EP 451. Cape Barren Goose Hunting in Tasmania

 

A World Away

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I am in Tasmania, Australia, almost 9,200 miles from Brandon, Mississippi. It took 70 hours, 3 days, 4 airlines and 5 flights to get here. But here I am shooting Cape Barren Geese with a man named Rockjaw. Rockjaw, how the heck are you, man?

Rockjaw: I’m very well, thanks, Ramsey. Thanks for the effort of making the miles to get here.

Ramsey Russell: Yesterday, the first push, I’m like, this was worth it, I enjoyed this and I had a really good time. It’s just a real different, different place that we are right now because I’ve been to other parts of Australia. I’ve never been way to heck down here towards, in Tasmania on a small little island surrounded. You got the Tasman Sea on one side, the Bass strait on the other. I guess the Indian Ocean is not too far from here, heading south, the Pacific and the Atlantic. It’s a very interesting area right here. Were you born and raised here?

Rockjaw: I’m fourth generation here. My mother and father were born here and my mother’s mother was born here and her mother was born here, so that nearly makes me a local.

Ramsey Russell: How would they have ended up here? How do people end up somewhere this remote like this?

Rockjaw: A lot of the settlers came out in the turn of the century, and before that was the sealing day. So some of my ancestors go back to actually when they first harvested seals here in the Furneaux group, and there was millions of fur seals here, and some of the people stayed on to catch mutton birds, and then they snared wallabies, and then subsistence farming, and they lived on a lot of the smaller islands because you didn’t have to have a boundary fence.

Ramsey Russell: Do you think that back in those days when the fur sealing industry was so big and all that kind of stuff, do you think it was a lot more people than it is now on Flinders Island?

Rockjaw: There would have only been about 20 or 30 people living, the whole of the Furneaux group, because the sailors would come down from Sydney and they’d live here for six months and during the seal season, and that was probably for the first 10 years of the sealing season, they’d get aboriginal women from Tasmania to help them harvest the seals. Then around 1810, they actually lived here all year. So they built cottages and lived on the smaller islands and grew potatoes and wheat and barley and had a pretty good lifestyle.

Ramsey Russell: Did they talk much about how they harvested seals? Was it one of the kind of deals you hear about where you walk around and hit them in the head with a stick?

Rockjaw: Originally, they would. That’s probably what they would have done. They would have walked around and harvested the seals with clubs or the young seals, because they’ve never seen humans before. But later on, they got smart, and they shot them with muskets and whatever.

Ramsey Russell: And all these years later, 4 or 5 generations later, since the seedling era, here we are on this island that I had to look this up. It’s a small island. I’m going to say. I’m going to describe it as about 50 miles long, 25 miles wide. Do the math, it’s around 575 sq. miles, and you told me the other day it was 900 people on this island.

Rockjaw: The present day population was 900. At the peak of the population, we had probably 1500 people living here because after World War 2, the australian government cleared a lot of land, so it created jobs for the return servicemen.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, really?

Rockjaw: My father got one of the farms that was the war service land settlement scheme.

Ramsey Russell: You all still farm?

Rockjaw: I still got a couple of farms here, but-

Ramsey Russell: We talked about this and we may get into a little bit more into it. But when you say farm, you mean grazing land, ranch.

Rockjaw: Yeah. It’s basically all grazing here because you’ve got to freight everything off so that most productive stuff is livestock. So it’s just pasture and sheep and cattle.

Ramsey Russell: I haven’t seen any beans, any corn, nothing.

Rockjaw: Occasionally people will grow, grow crops, fodder crops like turnips or oats or whatever. But this is where-

Ramsey Russell: Garden vegetables.

Rockjaw: Everybody’s got their own garden because you just haven’t got access to a supermarket where you get reasonably fresh veggies, but there’s nothing like growing your own veggies and living off the land.

Ramsey Russell: That little store we went to today, I said, you all ain’t got a Walmart? And he goes, this is Walmart, and it was just like a big. I think you bought fish bait. We all bought coffee. There’s everything in the world right there, but it’s small. I would guess that everybody in the community goes by there to drink coffee. We drove by later this morning, all the men were sitting there on the picnic table drinking coffee.

Solving All the Problems in the World

We basically call ourselves Bass Straits men, whereas we don’t classify ourselves as Tasmanian. 

Rockjaw: That is the coffee club. So every morning you go up and catch up on the gossip of the island and save the problems of the world.

Ramsey Russell: Haven’t lived here your whole life. Are there any strangers?

Rockjaw: In the last 10 years since COVID it’s really picked up. There’s a lot of people have moved here with holiday houses just to get out of the cities.

Ramsey Russell: If a pandemic or that kind of stuff breaks loose again, they can get out somewhere wild with less people, get out and stretch their legs. When the pandemic kicked in, Rockjaw did, were you all in the same lockdown type stuff that we all were?

Rockjaw: You weren’t allowed out of your house. You had to be in your house every night.

Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy.

Rockjaw: You weren’t allowed to go fishing. If you had a shack, you weren’t allowed to go and start your shack. But me and my partner have got another little island off-

Ramsey Russell: Well, you do. That’s right. You showed me the other night at dinner.

Rockjaw: At Vansittart. We run sheep over there so we’d go and spend our weekends over on Vansittart

Ramsey Russell: Farming. I mean, it’s crazy to me because do the math is 1.3 human beings per square mile on this entire island. Clint and I drove up today to go look at the ducks on that bay. I’m going to say we saw 25,000 or 30,000 ducks, geese and swans. We passed 2 vehicles, that went to town to get a coke.

Rockjaw: That was a traffic jam.

Ramsey Russell: It’s amazing. I want to ask you a couple of questions about some of the history and mystery, or whatever you want to call it, the legend of this island. Are there really 2-headed people?

Rockjaw: Not in Bass Strait. We basically call ourselves Bass Straits men, whereas we don’t classify ourselves as Tasmanian. That’s where the 2-headed people came from.

Ramsey Russell: Explain to everybody how 2-headed people read. I thought Glenn started talking about 2-headed and thinking. I thought he was talking about geese. I’m like, what? No, man, people. I said, what?

Rockjaw: That’s a bit like the back blocks of Kentucky. The people are closely related.

Ramsey Russell: There’s no truth to this, is it?

Rockjaw: No.

An Abundance of Snow Geese

I’ve actually farmed Cape Barren geese 40 years ago-Farmed them to sell them to restaurants.

Ramsey Russell: But I’ll be honest with you. Haven’t read the story. We got out, you introduce yourself. First your wife did there at the airport, I couldn’t help but look at her neck, see if there was cut, and then I met you and I found myself doing the same thing. I said, I wonder if that’s a tan line or a cut.

Rockjaw: We’re Straits men. We’re not Tasmanians. There’s a distinct difference.

Ramsey Russell: How did you get into goose hunting? I don’t mean commercial. I mean just yourself. Was it something you did growing up as a little boy around here? Was going and collecting dinner, shooting these geese?

Rockjaw: Yeah, I probably shot my first goose when I was 12 years old. So that means I’ve been shooting geese for 50 years. I’ve actually farmed Cape Barren geese 40 years ago-

Ramsey Russell: Farmed them?

Rockjaw: Farmed them to sell them to restaurants.

Ramsey Russell: You’re kidding. I had no idea.

Rockjaw: I had goose breeding on my property. And we’d sell the young ones off to the restaurants, but there was just too many middlemen. So I came up with bringing people over. The thing with the goose management program is they like to maintain the number of geese at a sustainable level. Because if they get too high, that affects all the farming properties, and nobody wants to see the geese extinct.

Ramsey Russell: No, nobody.

Rockjaw: That’s where the hunting program does the work for the conservation, because it keeps the population at a sustainable level. If the population gets too high, the farmers will poison the geese or use other methods that try to control the geese, which can be disasters.

Ramsey Russell: That’s worldwide, and geese are interesting to me that when their populations seem to get out of whack, like big. I’ve seen this in Holland. We’ve been wrestling with the midcontinent snow goose population. Now we got resident Canada geese proliferate throughout the north. Hunters going out and hunting within bag limits and frameworks, and even shooting 20,30 geese a day, really, or unlimited in the case of snow geese, really does not impact, it doesn’t affect those populations. It’s like they’re almost, they’re too big. Hunting doesn’t do it. So like I say, the farmers go out and do what they got to do to protect their crops. There’s so many geese that they really do compete here at times. If left unchecked with the grazing.

Rockjaw: It’s not so much the amount of feed that they eat. They foul the pastures and foul the water supply. So when the stock try and drink the water, it’s all polluted. Because the cape barren geese are very good processes of protein, but very poor processes of the fiber. So, whatever they eat passes through them in a couple of hours. So when they defecate in the water holes and the water troughs, that all creates a blue green algae and can be poisonous.

Ramsey Russell: Wow, I had no idea.

Rockjaw: The stock just won’t drink it and so then they lose weight. So that affects your bottom line.

Ramsey Russell: I know this. I read up on a little bit before I come here. I got a bird book. It’s my Bible. It’s waterfowl of the world. It’s a little dated, but I love it, and they were saying that in terms of the very specific distribution that these geese have, they’re the rarest huntable goose on earth. Again, we’re talking about 500 sq. miles here on this one island, maybe 100 sq. miles on the island south here, Cape Barren island that supposedly they originated. Somebody told me they taken 30 pairs and put them on mainland. But still, we’re talking a very finite area that these birds exist.

Rockjaw: They live in small flocks on the southern of Australia, but only small flocks because a lot of them live in their original habitat, which is small islands, and they’re very protective. It’s only in the Furneaux group where we’ve cleared probably 300,000 acres of land, that the geese population has exploded because they’ve got all that pasture to live on during the summertime, and that actually gets more geese through the summertime. So the population has exploded.

Ramsey Russell: What’s so interesting about this goose? They’ve got this really unique bill, very short, very stubby, and it’s got that huge yellow saddle called a sear on it, and they’ve ecologically developed to feed in that brackish water, that saline, and they use it like a lot of our sea ducks due to excrete salt. You were telling me the other day that they’ve evolved because, in the Furneaux group, all this pastureland, they’ve evolved here, at least beyond the marsh. Is that true?

Natural Goose Population Dynamics on Breeding Islands

They’ve pushed the young birds away and the young birds are going to find a partner and try and establish their own territory. Once you’ve filled the biomass of food, then the biomass isn’t going to grow any bigger and the young birds would die during the summer because there isn’t the food.

Rockjaw: Yep. Originally, what would have happened, the pair of geese would have had their young, and once they’ve fledged, they would have driven them off the island so that the parents would have had a set amount of grazing that would have sustained them. They’ve pushed the young birds away and the young birds are going to find a partner and try and establish their own territory. Once you’ve filled the biomass of food, then the biomass isn’t going to grow any bigger and the young birds would die during the summer because there isn’t the food. But because we’ve developed land on Flinders island and it’s only a short flight from all their breeding islands, then all more of the young birds would survive through the summer. Then the birds on the other islands weren’t as protective because they knew their young birds would survive during the summer and that a lot of the old birds would come over, migrate to Flinders island in the summertime and live on the pastures, and that here in the summertime as well.

Ramsey Russell: These waterfowl are amazingly adaptable. It just never ceases to amaze me. We’ve got a snow goose back home. Rockjaw, you may be familiar with the white snow goose that historically preceding agriculture, which was 150 years in North America. They come off the Arctic, come off the prairies and almost fly straight down to the marsh, the Gulf coastal marsh, and overwintering them is a marsh bird, and the old folks back in those days didn’t really prefer them during the market hunting days. They were just a little strong because they were brackish. Along comes the rice industry and it’s a good surrogate for marsh. It’s shallow water, its vegetation, and they convert it into rice fields. Now break all these years later, they’ll get into the marsh a little bit, but they’re short stopping, clear up the Mississippi and Central Flyway into places that never overwinter, because they’ve adapted to rice or corn or beans or oats or wheat or something, and they’ve become an agricultural bird. Very similarly to your cape barren geese here. What are some other unique features about these cape barren geese?

Rockjaw: Some of the unique features is that when they used to always breed on the smaller islands and when they actually started breeding on Flinders and on Tasmania, instead of being a ground nesting bird, they’d nest up on top of the grass trees or on top of trees, and that there’s something in their psyche told them on the bigger land masses, there was predators that would have taken their eggs.

Ramsey Russell: That’s why they got such long dells. They’ve almost got, I wouldn’t say like an eagle, but they’ve got extremely long talons.

The World’s Largest Geese

They go up, lift the tail up, and as soon as they bent down, the gander being very protective, would fly at these people and drive the claws fair into their backs.

Rockjaw: When I was actually farming the geese, I had the females nesting and sitting on eggs, and visitors would come around to see the geese breeding, and I would say, just go over and lift her tail up and see how many eggs she’s got underneath it. She’s quite happy sitting on that nest. They go up, lift the tail up, and as soon as they bent down, the gander being very protective, would fly at these people and drive the claws fair into their backs.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Rockjaw: I’ve never seen grown men run out of paddocks being chased by geese.

Ramsey Russell: And the world’s largest goose.

Rockjaw: They say that the spur wing are probably bigger, but I think these on average would be heavier than Spur.

Ramsey Russell: I would agree, everything I’ve read, I’ve shot a lot of spur wings. I knew you had too. We’ll talk about that, but I’ve always heard that it’s a toss up. What I say is the big spur winged geese are quite heavy. They got longer necks, wider wings, but these are cinder block thick tanks, these big Cape Barren Geese. They’re very dense animals. When I looked at one yesterday, at a glance, he seemed about the size of a truly big Canada goose. Until I picked him up, I’m like, oh my gosh, he was massive.

Rockjaw: Just when you take the breast meat off these cape barren geese, it can be up to a kilo a side, so there can be just 2 kilos of just breast meat, and then you add the legs on top of that, because they normally walk around. They generally do more walking than they do flying. But they can fly. I’ve seen them chase hawks and crows and stuff like that, and you would swear they were a black duck or something like that. When they’re angry, they can really fly.

Ramsey Russell: I bet they can. They don’t look fast flying through the air because they’ve got an extremely slow wing beat, and they’re a big animal, but they’re flying as fast as goose. I mean, they’re coming at you. It’s just amazing how you wouldn’t think that slow wing beat could project them as quickly as it does, but they’re coming.

Rockjaw: Yeah, their wings are really deep as well, so every flap of their wings pushes them along. Often people ask me, how fast are these flying? And if you look at a skeet range, you’ve got a crossing target, skeet’s doing 60 km an hour. These birds can fly at 80 km an hour.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Rockjaw: Well, when you shoot skeet, how far in front of the target are you when you pull your trigger. With these geese, you’ve got to be that much further in front because you want to shoot them in the head and the neck. The people see such a big body and they just get confused.

Ramsey Russell: I’d say they’re flying 45 miles an hour, like dude, but it doesn’t look it. What I learned to do yesterday was just do about a one or two Mississippi count and let them get right here. So, I could judge at speed. It was trucking. It was coming on, and it’s like you go shoot 1 and swing on the second one, he was in the rearview mirror already. He was trucking. They were going, man.

Rockjaw: Yes, they have got a bit of a turbo boost. When they, when they get excited.

A Distinct Tasmanian Shooting Technique

So, you let a certain amount into your circle or whatever, you got your shooters in, and then the first shooters shoot at the last mobs that come through, and then they tend to swirl around and circle around, and everybody sort of gets a shot, and then they start coming back out where they first went in.

Ramsey Russell: They’ve got a turbo boost. Talk a little bit about how you all hunt them. I’ve shot driven birds before, but I would find you all’s technique distinctly Tasmanian. You got your own spin to it.

Rockjaw: Yeah. If you’ve got enough wind, they’re pretty easy to master and drive. You can really muster them like sheep if you’ve got good enough eyesight and know the habits of the geese and where they’re going to fly. If they fly through gaps in trees or stuff, or you usually get to know, when you stir the geese in a direction, you usually get to know where they’re going to fly.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Rockjaw: There may only be 20 or 30 birds in this mob and 20 or 30 birds in the next mob, but you’ll push one mob up to the next mob, and you’ll get a mob of 300 or 400 birds, and you’ll try and drive them over the shooters, because the percentage of those are going to go over the shooters, and you’re never going to get all the geese over the shoulders, but you’ll get.

Ramsey Russell: Sometimes like herding cats. We saw that yesterday.

Rockjaw: That’s it.

Ramsey Russell: You’re right. It’s like there’s geese everywhere, but there’s not massive concentrations in this paddock, that paddock. They’re just little family cohorts or a couple of mixing together. So you go out on the 4-wheeler, drink your Red Bull first, I’ve watched, and then go out on your 4-wheeler and puddle on. You’re like a border collie, just kind of going back and forth and pushing them along until they just say, all right, let’s go, and then they fly. You’re right, you had everybody placed where they needed to be yesterday, and they flew over a lot of those spots.

Rockjaw: That’s the secret of the knowing what you’re doing. It’s. I’ve seen a lot of people just think, we just got to chase the geese, and they’ll go this way or go that way, but they’ve got a mind of their own. By the end of the season, you’ve got the geese that confused because you keep putting the shooters in different spots, and they’ve got excellent memory. So, they say, we got shot at going through that gap last time. We’re not going through that gap.

Ramsey Russell: So how long did it take them to catch on to that? because you were saying that yesterday, you might push them from in front of the guns. They fly back, and hour later, I’m hearing birds coming from behind me. Now they’re coming back. How long before they go?

Rockjaw: It doesn’t take them long. About 2 to 3 weeks.

Ramsey Russell: A couple of passes.

Rockjaw: Couple of passes, right. We know where the guns are, and their hearing’s excellent. If you fire a shot before you get the big mobs of geese to you, they know that, right we’re not going near that shot because they don’t like.

Ramsey Russell: That’s one of the 10 commandments.

Rockjaw: That’s one of the 10 commandments.

Ramsey Russell: When we’re setting up, and a straight pair kicks over, don’t shoot.

Rockjaw: No. A lot of that is even the first mobs. You don’t shoot first mobs because you’re trying to push them into an area where you’ve got surrounded by shooters, and if the first mob goes through the next mob’s behind them, so we can get through there, that’s where we’re going. So, you let a certain amount into your circle or whatever, you got your shooters in, and then the first shooters shoot at the last mobs that come through, and then they tend to swirl around and circle around, and everybody sort of gets a shot, and then they start coming back out where they first went in. There’s geese just going in every direction, and it’s sitting back in the 4-wheeler. It can look very exciting.

Ramsey Russell: If they weren’t over me, they were over another part of the line. It was exciting just watching. I had so much fun yesterday doing that. I could not believe it. We had this talk the other day over dinner on the beach? Why don’t you use decoys?

Rockjaw: For the same reason that they’re not in big mobs. They’re not like ducks or your geese in America, that are like, oh there’s geese, they’re feeding, we’re going to join that flock. They’re more territorial, so they’ll be in smaller groups. I used the-

Ramsey Russell: So, like, this family will use this 40 acre paddock and this family will stake out their own little area.

Rockjaw: Yep. They won’t come and land in decoys like ducks or, or other geese, but they’ll see the decoys and they’ll say, oh, that’s safe over there, and they’ll go and land near them. That might be 30, 40 meters away or 50 meters away, and then walk up to the geese. I have still got a few Windsock decoys that I bought 20 years ago, but I’ve never been able to find the same pattern of decoys, and these decoys do work.

Ramsey Russell: Do you know what kind they are? This is the perfect audience to ask.

Rockjaw: They’re a gray windsock decoy and they originally had an orange bill, so they were quite large. They’d probably stand nearly a meter.

Ramsey Russell: I wonder if they were Sandhill cranes. I would think they might have been Sandhill cranes.

Rockjaw: I’ll show you one later on. I’ll go to my decoy box and, if I could find this same one again, I’d probably buy 50 or 60 of them because you could actually put them up and you set all your hunters up 100 meters away from the decoys in a big circle, and a lot of the geese will see the decoys and they’ll fly towards you.

Ramsey Russell: We’ll assume some have already flown through the line and there they are. Some will fly to them.

Cape Barren Geese Populations

A lot of the time though, if you’re shooting on crops early in the morning, like where they’ve got fodder crops and the geese are coming in, the decoys work pretty well then, because they’re the first geese into, into that paddy.

Rockjaw: Yep. A lot of the time though, if you’re shooting on crops early in the morning, like where they’ve got fodder crops and the geese are coming in, the decoys work pretty well then, because they’re the first geese into, into that paddy. We’ll go and have a look and see what that they’re feeding on, and you’ll actually get them to, you can set a shooters up in a line in between where the geese are coming from and it just take, they’re not looking at the hunters if they’re moving or whatever. They’re looking at those geese over there and that’s where we want to be.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. The limit right now is 12 birds, and even though they’re the ‘rarest’ it’s all about their distribution, not their population. How many Cape barren geese are there on this island and associated islands?

Rockjaw: In the Furneaux group, which is 52 islands, they estimate-

Ramsey Russell: 52?

Rockjaw: 52 islands.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, I had no idea of that many.

Rockjaw: Yep. A lot of are only small islands, and these are the islands that the geese breed on, and some of those geese don’t come off in the summertime, but there’s probably about 8000 geese in this population. But there’s probably a couple of 1000 geese in Victoria and in Phillip island and places like that. In Tasmania and Mariah island, there’s probably another couple 1000 geese. So Australia wide it might be 15,000 geese.

Ramsey Russell: That’s it?

Rockjaw: That’s it.

Ramsey Russell: I would expect it more.

Rockjaw: No, back in the late 80s, the population got up to into probably 25,000.

Ramsey Russell: Which was out of hand.

Rockjaw: And it was out of hand and people did drastic measures to get the population back down.

Ramsey Russell: I want to talk about that. You told me a story about somewhere they had put some geese, or there were some geese that got out of hand and they cured them naturally. One of the government agencies put some critters out there to get rid of them. How’d that go?

Rockjaw: Well, it wasn’t a government agency that put the tasmanian devils there, but the actual devils turned up there and the government agency tried to remove them, but the person at the time let go the pregnant female. So these devils inbred more than what they normally would in Tasmania, this happened 3 or 4 times. So, they were inbred 3 or 4 times and they were let go back in the northeast of Tasmania and this is where the facial tumor virus started from.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Rockjaw: Yeah. So there’s no actual proof of it, but yes, I’ve pretty confident that’s probably what happened.

Ramsey Russell: You can’t make that up. I missed that part of story the other night. Are there any tasmanian devils around here? I’d love to see one if it was.

Rockjaw: No, it has none. The devil’s something-

Ramsey Russell: How big are they?

Rockjaw: Have you seen the wombats here on hunters?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rockjaw: They’re about the size of our wombats.

Ramsey Russell: On the size of a cinder block.

Rockjaw: Yeah, it’s about that size. They’re not as big as the mainland wombats, but they’re about the size of the Flinders island wombats, because

Ramsey Russell: They’re truly ferocious.

Rockjaw: When they-

Ramsey Russell: I We’re talking an animal way smaller than one of these big, big gander cape barren geese.

Rockjaw: They’re about the same size as a goose, but they’d catch the geese sitting on the nest. I was actually collecting eggs on one of the islands that had the devils on them and all you’d find was that eat everything except for probably the longest of the wing feathers and the breastbone. Everything else was just disappeared, the eggs, everything. There were probably 5000 geese breeding on this island that got reduced down to nothing.

Ramsey Russell: My goodness, are there geese there now that they have got rid of the Tasmanian devil?

Rockjaw: Now they’ve got rid of the devils on there. The population’s come back and it’s probably breeding about 2000 geese a year.

Ramsey Russell: Was it back in the 80s that the goose population got so out of hand that you and some associates were hired to go out and be gunners?

Rockjaw: A lot of the farmers here would give you cartridges just to-

Ramsey Russell: Here you go.

Rockjaw: Shoot the geese, and we can shoot 300 to 400 in a day.

Ramsey Russell: My goodness. Days on end?

Rockjaw: Once a week probably because you get concentrations of 1000 geese or more on a paddock and it’s just useless for Stockton because all the, all their feces and that on the paddock the stock wouldn’t eat the grass.

Ramsey Russell: You would have to have a pretty strong back to move 300 or 400 Cape Barren geese in a day.

Rockjaw: We’d just drive around, pick them up and throw them on the ground.

Ramsey Russell: That was almost like work

Rockjaw: A little bit like work.

Ramsey Russell: How long did that era last before it just played out?

Rockjaw: When the wool crisis came and China stopped buying our wool, the farmers sort of ran out of money. So that was one of the first things they wouldn’t buy a case of shells a week. That was one of the first things that actually people had to tighten their drawstrings. That was one of the things that they did.

Ramsey Russell: One thing they could do is not buy shotgun shells. I guess you still went out and shot a few yourself.

Rockjaw: I was a farmer as well. So, we basically went from really good incomes to negative incomes for 5 years. That was pretty disastrous.

Ramsey Russell: Tough being a farmer. So does a lot of your wool still go to China? I was going to ask you, but I’ve seen a lot of beef production here.

Rockjaw: In top of the wool market. Flinders island used to produce 1% of the wool in Australia, and this is often as a sale-

Ramsey Russell: It’s kind of a big deal.

Rockjaw: We used to produce 10% of the wool Tasmania produced. Tasmania used to produce 10% of the wool which Australia produced. So just off Flinders island, on a little island like this, we produced 1% of the wool that Australia produced. We had 4 gangs of shearers working 8 months a year. So that you’re talking 50 or 60 people deployment. That created to an island this size, and now there’s one gang of shearers work here for a month.

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Rockjaw: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: But it’s converted to beef.

Rockjaw: Pretty much converted cattle.

Ramsey Russell: No shortage of beef.

Rockjaw: Pretty much all converted to Angus cattle.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I asked you the graze here. Is there a grass fed market or do they all get shipped over to Tasmania for feedlot?

Rockjaw: Pretty much. You grow the cattle out to 450 kilos and then they usually go to the feed lots and feed on grain for 6 weeks and they go to the supermarkets.

Ramsey Russell: That’s amazing. Is that the principal economy of this little island?

Rockjaw: Farming’s a-

Ramsey Russell: Cattle.

Rockjaw: major.

Ramsey Russell: Sheep. I’ve seen sheep.

Rockjaw: There was a few sheep. Not that many sheep left now compared to what there was back in the heyday. Then the next biggest industry is basically the building industry with carpenters, electricians, plumbers, just building houses because all these people that come from Melbourne and places like that all want their houses built and they want them built yesterday.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Do you see any problem with that?

Rockjaw: The biggest problem is that these people come and stay in the house for 2 months of the year, then the house is tight. There’s no accommodation for actually workers on the island because the house comes up for sale. Somebody from Melbourne will pay more than what it’s viable for a local to buy or a builder to buy. That’s only got 3 or 4 months work.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that makes sense.

Rockjaw: Yeah. It’s a godsend in one way and not so much in other ways because these people come over and enjoy the place in the summertime, but come winter time, there’s just nobody here for all the emergency services and volunteer stuff and stuff like that.

Ramsey Russell: Do a lot of people come here just to goose hunt? Is tourism big is what I’m asking.

The Economic Impact of Hunting on Flinders Island

I work every day for 3 months, 4 months and then another 6 weeks from just the quail season of work every day. The hunting industry just on Flinders brings in quite a bit of tourism.

Rockjaw: Tourism is probably the 2nd or 3rd biggest industry on the island. I work every day for 3 months, 4 months and then another 6 weeks from just the quail season of work every day. The hunting industry just on Flinders brings in quite a bit of tourism, but there’s a lot of other tourists that just come and want to go fishing off the beach. Basically what I try to explain to people, Flinders Island’s 30 years behind Tasmania and Tasmania’s 30 years behind the mainland. That’s just like a step back in time.

Ramsey Russell: It really, truly is like stepping back in time. I asked you, do you all get Amazon delivery? Yeah, Amazon does deliver here, apparently.

Rockjaw: It does, yeah. The other thing is that everybody’s so friendly here. You drive along and everybody waves to you, it’s just what happens on Flinders island.

Ramsey Russell: Some of the boys from Geelong that were hunting with some other Australians. We were following you yesterday, going somewhere, and the few people we passed, just kind of gave you the nod. How you give your index finger wave when you’re steering? And he goes, this is so amazing. I’m not used to seeing this on the mainland. He said, do you all do that in Mississippi? I go, yeah, as long as it’s the middle finger, you did something wrong. That’s what everybody does. You wave to each other because you all know each other, don’t you?

Rockjaw: They pretty much know each other. The only other place I’ve seen is Land Rover drivers in Tasmania or whatever. If you’re driving a defender, everybody waves if you pass another defender.

Ramsey Russell: It seems like a real sense of community here. Do you all have to grapple with natural events like tsunamis or hurricanes?

Rockjaw: We live in the roaring 40s, so everything here is built to withstand pretty strong breezes. Our major concern here, because we’re such a small island, is bushfires and we’ve got so much native vegetation and stuff like that. We’ve got about 5 or 6 fire brigades, but when we have a really major fire, they bring a lot of fire trucks in Tasmania and just to help out and helicopters to water bomb things. We found over the years that normally once the fires get out into the pasture, we can usually control them, but once they’re in the native vegetation, it’s a lot harder to control because-

Ramsey Russell: It looks like these trees and stuff will burn like something else. Some of the thickets I walked through earlier today were, I guarantee you they carry fire.

Rockjaw: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: All that evergreen duff and wood, it had to light up pretty quick. Do you ever do, fire lanes and stuff around some of the areas?

Rockjaw: Some of the places they do, but our powers to be don’t want too many fire breaks, and if they do put in fire breaks to stop fires, then they go and revegetate it all again. So, they’ve got to go out and do it again next time.

Ramsey Russell: It’s not making sense.

Rockjaw: They want to try and leave it pristine, but we’ve been here for 200 years and we’ve modified the place so much. What’s pristine anymore?

Ramsey Russell: You got to deal with what is, not what was 200 years ago. That’s the way I look at it. What do you all do for fun? You’re farmers, but you don’t just farm 24/7. What do you do for fun?

Rockjaw: We got fishing and hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Fishing and hunting. It is what you do, isn’t it?

Rockjaw: That’s what we do.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about fishing a little bit, Rockjaw. That’s a big deal. You all went fishing today and we’re hauling in. Well, these guys were happy about all the stuff you all hauled in.

Rockjaw: Yeah, we caught our bag limit of gummy sharks, which we’ll feed these boys for-

Ramsey Russell: Delicious. We had them last night for dinner.

Rockjaw: Yep. It’ll feed these boys for a month or so. We caught a few large King George Whiting today as well, and the other boys went fishing off the beach and caught what any Australian would say is a monster flathead.

Ramsey Russell: Really? Is that a catfish?

Rockjaw: No, it’s a-

Ramsey Russell: It doesn’t have whiskers, but it vaguely looks like a catfish when you pull them out of water.

Rockjaw: They basically look a bit like a catfish, but they’re flattened out like a flounder.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, really?

Rockjaw: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: They taste like flounder.

Rockjaw: No, they’ve got a unique taste, but they’re probably as good at eating fish as we’ve got. The ones we catch around here are blue spot flathead, whereas offshore in the boat that you catch what they call sand flathead, which rest of Tasmania, they’re pretty much near endangered now, whereas Flinders island, because it hasn’t got the fishing pressure, we can still go and catch as many flat head as you’re allowed to. Whereas in Tasmania, they’ve reduced their bag limits and so we might be isolated. But that has got its upsides.

Ramsey Russell: It does, doesn’t it? Because you don’t have the pressure. I guess coming from Australia, it’s not terribly hard to get here. A couple of flights and the last flight is just getting a space on there and especially somebody bringing podcast equipment. It’s 21 kilos or about 40 pounds, that’s it. To include your carry on and everything. You bring about 40 pounds. So, pack light and I overpacked Rockjaw. I did not expect it to be extremely warm or enjoyable weather. I could have packed almost like going on beach vacation, that weight clothing, or going to Mexico somewhere just warm, or like Africa, somewhere warm, except you all don’t get near as cold in the mornings as Africa does. Africa warms on up. This is very moderate and temperate weather. In imperial measurements, it would be 65 to 75 degrees. I found it just extremely enjoyable.

Rockjaw: Basically, on Flinders Island, we can go and catch a feed of crayfish whenever we want. We can go offshore and-

Ramsey Russell: Talk about crayfish. Now where I’m from now, crayfish is a little old bitty thing to crawl around in the mud called crawdaddies. You talking about lobster? I saw a picture somewhere of you holding up ginormous lobster that you call a crayfish.

Rockjaw: Yeah, basically what we call crayfish, a southern rock lobster. We’ve got enough crayfish here to go and catch a bag, when the weather conditions are right. That’s one of the benefits of living in a place like this, you just haven’t got the fishing pressure. The size of the crayfish are a lot bigger than what they would be in Tasmania, where they’ve got a lot more fishing pressure.

Fishing & Hunting Pressure in Tasmania

Ramsey Russell: Wow. I’m going to shift gears on you completely and talk about an experience I had today. What is the limit on those?

Rockjaw: The limit’s 2 per person.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, man.

Rockjaw: So, 10 per boat.

Ramsey Russell: What’s the weather look like today? I mean, there’s 10 of us in camp.

Rockjaw: There would have been enough lobsters there to feed all ten of you, there’s no problem.

Ramsey Russell: I guarantee you.

Rockjaw: There’s things like that. There’s upsides and downsides. Fair enough. It might cost $600 to fly to Melbourne and back, but who wants to go to Melbourne?

Ramsey Russell: Nobody.

Rockjaw: To me, that holds no attraction. There’s nothing you do on Melbourne you can’t do here on Flinders island, except probably go to the Melbourne cup or go and watch AFL, but apart from that, that’s what TVs are for.

Ramsey Russell: Speaking of Melbourne, speaking of Victoria, do you all have anti-hunters down here? Are there any anti-hunters on Flanders island?

Rockjaw: There is a few antis, but they know which side their bread’s buttered on.

Ramsey Russell: I heard somebody say the other day, no, we have shovels.

Rockjaw: In an ideal world, we should have no right. Like the problem I have with antis of any kind. I’ve got no problem with people expressing their views, but it’s the radicals that give all the normal people a bad name. The people that go around with face masks on that just-

Ramsey Russell: It’s like Antifa.

Rockjaw: Yeah. Just don’t want to be.

Ramsey Russell: What do you call those people? They’re anarchist.

Rockjaw: It’s the same as a lot of these rebels and that we see fighting all over the world. They don’t want to be identified. Excuse me, if you wear your hat and you sleeve. And like, the anti-hunters you see in Victoria and places like that are more renter crowd. They’ve got no idea of what actually conservation is, because it’s the game licenses and the government putting money into conservation areas for duck hunters is that’s what keeps the duck population viable. If there was no hunting, the ducks would overpopulate. I’ve seen mass die offs from botulism where there’s 1000s of ducks dying through no cause of their own.

Ramsey Russell: Well, the anti don’t know that. It’s not duck season, so they’re all drinking lattes or rebelling against some other form of society, in my humble opinion.

Rockjaw: People just don’t want to see other people enjoying themselves.

Ramsey Russell: I think you’re right.

Rockjaw: If you get enjoyment out of shooting a duck, taking home and eating it, you’re a barbarian, because it doesn’t fit in with a lot of set.

Ramsey Russell: My personal dealings, and I’ve had many now with your anti-hunting countrymen, primarily from Victoria, but also a few other provinces. I really think that they are self-hating people. If they were in high school, they’re loners, they’re quiet, they’re antisocial. Society has kind of pushed them off to the side. Not so much the fact that somebody’s hunting, but the fact that there’s a because and an opposition against it. It gives them a platform to just vent self-hate towards others. That’s been my personal experience, and prove me wrong if I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. I think they’re just absolutely self-loathing forms of humanity. I think Rockjaw, they’ve got a twinge of lunacy to them because. I don’t mean agnostics, as I heard them describe last night. The middle ground, the people that neither hunt nor fish. I’m talking about the radicals you’re talking about. Because no normal human being that was grown up in a nice family and has self-respect would say and do the things that they do. It’s unbelievable. One of the shirts I saw, those that hunt are rhymes with hunt. Who would wear that or say that to another human being?

Rockjaw: Yeah. One of the slogans that is going around is teach your kids to fish and hunt, then they won’t deal and steal, and that’s a big-

Ramsey Russell: Exactly.

Rockjaw: That’s one of the biggest problems that we’ve got with our young people is drug use and everything else, because they end up on a downward spiral. And where does that get the world?

Ramsey Russell: You don’t have that problem much here, I’m guessing. Drugs and crime.

Rockjaw: This is probably one of the only places where you can leave your house unlocked, your car unlocked, because nobody’s going to steal anything because you’re a small island. Everybody knows-

Ramsey Russell: Somebody turns with a new TV, they all know where it came from.

Rockjaw: There’s a lot of community policing. So if somebody does something wrong, then they’re in for shock.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Holy cow.

Rockjaw: That’s where the shovel should come in.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I can see it. I’ll bring up one topic here. I did something today. I shrugged it off, I’m like, I don’t want to do that is I’m a team player. There’s 10 folk in camp. I’m going to go along with it and some guys wanted to go up here to this paddock and go shoot wallabies, these cute little kangaroo looking animals. They’re dark and furry. I’ve got them walking around in my cabin yard over here, and I’m like, I don’t want to shoot no wallaby. I got anything against shooting Wallaby. It didn’t speak to me to go shoot one. So I was going to be a pusher. I took my shotgun and I’m just going to walk, push. What’s the chance that I’m going to walk up on one of these fools, and push them towards the blockers? And I’ll just say, I had fun. I didn’t just like it. I had fun. They’re lightning bolt. I had no idea because I walked up on one Rockjaw. I saw the bushes move. Instead of running, he huddled up like a rabbit, asleep with his head and stuff, tucked up under where I wouldn’t see him. I looked right down at him. I go, is he dead? And when I realized he wasn’t and he sprung, I couldn’t shoulder my gun, for he was gone in the flash of a light. I kind of figured out they were hanging out. They really like, not those dense pine thickets. They liked the bracken fern. I’d get on those trails that were cattle trails also, and just ease long and, I’d go do it tomorrow morning. I had so much fun. Now back home, we run beagle hounds and stuff and hunt rabbits with dogs, and I was thinking, man, if somebody would turn loose a pack of beagle hounds here. But you said you all do run dogs.

Rockjaw: No, my English setters, sometimes I’ll put them in there to cull the numbers down, because basically you’ve got a feral fence all around, but there’s gaps at the end of it. So the wallabies will come in from 3 km away and then get driven up into the scrub here, but they can’t get out. So, they’re all, end up populations building up in there.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rockjaw: The only way to call them out is to get in there and push them out and push-

Ramsey Russell: Are there bad limits or their hunting seasons.

Rockjaw: There’s no bag limits whatsoever, and hunting 365 days a year.

Ramsey Russell: Do you think that for the 4 or 5 generations we’re talking about that you all been here on the Furneaux group? Has that always been a thing? Is hunting, hunting wallabies-

Rockjaw: In the early days, there was everybody go sneering wallabies for the fur. It was a fur trade on the wallabies and the possums and whatever, and so a lot of people have dairy. They only had really small holdings before the war, service and settlement. So they’d have small dairies and there was a butter factory on the island, but you’d also run a line of snares, so you’d have 40 or 50 snares. That worked twofold. It kept the population of wallabies down, but also gave the people an income from the skins off the wallabies and the possums. That combined with sort of mutton birding, they’d dry all their dairy cows off and go mutton birding for 6 weeks in the mutton bird season, salt mutton birds and sell the mutton birds off. So that was like subsistence farming, but those projects gave you a cash income that helped you survive, and there was some of these families had large families to look after. So they’d eat the wallabies, you’d eat the mutton birds and-

Mutton Birds??

A mutton bird’s a short-tailed shearwater….That’s a cross between duck and anchovy.

Ramsey Russell: What was a mutton bird? Have I seen one?

Rockjaw: A mutton bird’s a short-tailed shearwater.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, really?

Rockjaw: They actually nest on a lot of the smaller islands here, but they have got one of the longest migrations of any bird. They fly every year up to the Aleutian Islands and feed up there in the northern Summer.

Ramsey Russell: You are kidding me. They go from clear up to Aleutian Islands in the northern hemisphere, which is practically the Arctic, all the way down here to-

Rockjaw: They breed down here all around the coast of Southern Australia.

Ramsey Russell: I had no idea. They’re probably protected now, aren’t they?

Rockjaw: No, there’s still a commercial harvest. Mutton birds even today, like once the sealers reduced the seal population to where it wasn’t as viable. They used to catch the mutton birds and sell the feathers, and then they started processing the meat and selling the meat, and that’s been going on for 200 years.

Ramsey Russell: Is it good to eat?

Rockjaw: That’s an acquired taste.

Ramsey Russell: I would think so.

Rockjaw: That’s a cross between duck and anchovy.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, I’m imagining cormorant.

Rockjaw: No, a lot better eating than cormorants.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. A cross between a duck and an anchovy. A mutton duck. Back on these wallabies. I had a good time, and it was a lot of fun, and we scanned them, they’re good to eat. You were telling, these are the redneck wallaby. Also called something else.

Rockjaw: Yeah. Bennett’s wallaby.

Ramsey Russell: Bennett’s wallaby. In terms of hunting, it’s kind of like rabbit hunting, if rabbits were 15 or 20 pounds. One of my sons said, what was it like? I said, it’s thick ferns, so you can see just glimpses. Just imagine if one of them, batteaus, like in a sporting clay’s range where they shoot them and it run across the ground like a rabbit. Imagine if it was doing 60 miles an hour and it weighed 15 pounds. That’s what this is like. It was amazing. You say they’re really good to eat. We haven’t eaten them yet, but we’re going to.

Rockjaw: Yeah. We shoot a lot with the spotlight of a nighttime, and you turn them into snitzels or used to.

Ramsey Russell: Chicken fried.

Rockjaw: At our sporting place range. It used to always be a staple to have wallaby burgers for lunch. So you’d-

Ramsey Russell: Somebody said there’s a restaurant nearby that their specialty is wallaby pie, like chicken pot pie I’m imagining.

Rockjaw: Flinders island bakery makes a wallaby pie. A lot of people love the wallaby pies.

Ramsey Russell: I would like to try it. I’m imagining minced meat. I bet that is amazing. They feel the ecological niche of deer. They graze, they browse, and that’s why this cattle habitat is so good for them, but I noticed problems, too, like that paddock we hunted. They had holes going all up underneath that. First, somebody described dinner last night. First rabbit goes under, then comes the, what’s the big cinder-block size animal.

Rockjaw: Wombat.

Ramsey Russell: The wombat, he comes under, pushes up a bigger hole. Then the kangaroo pushes up a bigger hole. Now calf says, see ya. Do you ever have problems like that?

Rockjaw: No, not really. We try and keep on top of them a little bit.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. There’s a lot of electrical wire around here and I found that out yesterday.

Rockjaw: Flinders Island lives on electricity.

Ramsey Russell: It lives on electricity doesn’t it. I saw you out there riding around and knocked a few geeks over that wire. I got to get over. It was just because of the bushes nearby; I couldn’t get like the dead center and weighed it down to step over it. So, I touched it, I touched it again. I’m like, oh, hell. Rockjaw then turned the power off here, so I straddled it. When I laid my hand back on it to push down and get a grip, it lit me up. I’ve jumped five foot. I’m glad it lit up my hand, not something else that was hanging low on them too. I’m going to tell you that right now. I’d probably still be limping. I’m going to say for a full 5 minutes, I couldn’t feel my fingers. They were just tingling. And let me tell you what didn’t happen. I didn’t go nowhere near that fence again.

Rockjaw: That’s basically what happens with the cattle. It keeps the cattle in.

Ramsey Russell: And of course, after all that, I start reading the 10 Commandments. One of them says, the wire’s hot, don’t touch it. I should have read the Ten Commandments first?

Rockjaw: Yes, that’s what the 10 Commandments are all about.

Best Ways to Cook Cape Barren Geese

 I turned them into salamis and kranskis and pastramis.

Ramsey Russell: Have you got some favorite ways to cook these Cape Barren geese?

Rockjaw: I turned them into salamis and kranskis and pastramis.

Ramsey Russell: Is that the butcher there in town I passed by today.

Rockjaw: No, I do it all.

Ramsey Russell: You do it yourself?

Rockjaw: Yep. Also with the fresh meat, I turn them into stir fries and stroganoff, and you can put them into schnitzel. But we’ll have stroganoff tomorrow night, and everybody that I fed this to said it’s as good a meal as I’ve ever eaten.

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to film you. And of course, I put you on the ropes from when I met you about wanting to get a recipe, but would you share, just in general terms, not cups and teaspoons, but just general terms, how you cook a Cape Barren Goose stroganoff?

Rockjaw: Well, I don’t deal in dealing measurements. I go by eyes. So, for a start, you usually tenderize the meat with a spiky tenderizer, then slice it and then marinate it for a day in sour cream, paprika and garlic, and then you fry off your mushrooms and then fry off your goose in batches, and then just add your other ingredients and a bit more sour cream, and away you go.

Ramsey Russell: That’s it.

Rockjaw: That’s it.

Ramsey Russell: I have had a lot of andouille and different sausages and pastramis. I’ve had summer sausage. There’s snack sticks a million different ways. You can use waterfowl creatively that everybody enjoys. But yesterday for lunch, took the cake. It took the absolute cake. When I showed up and you had about two gallons of ballpark Frank. Cape Barren Goose ballpark Frank’s hot dogs cooking. I’m like, you got to be shitting me.

Rockjaw: Goose dogs.

Ramsey Russell: Goose dogs. That was amazing. First thing I did is get on social media and I’ve already got a butcher down in Texas. It does. I’m trying to find one closer to home. That is unbelievable. I love a hot dog. Who doesn’t like a hot dog?

Rockjaw: Everybody loves a hot dog.

Ramsey Russell: I appreciate your tip. Just real quickly, last question. What’s the wind going to do for us in the morning?

Rockjaw: I’ll blow a little bit fresher, so it’ll make the goose shooting a little bit easier. So it’ll be blowing about 20 miles an hour.

Ramsey Russell: Think we better hem them up. Think I might better shoot another goose or two, because I sure enjoyed it.

Rockjaw: I reckon you might be able to get one or two if you’re lucky.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you very much, Rockjaw. I appreciate your hospitality. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere from Tasmania. See you next time.