmon: Well, that’s an interesting question. I think that back in, say the first 10 years, maybe the first 15 years, it absolutely leveled the playing field. Because take the year 2000, that’s the first year we had it on the broad market, 2,000. If you had money or if you’re lucky and your family owned a good duck farm or your friends family owned a good duck farm, you go on a good duck hunt. But if you just had to go out on your own, like a lot of these college kids had to do, high school kids had to do, go to some public refuge or someplace like that and hunt, it was a tough game. And of course, in our world, you know this better than I do, we need to recruit hunters. We down to 5% of the population buying a hunting license now, pretty soon we become irrelevant and politically irrelevant, and so we need to recruit hunters. We need to have the young people join in the hunt. And that would be true not only for hunting in general, but for hunting different species, like waterfowl hunting so drastically different than say, big game hunting is, and it takes a lot more equipment and pretty much a lot more effort, a lot more planning, a lot more of that type stuff. Well, when it first came out with the MOJOs, those people that fit into that category, they could go to a lesser place than say, me and you might have been able to go to and be successful. And so I think that that helped a lot in recruiting young people and keeping people in the waterfowl hunting game.

Ramsey Russell: I agree entirely. I’m going to ask this question just right. Do you ever feel responsible for the way birds act today as compared to then? Or are we duck hunter just blaming MOJO because we don’t want to admit that our behavior itself is changing, duck behavior.

Terry Denmon: You said you’re going to ask that question correctly. Are expected me to answer it correctly?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, exactly.

Terry Denmon: No, I think we are partly responsible for it. However, I don’t know if I would use the word blame because there’s so many different things, so different pieces of equipment today that’s available to people. You stay out there longer because the clothes are better, the shotguns are better, the ammo is better, you can get to places that you couldn’t even think about getting to back then. So there’s a lot of different things that caused there to be more pressure on ducks, more hunting pressure on ducks.

Ramsey Russell: That’s exactly right.

Terry Denmon: Than the MOJO mallard. But we certainly was part of all that, and I don’t know if that’s something that a person should be blamed for or not. The world just gets better.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a really good answer. Because I know, you and I talk about this in duck blind, Terry, MOJO is blamed, it’s a culprit, that’s why ducks ain’t acting right and I don’t believe it. But I just remember one of the very few things I remember from my education at Mississippi State University because life has changed. But I had the statistics professor one time, and it was some kind of cause and effect or correlation statistic, just a simple little homework question. And it was a couple of variables. Some of the things you were mentioning variables is that Christianity contributes to murder this paragraph, because the more churches you have, the more murders there are per capita. And then there were other variables like number of light poles and number of streets and whatever. And sure enough, the more churches there are, the more people that die because of homicide. But that ain’t, the answer is there’s all these different variables that led up to the fact that what had nothing to do really with churches, which is one little variable in the whole equation, Terry, it had to do with the more people you’ve got, the bigger the population, the more murders there’s going to be, or the more crime, or the more speeding tickets or any other variable you could have stuck in there, you follow what I’m saying? And so you’re right. I mean, the technology has changed in all of duck hunting, it’s undeniable that not only are we hunters hunting harder and putting more hunting pressure on these birds, but we’re disturbing them more. I mean, Terry, you and I have talked about this that way back in the day, you remember back in the great old days of duck hunting, it seems like, you were lucky if you had a little old 3 wheeler to get by. It gets you stuck as much as it gets you somewhere, but that was convenience to access in some of these places or just a boat. But now every square foot of the horizon can be accessed. So I think there’s a lot of different reasons, but that was kind of the answer I was looking for.

Terry Denmon: Ramsey, let’s see, you could say that MOJOs got reasonably popular across the country in the year 2000. Well, we know that ducks started becoming nocturnal in their feeding patterns around 2000, 2001, 2002, I know well before 2002. Well, MOJOs didn’t cause that to happen because we didn’t even hardly exist at that time. We did exist in the year 2000. So it was just hunting pressure, it did that. And I would ask the typical duck hunter out there, when you go hunting and it’s different every day. Duck hunting will not be going to be the same every day, same place, same everything, same duck going to be different. Just think about, okay, what is the pressure done to these ducks? And I’m not saying that to take the blame off MOJO, I’m just saying that because it’ll make you a better hunter.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. And the reason I use MOJO, Terry, and shoot and hunt like I do is because I want every advantage I can have to being more successful in the field, we all do, that’s the whole point. And you reminded me, too, that way back in the mid to late 90s, there was some research out of LSU Dr. Al Afton was doing a lot of research at the university back in those days, and that would have preceded spinning wing decoys. And even back in those days, he was seeing that pintail and scaup especially were rafting during the daytime 30 miles offshore just to find somewhere that they weren’t getting shot, that’s crazy. And how have things changed since the mid-90s on the north American continent. Another question for you, Terry, back in the day, that aha moment, you knew there’s going to be something the first time you put a MOJO out in the decoys, and before you even got the blind, there were ducks landing on top of you. Did you ever expect the MOJO to be so good that some states would regulate or even ban it?

Terry Denmon: I don’t know that I thought about that before they started doing that. I probably started thinking about that when people started discussing a ban. A lot of states, tried some of that and abandoned it and come back, there’s still, I think, two states left that don’t allow you to use, not just spinning wing decoy, they don’t allow you to use motorized devices at all. And I don’t really get that myself, but it’s their state, I guess they can do what they want to with it. So, it got to be a big issue, maybe the first, not the first, in year 2 or year 3 or year 4 somewhere in there, they did studies about how effective they were and whatever, and we work with some state departments, to try to get some facts on the table in front of people. And of course it kind of went through that, then it went away, other than those two states. And so I did not think about in the beginning, really, to ask you a question, it didn’t dawn on me in the beginning, but it didn’t take long for it to come to light.

Ramsey Russell: Change the subjects. What’s new in the MOJO pipeline this year? What are you excited about coming down the pipe in MOJO? I know you got one I’m excited about.

Terry Denmon: Well, we got 2 things that, we got about 5 new products, we got 2 things that are most exciting to us, and one of them is that California Big Blade. And you brought me to that product, you kept telling me about, they still use those things in California. But when we were first in business and we were first applying for our first patent, a guy named Mac Bride in California had received the first patent that I ever knew anything about onto a spinning wing, and he had that big blade and put it in a U frame and they would nickname it the Goalpost Decoy. And me and Murray talked to Mr. Mac Bride, but then within a year, some other guys came out with two wings and a duck body, and it looked a whole lot more like a duck, so that turned out to be the popular way to go. And naturally, that’s how we got started in that business. But in the last several years, I have noticed that some of these guys even be mostly outfitters or are people hunt every day they go into bigger and bigger wings, and they say it makes a difference. They say it makes a noticeable difference. And we got some friends up on Real Foot Lake, for example, and that’s what they’re doing, they’re just taking a MOJO, building bigger wings for it and they say it makes a difference. And so we said, okay, let’s do that. Let’s come out with this big blade. And we did. What we did was took the original concept and again we added some modern technology to it, we got some bearings in there that makes it run smoother. We got it to where you can flip a couple little things and take the blade out of it, don’t transfer it. Then we got built in lithium ion battery in it, got a nice big heavy motor. So, there’s a lot of excitement about it in California.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, you better believe it.

Terry Denmon: It’s going to take a little while for the rest of the country to pick up on that. But you take my comment on Real Foot Lake, there’s a huge body of water, I forgot how big it is, but somewhere like 50, 60, 70,000 acres of water in that one lake. And so there is a thought out there that well, it’s good for big water but not for little water. But most of the places where there’s a lot of heavy waterfowling going on in the USA, especially down south where you and I are, it’s not one big body of water, it’s one rice field after the other rice field after the CRP after CRP. So, it’s tantamount to a big body of water. So I think they applicable for most anywhere. But anyway, they got a huge interest in them California and I got some guys around real foot like this, heavy duty on to them and it’ll probably take a little education before the average hunter gets on to it. So I knew that was going to be the product you would talk about. But I also got that dabbler, a diving duck, we call it a diving duck, but it’s not a diving duck. Diving duck dives underwater, this is a puddle duck that rotates and feeds. And at the shot show it was the most popular thing we had in our booth and we shot a little phone video of it in a little tank, we got a water tank there, within there and posted that on social media and it blew up on traffic, it really did. It should be a good product.

Ramsey Russell: That big blade I am truly excited for, I really am. Now, I think it was December 20^th, January 21^st, I went out on a 16 day California burrito tour, I called it because all the restaurants were closed because of COVID, you could order a $70 steak but you had to eat it on a styrofoam plate in your lap, I’m like the heck with that, I’m going to eat burrito because they got good burritos out there in California. And I hunted with outfitters and I hunted with, I hunted with folks, I hunted a big stretch of Sac Valley and the grasslands and everywhere else and I was Shocked that everybody had – One guy hunted with had a gold post that was 30 something years old and all he had done to it was rig it with a remote, that’s it. And man, it was a big old blade, I just got like a ceiling fan blade, I’d never seen nothing like it. And one guy hunted with some friends of mine in the Sac Valley, not too far out of Sacramento, had 3 of them, 3 modern incarnations that they paid a pretty penny for, an unbelievable amount for. Had 3 of them out there and the way they did it, because it was a clear day and it was so much flash, is they kind of had it out from the decoys. But you understand the Sac Valley, Terry, you can see I don’t know how many miles, but it’s like looking across Lake Pontchartrain on the bridge, and seeing the lights of New Orleans, you can see forever out there. And we were sitting there talking and I had asked everybody who, I just wonder who invented this thing because you and I had talked about it before, maybe it was famous fan blades spinning on the side of a greenhouse, who knows how somebody, the human mind came up with this concept of a spinning wing decoy. And I asked my host, and as we’re sitting there talking, I get a text and I pull my phone out and it’s from him. He goes, that’s the guy that invented it. I go, how you know he invented it? He goes, because he was an equipment operator on my 5^th generation farm, you’re sitting on. He don’t live but 20 minutes from here calling him. So I called him Mr. Andy Anderson and he was not the first person to have a patent because he was too freaking busy out there killing ducks over his gizmo. And it was so effective. He just a regular dude, he was an equipment operator and had a little old duck pit on, and next to a big gazillionaires duck club. And he shut the gazillionaire down. And the gazillionaire called the game warden, said my neighbor’s baiting. And he described one morning him and his buddy are hunting and there’s federal agents out there dipping around his blind looking for bait. And the ducks are steadily falling in on top of them agents. And they just can’t get their mind wrapped around that it’s this invention of his. And he went and dug out the very first decoy, the one he was using when he shut his neighbor down and it looked like it was a pole with one of flat switch panels, looked like one of them skinny plastic things you slide out of an old timey TV that solder stuff onto and it had two wings. And that was the very first one he ever invented. And you could tell it had been buried under lumber and grass and everything else behind a barn somewhere and he dug it out to bring show to me. And he wouldn’t give it to me or sell it to me though, he kept it. And then he showed me the second one he ever made was the more conventional goal post because he said it was just easier and more efficient and more durable than this one right here. And that for those of you all listen, want to hear, didn’t hear it, episode 106 the original MOJO Duck in California Duck Hunt. Mr. Andy Anderson tells a great story about this. And his buddies kept saying, man, you need a trademark patent to do all this kind of stuff with the thing. And he said, yeah, I’ll do that after duck season. Well, after duck season, word done got out and other people had done it and the board had the 30 year old big wing, big gold post that hunted with, he told me that when that thing hit, when that first concept hit California, so it’s been the year after maybe Andy come out with his. He said that every welding shop in the Sac Valley that could work with aluminum had gone full bore into it. And you would stop on the side of highways going up to your duck camp and you could buy them just out of back of a pickup truck like somebody selling boiled peanuts in Louisiana or Boudin. And he said, and the truth of matter, he said $600, 30 years ago he paid for his $600, 30 years ago he paid for that decoy, that’s why he ain’t got rid of it yet. And he said, if you didn’t have one, you were SOL. And he actually called me, Terry, Casey has called asking about when is this new decoy coming out? Everybody in California excited. And I took one of the prototypes you sent over and I use it a few places. But I think you and I have talked about this, sometimes in some conditions you can have too much flash for the situation. Well, I took it up to one of the Great Lake areas to diver duck hunt with Mr. Jaden Banks. And man, we put it on a Buoy, they ballasted a buoy so we’d ride in 7ft, 8ft of water, whatever we were hunting in our layout boat hunt. And it would toll divers, 20 miles, I’m guessing a duck. Because they would come ripping in, and when it was cloudy or early in the morning, late in the evening and it was cloudy or darker or dimmer, it’s like they’d almost ricochet off of it, they’d hit it so hard. But when it was real bright and real clear that, oh, my Lord, were they piling into it. But then they’d kind of skirt around to the smaller MOJO, we had. You see what I’m saying? They’d get told in by the big one and then bounce about 10 yards into the smaller one. And I don’t know how my eyesight compares to a duck, but I do know this, that I’m 59 years old, I’ve got mediocre eyesight. And we dropped a pin and bowed it away, and for about 1 to 1.1 miles away, I, with my naked eye could see that thing flicking. You want to talk about some effect, that’s some flash coming off that thing. Personally, I’m to your point, I’m very excited about this new decoy. What is that new big wing going to retail for, Terry?

Terry Denmon: It’s right at $200. I couldn’t tell you, we had it down below. We had it about $180, but the tariffs have set in.

Ramsey Russell: But it ain’t going to be no $500 or $600, it’s going to be affordable.

Terry Denmon: Around that 200 mark, give or take 10 bucks somewhere like that. It is smooth and quiet. We bought one from California too, made in a machine shop out there, it would work, but it was very noisy. And I hate to hunt with a noisy thing, but seem like the ducks don’t mind it as much as I bind it, but this one’s very quiet, very smooth.

Ramsey Russell: Are you going to have the new dabbling duck? Is it going to be a DUX for us to look at? Are you going to have it on display?

Terry Denmon: It will. The big blade and the DU will be there. Our upgraded mallard machine, the one you bragging on a while ago, we fixed those little problems we had with the very first ones, it’ll be there. We’ll have our water tanks there, so we’ll have all that in our water tanks. And one of the more popular products we had the last few years is that little spinning blade slapping the water with the triple whammy.

Ramsey Russell: Triple whammy.

Terry Denmon: We had a tank, we put it in then, it’s a very inexpensive little decoy and it does a lot of different things. And one thing it does, and this dappler does it too, it throws droplets of water up in the air. And a lot of duck hunters not owned that yet, but especially if the sunshine and you throw them drop us water up in there, so it’s a great attraction to ducks. And I didn’t know that until so many years ago. And me and Chuck, who manages MOJO here for me, we was down playing with some decoys one time, the season wasn’t even open on our farm during the split and we kept hearing this real loud noise. And so Chuck climbs up on, we got a Polaris parked out in the middle of the water, Chuck climbed up on top, he said, one of them ducks over, washing their feathers, doing that kind of thing says come up here and look at it. So we studied them for a long time, they sticking their wings in the water and throwing water up in the air. Ducks just recognize that as other ducks. And one thing that we don’t think about as duck hunters as much as we do, what a duck’s really trying to do if it’s flying around in the air, unless it’s going somewhere, is looking for a safe place to land. And a safe place to land is where other ducks already are. And so if you can make your decoy spread look like other ducks, anything you can do to do that, it’s certainly got to help. And it’s a little triple whammy deal, it’s just kind of a fun little product.

Ramsey Russell: All these motion decoys, whether it’s making ripples or muddy in the water like some of these ripplers will do, or flash, again, back in the time, the one season that I flew midwinter waterfowl state of Mississippi, you spot decoy spread a mile away because it was just decoys on a typical day out there in 8 inches of water in ag field, bean field, rice field, the decoys were, it looked like little plastic ducks sitting on glass, but where ducks had been or where ducks were, it was chaos. The water was muddy, there was ripples. And go out with a camera and just sit up quietly on some ducks or songbirds even, and they’re always moving, they’re always adjusting their feathers, their feet are always moving unless they’re sleeping, you know what I’m saying? And that’s what really I think, and sitting in the water, sitting in a blind, going out there, is a totally different perspective than a duck cruising around at 350ft to 500ft, looking down, he’s seeing the same thing I was seeing in that airplane. He’s like, well, there’s some plastic ducks sitting on clear water, they know those aren’t ducks.

Terry Denmon: You saw that footage that came from the boat hunt you and I did a year ago down in Argentina in that marsh, and we had a mallard machine there. And of course, that mallard machine needs about 12, 14 inches of water to behave exactly like it’s designed and behave for. But you could put it in shallower water, and we had it in some shallow water. And for my drone footage, it just made a mud all around that decoy. That’s what you want that’s what you want now. I have for years riding my 4 wheeler through the decoy spread and it can’t anything like what real ducks did, it just can’t do it.

Ramsey Russell: Business calls.

Terry Denmon: Go ahead, Ramsey, go ahead.

Ramsey Russell: Well, Terry, I mean, you got all this great product coming out, you’ve been in business 25 years, how much longer before we see a decoy that flies itself to a blind, sets itself up, cooks breakfast and plucks ducks?

Terry Denmon: Not in my lifetime.

Ramsey Russell: I got faith in you, Terry. I got faith in you. You’ve hunted with some legends, lunatics, everything in between for MOJO TV. Who are some of the personalities that most stand out and why?

Terry Denmon: There’s a lot of them. One thing that I noticed when I first started traveling and hunting, I’ve been hunting since so long that I can remember, but I didn’t always travel and hunt, wasn’t old enough, didn’t have enough money, all those different type things. But one thing I’ve noticed is that, hunters are good people, I don’t know how that exactly come together, but they’re good people. We hunt with people like Steve Biggers, Steve McCain, Rob Reynolds, you hunt with some of these people also, and they just good people and they’re hard working. And I’ve a big game on it, on some of these ranchers, I had one ranch that I hunted on in West Texas, the Bright Ranch, I hunted on it for many years, and so Mr. White, the guy that his family owned that race, but he would run it when I was there, he’s dead now, but I think of him almost every day, just make such an impression upon. But these people, they just so honest, and they trying so hard to deliver you the product that you want to deliver to that they are pleasure to be around, they really are pleasure to be around. And a lot of others that I didn’t mention that I should.

Ramsey Russell: Well, you probably couldn’t mention everybody, but you’ve also mentored a lot of people, whether you know it or not, myself, and I’ve heard several others mentioned, what an influence you’ve been on them. Who are your influences in the outdoor industry? Who are some of your mentors or influences or people in the outdoor world?

Terry Denmon: Well, the first one would be my dad because he’s the first person I hunted with. And I’d wander around with a BB gun when I was maybe 6 years old, hunt on my own. They finally let me wander around with a 22 rifle, single shot, by the way, pull the plunger back, put a bullet, and pull the plunger back, when I was 6 or 8 years old. But my dad would actually take me hunting, he didn’t want to hunt anything but quail, he raised bird dogs, hunted quail, so he took me. So, he probably taught me the basic rules of doing that. But I’ve hunted with people, you, Ramsey, I’ve heard a lot of stuff about hunting with you and about life and some of it I can’t describe on here, but a lot about my life. But there’s a lot of people like that, Mike Morgan.

Ramsey Russell: Mike Morgan.

Terry Denmon: Mike Morgan, I learned so much from Mike Morgan. And of course, he was in the TV business long before I was. Him and Jim Jones are the two that got me into the TV business. But Mike Morgan is the type of person that once he was gone, and for you all that don’t know, Mike died a few years ago from cancer. But once you’ve gone, he’s the type of person you just can’t forget, you think about him all the time. And so there’s just so many wonderful people out there that and guides I pointed on us, this would be more applicable probably to big game hunts than it would be maybe to bird hunts. But some of these guides, their honesty and their sincerity is probably what impresses me the most about some of these people.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What are some of the most hair raising moments while filming? Near miss or total chaos? Because when you’re sitting there, when the average guy is sitting there watching a television show, it’s perfect. Oh, man, look at this, this is awesome. And thath ain’t reality. I’ve hunted with you long enough to know that ain’t reality. But what are just some of the most hair raising moments or craziest things that’s happen while you all are on location?

Terry Denmon: Well, probably more in big game than anything, but the one that comes quickly to mind is, we’re in Alaska bear hunting and this kid shot a bear right at dark and knew he hit him good, but he ran in the woods. So go in the woods after, so I’m hunting a wounded bear, and it’s getting dark, and I’m trying to look out through this wood to see if I can spot this dude, I don’t know if he’s alive, whatever. So I come to a place where two trees was leaned over, and so I started walking up those two leaned over trees, they right together, it’s probably like a split tree, one that had two trumps and I get up to a place where sapling had drawn between them, they kind of stopped me and so told me to look on the other side of that. And I was up on this log with this wounded bear, and he picked his head up and looked at me. And I wasn’t really bear hunting, I just took these other people up there bear hunting. And so I had my little sheep gun with me because we had the saltwater. And so I just go boom, and shoot him right between the eye. And the bullet went up his toes and killed him. And I didn’t even think anything about it at the time. But if you stop there and think about it, the only reason that bear didn’t get me was he had run out of steam. But he picked his head up and looked me right in the eye.

Ramsey Russell: He was thinking about it.

Terry Denmon: If I think about it now, if he had life left in him, he would have gotten me then.

Ramsey Russell: Do you have any idea how many MOJO episodes you all have filmed?

Terry Denmon: Let’s see, probably around 300.

Ramsey Russell: What episode or destination do people most bring up?

Terry Denmon: Well, it depends upon –

Ramsey Russell: Or something stuck with your audience.

Terry Denmon: It depends on what game you’re hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s keep it on the duck hunting side.

Terry Denmon: If duck hunting, the viewer likes the one that shows big groups of ducks, they like that much better than they do. The easiest way to kill limited ducks is you get them to coming in onesie, twosie, threes, that’s the easiest way to kill. And big groups, you don’t typically kill anymore if there’s many out of a big group, as you do out of a ones and twos and threes, so they like the big groups of ducks. And they’ll like that no matter where you get it, you get a lot of that, all over the United States. But naturally it’s famous for being up in Canada, down in South America, Argentina, Mexico, places like that. But they like to see the big groups of ducks. They like to seem to see the ducks more than they see the shooting of the ducks. And I’m not saying they don’t like to see the shooting of ducks, I think there’s something fascinating about big groups of ducks coming to the decoys.

Ramsey Russell: Nobody does slow motion better than you all do. Nobody. You’ve got, in my personal opinion, the best film staff. And they’re good at what they do technically, but they’re also good people. I mean, and some of these boys have been around forever, Terry. I mean, you’ve got a crackerjack staff. Same could be said about there’s the shop making this product, but I’m talking about the TV staff, they’re great people.

Terry Denmon: Well, thank you for saying that and I know they would appreciate you saying that too. And we do. But along the way of those guys, we’ve gone through a hundred of film crew group, and some of them may want hunt with us and not make it make another. And some of them don’t want to go hunt with us again, some of them, we don’t want to go hunting once again because you’re trying to pick the people that can do just what we do. Because hunting with Mike Morgan and Jim, back in my earliest days of making TV show, I figured out a lot of things that relate to what people want to see too, because even though it’s a hunting show, we’re still entertainment, we’re there to please the viewer. That’s what our purpose of being there is to please the viewer. So we worked on that hard and we basically call crew members until we got the ones that really know how to do it. And we have probably 5 that I’m not going to go film a hunt without one, at least one of those guys, they can’t all go, it’s only ever hunt, but go without at least one of those and I got two, and which two that is, I got two of them. If I’m going duck hunting, if I can, I’m going to take those two guys.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Terry Denmon: And they had to learn, everybody had to learn. Filming ducks in the air is one of the hardest things you can do.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable. Terry, all these years we’ve hunted together and film TV. Do you now shoot shovelers like the rest of us? Do you now shoot shovelers like the rest of us? Are you a spoonie killer now? Because I remember we first met, you told the camera, I do not shoot, my name’s Terry Denmon, and I do not shoot spoonies, and me and Mike took that as a challenge.

Terry Denmon: Yes, you did. I’m sitting up here, I’m being hesitant because I want to say no, but I know that you’ve got me on film shooting spoonie, I can’t say no, but I am glad that I –

Ramsey Russell: So we brought you to the dark side.

Terry Denmon: I’m glad I didn’t do it back when I hooked up with you and Mike Morgan, or we would have never had those conversations, those jokes, those whatever else you want to call them about spoon bills, if I was shooting spoon bills, too.

Ramsey Russell: But I praise you that time in the decoy, Jason carved that ended up becoming you all Spoonzilla. And I’ll never forget springing that on you and it was on TV down in Mexico somewhere, and you want me to sign the wing. I’m like, what do you mean, sign the wing? I need you to sign it, so when I put it in my office, I said, no, this is my decoy, you own the company, you make your own shoveler decoy, this is my shoveler decoy. And that’s one of the stories I tell on Terry Denmon all the time.

Terry Denmon: Well, you walked out and showed it to me by putting it out, and that’s what people do when they try to give you something. So I thought that you were going to give me that, I should have known better than do that. But we get requests to sign wings for people.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Terry Denmon: And so I just thought maybe if you’d sign a wing, I mean, I’m not going to put a wing in my trophy room that I signed that don’t cost anything.

Ramsey Russell: All right, Terry, after 25 years, very successful in the decoy making, very successful in the TV and entertainment world, and very successful in the social media space. Let’s face it, Terry, Instagram, for example, that’s kind of for the younger people than me and you, me and you are the dinosaurs in that audience, but you’re very successful in that. Do you have any advice for any listeners that are aspiring to be an outdoor personality?

Terry Denmon: Yeah, I get to comment all the time and basically say they say it in different ways, that I want to do what you do. I said, well, it’s not always greener on the other side of the fence and I use the example. I said, a whole lot of difference between going hunting because you want to and going hunting because you have to. But I’ve been on a lot of trips, get sick, get a sinus infection, I never got really sick or get a sinus infection, get a cold, get the flu and you’ve gone off, spent thousands and thousands of dollars get this spot, you just got to go

Ramsey Russell: Got to go.

Terry Denmon: Really not fun out there trying to hunt ducks with the flu or even the sinus infection or anything like that. But they do, and I get their point. It’s a lot of fun to be had doing this, when you do it, it’s a lot more work than you expected, but when it’s all over with, most of the better things in life, the better memories you have in life and involve some amount of hard work, discomfort, pain or something, the things that’s really easy don’t always make a good memory through them. So, it’s a wonderful. I’m glad I’ve done it, I’m glad I’m still doing it.

Ramsey Russell: Any advice you’d got to any young person on how to get started or how to behave or what to do to break into the business?

Terry Denmon: Yes. And the only advice you can give them is, get yourself involved some kind of way. You might just go to work for some company that’s doing that, see if you can get to where you touch that in some kind of way or other. I know people that’s good hunters and a good fisherman and stuff like that, and they’ll ask me, so, well, how do I get sponsorships? I said, well, you get sponsorships by earning them. If you’re trying to get a company to sponsor you, you got to offer them something that’s at least as valuable as what they going to pay you. And I see so many of them don’t think of it that way. But there are a lot of companies out there that you can go to work for that get you involved in some of that stuff, even if you’re just doing part time work for. But there’s really no avenue, there’s no way you can go to school and then turn out being a TV type.

Ramsey Russell: Show it, create value or bring value to that company.

Terry Denmon: Absolutely. Why would a company want to pay somebody for a sponsorship if it don’t make them money? It has to be an investment. And once I explain that to people that, they get it, but it doesn’t seem like they have that thought ahead of time. But there’s really no clear cut avenue in there, you can go to school and get to be a videographer, a producer, an editor, those type things. And that’ll get you on that side of it, but it don’t get you on the other side of the camera. You just got to work your way onto that side, you got to adopt that as a goal and keep that goal in your mind every day and strive for it every day. And I’ve found out in my life that if you pick out a goal and you just strive for it every day, you probably going to get there.

Ramsey Russell: Good advice, Terry. You were talking about plowing through when you get sick and get cold or whatever happens, behind the scenes and we just talked about that Spoonzilla, Ramzilla spoof and the craziest thing about that TV show, that event, that time together is, sometimes when you’re going and going, you get tired. So I had gone and bought these vitamin packets, had about 10 pills in it, just a little vitamin, maybe some vitamin to give me a little energy, a little vitality out there for grinding it out on these long stretches. And I started taking them, the day we showed up in Mexico to film that series, we were actually hunting Mexican ducks, what we were doing that time, and I had an allergic reaction. And in the segment where I go out and get that Spoonie decoy and show him to you, my top lip looked like Homer Simpson with Botox injections, that allergic reaction was, my lip went to about 10 times its natural size and I just had to go with it. When I showed that clip to my kids and my wife, they all said at the same time, what’s wrong with your lip? I look like a shoveler.

Terry Denmon: It was a topic of conversation. And I don’t remember you telling us it was an allergic reaction. We knew it was something.

Ramsey Russell: It was allergic reaction. And I finally Googled and searched and learned that other people were having similar reactions to that vitamin packet, so I quit taking them.

Terry Denmon: You buy the vitamin in Mexico?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, exactly. Be careful. Last set of questions, Terry, if a young duck hunter asked you, what does MOJO really mean beyond the spinning wings, what would you tell him?

I would tell him that MOJO’s goal in life is to make hunting or an outdoor experience, they don’t even have to be hunting, be outdoor experience, make your hunting and outdoor experience better and more successful, and that’s what we are

Terry Denmon: I would tell him that MOJO’s goal in life is to make hunting or an outdoor experience, they don’t even have to be hunting, be outdoor experience, make your hunting and outdoor experience better and more successful, and that’s what we are. We were lucky, and I can tell you right now, I wouldn’t be sitting in his chair today had we not just stumbled up on the spinning wing concept. I wouldn’t be here today if my partner, Murray Crow, hadn’t made the very best spinning wing decoy there was on the market, all that brought us through. But that’s our goal in life, that’s MOJO’s goal in life, is to bring the best experience we can to an outdoors person.

Ramsey Russell: What makes Terry Denmon tick? I mean, boy, MOJO hadn’t come along, if Murray had invented that decoy, you might have just retired from engineering. Who knows what you’d be doing now? But what makes Terry Denmon tick? What’s kept you motivated all these years? It sure ain’t selling plastic decoys, Terry, I know that about you. Or even shooting ducks like myself, we’ve done plenty of that. What keeps you moving forward, establishing those daily goals?

Terry Denmon: I’m not sure I explained that where it makes a whole lot of sense, but I just been that way my whole life. I grew up in an environment where people were hard working, poor, hard working and independent. I worked when I was in high school doing everything I could. But I can tell you this, when I go home at night, whether I consciously think of this or not, I think of it from time to time, I’d rather say that I accomplished something that pleased me, that I made a dollar.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Terry Denmon: So it’s not about a dollar, it’s something about accomplishment. I feel good, but same thing with when I was in engineering business, same thing about farming, same thing about MOJO, I like to go home at night when the day’s over, say, just feel good about something that we accomplished that day.

Ramsey Russell: You’re a workaholic, Terry. I mean, I say that as a compliment. The times I’ve been around you, be it most recently in Texas or Argentina or wherever we are. I mean, we’re out, we’re getting up at crack of dawn, we’re hunting, and during the quiet moments, you’re on the phone talking to China or talking to your staff back home, I mean, you’re just constantly on the move every day. Does that give your life a sense of purpose?

Terry Denmon: God, I hope so. But I don’t know for a fact, but I just been that way. I really have no desire, part of my life plan is not to retire. And so I know Murray used to ask me all the time, when you going to retire? I said, I’m going to die working. I just got to get up and come to work, so I got to do something like that. I don’t have to come out here to MOJO, but I got to go do something. I can’t sit around the house, I got to go do something. And that’s why I keep, in some way this farm and interested in something like that. I can always go out and get on a tractor, plow, mower, do something like that. So, I don’t know, except it’s part of my chemistry, I suppose.

Ramsey Russell: Somebody asked me recently, they just took that deferred retirement that was passed around, and they asked me when I was going to retire, and I said, retire and do what? Duck Hunt? No, thanks. I’m just going to keep on going, man.

Terry Denmon: You can go to beach. Go to Disney World or something like that.

Ramsey Russell: No, thanks. Terry, last question, 25 years MOJO has gone at it. But what do you hope MOJO’s legacy will be? How do you want to be remembered 25 years from now?

Terry Denmon: You mean MOJO or me personally or both?

Ramsey Russell: Both.

Terry Denmon: Well, it’s certainly more important that MOJO gets remembered than I get remembered because I’ll be gone one day, like we all will be gone, but it must be over. But there’s no reason MOJO don’t go on forever and forever. So, I would always hope people look at us as an honest company, an innovative company, a company that attempted to bring the best product to the market that we could. We can certainly, most any company can tell you, I can bring more money, I can bring a better product to the market if people are willing to pay more money for it. So, that’s really our restriction is how much people will pay for the product that we put out there. But we just want to be remembered as an honest company trying to put honest products out there for the market.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Terry, you asked a question. You mean MOJO or me? And I mean, I’m Ramsey Russell, a human being, but after a quarter century, it’s very difficult to break it out from getducks.com because it’s such an integral part of my life. Do you feel the same way? I mean, you are MOJO.

Terry Denmon: Well, yes, but not to the extent that you should feel that way. I can’t tell you how you feel, you can only tell me how you feel. But you are getducks.com and without Ramsey Russell, there probably never be a getducks.com, I don’t know who’s going to feel your void when you gone. But that’s not as true about MOJO. MOJO can go on long after Terry Denmon’s gone and MOJO could go on tomorrow if I thought wasn’t here. So I’m not as closely associated with MOJO to the public as you are to getducks.com. I don’t know anybody else that would have built getducks.com, me and you had that conversation in Wyoming, remember that?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Terry Denmon: So it’s an enormous amount of work and suffering to build something like that.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I think the same could be said about you, Mr. Denmon and I really do. The right person at the right time. Anybody else could have taken that idea and flamed out like all the other spinning wing decoys did. But you took it a quarter century into it and built the most recognized name in decoys. Congratulations on that, thank you very much. Terry, thank you very much for coming on today and sharing your time and sharing your milestones and memories with us.

Terry Denmon: Always good to be here, Ramsey. And we’ll get to be together in Memphis here shortly.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, sir. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Come by and see us at DUX August 1^st through 3^rd, come by and see some of these new products, meet Mr. Denmon. Look, hour and a half, don’t do it just, the man’s got, trust you me, after hunting with him for 20 years, I’m going to say, he’s got a lot more stories to share just ask him. See you next time.

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