EP 382. Cooking Up Real Conservation in Cordoba, Argentina

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Duck Season Somewhere, where today I’m in downtown Buenos Aires with my good buddy John O’Dell, who you all may remember from a couple of podcasts we did last year in the state of Arizona. John, what was your former title last time we met?

John: So, my former title was the migratory game bird coordinator for the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, and you’re also big up in the Pacific Flyway.

John: Yeah, I was Arizona’s representative on the Pacific Flyway and everything else, yeah. And now we move from Arizona to the next day, Argentina.

Ramsey Russell: Buenos Aires. So I get this phone call from you one time, and out of the blue, and you’re like, I’m going to Argentina, and can you point me in the right direction? Can you what? Huh? And I want to talk about my buddy John O’Dell here in Buenos Aires, before we fly off to some other topics that are going to blow some people’s minds and us drinking coffee at one of my favorite street-side cafes, you certainly set me straight on some topics and some heartfelt beliefs, I had regarding especially dove hunting down here in Argentina and I’m emboldened, I’m encouraged having talked to you about that topic and some of your works in just a very short amount of time that you’ve been here. John, what in the world brings you to Argentina? Last time I saw you, we were standing knee-deep in the Salt River just outside of Phoenix shooting ducks. Break, break. Now I’m in downtown Buenos Aires. You round the corner, I’m waiting on you. I’m looking for a long-haired guy with a ponytail and when I saw you around a corner, half a block away, I go, he is dressed like an American, I mean, we dress differently, but I said, that can’t be him. I don’t see a ponytail, I don’t see long hair. What in the heck brings you here to Argentina? What are you doing living in Buenos Aires?

A Culinary Journey in Buenos Aires

“Argentina’s cultural identity, I mean the cultural identity of these people, is food and its meat cooked over fire.” – John O’Dell

John: Well, I mean, it’s kind of a long story, but I’ll condense it as much as I can, and I know you appreciate this story, as it goes along. I had spent 20 years really kind of devoting my life to wildlife and wild things and wild places and all that. And 17 years with the Arizona Game and Fish Department and good four years of college and all that.  I think COVID changed a lot of people’s minds and hearts about things and my wife had the good fortune to be able to retire from her job, just about a year or two before COVID. So she was sitting there and she asked me the question. She said, hey if we were independently wealthy, what would you do? And so I said, well, you gotta give me a minute to think about it. And I came up with a whole laundry list of things, I wanted to do all over the world. And, if I was just filthy rich, i’d won the Powerball and done all this. But the one fact of all of them is they were all revolved around either hunting or food. I’m a big foodie. It’s a passion my mother gave me. Being in the kitchen, hanging out, and realizing the connection between food and wildlife and some of the reasons why we hunt and fish. She said, Okay, so we’re not independently wealthy. That’s a great list, but we can’t afford to go do all those things. But she said, if you could do one thing out of that list for a year, what would you do? And I said, well, you’re going to have to give me some more time to think about that, too. So after a little bit, I really, really thought long and hard and I said, i’d really like to go to Argentina for a couple of reasons. One is obviously, as you’re well aware and have done for so many years, is the hunting down here is pretty incredible, such great diversity and all that. But Argentina’s food culture is probably one of those things that I think it’s a real sleeper when it comes to the United States, where folks aren’t really aware of Argentina. There’s all these Brazilian steakhouses, so everyone kind of is familiar with Brazil but Argentina’s cultural identity, I mean, the cultural identity of these people is food, and its meat cooked over fire.

Ramsey Russell: Meat cooked on fire.

John: And so no one can really disagree with that at all. Certainly is in my real house. It was something that was interesting. And I hear people all the time, people go to culinary school and they get French training, at Le Cordon Bleu or some of these other ones, or the ACI, the American Culinary Institute. And I said, I haven’t heard or met anyone who’s like, had culinary training out of South America. It’s kind of somewhere off. And so I started investigating that a little bit. And come to find out, two of the top culinary schools in South America are about two to three blocks apart here in Buenos Aires.

Ramsey Russell: Right here in Buenos Aires.

John: Right here in Buenos Aires, yeah. The AIG – Argentine Institute of Gastronomia and the Instituto Gato Dumas, who was a very famous chef here in Argentina for a very long time. And I just kind of felt like, I could continue at my job at the Arizona Game and Fish Department, you know, live kind of a happy safe life as it were. It was probably going to be about another ten years that it would take for me to be able to reach retirement age and all that. And I said, in ten year do I want to find out that either I can’t go physically because it isn’t right or maybe I don’t want to go in ten years, things change, things happen a lot and I felt like I wanted to really become a better student of food. Like I said, my two largest passions were always food and wildlife and the interconnected between the two. And so I’d spent a good 20 years helping to save wildlife and working with wildlife and all that. And so it was like, maybe it’s time to become a better student of food, move to Argentina. And it still helps me keep 1ft in the door that there’s such great dove hunting and duck hunting and everything else down here. It was a good tie-in. So timing was right. Everything was good. My daughter was just about ready to graduate college, and wife and I were about to become empty nesters and it was like, well, let’s try something new for a while. Let’s take a year and see where it leads.

Ramsey Russell: You’re 45 years old.

John: Yeah, 46.

Ramsey Russell: That’s about the age I quit the federal government to get ducks. And, I mean, I felt like I had 20 more years ahead of me to live a whole other life. And this time, instead of working for the man, I’m gonna work for myself, I’m gonna write different chapters of my life. That was an approach. You talked about that over coffee earlier about how your approach to living life is like writing a book.

Living Life as a Story with Many Chapters

“A lot of people when you think about life you gotta think about it like writing a book. And so many people write chapter one and then just keep rereading it the rest of their lives and never get to chapter two or chapter three or chapter four.” – John O’Dell

John: Yeah. Someone I’d listened to the other day, put it pretty eloquently, but he said, a lot of people, when you think about life, you gotta think about it like writing a book. And so many people write chapter one and then just keep rereading it the rest of their lives and never get to the chapter two or chapter three or chapter four. And so it wasn’t really a midlife crisis, I wasn’t in a bad place, I loved my job, I loved the work that I was doing and everything else. It was just maybe there could be a different chapter, maybe there’s a different direction this book could take. And so let’s give it a try. Like I said, I think as you and I’ve talked, I mean, I firmly believe there’s a major connection between food and wildlife and why we hunt and all that stuff.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about that because it went back to a cookbook your mama had that you still got in your treasure trove of books. That blew my mind. Talk about why people hunt, the two reasons they hunt, and about that connection and the original culinary art of America.

John: Yeah. Of course, obviously, like I said, I got my wildlife bent from my father and my father’s side of the family. I mean, they were the hunting and fishing side of things. And it wasn’t an avocation. It wasn’t like something, oh, we look forward to once a year, twice a year, we’re going to go hunting or whatnot. It was subsistence. Absolutely like this is how we survived. There was the immediate family, the kind of the family compound, my grandparents, their two boys, which my dad was one of their families and kids. There were 13 of us total. And we just hunted. We hunted and fished. And it was about collecting meat. We got to feed the family for the year. It was pretty rare for us to buy beef or pork. I ate more elk and deer and pronghorn bear and stuff throughout my life but I started that. And so when I was outside it was always, hunting and fishing with my dad but when I was inside, it was certainly my mom’s kitchen. I was hanging on her apron strings and stuff. She came from a long line of a cooking family. Her grandmother was a ranch cook on a big ranch in Montana, mom the same way. And then, of course, my mom, she started really, the more professional stuff. She worked in cafes and restaurants and more professional-style cooking and industrial-style cooking and stuff. I learned a lot from her as a kid, but I knew, like, I was always amazed that she could do so much more than I could ever do and I know that comes from a lifetime of cooking and learning and all that, but, being the rambunctious boy that I was who was outside running around playing in the dirt and gathering worms and bringing home three fish or whatever. She had to kind of control me but in my mom’s cupboard, in the kitchen, I still remember to this day, she opened the cabinet door and on the top shelf, there were these cookbooks they were probably the most valuable to her. It wasn’t a large collection. But anyone who’s old enough to remember there was a red and white gingham, like a picnic tablecloth, the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, right next to it was Julia Child’s French cooking. And then next to that there was this little green book, little small book, it was James Beard’s wild game cookery. Now, anyone who knows American cooking knows that James Beard is the father of American cooking. The James Beard award is named after him. The James Beard house hosts a lot of things. So for American cuisine, that’s really our top culinary level within the United States. And so I got to know James Beard in a very different way because this was one of his early books. I know, like it wasn’t as prolific as some of the other books that he had produced other cookbooks and stuff but for me what was cool about is my mom would sit me down at the kitchen table and she would hand me this book, and in it you would read about all these fantastic animals, pheasants and moose. And then I’d stumble across this recipe for woodcock. And I was like, I grew up in Montana, like, what the heck is a woodcock? I’ve never heard of this before. And it’s like, oh, it’s these edible birds, and how they would cook them. And so it gave me that fascination for wildlife at the same time while it also kind of spurred me on with kitchen stuff, it’s like, oh, like, you don’t just have to do cooking animals a certain way or whatnot. And so it really, one of these days, i’ll actually write a story about the James Beard I knew. That’s going to be the title. If anyone out there steals it, I swear to God, I’m going to come and hunt you down, because it’s on this podcast. But so I’ve said it first. But the James Beard I knew wasn’t the man who like, I think most people know today, of all the other culinary parts of that world, it was all related to wild game. And if you look at, as we’ve talked about, when people came to America, I mean, this was the land of milk and honey. Actually some of the reasons why people emigrated to the United States because they were under the king’s rule. When you think about the story of Robin Hood and stealing from the rich and giving it to the poor, he was a deer hunter, he was a poacher, and he would give the meat to the poor. But when people heard about America after the exploration, first started with Columbus, and then people started settling here. The one thing about America that most people heard was that there was game everywhere and everyone got a chance to eat it, wild game, which was unheard of in most other countries. And so it was this great idea that there was limitless game and all that and really that became America’s kind of first food overall because we didn’t have the livestock at the time that ended up coming later. And there were strange things, like turkeys, I mean, turkeys are a North American thing. There were other ingredients that were uniquely American. I laugh about it to this day. Italy, italian food would be nothing without North America.

Ramsey Russell: Like, how so?

John: Tomatoes.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

John: Yeah. You think of all the tomato sauces that you have in Italian food. Tomatoes came from the Americas.

Ramsey Russell: I had no idea.

John: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You’re kidding.

John: No, potatoes are from Peru, potatoes originally stem from Peru. And so turkeys and tomatoes and corn and all these ingredients kind of came together with wild game as this fantastic thing. I mean, you think about some of this species now that have gone extinct, which is a terrible thing passenger pigeons, heath hens, all that. They went extinct partially because they were so good to eat. People were hunting them and using them and that’s kind of really America’s earliest ingredients.

Ramsey Russell: And back in those heydays, it wasn’t just what we think of as game animals today deer and moose and elk and rabbit and doves and ducks. It was songbirds, it was shorebirds, it was all kinds of stuff.

John: Most definitely yeah, I mean they were eating just about everything at that time. I mean, nothing was off the table. Yeah, nothing was off the table when it came to culinary delights. It’s always interesting what we consider game and what we don’t consider game. There’s the old story, and I don’t know if I’d ever talked to you about it, but if you ever read William T. Hornaday’s our vanishing wildlife, it’s probably one of the most, like, awful parts of that book is the racial overtones when it comes to doves. There’s actually three chapters in there that talk about dove hunting and how he didn’t want, pardon my French out there listeners, but he didn’t want the greasy Italians killing doves and poor black southerners and all this stuff killing doves, which is why the New England states still consider doves of songbird to this day. It’s how they were able to protect it from the bad immigrants of the day in his time, in the early 1900’s, from doing that. It just kind of became this thing for me where it was like, let’s try a new road, a new path and if there’s any place better than Arizona or Texas for doves, it’s Cordoba. We hear about it all the time, come to Argentina. And so that was for me, it was like, yeah, I should come down and see this, and experience it, and try out what Argentina has to offer, so.

Ramsey Russell: What was it? You had never been to Argentina before when you said I’d go to Argentina. Of all these things, I pick Argentina, but you’ve never been, you came down here and looked at the school to get your bearings a little bit.

John: Yeah, last September.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, I’m gonna move here. What was it like coming from America to a new country like this?

John: Well, there’s always kind of an adjustment period. I think sometimes you have rose-colored glasses when you visit a place and you’re only there for a couple weeks. Came down here, it was like, okay, this is Buenos Aires most certainly as far as cities go. I mean, it’s a gritty city.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a big gritty city.

John: It’s a big gritty city. It’s loud, it’s noisy. There’s 15 million people here, it’s much larger. I mean, Phoenix is only like 6 million.

Ramsey Russell: And they all got dogs like that, they walk and they’re out on sidewalks. John: Right, right. it’s obviously a city that’s built up. So, like you have people on top of people on top of people. Phoenix is a little more spread out. It’s space in the west versus, kind of these high rises here where you got, 9 story, 14-story, all these really tall buildings and small apartments and stuff. But, yeah, it was interesting to visit. Obviously I like this culture quite a bit, it’s fascinating to me, I mean, it’s a fascinating country, obviously the Spaniards were the first here. They came and then of course, there was some Italian influence. So the Spanish here has this weird sing-songy Spanish Italian type. It’s a little bit different.

Ramsey Russell: Different then Mexico.

Rediscovering Argentina’s Native Foods

“There are some chefs here in Argentina who are rediscovering Argentina, which I think is very cool. A lot of young new chefs are trying to dig into the archives and find people who know things way out in the country.” – John O’Dell

John: Yeah. I mean, they pushed all the natives out. To me, the saddest stories of Argentina, out of everything was the Spaniards came here, they colonized Argentina, and they pushed the Incas back north, but they wiped out almost pretty much every other tribe out there, that was here at the time and then moved all their cattle in, because the pampas are great. It’s just a great area for cattle but all these Spanish cows came in and all that stuff. For me, I think the saddest part of all of that is that they lost the knowledge of the native ingredients here. When you think of great cultural food, cultural foods, there has to be a very long, an unbroken chain of history. And so Mexico is that way. You had the Aztecs that led into modern day and so the food culture has just continued to become richer. That’s why that food is such like a, it’s a comforting food, there’s these deep rich flavors and chilies and everything else. And it’s the same with Peru. The Incas never got kicked out of Peru, which is why Peruvian food is always seen like as the greatest of the great here in South America. And it really, they had the oceans, you have all these ceviche’s, you have chili peppers and knowing what to eat off the landscape, and just cultivating that for the long haul. Argentina is a huge country. I mean, it’s huge. Large in terms of landmass. I think it stretches from like Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, all the way down to the Yucatan. If you were to place it over a map of North America, it’s huge and you think of everything between Saskatoon and the bottom of the Yucatan, habitat wise, environment wise, and think of all the natural native foods that might occur in that, in that space. And so it’s interesting to me. There’s some chefs here in Argentina who are rediscovering Argentina, which I think is very cool. A lot of young new chefs are trying to dig into the archives and find people who know things way out in the country. Because that’s the one thing I will say like Buenos Aires hunting gives you one version of Argentina. But when you get out into the more rural areas and all that, you eat the food changes. It’s so dramatically.

Ramsey Russell: You see, as an outsider, I like, and I spend ten nights or more here in Buenos Aires, the tiny little apartment I borrow and I like it. I live in a small town, but I love rural Argentina. I mean, that gritty city feel, to me, it’s like walking through a National Geographic channel, just walking around the block, walking down here to go this little restaurant where we ate breakfast. I don’t know, it’s crazy. On the one hand John, in this city block right here, there’s a, I’m gonna say two city blocks. There’s a health food store, there’s ice cream, there’s coffee, there’s food, there’s liquor stores, there’s laundromats, there’s all this stuff on the bottom floor and it’s like, really in a one to two, three, four block area, there’s this old little thriving local economy. And what you see when you walk around, guys go walk, Char dog, who does not like to do her business on concrete. We have to walk and walk and walk. But what you see is, you see like, a neighborly type engagement that doesn’t exist in suburb America anymore. I mean, you walk down, you’re gonna see lots of people talking to their neighbors in front of the apartment or talking to their neighbors over coffee or talking to the neighbors at dinner. It’s a real social community.

John: Oh, very much so.

Ramsey Russell: And very small, I can’t remember the word for it, but it’s like a cash economy, it’s a lot of cash economy. There are fresh fruit stands, there’s little grocery stores, I mean, and you see some of these tiny little businesses that are about the size of a walk-in closet in a big house back home. How do they make money? Well, they make money because they’re just swapping money with their neighbors on other goods and services. It’s very interesting that way to me.

John: It’s nice because it’s so much mom and pop. That’s kind of that I think one of the greatest appreciations I have for Buenos Aires is all these small businesses. A family essentially started this business and they’re gonna try and make it, selling whatever they might have like the little kiosko, which is essentially like a convenience store without a gas pump. You can get all your candies, you can get your cow milk.

Ramsey Russell: Cola.

John: Yeah, whatever you need right there and they’re pretty much on every corner Buenos Aires. So if you’re ever in dire need of a pack of chocolate or something like that, there’s always someplace close, but it’s that small mom and pop feel. I’m sure they’re not getting rich over this, but they’re making enough to break even and continue life and all that other stuff and they’re showing up to work every day. And it’s the same with the fruit stand or whatnot. I certainly know that in my neighborhood I’m known as like the big American who showed up out of nowhere, whose Spanish was really bad when I first started and it’s getting better. So like and I always get like, strange ingredients or whatnot like, hey give me some cilantro and this, that and the other thing, but they’ve gotten used to me, and so I get waves, and they’re like, oh yeah, and have been super helpful from the very beginning like, they know I’m at least attempting to speak Spanish or at least when I was trying and they were helpful, they were patient. And so it was a great kind of feel. Yeah, just experience that. You get to be kind of a creature of habit in those situations like, I have my favorite fruit stand for particular fruits, oh what’s in this week. And that’s one thing I will say, I have never eaten cleaner than I do right now.

Ramsey Russell: Clean eating here.

John: Well, so it’s seasonal, right? If you’re back at home and you can walk into a grocery store and you can find strawberries, okay, that’s not straight clean eating, right? Any time of the year, you can walk in there like, I find strawberries when they’re in season here and then I don’t have them. I think back home in the States, like, people get used to the convenience of everything, like, you have 365 days of strawberries for eleven of those months those strawberries are mediocre to garbage and one month they’re good. When I get strawberries here, they’re good for the whole time and then it’s over and there’s no more strawberries to be had for a while. Same thing with cherries. We’re here in the dead of winter right now, so it’s all like pears and citrus and all those things right now and so a lot of the things that I was eating a couple of months ago, man, I can’t even find now, it’s hard to find like processed foods.

Ramsey Russell: Stop at a kiosk or whatever you call it, stop at a convenience store because I noticed there you don’t find beef jerky or something like, you walk around town here, you go into the shops and there’s a heavy junk food culture at the truck stops, but overall, I think they eat pretty good. I mean, because most of the people you see, they go to the store. There’s no Walmart bags down here. You got to bring your own bag when you go to the grocery store. They go and they got these, they’re pulling these little, it looks like a little suitcase.

John: Right.

Ramsey Russell: Little roll-on suitcase and they carry it everywhere they go but usually when you see somebody walking with, they’re going to the grocery store. And they get what they’re going to eat for a day or two and then they don’t shop once a week or once a month. They shop maybe every day or every other day and get what they need.

John: And you stop at a few stores.

Ramsey Russell: A few stores, that’s right.

John: You got to get your eggs at this place, you get your fruit from this one, you like the vegetables over here better and so they kind of hit up all the different place.

Ramsey Russell: Have you got one little pull behind the bag?

John: I do.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, yeah.

John: I had to buy one.

Ramsey Russell: I think I’d have to if I stayed here for a convenient stretch. Every time I’m here, I have to buy a surrogate Walmart bag at Dakota to bring my stuff back, but it’s amazing. It’s like, man, look for a guy that eats like I do, I like meat and vegetables and fruit and just kind of a clean feel and it’s a great place to eat and live if you like that kind of eating like I do.

John: Sure.

Ramsey Russell: You’re talking about meat on a grill, meat over fire.

John: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: God, that’s me, man.

John: Well, I tell you, Argentine’s diet is a little hard for me to get into just yet because I don’t know how they do it. So in the mornings, it’s a coffee and a couple of medialunas, which are like these, they’re not quite croissants but yeah, I mean, that’s usually their breakfast. And then they have, you wait all the way to lunch so Elm Werzo, and then that’s usually pretty light, maybe an empanada, maybe a salad, maybe something like that. And then there’s Marieanda, which is like, later in the day, they don’t even have dinner until like, they don’t even start thinking about dinner until, like, 09:00 at night.

Ramsey Russell: Exactly.

John: They don’t eat till super late. So I don’t know how they stay so thin it’s like, there’s a lot of sugar in there.

Ramsey Russell: They walk their asses off in Buenos Aires.

John: Yeah. And you walk around quite a bit but, no, it’s a definitely unique experience. It’s one that I super appreciate because you don’t get quite the perspective on what it is to be an American or what America is like until you’re outside, looking in and getting someone else’s perspective on it. Other than like, because I don’t follow a lot of the news back home unless it just happens to, like, be national news and it shows up. Like, I think the only thing I’ve learned about America in like six months is that Joe Biden fell down at some event. That’s about the only thing I’ve heard about America, as far as, like, national news and stuff like that. It’s been almost refreshing in a way because it’s like, you get so caught up in the wheel of politics and what’s going on at home. It’s like, okay, I can live without it. I hear more about politics here obviously, Argentines are very vocal about their politics here.

Ramsey Russell: Everybody knows that Argentina is famous for its beef.

John: Oh, yes.

Ramsey Russell: Back home, we think rib eyes, New York strips, T-bones, hamburger. What have you learned about beef down here in Argentina?

John: Well, obviously, the lineage here is still from those Spanish cows that are originally brought here. And that’s one of the characteristics. The beef itself, like, the actual, like, cutting it off an animal, you can tell it’s different than beef we get back home. Some of the veins of fat are much thicker. One of the things that I appreciate, I think some people initially, when they get to Argentina. And not so much, I think, at the lodges, like, if you’re going to a hunting lodge and stuff like that, they know that they’re serving. They put a different spin on it. But, like, if you’re just getting an Argentine Parisia, one of the things that I appreciate the most is that they let the meat speak for itself. They do not season it at all, at the end, not at the beginning.

Ramsey Russell: Finished salt.

John: It’s finished at the salt. So what you get is, it’s cooked a lot slower usually they use the quebracho wood, and the quebracho wood is like it’s a hardwood, much like mesquite or hickory or stuff. It has its own flavor that it imparts into the meat.

Ramsey Russell: I call it Argentina mesquite. I think there’s got to be a relation.

John: Well, there’s two kinds, I know there’s red and there’s white. There’s red quebracho and white quebracho. Most of the time when they’re cooking, they like the red. And it’s just, you can tell when you get a side cut of that wood, the interior is red. Just got this beautiful rich red color. But, yeah, it totally speaks for its, they let the beef speak for itself. And, yeah, just strictly seasoned with salt. The salt here is, by the way, is very different, too. That’s one thing you’ll find is their salt is, it seems to be different than ours.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I know the finishing salt are coarse, but the table salts are ultra-fine like popcorn salt.

John: Oh, yes, very much so.

Ramsey Russell: So be careful, but I like salt.

John: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I eat salt like a horse eats salt licks, but I like my salt. But, John, talking about that quebracho wood, one thing, I’m always sitting around a pariah when people are cooking. I love that kind of stuff. But back home, especially the way I cook back home, it’s all about the smoke. And down here, it was explained to me the other day by a guy that’s a freaking master on a pariah. He says, no, no, no. They build that fire early in the morning, and they rake those coals under when the smoke’s done, when that wood is burned. Now we’re looking at live coals when it’s hot because they don’t want that heavy smoke. They want the heat, they want that wood flavor. And you talk about the meat speaking for itself. One thing, short ribs, asado, I love them, I love the matambre, I like it all. Everything with the moo they down here and all except for a couple of innards I’m into. I like it all, I really do. But one time we were talking about some beef, I was with some Argentines. They said, well, the difference in Argentina versus America is this. You all grade your meat based on fat and tenderness. We grade our meat, select our meat based on flavor. And sometimes it is a little tough but my gosh, the meat speaks for itself. It is, by God, eating real beef, it’s amazing.

John: Yeah and they do have like there’s, I know that there’s three different kinds of cows that I’ve seen when traveling Argentina and stuff like that. I can’t remember what the hybridization is that they have with the Black Angus, but they have something that’s like part Black Angus, something else. The Spanish cows almost look like, they kind of look like Herefords a little bit.

Ramsey Russell: Herefords. Yeah.

John: Little bit but you can definitely tell them. And then some other type that they use, but yeah, certainly, I mean, it’s delicious.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t think the food, the feed lot culture to propagate big amounts of fat is as prevalent down here. I think I feel like I’m always eating a leaner cut of beef.

John: Yeah and certainly, well, so they talk about, as I learned this in school, so when they talk about cows, they have first choice, second choice, and third choice cuts. Right. And it literally is from the head of the cow to the back of the cow.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

John: And so how they grade beefs and stuff like that, like what’s a first choice, what’s a second choice, what’s a third choice type of cut. The bondiola comes from like up in the neck.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

John: And so that’s a first choice cut. It’s how is the fat inside the meat or is it outside the meat like a bife de chorizo here is basically New York strip. It’s got the big fat cap on the one side, but it’s lean, lean meat all throughout. That’s usually one of my favorite cuts because then I can select how much fat I’m eating because I think as most people know, fat is flavor.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

John: Fat is definitely flavor and so as I eat a bife de chorizo, I get to select how much fat I’m taking in with every bite or I can go a couple bites with just some straight that beefy meat flavor and then switch over and grab a nice kind of charred piece of the outer edge of the fat and stuff. And it’s just a whole different experience and they, God, they stuff you with meat.

Ramsey Russell: I think, I read somewhere, I looked it up. Argentina’s red meat consumption is just a little more than twice of America.

John: Yeah, oh, I don’t doubt that.

Ramsey Russell: That’s hard to believe.

John: I don’t doubt that.

Ramsey Russell: And it’s really, I eat a little ground beef if they’re making spaghetti or something that Italian influence but really and truly it’s not, its chunks of meat.

John: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: All those different cuts. One time I took a picture, took a picture of one that meat cut guys was hanging on the wall of the lodge one time and took it to a guy back home in Madison County, Mississippi, that sells steers. And he gives you so many steaks and this cut, this cut, this cut and a lot of hamburger. I said, well, I want this, he said, I can’t do that. He knew, he looked at that thing and said, nah, that ain’t, I don’t do that. I haven’t found an American yet that can cut meat. I want some of these cuts of meat down here, I love it.

John: Oh, yeah. I will tell you, so like, my favorite cut in Argentina that I’ve tried and they use some modern cooking techniques, so it wasn’t a standard Parisia, but you have your ribeye, which they call ojo de beef here, I have beef, but there’s a cut of meat that sits on top, it’s the ribeye cap. That’s what it’s known as, in English language here they call it the eyebrow, which is really kind of interesting because when you look at a side view, you have your ribeye and then there’s a layer of fat, and then you have this eyebrow. But, yeah, they took it, and I mean, it was, they smoked it first over some different wood for about an hour, just really low kind of cold smoke and then finished it on the Parisian and It was like, it was so amazing, like I couldn’t believe how great it tasted and then the chimichurris here.

Ramsey Russell: Oh yeah. You started making chimichurris or you developing your own chimichurri?

John: Yeah, its most certainly I have been, I mean, it’s been a great experience for me to try chimichurris from different places. What I find most interesting is most of the time in the United States, we would tend to make fresh chimichurri. So, fresh herbs and herbs spices, everything going into it was all fresh. Here they use all dried with very, very little fresh. And then it’s rehydrated with vinegar first and then they add the oil to it, so it adds quite a different feel and flavor to it.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

John: yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It’s like gumbo back home. Chimichurri sauce around town, among families, among neighborhoods, among lodges, it all varies slightly.

John: Oh, very much so, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Some better than others, but it’s all good.

John: Yeah. I will say one of the things that I think was the biggest adjustment for me is most Argentines do not have the palate for spice. So being things that are picante as a quote, unquote, there’s not a lot for it. So, yeah, they laugh at the American quite a bit because you got any tabasco, you got a way to heat this up.

Ramsey Russell: I remember something I came across down here. I think I’m saying this right, Samuela is where they’ll put different garlic and peppers and whatever the recipe is in the bottle and fill it up with oil or fill it up with something and, like I saw one, there’s a little paria, I still say paria, that I like to stop at between here and one of our lodges, Nautres Rios. And all he does is fill up his bottle with garlic cloves and water, and then he sprinkles that on his meat as its cooking. Is that how you say it Samuela, Samuela? That’s a sauce that they just finish with and season with and everybody, every little place got their own little slight recipe. My favorite is olive oil with the peppers and the garlic and a little bit of rosemary and stuff like that but it’s wonderful.

John: Yeah, criogio is the other big condiment that you usually get, and that’s just a mix of onions and peppers, put together, diced up real fine.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a kind of like a sauce.

John: Yeah, almost, yeah. It’s more of a chunky one because it doesn’t have like, it’s not like cooked with a sauce, it’s just more, it’s raw, it’s fresh peppers, fresh onions, some garlic, maybe some herbs.

Ramsey Russell: We were talking about the James Beard that you knew.

John: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Have you ventured outside of Buenos Aires? I know you have a little bit, but have you ventured yet into some of their native game, like, since I’ve been here in the past 20 years, i’ve eaten caiman.

John: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve eaten, of course, i’ve eaten hare, but I’ve eaten carpentio de capybara. There’s another little animal, I’m trying to think of his name, it’s like a little chinchilla.

John: viscocha.

Ramsey Russell: viscocha, unbelievably, it’s like a pork, lean pork.

John: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Of course, i’ve eaten all the game animals. I’ve just eaten, so I’ve eaten, oh golly nutria rat. Unbelievable how good those little critters. Guinea pigs, i’ve eaten in parts of Argentina and Peru. It’s unbelievable. There’s a lot of critters out there, these folks are eating. I’ve eaten emboo, they call them Nandu and I call them Ria.

John: Yeah, yeah nandu’s, yeah. I will say that it’s kind of funny that, in America like if you’re a squirrel hunter for some backwards.

Ramsey Russell: You are.

John: If you’re a squirrel hunter that’s gross or whatnot to most Americans. But the amount of rodents that they eat here in South America is, I mean, it tops anything, the United States has capybear being the largest rodent but Vizcacia, I will hands down, that is like my favorite meat so far, here in Argentina, especially if they do it Escabeche style, where it’s pickled.

Ramsey Russell: Yes.

John: Just a jar of pickled escabeche, Vizcaccia with a little bit of hot sauce and some crackers and stuff.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable.

John: Super delicious.

Ramsey Russell: They pickle a lot of stuff like, they got that tongue vinaigrette type recipe, beef tongue but I’ve eaten ducks that way, i’ve eaten perdis that way. Now, viscocha, I mean, it’s good.

John: Yeah, no, yeah. I’ve had a chance to eat a lot of stuff. Guanaco down in the south, down near Calafate and all that, and Patagonia.

Ramsey Russell: What’s that?

John: So, there’s four camelid species here in Argentina, so you have guanacos, vicuñas, alpacas, and llamas. And so in the north part of Argentina, they eat llama. You’ll see llama, empanadas, and all kinds of other stuff. But in the very far south is where the guanacos are. And it’s very similar to a llama, trying to imagine in your mind. But they actually do some management, pretty cool management stuff they do on the guanacos down there. And then in the town of Calafate, you can find it on most menus. It’s a grated meat that they have. I’ve had the stew, i’ve had the empanadas, i’ve had the Milanesa, all different varieties of it, because I wanted to get the full feel of what guanaco tastes like.

Ramsey Russell: You better believe I’m a Milanesa fan, I mean, coming from the deep south.

John: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I’m a Milanesa fan. I love it, I really do. And I will say this, some of my favorite fried fish. Very simple technique. It’s one of my pocket recipes now, something you taught me back in Arizona is another pocket recipe. And I like to do it with duck and I learned how you can take a duck breast half and make about four cuts with a sharp knife and spread that thing out like a plate-sized piece of Milanesa. They don’t tenderize it that I do. And egg bath flour and breadcrumbs and making Milanesa but on a fried fish, it’s even simpler. They got this beautiful flathead catfish called a surubí down here. And you take the fish filet and egg wash flour, pan-fry it, and just make a gravy with heavy cream. Add capers on top. How simple can that be?

John: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I hate to say for a southern boy that my favorite fried fish is Argentina.

John: But the good news is, it’s a catfish, so

Ramsey Russell: It’s a catfish, that’s right.

John: So you’re at least still in the ballpark.

Ramsey Russell: What technique because you are a foodie man, you’re a food guy, and anytime I’m around you, we talk, the conversation does go to food, John. What have you learned, how has John’s cooking style and evolved in the very short amount of time you’ve been here in Argentina so far?

John: Well, so I will say that, Argentina for certain, there’s a couple of big, big differences, between what you would get at home and what you get here and the way things are done. One of the biggest things in Argentina is the panadería, so the bread. Bread making here is very, very different. Very different tastes, all kinds of stuff, so I’ve learned quite a bit there.

Ramsey Russell: Is that the Italian influence or the Spanish influence?

John: Well, what you’ll find is the flour here is different. The flour here is mild different. So, like back home, it’s like there’s all-purpose and bread flour and cake flour and all that stuff. Here, you have 4 aught, 3 aught, 2 aught and 1 aught and that’s it. And then the only variation is whether or not it’s integral, so it has the shell the wheat in it to make it more like a true like whole grain or whether or not it’s been cleaned out and all that.

Ramsey Russell: Wow

John: And so you learn about how the different flours and their techniques they’re using are different, whether it’s got the germ in it or not. Changes it a little bit. Yeah, they just, bread’s very different but also, I think I really have enjoyed the seasonal cooking with the available vegetables. It makes me, like really straight, I think that really helps cooking a lot is if you’re using the fresh vegetables and fruits and stuff that are in season at the time. It certainly the best quality ingredients are going to make the best quality food, and so you just cook and use what you can but I think some of the techniques that, the professional techniques that I was lacking is what I’m picking up in this school. And some of that is cuts, how to cut not only meats but vegetables and those kinds of things, because consistency of cut is also consistency of cook. And so that helps bring flavours out, but also really focusing on things like sautéing, extraction, reduction, how to really bring out the most flavours of what you’re trying to do in there. I will say that, though I have been able to. I think a couple of the chefs are pretty impressed there at the school because I’ve been able to teach them some things that they didn’t know about.

Ramsey Russell: Really.

John: So we were cutting up a lamb the other day. We had a whole lamb, and they were teaching us how to get through butcher for these different cuts. And at one point, you have to take out, it’s essentially, it’s the midsection of the back, right where the T-bone is, essentially, on one side you’ve got the loin, the other side you got the b filet churrasco or New York strip. And so they were showing us how to cut out the loin, which is usually on the inside of the animal and then the beef filet, which is on the outside, which is your back strap or for deer hunters and stuff like that. Well, what the chef didn’t know, and I told him, I said after doing this on hundreds upon hundreds of animals that, i’ve shot on my own, you don’t need a knife to pull the loin out, you can do it by hand. You stick your fingers up there, and then you just separate it from the bones and then just use your fingers. So that way you’re not, like losing any meat. You’re pulling it out. And he was just stunned. He’s like, oh, my God. Yeah, i’ve done this on 100. The only knife cut you need on a loin is the front and the back where it’s attached.

Top of Form

John: That’s right.

John: Once you make those two cuts, you can just use your fingers and your hand to pull out the whole loin, and you don’t have to use a knife and lose anything valuable as part of it.

Ramsey Russell: He like it, didn’t he.

John: So he was like, he’s like, holy crap. I said, yeah, it doesn’t matter how big the animal is, isn’t a lamb small, we could do this clear up on a cow if you wanted to, so

Ramsey Russell: When did you actually come down to Argentina, John?

John: January.

Ramsey Russell: January?

John: Oh, yeah. I’ve been here six months.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, yeah, six months. No time.

John: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Just getting your feet wet, really?

John: Oh, yeah, for the most part.

Ramsey Russell: Do you think when your school wraps up, you’ll vomitose on back home or you’re gonna stick it out?

John: I am actually actively hoping to stay here. So, like I said, i’ve been keeping 1ft in the dove world and in the hunting community and stuff here and so actually, I leave tonight or actually early tomorrow morning, i’ll be heading back over to Cordoba because I’ve been working with some of the outfitters out there and trying to do some. There’s a lot of questions about the doves and things that are going on about hunting in Cordoba right now. And so hopefully I’ve got a few transmitters, some GPS transmitters that we’re going to try and put on some birds.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a very, very encouraging topic. First, I want to preface that part of conversation like this. What do you know to exist in Argentina in terms of wildlife management as you know it in North America, the North American model, the surveys, the counts, the harvest, the $100 conservations, everything else. How does that compare to here in Argentina?

John: Well, I will tell you that it’s very, very different, for sure. And it varies everywhere. They have a government agency, the Ministry of Flora and Fauna, which falls under the Ministry of Ambiente, which is their kind of, the department. For us, it would be the equivalent of the Department of the Interior and Fish and Wildlife Service would be the Ministry of Flora and Fauna. There’s kind of the overarching, but then there’s also each one in the provinces. They each have a minister and kind of oversees things and all that. But they’re government, and it operates very differently than what you get down here. So, like in Calafate with the guanacos, I think it works everywhere it works somehow just a little bit differently. But the guanacos are a problem down in the Calafate area, because they compete for grasses with the sheep and the cattle. And so ,what they’ve decided is they try to control the population to a.

Ramsey Russell: Kind of like Elk and beef sheep back home.

John: Yeah, well, they try to keep the guanaco population at a certain level, there so that way there isn’t some of these conflicts and the government, I believe is the one who goes and does the culling. It’s not like a hunter-based system, but the government goes and does the culling. But because they do that and they do it cleanly, they’re able to offer that meat to, like I said, the restaurants and chefs there locally to serve in the restaurants at a great quality price. And I think you can even find it in the grocery stores down there. Now, that’s, I mean, that’s really one side where the government kind of has an intervention on wildlife management in that area, Cordoba dove hunting, completely different. When you look at Cordoba dove hunting, it actually the reason why it happens is because originally was crop damage. Late 1960s, early 70’s, doves and monk parakeets were just devastating the crop yields in Cordoba. And they were growing them a lot of small grains, which is what these birds like to eat and of course, ear doves down here are perch feeders, so they actually sit on the plant and pick it off. They don’t just wait until it’s harvested and there’s silage on the ground. So they’ll attack sunflowers, they attack sorghum, they attack in hordes because there’s so many of them. But back in those days the farmers were using poison baits, which not only would kill the doves, it would kill the eagles, it would kill so many others,

Ramsey Russell: It would kill the dove.

John: Yeah, I mean, it killed so many other species in the poisoning, there was a lot of collateral damage and so hunting emerged out of that as probably the most ethical means by which to manage the dove population and help protect some of the farmers’ yields every year. So that way as long as the hunting continues, they keep the numbers kind of in check or keep them off the fields long enough for the farmer to harvest his grains and get it to market.

Ramsey Russell: And your formal background of research academically is dove.

John: Yeah. Well, of course, being in Arizona, I mean, if you’re the migratory bird guy in Arizona, your time is eaten up with a lot of doves.

Ramsey Russell: You’re the dove guy. See John, I used to go, i’ve been to Cordova many, many times. We used to sell it back in the day, blah, blah, blah. But dove hunting in Cordova has greatly declined. People that have listened to all my episodes have heard me rant and rave about what I perceived as the gross over harvest of that resource that there’s no way, I mean John, it just 1000 doves a day captured are given away is the 2000, 3000 doves a day, 3000 doves a day as compared to 16 in the United States. 3000 doves a day. The world record is supposedly 14,000 doves, I don’t believe that’s possible, but still going out and shooting, there’s no way it can sustain that and it’s been my belief, i’ve come to believe in talking to some of the Argentines as the opportunity to harvest those tremendous amounts of numbers have declined and declined, and declined to decline. Okay, they were just shot in oblivion like the pasture pigeons. And because there’s just no way it could sustain like, I can remember going from one roost, you fly into Cordova, you drive an hour north, all the big lodges were there and you drove ten minutes, you went and shot all those dove numbers, and now you go further and further out to find those doves sometimes. And then about ten years ago, another route, an hour north of there, blossomed and it was thought that despite all the harvest and pressure we’re putting on these birds, they’re continuing to expand and then came the thought, no, no, they’re not expanding, they’re evading all this hunting pressure. And so it’s just been like this industrialized overexploitation of this resource down here. But along comes my buddy John O’Dell puts his foot in the door in the Cordoba and starts meeting with some of these lodges and your take on it was something completely different, and it’s very, very exciting. So tell me, tell me what your take on why the doves are not as abundant as they were ten years ago.

John: Well, for sure, I can’t say with any certainty because I don’t have any data but it’s my personal feeling that hunting isn’t the problem in Cordoba at this point, especially when you’re standing there looking and every time I have yet to be standing in there during high volume season December, right, to see what December and January look like, I still have no idea. So I’ve been here in the low points, right, the low parts of the season. So my first visit was in September. That’s pre-kind of really big breeding cycle before, you get to December where there’s a lot of birds. So you’re kind of at your lowest point of birds. Same thing with right now here in the winter. It’s just, we’re really in the lull of everything. But you stand there and watch the flights off on the roost and you’re like, wow.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable. You all see them swarm with sunflower field this time of year, it’s like more dove than you ever knew existed on earth.

John: Yeah, yeah. But I think for me, the two things that stood out for me, one of the big questions they had was the largest roost in Cordoba moved kind of unexpectedly just a few years ago. And so they took me to that roost, where it was and I got a real good chance there. There’s a gentleman who’s been on that piece of ground for 18 years, knows it like the back of his hand and has kind of a long history with it and then we went over to where the roost moved to, which is a really lower grade, lower quality habitat like it’s not normal, the dove should be roosted in this area. But we went and we looked at that roost and it was my personal opinion that that roost had become old and overgrown. I think because it was the biggest roost, it’s a big area.

Ramsey Russell: Kind of had become for that forest cover type had become old growth.

The Impact of Farming on Dove Populations

“Doves and pigeons are disturbance species. They are attracted to disturbance, and that’s why farming is so attractive to them.” – John O’Dell

John: Yeah. So obviously things were very good before that. Why the roost established there, is there was a lot of grazing through there, I mean trees get knocked over, there’s fires, there’s things like that. If you don’t learn anything about doves and pigeons for me at all, there’s one thing you should know about them is the only thing that you should really consider. Doves and pigeons are disturbance species. They are attracted to disturbance and that’s why farming is so attractive to them, that’s why they love hanging around farming areas because you turn over plants, you turn over the soil, you open up new feed areas, there’s grains in the ground, all that other stuff. But the same has got to be true with their roost sites. They don’t like old decadent, lush, like really thick nasty areas to roost in. And I think what happened to that roost is because it became kind of protected, it was like almost a protected zone. Let’s not mess with this fire out of it.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s not mess with it like we all are [**:01:04:16].

John: Yeah, let’s do it. It just became old and decadent and grew very large and you can tell now, like when you’re there, it’s full of tortelitas., the little ground doves, little incas. They love thick brushy habitat. That’s why when you see them in the states, anytime you see ground doves or whatnot, they’re always along old farms, along the hedgerows, and the old areas that were not farmed, where it’s old trees, old thickets. They love flying that right next to the irrigation ditch, right, you have the old irrigation ditch next to the really nasty area that no one wanted to farm and plow out and all that other stuff. But also there’s birds like chachalacas. Chachalacas stretch all the way from Brownsville Texas, all the way here to Cordoba, Argentina. And the chachalacas have moved in this area and Chachalacas really like that thick thorn scrub nasty habitat. That’s why they’re almost impossible to hunt. Down there in Brownsville along the border like, you gotta like wait for the perfect opportunity to shoot one, because, man, if they go down in there, you don’t want to send your dog in there, it’s too nasty and thorny and all that or you gotta like, crawl your way through, you’re gonna come out with more scratches than you’ve ever seen in your lifetime. But, yeah, they like it thick, and so those are indicator species to me that, man, this thing had gotten really old, really decadent. And it’s not a quick thing, I mean, it wasn’t something that happened overnight, it just over time, this became not ideal for doves to nest in or roost in. And particularly with old trees, when you think about old trees, some of the little spindly branches and stuff become very brittle because they’re focused on the main beams and producing leaves and all that stuff. So when a dove rests on that and tries to put it, they don’t invest a lot into building a nest, I mean they used to nest on my lawnmower at home because I didn’t mow the lawn enough. But they don’t invest a lot in their nest. But when they do put a nest down, those little spindly branches break off because they’re too brittle and stuff. It’s just not a good place to have a nest or to roost. So they had to go find new areas and so now they’re roosting in stuff that’s really sub ideal subprime, kind of like nasty stuff where they really shouldn’t be, I mean, they should be off the ground, they should be in the trees. And some of them are now nesting on the ground in these thicker.

Ramsey Russell: See somebody telling me about, you see I heard, for example, that during COVID there was a massive wildfire, millions of acres of pasada, what I call it brush land scrub, burned and then I heard that there was a big flood, and I said, but doves don’t nest on the ground. But they did. And it may have been just a preference versus availability. They didn’t have nowhere else to nest. They started nesting on the ground, along comes a flood. So you’re seeing them nesting on the ground because of this old growth habitat condition?

John: Yeah, obviously you have to really cherish these roost sites that have trees in them, like the cabe Rocha woods. They weren’t even harvesting them for Parisians, like that’s really where I could see back in the gaucho days. Oh, we’re running our cattle. They’re eating the grass underneath it. Well, let’s cut down a few trees so we can, cook our meats on it and stuff. And they were kind of causing a little bit of disturbance kind of over time. But then, oh, this is a roost site, so let’s protect it, let’s not, mess with it anymore because we want to keep it safe, and it just, 40 years later, it becomes old and decadent.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

John: It’s not very good anymore.

Ramsey Russell: What would be the prescribed habitat management for that, and how long would it take for it to recover and get productive again for these doves?

John: Well, a lot of it’s going to just depend on conditions and all that other stuff. But if you go back in and you do, it’s kind of like that field of dreams. If you build it, they’ll come, you need to go back in and if you cleared everything all in one shot and started all over from scratch, I mean, it’s going to take a long, long time for that to kind of come back. And so my thought was to do a third of it, come in and either if you want to, like, space it out across the whole thing.

Ramsey Russell: Like a patchwork.

John: Or you could just do one third, see this giant roost mountain range and just cut a third of it and say, okay, we’re going to do this first half, it would probably take a few.

Ramsey Russell: Are you talking about cutting it or are you talking about logging it or are you talking about burning it?

John: Well, I think anything you can do that would help, I mean, if you could burn it, that would be great. But I know Argentina doesn’t have the resources like the wildland firefighting resources that we do, and prescribed burns like that we’ve done in the states. So that might be a little harder to get accomplished. But a fire would be great because you want to clear out a lot of that old stuff. You certainly want to keep a few old trees like I think old, having a few old trees mixed in with a whole bunch of new growth is really, really good because then maybe.

Ramsey Russell: Just bring in some firewood cuts and spot, kind of like a shelterwood or something.

John: Yep. Do some fireworks, replanted, obviously with some new seedlings, to help spur growth instead of trying to start over from just bare dirt scratch and stuff. But you could probably get it back. I think birds would probably start revisiting maybe within 10 years. It would take a while but what I would say is like, do this first third and then, give it about five years and do another third and then come back and finish out the other third in another five years. So over the course of about 15 years. But that way you have things in rotation and it’s one of those things where we discovered this even in wildlife, sometimes some of the surveys and stuff that you did every three years were much harder to accomplish than the ones you did every year.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

John: Right because it’s like, it’s not something that’s just kind of standard practice or whatnot. You got to kind of keep on a schedule and if it’s that far spread out where you’re letting that first third that you did, if you went, let it sit 20-25 years before you come back in on top of it to redo it, who’s got the memory to do that, or who’s in control of it to be able to say, okay yeah, we need to, restart thinking about doing this one again or, kind of kind of redoing that work.

Ramsey Russell: What past research had been done on here? What kind of like I have said before to somebody who got irate, I said, well there’s no surveys. John, I just think that in the context of say, ducks back home or I’m sure songbirds or small game birds, they’re in doves. You know that we need to count, we need to do an inventory. You don’t go spend money, you don’t go run your ATM card if you don’t have any idea what you got in a bank account, so we do surveys and that’s just my training coming into it. And it was my understanding there were no surveys down here. There was no research down here. Oh, we did it back in the 70’s. How much research was done, on this resource down here?

John: As far as I’ve been able to find, there’s about three landmark papers on ear dove since 1970, that are really kind of important papers. And so the first one actually doves are like incidental to the entire paper. There’s great information about doves in it biologically but it wasn’t the prime focus, the prime focus actually was crops and it’s when they were starting to look at the damage that ear doves and monk parakeets and all that were doing to the crops down here. And so that first paper was more about the agricultural loss but incidentally while they were doing that they were collecting some data on doves, which they published which thank God they did because it’s like, okay this is cool information, kind of gives me like a little nugget and then, there’s another paper that was after that that looks at the eruptions of ear doves across South America and what that was related to was crops again, it was more of a crop paper, but it was more specifically on the population.

Ramsey Russell: They covered dove forest cover to seed crops, the doves erupted. The population exploded.

John: Yeah, it was the types, not only the type of crops we’re growing but the amounts in close distance to

Ramsey Russell: Talk about that.

John: Yeah. So I think what people remember about the ear dove particularly in Cordoba, everyone looks fondly on the past, right, like the good old days. Oh, this is the good old days. Well, there was an eruption in Cordoba, I think, and it was right around the time, the 70’s, like it was spurred on by a lot of the crop depredation that was going on, but there was a huge eruption of birds where it was just like the numbers we see today probably don’t even compare to what they were seeing at that particular time. And it’s due to the mix of wheat and sorghum or millet that was grown in close proximity to the roost sites. So what they kind of assumed, and it’s not for sure, but there’s an assumption that, ear doves don’t migrate but there’s a distance that the doves fly out from their roost every day and they feed on and then go back to the roost and all that stuff. So within a proximity to this roost area, like what was the percentage of wheats and sorghums and corn and those kind of things that were grown and wheat and sorghum were actually shown to be like really the two big indicators of these eruptions because it happened not only here, it happened in Colombia, it happened in Brazil, it happened in Bolivia. Other agricultural areas saw eruptions of ear doves and part of it was all related to this kind of this magic formula of crops. What percentage was grown in proximity to these roost sites that were just essentially, if the body condition of the birds is in great shape because of the food, they got all the food, so their body condition is great, that means they’re going to nest even more successfully and then the other conditions as well, environmentally and stuff just that are just perfect for birds because, Cordoba itself is probably, if you mapped it out on latitude and longitudinal lines, Cordoba is about the equivalent of San Antonio Texas. The city of Cordoba and San Antonio Texas are in the same zones just different atmospheres. And so you think about San Antonio and all the doves and all that are grown out in Texas. Environmentally, Cordoba is in that same kind of zone. And so they can produce a ton of doves. You just got to have the right conditions, right seed mixes, right foods, and everything’s great.

Ramsey Russell: And as those eruptions happened and they started doing that research and they realized, oh, these birds have a preference for this finer grain. Was there a transition to corn and soybeans instead?

John: Not on purpose. I think that’s more market-driven. Most of what, Cordoba is a little larger than Iowa, if you can imagine, yeah I mean, it’s slightly larger than the state of Iowa is what the province of Cordoba is. And most of what they grow in terms of corn and soybeans right now are used for export. It’s not used in the country, it’s mostly all export and stuff because that’s what makes them the most money. The same thing happened in the United States, particularly in Arizona, when Arizona had a large small grain seed crop and the white wings were going crazy but then they switched out to other things cotton and other goods and services that are goods that were providing more financial benefit to the growers and went away from that. And you see the dove population go down because of that or in conjunction with that. So it’s probably the same thing we saw in Cordoba is that, they switched to these larger grains that really don’t have the same nutrient value that, the smaller ones do, like wheats and millets and, sesame seeds, I mean, sesame seeds are one of the big things. Boy, if you can grow that, you’ll be buried in doves for a while. But yeah, it’s crop-related. So like I said, I think those are really the two kind of fold things of what you saw in Cordoba in recent past, one is kind of just an aging out of the roost, where these old protected roost areas are just getting old and decadent. And so it doesn’t support as many birds and they usually end up having to move to some place that will support the kind of growth they need, but also so you need the food to be able to support that larger populations as well. So it was kind of a two-fold effort, I think to what happened there. But hopefully here in the future things work out. I’ve got some proposals in to a lot of the outfitters in Cordoba, hoping to fund some research into figuring some of those questions out with some data to back it up. Since, like I said, we’ve only got about three good quality papers on ear doves.

Ramsey Russell: And the Chamber of 17, which is comprised of the 17 foremost

John: Outfitters

Ramsey Russell: Quarterback outfitters are considering your proposal, I mean you’re doing some work down here with it.

John: Yeah, they had me out in September to take a look and help see if I could answer some of these questions, just due to my experience with a colony nester, like white wings, which is what ear doves are, they look like mourning doves, but they act more like white wings. And so, they nest in colonies, which is not something that mourning doves are just spread out all over the landscape, ear doves colony nest much the same way white wings do. And they’re also perch feeders, the way white wings are.

Ramsey Russell: Is there a tipping point in their population, like I’ve heard people allude to the past on the old passenger pigeon that they believed there was a critical mass that those birds had to have below which they could not recover. Is there any tipping point evidence on either white wings or the ear dove down here?

John: That’s a big question, we don’t know.

Ramsey Russell: You have a gut feeling.

John: I would say we definitely have to be cautious because if the population reaches a low enough point, thankfully ear doves, like mourning doves, are spread all across, Ramsey Russell: Everywhere.

John: They’re across the entire continent, which is good. They have a really wide berth, which means a lot of different habitats, a lot of different things. I think the passenger pigeon may have been a little too narrowly focused. They were more specialists than generalists, which made them more vulnerable. Obviously the big shoots that used to happen along the Ohio river when all the birds were passing over that one spot, you can, you don’t see ear doves in just one single spot. It just so happens that Cordoba is like the heartbeat of where ear doves are. But they’re clear up into Colombia, they’re in Peru, they’re in Bolivia, they’re in Brazil. Not in such great densities but Cordoba just started to be the heart of it because of all the agriculture that benefited them and their numbers, just perfectly.

Ramsey Russell: I got several questions asked. I’m going here first, you’ve got, you’re talking about putting GPS backpacks on these birds. Talk a little bit about your research. And then you were telling me about collecting 125 wings from participating lodges. What are you doing here? What’s going on with these two things?

John: Well, so the transmitter thing is something that started even before I showed up down here. Brett Collier from Louisiana State University had a bunch of these GPS transmitters. The difficulty we’ve always had usually with smaller birds like doves is the technology hasn’t caught up

Ramsey Russell: Quite as quickly.

John: So like, most of the time these transmitters for GPS stuff have really big heavy batteries and if you’re going to put a backpack on a bird.

Ramsey Russell: It got to be light.

John: Well, it can’t be more, we usually try to shoot for it not being more than like, 3% of their body weight. You want them to be able to carry it without it impacting them significantly. So if you can imagine, 3% of your own body weight, just pick that up and carry it around for a while, it’s there but it’s not a hindrance but if you start getting like, 5 or, 7 or 8-10 percent of your body weight carrying around all the time, that’s problematic. That impacts your day and so, thankfully the technology has gotten to the point now where we have it small enough where we can get it on doves, and these really small transmitters, which are great, they pick up on the Argos transmitter satellite or the Argos satellite picks up these small transmitters now. What we wanted to be able to do initially with some of these transmitters is figure out the birds kind of daily routine. We like to get them out in a few different places and take three readings a day, one at midnight, figuring that’s got to be the roost site, they’re not moving around and then pick up another one at 08:00 a.m., and another one at 04:00 p.m. So we want to know where they’re feeding first thing in the morning and where they’re feeding last part of the day before they go back to the roost and just see if that pattern holds up or if they’re moving to different places. What are they feeding on, because we can go and see it in real-time, where this bird is, well, let’s go to that field. What’s growing right there right now, is it sunflowers, is it wheat, is it corn. What are they enjoying and where or are they moving, because this is kind of that precursor time. A lot of people talk about how ear doves, they can breed year-round, and we do see juveniles, kind of year-round, but there are definite peaks. And that’s where we talk about the high volume season in December because usually right around September, they’ll start going into that heavy nesting cycle where the population starts just growing and growing and growing into that December, January high volume area where there’s just birds galore. So it’d be nice to know if they’re kind of setting up for that, like, where these roosts are prior to going into the breeding cycle or are they moving, like, is there a definite move from where they are now to where they’re going to start nesting at. And so really, this is just a first opportunity to look at these dove movements really three times a day for the next however many days, the batteries on them don’t last. With any luck, the battery in this GPS unit hopefully will last 60 days. It’ll give us at least two months’ worth of data.

Ramsey Russell: If the dove lives that long.

John: If the dove lives that long, yeah, that’s the other thing is to just kind of see.

Ramsey Russell: I’d hate to be the guy that has to cut his way a quarter mile into one of those brush thickets because everything down there’s got thorns and is nasty to recover that GPS two days after you put it on that bird, it’s gonna be a thankless job.

John: Yeah, no, it will be. Yeah and the batteries, I mean, like I said, thankfully, they got small enough, but the battery life is still pretty short. If I shorten the window to, like, one a day, we might be able to stretch that out a lot, but I don’t know exactly what that. It’ll only tell us where they are at one point during the day.

Ramsey Russell: And what’s up with the wing survey?

John: Yeah, so the wing survey that’s part of the proposal that I’ve recommended to the outfitters there to start helping to try and answer some questions. So with the dove task force in the United States and the national Dove harvest strategy, the national mourning Dove harvest strategy, one of the key components to that is wing collection. It’s a survey, it’s a parts collection, it’s the same thing that happens in the duck world. For the dove wing collection, what they do is random hunters are selected all across the country. If they accept to do this, what they want is the wings from the very opening day or opening weekend, just send in your limited wings ship it back to us and then we would all meet just usually about the week before thanks giving there in Missouri, and we would just go through all tens of thousands of wings from all across the country looking at, we would age and score them so we can look at, whether they’re an adult, whether they’re juvenile. We look at the molt characteristics in the wings because they’re repeatable and that gives us an idea of, like, how many hatches happened in particular states, when these kind of peaks were, how abundant the hatch was, like, what percentage of juveniles versus adults were harvested, because that’ll give you some indication of a growing population. If you don’t want really high adult harvest, that’s kind of a bad thing, that the hatch was bad that year, and kind of give us a benchmark and that fed into a much larger model with other inputs that would help us estimate the population total for the country because we were looking at it a continent wide not just a particular state or a flyway but the entire continent to figure out, okay, how big is this and then we split it into the three management units, east, west and central and then that would feed into the next year’s hunting regulations, what’s the population doing, What’s the estimate, how are things going.

Ramsey Russell: Are the ear doves closely enough related to mourning doves, even though they act like white wings, that you can use the same age criteria? Is that right, I mean, because ducks in South America don’t molt like ducks in North America.

John: Right and that’s part of my hypothesis, I mean, we do know genetically there’s a great genetics paper that shows that mourning doves and ear doves are very, very close kissing cousins, if you were. But you look at an ear dove and you look at a mourning dove, they have pretty much the same plumage display overall. And so it’s my hypothesis, just looking at that because they look like each other, very, very close. Except morning dove has a very long tail, ear doves have a shorter tail that I believe that they probably molt the same way because you find this similar molt pattern in almost all doves and pigeons. They molt the same feathers in the same order, over a certain time frame. I don’t know if the days are the same. So, like on a morning dove, its primary feather molt is every 14 days.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

John: It’ll molt one feather grow in a new one and then the next one in line goes out and it molts from the inside out and so there’s ten, technically yeah there’s ten primary feathers on the wing, they have several more, they’re secondary and tertiary but the primaries are the outside ones, the outside ten, they molten a particular every 14 days. And that’ll help indicate how far back on a juvenile, particularly you can go backwards on a Julian date calendar and figure out, like essentially what day it was born. If you have a large enough sample size.

Ramsey Russell: You tell me you’re going to keep some in your house to test this hypothesis. What do I think about that?

John: Well, yeah, so what my goal was to capture some. I wanted to capture some juvenile birds, probably just a handful maybe about half a dozen or so, and then keep track of them and actually watch them molt, so that way I can verify that, how many days it is between each molt feather. Mourning doves particularly the secondary flight feathers are usually one to two feathers ahead of the primary molt. And those are some basic biological things that we don’t know about ear doves yet. These are like really simple old school, Aldo Leopold style biological things, biological information that we just don’t have on eardrums yet, the simple basics, start there and then start growing out because once you have that, then you can start building, the more little things you know about basic biology, the bigger and bigger the things that get. But what my goal is I firmly believe that we can do the same things that we do with morning doves, with that parts collection that we can do to ear doves here, and so my goal was to collect wings every week. I needed some of the outfitters to provide me with wings, just a random selection of the birds that they shot from one day each week. Send them into me. And Cordova, I was just sitting in my apartment, read wings for two, three days. But collect that information week over week over week, because in the United States, we do it with one weekend, opening weekend, it’s only done one time. And we’re able to just recreate everything from a single weekend. Here I’m going to be able to get like wings from every single week and look at any changes that are going to show up over time, because it’s a full 52-week hunting season, not a 60-day or 90-day hunting season like you get in the United States with only one day, I’m going to have one day every single week to track the progression of hunting, which hatches are the most important, when are those occurring within that single year. It’s trying to recreate and estimate the population level at that time and then which hatches are probably the most important to hunting and at what times. So we can see what high volume looks like versus low volume, certain aspects of those as it goes along. So I’m super hopeful for it. I’m hoping that they’re as excited as I am and want to hire me on to do that for about the next year and a half.

Ramsey Russell: I can’t imagine that they’re not because just the word on the street, so to speak, the finger on the pulse is because of the dove decline because of hunter interest, something like a big bag manager, I mean, it’s the last big bag hunt on God’s earth. And it appealed to a lot of humanity, I mean, there’s this thing in us that just wants to shoot a bunch. And so I can’t imagine them not. And there’s tremendous economy built around this Cordoba, this Argentina dove hunting, so that’s a big deal. John: Well, I mean, you think of, the Chamber of 17, obviously, you have the 17, established outfitters there on top of the freelancers who come in, but all the staff that they support, I mean, you know, there’s chefs back at the lodge, there’s house managers, there’s cleaners, there’s your bird boys, there’s fuel, cars, you name it, I mean, it’s a massive, massive economy.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a huge economy down here in a country that really doesn’t have one which is bringing me up to a question now. I want to ask about in the instance of doves and the research and the habita, I mean, man, you’re bringing North American modeling a very small set, you’ve proposed that North America concept of wildlife management to a situation that is floundering in a country that basically has no government oversight, like I think, of government oversight resources. And I’m gonna say this, about this time last year, the federal government was threatening or had shut down duck hunting in South America. Just so happened a lot of provinces said, F you. That’s the only reason we were duck hunting, because federal government said, you can’t duck hunting more. Provincial government said, oh, yeah, you can, and started issuing licenses and it ain’t gone away and it’s still a battle among a very left-leaning, anti-hunting, like left-leaning can be type government situation to this and point case this right here. So a lot of the outfitters in other provinces, outside of dove, now we’re talking ducks. They got together with their chambers last year and said, by God, we’ll count the ducks and show them there’s ducks to hunt because they’re saying there’s no ducks. Well, they’re not counting them, so it’s easy to say there’s no ducks when there’s no inventory. And a lot of, not all of, but a lot of your leading outfitters in this country put their time and their money into a survey, the government said, okay, count ducks on these wetlands and we’re going to put a government official with you so that you can’t just fabricate numbers. And on the low side of the interval, we estimate there’s this many ducks between this much and this much. All that inventory, all that survey was given to a government agency that crunched the numbers that presented at intervals said the duck population in Buenos Aires varies between this and this. And on the low side of that interval, it was 14.5 million ducks, which is over a third of what North America has in total duck population in one province. Wow. But my point being that, John, I’m getting back to government oversight. That was individuals that put their time and money into this survey, not the government. And now in Cordoba, you’ve got individuals putting their time and their money into research into habitat, into all this proposal you’re bringing. What is the government stand in this or is their government so different than ours? They’re completely indifferent to this valuable natural resource.

John: Well, when I met with all of them back in September of last year. That was one of my major selling points to them. As I said, as I thought through this understanding that this Chamber of 17, this is about their livelihood, this is about their businesses. Do they pull up stakes and leave now because the things going to hell in handbasket, do they invest or what is it they need to do to maintain their business? These guys are, they’re at the point, thinking logically from a business standpoint, they’re all smart businessmen and I hand it to them that, this is a commodity and a product that they need to be concerned about where they hadn’t had to in the past but now, like hey it’s time to start thinking this through. But one of the selling points I told to him is I said, as you start, what I’m going to try and do is answer questions for business for you, right. I want to make sure that you guys have the answers you need to make smart business decisions. For me, this is purely, like I said, if I can use this data, as intellectual property for myself and produce papers, the scientific side of this, not the side that really interests you guys, at this point, you guys are more interested in the business side. But, there’s not a lot of papers on ear doves. This will bolster your situation, tremendously, the ability to talk about some of the basic biological facts of them and having some monitoring, having some baseline data to go off of that says, look, here’s where we were in this particular hunting cycle. Now we can go back, we might be able to simplify the collection or do whatever we need to in case there is a challenge to, hey you shouldn’t be home because you don’t know what’s out there, use science to your advantage, against some unfounded questioning of, what you guys are doing, to me, I think that’s super important, for you guys. And they see that as smart businessman, I mean, they’re like, yeah, like, we don’t want to hire you just to go write your own white papers and pay for that. We’re here for the business stuff, but if you want to do that as an accessory to it awesome. And so it lends my credibility in my name to a lot of the information that they’re doing here because I have the background that I do a lot of the work that I’ve done in North America and all that stuff and the connections, I mean, a lot of my colleagues and stuff back in the United States, if I start working on this, they are super excited for me, because who knows what I’m going to find out?

Ramsey Russell: Who Knows?

John: It’s the things that we don’t know, I mean, that’s really what’s really inside it.

Ramsey Russell: It’s a do frontier and wildlife conservation.

John: But to be able to connect the two continents of the most common species on either continent, mourning doves and ear doves, I mean, these are literally the two most abundant, most common birds on both continents. And starting to be able to connect the dots between the two on population dynamics or hunter harvest and those kind of things. That is really exciting, that gives us some kind of new hope to be like, okay, not only were we managing mourning doves at a continental scale, maybe there’s some connection into South America on what we may learn about each other, the dynamics between the two.

Ramsey Russell: Will provincial or federal governments ever, do you think or have a guess or a gut feel, will they ever put money into this?

John: Well, obviously, that early money in the seventies came from the agricultural side, because of crop damage. Now, that’s what got doves classified as a nuisance or a pest species currently, in Argentina which is where, in some ways, it’s a good place to be, in some places it’s a bad place to be. They don’t see it as game, they see it as a nuisance, right. And they’re just, they’re trying to save the crops and the money for the farmers and the agricultural side of it. Agriculture may want to get into it, I don’t know if the government may or may not want to.

Ramsey Russell: They hadn’t so far that I can tell.

John: Well, I would assume that if we were able to pull off the project, my estimation, if I can pull off this project, it’s going to be a little over a year long, almost a year and a half long. I will have enough, probably information out of there to create between six and eight white papers, brand new information about a species that we don’t have a ton of information on, people are usually surprised, but sometimes those things that, like happen in the scientific journals which are about as dry as milquetoast to read, sometimes shakes the trees a little bit and you see what comes out of it because it gets people excited. It’s like, oh, there’s new information. I mean, you see it all the time, the news will talk about some new archaeological find in some remote place, and all of a sudden, they start dumping money into it or some little thing. Ducks Unlimited actually was very, very good at this. I think they learned pretty early on. It’s one of the things that I appreciate about Ducks Unlimited, I mean, originally, they were the habitat, they like, we just, we need to save habitat, right. And so they were dumping all this money into habitat, but there were still a lot of questions about certain duck species or, like, what was going on out there that we just didn’t know, and no one had the funds to be able to, like, figure it out. And so Ducks Unlimited decided at some point, well let’s invest in this. And sometimes if you do that enough and you find the right answer, it changes the game for everything. One right answer can totally change the direction of organizations, can change hunting, can change everything and it’s the one thing that I appreciate that Ducks Unlimited doesn’t just do, the habitat side of things for hunters, but they do, that because, man, the right answer means everything sometimes.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve got a question, Mike. What is the difference in doves and pigeons in terms of population dynamics and habitat and everything else? And I ask this because I’m a duck hunter and I love to shoot decoys because I can shoot a whole lot more of them than I can duck.

John: Who doesn’t, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I just got back from San Luis, pigeon hunting, he’s got a little corner over there with a lot of agriculture, a whole lot of wooded cover, a whole lot of pigeons. You don’t see big eruptions of pigeons in certain places and countless of the time in the past 20 years, somebody’s had pigeons that they shot them out. One of our longstanding combo hunt outfitters has got duck stuffs, pigeons but, boy, they put up, they keep a cap on that pigeon, buddy, I mean, we go out once a week. We shoot decoy and pigeons. And when you shoot 80, buddy, they take you gun, they all but tackle you, blow the whistle and say, stop, and that’s it. They really safeguard those pigeons. And I’m not lacking your background. I don’t know the difference in why doves seem to be so prolific. And a pigeon, which is just at a glance, a big old dove, is not. What’s going on there?

John: Well, pigeons, I don’t think, have the same reproductive potential that doves do.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve heard one or two eggs a year, maybe.

John: Yeah. Well, here’s the interesting thing. Doves and pigeons are usually all about two eggs a year.

Ramsey Russell: Okay

John: This is probably one of the most fascinating things about it. So they produce two eggs. One of the major drawbacks to, like, it’s about replication, right. Obviously, you probably know that doves and pigeons create a milk. What they feed the chicks very early on because they can’t feed them worms, they can’t feed them seeds. They’re too young, so they feed them this crop milk, which is like, it’s like, it’s the bad TV show up, like badger milk, like, you drink it and all of a sudden you’re like, you’re superhuman. It’s got like, all these growth hormones and everything else. Because doves and pigeons grow incredibly, incredibly fast.

Ramsey Russell: There’re like colostrum or something.

John: Yeah, it’s huge. The thing of it is, and this is what’s probably most fascinating is the reason why they only do two is because that’s all they can support, if one of the parents were to die while the other two eggs, one of the eggs has to die too. One of the other, the chicks, because one parent isn’t enough to feed both.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

John: They can only feed one. And so it’s one of those questions of like, that’s why when you talk about year-round dove hunting, is there an issue, because if you shoot an adult that’s got eggs on the nest, you didn’t just kill one, you killed two. So it’s like this doubling effect, it’s really strange.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve heard that the Doves in Cordoba breed have several clutches a year.

John: Yes. Just like, I mean, Arizona has between five and six hatches a year. Texas, kind of the same thing. It depends on climate and all. You got to have like a really long kind of warm season to be able to do it. And Cordova does but pigeons, yeah, pigeons don’t seem to produce, like, replicate that same rate. I think there’s a little bit more investment into them. And it could just be because of their larger size, where they don’t have five or six nests every year, they might, they certainly pull off one, do they pull off two, maybe, maybe three, I don’t know. But you kind of have to look worldwide, I mean, you have wood pigeons in Europe, you have band tail pigeons still in the United States. Like, people hear pigeons and they think about the stupid city pigeons. They’re absolutely prolific, like rats. But like, band tail pigeons are very spec. They’re wood species, they’re woodland species. You don’t find them in the cities.

Ramsey Russell: Very closely related to passenger pigeons, i’ve heard.

John: Yeah, last surviving member, closest living relative to the passenger pigeon. But they live in the trees, and they’re an alpine, it’s west coast style, Rocky Mountains, Cascade Mountain, habitats, environments, the peak azuras here, I think they’re a little different, I haven’t been able to dig into them a lot to figure out what’s going on with them, but I’m assuming it’s the same thing, where they’re pretty specialized as well, and you always have to kind of watch it. I think some of the pigeons ended up specializing where birds like mourning doves or ear doves became more generalists.

Ramsey Russell: There is a difference between, there’s even, like you said, there is differentiation between spot wing pigeons and picazuro pigeons, because generally speaking, picazuros are not as abundant as spot wings.

John: Right.

Ramsey Russell: Gosh for every hundred spot wing pigeons, you shoot two or three picazuros.

John: Right.

Ramsey Russell: Now there are areas you get around certain farms. It may be I have shot pigeon limits that were nothing but picazuro, but it’s real different. It’s very niche like that, their habits and all. But I was just wondering why pigeons are not so prolific. Boy, I wish they were.

John: Yeah. The only ones that are is the stupid city pigeons.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, I’m excited, John, every time I meet with you, I’m encouraged. Every time. It’s a very positive meeting and I am super encouraged to hear about your proposed research there in Cordoba and here in Argentina for doves, man, I’m encouraged because I had begotten very discouraged about the situation there. And, man, it’s exciting that the world’s best dove hunting can continue with some changes, with some common sense management and biological changes.

John: Well, and that’s, you’ve rang the bell a lot in past years, where it’s like, people need to start paying attention beyond their own borders. We put in a lot of work and effort to get North America to where it is today. And some of the squabbles that we have are pretty, they’re first world problems.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

John: Where you end up in South America and it’s more second or third world problems where wildlife doesn’t have the support or the mechanisms the same way that the United States does and Canada and all that so, kind of bringing to bear some of our expertise or something and not having to like, oh you have to be like the North American model. But maybe we can work in your system to help figure out how to continue this or be smart about the future of hunting and all that elsewhere, because that’s really the only way you’re going to ever defeat anti-hunting is to be smart about it, use science, use the things that we’ve learned for the betterment of wildlife everywhere and hopefully maintain and keep that betterment going elsewhere.

Ramsey Russell: We could do a whole series, I know you and I could, we did over coffee, about anti-hunting and about, the morality and the ethics and the science and everything else. But there are a lot of people that they can’t get their mind wrapped around coming somewhere like here and shooting hundreds, let alone thousands of doves. But you pointed out, you made a very good point. It’s a difficult pill to swallow is that in the absence of hunting, for example, we were recently hunting up in Entre Rios, and uncharacteristically, this farmer planted sunflowers, and my host said, oh, we’re going to hunt sunflowers in a few days. And the day after he sprayed them to dry them up, we went in there and started hunting. That farmer wanted us in there every day because flying doves can’t eat. The more we shoot, the more they fly and they can’t eat. And I’m gonna say I shot, I don’t know whatever 100 or whatever. And as I would look at the crop, they’re all just loaded with sunflowers, and I’d guess about a half ounce. Figure they’re feeding twice a day, an ounce a day and I don’t know how you guesstimate the number of birds in a three-quarter of a mile-long, black-smoked column of doves that’s 100 yards high and a half-mile deep, I mean, just gazillions is all I know. But I’m thinking, if it’s 100,000 birds, this guy’s losing a couple of tons a day of grain. And as quickly as that stuff dried, with us coming in every afternoon and just keeping them moving and trying to mitigate some of his crop loss, I’m going to say 3, 4 days after he sprayed, he had them dumped, but he lost tons of seed. And I’ve heard in Entre Rios, i’ve heard in Buenos Aires, i’ve heard in Santa Fe, i’ve heard over in San Luis, and a lot of these big agricultural areas, even though it is illegal, a man has to protect his crops and they will go out and poison the system. It’ll kill these birds and kill the animal that ate the birds and kill the animal that ate the animal that ate the birds, and so on up the food chain until it plays out about three or seven times. And it’s just an absolute biological bomb goes off and kills everything beyond just the dove or the monk parakeet or the pigeon. And hunting really does play a pivotal conservation role down here. It’s a very valuable role beyond just going out and shooting birds and having a good time.

John: It’s by far the most ethical way to control the dove population down here without harming a lot of other species in the environment, I mean, it’s cool for me to go to Cordoba and see, all the time I see buzzard eagles and caracaras and I finally saw my first kestrel a few weeks ago out there, it’s like, there’s so many other birds out here that literally would be dead, if you were trying to do any other mitigation through poisoning and stuff like that. But it’s nice to see that hunting is like, able to control it enough that the farmers are happy and they’re not poisoning everything and the bird life’s flourishing there, I mean, if you’re going to have that many doves, you’re going to have that many progress, which is kind of the cool thing, I mean, sometimes it’s inconvenient to have, like nine buzzard eagles flying around and keeping birds away from me, sometimes I’m like, i’ve had that experience where it’s like, okay, I’m obviously sitting in the wrong spot because I’ve got a buzzard eagle sitting behind me, and the birds are like, they’re flying directly at me. They see the buzzard eagle and turn away. So they’re off my flight line, but it’s still cool to see, any of that stuff, too.

Ramsey Russell: John, I’m glad to see you again.

John: I’m happy to see you, too. I think I was more excited to see Char Dog. Thank you.

Ramsey Russell: I tell you what that dog gets around.

John: I tell you.

Ramsey Russell: She’s becoming a little rock star. We landed at the local airport the other day and waiting on baggage. People were coming up, wanting to take a picture with her.

John: She’s a celebrity.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah. Just asked me to get the hell out of the way. They didn’t want me in the picture.

John: But you’re the handler. That’s all.

Ramsey Russell: That’s all, John. I appreciate you folks. Y’all been listening to my buddy, Chef to be John O’Dell. And, wow. Bringing, Bringing North American research, wildlife conservation to the Argentine country. I could not be more excited. Thank y’all for listening to this episode of Duck season somewhere from Buenos Aires. We’ll see you next time.