Spoon and Crockett: The Shoveler Show

Rocky Leflore: Welcome to the End of the line podcast and this is the special edition. You’re in for a special treat because we are going in camp with Ramsey Russell in Idaho and friends. We’ve got Mike Morgan there, we’ve got, Ramsey, I’m going to let you, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to let you introduce everybody, how about that?

“Blair Findley… flew all the way from Australia to talk about shooting shovelers.”

Ramsey Russell: Let me tell you where we’re at? We’re at the 1^st Annual Snake River Hunt. We’re at, right now I’m up here in Idaho with a bunch of friends. We are at the toxic calls international headquarters and laboratories. Mike Plein owner of toxic calls our host, he knows the place like the back of his hands. I’ve got Garrett Walker of Quack Rack. Got Mike Morgan, he and I go way back in the shoveler killing days of mojo outdoors and we’ve even got a special guest here and that we were going to talk about these shovelers, this guy flew all the way from Australia, his name is Blair Findley. Who I hunted with over in Australia and he’s going to weigh in about shooting shovelers because that’s a big deal for them over there now.

“Mike Plein… knows the place like the back of his hands.”

Rocky Leflore: Well guys, I want to welcome you to this special edition. I think it’s going to be a pretty cool because look, one of the things that I’ve even talked to Will and Troy about, we’ve talked many times about, they have poor phone service over cotton mouth is doing a live edition with them. So, I’m going to say you guys are pretty special being on this first in camp edition and Ramsey kind of put all this together and I think it’s going to be pretty cool. But I want to start off with this Ramsey because you and mojo took the internet by storm last week. And let me give a little back story into what happened, Ramsey as a guide played a little joke on Terry Denmon, owner of mojo and Ramsey, I’ll kind of let you take over from there.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, well I met Mojo, I met Terry Denmon years ago through my friend Mike Morgan. I’ve known Mike since I was 19 years old. And we reconnected and started Duck hunting together. One time we were down in Argentina and we shot a bunch of ducks and we were listing off species we shot and somebody said shoveler and Terry Denmon stop and held his finger said, no, I do not shoot shoveler and I did not shoot a shoveler. And I had no idea it was going to take me and Mike the better part of a decade to bring Terry over to the dark side, shooting shoveler but Terry does kind of make a big deal about not shooting shovelers. And I got to tell the story. I know Mike can tell it too but, few years ago we was hunting with OJJ Kent and he had a stock tank just loaded with shovelers and Mike and I shrugged and said, yeah, let’s go shoot it. And we shot, I don’t know we’re six in the blind, we shot six limits of ducks, one green wing and all shovelers and the name of that episode was Spooning Crockett mojo outdoors. Well, Terry Denmon saw the photo and sent Mike a text and says that does it. I’m never letting you and Ramsey film mojo again without adult supervision. So, we’ve been knocking around idea. And just for good fun, I always, when I’m around Terry, I say, you know, you all really have got pin tail and gadwall and blue bills, how come you don’t have a shoveler decoy? And he always shrug it off and made a big deal about it, stuff like that. So, when I ran across Jason choli’s carving site and saw what he was doing the retrograde those things. I just had this light went off. I said, I’m going to get old Terry Denmon with this and this is going to be funny. So, we put together that little old decoy and really had no idea it was going to blow up like it did. And but it’s been a lot of fun. You know, I don’t know how in the world we’ve been talking about this the last couple of days, how in the world, shovelers are in such a bad reputation. I mean they’re a duck, you know, moped of the duck world –

Rocky Leflore: Hold on Ramsey, you got to back up the design of this decoy, this thing has gold teeth and it is smiling heavily.

Ramsey Russell: Well, they call them smiling mallard and I don’t know, it just came to mind. I mean just that’d be what I’d imagine a shoveler looked like if he was on bugs bunny, you know, and just like that and the, Harper almost didn’t do it when I started describing this to Jason, he started crawfish and wanted to get out of it when I told him it was a practical joke. Oh yeah, he jumped in with both feet. And you know, there was all kinds of ways we talked about doing, I was going to put a Hillary for president sticker on him, you know, somebody said, why would you do that? I said, well because of a shoveler could vote, you know, we vote democrat. You know, we talked about putting Oscar Mayer baloney, him holding that but who knows, maybe Fish and Wildlife service, will call it bait and have Oscar Mayer on this baloney snatchers wing or something like that. But we’ve just had a ton of fun with it.

Rocky Leflore: I got to ask, have you heard any statistics on video views or how many people have requested the shoveler decoy, spinning shoveler decoy?

Ramsey Russell: It was a bunch. The carver, he just declined to carve. He had over 200 requests to carve that decoy within 24 hours. Somebody offered him $600 to carve him one just like it. And he just said Ramsey, I can’t, I got too much time in that decoy I can’t do it. Terry Denmon love the response so much they’re actually going, I believe make a decoy just like it to include the gold too just as a novelty item. I mean there are very serious decoy company, you know, change the way people duck hunt and the productivity of duck hunting but he liked it so well and the public response was so enormous, they’re just going to roll with it and it will probably be out this summer time available in the store near you.

Rocky Leflore: I want to ask you this because you told me this last week Ramsey, somebody actually sent you a direct message on Facebook wanting to buy that actual decoy, am I right?

Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah, they want to buy that decoy. And I said, well I don’t know if mojo is going to make this and she wrote back and said no you don’t understand, I want to buy that decoy for my husband for Christmas. And you know, I really kind of, I ain’t lie to you, I almost kind of went into this joke thinking I was just going to give it to Terry and once I laid my hands on it I couldn’t part with it. So, I did let him hunt with it and hold it a little bit, but it’s mine and we had a lot of fun with it up here in Idaho too. Mike has got Mike Plein got tremendous hunting up here, a lot of mallards, a lot of Canada geese and he said they don’t shoot any shovelers and Mike Morgan and I said, oh if there’s a shoveler to be had, we can find him. We’re from Mississippi, we’ll find that duck. So, he’s challenging us to shoot a shoveler and we’re bound determined to do it. Yesterday we shot golden eyes, you know, and today we’re going to target shoppers, the only one in the state probably.

Rocky Leflore: Well, Mike, I want to bring you in real quick because you kind of took the internet by storm this past summer, being in the shoveler video. Now, that was pretty cool also.

Mike Morgan: Yeah, again, when Ramsey and I started, you know, we’re duck hunters. If it’s a teal day, we shoot to teal, if it’s a mallard day, we shoot mallards, if it’s a spoony day we shoot spoony. And I hold every one of them just as high. I’m a duck hunter. I’m not a mallard hunter, I’m not a gadwall hunter. I’m a duck hunter. I shoot them right in the duck every time I can. And with these spoonys, you know, Ramsey saying has always been a decoy, like drunk sailors and anything, the decoys and pretty and I can cook them up and they taste just as good as mallards, that’s what I’m going to shoot. I love shooting them. You know, I was asked to be the president of the boot lip duck club by Kevin Blake Weldon and who’s got them funny videos out and I mean, I jumped right in the middle of it. I called him the other day said, I want to re-up and I want to go back with reelection again because I don’t want to lose my status and position as being the head of the spoony. You know, I’m all pro spoony from the get go and I want to see them right up there on the level with green heads. You know, if you shoot a spoony full power to you brother, that’s what, I mean, I’m all about it and they taste good, they look good, they decoy good. You know, we got a new saying says spoony’s decoy and like I said, spoony decoy, they stick to the decoys like tight underwear on the fat boy. And as long as that goes, I’m shooting spoonys.

Rocky Leflore: Oh my Lord. The boot lip duck club video that’s good stuff.

Mike Morgan: Yeah. They need to go under Kevin Blake Weldon funny hunting videos. I think that kind of what it is. He’s got a video on it. We went up to Arkansas during heavy spoony population up there and we went up there and did a video on it and it’s just what spoony shootings all about.

Rocky Leflore: I want to ask you and anybody can answer this question, but I want to ask this question, why since the late 90s have we seen this huge boom in the spoonbill population?

Mike Morgan: You know, I don’t know, it’s what you look for. You know, people just when they see a spoony, they kind of look the other directions like they’re embarrassed to shoot or something. Look, me and Ramsey aren’t embarrassed, were right there in the middle of it, that’s what we’re all about. And so I think people see more spoony than they fess up to.

Rocky Leflore: You all must be having a real good time, we cut out.

Ramsey Russell: Oh technical difficulty. It’s getting close to Christmas time and so many people want pocket calls for stocking stuff. You know, his phone is sitting here blowing up while we’re having our interview, you know, but we’re back online now.

Rocky Leflore: Well, back to the explanation of the boom in the shovelers because I can remember the first time I saw a shoveler in 1996. I was riding down the road in between Cleveland and Moorhead, Mississippi and I saw one sitting in the field and I was like, what in the world is that? And now just about every field, you drive by has a ton of shovelers sitting in it.

Ramsey Russell: To me it’s probably got to do it with habitat changes. They’re very specific foragers, they like a certain habitat and in terms of maybe their production, just whatever habitat they’re breeding in some of those little pools or ponds up there in Canada are just not under pressure being converted into agriculture. That’s the easy answer. And but you know what I’ve always wondered is how they’re trash ducks, how the heck is a shoveler a trash duck really? And I don’t even like to hear the word trash duck because it just devalues newer resource. But you know, here’s an interesting aside. You know, I talked to duck hunters all day guys want to go around different places to shoot different species and probably the number one most requested species in North America is a cinnamon teal. And I hate to kill the romance and of it all just a beautiful bird, but you want to talk about the trash duck, the place he hangs out, he goes into places a shoveler just wouldn’t be caught dead. They like a big mucky stinking bottom. You know, that’s what cinnamon teal like their diet is real heavy to that size. Just a mud bottom and nasty habitat. And like in California on the lower side of the rice fields where you see the shovelers and the cinnamon teal hanging out together. And I was telling Mike Morgan, we’re doing this wing beat deal, collecting wings. And I said, you know, 99% of any duck hunter in North America couldn’t, if I gave him a wing off a shoveler and a blue winged teal they couldn’t tell you, which is which. I mean, they’re practically cousins the blue wings and the shovelers their wings are almost identical, but anyway.

Rocky Leflore: But you know, one of the biggest mistakes by regular duck hunters, is that they think a shoveler is a diver, but they’re actually a puddle duck.

Ramsey Russell: They’re puddle duck. It’s like Mike said earlier, I say it is either trump’s pretty. You know, if you’re raising kids in this day and age, especially in a duck season like here in Mississippi or practically the whole country, you know, you got kids in the blind, they need to shoot and you know what kids are just like my dogs, they don’t differentiate, they just need to shoot and have a good time and shovelers are they’re plentiful, they’re abundant. My kids don’t care, I bet your kids don’t and just let them shoot, have a good time and they’re not bad eating if you cook them right. I mean it tastes like duck to me, you know, takes exactly like a duck. And but anyway, we came up here to Idaho myself and Mike and hunting with some buddies up here, Mike Plein and Garrett walker. And I just wanted them to be weigh into this, you know, both of these guys are very active in the industry and have done a lot of good things, got a lot of exciting coming on. I mean everybody, I know, listening everybody has seen the Quack Rack. We all drive Polaris ranger back home and I kind of said, there’s two kinds of Polaris ranger on here. One that had a Quack Rack and the one that wants it. And Garrett’s a real interesting guy, an accomplished hunter from down in Texas and you know, down Katy prairie, man shovelers just, that’s just the tour de jure. I mean those birds are, shovelers are part of the scenery down there and they shoot a lot of good pin tails and different species like that. Rocky, last night we were talking and about this shoveler and one of our guests here, Blair Findley from Australia. He had some pretty interesting things to say about shovelers over in Australia. I’d like you to hear some of his thoughts. You know, like, Blair, would you tell them about, hold the phone and tell them about like last year when they were going down, everybody wants one of most trophy birds.

Blair Findley: I guess, one of the biggest things with our shovelers is that it’s considered reasonably rare birds, so in Australia it’s treated as a trophy birds, we’re restricted in how many we can shoot and in a good season we can take two last season we couldn’t take any and that upset a lot of hunters because they wanted to go and they want to be able to get their shoveler as a trophy bird at some yeah, it’s held in pretty high regard as you say, there’s a lot of people who think it’s a bird that’s not going to eat well. And I don’t know what the problem is with that. It’s as good as any bird I’ve seen, it decoy beautifully and you dropped the hammer on them and they fold up in the decoys just like any other birds. Yeah, I think people just need to stop leaving the shoveler alone.

Rocky Leflore: I would have to say that’s the most unique voice we’ve ever had on The End of the line podcast.

Ramsey Russell: He ain’t from around here, Rocky.

Garrett Walker: He got a boomer rang hanging out of the pot.

Rocky Leflore: Put another shrimp on the Barbie.

Blair Findley: Yeah. Petty good. I’ll get you a can of fosters and we’ll have a good day.

Rocky Leflore: Oh my gosh. I can’t stop laughing, that’s a cool voice. Hey, our American women, I’m sure are falling all over that.

Mike Morgan: We got a write in program going on now.

Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah. Okay. Mike had a point, he was going to say.

Mike Morgan: Hey, Rocky, we got a call in program going on right now, we want all your listeners out there to help us out. We want them to go to toxic calls.com and just big Mike Plein, we need a spoony call something fierce and he’s the man that I know somehow can make one. So just go to toxiccalls.com and send Mike a little old love letter and beg him please to make us a spoony call.

Ramsey Russell: Didn’t you tell me you all hunted together first time Morgan, then you tell me you implied all together and he shot a shoveler down in Tennessee or something?

Mike Morgan: Oh yeah. Me and Mike and where were we at? That’s right, yeah. We were at Mallorca state and he comes down from Idaho and you know, we’re doing a little right on the edge of a flooded cornfield and a spoony comes by and he waxed that spoony and look, it was a race to get out there and get him. We have five pirouettes there in and the water did all kind of stuff and put that on TV and people, you know, people just, they enjoy seeing people that are having fun. And we had, I had as much fun shooting them spoony as I did waiting half a day to shoot six more mallards. But whatever is fun, that’s what you need to be doing.

Rocky Leflore: Well, there’s such a, I’ll say this, there’s a large crowd of people that are out there that love shooting spoonbills. But there’s a smaller crowd out there that shame those that do and are proud of it.

Mike Morgan: Yeah, they’re just closet spoonbill shooters they’d shoot them too when they’re by themselves. You know, friends take you hunting good friends shoot spoony where you while you’re out there hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Shovelers are the moped of the animal kingdom. You know good and well, everybody shoot them, just some people are embarrass to talk about it.

Rocky Leflore: Well, they hide them on that stream, I love to see the way that they shift them to the back and you can barely see that bill in the picture.

Ramsey Russell: You can’t hide it. You can bury it up with 100 mallards and that orange bills hand of shoveler still going to stick out but you go shoot a limit of green heads and two of them are banded and all everybody points out of that shoveler on the strap. Hey, I’m going to hand the phone over to Mike Plein. I want him to go into detail about this new shoveler call he’s making.

Mike Plein: All right. I don’t even know where to go with that one Rocky, does it come with a gold too?

Rocky Leflore: I’ll tell you Mike, it’s going to have to be somewhere in between the mallard call and a blue wing teal call.

Mike Plein: You know, we’re going to have to do some intensive research and field testing before we bring this thing to market but if it can be done, we’re going to try it.

Rocky Leflore: And look, you’re going to have to perfect it. I don’t know if you’ve heard those spoonys when they’re feeding the sound that they make, you ever heard that before?

Garrett Walker: Rocky. That’s not what I would say down here. They go baloney, baloney and they come right here when you do that.

Rocky Leflore: I think that’s going to be the most difficult for you to perfect is that feeding chatter that the shovelers make.

Mike Plein: The boloney feeding chatter, you know. I believe, and this is my prediction in the world is we’ve had the world’s duck calling championship for over 70 years how its stuck out there. It won’t be long and somewhere in Mississippi or it could be a carving contest, I don’t know, but there will be the world’s spoony calling contest hit the scene and you want to talk about the good callers coming out of the woodwork. That’s where it’s going to come from. I mean those are the perfectionist of the world. Yeah. And it’s a global bird. So, definitely the, we’ll have Australian and everything in the contest there themselves.

Rocky Leflore: Brian or Oscar Mayer or they can be the sponsor of it.

Mike Plein: That’s not a bad idea. You know, up here in Idaho, we get, we raised a lot of spoonbills on a very serious site. We do raise them. They were born here. They’re raised here, but they migrate very early on in our season. We raised a lot of cinnamon teal here, but they actually leave before the doves do, just the first hint of cold and they’re gone. So it’s funny I have quite a few friends that come up and hunting and just that, you know, a spoonbill is a beautiful bird and I have some California guys up here one time, which is very heavy in spoonbills and I literally moved them out of my way. I think there was three or four guys in the blind and I pushed them out of my way to get at this partially colored up spoonbill coming into the decoys. I mean that’s how bad we are. You know, they are true trophy in my neck of the wood.

Rocky Leflore: That brings me to my next question to you Mike, let me ask you this. In your world, no matter where you go to, I don’t care if you go to California, go to Maryland, go to Arkansas, the Dakotas, wherever you’re going to, there always seems to be a transit by somebody that’s one duck or one goose or something is a trash duck. So, in Idaho, what would be your trash duck?

Mike Plein: Oh well, that’s a hard thing to answer standing in this crowd in this point of the game because typically I’m a puddle duck purist, mallard, pintail, wigeon stuff like that are our primary what we’re here for and what we live by, but we get buzzed by these white shell cracker ducks that come through the decoys all the time and we’re actually annoyed by them, but yesterday Ramsey and Mike Morgan come up and that’s all they were searching for, was the white golden eyes and diver ducks, the buffle head, the ring neck and they really took me out of my element and I felt very odd. I mean it was almost as if I was in a different country trying to hunt ducks right? And it was very, very foreign that we were actually pursuing these other ducks or I have some other choice words we use for them but you know, we’re typically a mallard shooter. I mean that’s what we’re here for.

Mike Morgan: He had to shoot a coot yesterday.

Mike Plein: Yeah. I didn’t authorize this but we were actually cooking breakfast in the blind and a coot come by and some of these southern guys, you know they’re good eating next thing you know I hear a bang and one’s on my grill and I’m like, how did this happen? And they’re actually coots are not that bad to eat either. You know and spoonbills, I have had spoonbills. They’re great eating, there’s nothing wrong with them.

Rocky Leflore: The old water chicken. That’s what I’ve always called the old coot, the water chicken. They climb up on the dry land and pick around just like the chicken.

Mike Plein: That’s exactly true.

Blair Findley: They kind of tastes like chicken.

Ramsey Russell: Well, Rocky, since you call that old water chicken, what is your favorite recipe for coot and I’ll have Mike Plein share his.

Rocky Leflore: I’ll tell you the best thing in a coot is not the breast meat it’s actually the gizzards.

Mike Plein: You know, and Godly that sounds just like an echo because that’s all I heard yesterday was you need to get in there and get the gizzard out of it. And no, I wasn’t going that far and but we did, we literally, I mean we opened this bird up, he was steaming when I put him on the grill and season him with a little salt, a little pepper, some other seasons that I had in there and a little bit of sauce and just literally about two minutes on each side. And I hate to say this.

Rocky Leflore: I’ll tell you this the heart and the liver in the coot is really good too. But I’ll give you a little hint on that gizzard. You need to cut it open and clean the inside out and then cook it.

Mike Plein: You know, we had some South Louisiana guys here the other day and they could care less about the mallards and the geese. All they wanted to do when they heard our limit was 25 is they wanted to get on that river and shoot ‘poo do’ is what they call them ‘poo do’. They couldn’t get over how many we had and how big they were and I couldn’t believe it. But really, I mean when we drilled that one up, it was like a good stir loin steak. I seriously had a heart attack, it was great. Maybe I just haven’t had a good steak. I don’t know.

“We were in the timber and that mallard… so full of invertebrates.”

Rocky Leflore: Well, I’ll tell you what, for the leaders in the industry like you guys are, I’m glad that people are stepping outside of the trend of what a few say because I agree with you all. I think it’s wrong. Years ago when I first started guiding all I used to shoot was mallard 20 years ago when I first started my guide service and the population of shovelers as a group became a predominant duck for me as a guide and those that came in from out of state, they were happy just to shoot them until somebody told them it was wrong or said that it was wrong.

Blair Findley: I’ll tell you what Rocky, Ramsey and I traveled I don’t know how far it is from Mississippi up here to Idaho, but it’s probably 1400-1500 miles. We traveled all the way up here to hunt with mike. We chose yesterday to try to shoot divers and I had as much fun yesterday doing that as I have at the most expensive mallard duck club that there is shooting mallards. We cut up, we grilled out on, you know on the bar, we were on a little old bar, right on the Snake River. It was beautiful there. You know, mountains in the background. The weather was good. It was a little warm yesterday for this part of the country. No eyes in the 40s and we cook that stuff right there and shot buffle heads and what else we shoot mike? Golden eyes, redhead, wigeons, mallards and just had a good mixed bag and had a great time. And you know, I couldn’t have enjoyed that hunt more, then if I had been at the best duck club in the south, it was just, it was that much fun.

Rocky Leflore: You know, while I’ve got all, you all in a room together, I think it could be an interesting question to hear your thoughts on, I’m not going to ask you specifically about species, but what’s your favorite type of situation to hunt in? Whether it be timber, whether it be on the river, or whether it be a field? You know, I think that would be cool to get that answer from you guys.

Ramsey Russell: Start off Mike.

Mike Plein: Being from here in Idaho, we hunt the Snake River a lot. We you know, which is a very, I would like to call it a dangerous river for folks that don’t know what they’re doing or where to go because we have, you know, a lot of rapids, a lot of boulders that are submerged underneath the river that are, you know, scary, especially in the middle of the night when you’re going down river. But to answer the true question, I do love hunting in the river, but a good dry field mallard shoot is one of my favorites. When you shoot a big green head and he comes down and he lands there on the ground and he’s just as pristine and perfect as he ever was, he’s just dry, beautiful, perfect for the wall, there’s nothing that beats that, especially, you know, when they come in the large groups, we get them here, we’ll get them to 250-500 birds in a group and you know, they just tornado down and try to eat you alive. But that’s my answer, I’m going to send you over next to Garrett with Quack Rack here and he’ll weigh in.

Garrett Walker: You know, one of the things, you know, Quack Rack based out of south Texas and we do a lot of flooded rice field hunting and then some of our favorite hunts and what we hear from a lot of our clients down there is they want to do something different whether it be in the timber but one of the things that we hear from a lot of folks is that, they’ve never done to mike’s point a dry field duck hunt. I’ve been fortunate enough for the last several years to go up to Canada in October and I tell you what nothing beats what Mike said is seeing those 200, 300, 400 mallards lock up coming from a half mile away across the dry field. That’s what we and Mike and I both agree on is that those dry field hunts are pretty special and what we really like to do.

Blair Findley: I guess, where I’m from back home in Victoria, we’ve come 8.5 thousand miles or something to get here and we’re spoiled for choice little bit home. We can have a lot of different hunting scenarios. We can hunt dry fields. Layout blinds, we can shoot marshy swamps, rivers, creeks, you name it. To be honest, I’m going to say I’m boring, I’ll be that guy and I say this, no matter where I am and what I’m doing, if you put some decoys in front of me and a shotgun in my hand, you’ll have a smile on my face if there’s ducks. So that’s my as a –

Rocky Leflore: That sounds like a Ramsey Russell answer there.

Ramsey Russell: Well, he just stole my answer because really and truly my favorite hunt is the next hunt. You know, I say my top three favorite hunts are the first, the last and the next. And I like it all, man. I think it’s hard to beat flooded timber or flooded cypress and flooded breaks and I’ll say just in a generality, I like to hunt natural habitats. I like to hunt, sloughs and marshes and wetlands just that are pure natural. That’s just me. I’ve just had some great times around the world hunting those habitats and but yesterday just to get back on track, you know, we’re talking about a favorite hunt, that’s maybe not so much the habitat is just the hunt. It’s like yesterday I thought just bore out this thing. You know, if I look back at all the hunts in the world I’ve been on all the species and dead duck that’s not important. Well, I think most about is the people and last time I’m with some guys, I already knew, I meet some new people and we’re sitting on this absolutely beautiful river unlike anything we’ve seen in Mississippi, Rocky, there’s mountains up above us, ducks come whistling and streaking down the river, all kinds of different species. But we’re sitting there and we’re eating sausage and cheese and crackers and Plein cooked up a coot, you know, just for novelty or something. Welcome to Idaho. And but really it was just the laugh and the jokes and a good time and we still shot a bunch of birds and had a great time. And so I say my favorite places very similar just where I’m sitting at the time with a bunch of good folks having a good time.

Rocky Leflore: Oh yeah, that is the biggest part of a duck hunt.

Mike Morgan: All right, Rocky. I’m last but not least and I may be a little biased but being the president of the boot lip duck club, there’s nothing like sitting on the old stagnant pond out in the middle of a cow pasture and one of the big old fat boot lip, son of guns come grinning at you, like to say that gold to shining in the sun kind of sparkling it and shooting him right in the face. I love that it ain’t nothing like that.

Rocky Leflore: You know we had a huge discussion on the Duck South last week about, I got into a small debate with a mallard purist. This guy seemed to only shoot mallards and –

Mike Morgan: That’s all I shoot when they cooperate.

Rocky Leflore: I want on to say, look when the gadwalls are acting right and falling through the cypress timber, that’s one of the funniest hunts that you can go on. And I also said one of the other best hunts that I ever went on was old swag open, that was surrounded by trees and for some reason we had a ton of ring necks coming in and there’s nothing in this world like hearing a huge group of ring necks coming in. They sound like jets coming.

Mike Morgan: That’s it, you can hear them coming from a half mile off and you know they’re coming, they swoop in on you and I mean it’s just a blast. Any type of duck out there if it’s a duck it’s fun to shoot and that’s what I’m going to shoot, if they’re cooperating that day, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to have a fun time doing it.

Rocky Leflore: Well guys, let me ask this how many more, how much longer will you all be out there and what are the future plans on the future hunts over the next couple of days?

Ramsey Russell: Man, I don’t know, we were talking last night, Mike Plein is going home, he’s got a beautiful family, he had to go home and take care of them. We decided last night we’re just going to stay until he runs us off this country. And looks like he’s got plenty of turkey to share for Christmas. But now seriously I think everybody’s going to, we’re going to take off here Friday morning, it’s kind of interesting old Blair leave, we’ll leave Friday morning to get home Friday. Blair will leave Friday morning to get home, Sunday he just loses his two days traveling all the way back home to Australia. And but we’re going to hunt, we’ve got some field stuff plan, we’ve got some more river hunting done and some different species, you know it’s funny down in the same river a lot of these species we saw yesterday just utilized just different little parts of it. And so I think today mike’s got a wigeons hunt planned for us. And you know, we’re just going to have a good time. The plan is to have a good time and enjoy each other’s company and shoot and we don’t, nobody in our group wearing face bank, but we don’t care if they did, you know, we’re just out there to have a good time and hunt.

Rocky Leflore: Oh, you had to throw that in it, didn’t you?

Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah.

Rocky Leflore: Hey, Mike, I want to ask you a question because I think it’s something that people that get used to hunt in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee and Louisiana. One of the unique things about Montana, I mean Idaho, not Montana, but Idaho, is how fast the weather can change and how drastic it can change for you guys when you’re on a hunt. First what’s the weather like out there right now? But look at ahead, man, it looks like it is some extreme weather in the next few days.

“Hot water springs drop right into the river… ducks focus on areas like that.”

Mike Plein: And it does and it changes fast. You know, you always here if you don’t like the weather, stick around five minutes, but it gets pretty serious here. Today, it’s probably a high of 35º, 34º somewhere right in there and in the next day it’s supposed to drop out where the high will be 19 and the lows in the single digits. You know, we will get those arctic blasts that come through here and they changed the world on us and you know right now it’s kind of nice that Mike and Ramsey and everybody wants to shoot a couple different species because we need severe cold for our mallards to do what we want them to do and we need to freeze the little ponds in the desert, freeze the big water, so that they’re not wrapping up out in the middle. We need to freeze some of the refugees around here and send them to the river because the Snake River itself will never freeze and there are because there’s, you know, very deep currents and you know, bringing warmer water to the surface or there’s hot water springs that drop right into the river and you could be right by one of these springs and it’s 90° water coming out of the ground and the ducks will focus on areas like that and they’ll focus on shell beds and different habitat or structure or food sources that they’re looking for at the time.

Rocky Leflore: That brings me to a great, I want to ask you this, how does their diet change from just say a 40° day out there until it drops in the single digits, like you’re talking about. What did they go to as far as their diet? Because they really have to build up some fat to withstand it.

“Temperature dictates everything. I know where I’m going due to temperature.”

Mike Plein: Well they do and there’s some processes that I hunt with or some thoughts that I use when I pick and choose where we’re going to go for the day, you know, on the warmer days, if we have good bunches of mallards here, you know, if all of a sudden you see a upswing in temperatures then birds, they love the whole grains when the temperatures are cold. But if a bird keeps his diet strictly of that, it will kill them and they need to fluctuate, they need to move, they need their salad in their diet. You know, they need invertebrates. Remember mike we were hunting the one day and just literally like we were in the timber and that mallard was so full of these little yellow clams, it looked like acorns in his stomach is crawl there. So you know, they are getting, they move around, they get different food sources, they do different things and they definitely change and temperature dictates everything. I look at the temperatures more than anything. I know what I’m going to hit the river due to temperatures and I knew where I’m going due to temperature if that makes sense.

“That mallard was so full of these little yellow clams, it looked like acorns.”

Mike Morgan: Oh it makes a huge amount of sense because they, I have always heard that when you have those extreme temperatures, they have to eat something that almost burned in their system hot. Pumps them up.

Mike Plein: You are 100% correct. The whole grains, the wheat, the corn, those are hot foods. That’s a fire building food and they sit on that and the digestion process of that in the high carbohydrates burns and creates heat and that’s what they need. The salad is not, the seaweed, the invertebrates, that is not a heat building food source. So the colder the more grain they need to survive and whatnot.

Rocky Leflore: Well guys, I just want to tell you, this has been a huge opportunity like none other before that I’ve ever heard or seen in a podcast. Being able to join some of the most highly respected people in the industry in camp and I just want to thank you for that. All of you guys.

Mike Plein: It was great for having us. I appreciate it. You know, we’ve got two continents and I would hate to see the number of years of duck hunting education or knowledge sitting around five stools here. It’s definitely an honor for me to sit next to these gentlemen. So I appreciate for having us. Well guys, I think that’s a good stopping point, but I want to thank you again for letting us get a peek of what it’s like in camp with you guys. We want to thank all of you guys that listen to this edition of the End of the Line podcast, power by Duck South.com.

[End of Audio]

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