The Pied Piper of Duck Hunter‪s


Ramsey Russell on MEATEATER

Steven Rinella talks with Ramsey Russell, Hanzi Deschermeier, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis.

Topics discussed: How Jani is so not a trapper that he reminds himself to check traps by writing “coon” on his hand; Frito pie with mountain lion; Corinne and strawberries; breaking down what it means to flesh something out; the A.S.S. movement, the tissue issue, and how surface shitters are like meth heads; ocellated turkey stories and how badly Steve wants to hunt one; Ramsey on a life of collecting experiences; GetDuck.com being a sweet URL; booking as a shoddy industry?; incredible duck hunting in Azerbaijan and how the area where Ramsey hunts reminds him of the Mississippi Delta; the clean game and quiet pride; which countries are doing a solid job at conservation of the species?; Ramsey’s favorite recipes for cooking duck; Steve’s out-of-control horseradish and how Jani’s garden got up and moved; Hanzi’s rule on what not to do when cooking diver ducks; mouth calling; and more


Hide Article

Steven Rinella: This is The Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten and in my case underwear less. Presented by onX Hunt creators of the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters, download the hunt app from the iTunes or google play store, nor will you stand with onX. Janis, you know if you talk about what’s written on your hand, you’re going to get an enormous amount of feedback.

Janis Putelis: That’s fine.

Steven Rinella: A lot like what you really ought to do and what I would do and what he’s doing wrong.

“Listen, there’s a fellow in town from Tennessee visiting my brother in law, he found out that I’ve got a blue tick that, I’m looking to do some training with and he just had to meet me to give me his 2 cents about the whole situation, which I did and it was great. It was informative. He runs plots for bears there in Tennessee but I was glad to take it.”

Janis Putelis: Listen, there’s a fellow in town from Tennessee visiting my brother in law, he found out that I’ve got a blue tick that, I’m looking to do some training with and he just had to meet me to give me his 2 cents about the whole situation, which I did and it was great. It was informative. He runs plots for bears there in Tennessee but I was glad to take it. So yeah, we can talk about it. And I’ll read some

Emails.

Corinne Schneider: What’s written on his hand?

Steven Rinella: Coon. Meaning he’s a not a trapper Janis, I have never in all my experience of trappers, I have never met a trapper who is at risk of forgetting to check his traps. That’s all they think about. They’d be like writing breathe, don’t forget to breathe on your hand. But Janis had to remind himself to go see if he’s got a coon.

Janis Putelis: Yeah, well mostly because right now we’re very centrally located between my home and where this trap is and I don’t want to get home and then it had to turn around and drive an extra 15 minutes the other direction to go. Hopefully get my raccoon.

Steven Rinella: And you need the raccoon for?

Janis Putelis: I’m going to introduce Mingus, the blue tick hound dog to a raccoon.

Steven Rinella: If you want to give Janis some valuable feedback, tell him that he named his dog all wrong Mingus.

Corinne Schneider: It’s a great name.

Steven Rinella: Sounds like a disease. Did you hear Janis got Mingus real bad. That’s what I could picture saying to somebody.

Janis Putelis:  Most of the world really likes that name.

Steven Rinella: It’s a musician, right?

Janis Putelis: Yeah, Charles Mingus plays jazz. Used to play jazz.

Steven Rinella: What happened to him?

Janis Putelis: Died.

Corinne Schneider: That’s a good name origin.

Steven Rinella: Here in our home state raccoons are non-game, they’re not listed as a fur bear, it kind of gloves off on raccoons.

Janis Putelis: Yeah, same with rabbits, squirrels or at least the fox squirrels.

Steven Rinella: And your goal here in the end is to have a versatile hunting dog. No hound dog, versatile hound dog.

Janis Putelis: We’ll see. He’s very birdie on the grouse, very, and he’s not ranging too far, which could be a problem because Jake’s like –

Steven Rinella: How’s he going to catch the Lion?

Janis Putelis: Exactly, he needs to be able to cut loose and go on a tour by himself for 2, 3, 4 hours sometimes. But I mean, when we’ve been running trails, he’s not ranging too far, he’s been doing good, but I can tell you when he gets on a hot deer track, he’s got no problem ranging and going out of audible range.

Steven Rinella: I’m curious about your level of bloodthirstiness here. Let’s say that the dog is super good –

Janis Putelis: Isn’t?

Steven Rinella: No is, let’s say he does like to run mountain lions, he likes to run coons, do you picture becoming a recreational runner or are you going to be killing everything at trees and you’re just going to have all kind of dead raccoons laying around?

Janis Putelis: Oh, for the raccoons?

Steven Rinella: Yeah or just be like a little thing you go out and do.

Janis Putelis: They’ll be something in the middle, I imagine. I mean, if someone wants to hide, as someone who wants to shoot the coons and wants to hide then sure we’ll shoot them.

Steven Rinella: And how many lions? Because a lot of lions –

Janis Putelis: Most Lion hunters –

Steven Rinella: I don’t think Jake’s got one in a decade even though he treats 19 of them a year.

“Yeah, he put up I think close to 30 this winter. Most Lion hunters – Yeah, I’m a long ways from there. Mingus have a lot of work to do before we got to make those kind of decisions.”

Janis Putelis: Yeah, he put up I think close to 30 this winter.

Steven Rinella: And never shot one of them. The other day, we’re still eating it, I was down in New Mexico and we had a thing called Frito pie. You guys know what Frito pie is? Go and introduce yourself. Tell people what Frito pie is. This is our special guest.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve only seen them at sonic back home. Frito pie with Fritos and chili and cheese.

Steven Rinella: They sell that at sonic?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Janis Putelis: Ramsay just a little bit closer to the mic.

Steven Rinella: And say your name.

Ramsey Russell: Ramsey Russell.

Steven Rinella: And say what you like to do?

Ramsey Russell: Kill ducks. Yeah, that’s what – I mean, what do you call Frito pie?

Steven Rinella: I somehow, I don’t understand. I never knew it existed.

Janis Putelis: Tell me again, it’s Fritos with what?

Ramsey Russell: All right, corn chips, chili cheese, onions and jalapenos.

Steven Rinella: Yeah. So, I was down in New Mexico and they made chili with – he made like elk but you know people in New Mexico get all hopped up about it’s like, oh my hat is chilies and on and on. And they made very good new Mexican style chili in a pot. And you bring that out hunting with you just in a Tupperware and then you got cheese, onions, jalapenos, whatnot. And you take a bunch of Frito lay corn chips and like cereal in a bowl and instead of putting milk on it, you dump chili on it. Instead of putting sugar on that, you put jalapenos and cheese and whatnot on there and scallions. Like how I didn’t know about that is embarrassing.

Janis Putelis: But you certainly had chili-

Steven Rinella: But I just made it with mountain lions since I got home.

Janis Putelis: You’ve certainly had chili with corn chips in it.

Steven Rinella: I’ve put corn chips on it. It’s not like a sprint. It’s like the relationship between the chili –

Janis Putelis: Ratio is what you’re trying to say.

Steven Rinella: Ratio between the chili and the corn chips is that of cereal and milk, not that of between clam chowder and oyster crackers. So, I made a giant batch of that with the last mountain lion I had that still said 2017 on the package, I braised it down.

Janis Putelis: Yeah, I think I’ve got one loin left. No, it wasn’t from – is it the one that Pete gave me?

Steven Rinella: No, mine said 2017 on it. I had my last bag of my own and I had something that Pete gave me. God, this stuff is good though, man. That’s why I don’t think I’d be letting all those lions run.

Janis Putelis: No, I don’t plan on letting them all go.

Steven Rinella: I’m not letting them all run away.

Janis Putelis: Yeah, I’m a long ways from there. Mingus have a lot of work to do before we got to make those kind of decisions.

Steven Rinella: Yeah, getting a little ahead of you on that one.

Janis Putelis: Although Bart George, if you’re listening, Jake said, you know what you ought to do, you need to call your buddy over there in Washington, who’s treating more lions than anybody I know because he’s doing it for the government, you can’t even run hounds anymore in Washington, but he’s working for the government, doing all kinds of research and where most hounds men, I think, you’re doing really well, if you’re Jake and you’re putting up 25 or so. But this guy is putting up 20 in a month. He’s like, you need to just take Mingus out their –

Steven Rinella: Oh, do some government work.

Janis Putelis: And just hang out with him for a week. Jake keeps telling me, he’s like somewhere between 7 and 12, I think those were the numbers, somewhere in that range is where your dog is going to either get it and be like finished and ready to roll on his own or –

Steven Rinella: 7 – 12?

Janis Putelis: Tree lions?

Steven Rinella: Oh, they meant years.

Janis Putelis: No.

Steven Rinella: Because that’s also where they die.

Janis Putelis: 7 – 12. Treed Lions to where if he’s going to get it or she they’ve got it and they can go on their own. If they don’t then he’s like, I’ll probably start to get worried and start to think about moving that dog onto somebody that’s not going to hunt them.

Steven Rinella: He had a dog that got killed by a lion this year.

Janis Putelis: He did.

Steven Rinella: Bit her right in the head.

Janis Putelis: What’s crazy is that after that – those dogs they have such a one track mind when they have that smell on their nose. After that, when he came up to the dog, he didn’t know yet what had happened and the dogs still going on the trail because after that the lion had jumped and gotten treed like a couple 100 yards down the ridge or whatever by the other dog and the one that had been bitten is still working the track. But then he kind of started looking a little closer and realized, she wasn’t quite right. But yeah, it doesn’t happen often. But I’ve been really worn by my family, my girls that goes down with Mingus, I’m going to be have hell to pay.

Steven Rinella: I don’t know if you remember, but Floyd down in Arizona, those guys were telling us a story about tree in a lion that was in a tree on top of a rock spire. But you can picture down to Arizona right? Like some juniper or whatever, like with its roots grown into the cracks of the rocks, so anyways, it’s in such a position and the dogs somehow got up there, but they got up there in the dark and they couldn’t get up there with the dogs and the dogs are on the rocks, spire with a lion in a tree. They came back in the morning, in the middle of the night, the lion had come down, killed both the dogs, ate one of them went about its business making lemon out of –

Janis Putelis: Lemonade.

Steven Rinella: You know, I’m trying to say?

Janis Putelis: Yeah.

Steven Rinella: Corinne got her ass handed to her.

Corinne Schneider: I did.

Steven Rinella: Corinne went spouting off at the mouth about GMO strawberries. I never use that expression and the more I think about, I don’t really know like I get it, but I don’t really get it. Like implying that it was detached. You know what I mean right?

Janis Putelis: I think it means that maybe like you got it whooped so hard.

Steven Rinella: Where did that come from?

Janis Putelis: I don’t know.

Corinne Schneider: Steve is taking that literally.

Steven Rinella: We had this conversation yesterday, someone said – a similar conversation yesterday where someone said, we had a small part of an idea and we were agreeing in a meeting to expand upon the idea and someone said, well, let’s flesh it out. Now, okay. One thing you could be saying like, okay, here’s this skeleton of an idea and we will add flesh onto it to make it grow. That doesn’t seem like what they’re getting at. When you flesh something you’re reducing, you’re taking the hide and scraping it clean. I think that to say to flesh an idea, it would be that you have this big cumbersome ill formed over Ideated idea. And to flesh it out would mean that you’re going to reduce it down to like a crystalline clear idea. Handing asses to people I don’t know. Got her ass handed to her about off comments she made about GMO strawberries which really got people riled up.

Corinne Schneider: Yeah, people riled up.

Steven Rinella: And there’s two that were shared with me and they show that the breadth of personalities that we speak to on this show because one is very polite and he’s like sorry for the rant but this is the most common fallacy and on and on and I always believe in sharing information and we can all grow together and healing and hearing and then another guy – where’s the one that he writes in, other guy subject line, stop your nonsense dash strawberries and then goes to talk about how stupid everybody is, how horrible Corinne is. So you can pick it up with which ever gentlemen approach you want to take. You could be like listen to asshole or you could say, yeah in spirit of conversation, I will tell you what I was talking about.

Corinne Schneider: Yeah, definitely. I’ll take the latter approach. Yeah, if I stand to be corrected then I stand to be corrected. I think that in the spirit of not replicating and putting out information that is not backed up or that is not correct I totally welcome that –

Steven Rinella: That’s our spirit.

Corinne Schneider: Yeah. And yeah, if it’s like emphatically said with a little grumble and a little I – what’s his name? I won’t share his name. I hear you, I hear the frustration.

Steven Rinella: You’re talking to the mad guy?

Corinne Schneider: I am, I hear you and I appreciate that you wrote in, what I was referring to and I stand corrected.

Steven Rinella: You’re not going to double down?

Janis Putelis: No, because I’m probably wrong. I mean, yeah, I haven’t done all the extensive research because a lot of people wrote in, you weren’t alone. A lot of folks wrote in one thing that was interesting to me was –

Steven Rinella: I got to set the scene a little bit better. We haven’t done scene setting. We were talking about how is it that you can have such a giant bad, like where does Costco get these gigantic strawberries that don’t taste like anything. Why are they so big? Why do they look so good and taste so bad? And why is it that you can’t grow a bad strawberry in your garden? Like you can’t. I’ve never picked a strawberry from someone’s garden. It wasn’t like now, that’s a strawberry.

Corinne Schneider: And thank you to the – I believe it was a PhD student who wrote in, thanks Bob and offered some answers about that, we can probably go into that later.

Steven Rinella: When we cover that while you’re prepared to talk about the GMO comment? Corinne response was something about how it’s probably something to do with GM onus and how they bred them with fish.

Corinne Schneider: Right? So there is an article year 2000 from the New York Times, I’ve also seen some other things floating out there on the internet and obviously we have to be very careful with what sources we pay attention to. But I had not revisited this topic for years before I said what I said on the last podcast. And so the information that I had downloaded into my brain that I was walking around with was that one of the reasons why we have large strawberries that remain frost resistant or I should say they stay fresh and beautiful and plump looking for so long that it seems unnatural is because they are a strain part of – I might be using the incorrect terminology here, a gene from or a protein from arctic char combined with the strawberry actually makes the strawberry frost resistant and helps to preserve it for longer. To all you scientists out there, I hope that was a kind of basic, but –

Steven Rinella: That’s not true.

Corinne Schneider: But apparently that’s not true. Hopefully we get a lot more people writing in about this, what I have seen is that stuff like that does exist. I mean, there are scientists testing gene hybridization to make some fruits or vegetables taste a certain way or to extend the freshness of like, it’s not that this doesn’t exist. And so actually maybe I should call up our listener who wrote in and have a conversation about this and kind of – and flesh it out.

Steven Rinella: Flesh it out and do a follow up report.

Corinne Schneider: Yeah, I think that would be very helpful. But from the FDA.gov site that he sent in the email, it says GMO crops, animal food and beyond the question is what GMO crops are grown and sold in the United States and they are corn, soybean, cotton, potato, papaya, summer squash – hold on, let me just make sure that there aren’t like 57 things –

Steven Rinella: No, it’s not a long list.

Corinne Schneider: Alfalfa, Apple sugar beet and that’s it. And there’s no GMO strawberry –

Steven Rinella: No GMO strawberry has been approved. What he does go on to say is people shop with their eyes and they don’t shop with their taste. And he says, that when you go into the store and see if some giant strawberry, all they’re going for is, it has a pop to your eye and it has to be rugged and handle well and lasts a long time. And so there’s different ways they control the nutrients availability and when you pick it and all this that you get that ruggedness and eye popping bigness and no one cares what they taste like.

Janis Putelis: Do you have any strawberries popping in your garden right now?

Steven Rinella: Yeah, but they don’t last, the kids eat them.

Janis Putelis: I’m going to stop by and steal some.

Steven Rinella: Well, if you stop by, you’ll get one.

Janis Putelis: They check them real frequently.

Steven Rinella: They’re in there all the time and they’ve taken to eating the carrots, which are not like your pinky, big long pinkies. I have a very close person to me who I can’t name because he works for an agency and he needs to be tiptoeing about when he’s speaking for who and what. He goes, you could get a rid of GMO stuff, you better plan on starving off about a 3rd of the planet but go ahead. This is me speaking, personally, I have zero, like zero problem with GMO stuff and I’ll point out that there’s never been anyone that could prove in anything that would get scholarly consensus that there is a health implication from eating GMO foods. There’s just not. As off putting as that is to people because people want to hate them so bad, there’s nothing.

Hanzi Deschermeier: It’s a pretty robust dialogue though, wouldn’t you say?

Steven Rinella: Please, Hanzi. Like earlier you introduce yourself, Hanzi. You’ve never been on the show before.

Hanzi Deschermeier: No, I’ve not.

Steven Rinella: Ramsay our guests said, Hanzi like Fonzie, I never thought of that.

Hanzi Deschermeier: That’s the easy way to remember it.

Steven Rinella: Okay, give me your take on the robust dialogue. Eating GMO, not like what GMO does to crop systems, how it affects irrigation, pesticide use herbicides like none of that crap.

Hanzi Deschermeier: No, I think you’re on the money with saying there’s no like verifiable way to say this is what it does, right? But it’s only been around so long, right? I mean, we’re talking we’re not talking about like breeding like different crops and splicing different kind of crops together. Like one kind of apple with another kind of apple as the GMO it’s genetically modified. Seems like the dialogue is we’re talking about like marker assisted selection or some of these like really specific ways of genetically modifying, I mean how long have those been around? Like how do you do any multigenerational studies on that kind of thing? I don’t know I don’t have the answer but it seems like that’s an awesome question.

Steven Rinella: Meaning the assumption is there that someone will turn something bad up, so let’s start acting like we’re ahead of time.

Hanzi Deschermeier: No but the downstream consequences exist, right? We just don’t know what they are yet. So, how do we even ask a good scientific question? How do we do the scientific method if we can’t ask a good question yet?

Steven Rinella: Likewise, I think that you’re in the same situation when you want to say that they’re rant.

Hanzi Deschermeier: Totally. I agree. I’m just saying that the dialogue is good. It’s a good ethical debate going on here.

Steven Rinella: I don’t think it’s as good of a debate is why the strawberries at Costco taste like dog shit. That’s a real question.

Hanzi Deschermeier: That’s good.

Steven Rinella: Couple other quick things. I need to give a Father’s Day shout out to a guy named Dylan Shrubca. This is for Father’s day 2021. Happy Father’s Day Dylan Shrubca. And then also we have a thing we got to talk about real quick. We’ve come on the radar of the ass movement and the ass movement is – Janis break down the ass movement for me.

“Ass stands for anti-surface shitting. And it’s been a while since I’ve read this letter that – Yeah. And this fellow, I think he lives and recreates on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska. And he said it doesn’t matter fighting fire or hunting or fishing, he just says it’s out of control.”

Janis Putelis: Ass stands for anti-surface shitting. And it’s been a while since I’ve read this letter that –

Steven Rinella: We’ve gotten a lot – Do you want one of these?

Ramsey Russell: Sure.

Steven Rinella: Do you oppose people just going into the woods and defecating on the surface and not digging a cat hole?

Ramsey Russell: Cover your shit.

Steven Rinella: Oh so there you go, you remember. You can find the anti-surface shitting that you can find – what’s their social media handle? The guy’s last name is Booze interestingly @the_a_s_s_movement, can you check this Corinne?

Corinne Schneider: Can you say that again?

Steven Rinella: The ass movement. The anti-surface shitting movement trying to instruct people, inspire people to not defecate just out in the woods and leave their toilet paper blowing in the breeze.

Janis Putelis: Yeah. And this fellow, I think he lives and recreates on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska. And he said it doesn’t matter fighting fire or hunting or fishing, he just says it’s out of control. He says he sees way too much of this ship in quotes. It’s a real problem and there needs to be awareness around it and which is why we talked about the other day on the podcast about what are proper protocol was.

Steven Rinella: That’s what inspired us. His last name is legitimately Booze. I want to change my last name to Fever, Steve Fever, but now I’m jealous of Booze.

Janis Putelis: That’s real cute. And you don’t like my dog’s name of Mingus, huh?

Steven Rinella: No, if my name is Steve Fever by birth. So Corinne, can you double check, I’m getting this right on Instagram.

Yes, it is found them.

Steven Rinella: How many followers?

Corinne Schneider: Oh hold on, I was going to read out –

Steven Rinella: 6 million? The ass movement on Instagram.

Corinne Schneider: Well, they were just established in 2020 and they’ve got 1,183 followers at the moment.

Steven Rinella: So on their Instagram page, do you go and post pictures of poops that you found in the woods?

Corinne Schneider: Let’s see. Well, so far I’m scrolling, I see a lot of stickers and poo emoji’s but I wanted to point out, I’m on the firewild.com and that’s in the ass movement is part of this organization.

Steven Rinella: He’s a photographer too. So, I don’t want him mixing business and pleasure. Is the ass movement site for people to coalesce around the idea that you should not poop in the woods outside of a hole?

Corinne Schneider: It’s confusing because it’s the ass movement and it’s the firewild.com who we are. Fire wild is a wildland firefighter owned company and brand. Fire wild owns and established the ass movement in 2020 out of disgust and disappointment in seeing the tissue issue on fires, trails and all other public lands enjoyed in the great outdoors.

Steven Rinella: I think that what he should more – I think that he should morph his site into a place where you go to post – you know what we did our river clean up our river access clean up, I brought latex gloves and I picked up discarded camp money with my latex gloves on and bagged up discarded camp money.

Ramsey Russell: That’s real dedication.

Steven Rinella: I think it should be a place where you go post pictures of soiled wildlands when you come across evidence of surface scatting.

Janis Putelis: There is some of that in here.

Steven Rinella: Only 1000 followers.

Hanzi Deschermeier: Is there anybody that would like be counter to this? I mean, it seems like such an obvious. No, I’m going to go poop on the ground and leave it.

Steven Rinella: No, but do like, okay. Are meth heads pro meth or are they just meth heads? I’m asking, what do you think?

Hanzi Deschermeier: I haven’t met a meth head yet, who’s like got his like pro meth t-shirt.

Steven Rinella: I think surface shitters are like meth heads, they can’t help it. I hadn’t thought about it, they got trapped up in a lifestyle choices.

Janis Putelis: No, I think you’re giving too much credit if you’re saying that. I seriously like the first time that it came to – we weren’t going to quite fistfight over it, but there was –

Steven Rinella: Who you and me?

Janis Putelis: No another fellow down in Arizona we’re like a quiet hour long ride back to camp because –

Steven Rinella: He surface scat.

Janis Putelis: I had seen other signs and surface shitting before we went out into the woods and I talked and mentioned it, I was like, I can’t believe that. And then we get back to the truck or I don’t forget at some point, whatever he runs off to supposedly go flip a rock comes back and then it gets light and I look over and I’m like, hold on, is that yours right there?

Steven Rinella: After you talked about it?

Janis Putelis: Yeah. And he’s like, oh yeah, like that’s how we roll down here.

Steven Rinella: Who’s we?

Janis Putelis: And I don’t know, Arizona? I don’t know.

Hanzi Deschermeier: I’ve heard that in the desert that like you’re supposed to smear it to not disrupt Krypto biotic soil.

Steven Rinella: Yes, that is, but that does not involve, that’s bringing your teepee bringing teepee out or depending on conditions, you could always torture teepee though. I’ve been trying to get Spencer Newhart to do an article about all the crazy things have started forest fires. There was a teepee burning situation to start a big forest fire. There was a situation where some guys were having a gender reveal party – when I heard this story in my head thought that it was someone changing their gender and that was the party, but it wasn’t, it was someone who’s pregnant and his buddies filled a tanner thing with the appropriate colored powder so that he could shoot it with his rifle and it would blow up pink or blue and he would find out if he’s having a boy or a girl, I’m not joking that started a big forest fire. Woman burning love letters, her job. She was like a forest service employee burning love letters and started a big forest fire. And yeah there was a teepee burning scenario, so be careful burning your teepee. However, yeah, there are places where you’re supposed to smear on rocks. One of my favorite stories about flipping rock, you know this happened in O’Fallon Ramsey, you’re probably getting concerned that we’re not even going to get to you.

Ramsey Russell: No, I’m fine. I’m an adult –

Steven Rinella: Don’t worry. Okay this is a funny story. So, we were filming in Hawaii years ago and one of our camera guy’s Moe he got there early or something because he wanted to surf. He’s got a rental car, he rents a car, rent a surfboard, gets down to the beach, he doesn’t know what to do with his keys. So he finds this like conspicuous, easily identified rock and lift the rock up and throws the keys under the rock and then goes and surfs so it gets done surfing and he comes back up to the rock and flips the rock, but there’s no keys. He’s like, most have been another rock? So, then he starts getting into a panic, running around flipping all these rocks. None of the rocks look like the same rock, goes back, lift up the rock again, no keys. Eventually he realizes that someone had taken a growler had rolled the rock out, took a growler put the rock back but the growler stuck to the rock so that when Moe put his keys in the deuce, trying to use the –

Janis Putelis: Poo cement.

Steven Rinella: Captured the keys and when he would lift the rock up the keys would ride up with the rock. And only way later did he finally get around to looking and realized the keys and then he had to get them all cleaned up. So, next time you rent a car in Hawaii don’t lick the keys.

Corinne Schneider: Can I just circle back to one thing that –

Steven Rinella: You want to get back into your strawberry problem?

Corinne Schneider: No, Hanzi introduce yourself.

Steven Rinella: Yeah, what do you work for us?

Hanzi Deschermeier: Yeah, I’m a video editor here. Hanzi Deschermeier lot of letters there, but it’s phonetic and H. Long one. You don’t have to worry about that one.

Corinne Schneider: And this is your first?

Hanzi Deschermeier: It’s my first podcast ever.

Steven Rinella: Watch this Segway, you ready?

Hanzi Deschermeier: Yeah, let’s hear it.

Steven Rinella: The reason Hanzi is in here is he’s an enthusiastic hunter of ducks.

Hanzi Deschermeier: Fanatic even.

Steven Rinella:  Fanatic. And what better conversation for you to participate in than one with our guest

Hanzi Deschermeier: Ramsey Russell.

Ramsey Russell: Getducks proud to be here.

Janis Putelis: Is that clapping for your segue or -?

Steven Rinella: No, I was clapping to introduce the guest.

Hanzi Deschermeier: It was a good Segway, I’m impressed actually.

Steven Rinella: Tell everybody what you’re doing right now. 30 years ago, I had heard misinformation.

Ramsey Russell: It was misinformation. I wish I was in good enough shape to pedal across the country again. But 30 years ago I was 24, much younger and a college roommate and I rode bicycles from Bar Harbor Maine out to the Olympic peninsula just because we were young and it was there. 30 years later, there’s a stick in our spokes, nobody’s traveling his jobs, interrupted my job is interrupted. He calls up and says, hey, let’s go spin around for a couple of weeks camping bike. I said, let’s do it.

Steven Rinella: So, you’re doing kind of the same thing but you’re just interrupting the biking with driving.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, driving and just meeting with people and doing things. It’s more like a day trip. We drive here, we stop, we stay for a few days, we spent around a bike ride like we’re at home and go to the next destination.

Hanzi Deschermeier: So, have you stayed an enthusiastic bicyclists over the years?

Ramsey Russell: No, there was a long absence when I got busy and worked and did some other things, but yeah, I tried to stay in shape, so I like to ride bicycles. The thing about riding a bicycle versus real working out, I feel like a kid, who don’t feel like a kid riding a bicycle. but it was a heck of a summer Steven and we were just riding a bicycle and rode across the country and had a great time. But I see now we’re seeing America at 50 miles a day vs 80 mph it just created this wanderlust, it became manifesting what came later down the road,

Steven Rinella: What state were you born in?

Ramsey Russell: Mississippi.

Steven Rinella: Is that where you live now?

Ramsey Russell: Born and raised.

Steven Rinella: I caught you saying earlier, I overheard you saying when you’re out in the lobby there, that you appeared on a TV thing once, and they subtitled you?

Ramsey Russell: Oh my gosh, yes, way back when 15, 20 years ago, it was outdoor television show and everybody had nice accents like yourselves and they subtitled me. And I was trying to emulate and adopt the correct pronunciation of words, I’ve since given up, but they actually subtitled me. So I’d ask Hanzi, how are you all going to subtitle me today?

Corinne Schneider: Well, Sam who we heard about you from or through -?

Steven Rinella: Yeah. Sam is our talent scouter.

Corinne Schneider: Said you had a really nice draw.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a good description. Got a face for radio and an accent for Andy Griffith.

Steven Rinella: Tell people what you do for a living.

Ramsey Russell: We really we get ducks. And I love to say that, when you meet somebody and you say how are you? Oh, I’m fine, what do you do? I get ducks. But really we sell international duck hunts. We sell duck hunts on 6 continents duck hunting adventures, I should say.

Janis Putelis: How come not on 7.

Ramsey Russell: I haven’t found any on Antarctica yet.

Janis Putelis: Are there?

Ramsey Russell: I don’t think so. Too cold.

Steven Rinella: Yeah. I don’t know if I’m the edge of it somehow, at some point in time some pelagic duckish critter –

Ramsey Russell: Australia’s about as close as I’m aware. Maybe Tasmania. I don’t know how much closer you can get to Antarctica. If there’s ducks on Antarctica somebody let me know I’m heading that way.

Steven Rinella: So, you you’ve personally hunted ducks on 6 continents.

Ramsey Russell: Yes sir.

Steven Rinella: How many kinds of ducks?

Ramsey Russell: I believe I’ve shot – you know when I include subspecies 112 sub species of waterfowl plus, let’s say another 9 of the North American Canada geese so a 123 subspecies.

Steven Rinella: Yeah, but the number of North American Canada Geese taxonomists keep reducing it. It went from like 23 to 2.

Ramsey Russell: I think its 11 now. You’ve got Canada geese which are the big ones cackler geese which is the small ones, you’ve got 7 subspecies.

Steven Rinella: So they still accept that? I thought that they like with genetics, everything either gets more complicated or less complicated, but nothing has stayed the same.

Ramsey Russell: I think they sub group them into Canada’s and cacklers more for sportsman’s list. But there really are if you look there’s a lot of sub population of Canada geese when you get into it, they’re breeding and their migrations are isolated. I mean, they’re just are trying to think of one real quick. The dusky Canada goose comes down the pacific flyway, the interior start up and it’s up in the arctic and kind of come down to mid toward the Mississippi flyway through Ottawa Valley and peel over. James Bay population of the interiors come from a similar area but they don’t overlap and you can see that on band recoveries. So, you’ve got these little populations of Canada geese now, whether they’re becoming hybridized, who knows? But now I think they’re still accepted to be 11 total subspecies of Canada geese.

Steven Rinella: You’ve got all those?

Ramsey Russell: I need 2 of the pacific ones that I’m aware, I need the dusky probably have to go to Copper River Alaska area to get on those good. And I need, what I believe I need is the Vancouver, which is endemic more or less in the breeding area to British Columbia.

Steven Rinella: I’m just curious like, how’d you even get into the path that would lead you to being like an international, a world traveling duck guide.

Ramsey Russell: I was working for the US federal government. I went to college, I want to be a wildlife biologist, became a forester and I really left the Deep South to go up north in Canada to go – I wanted to shoot Canada geese, migrater Canada geese, real Canada geese and experience the prairies. And I went and brought some friends. The first trip I booked to Canada was just a disaster. Anybody’s booked enough hunts knows they exist. It’s just nothing like it was represented to be and just a complete and utter cluster. And I began to do my due diligence and met another outfitter in Alberta and brought a few friends. And the following year, a few more, in the following year a few more and he called me outside and said, hey, I’d like you to be my booking agent. I’m like, what the hell is a booking agent? I’m a forester for the US federal government. But he explained it to me and I started off just okay, I’ll help bring some hunters to this guy and things spun out of hand. I mean, it just one step. It just spun out of hand slowly but surely. I did not start out to say I’m going to hunt 6 continents and sell hunts on 6 continents, it just happened.

Steven Rinella: So, are you primarily a booking agent now or you have your own guiding outfit?

“I’m a booking agent, there’s so many mental steps and what we do and I hate that we’re booking agent because there’s a lot of nefarious ones out there in this business that don’t do their due diligence, and it’s very important to me that I’m going to represent to you, that this hunt is better than some of the other ones down there that I’ve been there myself but I’ve been to them all, so we go to them and we scout them.”

Ramsey Russell: I’m a booking agent, there’s so many mental steps and what we do and I hate that we’re booking agent because there’s a lot of nefarious ones out there in this business that don’t do their due diligence, and it’s very important to me that I’m going to represent to you, that this hunt is better than some of the other ones down there that I’ve been there myself but I’ve been to them all, so we go to them and we scout them. And we’ve gotten off in the bushes to where Argentina for example, a lot of our outfitters down there, we found them, we developed them, they don’t exist online, they don’t exist period except through us. And there’s some really pretty amazing hunts. And I’ll say just in terms of the overall experience when we go hunting, we don’t cater to 5 star, if you want a 5 star hunt take your wife to New York or Italy. If you want a real hunting adventure and here’s how you differentiate Steven, you can go to any of those continents, any of those countries we’ve been to and stay at the Hilton, but it’s not the Azerbaijan experience, if you stay at the Hilton, it’s not the Argentina experience just the Hilton experience, I want to see real Argentina. And that’s where we diverge and we’ve just cultivated good long term relationships with a lot of outfitters and built the program. My wife and I – it’s a very small company, my wife and I handle this side of it, explain the hunt, the logistics getting you there, picking up the phone assistance and stuff like that.

Steven Rinella: This is off subject docks, but do you have any hot leads on – what are you laughing about?

Janis Putelis:: Because that was the whole time, he’s explaining that I’m thinking, man Steven’s going to ask him where he can go get one of them Turkeys.

Steven Rinella: Are you familiar with what a super slam turkey holder is? You’re looking at one not towards Janis.

Ramsey Russell: When you say super slam, you’re not talking the 6? What’s the super slam then?

Steven Rinella: A super slam turkey holder such as myself that means you’ve gotten all 5 varieties of the American wild turkey. Now, where can one go from there?

Ramsey Russell: Ocellated and Goulds.

Steven Rinella: I already did Goulds. If I hadn’t done Goulds, you’d be looking at a mere grand slam holder.

Ramsey Russell: You need the ocellated.

Steven Rinella: To become the pinnacle of a turkey, man. Which is called a – what’s it call? World slam turkey holder. At which point I will get my world slam turkey holder tattoo. But meaning like we want to go down and oscillated turkeys bad is what I’m getting at, but we’re trying to find the right – I don’t want to be shooting the field Turkey coming out some field, I want to be out in the jungle.

Ramsey Russell: You want to be in the jungle? That’s what I was fixing to say.

Steven Rinella: I don’t want to stay at the Hilton.

Ramsey Russell: No, you want to be in a tent camp in the jungle listening to jaguar roaring. Now, that’s where you exactly want to be and how you hunt them? And as a non-turkey hunter, I’ve killed 10 turkeys in my life and I need the Miriam’s just so you know, so I can be that guy in your crowd. I love the oscillated turkeys.

Steven Rinella: We can go on an adventure sometimes can’t get them here, so it’s a little tricky.

Janis Putelis: Well, no, but that latest research that came out, didn’t you read that email that we got?

Steven Rinella: Are all turkey’s corrupted?

Janis Putelis: Oh, they’re saying that basically all the Western United States because of the stocking efforts from 20, 30 years ago, there ain’t a pier one left.

Steven Rinella: There’s hodgepodge. They’re these turkeys, I didn’t know that.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve got a lead for you on the perfect jungle experience.

Steven Rinella: Don’t say it right now.

Ramsey Russell: I won’t. But I’ve got the lead and you’ll love it and I love it.

Steven Rinella: Can you bump us at the front of the line because we want to go this winter we march, whatever.

Ramsey Russell: You want to go mid-April next year’s when you want to go. I know, but what you need to start getting the rains in the jungle and it is a dry. Don’t think jungle like lush jungle, think very dirty jungle, very dry jungle –

Steven Rinella: Yucatan jungle.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right Yucatan jungle and you need a little precipitation so that the cantor start to sing. But if you go too late like in may now you’ve got all the young birds drakes fighting and everything is torn up. You want to go mid late April and you can hunt them – of course you know a real true turkey hunter from the south doesn’t want to – he wants to call him in and interact with him and bring him in and ocellated he’s more like a gang bird than a turkey.

Steven Rinella: You bush whack them.

Ramsey Russell: Well, yeah you bushwhack them. And everybody said well you know sneaking up on a turkey shoot it might not sound like much sport, I’m like this is not like shooting in eastern Turkey in a pine plantation after rain.

Steven Rinella: People say that kind of stuff

Ramsey Russell: I know. I can remember crashing through the – my guide was as quiet as a shadow and I’m walking behind him sound like a kid rock concert coming through the woods and I woke the turkey up and he motioned to me to be still and cover up my watch so the reflection wouldn’t show in the jungle and then he vanished and it was pitch black dark and I can’t see him anywhere. And it’s so silent, I can hear sweat coming off my nose and hitting the floor and he was gone. And when he came back 15, 20, 30 minutes later and appeared, I almost screamed, it scared me to death. I hadn’t heard him.

Steven Rinella: Where’d he go?

Ramsey Russell: He had gone up ahead of the trail to get all the twigs and everything out of my way so I could walk up to that turkey.

Steven Rinella: He had manicured your path?

Ramsey Russell: He manicured my path silent as a ghost. But we also hunt around fruit trees and they got these big supposedly trees and the natives know where they are. Think of it like a fig and I grow occasionally out of the jungle and everything in the jungle ease it, so the male birds will spin around, they know where they are too. They’re looking for the hens and they’re spinning around looking, so sometimes you’re in an elevated blind like a very comfortable little hammock waiting on those animals to come in. Or sometimes you’re hunting in water to ambush them, yep. And some of these outfitters down here will turn on male calls to make that emulate the ocellated, that provokes them to start calling and become rivalry.

They’re like game roosters. I don’t know that the ocellated turkeys ever assembled in male and female like the eastern, the Merriam’s, I don’t think they do that, I think they stay off to themselves and fight. And so sometimes they’ll get those calls going to initiate them to come closer.

Steven Rinella: An electronic call.

Ramsey Russell: Electronic call. I’ll tell you one of my favorite hunts ever in the world was hunting an ocellated turkey and back on the road on the jungle road –

Steven Rinella: So you’re saying you’ve only killed 10 Turkeys but one of them was one of these?

Ramsey Russell: Two of them were ocellated.

Steven Rinella: You got it all backwards.

Ramsey Russell: I take it as it comes. I just take it as it comes, but I do like, I like the hunt. That’s what appeals to me.

Steven Rinella: You’re fixing to tell me another ocellated story.

Ramsey Russell: So, the guy turns on the electronic call, the outfitter turned on the electronic call and I’m following my guide through the wood for about a mile and we’re stopping and –

Steven Rinella: He’s walking with the caller?

Ramsey Russell: No, the electronic call sitting on the road and the cantor, they call it the singing bird starts to sing back.

Steven Rinella: The cantor is the turkey?

Ramsey Russell: Is the turkey.

Steven Rinella: They call it raha lite or no?

Ramsey Russell: No, I just know cantor. So, we get back here in the woods –

Steven Rinella: The cantor is a synagogue?

Ramsey Russell: No.

Steven Rinella: You’re not jewish Hanzi?

Hanzi Deschermeier: No, but don’t they like lead the prayer basically.

Steven Rinella: Yeah, like a cancer comes up and opens the Torah, you know what that is?

Hanzi Deschermeier: I do. Do you want me to explain?

Steven Rinella: You know what the Pentateuch is?

Hanzi Deschermeier: Wait a second.

Janis Putelis: Just say no because he’s just trying to prove that he knows more about –

Hanzi Deschermeier: Is Pentateuch the thing that hangs on the door that you spin?

Steven Rinella: No, it’s the first 5 books of the bible. That’s good to know. Yeah, I think the cantor comes up and opens the Torah the scrolls and start singing out of there. So it’s one that sings, oh, why am I asking Hanzi? Corinne, this is right in your wheelhouse. You’re kind of too much of a heathen. Go on. The cancer bird.

Ramsey Russell: Once they use the electronic call to get that bird initiated, I’m a mile in the woods and my guides, I can see him, I can’t hear the whistle, but I can see him whistling and now he’s making the hand call with his mouth and the bird starts getting closer. And we’re walking kind of towards a bird and about that time he lets out that sound they make that gobble, we sit and we were like in a little hole in the jungle where a tree fell and sunshine and heavy grass. I’m sitting down facing this way and the turkey is so loud now it’s making my ear drums rattle inside, they’re vibrating, so I know he’s close. The guide had laid down on his belly, all he got is the camo shirt, he pulled it up over his head and by the time my ear drums are rattling, he starts pressing me on my back.

Steven Rinella: And is this bird’s hammered?

Ramsey Russell: It is hammered and he’s right here.

Steven Rinella: Do me the noise.

Ramsey Russell: You can’t imitate that.

Steven Rinella: Just come on.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, I can’t imitate. Okay.

Steven Rinella: Do it again.

Corinne Schneider: That was pretty good.

Steven Rinella: Ask me to do a noise, ask me to do an impossible noise.

Ramsey Russell: I know, but I can’t do an ocellated turkey. It’s a rattle.

Steven Rinella: All I do is wild turkeys gobble.

Ramsey Russell: It’s nothing like that.

Steven Rinella: It’s not like that.

Ramsey Russell: It’s more prehistoric plus this bird is hammering right here and he’s pressing on my back – It’s more like a machine gun, mechanical machine gun, yeah, but he’s right here. And this guy’s pressing on my back. I’m saying, do you want me to shoot? I mean, if that turkey had kept coming, he’d have been right on the end of my gun barrel. About this time, this jaguar roars.

Steven Rinella: No.

Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah, from way off and the bird shuts up and I can hear him deaf as I am walking away. Well, I don’t speak Spanish, he don’t speak English, we get back to the road and asked the interpreter what was he saying? What was he doing? He said from where you were, the turkey was 8ft away. He was down under the cover and could see his spurs and see his feet and he was right there and he was scared that you weren’t going to be ready when he stepped out. He’d been right the end of your gun barrel. We didn’t get him that day, we came back the next morning and ambushed. But that was the hunt, that was the memory. You’ll love it.

Steven Rinella: That makes you want to go real bad.

Janis Putelis: Yeah.

Steven Rinella: When we were kids, we played World War 2, I feel like we’d go like –

Ramsey Russell: That’s it, right. You see why I can’t imitate that?

Steven Rinella: So one of the benefits of having an extremely talented engineer named Phil is that Phil will now insert the noise, so you can’t hear it and you can’t do it. And I don’t know what it is, but Phil is playing it right now.

Ramsey Russell: Perfect.

Steven Rinella:  Seduction, large seduction don’t let it happen.

Ramsey Russell: No, I think on that particular ocellated Turkey hunt, you really want the tent camp experience and the guys with the lodges, no offense, but they’ll say, oh, we’re only 10 miles from the jungle. That’s a long ways. Just because its 10 miles to the jungle, doesn’t mean it’s not another 10 miles in the jungle. Go into the jungle, stay in the tent and have the experience. It’s just to be immersed in that culture, in that environment is just monkey swinging through the trees in the afternoons and maybe the jaguars roaring and walking along and you see all kinds of Mayan antiquity everywhere, it’s just amazing.

Steven Rinella: Oh, I’m in 100%. Corinne was saying you had a near death experience as a kid.

Ramsey Russell: We did. I was involved in a home explosion, pretty obvious when I was almost 16 years old, had a bird dog that had torn up the back doors and was painting it, cleaning the paint brush with some gasoline –

Steven Rinella: Hold on backup let me understand, so what the bird dog do?

Ramsey Russell: Torn the doors up, scratch the paint.

Steven Rinella: You got to assign to – your folks want you to repair it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it was my dog and so we went and painted the doors and with gasoline and the pilot light –

Steven Rinella: So, you’re using it as a thinner.

Ramsey Russell: Of course and a pilot light ignited the gas fumes. What’s so crazy is I can remember, well I can remember the door opening to the garage and my neighbor coming in and my mom was shrieking and I remember pacing up and down around the driveway, waiting on the ambulance to get there and I can remember the ambulance ride to the hospital and telling my mom to call my – I bus tables at Shoney’s at the time, I remember better call Andy and tell him I’m not going to make it today.

Steven Rinella:  But you were a mess?

Ramsey Russell: Apparently. But you don’t see that, I just remember that and I can remember going being rolled into the ER and –

Steven Rinella: Can we go back to the explosion for a second? It’s not that it caught the cane on fire.

Ramsey Russell: No, the fumes.

Steven Rinella: Ignited everything in and around you.

Ramsey Russell: Like the combustion in the carburetor boom, that’s what it was. My neighbor across street thought me and my brother went into fight. He heard me holler and thought we were in a fight, he could hurt my mother hollering so he came over to break us up. It wasn’t that he –

Steven Rinella: Did you guys fight a lot?

Ramsey Russell: We were brothers, of course we did. Don’t all brothers? Yeah, but anyway I can remember roll into the ER, I remember cutting my clothes off and I remember this nurse putting a piece of ice in my mouth and how good that tasted. That’s really the last coherent thought I had for 6 months.

Steven Rinella: Then you were out of it?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I was out of it but it’s not like, some television show where they load you up with painkillers, no you just tough it out man. Those painkillers and all that stuff slows down growth and where you aren’t burned, they need the skin to cover up where you were. They flew me down to Galveston Texas to a Shriners unit happened on May 17th and I came home started back to school right after Thanksgiving a complete and utter mess. I think to cope with that humanity has places down beneath consciousness and I really kind of crawled into a hole I think. It’s like I kind of sort of knew what was going on but I got into a place to where I needed to be for a long time. It’s like I know from having revisited that burn unit that the lights were always on. It was 24 hour surveillance in that little unit with whatever it was a dozen rooms. But I just remember it being dark like I was in a dark room the whole time and maybe a year after it happened, you’re sorting through those memories of what was real, what was a dream, what was going on? And I told my mother, I said, I just remember this hospital room and all these bright lights before it got dark and people buzzing in and lights going off and I could see my body bucking when they put them paddles on it.

Steven Rinella: Oh you’re that gone?

Ramsey Russell: And I looked up at her and she was crying. She says, how do you remember that? That’s the night that brought you in when you died. And they had told my parents – I spent 6 weeks in ICU in a few weeks in ICU in Jackson Mississippi while they were looking for somewhere to send this guy and it was bad, it was 70% and had died the night I was brought in something percent 8% chance of survival and they told my parents he’ll lose his right arm and both his legs if he makes it.

Steven Rinella:  Let’s say you had died, what would the autopsy say? Had you like taken a – was it just reaction to having so much burned?

Ramsey Russell: It was just burn trauma.

Steven Rinella: So it wasn’t organ damage, it was just burn trauma.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, you’ve got 70-80% of your body I guess is an open wound and it’s just trauma, it’s just shock trauma and I’m sure it affects other vital organs. I think if you have heart disease it affects other organs and I’m really still no medical expert and all I try to do is get back on my life when it was over.

Steven Rinella: How old are you now?

Ramsey Russell: 54.

Steven Rinella: 70% of your body. Have you had a lot of plastic surgery?

Ramsey Russell: No, I don’t recall nothing. None of them make it look better. I wasn’t a good looking guy to start with. I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 some odd skin grafts then and a few functional surgeries afterwards, just to get me back on my feet where I could have some mobility and that was it and that is – once I had the mobility, I was often going like the energizer bunny.

Steven Rinella: You married?

Ramsey Russell: Oh, I am. I’ve been married for 26 years this August. 3 kids started dating her in 1990, the year we had a little love letter contest going when I was biking across the country.

Steven Rinella: Oh really?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Steven Rinella: Did that change your career path, I’m guessing?

Ramsey Russell: The girl or the injury?

Steven Rinella: No not that, you know what that does. You know, being close to death. I’ve never had anything like that happen to me. I’ve never even been like super sick, but I know that when I meet people that had that – they have a better – well I guess it can lead both ways. I have been fortunate to meet a handful of individuals who have had very serious near death experiences and then they wind up living life –

Ramsey Russell: To the absolute fullest.

Steven Rinella: Very deliberately.

Ramsey Russell: Exactly.

Steven Rinella: Ain’t taking shit for granted.

Ramsey Russell: Very good word choice. And I think like a lot of 15 or 16 year old kids, I had no purpose, no sense of purpose in life. I mean, 15 year old kid you got one thing on your mind and but yeah, after it happened and that’s what – man, lots going on with a young man at 16 years old in terms of personal identity and where you’re going, what you’re thinking and I think it did change and I know having gone through that and having come from that place that I wanted to really live, I wanted to get the most of the second chance and I knew that at that tender age that this is a second chance, this is borrowed time and there’s a lot I wouldn’t have done had I died then that I’ve now since done. You know what I’m saying? And I killed around – you say what you like to, introduce yourself and say I kill ducks. I do like shoot ducks. But what I think of is, I’ve shot the species, I don’t collect them, I collect experiences that’s what I like. So, I think it’s probably the most life defining moment of my life. I think it’s very definitive and having gone through some trauma like that.

Steven Rinella: Were you already a duck hunter when that happened?

Ramsey Russell: No. I grew up with duck hunters, my grandfather who was my mentor who was a duck hunter and that was at that age that generation didn’t take Children hunting. They didn’t take 5 or 6 years old, maybe carry the duck blind on a warm day but you weren’t hunting. It was his duck camp was a man place. And when you get to be 13, 14, 15 years old, then you start duck hunting and right about the time I was getting into that phase, he retired and his health failed him. And so I missed that part. I heard stories, I saw the ducks cleaned, we ate duck, we did all that kind of stuff but I just missed it. And getting through right after high school, he died my senior year, right after high school I did duck hunt, but it was just jump shooting wood ducks or scouting for deer and boy, you flush up some mallards they’re going to come back and get your shotgun and wait on them. Went down to south Texas because I wanted to be a deer biologist. I wanted to be Jim Kroll or Harry Jacobson, that’s why I went to Mississippi State University. We show up in the 107,000 acre ranch free range growing trophy whitetail deer and a funny thing happened, that became a job description shooting an antlerless deer and all this kind of stuff. But every time the wind blew out of the north from thanksgiving on the stock tank would fill up with ducks. And that began to kind of reconnect me to my roots. And then when I was in college I got invited to go to Arkansas and duck hunt some flooded timber public the limit was 2 mallards and that was all she wrote, I never looked back. It just something happened and I loved it.

Steven Rinella: I remember those days of being very young when they had the point system and you weren’t allowed like 5, 7 mallards like you are now.

Janis Putelis: What’s the point system?

Steven Rinella: Hey, can you remember well enough to explain the point system? Because it came down to them like game wardens carrying thermometers around and putting thermometers in duck’s anuses and what not.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know about that. They may have because –

Steven Rinella: You could tell that there was a problem you get into about the sequence in what you shot your ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Of course, it’s how you count. You have you got 100 points, it’s a value system based on the value of those ducks to the federal government or whoever is keeping count. You go shoot teal for 10 points, pin tails for 10 points, Mallards drake for 25 points, hen was a 100. So, you accidentally shot 100 off the bat you were done. Maybe I’ll have a chance that he didn’t see me and I didn’t do this, but I heard about it and maybe I would shoot her first that’s my 100 points. You could go over as long as you didn’t start over. I could shoot 3, 25 point birds and then shoot 100 point bird and I was done. But if I start off with 100 point bird, I’m done.

Steven Rinella: That’s what it was, so they would want to know – this is just the first couple of years I hunted ducks. They would wanted to know or at least prior to that I don’t even know what year they did this, we could find out really easily when they switch from the point system. But it might have been that I was so little that I wasn’t even hunting I just with my old man, but remember there’s always this fear of like don’t risk if you got a hen mallard don’t risk because they’ll put a thermometer in there and tell which of those ducks have been dead longer and that’s what kept everyone in check.

Ramsey Russell: And when I actually started duck hunting there in Arkansas it was right after this adaptive harvest management had started and it was restricted management regime and the limit was 2 mallards, the limit was of 2 mallards that year. I’d say it’s early 90s –

Steven Rinella: Didn’t matter boy girl or what?

Ramsey Russell: No.

Steven Rinella: When you were doing the Texas work that was – but you worked for the forest service but you also did Texas Whitetail work?

Ramsey Russell: We got all out of whack. No, I was in college and I co opt down in south Texas about 60 miles from the Mexican border on a vast ranch man, a couple of Texas oil bearing down 207,000 acres.

Steven Rinella: Is this like down in that? What’s that famous county, Janis?

Ramsey Russell: Dimmit La Salle Webb County.

Steven Rinella: No, we’re thinking of – the one we know, the famous county, we know about Maverick County.

Ramsey Russell: That I don’t know about. This was down around – this was Dimmit La Salle Webb County area the brush country. And just a couple of old guys had some land and they had hired a biologist who then turned around and hired some of those college kids to co-op paid a whopping 500 bucks a month but it was paradise. It was great. Best 500 bucks a month ever made.

Steven Rinella:  Man, those oil guys own a lot of land.

Ramsey Russell: They own a lot of land.

Steven Rinella: Something about – are they interested in it before they become an oil guys or something about being an oil guy makes you want to buy a ranch.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know that, I couldn’t tell you.

Steven Rinella: Do you become an oil guy because you want to buy a ranch or does – you know what I’m saying?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I get what you’re saying.

Steven Rinella: Or does it come with being an oil guy.

Ramsey Russell: I have no idea. I don’t have a lot of ranches.

Steven Rinella: If I could have every ranch ever bought by oil guy I’d have a hell of a property.

Ramsey Russell: Oh boy, would you?

Steven Rinella: Just land buyers. You told me a little bit about this, I’m still tracking how you got where you are today that you did some hunt with outfitter –

Ramsey Russell: I hunted with an outfitter I got out of grad school and made a career in the federal government. That was it, I was a forester.

Steven Rinella: You went to graduate school?

Ramsey Russell: I did, Forestry. Mississippi State University and got an undergraduate wildlife which at the time was forestry because wildlife management is a byproduct of forestry of civil culture. Then got a graduate degree in bottomland hardwood civil culture at Mississippi State University, landed the job doing a lot of restoration work in the Mississippi Delta with US Fish and Wildlife service there for a period of time went to USDA. It was in that period of time early on that, hey all of a sudden I had a job, I wasn’t a broke college kid anymore, I could afford to go to Canada. So, a couple of buddies and I did and it was real bad. I tell you, the year was 1998

Steven Rinella: You went up there to hunt?

Ramsey Russell: Went up there to hunt, the year was 1998 and I know that because that was the first year you can shoot 20 snow geese.

Steven Rinella: How old are you?

Ramsey Russell: 54. Yeah, I’m an old man, can’t tell. But anyway now even though we had – so we go we go to Saskatchewan, we back down to Alberta just to hunt, we booked a hunt because we wanted to go to Canada to hunt, myself and a major professor. Then we went to Alberta and started hunting with another outfitter and –

Steven Rinella: Just like paying clients.

Ramsey Russell: Paying clients man, yeah just paying clients we had jobs and that turned into something. It’s like, I came up there and a few more people came and a few more people came and I remember the 3rd year I was up there 25 clients came to that outfitter

Steven Rinella: Out of your word of mouth.

Ramsey Russell: Out of my word of mouth.

Steven Rinella: And he realized like you’re the pied piper of duck hunters.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what he said. He just said, hey come out here and drink a beer with us. He comes out and all the staff is sitting there, he says you know, Ramsay all these guys come up here and hunt with us from Mississippi and whoever you talk to and man, they know how to hunt and know how to shoot and know how to tip the guys, they’re a pleasure to be around, my boys are always cutting cards or flipping coins to who gets to take these guys, now the guys are nodding their heads and he says, why don’t you be my booking agent? And I’m like, what the heck is that? I have no idea what that is but yeah, it sounds good. And so how do you –

Steven Rinella: So, you were just socializing the fact that you had good –

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s all it was, was just showing pictures and having a good time and socializing that we were having a good time and people started going. Because I was an avid duck hunter by then back home people knew man, this guy likes to hunt a lot and I guess they found some credibility in that and started going.

Steven Rinella:  And you were at that time you weren’t getting like a cut of the action.

Ramsey Russell: No.

Steven Rinella: So, first tell us, you will go round up some more guys and bring them up at that point, he’s saying it –

Ramsey Russell: He said, yeah.

Steven Rinella:  He’s going to give you a kick back.

Ramsey Russell: Well, let me give you a commission, let me give you a commission for doing this. And that inspired me. Well, how do I meet more people than I just personally know, come up with a web page and I was doing a little bit of waterfowl habitat consultation, a little  conservation easement work at the time, I was writing baseline reports on as a side gig. I needed a good idea, I needed some way to reach people, so I came up with this idea, getducks.com and at the time

there was 2 clicks, click go to Alberta, click call Ramsey about habitat work and that was it.

Steven Rinella: Oh, get ducks was like, go get ducks or make ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that was it. Man, it was a long time ago, almost 20 years ago now, Steve it’s a – We’ve been incorporated since 2003 and that’s a long time ago.

Steven Rinella: I’m not trying to ask like how much money you made, but like in percentile points back your first deal?

Ramsey Russell: 10% that’s what they did. You know what I’m saying? And I’ll tell you I think part of the reason if we go there to what we’re talking about. I want to make this point because I really for some reason I’ve been a “booking agent” for nearly 2 decades, but I despise that term. Because I’ve got so many clients right now that had gotten in a bad way with a “booking agent” but they heard enough about us, they called and they booked a trip and we took care of it, everything was good and they said holy cow man, I just wore them off till I met you all. So, I don’t know what else to call it, but a booking agent. But that’s what we are. I hate the standard. And I’ll tell you a very –

Steven Rinella: I don’t even know enough to know this, I don’t know that’s a shoddy industry.

Ramsey Russell: I think it is.

Steven Rinella: Shoddy and all guiding, like fishing, hunting, big game, is it shoddy? Because like waterfowl is shoddy. I had a guy telling me recently a very big water fowler, that’s his life’s passion, he even studied ducks, big water fowler he was saying that he feels that his segment of the hunting world is the most corrupt segment of the hunting world when it comes to just killing and cheating and wasting and not using your stuff. He has a very dim view as a water fowler, a career water Fowler has a very dim view of water fowler’s which was surprising to me. He’s like the things I see come out of my community are worse than things I see come out any other community.

Ramsey Russell: I hope it’s cleaning up. I like to think it’s cleaned up because I can remember Argentina is a very big destination for us and I can remember 15 years ago, let’s say one of the primary questions that somebody enquiring about Argentina would ask and I mean one of the top questions, how many ducks do I kill? And all these years later, it’s one they might ask, but it’s not – I think I have seen and perceived at least with a lot of people that I deal with a change in the hunter’s heart. I think I really think it is shifting more from a quantity to equality. I believe that. I think, there’s probably a lot of issues. And I wouldn’t say just duck hunting, I think that anytime you take public resource be it elk or waterfowl and involve money, there’s room for corruptness. And I wouldn’t hang that on waterfowl though.

Steven Rinella: I think one of the things that leads to is that it’s hard, there’s a lot of bad days and then now and then you get yourself into some situations that are just so good.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve heard it and seen it.

Steven Rinella: It’s so good and you’re like a mountain lion, it gets into a pasture full of alpacas, man, like you just can’t turn it off. I understand it.

“But big game hunters, a guy will drive from Mississippi or whatever out to Montana and camp and hunt elk for 10 days and if you doesn’t get one that’s hunting, but it seems like sometimes guys want to go duck hunting and they just expect all the limit because they’re not hunting in their backyard and that’s not reality. You know, ducks don’t just fly on command, there’s weather and migrations and skill sets involved.”

Ramsey Russell: But big game hunters, a guy will drive from Mississippi or whatever out to Montana and camp and hunt elk for 10 days and if you doesn’t get one that’s hunting, but it seems like sometimes guys want to go duck hunting and they just expect all the limit because they’re not hunting in their backyard and that’s not reality. You know, ducks don’t just fly on command, there’s weather and migrations and skill sets involved.

Steven Rinella: Did you have like, any kind of moral crisis where you said like – this guy comes in, you’re young and you got a job or you’re starting out as a federal employee, you’re not making a presumably – you’re not making like some obscene salary and all of a sudden you can get a kickback, get a cut for bringing people in. Did you have to decide like – you know what I’m going to do? I’m only going to book people for really good trips or did you make a mistake or did you just have a moral compass and that’s always to serve you well?

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to say a moral compass I had no compunction about selling hunts or selling consulting services or doing something like that and none whatsoever. It’s just that even today all these years later my first obligation is not to the outfitter, I’ve got a very good credible working relationship with an outfitter anywhere in this world. But he’s not my first obligation, the client is.

Steven Rinella:  Yeah, I could see that being. That’s a good way to view it man, you don’t work for the outfitter.

Ramsey Russell: No, I work for the client and they’re buttering everybody bread.

Steven Rinella: I can understand your view point.

Ramsey Russell: But at the end of the day that’s why we’re willing to – and it was very difficult back when it was early, especially back when I was still working for the federal government and doing this thing part time, it was very difficult to spend money out of my pocket and go on these destinations. And not every destination you see is every destination we’ve been on. We’ve been on 10 to 1 ratio that just didn’t work out that just, this isn’t worth, this is not what we’re looking for, that’s not what we want to be a part of. But it took that commitment because I feel like if you’re going to trust me to go on a duck hunt that I recommend that I need to better speak personally to it. And it’s just like a retriever just like a blue tick hound, those relationships and that working relationship builds over time, you know what I’m saying? Okay, so I go and hunt with your camp, yeah you’re a good hunting, sell it hunt, that’s not near what it’s like 10 years, 12 years down the road working with that outfitter, you know what this outfitter can do in the good years and bad years because ducks don’t – there’s weather, there’s different conditions that ducks don’t fly and I always say man, opening day, every guy in the world is a rock star on opening day, it’s the tough days. It’s those days that the ducks aren’t doing what you wanted to do, the client may be a little disappointed that the best of the outfitters dig hard. What I say about the best waterfowl outfit and I think the same might be said anywhere in hunting industry is the good outfitters when you’re killing half as much they’re working 2 or 3 times as hard, not half as much, they’re working harder and you can build those relationships only over time.

Steven Rinella: Tell me a story about an outfitter that you checked out and it didn’t work out.

Ramsey Russell: Oh boy Romania. That was just the first one that pops in my mind.

Steven Rinella: Give me an idea like what not cutting the mustard looks like.

Ramsey Russell: We went 2 or 3 months back and forth and email he kept wanting me to come over and hunt and we finally got it sorted and Steve I’ve got a –

Steven Rinella: Like the expectation being clear.

Ramsey Russell: The expectation –

Steven Rinella: He’s like come check out my lodge and bring me clients.

Ramsey Russell: But just getting to the initial visit point was – I don’t know, awkward tenuous. But we were going to Sweden that year, I was going to swing through Amsterdam and check out Netherlands, Netherlands is a great hunt. And I’ve got a group of clients that just have been on some of these regular hunts, Argentina, Mexico, wherever and now they want to go do real Ramsey shit, which is to say I want to go somewhere you hadn’t even been, let’s just figure it out together. And I like that because now it’s not just what I see in this outfit it’s what the client sees too. And they’re up for everything. So me made a client show up –

Steven Rinella: Hold on, I want to make sure I understand what you’re saying. They use you so much and they get to the point where like, I want to go with you to check something out?

Ramsey Russell: That’s it. I want to be on the first –

Steven Rinella: And then you make clear with them that like, well you know what that means, right? Like I haven’t checked it out.

Ramsey Russell: But they’re real hunters.

Janis Putelis: Yeah, I mean, they’re the clients that all guides want to hunt with because they’re there for the adventure and a good time and if they go home –

Ramsey Russell: That kind of client. So, we’re in Sweden and the next morning we’re going to pick up fly to Romania and I get an email in Romanian that is not from my outfitter and it’s saying something – I have to go google translate, which is kind of imperfect. And I gathered that he’s not going to be there, but everything’s in place, I go, I don’t like this idea and Scott and I talked, we have a drink, we talked more and so yeah, let’s go check it out. And as we go back and forth and all I can understand in google translate this is the guy’s brother or brother in law or somebody. So we show up and we decide we’re going to check this guy out. We’ll just see who our ride looks like, we’ll just make a gut instinct call and like if I said the word Romanian hitman, what would you think? Because that’s exactly who met us.

Steven Rinella: Some guy looks like Janis?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Guy meets us and we get to talking and we start indicating him were we’re stopping right here and he hands us the phone. Now, this guy is speaking a little broken English is the guy that wrote me the email. I’m the guy’s brother in law and I’m saying, well where’s the outfitter I’ve been talking to for 2 months. And he’s like, well he can’t make it, something’s up. I said, is he in the hospital? No. Is he in prison? No, he’s just at the police station. So long story short, we make our way to the van and I realized the minute we get out to the van that this is like a legit rental transfer van. I still take a picture of the license plate just sent to my wife and say I’m getting in this truck right here, if you don’t hear from me in 24 hours, call Interpol or whatever. But we found out he’s just a real guy. He drives us just down the road introduced to his brother. And that was just all an adventure. The reason it didn’t work out, the food was great, the host was great, the guides were great, the duck hunting was just terrible. It was just terrible. I mean, we shot 13 ducks in 3 days. There’s just nothing to it. It’s just an overshot resource. And we’ve looked around in different places like that and sometimes you run into places that there’s just too much hunting pressure. And in parts of the world like that. There’s no hunting pressure much.

Steven Rinella: But they hunt ducks hard in Romania. They hunt brown bears still. They’re

Ramsey Russell: That I believe they do. But they hunt ducks. They’re Italian clients hunt ducks hard there’s no bag limit. So, just in places they shoot too many for it to sustain quality.

Steven Rinella: What are the ducks they have there?

Ramsey Russell: Mallards, gadwall, shovelers, Eurasian green wing, Eurasian wigeons. A lot of the birds we hunt, one of my favorite places to go right now is a little country call Azerbaijan. It’s between the Caspian Sea and turkey and how we found it is, there were some species kind of in that Eurasian area over there, I just wanted to encounter, I kept hearing about the Volga River coming through delta – through the Volga River coming through Russia. And as I began to explore and talk to some resources over there, it’s a fall hunt October. So even if you go over there, even if you time the ducks coming through right in that part of Russia, you’re just dealing with brown ducks. I go shoot a bird of a lifetime a red crested pochard, he’s brown.

Steven Rinella: Just cause they haven’t gotten their maturity.

Ramsey Russell: They haven’t hit that plumage yet. And it took me a while to for it to kind of go through my knife drawer and figure this out. But I finally got to wonder one day where does the Volga River go, it goes to the Caspian Sea. And so we began to research that area right there and we found –

Steven Rinella: Trying to catch ducks laid.

Ramsey Russell: Where are they going to overwinter instead of going here, let’s catch them in the wintering grounds. And about 3 or 4 years ago we began to put together a little tiny country called Azerbaijan. And it was a very amazing hunt. And I bring it up because to me it’s – on the one hand you think of, okay, I’m going to fly 6500 miles from home, its distance. But in sometimes thing I love about this job is not just business, it’s time, it’s almost like I’m stepping into a time machine and going back because these guys are so fundamental duck hunters. They still market hunt over there. A lot of my guides are feeding their families or their communities with the ducks we kill and they are game on absolute grade A duck hunters. The good ones are.

Steven Rinella: And they’re hunting the delta of the Volga River.

Ramsey Russell: Well, that would still be in Russia we’re way further south down in Azerbaijan. In fact, I can put you on a map where the wetland we’ve been hunting the past few years is 8 miles from Iran. And one of the wetlands we scouted this year, standing on this lake levy, I could look down and see the border crossing for Iran. Baku if you look it up beautiful. We’re hunting about 4 or 5 hours from there.

Steven Rinella: And what’s it look like where you’re at?

Ramsey Russell: It looks strangely like the Mississippi delta. I’ve got family in Greenwood, Mississippi, which is the long staple cotton capital of the world self-proclaimed and pulling into that little village and I can’t remember the name of it. But pulling into that little town for the first time when you come into Greenwood Mississippi every entrance every little 2 lane highway coming into the city there’s a big bulletin board with cotton bolls on it and going into that little town we’re hunting there’s a big banner over the entrance with 2 cotton bolls. So, to be so far from home, it feels so much like home and just turned to the habitat then everything gets different.

Janis Putelis: Is this similar in latitude.

Steven Rinella: I’m so close to pull me a map of the world.

Ramsey Russell: Pill it up and take a look at it man because it’s a – I think it’s I think it’s going to be a little bit further north of our latitude. I believe.

Steven Rinella:  I’m digging in right here man.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I had to look it up on the map the first time too.

Steven Rinella: I want to help out people get we’re at. I’m trying to steer people in from Latvia. So if you go to Turkey, if you go up to the confluence of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran and then shoot little off over toward the northeast, that’s Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea.

Ramsey Russell: Which is not a saltwater body of water, believe not the Caspian Sea is the largest freshwater body. When you stand on the banks, it’s like looking at the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s the largest freshwater body on earth.

Steven Rinella: And that town Baku sits out on a little peninsula.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it is such an incredible city like you walk around town and you walk by Ferrari dealership and a Lamborghini dealership, we don’t have those in Mississippi.

Steven Rinella: Is it remote though? The parts where you hunt?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it’s just a little farming communities we hunt. And it’s like the basin we’ve been hunting the past few years is I understand it and as I perceive it to be looking at it, it’s like 100,000 acre at full capacity agricultural storage reservoirs, is what it is. It catches a lot of watershed seasonally and then they use it to irrigate fields around. And you can just tell by the habitat, you can tell by the cover type that it’s ephemeral at times at least parts of it are. But it’s just amazing and what made me think of talking about that when you start asking about species is, one of the most iconic waterfowl species in America is the mallard duck, but that ducks found everywhere in the Northern hemisphere that there’s ducks and everywhere did you hunt them Pakistan, Azerbaijan, they’re a trophy. They’re the prize just like they are here, they’re the big duck.

Steven Rinella: Big duck tastes good lots of them do.

Ramsey Russell: But what do you think Steve, what do you think the number one favorite duck in the northern hemisphere of all the countries I’ve been to that have them. What do you think the favorite duck on table is? Green wing teal. Every country I’ve ever been to that has green wing teal. That’s the one.

Steven Rinella:  That’s the one they want.

Ramsey Russell: That’s the one they want and we eat a lot of them over there. But I’m going to say about Azerbaijan, I went there to find red crested pochards, tufted ducks, common shell ducks, ferruginous pochard, things of that nature that you’re just not going to find anywhere else that I have found yet.

Steven Rinella:  And when you’re saying pochard, you mean like the family of –

Ramsey Russell: That’s their common name.

Steven Rinella: Blue bills, canvas backs.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right, their genius would be Aythya but they’re pochards is what their name was. And they were just these really cool species don’t ask me how –

Steven Rinella: Okay, because I know that word to be, basically all your good tasting divers.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well the diver duck, the pochard family. But we went over there looking for those specific species, red crested pochard were just a real unicorn species for me. But what I loved about it was we shot a lot of Eurasian wigeons, we shot a lot of Eurasian green wing teal. We shot a lot of mallards, gadwall shelters, pin tails.

Steven Rinella: And those mallards just like our mallards.

Ramsey Russell: Just like ours. Oh, just you call them in. I don’t leave home in the northern hemisphere or hardly anywhere without a mallard call. I use it down in Argentina to call in Rosy billed pochard just by growling into it just you growl into like we would call for scaup or red heads or anything else. And it was so crazy because the first time I hunted in Azerbaijan was just amazing. I didn’t know what to expect right here in this little blind was well built. I’m by myself and my little Adil my bird boy. And he’s good eyes. And the first time I saw those red crested pochards, I didn’t see the oranges head, I saw the black bird with the white wing bars that instinctively reminded me of rosy bill pochards down in Argentina, same genius and I grabbed my call and growled into it and they heard the call and they just – right into the decoy. I don’t know to this day, I don’t know what the Azerbaijan word is for Red Crested pochard because every time he sees one, he makes a sound, Adil grab my call and call to them. We’re in this tiny little P-row looking, you’ve got enough room to sit, your decoys, your blind bag, your shotgun, he’s standing in the back push polling.

Steven Rinella: Through the marsh?

Ramsey Russell: Those boats they use – think of it like a 12-14ft sized P-row blind bag, everything we need in that little boat and off we go and it’s silent and it’s stealthy and you hear the ducks and the bird life around you when you’re going. And if you push it far enough in the weeds and get it in that cane just right, it makes a great shooting platform. But the guides don’t speak any English and I’ve learned that google translate, it’s good for yes, no hungry, it don’t work translating for us having a conversation. And this year, one of my clients was saying, man, I’m just really disappointed, this guy didn’t speak English, blah-blah. And I go, you’re a duck hunter and he’s a duck hunter and we don’t have a conversation like this Steve, I mean you know what to do as a duck hunter. Man, you know my life is a Crayola box of colors and cultures and creeds and races and religions but in the times I see them, we’re all just duck hunters. And that’s one of the most beautiful things about what we do to me, is just to meet a guy in form – a guy in Azerbaijan, a guy in Argentina and they’re real hunters and this relationship forms. But no spoken word, no common words, just hand signs and signal, we know what to do. And that’s just a very rewarding aspect of it all.

Steven Rinella: When you’re traveling like that, like when you’re going into customs and stuff. And they’re like, what are you doing? Like I’m here to hunt ducks.

Ramsey Russell: No, heck no. What are you doing? I’m a tourist.

Steven Rinella:  Have you hunted ducks in countries that have no regulatory system, no hunting licenses?

Ramsey Russell: Not that I’m aware.

Steven Rinella: Everyone has some form of regulatory system.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, they do. But I do say and I’ve talked about this before, America, Canada, well the north American model Australia, New Zealand, there’s a lot of parts of the world that are black and white. Man, we in America are blessed with black and white. The laws and they’re sent out and they’re published and we all know, if we can read, we know what the laws are. But you get into other parts of the world, it can be grey. Some of the invites I’ve been on, I’m to a point right now there’s places in the world I’d like to go hunting down in Southeast Asia. I know to go to North Korea, I’m probably going to have to know somebody pretty high up the food chain to get into North Korea and feel comfortable about it. But I’d love to go.

Steven Rinella: You think they’ve got good ducks in north Korea?

Ramsey Russell: I bet they do, yeah. I bet there somewhere they got some good ducks and got some species we’re not going to find anywhere else. But it’s gotten to the point is, I get invites, I get contacted by people, I’ve just got a 2 or 3 fingers worth of question I’ve got to ask is hunting legal? Is the species legal? Is me holding a gun believes you can’t hold a gun. You can’t hold ammo. There’s countries that that’s a real big deal. And so I started asking these questions, I’ve been invited come to Japan. I got invited to come to Japan where there’s no legal hunting. I’ve been invited to go to Turkey. There’s big game hunting, there’s not bird hunting. I’ve been invited to go to the Bahamas, the Cuban whistler and the white cheek pin tail are protected. You can’t go there.

Steven Rinella: You’re talking about the grayness of laws, we would go spearfish in the Bahamas my brother goes there for quite a bit and you can just use a sling, you can’t use like a gun, you know? But he did a lot of work because he never could get a straight answer, so he works to get like the rigs, right? Like what are the rules?

Ramsey Russell: There may not be any.

Steven Rinella: Well there are, but when you express them to the people down there, they’re like, there’s no such thing as that rule. Like dude, I’m telling you man, I’m looking at it right here, like here’s the rule like no man, you fish where you want man. And they argue with you but it’s your rule. Dude, like I’m telling you cannot on these certain islands, you cannot spearfish within 200 yards offshore or something like that. And they almost act like hostile to the idea and like how big a spiny lobster supposed to be. No, mine. You keep what you want man.

Ramsey Russell: Nobody’s probably enforcing it down there.

Steven Rinella: No, they’re like, dude, don’t even – they’re like, I don’t want to go down that path, I’m talking about there being rules about this shit. You guys got to borrow a gun everywhere right?

Ramsey Russell: Someplace you have to – Peru has some weird issues where you can’t bring guns and we use there’s –

Steven Rinella: But like Azerbaijan, am I saying it right?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. No, it’s as easy bringing a gun into Azerbaijan as it is Canada.

Steven Rinella: Really?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. It was as easy bringing firearms into Pakistan as it was in Saskatchewan.

Steven Rinella: Your own ammo, your own gun into Pakistan?

Ramsey Russell: I cannot remember, we got the permit for ammo. Well, you run into a problem bringing your own ammo is weight restrictions in airline rules. If you can get a permit for the firearm, you can get a permit for the ammo. But where you run into problems is airlines allow 11lbs and then they’ve got restrictions on just how much you grow pounds can be bringing bags anyway. So that gets a little iffy. But bringing guns was – the craziest thing about –

Steven Rinella: I just want to clarify like, the part that I wonder about with guns is like that some countries – I could just picture countries having not enough demand from international travelers trying to bring in firearms that they never bothered to set up a system by which it’s done. Like doing in Mexico, we do it every year but it’s a nightmare. I mean, they put together a system but it’s a very clumsy system that takes – how long do you have to start ahead of time, Janis?

Janis Putelis: Well yeah, we just turned in our information for next January’s hunt and it’s –

Ramsey Russell: Hope it doesn’t land on a bureaucrat’s desk and get stuck.

Janis Putelis: We did in June.

Steven Rinella: And so in June laying the groundwork to bring a gun into Mexico in January.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know how our clients do it in parts of Mexico where we flying to Hermosillo. But if you can give me that information within 2 weeks, 3 weeks our outfitter will get the permits for you.

Steven Rinella: The guy we go with like he runs extremely tight ship. He’s very organized and doesn’t like surprises.

Ramsey Russell: Nobody likes surprises. When you’re traveling hunting, nobody likes surprises. You know speaking of – I had a client one time, that was one of those clients who wanted to go do real stuff, so we were going to Mongolia and as I was talking to him, I said, well you might just want to meet me over there because I think I’m going to stop in China and they got to send me to our visa, I don’t need to get a visa permit through the consulate and I’m going to stop there and go see the wall of China which was built to keep the Mongols out of China. I want to go do that too. And we’re both fine with firearms, so we were talking to the guy over there that arrange this and we’ve gone back and forth for months. Like you said to get this firearm and all this kind of paperwork going and I call them as I’m going to the airport and I’m fixing to leave to go to the airport, I don’t have my firearm permit for China. It’s just a little temporary pass through permit and I called him up and say I need to get this paperwork just to have it. He goes, no you don’t need it Mary Wayne’s going to meet you with it. I said, yeah I get that she’s going to be our tour guide and she’s going to have my paperwork but I’ve been through this show before, I feel comfortable just having it on my person and we went back and forth and finally I said, I’m not boarding a flight without my permit. It comes over the fax machine. And as we’re coming in through the temporary visa line it took forever, 3 hours. And the lady knew to ask us did we have any paperwork and I’m showing every piece of paperwork I’ve got to include my firearm permits. She goes you’re bringing guns? Yes ma’am. That was it. She sent us on through and we get and there’s our guns and there’s our luggage and there’s everything else and I read my text it says, you’re supposed to meet Mary Wayne in baggage so we just start proceeding towards the exit and we’ve got all our luggage and I’m sitting there just looking at the guard or whoever he is, the guy at customs looking at the computer monitor of everything coming through X-ray, he might have been slumped in his chair a little bit, the minute he saw guns boy did he get straight and he started talking loud and everybody started talking loud and I just got off, we’ve been traveling for 30 hours and I’m just kind of watching the situation unfold, if somebody comes out of the back followed by a crowd of people coming out the back all talking loud of the next coming my way and looking at the picture on the screen and I tell the guy with me, I said, I don’t know how this is going to go. So they very politely hurt us up and they’re all talking man and they carry us back to this little tiny room smaller than this studio, small in this little room here and it’s got 2 school desk with a steel bar where they can put a steel bar across your lap and lock you in, I’m like boy don’t sit down.

Steven Rinella: They’ve got a what?

Ramsey Russell: This little chair –

Steven Rinella: Like a little jail chair.

Ramsey Russell: Like a little jail chair. Well, they didn’t ask us to sit but the room is getting more and more people and they’re all trying to tighten, and they’re shouting –

Steven Rinella: And you sit in the chair –

Ramsey Russell: Oh, I’m not in that chair, I’m doing anything but sitting in that chair.

Steven Rinella:  I’m not saying, but just trying to understand to. One sits in the chair if one were to. They swing a bar over and they throw a lock and you’re stuck in your chair.

Ramsey Russell: I’m not going to lie to you, I’m on the verge of cracking a sweat like this shit is going downhill quick because these people are going at it and I’m trying to –

Steven Rinella: What kind of gun you got with you?

Ramsey Russell: Benelli. Got my shotgun, my ammo, we’ve got a rifle, just a little rim fire rifle and I’m trying to get over here to get my hands on my permit, I can see it, they got the gun case open and boy they’re getting agitated. And I’m trying to get my permit and I mean it’s like they’re breaking into Kung Fu stances and everything, because here’s a guy in the country with a firearm.

Steven Rinella:  Trying to get at his stuff.

Ramsey Russell: And finally I just make a dash, I grabbed my paperwork and it open, I gave it to the guy that’s yelling the loudest and he says something loud and it’s just hush falls over the room and somebody comes up and what do you know they speak and he go, do you have a translator? I go, yes sir, he said call her on the phone so I called Mary Wayne and she comes back there in a minute she walks in it all starts again and everything gets calm and she says everything’s fine, the lady that let you in through the 72 hours she was supposed to notify the police and notify TSA and she did not. I said, so what now? He said, oh she’s either going to jail or she’s fired. I said, no man what about us? And he said, oh we’re going to be here a while so settle in, we were there for 4 hours. We end up spending the time we landed in Beijing with those firearms over that one misunderstanding until the time we exited to go to the hotel with 9 or 10 hours. And I asked the client how you like this? How you like this part of the job?

Steven Rinella: So then you roll out into the streets of Beijing and you got a semi-auto shotgun.

Ramsey Russell: Oh heck no, you leave them at the airport. We put those in police custody, they locked him up under lock and key and we signed for them, now we’re in the streets of Beijing. And I was told you before going to China that I love Chinese food. I would have said they know egg foo yang and spring rolls, I’ve been to China. I like Peking duck.

Steven Rinella: You like American Chinese?

Ramsey Russell: I must, I do not like the real thing I found out.

Steven Rinella: Because of what?

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know. We go to some restaurant and Mary just clambers on and on about the pork something at this particular restaurant, so we all open it, would say both of us and her order this dish and I take a bite taste, it tasted kind of like that old brown stink bait smelled.

Steven Rinella: All fermented stuff.

Ramsey Russell: Something and I drink a little cocoa and try it again, I’m like boy, I don’t like this I found out. And everything I tried over there was just, but the Peking duck, I lived on Peking duck. We found a restaurant with Peking duck and we ate a duck every night

Steven Rinella: Because you like ducks.

Ramsey Russell: I do like duck. And if wild duck tasted as good probably or had as much fat content as Peking duck, they would likely be extinct.

Steven Rinella: You know, you’re saying that everywhere you go, you got like some of the same ducks keep popping up like different versions of the same ducks, do ducks act like ducks? I mean, it’s like, people that hunt ducks over the world over decoy, spread, blind, calls, do you ever go somewhere and they just hunt ducks where they have a completely different way they hunt ducks? And you have to be like, you know what it works good is to put out decoys and build a blind.

Ramsey Russell: No, it’s kind of the way the game is played is with decoys.

Steven Rinella:  So, people will figure that out the world over.

Ramsey Russell: That’s the way they figure out the world over. But I’m going to tell you as somebody that’s traveled and seen and hunted around the world, on the one hand, I believe that American hunters are the most passionate, the most dedicated. We have elevated every aspect of duck hunting to art form the camo, the guns, the ammo, I mean everything, everything is state of the line technological art and you really don’t need that to shoot a duck. You really don’t need some of that to shoot a duck. And I go back to Azerbaijan the fundamentals where they’re hunting not with us but for themselves to feed their family, they’re literally hunting over pop bottles, over soda bottles,

Steven Rinella: Paint it up.

Ramsey Russell: Black paint. I found a spread this year that was nothing but old Clorox bottle, a different bottle with wool socks over them and just put out. And they put them out in the right place and the right formation and hunt them at the right times and they kill ducks to feed their families. And they’re just very traditional hunters, it’s like hunting way back in time and that I really – and it’s like, I’ve got a 22 year old son, my oldest, 20 year old son my youngest, but they’re at a totally different stage of the game and I can remember, they’re really at a different motivation at that age than I am at an older age now. And to me, a lot of clients or a lot of duck hunters, the merit or the break over point or whatever, the metric of a good hunt is a lot of trigger pulls. And to me, the more I get into it, it’s like the fewer trigger pulls, if the limit is 7 ducks out here in Montana closer I can get shooting 7 times and killing those 7 green heads the better, that’s how it is to me. You see what I’m saying? Which brings up a good point that duck hunting is so subjective, it’s a very subjective experience. The 4 of us go jump in a duck blind and we all want maybe something a little bit different out of it.

Steven Rinella: Do you find motivations to hunt or similar everywhere you go? Like, meaning – I was struck a couple times and I’ve been around hunting with people from very different cultures in faraway places where there’s a palpable excitement fishing, whatever. Like people get excited, when it’s good, it’s good and people like it and there’s like an enthusiasm, someone catches a big one that’s enthusiasm, like, do you see that all? Do you always see that like here comes a flight of ducks and people are like there’s an electric feeling when it comes to ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, especially when you’re hunting with a crowd of folks, it’s just you feel it. You know how everybody sitting here all talking and socializing and the one time you really need to be still in a duck blind is when there’s ducks flying, we’re sitting here talking, having this conversation, there’s duck and everybody starts break dancing, looking for the guns getting ready, yeah, there’s excitement and it’s an energy and I love it. There’s an energy right there everybody’s proud. I see, my thing with older duck hunters more way more experienced duck hunters and stuff like that, it settles into a quiet proud, I like to say that. Over in Azerbaijan this year and this is the kind of hunt I like, just personally speaking is when the ducks are difficult, there aren’t gangbusters full of ducks that you’re expecting and you’re in a blind by yourself and this year in Azerbaijan maybe we’re shooting a dozen, 15 birds apiece but it took utter focus. It took absolutely keeping your head in the game the entire time. And Adil, he went back 50 or 60 yards from where I was hitting in this little blind by myself and he would whistle loud, I’m looking downwind and I’m as focused as I can humanly be and when 3 ducks come in, it’s not just okay, it’s 3 ducks, let me shoot one or how do you make the play to kill them all? I mean the numbers are tumbling the whole time, these 2 first past, no on a second pass, now they’re coming in, now I’m going to run the table on and it’s just that focus what I’m saying, just playing a real – what I call a real clean game. Call the ducks, get them in close, make ethical shots, knock them down and just really go all in. It’s like Steve back when I was an archer or let’s say fly fishing, I was watching some guys on the river fly fish the other day and what I think about it is how fly fishing is really not about getting grease hot and eating, it’s an art, it’s a ritual, it’s a process, am I right? I mean those guys are really getting into it. Why else would you go out there and whip the water forever, you’re not going to eat a big dinner. But seriously, it’s something about that hypnotic thing that art form and getting better and laying that can fly better and when I did bow hunt way back in college in the days with no compound bow, it was never about whack and stack as many as I could, I mean it’s like every time I drew back the dozen deer I shot in my life, every time I drew back that string creased a smile because I own that deer, I played that game, he was right here and it’s just a matter of letting the air go and watch death and duck comes like that too. I know too, a lot of people duck hunt just a bunch of buddies out there just letting loose as much ammo as possible. But I think there’s a ritual to it from the decoys and the placement and getting the birds in and calling to them and speaking their language and having that negotiation to coax them into that range that you own them and there’s something pure about that to me.

Hanzi Deschermeier: There’s a big portion of my enjoyment from duck hunting that comes from – and I’m not going to put some arbitrary percentage on it. But anticipation is just – I mean everything from come June like washing off my decoys from last year and scrubbing them down and making them look nice, whether that – not shiny but nice, you know what I mean, to being in that holding pattern and waiting. Is it the second pass or the 3rd pass, am I screwing up by not going on the first pass? Those split second moments of joy are instrumental in my satisfaction with the sport.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what keeps that energy and that enthusiasm and that vibration coming on. You’re watching that bird. I mean, like down the Deep South where we hunt a lot of gadwalls. Gadwalls kind of work in in reverse order. Their cork screw is getting further away. You better get them on the first pass if you can because the 2nd, 3rd and 4th pass usually going to be further away. They’ve talked themselves out of coming in, but sometimes they do and you’re trying to find which duck do I watch? Which duck is bringing the flock in and focused on him but that’s what keeps it great. So what if you don’t kill every duck? That’s okay.

Steven Rinella:   Presumably you get a lot of clients who are wanting to tick off lists? What’s your relationship to that motivation? I mean, you’re in business, you got to take the money, but do you ever feel like it’s a – like the motivations aren’t quite what you wish they were. Someone just ticking off numbers?

Ramsey Russell: No, in this day and age in hunting –

Steven Rinella: Because this is coming from a guy who was just saying I want to get an Ocellated so I can become a world –

Ramsey Russell: Why somebody hunts and for that matter how somebody hunts. We kicked off the episode talking about hunting with hounds, there’s people that opposed to it. There are pears that don’t think we should hunt with hounds, I disagree. I think we should hunt. And so why somebody hunt or how somebody hunts or what motivates somebody into different parts of the world is really kind of their business. As long as it’s legal and ethical, let’s go for it. But you know that whole species thing, it’s like on the one hand, I did kind of find myself wanting to shoot a different duck than I shot, hunt a different bird because you were asking about duck hunting, duck hunting styles, you know all of hunting, all the fundamentals of duck hunting is predicated kind of on hunting mallards, but not all ducks are mallards, something they don’t play by the mallard rule book. And then you have to figure it out. You have to adapt from your rule and figure out something a little bit different. Hunting divers is different than hunting birds that come in high, which is different than hunting geese, which is different than hunting some other species. But it’s still the fundamental game, but every species you start having their different little rules. There’s a lot of guys that want to collect as many duck species as they can. And I see a lot of young guys now, because there’s people out there that they’re chasing the North American Slam. I don’t believe, its 41, I believe it’s closer to 60, probably around mid-fifties, high fifties than 41. But whatever you’re chasing, chasing it, go for it.

Steven Rinella: Do I need to add up where I’m at now?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, go for it. I mean the chase never ends. But seriously what we found out is really and truly as we began to meet that kind of hunter that wanted to chase off the beaten path into different species that really kind of drove us, it wasn’t that kind of like the cart before the horse who’s driving who here, the clients coming in and having those conversations? What do you know about shooting bar headed geese? Well, I need to find a bar headed goose, which led us to Mongolia. Now, I’ll tell you, I think most collectors that I know, I think at some point in the line they’re going to realize they’re really not collecting a bird or a trophy or an animal, they’re collecting experiences and that’s just placeholders for that experience.

Steven Rinella: I agree with that. So, I remember it was 188 countries or something on the planet? I don’t know, sub 200 countries. How many countries have you hunted ducks in? More than a dozen.

Ramsey Russell: No more than a dozen, I’d say 25 or 30. Maybe more, maybe 35.

Steven Rinella: Who’s got it right and wrong? Like who is paying attention to ducks in a way that they’re playing the long game, so they got ducks in 100 years?

Ramsey Russell: America. I think so. Because nowhere else on earth that I’m aware – Australia’s trying, Australia is doing a great job. But nowhere else in the world do we have crush the numbers like they do here. Do the surveys, do the breeding count, do the pond counts, I mean America is trying. And maybe it could be said that hardly anywhere else in the world do we have the pressure, the hunting pressure for ducks. And it’s not maybe just the total number of people hunting. But I think of my granddad who got me into this thing, maybe he hunted a dozen days a year maybe. Man, how many people’s hunting 12 days a year now? A lot of guys are hunting way more than that hunting. Going to Canada, going to Kansas, going to Mississippi going Alabama going chasing these ducks, there’s just passion, there’s this obsession. And we’re not only hunting them harder, but we’re doing it with that elevated art form worth of equipment to make us more efficient hunters. So, I would like to see – I really do believe that here in the US we’re playing the long game as best we can. We’ve got a lot of science and a lot of money behind the research and genetics and management and harvest. I don’t see anybody else really doing it. The advantage they have in places like Argentina, they’ve got just a miniscule demand for hunting, minuscule hunting pressure I should say.

Steven Rinella: Do you feel that we’re making any big mistakes as a country around duck management?

Ramsey Russell: No, I don’t. I believe the numbers. I’d like to see – no, I don’t believe we’re making many mistakes.

Steven Rinella: How many clients do you have that run around town, the ducks don’t taste good?

Ramsey Russell: A lot. How many times do you hear?

Steven Rinella: It’s just a widely held –

Ramsey Russell: And I hate that. Steve, you ever watch Andy Griffith?

Steven Rinella: No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Ramsey Russell: There was an episode –

Steven Rinella: I watched Don Knots.

Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah. Well, I love him.

Steven Rinella: He only go out with one bullet and shoot.

Ramsey Russell: There was an episode of Opie with friends with somebody that was apparently wealthy and he came over to play with Opie and aunt Bee was putting on airs and Andy come in and goes is that goose and to put on airs and to impress this young rich kid, she had cooked a Christmas goose. I was thinking man, it wasn’t but back in the 60s.

Steven Rinella: Oh and that was regarded as like an opulent. Well, in a Christmas carol.

Ramsey Russell: In christmas carol. Exactly.

Steven Rinella: Dickens, when he wakes up and he’s like in a better mood after the goals to past, present, future comes and sees him, he wakes up and sends the kid down to go get the goose. Now, he’d be like, what the hell you send him to get now. Real ribeye.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, well that’s what we do. But I really do – I like duck and I wish – that’s one thing that excites me about you all’s program is, you all get people excited about eating and how to cook and how to prepare and how to do all this stuff with these birds. And I think it’s become a lost art. That’s really and truly why I think more waterfowl aren’t eating, it’s just a lost art. People don’t know what to do with it. If you ever had bad duck one time, that’s going to last a while.

Steven Rinella: I mean I’ve had a lot of bad duck, but then it’s not that hard. It’s like pretty easy. Well, no, it took a long time but once you learn how to cook and you cook it really well for a decade or whatever, it just seems simple because you learn like a couple of basic rules. And then it’s really good and then you get annoyed with people who don’t see that it’s good and you kind of forget the fact that you ate a lot of shitty duck over the years. Now, I know what to do, like I know I can look at it, I know what kind of duck it is, I know what you can get away with that duck, I cook that duck, it’s always good and now I’m like, people are so stupid, but I’m like, wait a minute cause I’ve cooked some bad meaning, typically like grossly overcooked.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I think that’s the biggest mistake is over cooking.

Steven Rinella: Unless you’re over cooking it in the right way when it becomes okay, but not overcook it the wrong way.

Ramsey Russell: One of my favorite recipes and I would tell everybody, how many times you’ve heard cream cheese, jalapeno, rappel bacon? You could probably put a dog turd and it tastes all right, you know? But it gets old and it’s like, I’ll tell you a simple recipe for cooking duck that I think it would go over big time is, duck breast – if you’re going to breast the duck breast the duck soak it in olive oil with copious amounts of cavender seasoning and steered on both sides –

Hanzi Deschermeier: What kind of seasoning?

Ramsey Russell: Cavender, it’s just like a Greek seasoning and –

Steven Rinella: I know that stuff.

Ramsey Russell: And just hit it a couple of minutes on this coal.

Steven Rinella: Kind of has it like a green lettering on white bottom?

It’s just cavender Greek seasoning but it’s rare. One of my favorite ways to really get –

Steven Rinella: So, you soak it in olive oil?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I just put it on the table in a Ziploc bag with olive oil and that seasoning in there and I think that I think something about oil helps it penetrate that meat but it’s just great, it’s good and it’s simple and it’s easy, just don’t overcook it, cook it rare. And I was telling somebody, one of my favorite way to cook duck is chicken fry it. I mean, if you want to get rid of a bunch of duck quick chicken fry it, simple.

Steven Rinella: Walk me through that.

Ramsey Russell: Take your breast portions tenderize it,

Steven Rinella: Like beat it with the hammer.

Ramsey Russell: I use the back of a knife, boom tenderize it, soak it in milk, season it dredge in flour. And I like to make a couple of dipping sauces, my favorite of what we call jezebel sauce. I got it from somebody over in Arkansas but it’s vaguely –

Steven Rinella: Remember that band, Gene loves jezebel?

Ramsey Russell: It’s good. Anyway, jezebel sauce a dipping sauce had equal parts of orange marmalade, apple jelly and really good course ground horseradish.

Steven Rinella: Hold on and say that again cause I got a brand new horse radish patch that is going insane.

Ramsey Russell: Equal parts of horseradish, orange marmalade and apple jelly.

Steven Rinella: So, shred your horseradish.

Ramsey Russell: I buy it out of a jar, but it’s got to be the good, some of us like week. I like the strong.

Steven Rinella: One of our guys that works with us Byron, he made me some prepared horseradish and then he gave me the roots and I planted them but man that stuff is like a jungle already.

Ramsey Russell: That’s pretty cool.

Steven Rinella: It’s a very prolific plant.

Ramsey Russell: I’d like to have some. That’s just the way to get rid of a lot of duck quick. I think we owe it to the resource to learn how to cook one good dish Anyway.

Steven Rinella: Yeah but tell me one more time because I’m all hung up on the horseradish. So prepare horseradish marmalade, orange marmalade apple jelly and so take the jar, take the jellies and put them in your microwave just to get them to where they’re liquefied enough, so you can mix them, put in your horse radish and shake it up. Maybe put in a big dollop of yellow mustard.

Steven Rinella: Is this apple jelly or apple butter?

Ramsey Russell: Apple jelly, not apple butter, the yellow stuff, apple jelly.

Steven Rinella: And then do what with that again?

Ramsey Russell: liquefy it. Get in the microwave, get it warm where you can mix it. Orange marmalade, same things, you can mix them, put them in a jar, put your horseradish in, shake it up, it’s excellent. And the next day is going to be even better.

Steven Rinella: Oh so, that’s your dipping sauce.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a dipping sauce.

Steven Rinella: You’re not soaking the duck in there.

Ramsey Russell: If you’re going for chicken fried duck soak them in milk.

Steven Rinella: Oh, that’s your dipping sauce for chicken. I thought you were laying out whole investment –

Ramsey Russell: No, it’s good on anything, that dipping sauce will be good on anything.

Steven Rinella: Janis should I give you some of the roots man?

Janis Putelis: Not quite yet, our garden’s not ready to accept plants right now. We just don’t have a garden ready to plant it.

Steven Rinella: You’ve had a garden for years.

Janis Putelis: Yeah, but every year it keeps moving and it’s just not right. So this year we actually don’t –

Steven Rinella: You don’t got up and moved you’re just trying find to them.

Janis Putelis: We don’t have a garden to plant it. Yeah. And so this year we’re actually, we’re back in there with the mini ax and it’ll be ready next year.

Steven Rinella: Oh, you’re going next level.

Janis Putelis: I brined and smoked a bunch of ducks the other day, man, did those come out good. At first I did one hole next to a pheasant and that was so good, I decided to do more. So I pulled out, I had some – what do they call it when we do it with the breast and the thigh and the leg together, airplane or something like that?

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know.

Janis Putelis: And you smoke them like that.

Steven Rinella: I didn’t know there was a name for it, I call it the thing I stole from the University of Montana wild Game cook book.

Janis Putelis: There’s a name if you chicken that way. Anyways, doesn’t matter. And I had some mallard breasts, then there was 2 gadwall or something other ring necks, maybe something random that had just come into the spread that I ended up with at home. And there was too scoter breasts with the skin on.

Steven Rinella: Where’d you get scoters?

Janis Putelis: North Carolina a couple of years ago. So they’ve been in my freezer for a while and they all got the same treatment brined throw on the smoker and the mallards are just eating just so good, just fantastic. I gave them a little mastodon, like Dustin mastodon seasoning on there and I get to the scoter and man, I’m feeling it and I’m like man, it’s like squishy, like softer, even though I cooked in the same amount of time, I cut it open and it’s just beautiful, like mid rare inside, but just tender and that nice there’s like a nice fat cap and then the skin is all crispy from the – because I did a really hot – scoter fat and I mean just touching the 2, you’d be like, man, I’d rather eat that scoter because you can just tell, you know how you can touch meat and tell that’s maybe tender.

Steven Rinella: Yeah, but I’ll be looking at it and thinking about the skin on their man.

Janis Putelis: Well, yeah I don’t think it wasn’t just the skin, it was kind of like that bear that you had that one time that when you brined and smoked and it tasted like you were eating smoked fish. Same thing with that scoter. I mean it just tasted like a fish.

Steven Rinella: I wasn’t there and I’m no a Dr. Duck, but I can tell you that a lot of that fish was laid up in that skin. And if you’d have been here, if you hadn’t been playing hooky, you’d have heard from the meat scientist about why that is, why that fishiness is in that fat and what fat does and how it functions but you don’t know.

Janis Putelis: I don’t know. I haven’t listened to that podcast.

Ramsey Russell: So to cook scoter –

Janis Putelis: Yeah, tell me what you do with a scoter.

Ramsey Russell: I’m asking the expert so to cook that scoter –

Steven Rinella: I’m not an scoter expert. But if I had to like come and cook a scoter, I would get the skin off there. Any of those fish eating ducks, I’ll get the skin.

Janis Putelis: Hanzi says, because I ran this by a Hanzi earlier too and Hanzi why don’t you tell him what you told me.

Hanzi Deschermeier: Oh, I try to avoid smoking diving ducks. I feel like, if it’s already fishy to begin with, it’s just going to enhance that fishiness. I feel like it.

Steven Rinella: Makes it the smoked fishiness.

Hanzi Deschermeier: Yeah, it just makes it that much more bad. I don’t know. I like to skin, I like my diver ducks, like skin them, put them in – I love making meatballs out of diver ducks. I mean, it’s like, mixed with some pork fat, it’s like a little guilty. But I think it goes great.

Steven Rinella: Reason to take some divers, the divers aren’t that great and pull the skin off them, cut into very thin strips and put like fajitas seasoning on them, do it, likely like seer them like that and then you got your peppers and onions and salsa and it’s just at that point, just stuff to eat. It’s like stuff to eat. That stuff that it’s good. And you’re like, glad you got them. It’s better than buying some stupid junk from a grocery store. I just never look down on them.

Janis Putelis: I’m not shooting scoters anymore.

Ramsey Russell: You ever had used waterfowl for hamburger? But –

Steven Rinella: Making a burger?

Ramsey Russell: You’ve had venison and bacon burger.

Steven Rinella: No, man, I’ve never made a duck burger, that’s a good idea though.

Ramsey Russell: It’s great. Yeah. And get the bacon in, so you’re baking like a bacon burger put some cheese in there. Oh, it’s good absolutely. Any duck not sea ducks maybe but the other ducks.

Steven Rinella: So you work all over the world, we’ve been talking about that, but I want to hit on something real quick just for people who might become interested in wanting to deal with you a little bit and associate with you, do you help people book trips here in the US?

“You know, in the United States here, what we do Steve is, the short answer is yes and no, because what we do is with long term relationships. We just don’t have the time to book your hunt to say Oklahoma. You know, what I’m saying?”

Ramsey Russell: You know, in the United States here, what we do Steve is, the short answer is yes and no, because what we do is with long term relationships. We just don’t have the time to book your hunt to say Oklahoma. You know, what I’m saying? And really truly that really does crowd me as a middleman. That really makes me kind of pushes my middleman boundaries. If you’re calling me to book a trip to Oklahoma but I’ve been to Oklahoma and some of these states on our US hunt list we call it, Canada and the United States and I’ve been to these guys just like, I’ve been elsewhere and I know they’re going to do what they say, they’re going to do no guarantee of duck limits every day, but they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do and we put you in touch with them on our website, their name, their contact information. Because I really feel like –

Steven Rinella: You don’t pull anything out of that?

Ramsey Russell: No.

Steven Rinella: If people hear you and they’re like, I got a good feeling about that guy. They want to vet a duck trip, they can call you and you’ll give your 2 cents on what your experience or what the rumor is.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. We’ve got the descriptions written up at US hunt list, just like we do at getducks.com. But still call me.

Steven Rinella: That’s a website US hunt list?

Ramsey Russell: US hunt list, it’s just a part of getducks.com.

Steven Rinella: So, people can get there by going to getducks.com.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right, click on US hunt list and boom and go take a look at it and see a hunt you like, you still have questions about call me, inbox me whatever like that. We just look at it like a value added service and in a way of working too, I kind of look at like a gateway drug. You think of kids sitting out here in the middle of nowhere, he shot his mallard and his pin tails and his gadwalls or his wood ducks or whatever and they come to us as like I want to collect, I want to go do some stuff, go to New England. You can get the scoter, diver, the long tail, go knock some real exotic stuff off and now they’re heading down that slippery path and I want to collect and they should be collecting those different experiences. But yeah, so we work with US outfitters and Canadian outfitters just to put you together. What I want to see is, if you want to go to a different place in the US or Canada, I want to put you in touch with them, get in touch with them quickly because it is a very subjective why are you going to Canada, what do you want to shoot in Oklahoma, why are you going to New England? Do you want to shoot eiders, do you want to shoot scoters, start working with that outfitter to get that thing right. You know, we start talking about foreign countries, firearms and hunting licenses and permits and language barriers and money wires and stuff like that, now I’m coming in and bringing a whole different ballgame to that equation that I would be just sending you to Oklahoma.

Janis Putelis: I got one follow up question. Have you hunted a duck in Latvia or any of the Baltic States?

Ramsey Russell: I have not yet.

Steven Rinella: You haven’t hunted Latvia?

Ramsey Russell: I have not yet.

Steven Rinella: Me and Janis want to go there and hunt so bad.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll put something together, let’s go.

Steven Rinella: Oh, can you work whatever magic you work around the world, but work in Latvia for us?

Ramsey Russell: Maybe.

Steven Rinella: Well, here’s deals Janis been kicking it around for quite some time. But he can’t make it like a full time job E-scouting Latvia.

Janis Putelis: I feel like I just can’t get a real solid commitment out of you as the host of the show that we’re going to do it.

Steven Rinella: Because I need to have it laid out. Like you have it laid out.

Janis Putelis: All right, we’ll keep working at it.

Steven Rinella: In a spare moment, run the getducks.com process on Latvia.

Ramsey Russell: I will. I need to get over that part of the world anyway. It’s bigger than just Romania, that part of the – I need to get over that part of the world and take a look.

Steven Rinella: Show me your ring Janis. It’s a Latvian powering ring. It’s called a Namis.

Ramsey Russell: Very good.

Hanzi Deschermeier: I got another question actually. I’m just curious about like mouth calling for ducks and I mean, I know that there’s places that it’s still practiced, right? I mean in the United States, not even going out of the borders, but like –

Janis Putelis: Explain what it is?

Hanzi Deschermeier: Calling ducks and geese with your mouth. I’m not going to be like a good example of it, but like I want to – I’m curious like what your experience has been with that, like what?

Ramsey Russell: The first time I ever saw a mouth calling was in Tennessee on Reel foot Lake. This was many years ago, oh, many years ago and they use these calls over there the typical traditional Reel foot lake call has got a metal reed and it’s a real high pitch and when those ducks start getting in close, they start ankhing them, start shouting and that’s how they finish those birds, it’s very traditional, Reel foot lake style call. And I’ve seen the same thing in Netherlands where they’ll ankh them, they don’t call it akhing, they just start anking –

Hanzi Deschermeier: And when you’re saying this, that means that with their voices, they’re saying the word ankh.

Ramsey Russell: Exactly. It’s loud. And I’ve seen, you take it to a whole another level. And here in the US I know that the guys that are hunting swans, they’re probably going to call them with their mouth. Especially the tyrant swans they’re going to call them with their mouth. I can’t –

Steven Rinella: Do that call.

Ramsey Russell: No, I can’t do that needs a whistle.

Steven Rinella: I’m calling my ass off, just do the call.

Ramsey Russell: But you go over to Azerbaijan again those guys call everything. Now, they’ll use electronic calls at times but it’s not enough. They’re subsidizing it with their own calls. In fact, we posted somewhere on our Instagram, we posted one of the duck guides over there, they let you hear an electronic call faintly in the background. But he’s running through all the species with his mouth and it’s unbelievable. You know,

Hanzi Deschermeier: So, when you come back from Azerbaijan, you are hunting all over the world. Is there any kind of specialness that comes with hunting where you first started?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I think I know what you’re asking and it’s like the more you hunt, the more you see and the different stuff you do. It’s like this thing for hunting at home. It’s like, it’s so strange and different from home but then at the same time it’s so much like home and it really gives me a fidelity for home. Hunting just like I did traditionally at home. I think that’s what you’re asking. How we hunt ducks here is way different than how they hunt ducks everywhere else. And same as hunting those Ocellated turkeys the way we started, you can’t paint yourself in a corner. The world’s a lot bigger than our backyards. I’ve shot ducks. For example, here we are in Montana, I know you all shoot waterfowl up here, but just think about it, man, we’re in the mountains. Water runs downhill, I feel like I spend most of my life in the lowest lying places on earth shooting ducks. But I have shot a pair of Andean Geese at 16,000 feet in Peru.

Steven Rinella: No really?

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely. I’ve shot them on the Bering Sea in January. I’ve shot them in the timber in this. I shot them at night by light. I shot them at night by moonlight. I’ve shot them with naked eyes. It is how people hunt around the world, it’s very different. One of the craziest things was in Russia, we were shooting ideas on the White Sea and they Russia has no basis, no concept for duck hunting. None, zip. It killed the duck, that’s it. Very practical Russian hunt. So, we’re going to go out Eider hunting, I brought some decoys no, we don’t need those. It was like a James bond movie, we’re in a metal speedboat, he’s going as fast as he can. And we’re up beside the eiders and I’ve got my legs out on the boat, so I don’t fly out when we hit a wave and I’m holding on one arm and shooting with the other.

Hanzi Deschermeier: I thought you were going to say, you were throwing dynamite.

Ramsey Russell: Right about the time you think you’ve done it all, somebody shows you another way to shoot a duck. And I like experiencing that.

Steven Rinella: The writer Ian Frazier, he told me a really good story, he spent years in Siberia writing a book about Siberia and he was telling me about – he finally gets an invite to go out with these guys to hunt, they want to hunt some kind of seal or sea lion I can’t remember what they were going for. But they’re like, Siberian anyway, I can’t – what do they call? There’s a different name for the – like, Eskimo or Inuit, people who live in Siberia, I believe they might have a different word. Either way he is with them and they go out and they have a bullet, there’s a bullet and they go on the most like, hellacious motorboat ride. Going through the seas, they get there, they’re just getting tossed around by waves, he’s seasick the whole time, the whole time, there’s like seals out in front of but they can’t shoot because they’ve got like a bullet and they eventually get it where a guy gets just the right shot and shoots the bullet and kills the thing and they start heading back and he’s getting more seasick and he’s soaking wet. He’s like, I don’t know how these people can like, how can they do this? Like how can they even stand this kind of thing? And he says high up he sees this duck like this duck crosses over the boat and it starts losing altitude and drops down into this distant bay and he said that boat turns in that direction, he’s like no. They went spending the rest of the evening looking for a duck. I like to jump shoot ducks, pass shoot ducks, decoy ducks but I found it with turkey’s man. Like I want to hunt turkeys in leaning against a tree trying to call a turkey. Like a called in Turkey means a lot more to me, alone pressured called in turkey means a lot more to me than bushwhacking a turkey or ambushing a turkey or getting turkeys that just run across the field because they have never seen a decoy in your life and then they stand there for 20 minutes. Like I like that turkey that comes just in after like an excruciating amount of time and he doesn’t want to do it and eventually does it. I like that, but a lot of stuff, I just take it as you get it.

Ramsey Russell: I agree. No, I mean, it’s that relationship you feel like you earned it that way. Sometimes birds just play different rules.

Steven Rinella: Oh yeah, I’ll take a wall, I mean short of throwing dynamite in the water. I’ll take a wall. They’re coming on bait, that’s great, coming on bobbers, I’ll take it. It’s like, I don’t need it to be as that I vertical jigged it, I’ll just take it.

Hanzi Deschermeier: I unabashedly prefer hunting ducks over water. I don’t know what it is like jump shoot over decoys, but something like a cornfield alfalfa it doesn’t get me in the same spot. I don’t know what that is.

Ramsey Russell: I agree.

Steven Rinella: All right, Ramsey Russell, thanks so much for coming in. Tell us how – I know we talked 100 times about, getducks.com but how else can people find you?

Ramsey Russell: Check us out on social media @RamseyRussell.getducks. That’s a great way to keep up. Especially when the world’s turning and we’re traveling to keep up with where we’re at and what we’re doing – Steven Rinella: All one Word. RamseyRussellgetducks. No, like tons of a underscore s underscore s underscore –

Ramsey Russell: No, don’t compute everybody @RamseyRussellgetducks.

Steven Rinella: And you’re on Instagram whatnot?

Ramsey Russell: That’s it.

Steven Rinella: All right, so go check him out on Instagram. Ramsey Russell get ducks, the great Ramsey Russell. Thanks for coming. We came in with an applause, we’re going to go out with an applause.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you all, I’m honored to be here. Thank you all very much.

Steven Rinella: That was fun.

 

[End of Audio]

LetsTranscript Transcription Services

www.letstranscript.com