00:00:02
Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to onex Hunt for their support of this podcast. I’m your host of Lake Pickle. On this episode, we’re going back to a topic that we recently discussed on this show, the notable decline of wintering mallards in the lower portion of the Mississippi Flyway. We just did an episode on this back in December, and it got quite a bit of feedback, so much so that it’s earned itself another look, which is great. And when we dive back in this time, we’re going to be hearing about this subject from folks just like you. The hunters, the duck stamp holders, the folks that are out there in the marshes and muddy backwater every single chance they get. The folks that love to duck hunt more than they love the next breath they breathe. It’s time to learn what those folks think of all this. Let’s dive in before we meet our first diehard duck hunter. Allow me to set the stage a bit. The format of this episode is going to be a bit different than many of the other Backwoods University episodes that you may have heard in the past. I’m going to go ahead and say I can’t take credit for this idea. Steve Ronella actually prompted me to do this before we ever officially launched this show. He called it Bar Biology, and the premise was to go around to local hangout spots for hunters and get their honest opinions on different sorts of wildlife issues, deer management, wild turkey declines, law or regulation changes, or in this case, the decline of the Mallard duck. And while I didn’t go to any bars for these interviews, Mom, just so you know, I did seek out ardent duck hunters that love waterfowl and love hunting them. Some of these folks I’ve known for a long while, and some of these folks I met for the first time the day we were court of the interview. Hearing from a wildlife biologist is great, and believe me, if you continue to listen to this show, you’re gonna hear from more of them. But I also think it’s extremely important to hear what the average hunter thinks, the citizen scientist, the common man. What does he have to say what does he thinks going on? What’s their opinions based on their experience out there? Well, let’s find out. Our first duck hunter has been hunting in the Mississippi Delta for decades, and while I had not had the pleasure of meeting him until this interview, I had heard of him in several duck hunting circles. His name is Jim Cruz. He’s a lifelong duck hunter and an author of a book called Amid the Cypress. I’m sitting in Jim’s office and on the walls hang several framed pictures of successful duck hunts that took place throughout the years. I want to start this conversation off hearing about one of these very photos. What about this one right here, the top one on the on you right.
00:02:55
Speaker 2: That top right, Yes, sir, that was just for whatever reason. Remember that was opening day of two thousand and three. That’s a picture of my wife and me and my dad and one of our girlfriends were along and we had killed a limit of mallards and gadwalls in very short order.
00:03:19
Speaker 1: That looks like a pretty great hunt.
00:03:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was a super hunt. My dad was a passionate sportsman, he grew up in a time when duck hunting really was the hunting that was available. He lived in Memphis, hunting the Mississippi Delta in eastern Arkansas both and that’s what he did growing up, And by the I guess the nineteen sixties, he had gained access to some of the property along the Mississippi River that we still hunt today. Well, as I grew older, I had a friend move in next door. He was a little bit older than me. He was old enough to drive. I wasn’t, but he was nice enough to tag along with a younger or a little younger guy tag along and hunt. He loved a duck hunt, so I got into that. So we spent many, many, many years hunting ducks together, and other things too, but tons of duck hunt.
00:04:23
Speaker 1: Right, So you’re pretty much whole origin of duck hunting started in the Mississippi Delta.
00:04:29
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, for sure, the great majority in Mississippi Delta. But I’ve hunted ducks in every flyway, Atlantic, Mississippi, Central, and Pacific. I’ve hunted I don’t know how many states, a lot, and then several other countries as well.
00:04:47
Speaker 1: Right.
00:04:48
Speaker 2: Waterfolon is a big part of life for my family and me.
00:04:53
Speaker 1: We’d established that Jim Cruz has been duck hunting for a while, there’s no question there. Before we start talking, Mallard declines, I want to get a better understanding of what duck hunting means to him.
00:05:04
Speaker 2: The things that still stay with me. We had, I guess my first duck hunts. My father and some of his friends had a lease on what’s now the famous York Woods in Tallahatchie County, and that those are really my very first duck hunting memories. And what I specifically remember is the sound of those wings overhead, that whistling in the darkness as we waited for the sun to come up, which incidentally I can’t hear anymore, but I still remember how that sounded, and the colors on those ducks. Somebody had shot a drake wigeon with that bold green iridescent stripe on his head, and I just remember picking up that duck and thinking out I was holding a miracle, and you know, as I want, but I remember that. I remember the smell of the wet burlapp that we used to camouflage the boat, smell of the outboard motor exhausts, These just things that come back to me. This was, you know, probably my first season. Yeah, stopping and getting potato logs and chicken nuggets at the gas station in Charleston. Just everything about it got to me and never got out of me.
00:06:30
Speaker 1: It’s always fascinating to me to learn the things that stick with us so tightly that don’t involve the actual hunt, like the smell of wet burlap or the brilliant colors on a duck. I feel like it’s often those tiny details that add up over time and help develop the love for a particular type of hunting that I’m sure many of you can relate with. I now want to turn the conversation to what we see today. I’m curious what changes Jim has seen in the Mississippi Delta throughout his time hunting here.
00:06:58
Speaker 2: One of the greatest changes I’ve seen in the Delta is the way the land is laid out. You know, when I was a kid, we would travel Highway forty nine or Highway sixty one, depending on where we were going to go hunting, and one of my favorite things to do was look for ducks out in the fields, and I knew where every wetland was on every highway, whether they were permanent wetlands or femeral wetlands that were just low places out in fields that would flood if you got a good rain. Those are mostly gone now and you don’t see the ducks on the landscape that you used to back in those days. And that’s you know, that’s just a product of more efficient farming practices and land leveling, and you know, goodness those I can’t blame a farmer for wanting to get water off his fields so he can have them ready to plant in the springtime. But it has changed the landscape for the water. So that’s a big change. I think we all read these statistics that say numbers of duck hunters are in decline. I, based on my anecdotal observations, have a hard time believing that it just seems more popular now, which is not a bad thing. I mean, it’s an activity that I sure love and I can understand how people are attracted to it. But again, I read the numbers that say hunter license sales are constantly declining, so I don’t know how to reconcile those with what I see. I just make that observation, right, So that’s a big change. Another one that I’ve seen them in my own lifetime in a big way is to change migration patterns of geese, snow geese, and specklebellies, to be precise. When I was in high school, it was a big deal for us to see a flock of snows or specs. And I was hunting all over eastern Arkansas northwest Delta, and if I saw a flock of snows on the ground, I would actually put a line in my journal noting that fact. That’s how special that was. And I don’t know how many trips we made a bunch to Texas to go hunt snows and specs in Little Canada’s Richardson’s Canada’s. The limit on them was five light geese and two dark geese. At that time, we would go down there for that purpose. In Texas was the promised land for geese. At that time, it looked like the Jonesboro, Arkansas area does now. So the geese migration has changed drastically from what I understand, and they just don’t really get down there southwest of Houston in any significant numbers anymore. They’ve moved northward. Yeah, so that’s changed, and it raises the worry that what other northward shifts are going to happen with waterfowl. That’s no secret. That’s a big topic among a lot of duck hunters, is or flyway patterns shifting.
00:10:27
Speaker 1: I mean, do you think that mallards have been declining down here over the past couple of years? Do you think there’s less mallards that make it down here.
00:10:35
Speaker 2: I don’t have a good answer for that.
00:10:37
Speaker 1: Okay.
00:10:38
Speaker 2: I know people who are killing mallards just like they always did, and I know others who are saying they’re just not here like they used to be. So I’m not trying to dodge the question, but I just I don’t have a pad answer for that one. I will tell you this. I have a really good friend who lives over in Cameron Paris, Louisiana, which historically, I don’t know if it still is, but historically was the number one county in the United States as far as duck kill, and back in time when he started duck hunting back in the eighties or early nineties, they killed tons of mallards, tons of pintails, tons of specklebellies. I’ve hunted down there now five consecutive opening days and I’ve seen two mallards and all those trips, a little handful of pintails and a few specks here and there. Now they still get plenty of gadwalls, plenty tel spoons, but they don’t the mallards and the pentails just don’t get there in any numbers. And of course that’s a lot of folks over there rightfully upset about.
00:11:54
Speaker 1: That’s the big question mark, you know, like, what is it’s causing that? Right, That’s what a lot of folks, and even the folks and I’m talking about personally here, I’ve had. You know, some folks, they’ll get angry when you start talking different theories. And from what I have deduced, even the folks that get angry, sometimes they get angry with me if I share an opinion, I have to do something like, look, these guys. One thing we have in common. They love waterfowl. They love to duck hunt. So even what about it, when they get angry, it’s coming from a good place, and I can appreciate that. And so that’s that’s why again it’s like I’m curious. I’ve heard from the biologists, and so I’m just trying to gather opinions. What do you think’s going on? You know, but in your opinion, there’s no right or wrong answer, it’s just what do you think is happening.
00:12:38
Speaker 2: Well, I’ll say this, this flooded corn phenomenon is not something that’s been going on for decades and decades on a widespread basis, And that is the huge ticket item. Are all these private flooded corn reservoirs significant enough to affect migration? I have friends who have some, and I’ve seen, you know, the roost flights there, and you wonder, are all these ducks coming in here? Ducks that used to go somewhere else.
00:13:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don’t know.
00:13:16
Speaker 2: I was told. Well, I know that there are a huge number of duck clubs up in the Saint Louis area. That’s a very historic duck hunting area where the I think it’s a Missouri and the Mississippi come together. And from what I understand, every club plant’s corn. And one logical conclusion is that if you have thousands of acres of corn, you could affect the migration to some degree. So for what it’s worth, I know in one of your prior podcast episodes, you’ll touched on the global warming issue a little bit and made me think I really ought to take the time to go back through my journals, which go back all the way to nineteen seventy six, and I have every hunt written down from then to now, and I would be able to tell you the days we were frozen up on a day to day, year to year basis. That would be It would be interesting to look at that and see what truth was versus remembered perception. Sure, we’ve had very hard freezes in the last few years, just like the ones that everybody remembers in the good old days. So you know, by the same token, I hadn’t broken any ice this year. We’ve had a lot of cold days, but I hadn’t had to break ice yet.
00:14:44
Speaker 1: What about locally, You know, you’ve spent a lot of time hunting around the Mississippi Delta, even between you know, your family land that you still hunt to, maybe some other local places around there. What have you seen Have you seen any changes over the years through there abound abundance of mallards.
00:15:01
Speaker 2: I would say our mallards have pretty much stayed about the same now. Number wise, they’re up and down. Yeah, you know, some years are better than others that’s just duck hut. But percentage wise, I think our mallards about like they always have been. Personal observation on specific places.
00:15:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s good.
00:15:26
Speaker 2: You know, we don’t go out and just there are no mallards. Yeah, some days there may.
00:15:32
Speaker 3: Not be mallards. But overall, if.
00:15:34
Speaker 2: I look across the course of a season or ten seasons, I’d say percentage they’re about the same.
00:15:41
Speaker 1: Yeah. I like hearing that.
00:15:43
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:15:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, Because again, some folks that you know, they’re ready to wave a red flag like, yeah, this is bad.
00:15:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, I get that, and I know people I have friends who who feel that way.
00:15:55
Speaker 1: How do you feel about the future of duck hunting. Do you think we have an optimistic future?
00:16:00
Speaker 2: I think we have to be optimistic. If we’re not, what do we have left?
00:16:06
Speaker 1: I like that answer.
00:16:07
Speaker 2: You know, I can say for myself, as long as I am able and have the opportunity to hunt those ducks, I’m gonna be going out there and trying for them. My approach has always been if I’m not here in this office behind this desk and duck seasons open, I’m gonna be hunting ducks. And it’s been that way for decades. Yeah, and without regard to the weather. I’ll be out there every second I can get there.
00:16:37
Speaker 1: I’ll tell you, speaking candidly here, this was such a fun interview. I love hearing from guys like Jim. You can hear the deep appreciation and respect for waterfowl and waterfowl hunting in everything that he said. How cool would it be to go back and look through some of those duck hunting journals he mentioned that go all the way back to nineteen seventy six. I also was interesting by some of the potential factors he listed off for what could be affecting these negative changes in hunting quality or mallard abundance. Changes in agricultural practices, whether potentially or the perceived boom of flooded unharvested corn. That is definitely a hot topic these days, and I have my own opinions on that, but this episode is not about my opinions. So I hope you enjoyed hearing from mister Jim Cruise. I know I sure did. But now it’s time to move on to our next duck hunter. My dear friend B. C. Rogers, a lifelong duck hunter owner of Wren and Ivy sporting and travel gear and an all around good guy. How old were you when you started duck hunting.
00:17:41
Speaker 4: The answer to that question, there wasn’t a beginning, because my mom and dad have always duck on it, and they duck on it together when I was born, and but you know, starting in the seventies and so we don’t. People have asked me that question a lot of times. I don’t have any memory of not going.
00:17:58
Speaker 1: You don’t really remember life before duck hunt No, I mean I remember when I was able to take my gun, a gun myself.
00:18:06
Speaker 4: I was seven, a single shot four ten. Yeah, I took a BB gun before that. But I don’t ever remember not going to the blind Yeah, and my kids running ivy, don’t. I mean, I mean, I literally have pictures of them where you’re they’re in Papoosa’s. Yeah. I have also a picture of Wren. She’s the oldest, and she’s in that baby beyorn thing you wear in the front, zipped up in my hunting jacket. Of course I can’t shoot because I got a babe with like little camouflage cups on her ears, you know, like yeah, you know, and the same way. Of course, back then, my dad was a smoker when I was a kid, and he would tear off cigarette butts and stick them in me in my sister’s ears because they weren’t the earplugs like he would tell, smoke a cigarette and tear the filters off and stick them in our ears.
00:18:54
Speaker 1: That’s fantastic.
00:18:55
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don’t have I think I probably killed my first duck when I was but I don’t have a memory of starting hunting.
00:19:03
Speaker 1: So I don’t want to assume here would that have taken place that all that would that have been majority happened in the Mississippi Delta.
00:19:09
Speaker 4: No, one hundred percent of it?
00:19:11
Speaker 1: Was it?
00:19:11
Speaker 4: Yeah, at our family place that we’ve had my entire life. Yeah, in the blind that my mother and father and I will go to tomorrow morning.
00:19:19
Speaker 1: That’s awesome.
00:19:20
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:19:20
Speaker 4: Yeah, And they’re seventy eight and seventy six.
00:19:25
Speaker 1: That’s pretty dad gum awesome. To start duck hunting so early that you can’t really remember the beginning, and the memory of his dad using cigarette butts his ear plugs for them as kids, BC taking his own kids to duck hunt, his infants and papoosas and Camo earmuffs. And to know that he took his parents at age seventy eight and seventy six the day after I recorded this interview with him. Man, what a story. This guy has some history with duck hunting, with the Mississippi Delta and with their family hunting land. Let’s dive in more. People talk about Man, the duck hunting in the seventies and the eighties and nineties. Talk to me about some of that, some of the ebb and flows that you saw with the changes in numbers perceived from where you were hunting that spot.
00:20:11
Speaker 4: What’s interesting with my life as a waterfowler is that because my parents took us as babies and little bitty kids, and we were always at the camp our whole life, my sister and I. I mean I was there for the end of the point system. I was there for three ducks and thirty days. I was there for the conversion between lead and steel. I like to think of myself as not a very old guy. I was there for those things and got to see him, and it gives me an interesting perspective when people when we have a little bit of a drop in population like we’re going through right now. I don’t get too worked up about that because a few years of good conditions in the breeding grounds and it comes right back. And I was there to see that happened. I was there to see my dad and his buddies in the early eighties not realized that it was a resource that you could overutilize. They didn’t know. You know, these guys love ducks more than anybody, but they definitely shot over the limit and they didn’t realize it could go away. And then when the drought happened in the late eighties in the early nineties, I guess, and you know, y’all can fact check me, but that was my memory of when it happened. I saw them realize, wait a minute, this can all go away. And I saw them get really dialed in on we’re not going to overutilize this resource, and we’re going to do everything we can to send money where ducks are hatching, and we’re going to take care of them when they get here. I think that happened all over the continent, and it happened in that age group. You know, those guys are now all dying, but those guys that are in their seventies, sit them down and ask them about it is, they’ll tell you it’ll go away and a lot of people. Another thing I saw in the late eighties, I guess lots of people quit duck hunting. You know, when it went to three ducks in thirty days, there were a lot of guys you know that were you know, they were duck shooters, you know, you know, they like to eat ducks, they like to make gumbo, they go shoot some ducks. Those guys all quit, they went to deer hunting. As I’m telling you that, I’m thinking of all these guys that used to hunt with us, that they just quit duck hunting and it wasn’t worth the time, effort, or money to go, you know, shoot one duck, sure, two mallards, you know, for a period of time there. I hope that we don’t get back to that, and I think it’s really important that we do everything we can to keep from getting back to that, because we’ll lose all of this great community. I say, we’ll lose them. We lost them before.
00:22:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you just don’t want let that happen again.
00:22:50
Speaker 4: I really don’t.
00:22:51
Speaker 1: What do you remember the Delta looking like back then? Oh?
00:22:54
Speaker 4: Man, I’m so glad you asked me that question. So the amount of land that is cleared Now you just can’t imagine how much less it was. We’re talking about Mississippi, how many more rice fields there were, and how fewer cornfields there were. Of course there was no maybe there was, but I’d never seen a precision leveled field. So there was grass and crop that didn’t get harvested in every field. There were little swags of water that had grass, and it was a part of the field that they couldn’t plant, so grass grew up in it, or they couldn’t harvest, so there was standing crop in it. And there was just little pockets of habitat everywhere. If you drive through the Delta yesterday, before this good rain that we’re finally getting, it looked like a moonscape. Now I’ve been driving around for the last two months and every field you passed by it looks like a Walmart parking lot. I mean, it’s flat, there’s zero water. Great for the farmers, and certainly I understand why we do that, But the Delta looked so different twenty five years ago and even fifteen years ago than it does today. And that’s not even talking about what it looked like in the eighties. There was just a lot of.
00:24:19
Speaker 1: Habitat so you think, and this may seem like an obvious question, but I just I don’t want to assume anything. So would you think that we have a habitat problem down here?
00:24:29
Speaker 4: We have a continuity of habitat problem? In my opinion, there’s a lot of people who are spending a lot of money and effort to make their be habitat, much more so than there used to be. Duck hunters used to be much more opportunistic. You had a bunch of land that you deer hunted and turkey hunted and duck hunted. When the water backed up into your field, then you got ducks and you shot some ducks. Now it seems that it’s more focused around these habitat blocks where people are really made making it perfect for ducks, which is really great for ducks, but it doesn’t have a lot of continuity across the landscape. So on a really dry year like this year, ducks are going to find those places that were able to pump water and have some food, whether they grew that food or it’s some moist soil or however they do it. And ducks know God created them, so he doesn’t mess up ducks. No, it hadn’t rained i’ve got water, I’ve got food. There’s no continuity of that habitat from here to the next place that has water and food. I’m going to stay right here. And that’s why when you drive around you don’t see ducks trading around because it’s been so dry here. Less so in other states in the Southeast and certainly in other states of other places. But that for sure has affected this year in Mississippi. In affects mallards every year because the continuity of habitat is more spaced out, and you get these areas where there’s a bunch of big landowners and WMA’s that are all kind of in one area, and then that becomes the duck area. Twenty five years ago, the whole Delta was a duck area because there were these pockets. There’s a tupla gum break right there, and there’s a cyper slew over there, and in between them are one hundred different swags of leftover grass and crop, and the continuity is what’s changed.
00:26:23
Speaker 1: A lot of folks would say, right now, we have a duck decline that we’re going through right now. Would you agree with that?
00:26:29
Speaker 4: I don’t think there’s any way to disagree with.
00:26:32
Speaker 1: That, just just making sure, yeah, I making sure.
00:26:35
Speaker 4: Yeah. I am not a duck expert. Most of what I can tell you is anecdotal. Sure, it’s my observations, but I don’t subscribe to the idea that I can judge an entire flyway by the three thousand acres. I pay attention to my little place that I get to hunt and the three thousand acres that surround it, and I think a lot of people do that. I think that’s very dangerous. But there’s no question that we have a measurable percentage less ducks right now than we did at the peak, which wasn’t very long ago. So something that’s a challenge right now is that the young and when I say young, people who can still actively duck hunt, were duck hunting at the peak of the population, and they weren’t duck hunting in the eighties and early nineties when we saw those big declines. Those people who have been here long enough to have seen the big decline and see it come back are less reactionary than these air quote newer people who started hunting at the peak of the population and now they’re seeing sixty percent of that is what I’m hearing and they’re thinking, oh, man, the sky is falling. I don’t subscribe to that. I think that we have to continue to do the things that we’re doing to make sure that when the weather can conditions cooperate in the breeding grounds, that we’re ready to take care of those birds. You don’t change, you make sure that you got it ready for him when they get here.
00:28:12
Speaker 1: I really appreciate BC’s perspective and attitude here because of his literal lifetime spent duck hunting. He’s seen declines before, He’s seen the good and the bad. He’s seen duck numbers and duck hunters go down and rally and be able to recover, and man can I sure appreciate his optimism and his message of stay the course, keep the habitat here, because when things do change back for the positive, we need to be ready. Before I wrap up with BC, I want to make sure I ask him about some of the topics that you hear come up these days, the alleged shortstopping of the migration or the shifting of the migration, the flooded cornfield topic, etc.
00:28:54
Speaker 4: Now, certainly I hear those opinions that are not science based in many cases, what is science based is that in our lifetime the freeze line was three or four hundred miles further south than it is now, and that happened in mid December. That’s not opinion. You can look it up. So when everything is frozen and covered in snow, ducks have to go past it, and when it’s not frozen and covered in snow, they stay there. That duck is only going to migrate as far as he has to, and if it warms up, he’ll go back. So the idea of short stopping, I think that that’s people saying that they’ve created a lot of habitat in an area that didn’t have habitat. I don’t know that that is statistically true. That habitat was there, it was frozen and covered in snow. Now is there a lot more habitat throughout the flyway? That’s probably true. But you have to decide as a waterfowl or do I want to kill more ducks or do I want want there to be more ducks and a healthy duck in Missouri. I’m still happy he’s there. I would love to see him land in my decoys someday, But if he’s not healthy, he’s never going to do that, So I’m never going to be upset about somebody making happy, healthy ducks north of me. I think that’s short sighted because I want there to be more ducks, and when the weather pattern changes again, which it almost inevitably will, they’ll be more ducks. You don’t change with the weather, keep the plan, make sure when they get here in February. It can be very frustrating for me and all of my friends when you go three weeks after the season is closed, or on Easter morning and all your duckholes are slammed full of mallards and you didn’t have a great season. But I like to try to think to myself, Yeah, but they’re going to be really happy and healthy when they’re headed back. So it’s just a mindset. If you’re unhappy because they are not ducks in your specific spot, it’s important for you to expand what you’re looking at. Are you looking at your one duck hole that’s you know, forty acres? Are you looking at your county? Are you looking at your the delta, your state, the entire Mississippi Flyway? Because what’s most important is are there is there a healthy breeding population on the entire landscape. Now we can get into the venutia of why there’s ducks here and not there. But the most important thing is that there are ducks. And we’re still in a liberal frame work. Even though the duck numbers are down forty percent. That tells you how great it was fifteen years ago. Because we’re still in the liberal framework and we’re down forty percent, that says to you there are plenty of very healthy breeding population of ducks and every species, and they’re gonna let us continue to hunt them. That should be more important than the forty acres.
00:31:58
Speaker 1: That was some good stuff, and I’m going to quote him directly here. He said, the most important thing is that there are ducks, and frankly I agree. I hope every duck hunter out there would to hear from our next duck hunter. We’re gonna have to hop a state line and head over to Louisiana. Wade Shoemaker is one of those guys who can pretty much be described by how much he likes to duck hunt. And also, in the name of getting some different perspectives, I thought it would be important that we hear from a Louisiana man about this Mallard decline subject as well. Here’s Wade.
00:32:31
Speaker 5: I would tell you that we killed more then not knowing what we were doing. I want to say more, but we killed a lot more than we should have not known what we were doing than we do now, you know, even knowing halfway what’s going on. I mean, I can tell you just in the last ten years, people would call that I’m friends with it. I met over the internet, you know, for the most part, and we would compals and we met each other other places. But they wanted to come hunt and they’d never killed a Mallard or something like that, you know. And I said, well, if you ever come down, come on to go hout and we’ll for sure get that, you know. Well, now I don’t really tell them that anymore. I’m like, look, we’ll go and we’ll try, you know, but like, we don’t know where the water is gonna be, we don’t know what the weather’s gonna be like. And used to, it didn’t matter. Used to, You’re gonna go shoot some, you matter, shoot a lot, but we’re gonna shoot some. And now and now I don’t. I mean, I’m optimistic about it, but I’m also realistic that it the likelihood of it is way way less than it used to be. Yeah, we shot, we shot some this year, a few, but like last year, year before last, we didn’t hardly shoot what we did six, eight, ten years ago, you know. And this is a lake like it’s a floating blind that stays there with decoys out the whole year. You basically are running traffic or waiting on a flight day, you know, and even on the days like the flight days, it’s just not what it was.
00:33:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, So we know that Wade has seen and felt the effects of less mallards making it down to the lower portion of the mississipp Flatway. No surprise there. I now want to know what he thinks is causing it.
00:34:06
Speaker 5: I think it’s climate. I think it’s pressure, and I think it’s development. I think those are the three things that play a larger role than any of it. You’ve got to you know, it’s not I mean, dude, we run over a snake today on the road. I asked my buddy Hunter, he’s filming. We’re on boat Ram two or so. We were filming and we were just going. We weren’t filming at this point, but we were going on the road and Hunter was beside me, a camera guy, and I’m like, did I just run over a snake?
00:34:29
Speaker 1: You know?
00:34:30
Speaker 5: I thought it was a stick and then I saw and he’s like, I think you did. So we got out to look at it. Sure enough, snake and it’s what January the ninth. So that plays a role.
00:34:40
Speaker 2: Man.
00:34:41
Speaker 5: Birds aren’t gonna come down for a summer vacation, you know, They’re going to roll out and go back home where they’re comfortable and do their thing or back towards that way.
00:34:48
Speaker 4: Anyway.
00:34:49
Speaker 5: I think pressure is a large piece of it you’ve got, And this is like no shot at anybody, Like I’m not trying to knock anybody doing it because I hunt as near days as I can. Everybody does, and I can’t blame them for it, you know. But on top of that, you’ve also got an exponent of outfitters than you did twenty years ago. I don’t know about thirty there probably wasn’t hardly any, you know, but now you’ve got them everywhere. And I get asked a lot of like, hey, well, where should I go with when I go here? And I’m like, well, dude, there’s so many in that area that, like I can’t I can give you a couple guys that I know, but there’s so many I don’t even I can’t keep up with them. So and I’m just giving you a very high level of that, Like I don’t want to get real granular with it, but it’s that. But then also I think it’s development. And I’m going to put this together, but development and lack of management, and I don’t know where that blame lies, but I think that’s a big part of it. And it’s crazy because the development part, you can’t stop. That’s progress, right, Like you’ve got to build buildings, You’ve got to create jobs, you’ve got to keep moving things, and people build houses. There’s more people than there was now and they’ve got to live somewhere. So I think there’s a lot more concrete than there used to be. There’s a lot more buildings than there used to be. And just like local i’m where I live, solar panels are a big thing, and I consider that part of development, right, I think solar panels or whatever that is, whether whatever it does, I’m not going to get into that because I don’t have it. I don’t know enough to talk about it, right, but I do know that it takes away from a field that birds used to go hang out in and eat and whatever they do. So that’s a big part of it. And then right up the road from all these solar panels that have been put in by where I live, there’s Meta just bought two thousand acres in a very important part of where birds fly over. It’s a Meta AI facility. And then I was told a month or two ago that Google just put a bid in on another large piece of property over there. We’re talking northeast Louisiana. Dude, ain’t nothing out there, like you know, farms and all this stuff, and like lowland anyway, you get what I’m saying. So, and then the lack of management part is just like on the public land that we do hunt, you know, like Dode. We used to go hunt these holes and all these all these things at home. You go in and say, in a hole and you shot ducks because it was a hole. But now you go in those places and they’re either growed up with coffee bean that you can’t even get in a hole anymore, there’s buck brush all over it or whatever. It is just crap, dude, Like I mean, there’s a lot, a lot better agive to describe it, but to sit in the place and it’s not good. There’s holes that we can hunt anymore, and then there’s sanctuaries or revenue no hunt zones that aren’t no hunt zones anymore, or they create no hunt zones that are literally just a tennis match of just like back and forth over the hunt zone. Yeah, you know, and I’m going on a rabbit track, like I’m going like way off now. But the birds we used to hunt when you only had one part of that refuge, they had plenty of room they could hang out, but as the water rose up, it would force them to go somewhere else and use the rest of the refuge and create more opportunities for hunters. And at the end of the day, the goal is to have more ducks. But if you have people that aren’t enthusiastic or excited to go hunting anymore, then you’re gonna lose the funding that pays for those things that helped create more ducks. Yeah, anyway, that’s a domino thing. But yeah, I think it’s climate, I think it’s pressure, and I think it’s development with lack of management. On the other side, is you’ve got private landowners who are managing the crap out of their stuff, and it shows like that’s why they got ducks.
00:38:17
Speaker 1: You know. I feel like a lot of what Wade is saying aligns with what we heard from our previous guests, climate habitat losses, and he also brings up a good point about hunting pressure. Could that be a significant factor moving forward with Wade? I feel like there’s one specific topic that I just have to bring up, especially with him being a Louisiana resident. Earlier this month, Louisiana Senator John Kennedy called upon the US Fish and Wildlife Service to study the impact of what he referred to as unfair legal baiting, otherwise known as a flooded cornfield and its alleged effects on waterfowl migration. Some of you have probably heard of this already because it’s a hot topic right now. Want to hear Wade’s take on this.
00:39:02
Speaker 5: I’m just gonna say, like I have a really hard time of telling anybody, anybody what they can do with the property they own. You can talk about flooding the corn or whatever other extreme you want to talk about, when it comes to ducks and food. You know, I have a hard time saying they can’t do something on their property because they own it right now, as long as everything they’re doing with whatever they’re doing is legal when it comes to shooting those birds, like, don’t go crazy and go over your limit every day. But if you’re shooting your limit, that’s why there’s a limit, right, So I guess mine is if you got it and you’re doing it, more power to you, Like I, you know, sure you might shoot ducks when I’m not or hold ducks when we’re not, but like you’re holding ducks and feeding ducks, dude, like, thank you, but they’re you know. The downside is, well there’s a lesson we’re not gonna shoo as many because they’re holding man and I don’t have a problem with that. But Kennedy man and I generally like enjoy listening to him talk because I think he’s one of those guys is no none sense and likes to say things. It’s honestly pretty hilarious if you listen to some of the things that he lets come out. But I think he’s got some people in his ear that’s telling him things and he’s just trying to appease. Maybe he believes it I don’t know, but I think it’s an appeasing thing. But also I think it’s kind of short sighted. If I can say that you’re looking at a thing that’s been developing over thirty years and early two albums Louisiana, I was shooting three to four million birds on the harvest report, and now we’re shooting under a million. That’s a you know, two plus decade decline. And corn’s not what caused that over two decades. There’s several things that come into that come into play there, and I say, I call it short sighted because there’s obviously other things. But also, man, I didn’t see anything in his letter that talked about what we would do as a state to help improve what happens when we get them. If we want to force people to hey, to quit doing what you’re doing because you’re doing really good, we have to also say you can trust us with the resource once we get it right. And that up to the lack of management side, Like you’ve got saltwater intrusion down here, You’ve got you know, development, you’ve got crops. There’s a bunch of sugar cane down there now, and it’s like, dude, ducks don’t eat sugarcane, but they did eat what was in that field before you plant sugar cane, you know. And I’m not mad at a farmer for chasing a commodity. You got to you got to get paid. I’m not, But I mean, let’s let’s look at ourselves first, like what can we do to be better if we’re expecting these people to change what they’re doing, you know, let’s change what we’re doing first, and then let’s let’s let’s talk about what we can do collaboratively to make sure we all have that opportunity.
00:41:37
Speaker 1: Right, This topic brings out a lot of different opinions. I know that, y’all know that. I think what’s important to keeping focus here is that we as a hunting community all want good duck hunting and most importantly, healthy waterfowl populations, regardless of how our opinions may differ. For our final interview of this episode, I want to introduce y’all to my good friend Jay janis a man who helds from the Mississippi Delta and loves ducks and duck dogs as much as anyone you could ever hope to find. If you hear some odd background noise during any of this. It might be because I conducted this interview in Jay’s mudroom slash storage building, and the wind was blowing pretty good, and our two dogs were playing with one another while we talked. This one’s as real as it gets. I talked to Jay about his early memories from duck hunting in the eighties and nineties, and honestly, it pretty much mirrored identically what we’ve heard from earlier guests. More ducks and geese around the land looked a lot different. There was more water, more habitat, colder weather. Where I want to pick up this conversation with Jay is when he’s talking about a factor that we’ve not brought up yet.
00:42:44
Speaker 3: When I moved away from here eighteen nineteen years ago, I started hunting with a group of guys in that area where I moved. And the main guy who’s got the land, he does it right, and he’s on the X. You know, I just so fortunate that he asked me to go. And man, we we were doing very well for many, many, many many years, like when we were killing when other people weren’t killing, and he had a there was a refuge not far from him.
00:43:11
Speaker 1: Like no hunting.
00:43:13
Speaker 3: You know, the government flooded up for ducks, planted corn and all that, and I’m telling you we stood on them. We had five men, we were killing five men, mount of limits. Just it was like some of mine ever seen. I’ve been down here. I was like, my god, we had it good out here. Yeah, that was something. And they stopped flooding that refuge. We still killed, but it’s nothing like it used to be. You know, But the last several years have been tough for everybody. But they don’t see the ducks. I mean, you just don’t see them in the.
00:43:51
Speaker 1: Air they were. I mean, was there ever any clarity as to why they stopped flowing flooding that refuge.
00:43:56
Speaker 3: I think there’s some people involved finding out what would happened and if they’re going to start doing it again and all that. But I’m not involved enough in that to even know.
00:44:04
Speaker 1: Because well, there’s talking about ducks and the state of duck cutting down here. One thing that I do stand on, there’s a lot of factors in there right of what’s causing it. And I do hear folks, because folks back man, our refuge systems are WMA’s. They need to be in better shape, they need to be flooded. One thing I do say is I’m like, I agree with that, but also you got to realize if you took all the refuges in WMA’s in the Mississippi Delta, you wouldn’t. I don’t think you’d account for ten percent of the land mass of the Mississippi Delta.
00:44:37
Speaker 3: However, every little bit helps.
00:44:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it’s I don’t know the why. And like I said, I’m I’m a fan of most biologists. I’m a fan of our of our wildlife department. So I don’t you know, I’m not trying to throw any one of the under the bus here, but because maybe there’s some legitimate reasons as to why. But if it’s a waterfol refuge or a waterf o WMA, if I would be starting to ask why doesn’t it have water on it? As a as a resident here.
00:45:06
Speaker 3: You know, let’s take this situation we’re talking about unless and yes, you can put weather in it and everything else on the Poe chart in there, right, but to see the decline in numbers of the ducks from when that refuge was managed to when it’s not, it was immediate. Really, yeah, it was an immediate decline, and that what you saw in the air, because we would have, you know, several hundred circle like this. We called it the curse because nobody wanted to be first to come down because you were field hunting, you know, and it’s tough. That’s a tough environment to get a big group down.
00:45:43
Speaker 1: Oh for sure. My conversation with Jay went on for quite some time, and I wish I had time to share all of it. But he does bring up an interesting point in terms of how some of our public lands set aside for waterfowl are managed. I’ve seen this topic come up a lot, and could that be a factor. I don’t have all the answers, but perhaps that’s worth looking into. To wrap this conversation up, I’m going to go back to Jay for something I know I can always count on him for optimism.
00:46:11
Speaker 3: But yeah, it’s amazing, man, how it’s changed. I just keep thinking. Man. I do know, like two years ago, when the weather got right there for just a little bit, it got right in Missouri, Arkansas. Everything it got right right, but everything in the fields were locked up, shallow water was locked up. They still come down here when the weather gets right. I saw them on the river. It was as many as I’ve ever seen as many I’ve ever seen out there. Yeah, and I mean it was just I couldn’t believe it. Yeah, you know, it’s got to get better. Yeah, yeah, gotta get better, you would think.
00:46:49
Speaker 1: But I tell you one thing that has been encouraging every one of the every one of these duck hunters that I’ve talked to. Everyone’s acknowledged that it’s not great right now, but I haven’t met anybody that’s been like, this is the end. We’re screwed. Everyone’s still holding on to.
00:47:08
Speaker 3: I’m a friend of mine from North Carolina. He’s eighty two now or eighty one, I don’t know. His name’s Ritchie. He told me this a long time ago. I love that man. I started hunting with him a long time ago, another one of my best friends here, and every time we were on a bad hunter or something, he would say, Jay, hope springs eternal in a duck hunter’s heart. So that’s what you got, man. There’s always next year. Yeah, always next year. I like that, and uh because a lot of times next year happens.
00:47:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, next year happens. But hope springs eternal in a duck hunter’s heart.
00:47:51
Speaker 3: That’s correct, that’s correct.
00:47:53
Speaker 1: I like that hope springs eternal in a duck hunter’s heart. I’m going to hold on to that one. That’s good stuff, Jay and I think we’ll end on that. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Grease in this country life. I cannot overemphasize how much we all appreciate you tuning in. If you liked this episode, share it with a friend this week and stick around because there’s a whole lot more on the way.
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