Ramsey Russell – The Jim Shockey of Duck Hunting

Trey Bowman: Today’s episode is presented by Whitetail 101, the most comprehensive video tutorial of its kind. If you or someone in your life is getting ready to start hunting white tails but doesn’t have an experienced mentor in their life Whitetail 101 will walk them through this process step by step. Check out the Whitetail 101 program at sportsmen101.com. Hey, tell them Trey and Eli sent you. Enter promo code Tomorrow20 at checkout to save 20%. Remember that sportsmen101.com promo code Tomorrow20. Now to the show.

We’re back Tomorrow’s Hunters almost said today’s. Today we’ve got an awesome guest Mr. Ramsey Russell with getducks.com. Sitting here myself, Eli Frierson, Trey Bowman Ramsey, I’m going to let you bring it in, man, tell us how’s everything going in your world?

Ramsey Russell: Boys, things going good, the only thing that would make it better if I was sitting in a duck blind and that’s a fact. I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. Our motto is its Duck Season Somewhere. Its duck season somewhere right now. But this CORONA thing is putting a dent and travel right now, making a little hard to get in and out of countries.

“I can understand that, but Ramsey tell us about getducks.com, everything that you’re involved in and tell us a little bit about what you do.”

Trey Bowman: I can understand that, but Ramsey tell us about getducks.com, everything that you’re involved in and tell us a little bit about what you do.

“For those that are unaware, my wife and I run a company call getducks.com and I love it when people say, what do you do? I go, I get ducks, they go, what? Like they heard me wrong.”

Ramsey Russell: For those that are unaware, my wife and I run a company call getducks.com and I love it when people say, what do you do? I go, I get ducks, they go, what? Like they heard me wrong. I say, yeah, I get ducks but we really do. It really started kind of sort of accidentally a long time ago I went on a really bad hunt and anybody that’s traveled out, spent money and gone away from home to hunt every now again hits a bad hunt. Well this one, you just really could not make up how many things went wrong and I got out and this was kind of before the internet, this was way before the internet is what it is now. So, it was still kind of calling people and talking on the phones and looking at magazines and interview and just a real organic search. But I found a guy out in Alberta, we went and redeemed ourselves. It was a very good hunt. And I hunted with that outfitter – I cannot remember Alberta, I don’t know, Alberta fly away and maybe who they were, Jeff Clothe was his name, we hunted with him for many years. And about the 3^rd year I went back there may have been as many as 25 people booked with his lodge that year because of my recommendation. Just because people on the internet and whatnot. And he called me aside one day and said, hey man, would you be my booking agent? And I go, what the heck is a booking agent? I probably didn’t say heck, but I said, what the heck is a booking agent? I’m a forester with the US Federal government and he explained, he said look book hunt for us and here’s how it works blah-blah and I said okay. And I was doing a little bit of habitat consulting, a little bit of environmental consulting on the side anyway, and I just had this idea well, heck to sell hunts you need to build a web page, what would I call this web page? I was doing duck habitat and selling him duck hunts, so I called it get ducks. And purely just a hobby, just a way to help and send him a few hunters and one thing led to another, I’ll spare you the details, I’ve told them 100 times another podcast. But in the age of the internet it is very easy to find things on the internet. It really truly is. I heard a statistic and it’s been a while ago, but you take the smartphone, it’s in everybody’s pocket today, if you’ve got cellular connectivity, you have more information at your fingertips in seconds than George W. Bush did the day he was sworn into office. It’s almost like James Bond technology I can find and put my hands on anything in this world in second. The downside of that is anybody can be anything. I mean, there’s a lot of businesses, especially in the hunting world right now, there are a lot of businesses that don’t even take the time or spend the money to build a web page, they just get to plow their product for free on places like Facebook and Instagram, there’s zero cost. And you know what, you can be anything. Think about this guy, if we 3 went out and shared a duck blind and killed 18 ducks a great day, how many pictures can we take to sell that story about -? I mean we could create a whole duck season from 18 ducks and it happens, I see it happen. And while anybody can find anything on the internet, anybody can be anything on the internet. And it took almost 2 decades to say this but slowly but surely we built a credible objection or voice in duck hunts. Now, not everybody’s duck hunts. If you’re looking for a true, absolute true 5 star experience, take your lady to Italy when they clean out or take your lady to New York City when you can travel again, don’t call me because we go to duck camps around the world. And I kind of coined that from very wealthy man I met at convention one time and I realized immediately by his business card, the way he was dressed and our introduction conversation that this guy was somebody half a percenter you know what I’m saying? And so I defaulted into 5 stars and with a slow Texas draw, it’s like he was raining back horse. He goes, whoa boy, whoa! He said, you don’t hung me on the wrong peg. And I said, sir, he said, number one, there’s not a lodge in that country that rivals my guest house. Do you understand? I go, yes sir. He goes, but if you come to my duck camp, it’s a 10 x 70 mobile home, my grandfather moved out there to that farm and you want a place to sit, you got to pull a lab off the couch to sit down and eat supper, he said, but there ain’t a better duck hole in that part of Texas. He said, son, I’m here because you’ve got a good reputation and all I’m asking is that you send me to Argentina, I want to be among real duck hunters. I want a real duck hunt and I want to be among knowledgeable duck guides. I want to be among, he said my people. And you know what, a lightning bolt hit me in back of head, I go, holy cow, I’m a duck hunter, that’s what I want, that’s what everybody wants. I mean, maybe you all know some 5 star lodges but I don’t, I go to duck camp, nice little comfortable, warm dry places and I elbow to elbow with duck hunters and it’s the atmosphere and the hunting and the dog work and all the aspects that’s going into it. Truth the matter is if I want to eat food and smoke fat cigars and drink expensive wine in a fancy restaurant, my wife wearing pearls and me wearing a James Bond tuxedo, I’m going to go on vacation, I’m not going to go to duck camp.

“You’re right. And I’m just going to throw that out there, we don’t know any 5 star lodges.”

Trey Bowman: You’re right. And I’m just going to throw that out there, we don’t know any 5 star lodges.

“Now, I’m looking for 4 McDonald’s hamburger sitting in a mile and a half by 3rd mile wide lily pad pond and it was some doings. And we kept walking around and glassing and for several hours and by now it’s hot. It’s just like just imagine walking along the side of an oxbow in Mississippi and June that’s what reminded me of.”

Ramsey Russell: No, there ain’t none. But I saw early on in my business, especially after that conversation, I realized when I went back down to Argentina, which is our – I mean, that’s ours. I love Argentina, I like real Argentina, I don’t like other Argentina. I like our Argentina which consisted about 4 operations down there but I spent the next year – I spent 2 months down there going lodge to lodge to outfitter to outfitter and knocking on doors and now I go to Safari Club International or Dallas safari club, the 2 biggest hunting shows in America and I have met every – I have had my boots under the table of every single outfitter down there and I don’t represent none of them. Because it’s like – I never will forget one time – it’s just what I’m trying to explain is like, you go to a guy’s booths and he got all this beautiful artwork and all these books laid out for his lodge and it’s like looking at wedding photos, the lodge and the food and just the backlighting with the meringue and I’m like, oh that’s fancy. The bubbles coming up by the champagne and I’m like where’s the ducks man? It’s like all this overcompensation and then when I go and hunt with them, yeah, we shoot a bunch of birds compared to an average day in Mississippi but nothing compared to real Argentina. Real Argentina is like setting back into the late 1800s in America. That’s what you go that far for, not to go shoot a dozen or 15, 20 birds that ain’t why you go to Argentina, that’s why – so what I kind of realized the way this industry is structured if you as a duck hunter and I know the people listening to me or a lot of my clients are duck hunters, it don’t take much asking, it don’t take much scratching the surface to realize the guy you’re talking to is not a duck hunter. Asking 5 questions you would ask me or ask you or ask your daddy that duck hunted ask them 5 questions and it don’t take any time to realize this guy ain’t no duck hunter, he manages a lodge. See and that’s just kind of where we came in. And so we started off in Canada Alberta and went to Argentina on a vacation and kind of got tied up booking agent down there with this guy and realized it was a fraud, it was run through another American that was a “booking agent” and I realized this is a complete nut of fraud and a hoax and rip off. And that’s how I got started in Argentina and 20 years later we now have operators that don’t exist outside of us. They do their part, they know what American hunters want, what we expect. They know we Americans don’t want to eat dinner at 10, 11 o’clock at night like they do, we want to eat when we come in and take a shower and have a drink and so we can go to bed about 8, 9, 10 o’clock. Because we’re going to get up and go kill a whole bunch of ducks next day they get that. So we’ve been able to go in and craft these hunts but then something funny happened about midway through this nearly 2 decades trajectory, all of a sudden this thing took a life of its own. In other words, we were kind of sort of sailing the ship but then the storm blew in and that storm was an increased client following. So now we’re chasing duck hunts, so just imagine part of the clients, we chased are looking for experiences or trigger pulling vacations I call them, Mexico, Argentina, South Africa would qualify for that. But then a whole another wave came in and blew a whole lot of stuff in ourselves and started pushing us off in this direction, which were the guys chasing species, the collectors. Now, I hear a lot going around America about the list of 41 and that 41 is a pretty fair start. There’s 50 waterfowl species by my count, I do include subspecies for the full North American experience. But then like I talked to these guys like, what do you do? What do you do after you killed that 41 or 45 or 50 or however you count it, what then? Do you quit and play golf? No, there’s a whole big, beautiful world out there. And I have logged 112-113 species worldwide. And the crazy thing about it, I realized a decade ago I don’t collect species, I collect experiences. And it’s like, the first one that comes to mind the best example I can think of, I’ll give you 2 examples, one is a unicorn species for me. Don’t ask me how bar headed goose got in my mindset, but it did. And it’s the highest flying goose, it’ll fly over the mountains down there in Asia at time, it’s the highest flying water fowl at times and its Asian species and most of the wintering population literally over winters. If you look at a map between Pakistan and India right there on that political boundary and that’s just nowhere we can hunt. It’s illegal in India pretty damn dangerous in that part of Pakistan at times. And we have hunted Pakistan and we’ll go back to Pakistan just not there, that’s not where our guy operates. But I want to shoot this bird and so we found them in Mongolia. And never been to Mongolia, never dreamed of Mongolia but I went to Mongolia to shoot that a swan goose and a couple of shell duck species and whatever else we came across and we got our birds. But it was just – when I look at that bird, I remember hunting them and I remember how we hunt them, I remember what we did, but mostly what I remember is the Mongolian landscape. There are 3 million people in a country, I don’t know, I’d say it’s complement size to America not including Alaska, 3 million people, which is the population of Mississippi, 35 million head of livestock not a single strand of barbed wire. And I’ll never will forget we drove from one camp to the next one day to go do a little exploring for a couple of days and we drove for 6 hours across what they called the Asian steppe, which looks like parts of Utah like a high desert and it was nothing but tire tracks just 2 tire tracks running. And we stopped to eat lunch just a little sack lunch we brought and there was this great big square stone about a size of refrigerator, just sitting there and there were some flowers and ribbons around it and it’s out in the middle of nowhere. And I said, what is that gala? And he says it’s a headstone. I said who? He says, nobody knows, but it must be somebody very important. I said, why? He says because that stone doesn’t exist in Mongolia. It was brought from somewhere in China, it’s about 1500-1600 years old. And what they must have done that many thousands of years ago to get that stone right here for that person is nothing short of astounding. I remember things like that, it was just like – it’s that experience. So, another example for me as an experience collector would be this little picture, we held this picture up on our Instagram account at Ramsey Russell get ducks, Instagram account. It was a tiny little pygmy goose we shot last year in Zululand South Africa and Africa is a desert. I mean it’s a very dry continent, mostly very dry. Unless you get up there around the Congo and place like, but it’s a very dry desert, South Africa its desert. And this particular little bird is about the size of a green wing teal, it’s a perching duck not a goose, but it’s called a pygmy goose. And it’s got this little short stubby wigeon looking bill because it uses that bill to pinch water lotus, it eats lily pads, and lily pad seeds. So in a desert environment its habitat is lily pad. Do you know how far off the trail you had to go in Zulu land to find a lily pad pond? Way off in the deep bushes. And so we found ourselves, we heard a report that there were 2 pairs somewhere south of where we were a few hours, so we drove that way and we get there, it’s a mile and a half long oxbow about 3^rd of a mile wide, covered with lily pads. Now, I’m looking for 4 McDonald’s hamburger sitting in a mile and a half by 3^rd mile wide lily pad pond and it was some doings. And we kept walking around and glassing and for several hours and by now it’s hot. It’s just like just imagine walking along the side of an oxbow in Mississippi and June that’s what reminded me of. Kookaburra and coffee weed just, boy, I was just waiting on a big old snake to come crawl out of my boots. So we couldn’t find them, so we went up to a high hill and we had decided because it was so late in the morning we figured, they had been seeing these birds around 07:30 8 o’clock in the morning we’ve been here and hadn’t found them, they probably flew off to the river to loaf during the day. But before we left we got up on this real high advantage point and everybody just sat down with their binoculars. Now, how many times do you carry binoculars duck hunting? Me, every time. Most people never, but it’s a tool of the trade when you’re traveling doing this kind of stuff off the beaten path and we just all sat down and started glass and we just broke it up into zones and started picking it apart, lily pad by lily pad, looking for these little ducks and Jake Latendresse was filming and just going to get a little b roll. And he said, Ramsey, I said, hang on. He said, Ramsey, I said, wait, just wait, he said, Ramsey come look, so I stood up, walked in and said, what? He says, is this what you’re looking for? And I looked through his lens and there they all are zoomed in right there on his lens across – right freaking there where we’ve been just an hour ago that we had stopped about 100 yards too soon and there they were and we’re like, okay, great, how the heck are we going to get to them now? And it’s like they read our minds, it picked up and they flew right to the base of the hill where we were. And so we walked up and jump shot them and there you go. But it’s not the species, it’s when you fall off into that where those birds take it because unfortunately not every duck on God’s earth is a Mallard. Mallards play by the rule book, they wrote the rulebook decoys and call and get downwind and square up here, no, not all these ducks do that, but I love where it takes me. And so personally speaking, experienced hunters, I’ve got a lot of clients that are trigger pullers, they just want to go have a good fun vacation. I got a lot of clients that will go anywhere to shoot one bird they don’t have. But at the end of the day, I know we’re all just collecting experiences.

“No, you’re right. And one thing you mentioned a bunch of countries and continents and everything like that. I want you to tell everybody where you all are – yeah, I guess you all’s footprint is and I do want you to go into, that’s got to be a lot, there’s got to be a big organization you have that’s helping you and working with you to put this together.”

Trey Bowman: No, you’re right. And one thing you mentioned a bunch of countries and continents and everything like that. I want you to tell everybody where you all are – yeah, I guess you all’s footprint is and I do want you to go into, that’s got to be a lot, there’s got to be a big organization you have that’s helping you and working with you to put this together.

“I got invited to go to Russia. This is pre Facebook and pre my Facebook, this is when just college kids were on Facebook, so social media as we know it now didn’t exist, it was chat room. And I went to Russia and it was incredible waterfowl, capercaillie, black grouse, I mean it was just an incredible experience.”

Ramsey Russell: I wish it was. We’re on 6 continents North and South to South America to start. First, North America, Canada and then way back in our early days, we were working throughout the United States with outfitters just call me, I’d book your trip to Oklahoma or whatever. Then Argentina and then Uruguay and then Peru and then Mexico and I really stayed out of Mexico. I used to hunt down in Mexico back in the late 80s and 90s when I worked, not too far from there in south Texas I was co-opted. And the reason I stayed out of Mexico is apples to apples, it is a fairly expensive hunt compared to say Argentina, it really is. You’re going to spend more money in Argentina because of the airfare and stuff like that, but it’s really apples to apples, its a little more bang for the buck going to Argentina. But we ended up in Mexico and that is one of our very most top hunts in the world is Mexico right now. And we coasted for a while and then I’ll tell you in about 2011 or 12 right when we were just – I was working with the federal government I was halfway through a career and I was doing this part time and the 2 worlds just collided. It collided. It could have been a scarier time to do what we were doing because the stock market has just cratered just like what you’re seeing on television today only worse because of that mortgage fiasco and it and it cratered. But my 2 worlds collided and I had to make a choice, I had to decide what am I going to do. And at the time I was consulting, I was working on get ducks, I was working for the federal government and I’m going to tell you, I never will forget one time I might go – it’s like I would work all night and get up and go to work at the government and then come home and work all night and go to work for the government and come home and either work all night or die. And then I’d wake up if I died and start again. And one morning the coffee pot went off and my wife is not an early riser she’ll get up – it’s time we had Children. So she was up in time to feed them breakfast to get them off to school, you know what mamas do, she’s a good mama but she won’t get up at 05:00 just to drink coffee with me, I can tell you that. But she got up and she beat me to the coffee pots, pour 2 cups and come into the office and she said we need to talk and pursuant to that conversation, she basically said, look, you haven’t been to bed 3 nights, I’ve been just going and I pointed to a pile of paper a ft. tall I was doing consulting I was doing and at the time of doing these baseline ecological reports for conservation easements and I was building my web page and I just had endless things to do and it was never going to do itself right? This America may know the American dream is not being wealthy is the ability to chase and all you got to do is work there it was sitting on my desktop, so I worked. And she said, you can’t do this, nobody can do this forever. And she basically said, look, I love you, I’m with you on this, whether you choose the federal government or you choose this, I’m in but you need to decide and I did decide, I decided to drive to work that morning, I’m going to work for myself, this is America and no offense to anybody working for the federal government I think it’s a great career, I chose a different path. And one of the first hunts we ever did outside of just kind of the norm and now understand we really were tad of relevant at this point. I got invited to go to Russia. This is pre Facebook and pre my Facebook, this is when just college kids were on Facebook, so social media as we know it now didn’t exist, it was chat room. And I went to Russia and it was incredible waterfowl, capercaillie, black grouse, I mean it was just an incredible experience. I came back and I blogged it, I built a web page and I got on these chat rooms and about a week later my web guy called and said, what in the heck is going on? I said, what do you mean? He says, I’ve got you on a shared server and I just flipped you over to a designated service but I can’t sustain this, the costs we’re talking about, I said, what’s going on? He said Ramsey, you’ve got 20 times the amount of traffic come pouring through your site right now than normal and I go, aha, boom. Because I had showed the world something they didn’t see. And it was kind of a gamble. I said, okay, I’m going to show the world not the world beating my door down to go shoot capercaillie, the people that know what a capercaillie is are beating my door down and go shoot the capercaillie nobody else is, but since I showed them something they had not yet seen while they’re there, they might as well look at my other hunts too. And that’s where we really rounded the curve and started picking up. About 10 years ago and from there, there was just no end. I mean, there’s a lot of people in the hunting industry, especially “booking agents” and I despise that description because it’s a very nefarious description. There’s too many people in that space that are running it as part time, maybe they’re a taxidermist, maybe they’re an asphalt contractor, maybe they got a job with the federal government like I did and they’re running it part time and what I learned and when I left – by the time when my those 2 worlds collided, what I realized is these people are entrusting me with a very important part of their lives and they deserve my full time attention. And that’s exactly what we did and well, Golly man instead of working 40 hours a week on get ducks now, I had 80 or 120 hours a week. And that’s when our business took off. But we’re on 6 continents and in terms of a big network, I wouldn’t describe it as – my business is, we’ve existed for 20 years and so we have got a very good foundation to know what needs to be done? What kind of problems can be encountered in terms of import, flights, customs, visas? I mean, we’re well experienced as experience as anybody on God’s earth and doing that kind of stuff. But at the same time we’re small enough to be very nimble and responsive and personally involved. I’m telling everybody listening when you call getducks.com, it’s a 99% chance you’re going to talk to Ramsey Russell or to Anita Russell, you’re going to talk to us. One thing I know is this, I get up every morning and I wake up, the first thing I do before I step out of bed and look at my phone and punch a calendar and see who’s traveling. Now, and I can’t verbatim 20 people that are traveling on any given day but I got an idea and every client I’ve got is in my phone. And one thing I know is when my phone rings and that client is in travel, he ain’t calling to tell me he found the best ribs in Dallas airport or drinking the best margaritas in Mexico or having a great time, shot a banded bird, no, something’s off the track. He’s stuck somewhere in an airport, something’s going on. There’s a fire that needs putting out right then. And you know what, that commands my full time attention. And that’s what we give them. I think our reputation speaks for that. I don’t guarantee hunts anywhere in the world, we don’t shoot tame birds, these are wild bird hunt. And the same migration that we experienced above average winter temperature in North America, you can expect the same trends that winter 6800 miles from here on the complete other side of the earth in Azerbaijan. It’s a trend, these are migratory birds and it’s always changing. But I know that the people I work with, I’m entrusting your hunt to them. I’ve been there, I’ve worked with them, I have built trust over many years and once in a blue moon an outfitter fades out and that’s any business, that’s anybody that any outfitter or sometimes they just fizzle. I left an outfitter – last year I worked with up in Manitoba for over 12 years they just crashed and burned, they just played out. You couldn’t throw no wood on that fire to make it burn, it was just dead, so we just moved. And because my obligation, I’ve got a business relationship with my outfitters but my business and my obligation is to my client. It’s like you ever bought a house and you see where the real estate agents declare themselves a dual agent that represents me and the seller? That’s baloney. You know who they are representing? They’re representing themselves. You can’t be that guy. I can’t be that guy. My lifeblood is my client. Hey, we’re recording this right now and the whole world is melting over a virus, Coronavirus, a novel coronavirus.

Trey Bowman: Hey Ramsey, I want you to go in and I know, we talk – tell us just right now, how this is affecting you right now. I mean, it’s duck season somewhere, I want to know how this is -?

Ramsey Russell: It’s duck season somewhere and that’s a good topic to go into, as what I was building on here in just a minute about the client experience is, I left Azerbaijan February 21^st and as we were eating dinner, my partnering outfitter over there announced that he had just read that coronavirus had hit Iran nearby and they had quarantined off, sealed off coming and going the entire country and well okay, but hey we’ve all been through Ebola and SARS and swine flu and H1N1 and it’s just whatever the next flavor of the – fear flavor of the month is and so as recently as last week, no problem. Well, we’re kind of crowded and you got to understand this 6-8 weeks, I’ve got a whole lot of business starting clients in travel status.  And businesses has been very good. Our business has grown every year for 20 years. And I’ve just come to the conclusion, I mean as recently as the last 3 or 4 days I’m taking these travel warnings, the fact that President Donald Trump has been on – personally been on given news briefings every single day for the last 6 or 7 days and all those executive series level staff, his cabinet members have been on there too, that ought to wake everybody up that this ain’t some political hoax. But see, I talked to outfitters all day every day, all I do for the last 20 years, I talked to outfitters and duck hunters worldwide. And so my phone’s been blowing up on 6 continents of what’s all going on in their respective countries. Argentina has martial law installed. If you live in Argentina, you’re supposed to be at your home. If you’re caught outside your home and you’re not going to a pharmacy or doing some kind of approved practice, you’re arrested and your car is impounded. If you’re in Peru same thing, you’re arrested on site. And I’m looking worldwide the countries that we go to and they’re sealed off. Do you realize that the airlines of America – the American airlines, I don’t mean American airlines the company, I mean, American airlines companies plural account for 8-9% of our total gross domestic product. When you see those guys laying off 75% of their flights, when you see them taking a lot of their jets to the desert the park in a bone yard, you better know something’s fixing to happen. When you see a carnival cruise ship mobilized as hospitals and general motors turned into a respirator facility, well right now ain’t nobody’s going nowhere. I’d have said earlier this week, I’d hoped you’d clear out in a couple of months. I think we went for the long haul. So we actually wrote an email to all of our clients to everybody in our email database, we wrote an email blast Monday or Tuesday morning that just basically let them know we’re aware of it of course, what we knew that Argentina was in full down quarantine, they were not allowing anybody into their country. Australia is not allowing anybody into their country. New Zealand not allowing anybody into their country. South Africa has revoked all visas period end of the discussion. We’re at the highest travel status I’ve ever seen Americans issue for don’t travel. Dear Americans don’t travel, don’t go anywhere, stay at home. I’ve never seen that. I’m 53 years old, I’ve never seen that. And so what we realize is okay, this season is a wash and so we wrote an email to all of our clients and all of our clients – everybody in our database just saying, hey, we’re aware of the situation and it’s probably going to impact your travel this year, don’t sweat it. Don’t worry about this hunt because there will be a tomorrow and when tomorrow comes, your hunt will be there and we look forward to seeing you all at our lodges. We built a contentiously plan, we spent all of last week on the phone with outfitters and the entire southern hemisphere that we’ve got hunters coming to, that we’ve got film projects scheduled for and we built a contingency plan and basically is that, hey guys, go home, take care of your life, take care of your business, take care of your health, we’re going to get through this. Because if you want to see America at its best show me a crisis, that’s when America rises to the calls and when that crisis is over, we can’t wait to see you all down here, this hunt, it’ll be intact. And that’s all we know we can do. Don’t worry about this hunt, you’ve got a lot of other worries right now, but you’re hunt ain’t one of them, it’ll be there, next year or the next year or whenever it tells you to get you down here to redeem this hunt that hunt will be there. And that’s what’s going on right now, is this duck season somewhere? But ain’t nobody going nowhere? That’s just where we’re at right now. But what do you do as a business? You take care of your clients. And I know from some feedback I’ve received already, I know from the direction of some of the conversations I’ve had with clients that they’ve talked to friends of theirs that had booked elsewhere that they might as well just write that money off it’s gone. And like I said to start with, you can find anything on the internet, but anybody can be anything on the internet and when planes don’t fly and things don’t happen and things go south at an unprecedented level like this coronavirus, guess what chances are somebody just made off of your money and I’ve seen it too many times but not us, we’re holding the forts and we and our outfitters will get through this.

Trey Bowman: Well this is unprecedented times that we’re in right now. I do want to step back and ask you a question basically why ducks? You can tell, I mean we’ve been rolling and you’ve been rolling for probably 30 minutes now, you can feel the passion. I mean, that’s real. I mean you’re really passionate about this, but why ducks, why not dear or Turkey or something else? What is it that drawing you? Or golf or anything.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know, man, I kind of sort of do. But it’s like when I was young, very young, I started dove hunting with my grandfather, he was a duck hunter. I grew up listening to, he and my father and uncle talk about duck hunting. My grandfather had bad help. So right about the time I’m old enough to go share a duck blind with them, they quit, he quit. It’s just his health won’t allow him to go. And it’s so maybe kind of sort of – if you get a brand new retriever or you are going to throw a baseball with your kids, don’t ever throw that baseball to your little boy until he’s tired of it. Always leave them wanting a couple of more pitches, always leave them wanting them other pitches. Same with a dog. Right by the time he’s coming up and hitting them and just crashing down and calling up like a spring to go get another bird, pet him on the head and go feed him, quit it, don’t ever burn one out. So I think it left a spark like that. But I was a deer hunter. I mean through high school, I deer hunted after high school I deer hunted and right after high school, I got into duck hunting but it wasn’t and end of the day it ought to be something I did late in the evening or early in the mornings and went on a deer hunting and did something else. And I went to Mississippi State I wanted to be a deer biologist. I wanted to be the next doctor deer, I wanted to be the next Jim Crowe or Harry Jacobson that was my goal. I wanted to be a whitetail deer biologist and I went to state and I was sitting in a biology lab and had a lab partner that was also in forestry and I never will forget we were dissecting earthworms, I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about that whole experiment. I remember doing it, messing with those nasty formaldehyde smelling things but the whole time he was telling me about this job he had applied for co-op down in south Texas and I mean God dog, he was going to make money and go shoot a bunch of deer and plant food plots and just big wild Texas ranch and well I want that job. He said, well you ain’t going to get it but you got to go apply. So, I went applied for and I left that lab quick as I can get out of the classroom and walked right over the co-op building applied and was walking down the hall 3 days later and Harry Jacobson called me Russell, come here and I walked into his office and talk to this guy on the phone. I said sir, he said talk to this guy on the phone and it was the guy just applied with a job for down in Texas and he asked me a few questions and I said yes sir, no sir, he said you’re hired, when can you show up? I got the job and I went down to this – I went down to this place probably 50-60 miles north of Rio Grande On a 107,000 acre ranch and trophy whitetail deer management. And I mean it was like my first job assignment was shoot antlerless deer, all of them. Yeah boy. Let me tell you what that sounds fun, no that was work. That was work that was working. I mean we went after those does like they hurt our mama’s and about November started to cool off you get them weekly cold fronts, a little pushes from the north and all them stock tanks would fill up with ducks. And every time you drop the disk does would just swarm to it because it’s all just goat weed and some flowers that come into that highly disturbed soil. Quail were out the roof and I went down there wanting to be a deer biologist, I came back reconnected to my wing shooting roots. And now look, I remember being a very young man college age and shooting a few of those ducks that I didn’t know what they were. I had to go look them up in a book and hen gadwall, I’ve never shot a hen gadwall before I had to go look it up. Break a few years later, the limit was 2 mallards we’re in a real decline in ducks and we were on a system and the limit was two mallards and I fell in with fraternity brother and went to Arkansas and hunted some public land and that was all she wrote. I fell off into it in a big way. And as I started shooting a few birds around home, I realized the world is a little bit bigger than this, there’s more birds, there’s more species and one thing led to another, but it’s just something about it, I guess it’s something about my roots, something about my upbringings. The shotguns, the dogs, the water, the whole social aspects of it, deer hunting to me, if I couldn’t sit in a deer stand and play on my phone or read a book, I’d be bored to tears. I like the social aspects, I like the interaction with that resource, I’ve never felt deer hunting. I’ve tracked them, I’ve figured them out, the funnels, get into range. I used to bow hunt when I was in college, so I get the 20 yards closer, you draw back and the string increases a smile because you got him. But even then it wasn’t the relationship that I feel that I have with the resource when I’m hunting ducks and you kind of lump them all together duck hunting and you think about the whole duck hunting thing or system is built around mallards, the duck calls, mallard duck calls, mallard decoys and getting the wind right to accommodate a big old mallard coming in, I mean that’s kind of the thing. But then you start hunting sea ducks, well it’s a little bit different. Start hunting divers just a little bit different yet start hunting something else. And then you start traveling hunting geese hunting around the world. And it’s always kind of sort of the same game. But the ducks played by a little bit different rules and you got to figure it out. So maybe you got to stalk them, maybe you got to glass them and hunt them, like they’re spot and stalk big game. Maybe you’re working snow geese to come in straight down on top of you or maybe you’re hunting Canada geese that set up like a big long runway out in front of you. Maybe you’re hunting mallards or maybe you’re hunting teal it’s just all very different and it’s something about those feathers – Like I said, I’m not a trophy hunter, when I do hunt big game, I’m not after a big deer, I could care less about a big deer. I want an old deer, I want an old, ugly rundown buck. I just want an old and I like old animals. And I don’t care – I’ve hunted big game in other parts of the world, I’m not a trophy hunter. And somebody asked me that surprise somebody not too long ago, I guess we were eating dinner in Azerbaijan and I made that comment, well, I’m not a trophy hunter, they go, how can you not be? You’re here hunting red crested pochards of all things. I go, well, see the first red crested pochard you ever put your hands on is a prize, but the rest of them looks just like the first, follow what I’m saying? It’s a duck. And again, it’s the experience and figuring out animal out being where he is and everything else that does it for me and big game just doesn’t – I know I’ve got a lot of clients that chase sheep and Ibex and some of these mountain animals and some of these jungle animals and I can see, I can kind of see similarities. But for me it’s just something about those feathers. And that social aspect if – I believe – let me articulate this way. I’m hunting with a friend of mine that hunts in Canada completely do it yourself, no outfitter just a few buddies and he goes up there and hunts and he made a lot of friendships with farmers and stuff and one time this past year he was telling me this, we enjoyed a great hunt together and he said, you know, a lot of the locals up here don’t hunt, they don’t understand, they don’t get why somebody would drive from all the way in the Deep South of America to come up here and spend a couple of weeks shooting birds, they just don’t get it. And so one day at dinner I invited them to come share a blind with me and they go really? I go, yeah. They said, shooting time is at 06:30, so if you could be there about 06:15 I’ll have everything set up, you all just come sit and drink coffee while I hunt and they did. And they both told him after the hunt, they said, watching all these geese from the kitchen window, there’s nothing like being right where they’re trying to land and here they are – he said in their 60s and 70s born and raised in Canada not waterfowl hunters and thanked him profusely and begged to come back every time they could. Because he had shown them something right there in the backyard they’ve never seen. And that was that relationship that was the calling and knowing where them birds are going to land and just coercing a wild bird that can fly anywhere in the sky. There’s no fence in the sky, there’s nothing containing them. And I’ve got to get them to 40 yards or closer. And I’ve got to imitate them, I’ve got to have this negotiation, I’ve got to have this conversation. I’ve got to kind of know a little bit about them, they got to know a little bit about me and I’ve got to seduce them into this small little part of the world. And that’s just to me, a very intimate relationship. And if that’s not close enough, go make your own decoys, go take out a 150 year old family heirloom shotgun. Go there’s all kinds of ways, go make your own call. I mean, and once you start hunting birds over your own decoy as crude as though they may be, it just takes it to a whole another intimacy level. That’s what gets me about it.

Trey Bowman: You said that and I watched your little short film on Blood Origins and if everybody if you haven’t seen that go check it out. I think, it’s bloodorigins.com. Ramsey maybe even have it up on his platforms. But what you talked about what really got to me was really two things. One the connection. The connection to the sport not just the duck but the people you’re hunting with, the environment and all that. And one thing to me it got me was I have a 6 month old our first child, our 6 month old little boy. And you told the story about the daddy and the sun hunting and you told him you said um kids don’t spell love DUCK they spelled TIME and that right there stuck out to me big time. Like especially being I guess being a new dad that really hit home is, hey man what we’re doing here, yeah we’re shooting stuff, we’re having a good time. But the connection and the time we’re all spending together that’s what hunting is all about.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right, that’s what it’s about to me. And I think I think we all go through stages and phases and when I was young it was all about getting my hands on them critters and shooting them and having – it was that and now as much as I love to shoot and boy do, if I didn’t, I’d just be a photographer right? I’d just go out there and watch birds with binoculars. I do like to hunt and I do realize the implications of killing that animal. But it’s something about sharing it with somebody new with a child, with family, with friends and sharing that moment and no matter where in this world of matter – here’s an example of like a common language we all speak. We went to Azerbaijan which is 8 miles north of Iran, right on the banks of the Caspian sea where we hunt this big wetland and you get out there in the mornings and step off on these little P-row, I mean, they’re just like this tiny little double points on reach in P-row and you sit down and your gear is loaded and that boy stands in back and starts push polling 30 minutes, 40 minutes, 50 minutes maybe off into the marsh to a duck hole you set up and you start to hunt and even with the modern technology of google translate like I can go down to Argentina and Mexico and we can hand the phone back and forth and have a pretty good conversation with google translate, that don’t work in Azerbaijan. It’s like, yes, no hungry duck bad good, I mean it’s just one word translations and everything else is out the window but it don’t matter you don’t need the phone. We were push polling out one day this past year pitch black dark and those boys don’t even really want you to turn on their phone but because they can see perfectly well and pitch black dark. You know the water kind of shines and they know where they’re going and when you start off, you know maybe 2 or 3 boats there together because each hunter by himself going to your own respective blinds and one of the clients said, gosh, the only thing I wish is – I’m so frustrated because I can’t talk to this guy. I said, what do you mean? He goes, well there’s no common language they should actually learn English. I go dude, he’s a duck hunter. He said, what do you mean? I go, he’s a duck hunter. This guy is not just a push poller, this guy is a duck hunter, probably a market hunter, he’s a duck hunter. I said, speak his language, we all talk the same talk you don’t have to utter a word, you don’t have to say a word and it’s the truth and it doesn’t matter. I’ve been to Pakistan, oh boy, what an incredible experience that was. It’s so different than anything I’ve ever done. I’ve been to Africa, I’ve been to all these countries, they don’t speak English and if they duck hunt they get it. Now trust you me they get it. They made duck hunt differently. Now, we Americans have elevated it to absolute sheer the first world country art form, everything is art form. Our guns, our ammo, our camo, our boots, our gear, our boats our motors, our ammo everything is the very best in the world. But the way we hunt is absolutely perfect because it has to be. And other countries you go to you can relax a little, you can play, you got to still play a clean game, play by the rules I call it. But if the wind in your face, you might do and then you have to do that sometimes. You have to hunt with the wind in your face, you have to hunt with the sun in your eyes. You just got to play a clean game and play the cards you were dealt, that’s just how it is. But they get it and it’s like you go to all these countries and it’s so different than America, but because you’re with duck hunters, there are just many similarities, the language doesn’t matter. You point, you raise your hand, you make facial gestures, I mean it’s just easy because you’re a duck hunter and they’re a duck hunter. And sometimes me and my guide will get out there and we’ll look at each other and I’ll point over here, I don’t say a word, he looks at me and he ain’t just throwing decoys and he looks at me, he’s asking me what I want to do. And I’ll point over here to my left and that’s where the decoy start going. And he’ll look at him again, I’ll point on my right and that’s where the decoy start going. And he look at me again, I’ll point straight ahead and that’s where the mojo goes. And sometimes he don’t ask because he knows how he wants to hunt this place and that’s how we work and it’s good. I mean, it’s very rewarding to me to hunt like that.

Trey Bowman: Well Ramsey I got to – and I can relate to this to an extent. I’ve been fortunate enough to chase turkeys in the States and I try to keep going and everything else and one day I want to see the country, that’s how I want to see our country is by chasing turkeys. Now tell me, what’s your pitch to somebody out here that’s listening right now and they’ve been thinking – they’ve always wanted to go off and do this, make a duck trip like this. What is your pitch? How can you sell them right now on – they’re going to have to save up money, they’re going to have to dedicate this time, they’re going to have to plan this out, sell me, go ahead and just sell me on that. And then also, why do we need to go through get ducks? What do you offer? What sense of – I’m lost for words here. Just why trust you with that also?

Ramsey Russell: That’s a good question, man. Let me take a deep breath, try to answer a question like that. But a lot of our clients, a lot of our clients come to us on the 2^nd, 3^rd time – I would say that the bulk of our business – and I don’t mean the guys that just called and book a trip, I mean our core clients. We’ve got clients that book every year every other year everywhere they travel every single place they go, they hang their ring on us. And their words not ours, there’s thousands of testimonials on the website, I can’t possibly that I don’t have time in the day for the rest of my life to get them all put up but they’ve been with the other people. It’s a truth in advertising, I had a guy ask me this just Monday morning maybe. He said, I got a question for you, I said, yes sir, he goes – he’s shopping from Mexico wants to go duck hunt he’s been all over the internet, he says, I noticed on your page and the reason I called you is because all the information is there all the prices, all the rates are they right? I go, yes sir, he says everything is on there. He said, how come it’s not on every other body’s page. I go, I’d ask you the same question. How come somebody doesn’t put all the information online? How come they don’t even have a web page? Why is that? Why aren’t they willing to put all the numbers out on the web page for all the world to see? That’s a question everybody should ask themselves. That’s number 1, number 2, it’s a sad dog that can’t wag his own tail, but I’m not a bragger. I hope it just doesn’t come across like I’m beating my chest because I’m not. But here’s a very big distinction between what somebody like me does, what I do versus what an outfitter does. Just imagine you’re at a hunting show, you’re walking around, you want to go to this particular destination when you talk to an outfitter there’s one – it’s like going to the spinner baits at Walmart and there ain’t but one hanging there, just imagine it’s a big white spinner bait hanging up right there and that’s who you’re talking to. And if you don’t buy that spinner bait, that man don’t make a sale. And I have seen it time and time again that some foreign outfitters will promise you the absolute moon point in case. I’m sitting at down at Safari club this year and a kid 17-18 years old and his daddy comes by and we talk and carry on the next day, first thing in the morning, here they come tearing down man, I couldn’t blah-blah, the kids just face me, I follow you on Instagram and I mean, I didn’t recognize, he’s talking 90 miles a minute and I get to talking to his dad and they’re like, yeah, we went to Argentina we did a combo hunt last year, he said, I wish we’d known you. I wish I had called you and said, well that’s okay. I said, how did your combo hunt go? He says, well we killed so many doves, it ain’t even funny. He said, but there weren’t any ducks. I said, well who’d you hunt with? He said, that guy down there in the yellow booth and I said, in Cordoba? He goes, yeah, I said, well what did he tell you, why there weren’t any ducks? He goes, well, he just said it wasn’t cold enough, they hadn’t migrated down yet. I said, great. I said, well, just so you know, for future reference, there’s no continental migration in Argentina. He said, really? I said no, there’s no continental – those birds they’re nomadic, they’ll move a few 100 miles here and there. But they’re as soon to go north, east, south and west as they are any particular direction, there’s no continental migration. And I said, that’s number 1 but number 2, that guy you’re pointing to in Cordoba is a dove guide and there are no ducks in Cordoba and what few ducks, they are strictly protected because it’s mountains, they’re far and few between, there’s not duck habitat. He goes, well, he told me there was, I go, of course he did, you bought it, didn’t you? You see what I’m saying? And I can’t do that because the reason we have multiple outfitters and I’m using Argentina as an example. Do you want to go shoot ducks? Do you want to go shoot baited ducks closer to Buenos Aires or do you want to go to the end of the world and shoot one of the wildest, most remote duck marshes that I’ve ever encountered? Or do you want to shoot doves and ducks? Do you want to shoot ducks, doves, pigeons and geese? What do you want to shoot? I got a whole selection of spinner baits here. Which one best suits your need because here’s the distinction in myself and a foreign outfitter. I’m right here in Mississippi, you could drive and knock on my front door and put your hands around my neck if you need it to, you follow what I’m saying? I’ve got a reputation to behold and again, my obligations is to my clients. And in terms of why somebody should do it, why they should save their money, one of my sayings is and I truly believe that based on my own personal life history life’ short, don’t take life for granted because tomorrow ain’t going to come always. They’re going to be more tomorrow for some of us than others. I’ve got a small little camp house and I’ve got a little taxidermy in there, but a whole lot of pictures. And after 20 years I can walk down and look at those 8 x 10 photos. And there’s a buddy of mine, he and I are tuna fishing, he died at 50 years old. There’s a buddy of mine down in South America duck hunting, we had some incredible hunting, came home and had a stroke in the mid-40s they’re client of mine, a very respected mentor of sorts, went to bed one night at age 66 and didn’t wake up, I’ve got a dozen clients like that. And think of what is it if it’s not duck hunting, if it’s turkey hunting, if it’s deer hunting, if it’s golf, what is it that you love to do? What is it you love to do? Here’s my suggestion do it. Because there’s no guarantee, you know what I’m saying? Make a little time for yourself.

Trey Bowman: You’re exactly right. And I think you hit it right there and Ramsey, they’re about to throw us out of this studio. So, I want to give you the last few minutes here, the last minute or so. I want you to plug everything and where everybody can find you, social website, everything right now.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, thank you all very much for listening. You all can find me getducks.com. Videos, testimonials, hunt details the whole ball of wax like that. But in this day and age social media, we do have a YouTube channel, we got a short film series we call Life’s Short, Get Ducks. Try to put out 4 or 5 episodes a year. We storyline – I mean normally when the world is normal, I spend 225 days a year traveling and I storyline it completely on Instagram @RamseyRussell.Getducks. We do have a podcast airing in the next week, first episode, Duck Season Somewhere. And think of it as fireside chats with duck hunters and conservationists. So, I’m everywhere.

Trey Bowman: One thing, we’d love to have you back on because there’s a few things, especially on the conservation and political side and you’ve been all around the world and we want to get your input, your thoughts, nobody else’s just yours on a few things and like I said, we’d love to have you back and we appreciate it. Yeah, we appreciate it. I feel like we read the first chapter on the Book of Knowledge, absolutely Ramsey, I appreciate you coming on.

Rocky Leflore: I’d love to have that conversation.

Trey Bowman: We will definitely do it. Well, thank you for having us on. Everybody again, you can find us @Tomorrow’s Hunter on Instagram, Tomorrow’s Hunter on Facebook, Carbon TV and Waypoint TV. Until next time, see you guys.

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