EP 297. BS’ing at Briscoe’s Shop

Waterfowl in the Southern Hemisphere 

…but down in the Southern Hemisphere, those species stay colorful year round. 

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Duck Season Somewhere down here at the shop of my buddy Joe Briscoe, outside of Houston. And you all know how crazy this is? This bad plan, I had some stuff shipped to head down here to Joe, I swing by today and pick it up. Well, I wake up this morning and I’m an hour and a half west of here staying tonight, an hour and a half west of here, but got to come an hour and a half back east to meet with this crazy and pick up my new call and find out that my shoveler call ain’t ready. But anyway –

Joe Briscoe: And pick up all your pre-shipped items that your lovely wife sent ahead.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, she did. Team dependable back home keeping it going. Well, it’s plenty hot out there for teal season.

Joe Briscoe: I heard Friday it’s going to be back to 100°.

Ramsey Russell: That ain’t good. Well, by Friday, I’ll be a day’s drive north of here, heading to the Canadian border.

Joe Briscoe: Yeah, a day north of here would be put you in the panhandle and that’s when it gets to high 50s, low 60s in the evenings. That’s nice.

Ramsey Russell: There you go. What you been busy doing these days, Joe?

Joe Briscoe: Just turned in a few, hadn’t done a guitar at all this whole year, not one. I finished the one you saw the last time, I finished it, it looks good.

Ramsey Russell: And then what?

Joe Briscoe: I got out here and piddling –

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I pulled up and I wasn’t surprised to hear a bunch of blues playing through the shop doors.

Joe Briscoe: Freddie King.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, still a Freddie King fan. Did you hear about that ringed teal shot down here in this park?

Joe Briscoe: Yeah, I saw it on Instagram.

Ramsey Russell: I think there were 2 or 3 shot down here this year.

Joe Briscoe: All I saw was the one and I had never heard of, had never seen it, they shoot a Eurasian teal, I don’t know, every one or two years where Bill is. Bill thought he had killed a spoonbill, no, it’s an Australasian spoonbill. Bill thought he had killed an Australasian Cross. So, I put it up and I said anybody know about this and one guy came back and said it’s not a cross, I said, okay, well, I’m just asking, I’ve never seen one. Well, he sent a picture and this guy has every spoonbill in the world and he killed them, he goes, no, that’s not what you think it is, it’s not a cross, but Bill still tells everybody it’s a cross.

Ramsey Russell: I had no idea. I think, people get excited, Char dog lay here on her feet, she picked up about 400 little ringed teal down in Argentina this year. But I don’t believe that bird flew up here, there’s a lot of aviation, it’s probably one of the most raised birds in aviaries, they’re docile, they’re friendly, they’re easy to raise, they’re prolific, like bunny rabbits and it’s just bound to blown out. I wish what they post to be the foot because if the aviary is doing it right, there’ll be a rear toe missing, if it’s grown in an aviary, not to say they’re doing it right, but it should be.

Joe Briscoe: I’m going to go back and look at that picture now because all I ever saw was just a body shot of it and more like this, more like a 3 quarter.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I’m not saying I’m not going to shoot a ringed teal if it comes to the decoy because I definitely will shoot anything different that comes into the decoy.

Joe Briscoe: Well, he was full plume.

Ramsey Russell: Well, that’s the interesting thing about it, those Southern Hemisphere species don’t have a molt like ours do. Ours are brown, like the little blue wings coming through right now and they get colorful in spring during the breeding, but down in the Southern Hemisphere, those species stay colorful year round. And what’s so odd is when they bring them from the Southern Hemisphere, like the ringed teal and put them in pens, they stay that way. And I’ve been told it’s genetic that it’s got something to do with their long breeding season and on the flip side of it is you’ll never find one that’s as colorful, as beautiful, that was an adult drake that, that guy was holding on the internet, they’ll always have some pin feathers, always have some pin feathers because they’re always in a constant state of molting something and that’s craziest thing, isn’t it?

Joe Briscoe: Well, and just like the picture I sent you of that blue wing and I’d never seen what looked like a turkey feather behind that patch and I was like, what’s up with this? It was kind of a green looking –

Ramsey Russell: I thought you were messing with me.

Joe Briscoe: No, hell no, that’s why I called you.

Ramsey Russell: It was an adult blue wing drake and call it a nerd something or another, but it’s important to me to know what those blue wings are and you primarily look at their wings to differentiate between the male and female and especially the hatcher bird and so far this is day, I don’t even know what day this is 10, day 10 of the blue wing teal season in September and I’ve yet to see more than about 20% hatcher bird, which tells me those are just some of the birds that hatched out early and came down with the vanguard mostly is still running 70%, 80% hatcher, excuse me, adult drake, which tells me that there’s a whole lot of birds that probably bred late and ain’t down yet, that’s what tells me. It’s just an indicator to me that the main migration ain’t here yet. I’m starting to see it out here, day 10 of the blue winged teal season, Joe, you’re starting to see it, the birds are a little acting, they’ve seen it, especially in this part of the world.

Joe Briscoe: And I think according to last year, I mean, there’s people that shot blue wings all season here because they just kept trickling in and trickling in.

Ramsey Russell: What other projects you’re working on?

Prototyping a Duck Call

 I was surprised when you handed me my gadwall call and how quiet it is and no hell calls, no high volume.

Joe Briscoe: This guy’s got me coined into making him up shoveler call.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, you need to, just like that, what do you show me that picture for? I saw that.

Joe Briscoe: I know, I didn’t know if you remembered it.

Ramsey Russell: Of course, I remember that, it’s an adult drake blue wing.

Joe Briscoe: I was just wondering about the patch on the back.

Ramsey Russell: I’m not as dumb as I look.

Joe Briscoe: I never said you was, I call Hank and ask him what he says.

Ramsey Russell: Got a helicopter? You got a helicopter around here?

Joe Briscoe: Yeah, they fly from Ellington to the Strategic Oil Reserve twice a day, right about now and then right at dusk.

Ramsey Russell: Make sure it’s still there.

Joe Briscoe: Well, that’s just something I get to do in training.

Ramsey Russell: I was thinking, when I drove down to Gene Campbell the other day I got thinking, somewhere up and down that road where you were telling me that trails was and I tell you what, that part up against the interstate starting to become a little mini McMansion development and the drive in here is too. Is that old bill you’re talking about that where they play the blues still there?

Joe Briscoe: Yeah, it’s there, it’s not usable. There’s a historical marker in front of it, it’s not very far off of, what would that be, 563, not very far off of it at all.

Ramsey Russell: I caught myself looking but I didn’t see nothing that looked like it.

Joe Briscoe: Yeah. You’d have to drive in there like you were going to that other, where the other lodge is where we went and ate dinner that one night, it’s on that road. Not very far off 563. I meant to tell you that, but you were –

Ramsey Russell: I just want to talk about last year, I was here and you were working on a call, you had like a few of them, you kind of prototyping. How did that go?

Joe Briscoe: It went really well and I won’t put anything out that I don’t test first, so there’s a fellow that hunts down south of here, close to Colorado River and he said, I’ll do it. I said, okay, I said, just call me back and let me know what you come up with. So he called and he said, I got two weeks vacation, I’m going to hunt by myself just me and my dog. He called me on Sunday evening 2 weeks later, he said, you want the number? I said, yeah, what did you do with it? He said I killed 84, I went, wait a minute, you shot nothing but gadwalls in two weeks, he said, nothing but.

Ramsey Russell: Limited out every day, he used your gadwall call.

Joe Briscoe: That’s all he was blowing.

Ramsey Russell: And so you gone full scale into gadwalls all of a sudden.

Joe Briscoe: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Well, they still come down?

Joe Briscoe: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It’s kind of becoming a mallard of Mississippi. We still get mallards in places, but a lot more gadwalls.

Joe Briscoe: A lot of gadwalls here, a lot of gadwalls up in that timber. And then that down there where they are on the lower Colorado it’s crazy.

Ramsey Russell: I was surprised when you handed me my gadwall call and how quiet it is and no hell calls, no high volume.

Joe Briscoe: I think about when you call them and they get close and they’re broke and you start hearing them and that’s what I hear in my head when I’m tuning it, that’s what I hear.

Ramsey Russell: What did the guy that used it and killed all those gadwalls? What did he say about it? Is that what he did just wait on to kind of start working around or was he going full on gadwall?

Joe Briscoe: He would see them coming at him, the one he described was a pair or was it four? I mean, two pair, how about that? So they were coming at him and so they were outside, they were coming straight to him, I wouldn’t have said anything but he gave him a three note and it kept him locked in on the hole and right when they get to the hole, they have that habit of sliding. So, right before they just at that spot where they’re coming to the hole, he hit them with three notes again and they come right in feet down and that’s how he shot every one of them.

Differences in Duck Calls

But the silver teal is in the same genus as the blue wing, as the Cinnamon, as the shovelers and some other species, and they sound remarkably similar.

Ramsey Russell: Are you selling more gadwall calls than your mallards and specks and all that stuff?

Joe Briscoe: Specks are slowed down, I mean, everybody’s got a speck call now, so it is what it is, I sell a few a year, there was a contest over an Eagle Lake over the weekend, kid come by here and he wasn’t here 15 minutes and then went over there and I think he won the amateur class, we had a 1st and a 2st and that, and then we had a 1st and 2nd in the speck. So tickled.

Ramsey Russell: What about your teal call? You got to be selling a lot of those teal calls. You know what blue wing teal season, I know you call it a teal call, I call it a blue wing teal call. But I do carry it during big duck season because I get around till I use it. But I’ve spent 9 or 10 weeks down in Argentina this year and especially up in that remote marsh where it was dry and shallow, it was just silver teal and it worked gangbusters, I wore it out.

Joe Briscoe: What about in Guatemala? Did you use it there?

Ramsey Russell: I used it in Guatemala for blue wing and all them boys want one.

Joe Briscoe: Okay, we’ll fix them up.

Ramsey Russell: They all want a blue wing teal call because they never – you get around the world they don’t have a duck hunting culture, so they don’t have duck call makers and up here mallard calls and what’s driving the whole chain, but all of a sudden where they hunt all blue wings, that’s what they want. But the silver teal is in the same genus as the blue wing, as the Cinnamon, as the shovelers and some other species, and they sound remarkably similar.

Joe Briscoe: I was going to say, didn’t you tell me one time a silver teal has a different cadence?

Ramsey Russell: A little bit. To me, it’s a little bit faster, but it’s the same little sound and little call, I mean, same little voice and it works, it’s all I know and it’s important. Because like here’s the deal, baiting is legal in Argentina, so they put out corn, but here’s the deal, shovelers and silver teal and birds of that nature, they don’t really respond to corn, like grain eating birds because their diet is so heavy to snails.

Joe Briscoe: Okay.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve never hunted anywhere you can legally bait blue wings, so I’m guessing they might come in. But I know, I wouldn’t believe for a minute that a cinnamon teal would come into bait because we shoot them over decoys around bait piles, but it ain’t because of the bait. The shovelers might fly over, going from one to the other to see the decoy to come in, but they’re not coming in to eat corn, they’re not corn eaters. Which is all to say this, it’s important you got to call, make sure you’re in the right location where the birds are feeding and it’s usually going to be a lot of submerged aquatics and a whole bunch of snails, little bitty snails, tiny, grains of sand are smaller or about the size of a BB and that’s where you’re going to find a lot of those silver teal.

Joe Briscoe: Jane always talks about like the week before Christmas somewhere around the 10th is when those birds switch to crustaceans or snails.

Ramsey Russell: All the ducks eat invertebrates but some birds eat more and the spatula genus silver teal, blue wing sentiments, they’re heavy on that. When we shoot, everybody wants to shoot the trio, so we go down to Mexico, let’s say and a lot of times we’re going to pop the shovelers and the blue wings and cinnamon is going to be a slightly different habitat, it’s going to be muckier, it’s going to be invertebrate heavy in February and March, that’s where I see the greatest concentrations of them.

Joe Briscoe: There’s a boy and it’s been probably 5 or 6 years, he called me from California, I said, man, I sure would like one of your calls. I said, okay, we can make it happen. He said, I’ve never shot a trifecta and I said, well, hopefully you will. And I’ll be danged if two days after he got it, he sent me a picture of trio and I give him a good cuss. And so every time now that he shoots a trio, I get a picture of it, he’s not far from the White Brothers.

Ramsey Russell: Out in California. That might be a place you could shoot a trio if you’re going to try to.

Joe Briscoe: He’s gotten pretty regular at it.

Ramsey Russell: I want to hear you, I wanted you to do some samples and some calling and some technique stuff with your gadwall call.

Joe Briscoe: Hang on one second, we’ll get one from Kirby here that I just tuned check.

Ramsey Russell: That really does sound like a gadwall and tell me what the technique that guy is using when he brings in birds in again, I mean, when the gadwalls are working because I quacked a gadwall with a mallard call and I might go with my mallard call.

Joe Briscoe: And most everybody does that. We just happen to find the tone and there is a video on YouTube, it’s nothing but gadwall sounds. So we sat here and listened to that and he got a good grasp of it. And just strikes. I mean, if they get spooky, you can take the teal call and make a gadwall hen out of it, it’s just a different cadence than the teal.

Ramsey Russell: I tell you why I think it’s worth a gadwall call is worth seriously, if you got a lot of gadwalls in your area, well, I think it’s worth it. Like, believe it or not over in Azerbaijan 8 miles from the Iranian border those wetlands we hunt, gadwalls at times are principal ducks. If I go out and shoot 15 ducks some morning, it may be 15 gadwalls depending on what part of that lake I’m hunting in. And I got my mallard call but over there they can legally use electronic call and you ought to see how those gadwalls respond when they hear a call. I mean, they come in, we’ve all call mallards when are mallards digging what we’re doing and they respond because birds of a feather flock together and those gadwalls are the same thing, we’re talking about teal calls, teal come in for, that’s good. I mean, we played around with my reed some, buddy Kirby Taylor come in, we looked at his call and his sounded differently than mine, so we shape my reed like his, now mine sounds really good too.

Joe Briscoe: Less than 1/16th of an inch difference.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. But it’s not just the reed, it’s a different sound board entirely.

Joe Briscoe: The sound board is the biggest deal is the front end is taller than any Mallard call I make so it doesn’t have that big radius. So the air gets up here, you can’t put it in a short barrel, it’s too fast and then it’ll slap. But this wood and an acrylic insert and the one you got is boat a with an acrylic insert really takes the pop off of it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I think you’re going to be successful with that.

Joe Briscoe: All acrylic is, it’s just not the way to go, it just pops way too much.

Ramsey Russell: Are you selling a bunch of them right now?

Joe Briscoe: Quite a few. 

Ramsey Russell: Because it seemed to be mostly people down the Deep South.

Joe Briscoe: Pretty much, yes.

Ramsey Russell: Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi.

Joe Briscoe: East Coast. I’ve sold some in Virginia and Maryland.  Sold one to a fellow in Rhode Island that hunts in North Dakota, he caught wind of it and so we got it to him, he’s ready to put it to use.

Ramsey Russell: What about the spoony call? We just said and you agree gadwalls come into gadwall sounds, teals come into teals sounds, mallards come into mallards sounds, pintail come into pintail sounds. Where the hell is my shoveler call? I mean, I saw the prototype over there last year, where’s it at? Folks, seriously, I mean, if for no other reason than the novelty, wouldn’t you like to own a call? JB Custom Calls on Instagram, hit him up and tell him just please tell him you want a call.

Joe Briscoe: It’ll be the Ramsey Russell model, it’ll have Ramsey signature on the bottom and then besides that, we’ll test that –

Ramsey Russell: I want the barrel shaped or the insert bottom shape and flared out like a shoveler bill.

Joe Briscoe: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. This would have to be redrawn but not a big deal. I mean, you do the same thing you do here, but this is all CNC work.

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to show you a video we get done recording again over in Azerbaijan, I’ve got a guy over there named Tofi and he can vocally call with his mouth, he can imitate every single duck over there. No kidding. And he’s got a shoveler call and when shovelers fly by he calls, they don’t bait and I see plenty of shovelers over there. I mean, there’s lot of days some of us poor duck hunters have to sell it for what we get and I want an arsenal of them, I want to shoot mallards, don’t get me wrong, I love shooting blue wings, green wings, gadwalls, but I’ll take shovelers.

Joe Briscoe: Yeah, over on this side, we used to have a ton of wigeons, we don’t anymore. We don’t see them as often as we used to and I don’t know why, I mean, they get a good front, you’ll see a few and then they disappear.

Ramsey Russell: Wigeons are one of the most acceptable to a wigeon and call of any species I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking chiloe wigeon in South America, Euro wigeon over in Eurasia or American wigeons here. If you really are dialed in on that sound and again, in parts of the world, South America and Eurasia where electronic calls are legal, there is a reason that they’re prohibited in the United States. Because when a wigeon hears a wigeon sound, no matter where he’s going, what he’s doing, the band just shot at, he’s coming in, he’s absolutely going to put on the brakes and come in.

Duck Call Training Lessons

There’s nothing here you blow with your upper air, it’s always out of your diaphragm.

Joe Briscoe: When the limit was 10, we had one spot up in the timber that, when the limit was 10 a man, so we went in with about a dozen and a half decoys and they were mixed in with the gadwalls, but we shot 10 gadwalls and 10 wigeon walked out 45 minutes, hadn’t seen that in a long time.

Ramsey Russell: Are you making baseball bats now?

Joe Briscoe: No, you got to have a bigger lat for that. Why you want me to make a –

Ramsey Russell: No, I just see you got baseball bat here piled up in the corner.

Joe Briscoe: Well, that’s because I got to train people that don’t listen.

Ramsey Russell: You go into a liquor store in the wrong part of town or something had to walk in with protection?

Joe Briscoe: I don’t have to worry about that. I carry my little black friend in the middle of my back.

Ramsey Russell: It is. What’s that for then?

Joe Briscoe: That I use, when there’s a lot of people coming in here and they use their air from their lungs versus and I can hear it just right off the bat and I tell them, sit up on the stool, I said, take a breath, I said, now hold it with your larynx and I take this and I push it right in their diaphragm, I said, hold it with your larynx, do you feel it? Yeah. I said this is your air supply right here, your larynx is your gas pedal.

Ramsey Russell: And that’s a coaching tool. I bet your wife got a stack up in the corner for banging you on the head when you come in.

Joe Briscoe: No.

Ramsey Russell: I bet there’s one in the corner of the kitchen that ain’t got no paint on it.

Joe Briscoe: No, she can do a lot more damage with a lot less. But that really has done a lot of people here, a lot of good, you were one of them – 

Ramsey Russell: Is Kirby one of your pupils?

Joe Briscoe: Kirby is one of the pupils and once he understood it and he felt it, he was like his eyes got this big because he finally made a note –

Ramsey Russell: The hardest thing to explain to somebody to me on how to make that quality of air come through, just blowing a duck call.

Joe Briscoe: And I always throw things out and maybe they’ll pick up on it. Like, if you’re going to clean your glasses, how would you do it? So if you want to clean those glasses, you want that hot air or solid volume of air from your diaphragm.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, that’s a good point. I never thought about that.

Joe Briscoe: That’s something that drives every one of these calls here. There’s nothing here you blow with your upper air, it’s always out of your diaphragm.

Ramsey Russell: Besides the Ramsey Russell signature spoony call, you got the other calls coming down the pipe, any other species you’re working on?

Joe Briscoe: Not at the moment besides the shoveler call and if that happens to do good, then your idea of doing it in a gadwall and we’ll do it in a blue wing teal.

Ramsey Russell: I’m telling you right now, that’s a million dollar idea. Those ideas I talked about on what them calls should look like, guaranteed you won’t be able to keep them in stock.

Joe Briscoe: Well, I got my investment banker here, so you and I will split it.

Ramsey Russell: He’s shaking his head. Kirby don’t want no part of that. I don’t know what that says about a being a people of yours. Well, I do owe you a bit of thanks, even though you screwed up the shoveler call right ahead of the tour to where I needed it this year. But I do got some thanks. You hook me up with Grant at that barbecue and it was life changing and you know what, I’m glad, some of the guys listening may have actually heard that podcast, we’ve been on Texas barbecue and what was so life changing is we got there and coming into lunch crowd, got a shady table out back, I can smell the smoke wafting. I mean, he’s got two freaking pit barbecues, they got to be 50-60ft long a piece back behind that shop and the folks were just pouring in and he said, well, you want to get a bite to eat before we record? No, let’s go ahead and record. So I was busting him in the chops about beef ribs and when we got done, he brought out a plate. He had some pork ribs that were really good and he had a beef rib about the size of Fred Flintstone something there. And it took me 2.5, 3 days of travel and to eat it. But it was like eating steak flavored ice cream, it was so good. And I just couldn’t get enough. And so I was in a store, a butcher – you can’t find that kind of stuff in Mississippi, I just happen to be in some little specialty butcher shop the other day and I had some big old beef ribs and I bought a couple and I texted him and he told me the temperatures he said, do it this way, wrap it in a bunch of paper and do it that way. And everybody at the dinner table said, yeah, we need to start cooking beef rib instead of pork rib now. And I cook a good pork rib, it was a –

Joe Briscoe: But wait. Did you serenade them?

Ramsey Russell: Oh, with blues. If my smokers go on, my turtle box. Man, look, I got a turtle box and that’s another thing come out of Texas, it’s the best ever, biggest and best ever. Have you ever seen a turtle box Bluetooth speaker? So I’m serenading my ribs, if I’m sitting inside watching TV, I’m serenade myself and I’m serenade my neighbors and probably their neighbors when my music is play on.

Joe Briscoe: What about your ice cream with the topping on it, that too?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. But the beef rib is – man, he’s got a heck of a barbecue joint down there, he’s like, a two or three time beef division world championship and the way you carried on about him and all he does and not expect to be the guy, this guy is in his young 30s.

Joe Briscoe: Yeah, he’s young. He started cooking early.

Ramsey Russell: But he’s good. I cannot believe, I guarantee you, I got ancestors rolling over in their grave me saying them beef rib are better than pork ribs, but they were. And I got to tell this funny story. You go to Kroger and go buy some jalapenos at best, it’s about as spiciest as ketchup these days. But they’re just trying to turn that poor jalapeno into a bell pepper and the thing about Texas barbecue nearly anywhere I’ve ever been dill pickles and jalapenos come to the side just standard. And so he threw some jalapenos, look man, he brought out a platter of sampling of the barbeque and some of them jalapenos and stuff I put in my ice box, I get hungry, I stop and get a bite and I was somewhere up in next state north here driving down the road jamming on the phone, I bet that jalapenos and the girl on the line was like, hello? Are you okay? And I mean, I’m like, I got to go, if I was able to say, I’ll call you back in a minute and I got out and rinse my mouth with water and I like spicy food, I love spicy food, that son of a gun lit me up son, it lit me up for 30 minutes, it lit me, it’s the hottest jalapeno I’ve ever had in my life.

Joe Briscoe: It’s the thing that will defeat it real quick, like if you get a kid that bites into one. Well, I’ve never heard buttermilk, I was always told tomato juice.

Ramsey Russell: I didn’t have either one in the ice box. I was on the side of interstate gargling water, cool my tongue off, but it was some kind of good and I appreciate you for that. You suggested to me that I get my wife and Forrest and I had to do a podcast and them two won’t do it.

Joe Briscoe: Why?

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know.

Joe Briscoe: I’ll come over there and be the director, they just don’t want to get on and talk to you.

Ramsey Russell: They don’t want to get on, might say something dumb. Forrest is quite until about the third beer and he talks pouring it on. And my wife’s just shy and quiet really. So, I need to pull that off yet.

Joe Briscoe: I’ll call and ask her.

Ramsey Russell: That ain’t going to help.

Joe Briscoe: Yeah, I probably got a reputation over there.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I mean, maybe if your wife will send that baseball bat over, say, look, he gets out of line just bang him in the head like I do.

Joe Briscoe: Well, I send her that rolls right there, there’s a Louisville behind it. Those are made in Baton Rouge.

Ramsey Russell: Are you a Houston Astros fan?

Joe Briscoe: No.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Joe Briscoe: No, sir.

Ramsey Russell: You’re probably like the only one within 200 miles of where we’re sitting right now that ain’t a Houston Astros fan.

Joe Briscoe: Probably.

Ramsey Russell: I can’t believe that.

Joe Briscoe: I started going to games when I was 3 years old, 3 or 4 in 1969 and the whole deal was, I was small enough to just walk up with an autograph book. But as I got older, say 12, 13, I can’t remember when the Reds, beat them up, beat everybody won the World Series. But every time the Reds would come to town, that was a big red machine at the time, we were sitting right behind the third base dugout, mother got tickets every series every time and I got see P. Rose at his best. And so I said, that’s who I want to play ball. Like, I had one coach say, man, you can’t head first, slide into second every time and I said, why not? I said I’m big enough, they’re going to get out of my way. So, same thing when I was younger, I’d go to my grandmother’s in the summer and I play Dixie Ball for about a month and then come home for a month and play Little League and so I was flip flopping back and forth. So they had the one of Saint Louis foreign teams, I want to say it was double A, I don’t think it was triple because they’ve been in Memphis forever.  and every time somebody hit a foul ball, man, I was on fire because they didn’t have anything to keep it out of the stadium and besides me, there might have been 5 people in the stands. So, down here, when you go get a foul ball and turn it in, you always got a snow cone. Coach said, how many of them balls you got? And I said, I don’t know, 8 or 10 they should bring them down here, I went, he went god dang, he said, do you want a job? I said, I don’t know, what is it? He said, do just what you’re doing and bring us back all the balls because if they’re scraped, we’ll use them for batting practice. So then that became –

Ramsey Russell: What happened to all the snow cones?

Joe Briscoe: I never got none, they never come out one. So that, proceeded to finally coach said, hey, go out in the outfield and shacks some balls, when they bring out the batting cage for batting practice the rarity, they went backwards. So he goes, go out there – and I mean, you’re looking up to these guys and eventually they’re going to be upstairs and they just take the time to show you things that would help you and that’s great. I hadn’t heard of anybody doing anything like that in years and I would always say, hey, coach, I got to go home for about 3 weeks or 4 weeks, he goes, your job’s waiting when you come back, just come on, it was fun, it was a lot of fun.

Ramsey Russell: That’s pretty good. That’s a good story Joe. 

Joe Briscoe: That’s probably one of my favorite memories from going up to see my grandmother, I couldn’t wait for summer because I knew I was going to play Dixie ball and I was already had it going down here. Well, up there they used a pitching machine. Oh, I hit a few out.

The Creation of a Shoveler Call?

Ramsey Russell: How can folks get in touch with you? In case they want that shoveler call.

Joe Briscoe: The gadwall call, you mean?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Joe Briscoe: I’m on Instagram at JBcustomcalls. Don’t go to my website, I quit using it or you can shoot me an email @jbcustomcalls at yahoo.com or I mean, If you know how to look it up on Instagram, my phone number’s there. Feel free to call.

Ramsey Russell: You all, do me a solid, check out his gadwall calls, check out his teal calls, a lot of you guys are hunting bird are going to want a couple of them calls but hit him up and tell him to make his shoveler call. I mean, I’m sitting here looking at the prototype and he had all year to finish it and he ain’t got it going yet.

Joe Briscoe: Well, we all know why.

Ramsey Russell: Well, JB love you to death but you ain’t got no moonshine and I got to drive through Houston traffic.

Joe Briscoe: Here, I got some Crown right here.

Ramsey Russell: So I’ll see you next time. Thank you very much.

Joe Briscoe: Absolutely. Thank you for coming by, it’s always a joy.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, the pleasure is all yours, I’m sure. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Duck Season Somewhere, we’ll see you next time.