Life’s Short, Get Ducks Part IX: The Birth Of GetDucks.com (Part 1)

Rocky Leflore: Welcome to The End of The Line podcast. I’m Rocky Leflore sitting in the Duck South studios at Oxford, Mississippi. How’d you like that Josh?

Josh Webb: It was beautiful. Look, we were just talking about this a second ago. Yeah, I think the later at night it is, the better it gets Rocky’s intro into the podcast. But I really think, and Ramsey made a pretty good joke about it. I think, we were talking about – to me it sounds like, somebody who has been sitting around for a few months waiting for that first Friday night football game to start and he’s about to introduce the returning quarterback and we got a new kid at running back this year. But Ramsey made, he made the best comment and that was, it sounds like Rocky is warming up to introduce, is it a hammerhead shark? Or I don’t know what the crap the thing is –

Ramsey Russell: Tony the shark. It must be a tiger shark.

Josh Webb: Whatever he is. I think that’s what Rocky’s going, I think he’s just using us as a practice tool for –

Rocky Leflore: Stepping stone.

Josh Webb: For introducing. Yeah.

Rocky Leflore: And hold on and on the other end of the line with us, tonight is Ramsey Russell. That’s a little too far and the Get ducks –

Ramsey Russell: Hell stay.

Rocky Leflore: I took it just a little bit too far. I’m sorry, that sounds like a boxing match. Guys, how are you all tonight for real?

Ramsey Russell: No, we’re good. If I was any better, I’d be knee deep in a duck hole right now.

Rocky Leflore: Hey, it’s duck season somewhere.

Josh Webb: How many days sober of being on a duck hunt are you in right now?

Ramsey Russell: I have not been on a duck hunt since the 26^th or 27^th July. And we got 16 days until my favorite day of the year, which is open day of dove season.

Rocky Leflore: Hold on. Ramsey, hold on, do you understand how crazy that does sound though saying that? I haven’t been on duck hunting since July the 26^th and 27^th.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I know, it’s crazy isn’t it? Hey, it really is duck season somewhere.

Rocky Leflore: It’s 117°, it was July the 26^th and 27^th but Ramsey was in 40° weather, shooting ducks.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Josh Webb: Amazing.

“I was telling somebody the other night, somebody’s asked me what’s the weather like when you travel be like, look I spend my life in duck season and on the warm side of duck season it’ll warm up to 50º or 60° and on the cold side it’s much colder but typically it’s a 40º, 50º that’s just an average duck hunting day anywhere you go and 12 months out of the year it’s duck season somewhere and I love it.”,

Ramsey Russell: I was telling somebody the other night, somebody’s asked me what’s the weather like when you travel be like, look I spend my life in duck season and on the warm side of duck season it’ll warm up to 50º or 60° and on the cold side it’s much colder but typically it’s a 40º, 50º that’s just an average duck hunting day anywhere you go and 12 months out of the year it’s duck season somewhere and I love it. Don’t get me wrong, boy, this afternoon when I went to post office stepped out in that hot parking lot, I guess heat index was 115° and it felt like it man, this time of day, it’s 8 PM, I’m on the front porch man, it’s just so nice and just the humidity and the warmth of Mississippi is just so embracing how can you not love sitting outside this time of day, it’s wonderful.

“Where get ducks got started and that whole process, because to grow into what you’re in today, that had to be a huge stepping process.”,

Rocky Leflore: Ramsey, we have chased this story in a lot of different directions and I hope to get us back on track tonight because I’ve had a lot of people ask me in the life’s short get ducks series, we really have not – look we’ve talked in so many ways around it, but we’ve never actually talked about it. Where get ducks got started and that whole process, because to grow into what you’re in today, that had to be a huge stepping process. A lot of failure, a lot of learning processes, you understand what I’m saying?

Ramsey Russell: Oh, it was a learning curve of effort proportion and it still is. I’m going to tell you, just to clarify, Anita and I talk about this all the time we didn’t build get ducks, we’re building get ducks, it’s a continuous process. There’s a learning curve, but there’s also shifts in technology. I mean technology, it’s unbelievable how much internet technology has shifted how much the way we communicate, how much social media, how much the algorithms, it’s so much change in around us and the way people communicate the way people want to hear information, it’s just changing, it’s crazy. So, it’s a continual process of building. And you all remember, we start this whole podcast series talking about the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past you kind of are everything from your past, good and the bad and the ugly, the successful and the failures and that’s kind of where it is, but Anita and I, we talk about this all the time now, just the bar a little bit from some of those dark chapters we talked about, I was going through photo album that my mother put together back in 82, when I got hurt, Jake and I are working on a project and he’d asked me for a couple of headlines or something like that and I had them, I was looking at them but I was actually looking at them like reading them for the first time in a long, long time at the bottom of that one of the photo album pages, my mother grandmother one had put like a newspaper article, like a feel good moral story and the title of that newspaper clipping was the “station” and last night I read it. And what it was saying is all throughout our lives, we’re looking for that destination, looking for the top of the mountain, when I get to the top of the mountain, I can bring it easy, when I get to the next stop, I can get off the train or when I make a living, when I get my kids out of school, when I do this, when I do that, at the end of the day we’re chasing rainbow waiting on the station because it really doesn’t exist. It’s not the top of the mountain, that’s living, it’s the climb. And I think that kind of ties into what Jake was trying to say about the climb. The climb never really is, I mean, it’s the size of the mountain that life really happens and I mean, I don’t know what we do if we ever found ourselves at the top of the mountain with nothing to do because we’re so accustomed now to just working on this thing all the time and I was telling you all one time we work from our home, we’ve turned a room in our home into a war room and it is a absolute battle room and the great thing is my office is just right here, the bad thing is I never leave the office. And we’ll find ourselves sometimes 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning and just because it’s just never play stop but we love it, we say it all the time, we wouldn’t have it any other way. So, we’re building this process is where it’s going.

Rocky Leflore: So, where did it start?

Josh Webb: That’s exactly what I was about to say.

“A real bona fide income and the one thing I really wanted to do and I dreamed of doing this for quite a while, I wanted to go to Canada. I wanted to shoot real, migrater Canada geese.”,

Ramsey Russell: That’s a good question and I’ll preface by saying this. You heard me talk about my kids, I brag on them, I’m proud as I can be, everybody thinks they’re crows are the blackest and I’m very proud of my kids but one thing I really love the distinction in them versus me was just right now they’ve got a direction, they’ve got a plan and they’re heading down from point A to point B in that direction and they got a target down range and they pulled the trigger and that’s where they’re going. And I did the same thing eventually, I ended up going to school and I became a certified wildlife biologist, I became a registered forester because then back in the good old days at Mississippi State University when you went to the wildlife program, you are a forester. You just took extra hours and took a little more accreditation to get the wildlife part and found a job, a career in the federal government and was loving it. Now, I got real lucky going to grad school and I know a lot of my high school buddies and a lot of folks, my teachers too back in high school, no times we talk about they were shocked to learn old double R gone to college at all, let alone got a master degree, let alone get off the PhD. And I really at that point when I got my undergraduate, I wanted to move, I want to leave Mississippi, not to leave home, but I wanted to go and do some research elsewhere and to get my thesis but by that point because I had the forester background, I was real hyper focused on what I wanted to do and it wasn’t a particular species, I really didn’t care if it was amphibians or white tail deer, spotted owls, I didn’t care but what I wanted to do was complete a thesis on looking at wildlife, a wildlife dynamic or a wildlife response in a civil cultural system. Clear cut versus shelter wood versus old growth and there wasn’t anything in the world I could land doing that. And one day in school, somebody asked me about, they said, well John Hodges up there in the forestry department, just fixing to hire research assistant and it pays, it’s a real job and we can talk about that in depth another time but I got the position and I was the last man, I mean, he just entertain me because I was very persistent on getting an interview but as wild lifer I didn’t stand a chance against the two foresters that wanted it. The two forestry majors and during the conversation in a year or so later I was duck hunting with one of our students, we had the largest graduate research program in school of forestry over 60 masters and PhD’s students from around the world that came to Mississippi state to study hardwood civil culture. I was a research assistant and I kept up with a lot of hard funded research regeneration and a lot of regeneration studies Vanison Tully and Kimberly Clark, a lot of different places around the southeast but part of my job was to keep up and keep their programs, keep those students, keep their research online and just keep it progressing forward and help them where needed. I had a staff like 15 undergraduate students working with us when they could, just doing field work and data work and lab work just to keep all these things going and the beautiful part about that is, I had all my hard fieldwork it began this time of year, actually it began on July 15^th because that’s when hardwood trees start to relocate all the photosynthetic into the roots and that’s when you can go measure that year’s growth, it was a tough job. Its back before GPS’s and all that good stuff, so we just had to use old compass and pacing and to go out and find a literally a survey flag or a piece of PVC pipe half a mile out in the middle of clear cut and do pull 10^th acre into all the regeneration study but we did it and I loved it. And I worked like that every single weekend, seven days a week usually until about first frost by first frost we had wrapped up all the work in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi all the studies we were doing in the field work and then the best part kicked in because hunting season was coming around, I got to use all that time, I’d worked extra, I got to take it as just free leaves. And man, I just freed up a lot of days for duck season. It was a really good way to get a master degree because I had a real income coming in, that’s when I was married, I brought home, I had my first son and it was a good place to be and it cost me $25 per semester to get a master’s degree, it was a beautiful setup and I got to hunt a bunch. And when I got out of school, I finally landed a job with US Fish and Wildlife service and now I had a real income. A real bona fide income and the one thing I really wanted to do and I dreamed of doing this for quite a while, I wanted to go to Canada. I wanted to shoot real, migrater Canada geese. I wanted to maybe shoot some snow geese, I want to shoot the little Canada geese they’ve got up there that I’d never really laid hands on before, I just thought that the fab, I mean, they hunt in dry fields I was thinking so this was just a huge adventure. My long-time friend, Ian Munn was one of my professors, my senior year, he taught a professional practice course and which is basically show up six times a year to get a little line out, it’s a self-forestry plan or whatever. He gives you so much rope you just bound to hang yourself, I didn’t. We became good friends that semester and then when I was working for the department, we became hunting buddy. And we figured up the other night at Duncan’s going away party, we’ve been hunting together probably the last 22 or 23, opening days together and all over the world. He’s seen both my boys, grow up into hunters, now we just shared a lot of good time with Mr. Ian calling. But anyway, he and I decided we were going to go to Canada and we looked up the world’s foremost outfitter was selling hunts and we call him up, we look through the catalogs and call him and said, we want to go on this hunt. No, that ain’t the hunt you want to go on boy, you want to go on this one –

“Hey, Ramsey, at that time when you were looking at Canada hunts – when you were looking at Canada hunts man, they weren’t as widespread as they are now?”,

Rocky Leflore: Hey, Ramsey, at that time when you were looking at Canada hunts – when you were looking at Canada hunts man, they weren’t as widespread as they are now?

Ramsey Russell: No, there wasn’t. The internet that existed now, there weren’t as many outfitters as exists now and I would say at that time in the early 90s, I do not recall a single US owned operation. There were none. And it took kind of the old school, you know the telephone calls, go through the magazines, look up telephone number, you could do a little bit of research on the internet not much, heck nobody understood the internet. I was still writing programs at MS. Dos. You know what I’m saying? Remember MS. Dos, where you had to write the commands, windows had maybe had just come out and so it was just a whole different world for kind of putting together hunts and it was very easy to go to a booking service with the world “foremost outfitter” and the guy we called and talk to, he said, no that is not the hunt, you want to go and you want to go on this one. I said, no I’m pretty darn sure I want to go on what I called about, no, man you want go on this one blah blah. And this is funny we were talking about this the other night too because Ian is considerably older now but his wife is due within three weeks, four weeks of having their first child and my wife was pregnant with Duncan and he was due within a month or six weeks off we go to Canada in the year 1998 and I knew from working at Fish and Wildlife that year. Even though I was a forester, I just got exposed and brought into a lot of waterfowl management conversations in 1998, the national office deployed a team, you could call them as biologist and they went to 6 or 7 places throughout the United States and had the big think tank meetings with refuge personnel. It’s like charts and pamphlets and big white sheets, big white board they can write ideas on and figure out what they’re going to do because they had a problem. And the problem was the mid-continent population of snow geese, it had exploded. They went to sleep at the wheel of what they’ve done, they let them, they know previously that limits 5 or 10 or whatever it was ridiculous. Well, now they have so many, there’s eaten out of house and home and everybody considered them sky carving. And nobody wanted to hunt them, nobody knew how to hunt them, nobody had the resources to them. It takes a massive spread to really hunt snow geese and they were struggling. When you look at the breeding grounds of snow geese, it is as big as the entire eastern half of the United States and the colonies aren’t just a couple of feet apart, they might be hundreds of miles apart, so to go in at a cost and have to egg the colony or do something like that was just physically out of the question, the only resource they had to get the American hunters on board. A Conservation Order. In 1998, I was sitting on the meeting when they said it, that was the year we were scheduled to go up to Saskatchewan and get into a camp that had 8 hunters, no more than 8 hunters and specialized in geese and ducks and shoot all the Canada’s we wanted, it was a dream come true according to the world

Rocky Leflore: Hey, Ramsey in Texas, Gosh Avery didn’t come out with a snow goose decoy until 99, a full body decoy?

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Rocky Leflore: They were shooting those something with rags though in the 90s over in Texas.

Ramsey Russell: When Anita and I were dating, we were engaged the first hunt out of the state of Mississippi, I went where I truly realized, hey, it’s duck season somewhere other than Mississippi. I think we talked earlier about growing up in Greenville, Mississippi and watching all them snow geese fly south back in the mid-early 70s and they’re all going to the Gulf Coast and down to that part of the world. And I mean, call it detention center called it a study hall one way or the other, I ended up in the library having to be real quiet high school, reading magazines and I used to read those stories about those guys shooting those geese and man, when I got that job at the Department of College Forest resources at Mississippi State University, I had a cash and Anita and I went down there, it was my first trip out of Mississippi and man look, we kill snow geese now the limit was 5, but we killed snow geese. I killed, she stayed at a hotel, I went hunting, I was by myself, now look, this is the craziest thing that I can’t remember the name of that outfitter we used to hunt with down there but they had what they called a guaranteed program. They guaranteed that every hunter in the group would killed at least one bird or we’ll give your money back, a pretty fair deal but it costs more money. So, I just booked a regular I’ll just take my chances. And the first day we were there, I got put with some older gentleman probably in the 50s about my age now, here I am fit as a fiddle and been crawling through clear cut the last three months and was healthy anyway and young and I got put with them when they call the shot, who do you think the first one and boom shoot? I mean, I was quick. And after that first hunt I found myself getting put with the guaranteed hunters. So, I kept going back for two or three years and getting on that program because I’d show up by myself and they would put me with a guaranteed hunt and it is usually pretty darn good. Now, I’m saying pretty good back in those days, I think the biggest hunt we had back in those days was 40 or 50 birds, that’s still a whole bunch of snow geese to a guy from Mississippi back in the late 90s.

Josh Webb: But was that where the switch flipped and you said, okay, I’m going to do this –

“I had a letter, I had written with about 50 itemized points of where that hunt was a failure far right to that agency every year I sent it. I sent it every year for about five years like gave up and realize they didn’t care.”

Ramsey Russell: No, it isn’t. I’m getting there. Canada’s were the flip switch. I’m going to tell you this. It’s completely accidental but that’s when I kind of realize, hey, this is fun going shooting stuff elsewhere, there’s other opportunities besides the 60 days that Mississippi is over, I love so much. I really struggled with Mississippi when next month season is open. And so Ian and I found ourselves up in Saskatchewan, we show up to this camp, there’s not 8 people in camp it’s 30 and it’s a big mess, it’s like a big game camp, the guy decided he’s going to get into waterfowl this season and I cannot remember that guy’s name, I probably wouldn’t say it and I can remember the name, I’m not going to say it. This outfitter, he’s kind of old in Manitoba side but he jumped over in Saskatchewan, he was hunting over there on some management units and we asked them, of course, remember 1998 at the end of the meeting, snow geese man, we’re in Saskatchewan, so I say what about snow geese? Oh, snow geese ain’t here, look I kept pestering about it and he just got kind of rude and certainly like some of those guys can get about, there ain’t no snow geese boy and forget them. You’re going to shoot Canada’s and mallards. Yes sir. Well, the next morning and get this they put me and Ian 2 hunters with 4 boys from Michigan and really good guys. I mean that we just formed the perfect little six pack, got along fine, didn’t hurt my feelings at all, they were from way up north like that at the time and that didn’t hurt their feelings we’re from down the Deep South and talk funny, we got along. The next morning we step out on the front porch, we filled our thermoses with coffee and we’ve got our guns, we’ve got our ammo, we got a gun bag, we are wearing hunting clothes, we’re out on the front porch, like they said it’d be for the guide to come pick us up and all these trucks are picking up their hunters and leaving camp and we’re just sitting there looking at each other ain’t nobody showed up. Man, 08:30 AM, hunt of a lot of time. I call them Indians still because I’m old school, they call the first American but here come our guide, 3 sheets to the wind intoxicated in the back of his truck is nothing but snow goose decoys. Well, there ain’t no snow geese we were told but we go out to a field, I’m going to guess he has still had the egg shell on his wings. Canada goose accidentally flew over and we killed it that was our first day, we were severely disappointed. The next day it’s cold, we were there at daylight, now one of these Michigan boys was fresh back from Daddy Bush’s desert storm, army ranger, really good guy. And so we’re all sitting out in the soybean field and its frozen and I’m freezing and it’s cold and there are a million snow geese flying overhead, nowhere near us but they’re flying overhead and it gets light, we get out and walk around, look, and there’s not any sign, there hadn’t been a goose in that field since the dinosaur days. Yeah, it was just clearly obvious we’ve been stuck in the field. And the guide, I “guide” would just drop us off and disappear. I don’t know, God, it would to be about 08:30, 9 o’clock and just a bazillion snow geese have been just steadily flying over us all morning long going somewhere and that army ranger stood up and shut down his mouth berg instead, I’ll be back. And last time I saw him, he left at an army ranger pace with about a 6ft stride and not even breathing part and he disappeared over hill about a mile away, he was gone, he was following those snow geese. I’ve fallen asleep in my blind about an hour later when that guide came in a little white pickup truck come whopping up in the field on two wheels but the ranger was driving and he jumped out yelling grab your guns, grab this, let’s go, boy, I mean it was game on. And we were, grab them decoys and do this, do that, leave the blinds, let’s just wrap up, we’re driving and run around like man, we were run his command, I’m telling you what, that guy must have been somebody military cause he was hustling and going. And we threw about 50 rags and a couple of hard shells in back of that truck piled in on top of and off we go, boom we’re gone. And we get about 5, 6 miles down the road and it is sections upon sections full of snow geese like, I see it now in parts of Arkansas, but I’ve never seen anything like it. And we drive out and it’s like Moses parting the red sea, those geese are just rolling out of field and not even leaving the field is rolling. We got there stick 45, put on our white coats and then about the next hour we shot 45 or 50 snows and it was just a humble, man, we were pumped up and what we noticed though is about a half mile to the south was a big hill and to the east of it, was a big lake and it was just wild snow geeks and to the other side of that hill top was a barley field, our Indian guide explained to us was native land that had been hail damaged so it hadn’t been harvested. And we watched the stream snow geese and when they come over that hill top, it’s like if you’ve been on top of that hill top, you could have reached up and grabbed them and we have to plan to look, pretty plenty, let’s get out of here. Let’s just leave and let’s go back. Let me tell you what we got everything loaded back of that truck and that army ranger, young guy, nice guy, he got up, I mean like a drill sergeant on top of that Indian guide, that Indian guy pressed up against the truck, he said, you will be at the camp house in the morning to pick me up at 5 o’clock and we will be on top of that hill an hour before shooting time or I will kill you. He wasn’t going to kill nobody but I’m going to tell you what but the guide believed him because at 5 o’clock when we stepped on the front porch, that truck was running right in front of our steps and off we go and we set up and man, we had been up cleaning guns and just scheming the whole night about what we’re going to do the next morning. We put out about 100 rags on top of that hill and we’ve said and what’s going to happen is when loose flocks and family cohorts flow over, we’re going to shoot into them, because they’re going to decoy right into us and when big flocks come over, we’re just going to stand down because if we get lucky, we’ll have geese on both sides of us and we’ll be trading between the water and the feet. And in 71 minutes we shot 123 snow geese, it was so fast and furious and 20 apiece, we were 3 over, but it was so fast and furious we couldn’t keep count. And here’s what happened is another guide for the same outfitter had pulled in was supposed to be on, that’s where they were going to hunt, we were there our Indian guide believed what that ranger told him because when that truck pulled up he went over there to them and said, you all got to go, we’re here and I am not moving. And so they got down below us where we had hunted the previous day and in 71 minutes, look my little springer spaniel hunt over springs at the time, little Briar was bringing in snow geese so quick and the bird, I’ve shooting it over and none, the birds were coming in so hard I was loading top barrel only and as he would come in I would just take a crippled bird and put them under my leg until my leg got about three ft. over the ground and I couldn’t hold him anymore. So, I had to stop and ring necks and do everything to dispatch him and we were just steadily shooting and in 71 minutes we started getting up and throwing counting geese in the back of the truck by the 20s and them other boys came up explained to us, it looked like the 4^th of July when we started shooting, it was like firecracker strings going off. They were back at camp with their six limits snow geese before lunch and that was it. Guess what happened then, well then the outfitter had 30 unhappy clients that was the last time we saw that field. We were back on the regular program then of not shooting much and he had to run all his client through there so they just depleted it. And it was a horrible hunt and I had a letter, I had written with about 50 itemized points of where that hunt was a failure far right to that agency every year I sent it. I sent it every year for about five years like gave up and realize they didn’t care. It’s like they might as well have sold me a pair of waiters at least that’s just, they didn’t care. They didn’t get the personality of it. And so I still had not gone and experienced, it was the absolute, since 1998 I can tell you, I have not experienced snow geese like we did that morning. But it was not the hunt we were looking for and I’m still hungry to go get in some mallards and Canada geese and somehow or another, the following year I tracked down a guy named Jeff Clots. To this day he’s the gold standard of outfitters I’ve worked with. A lot of things I learned about the business from him, a lot of things I learned about how he operated, a judge, I found myself judge and all the other operations by what was his operation, he sold in 2007. So, he was a genius, he was a modest touch, he had a very, very vast background in other business ventures, he was not a goose hunter himself, he was not a duck hunter himself, he was Canadian, but he’s a very, very smart individual in terms of business. Real estate, he made a mint selling real estate around Calgary got bored with it, started getting into where you buy businesses and spent off the assets and make money and he got bored with it by now, he was rich. He had a brother and sister that were working for years in Silicon Valley, getting paid stock that was worth nothing until all of a sudden it was worth a whole lot and he had a business model for what he did and how he could scale and what he could do. And so the first time I reached out to him not knowing all that about him, he later explained to a group of friends of mine, not clients because I wasn’t booking at the time but friends at the dinner table he said, it was like a two hour interrogation when Ramsey Russell calls. I felt like the IRS and ATF and ABC and everybody else, had just held me up tie me to a chair and put a light on me and beat me to death with a rubber hose. He said that guy grilled me. He said, that the most thorough question any clients ever called. Because buddy, I know what 50 question to ask a man before I wrote him a check to go goose hunting. So, I went up there and hunting with him and I talked three good friends of mine into going, they’re older gentlemen. In fact, the first week I was in Argentina this year one of them passed, he was in his 70s and after this story line here he actually became a good client and he became a really dear friend but anyway we three drove up there and we hunted, it was fabulous. The next year those three people just through word of mouth on the internet sharing pictures on MS Ducks and stuff of that nature, I must say there were 8-10 people from Mississippi went up there and hunted the following year, 3^rd year there was over two dozen people and that came to that man’s camp that year. And that year was the year that Jeff after dinner he and his staff would kind of stay out in the garage and drink beer and plan the day’s events and download GPS waypoints and figure out who’s going to hunt where and thing of that nature he said, Ramsey, come out here and drink a beer with us, I said sure. Oh God, they were such good guys and I went out there and we started drinking, look, I’ve got a proposal for you, I want you to be my booking agent. And I said, what the hell’s a booking agent, Jeff? I’m a forester for the US Federal government. I mean, I was forester, I was a Fish and Wildlife service forester, what’s a booking agent? And he said, well, those people you book that Saskatchewan trip also, I booked they booked hunts for me too and this year you sent more hunters to my camp than they sent to anybody up here in the whole province and his staff was sitting there nodding your heads drinking bear and nodding their heads listening. And he said, when you Mississippi boys come up here and hunt, they cut cards to see who gets to take you all because you know how to call, you know how to shoot, go along with the program, you go up set up decoys, you know how to tip. He said, everybody that shows up here to just talk to you packs what they need to pack, acts like they need to act and I’m just suggesting to you that you start selling hunts and marketing me in your circles and doing this. And so he said and come up here and hunt with them and that was it, I was in at that point and he said, we’ll pay you a little bit for marketing. So, I get back home –

Josh Webb: That’s what I was about to say, what was that conversation like with Anita when you got back?

Ramsey Russell: Oh, she didn’t think nothing of it. Now look, at that, remember I got three Children at that time I got babies in the house now, she’s a full on mama, she ain’t got time to worry about nothing but that right? I mean really when we started having kids, she had been an elementary educator and we decided best decision we ever made, we decided that she was going to be a mama and raise our Children instead of putting them in places and we toughed it out, we did it and it worked great. But she really didn’t say anything, I mean, it’s like, she didn’t care. I mean, I said, I’m going to start selling these guys hunt, she says okay fine. And this is all back in the MS Ducks days, MS Ducks was chat room and there was a guy that practically all the MS duckers know because we were real tight family back. It’s not like this massive global Facebook community, this was real, this was like a coffee shop. It’s like going to the coffee shop on the way to work every morning except guys from all over state maybe in 4 or 5 other states but you all know each other, you all are here every morning, checking in when you’re check your emails and all I like do in the morning and I just keep my window open all day long during walking, I had a chance I check in see what was going on with somebody or something, it was a really special type community. And there was a guy on there named Harden Philips, AKA webbed foot. And Harden and I had dinner one day, at Sonny’s and he said and I was consulting on the side also that’s integral to the story, he said, I could build you a web page, I said, really? He said, yeah, there’s nothing to it. That’s the guy he was. No money involved, he could use, you could build a web page for him because he could build a web page he knew how, he would do it for me. Very simple web page, he said, but you got to tell me what we’re going to call it, so I gave it some thought life’s short get ducks that’s kind of been my personal creed for a lot of reasons, we’ve talked about previously. Jake and I are working on a little video series of duck hunting around the world life’s short get ducks the same as this podcast title and I said, getducks.com it’s going to be getducks.com. And all we had on that page was an Alberta Canada hunt and a pitch to hire me to do your consulting needs is what, I would –

Josh Webb: Okay, that’s what I was going to ask. Did you consulting site to it? What did it look like? Right.

Ramsey Russell: The web page?

Josh Webb: No, what I was getting, what it looked like when it came out. Was it just here’s this place to go hunt, no, I mean information. It was, here’s this place to go hunt or it was, here’s this and I can also do this and so what you’re saying –

Ramsey Russell: I haven’t seen that physical page in probably 15 or 20 years, 15 years at least and it was basically two paragraph.

Josh Webb: Yeah, but it was functional. I mean, it was what you needed.

Ramsey Russell: It was functional. You can find it. I put a link on my signature and you can find it but it was on page number 9999 of the Google Organic Search if you try to find it. It didn’t really exist, but it was there. And it worked enough to get a few guys to go and people kind of know I was setting Canada hunts, I’m doing some consulting and all that kind of good stuff. And that was just a guy Harden Philips AKA Webbed foot. Webbed foot actually rebranded with Mike and the boys at time, it was his idea to rebrand MS Ducks as Duck South, which is the present name now. The name that eventually stuck was Duck South. That was just the energy that guy brought to the table and so now I’m a Forester, I’m in 24 counties in the state of Mississippi but I’m selling duck hunts on the side to Canada.

Rocky Leflore: I want to say this. I’m going to say something, Harden was one of the first people outside of my circle group of people that were near me on the MS Ducks. He was one of the first people that I met that – man, he came to my booth back in ‘01, I’ll never forget it at the wildlife extravaganza in Jackson. Sat in my booth, one of the finest people, sat there all day just talking one of the finest human beings to ever walk the face of this earth and we’re –

Ramsey Russell: I’ve described and a lot of people have energy and a radius of an energy about them and a scalable relation of energy, Harden was a meteor. He just had this just this energy and enthusiasm, he is the reason we have a delta waterfowl chapter in the state of Mississippi. I mean, he was so energetic and contributed so much to – I think everybody that ever met him or knew him, he was that guy that built a web page called getducks.com had not knowing Harden Philips, I wouldn’t be here today talking to you. Now that page kind of vanquished a little bit, don’t get me wrong now, let me tell you –

Rocky Leflore: Hold on there are people that, let me say this, there are people that, I just want to make sure that Harden gets the – you could go on all day about Harden, but I’ve never met another human being that so many people gravitated towards him and would follow. You know what I’m saying? He’d come up with an idea and man, he would just have a band of followers and I’m not saying that in a negative light, he was the leader. People support him.

Ramsey Russell: Our government supervisor told me one time, he said there’s two kinds of people in this world, there’s butchers and there’s bakers. You think about that content, there’s butchers that tear stuff down and our bakers that make people rise and Harden was the baker. He brought out the best of people, he just helped out the goodness of his heart and he was one of the most profound influences that I certainly ever met down to Jackson metro area that ever came off MS Ducks into my life. Just because when I was around him my face hurt from smiling. That was Harden Philips, not sometimes, every time.

Rocky Leflore: That’s true.

Ramsey Russell: He was a good guy Rocky. And it wasn’t just Harden as time progressed, now understand, I’m talking about my boys being on the path, having a mission having a point A, point B, I was at my destination at the time. I was a forester with the US Federal government, I started with Fish and Wildlife transferred over to USDA covered 24 counties in central Mississippi, I love my job, I was out in the field all the time, meet with private landowners which you hear me say all the time, I love people and I got to meet with people and their relationship with land and the resources. I covered the all the forestry concerns under natural resource conservation service programs and I love my job but I kind of had this little thing going, where I do some consulting on the weekends and almost I take my leave time to go do a little consulting projects and I kind of just tinker around the duck and that’s really all I wanted to do I was just going to help this guy sell his Alberta hunt, I had a career, I wasn’t thinking beyond that. And find the next logical step was – in about 2000 or 2001, there was a taxidermist, a taxidermist from out of state and he kind of had a thing going and we had gone to Texas together, had a great time out in the panhandle hunting together with a guy and he invited me to go to Argentina and I did, me and Ian went and not knowing any better, it was unbelievably, it was great. Now, the goose season was still open back in those days and the goose hunting was world class. Best goose hunt on God’s Earth was Argentina goose hunting, we got to experience it. And the duck hunting was okay, especially since we’ve never been any further in Canada shooting few birds but certainly I mean, I remember the first day we hunt, we shot 30 birds in aggregate me and Ian and that was just, I mean wasn’t what I expected, but it was great. I think one day we got about 60 of piece. One day, I think was trashed zero. But this duck hunt, we didn’t know any better and the guy that had invited me to come on this trip said, hey you ought to book your trips over here, this place too. And sure, I mean I’m a booking agent now, whatever that is, I’m sure I’ll love to do that. Funny thing happened some gentlemen from camps and friends wanted to go on that trip and I said okay, and so I started trying to call this person and get some information and get the dates locked up, blah blah and I mean you know 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 20 calls over about two or three week period never got, never called back, I just picked up the phone and call the outfitter. Back in these days boys, you can fly to Miami round trip to Buenos Aires $500, $450 if you count it right and hunt were cheap. Now, back in those days, Argentina had just made negotiations with the international monetary fund and got their peso set par for a dollar, $1 about one argentine peso and you could go into a restaurant and order literally an endless platter of steak and French fries and salad and wine and when they brought your bill out it was about $8 a piece. That was the good old days of Argentina but they’ve been experienced about 20%, 30% inflation since every year, it just rapid out of control. But anyway it was very cheap, very good and when I started talking to that outfitter, the numbers that I had been told didn’t match up at all. It was like his numbers was – I can’t remember exactly but let’s say it was $3,000 to include round trip airfare out of Miami and the guy I was working through with numbers were no airfare inclusion about $2500 more. Well, I can’t be a part of that. That’s wrong. That’s criminal, I mean that’s ignorance, I can’t do that. So, I turned these guys off, I just said, it didn’t work out this year, let me find something else and I found something else, I started finding other stuff, I started traveling down there, I started going to Uruguay and by that time things have kind of grown a little bit, that’s kind of where the origins were for finding honest hunts, for finding good hunts, for finding value. I’m not some of my wealthier clients, I don’t live in that percentage class, I sell duck hunts for a living and I was a government forester making good money but not great money, you know what I’m saying? I always saw value the most for the bank. The authenticity and just good solid value is what – I want a good hunting and authentic accommodations and that was just where I came from. That’s kind of how that part of it started and I ended up working for the federal government, I found some Uruguay. Uruguay was one of our first big booking destinations and we were really hitting the lid down there in terms of numbers and experiences and my first clients were coming off of MS ducks. A lot of boys that I was plugged into locally, were supporting us and were wanting to go on these trips, a lot of real good friends were on board with us on this deal and that’s kind of how it started in Argentina. And what we learned after 10 years of chasing around Uruguay is it’s really not where you want to go to shoot anything. It’s just not. It is all by all standard of measure doves or geese or ducks, it is a fraction of what Argentina is or good Argentina I should say not just average Argentina but good Argentina. And that’s how we ended up in Argentina doing the real deal type stuff over there and over a period of time now this is, I’m kind of hustling through this, there’s no sense bore you with the facts.

Rocky Leflore: No, I want to ask you this, the first time you went down there, same kind of question is Canada, Argentina was just starting to walk or maybe far more worst –

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I mean compared to now it was, it had been walking the dove hunts kicked off in the early 80s, that’s what put Argentina on the map, then the goose hunts and duck hunts were a distant second from the dove hunt. But there were people that had been but nothing like now. It wasn’t mainstream like it was now, it was kind of like snow goose hunting. Snow goose hunting, there were people that snow goose hunted in the United States of America, but it wasn’t yet mainstream like it is now. Yeah, that day is correct. That was kind of the origins. What you had at the time, is you really didn’t, there really wasn’t a real effective way for any Argentines to fully represent themselves in the United States. The internet was new by all, it wasn’t nobody kind understood it and all that kind of good stuff and at the same time, you had a lot of old school blue blood booking agencies that were servicing the “discriminating” first class only hunters, that’s what you had. And it was rein pillage and plunder summer. I mean information is knowledge, information is power and that little deal I explained about removing airfare marketing it up doubling and tripling doing everything else that was rampant everybody was paying too damn much. And that’s just the truth. That’s just the business it was. And a lot of those guys, a lot of those companies are still around but they have faded they’re dinosaurs and but I was nobody. Now look, I was nobody getducks.com existed on about a two page website that was findable by clicking on my signature at MS Ducks and maybe refuge forms. That’s basically it. You couldn’t google any keyword terms, you couldn’t search and find Ramsey Russell or getducks.com or anything, it was invisible and Harden, was preoccupied elsewhere and doing everything else and he had built that web page and I decided, I wanted to do an update and I needed to do, I needed to grow a little bit, so the next phase was just the next step from a kind of a freeware build into a little more build. And I met a guy that was doing this kind of stuff, I met him off of refuge forms, nice guy and he was a duck hunter like Harden and that makes a huge difference. If you’re going in the hunting business you need, you really do need a guy that has a little knowledge of hunting, to kind of help you out I thought at the time and I finally approach this guy by doing it and we got to talking on the phone one day and he says well, describe to me what you want the page to look like, just give me a concept to go from. And I said, Gray’s Sporting Journal. He said, okay good. Now, what do you like about Gray’s Sporting journal? I said, I don’t know, I just think it’s a nice magazine. He said, well can you send me a copy? And I did. And that’s where the web page we got that came back, his artistic impression Chris Campbell is his name, we’re still friends, his take on Gray’s Sporting Journal was clean white and photographic rich and that’s where the photographic background came up, it was black and white at the time and it was very clean, it was very good looking website it was still very simple, very simple and it still only existed signature, it was invisible in the big google search thing which was fine, I was selling a few hunts and I had a career, I had a job. And my consulting was picking up because I was writing a lot of baseline reports for conservation easements which was a very good payday in a very short amount of time. It kept me very busy usually November, December, January, but not so busy, I couldn’t manage my regular fares and go hunting and do my stuff it really picked up that really led to an eventual exit. I put myself in a position with that work that I could exit and come up with a plan B. And not knowing at the time that there would be that time coming because I was happy in my career I was happy where I was, I had a paycheck coming in no matter what the economy is doing and I had a paycheck come in every two weeks, I had benefits, I had cheap family insurance, I had a job I liked, I love what I did most of the time and so then that’s kind of how this thing went.

Rocky Leflore: Yeah, I think this is a great stopping point, I know there’s a lot more to this story, but man, Josh because of time constraints, we just have to continue all next week.

“Yeah, I agree with you, think a lot of people might be kind of going dang, I don’t want to stop but it really is. There’s a lot more to it and things continue to build but like I said, Ramsey has to have some conversation with his wife and bosses and coworkers and it really goes into some interesting places.”

Josh Webb: Yeah, I agree with you, think a lot of people might be kind of going dang, I don’t want to stop but it really is. There’s a lot more to it and things continue to build but like I said, Ramsey has to have some conversation with his wife and bosses and coworkers and it really goes into some interesting places.

Rocky Leflore: All right. Well Josh, thank you for being here. Ramsey, thank you for being here, most of all I want to thank all of you that listen to this edition of The End of The Line podcast powered by ducksouth.com.

[End of Audio]

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