EP 467. Osage Basin–A Collaborative Approach to Habitat How-To

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where today we’re talking about habitat, but we’re going to take a different spin. We’re going to take a collaborative approach to habitat and habitat education. Joining me to talk about this is Josh Cussamanio and our mutual friend, Mr. Jeff Watt, both from Missouri. Guys, how the heck are you?

Josh Cussamanio: Good today.

Jeff Watt: Doing good.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, doing good. Glad you all are here. I’m very excited, Jeff, about this morning’s conversation. You’ve been talking about this for several years. I’ve heard you talk about it, I’ve been very interested in what you all call the Osage Basin’s Wetlands Manager Cooperative.

Jeff Watt: Yeah, I think the first time I spoke to you about it would have been when we were in Argentina.

Ramsey Russell: Way a long time ago.

Jeff Watt: Second time it would have been in May of 2022 because I think Josh and I had just decided that we were going to, that we were going to do something and I was telling you about it when we were sitting around.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Well, first, let’s back up and tell me this. How’d you all duck season go this year?

Jeff Watt: Josh, go ahead.

Changes in Duck Behavior

It was a very late migration this year.

Josh Cussamanio: Well, last year we had a big drought in western Missouri and I predicted we were going to have a really rough season. And I ate crow last year. 2022, 2023 was a pretty darn good season. We had good migrations this year. We kind of got, they got a lick on us this year. So it was rough and very unpredictable birds. Migrations were terrible. The weather was terrible. They’re reduction be killed. But boy, it wasn’t a lot of fun, and I got very fortunate, had a pretty darn good spot that really saved my rear last year, this last season. But boy, it was not fun. Very frustrating hunts and Jeff had some unique experiences in the woods, I think with weather, man, just changing the way ducks behaved.

Ramsey Russell: It was a very late migration this year. It seemed like, I mean, here in the deep south, we really didn’t start catching migrators until first week of January. Then about mid-January, we got another little plus. But it was a tough season, I think, for everybody.

Jeff Watt: Yeah. I mean, everybody knows or not everybody, a lot of people know I love hunt in the woods. And everybody talks about the woods, you go when it’s sunny. Well, we’d go when it was sunny. It wouldn’t be worth a damn. We’d go and we’d just go because it’s got to happen at some point, no matter what the weather is. And I think we had 2 or 3 of our best hunts on cloudy days.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jeff Watt: And that’s just unheard of. I mean, I would say we had significantly less, I’m not too good with trying to figure out percentages, but we had significantly less birds using our state wildlife areas, our private wetlands there than we have had during the years in the past. And I mean, you alluded to it. You didn’t see your first migrators until first week of January. Well, our middle zone, north and middle zones in Missouri are shut down by then. I mean, the middle zone shuts down, I think, first Sunday in January and our north zone is done in December. So, yeah, we experienced it for sure.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Jeff, what’s a little bit about your background for those listening, kind of introduce yourself, who you are, where you’re from, what you do.

Jeff Watt: Well, my name is Jeff Watt and I’ve live just south of Kansas City, little farming community that’s gotten caught up in the expansion of cities and city life and all that stuff. And it’s not too much of a farming community anymore. But my career is for, this will be my 33rd or 34th year as an independent contractor, sales rep in the hunting and fishing industry. And you couldn’t ask for a better job if you could make it happen. I mean, you get to talk about your hobbies and your passions every day. And my grandfather told me years ago that, hey, if you can find something you really love to do and make a living at it, that’s probably what you need to do. And that’s what I’ve been able to do.

Ramsey Russell: How about yourself, Josh?

Josh Cussamanio: Well, I’m a biologist by trade, I guess. So I grew up southeast Kansas and hunting around the ocean wildlife area and kind of inspired me to become a wildlife biologist and really wanted to be a kind of a wetlands, waterfowl biologist, but ended up in the kind of, in the general wildlife field and spent some time in Oklahoma and with the NRCs in northern Missouri. And I ended up at 4 rivers here in western Missouri and worked for Missouri Department of Conservation for 18 years as a biologist on there on 4 rivers and shallow stage conservation areas. And then I had the opportunity to jump over to private lands and work with private landowners. So I’ve been doing that since 2018, I guess.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic.

Josh Cussamanio: Really enjoyed it. Been very rewarding, and, like, the constituency there that we work with and have liked it all.

Ramsey Russell: Well, what is the Osage Basin Wetlands Managers Co-op? What exactly is this co-op you all have formed?

Jeff Watt: I think Josh does the best job of explaining how it kind of went, and he does a great job explaining our history, how our lengthy history, and then how it all of a sudden, it fast forwarded, and then, bam, we’re doing Osage Basin. So go ahead, Josh.

Josh Cussamanio: It started out because there’s a couple aspects to this other than just the education and habitat, and one of those is a social aspect. And this really started out with my job here. The first year I was here in Missouri in 2000, there was a big waterfowl event at a sporting goods store in Kansas City, and I met Jeff there. And being a salesman, having that great outgoing personality man, he was hopping around, talking to everybody, and we met, and we kind of kept this relationship going on, just every couple years we’d see each other, maybe phone call or something. He’d be asking something going on in one of our conservation areas, but it was no serious relationship whatsoever. And then kind of fast forward to probably about 2015 or 2014. There was a flood, and Jeff needed some assistance with his property, and so we kind of touched base a little bit more. And then from there, it became, when I came to private lands division, we started working more on his properties, and it evolved from a relationship with him and Mickey Heitmire. They’d been hunting together in Arkansas at the same place, and Mickey came up and looked at his place and said, hey, you ought to get ahold of Josh. He’s your biologist here. And so we really kicked it off then, and it stepped into him buying a property and working on development of that property over time. And that’s when this idea came together that I was seeing on the public side, that a lot of our constituency didn’t know, really what went into wetland management. They just didn’t understand what we were doing, how we got moist soil plants, how often it flooded in the basin, why we were planting crops or not planting crops for waterfowl, why we maybe had a pool dry later in the season, and we were adding water throughout the season to create availability of food over a longer period of time. And so I’d been seeing that. I’d worked with a few private landowners and realized that they didn’t have the knowledge entirely of what was going on and how to manage their wetlands the best way. A lot of guys were trying to take a really wet spot and drain it in January after duck season and plant corn on it in April, and then it would flood 7 times in the summer. And they weren’t putting the right habitat in the right place. So as I saw this and voiced this to Jeff, he said, I totally agree, because Jeff’s the manager of a couple duck clubs that he’s either owner or lease on it, and then the new properties developed. And so as he stepped up as management, his interest has went through the roof, probably a factor of where he’s at in his life and maybe more time. And so we just kind of started talking about this. And for like, a year or two, I said, man, this has always been a dream of mine, is to have a really nice first class workshop. And we talked about it, we talked about it, and finally he just said, Josh, well, why the heck we still talking about this? What do you need to make this happen? And I said, well, I need some help planning it, we need some money to get started because it wasn’t in my Department of Conservation budget to throw an event of this scale. And I said, I need the time, the man powers, money. And he said, I got all those, let’s quit talking about this crap and let’s make it happen. Go ahead.

Drawing in Ducks: What Do Ducks Like to Eat?

The different varieties of smart weed, all of this stuff that ducks like to eat, all of this stuff. 

Jeff Watt: And so one of the other things that I saw in this too and myself included, is the plant identification that mallard ducks or waterfowl or wetland species, whatever they are, shorebirds or whatever, like to eat. I would tell you 90% of your duck hunters don’t know smartweed from wild millet, pigweed from one of them. The different varieties of smart weed, all of this stuff that ducks like to eat, all of this stuff. And so, that was one of the shockers to me, I mean, I got 2 friends over here that are 25, 30 year duck hunters that can’t tell me. Oh, yeah, that looks like smart weed. Well, what do you mean, looks like it? And so I think that with one of the things that we’ve done in the last couple years is just be able to expand that knowledge base, and that in itself has created, I think, bonus points all the way around on all those privately owned properties or areas.

How Does a Coop Support Duck Habitat?

I’m a landowner, or I got a piece of duck property or whatever have you, and I want to improve it for waterfowl. 

Ramsey Russell: Jeff, it’s a quantum leap to go from, I’m a landowner, or I got a piece of duck property or whatever have you, and I want to improve it for waterfowl. And I reach out through NRCs or state biologists or different resources around my area that come and give me some consultation to, I want to form this organization and form a co-op and start operating. I mean, that’s a quantum leap. Where were you coming from on that idea?

Jeff Watt: Where I think it happened or not I think I know it happened was with our Shadow Oaks property, the woods. We bought that property in 1998, and it’s some of the best hardwood bottomland, oak or hardwood bottomland timber in the basin. And I mean, again, I mentioned I love shooting ducks in the woods. And what I had started to see is we’d have windstorms come in, we’d have trees just die of mortality for whatever reason. And so I’m looking around, I’m like, man, there aren’t as many oak trees as there used to be. And so that kind of kick started it. And that’s where I had a conversation with Jeff about, man, I need some help. And then it went to Mickey, and I had met Jody Pagan at the same time at five Oaks. And so it kind of, it was almost like the perfect storm where everything hit in the same 6 to 8, 12 month period of time. And we started right after having Mickey, and then Josh come over and take a look at what we needed to do at Shadow Oaks, getting LIDAR to let us know where the original oak trees were that had, because we didn’t have our drainage right to get the water off, we had actually killed some of those trees. And you saw the dead stumps and trunks and all that stuff. And so with having the LIDAR and first getting our drainage to where we could get water on and off or off and on the property as quick as possible, we were then able to go to those traditional and historic areas and reforest. So the first thing we started to do to reforest is we went through Missouri’s nursery and bought several thousand bare root seedlings. And we ran the bare root seedlings in there. And again, not knowing enough, I didn’t have enough sunlight. I did a combination of things. I didn’t have enough sunlight getting to those bare root seedlings. And we had a bunch of wet years in a row that killed them all, put them all underwater for a long time. And again, now understanding what other options are available to reforest with what forest keeling calls trees. So when we plant, we use RPM 3s, 5s, or 7s, and so that those trees range from probably 24 to 36 inches on the rpm 3s, 36 to 60 inches on rpm 5s, and 48 to 72 inches on rpm 7s. And so what we were able to do then with the LIDAR is go back and put these different height trees to keep them out of the water for the majority of their early life until they can get to where they’re going to be, 10, 15, 18, 20ft tall. And now doing that, so that would have started in 2020 because prior to 2020 with the big flood that came through and the Truman easement held water on most of the Osage bottom for close to 70 days from May till July or middle of April to July in 2019. And that pretty much killed all of our bare root seedlings. And so then, again, fast forward a little more when Jody Pagan or Daniel Duke and those guys take me to a set of woods that was reforested 20 something years ago, and they show me two trees. One tree looks to be about the size of a water bottle, and the other one looks to be the size of a not a 5 gallon bucket, but let’s say an 6 gallon pail. And I’m like, okay, so why are you showing me these? And they said, well, they were both planted the same day. And I’m like, no freaking way. There’s no way. Absolutely, it’s the sunlight. And then you show me and I see, well, yeah, it is. It’s shaded off by this large, hickory tree or whatever, or burrow, whatever was in there. And so then the stuff started clicking. By that time, we had bought, Josh and I had had other conversations. Josh was then the private land manager for the counties, and we purchased the property that he was talking about down around him, Deerfield, Missouri. And I found out what TSIs were Timber Stand Improvements. I found out what TFO’s were Temporary Forest Openings. Now it all started to click and then again go a step farther that Jody and some of the guys and Mickey and some of the guys in Arkansas, instead of doing north south plantings, they do east west plantings of these trees, so the trees get more sunlight than they would. East west planting is going to get more sunlight than a north south planting because sunlight’s the key. And again, depending on where you are on those lines towards the equator to where the sun’s going to spend more time on it. So then it snowballed.

Ramsey Russell: Jeff, it’s almost like you found religion. I mean, I’m sitting here listening to you. You go from a regular guy that comes into some duck land, and all of a sudden you start meeting with guys like Josh and Mickey and Jody Pagan, and they’re teaching you all this stuff you’ve never known before you see in the world. You found religion, and all of a sudden you want to become a preacher and share the gospel to all your neighbors, is what it sounds like to me. Is that how pretty much evolved?

Jeff Watt: But that’s part of it. The other part is if you, I met you in 2018, Ramsey. If you’d have known me from 2008 or from 1995 to 2018, this would all make sense. And why it would make sense is because in anything that I do, I want to have the best experience. So that means if I want to go shoot a nice elk, I’m going to figure out how to get to the best place, and I’m going to figure out the best time, and we’re going to go do that because I don’t have a month to go out there and scout around and do all that. I’ll put my time in, whether it’s shooting or doing this or doing that. And it’s the same with duck hunting. Every time I go, I want to have the best experience. It might not be, the best hunt where I come out with, there’s 5 of us go, and we always come out with our four mallards and our other two ducks, that’s not it. It’s the best experience. And I’ve said this time and time again, when we flood shadow oaks and the first group of mallards come in and eat the woods up, I’m done. I mean, I don’t have to, I want more bunches to come in, but I know my work’s been done. And so I’m selfish, I guess. Every time I go, I want it to be a great experience. And so that’s I think, where this evolution or where we sit today. And you expand that, that the more we do in that Osage basin area. Whereas again, before, I didn’t want my neighbor shooting any ducks, those are my ducks. Well, they’re not anybody’s ducks, they’re everybody’s ducks. And if you can keep them in the area longer, everybody has a better opportunity having great duck.

How to Attract & Hold More Ducks

And so we could collectively work together like a co-op, all of us landowners kind of putting pieces of the puzzle together to attract and hold more waterfowl during the winter. 

Ramsey Russell: So, take what you’ve learned on your property that holds ducks, spread the religion to the landscape level, and now everybody collectively holds more ducks.

Jeff Watt: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, better habitat at the landscape level, which to me is very important. Just last week we were meeting with about habitat loss up on the nesting grounds, and it’s no secret that throughout the entire flyway, we’re losing acres, it’s becoming a limited landscape and a lot more fragmented. And so we could collectively work together like a co-op, all of us landowners kind of putting pieces of the puzzle together to attract and hold more waterfowl during the winter. Would that be a fair description, Josh?

Josh Cussamanio: Oh, it is. And that’s what we’ve told people. Landowners, as Jeff said, being kind of greedy, not a bad thing, we all want to kill ducks, but you get these guys, some years, they’re like, man, it’s dry, and I can pump water. We’re going to slay them. And then we know when it floods in our area, in the 1986 flood, there was 250,000 ducks in the woods in this part of the world. And so that continued to kind of set a precedent of a benchmark for us.  hey, there’s a lot of ducks here. And the wetter it gets, the more habitat the more birds we hold. They’re going to trade back and forth. They’re going to find escapes from pressure, they’re going to find more food, and we’re going to have better hunting. And so, yeah, having an isolated pocket of water in western Kansas or something, you can have some phenomenal hunting. But here we want to hold large numbers of ducks on a whole lot of habitat, have birds trading back and forth between conservation areas, between even basins here, between states, like we talked about. And so the parts are definitely greater than they are. The whole is greater than all the parts separate and that really applies in, I think, the wetland and waterfowl management world in our landscape.

Ramsey Russell: Go ahead.

The Importance of Managing Hunting Pressure

But the single biggest factor that we’re running into at the properties that I’m a part of is pressure. 

Jeff Watt: Josh mentions Ethan’s, Ethan Dittmer, who you had on his banning project going on in Meredith or central, east Kansas or east central Kansas, right on the line. And when that cold snap that you were talking about where you saw that those first migratory birds and Josh told, a lot of those birds came into Missouri. A lot of those birds came into Missouri to where all of these properties are. And so not only is – I think, and Doctor Cohen, Doctor Osborne, Paul Link, all of those people will tell you that there’s a lot of lateral migration as there is the north south migration, depending on a couple things. And we just had our annual meeting at Blackacres here a couple weeks ago. And I said, man, there’s 3 things we can control, but there’s 4 pieces to this puzzle. Number one, we need to have water. Number two, we got to have some food in the water. And number 3, we can manage our pressure. Those three things we can normally take care of. The 4th one, the ducks, we can’t do anything about that. So Josh and I, we’re talking about the food part of it and the habitat part of it and then being able to get your water on and off. And then you’re going to have the migrations the way they’re going to come. But the single biggest factor that we’re running into at the properties that I’m a part of is pressure. How do you manage your pressure? And there’s Missouri and Kansas, a lot of smaller tracks, not like Arkansas or Mississippi, where they’re big tracks, that you can actually have a rest area on the property. Not many places here in our area to where they could allocate an area that’s a rest area. And so one of the things that we had brought up is I said, how can we access our property differently? So we’re going to try to go through some steps to see if we can access the property only during duck season from a different way.

Josh Cussamanio: One of the things Jeff has touched on and he’s just danced around it and not mentioned it is, we started this idea of just doing an education event, it grew as we were planning it. And I pulled up to this place one day and I saw a bunch of people running around. One guy’s on the drill, one guy’s on the tractor with the disc, one guys got a UTV going to do something, and it really dawned on me that, man, what we’re talking about doing here is we’re looking at a co-op. And this is landowners working together. And they had a model right there. And one of the aspects that, what I was getting at is he’s been touching on it, I’ve talked about it a little bit, but he’s mentioning all these people. And it’s not a name dropping thing. It’s the fact that through my experience with the state wetland management areas in Missouri is that I got to meet 1000 people every year at our waterfowl drawings or people coming in and calling and talking to me. And I had a fairly large circle of influence, I’m local here, I’ve lived in Nevada for 20 or well, 24 years now. And so got to know a lot of people here. And so Jeff is on the other side where he’s from Kansas City. He’s in with these duck club owners, he knows all these guys, plus he’s in the industry, and he’s got all these contacts. And so there’s a social aspect to this. And when we met in 2000, you would have never thought, oh, this is going to grow into something where we’re doing something like this. And I think one reason that this has been successful is we had a working model from Jeff and some of the guys there in Pipersville that were working together to share equipment and manpower to manage their clubs.

Jeff Watt: That’s exactly right. Because that time when you came up there, what had happened was 4 rivers farm down on the island, their tractor had broke down and they were wanting to do some work, and I had a tractor, I had the equipment, they didn’t have it. And I said, well, come on, let’s go. And so we got it all together and then we just started pooling everything. We went in together and bought a drill. We use everybody’s stuff and I don’t even have to be there on my property for them to go down there and do something or vice versa. And that’s the kicker. And then now you take it into hunting season, I’ve never hunted with them before at all, never asked that. I’d never been asked or I’d never asked them to go. Now all of a sudden, I’m going with them, if I’m down there by myself, there’s no reason for me to go down into my property and put some pressure and disturb what’s going on in there, they’re going, let’s go. They’re also quality hunters. And there’s normally two of them, and they, they roll down there and short order, they’ve got normally 4 mallards a piece, and maybe there are other birds, and they’re out of there. And that’s that disturbance, that’s that pressure thing that is hard to get across to people that don’t understand. I mean, you take 4 guys, put them in a blind, and in our turf, they want to shoot 6 ducks, 4 of those can be mallards, and they might not be very good shots are new to duck hunting, or this, that, and the other. Well, if there’s 4 of them, and let’s just say they want to shoot the mallards, if they shot one mallard out of each bunch, they got to have 16 bunches of mallards work them. That don’t happen very often here. I mean, it happens during the short window, and if that does happen and you only shoot one duck out of each one of those groups, you’re educating the hell out of them, and you’ve disturbed them. So, it’s an ongoing thing, and I think we’re making great strides up here. I mean, I think it’s unbelievable, really.

Ramsey Russell: Josh, you’ve been in the private land management business for a while. You’ve met with a lot of landowners like Jeff that want to improve their property. Jeff tells a pretty miraculous success story about finding real habitat religion. What’s it like going up to the average landowner? I mean, to me, maybe a lot of the average landowners think that it’s not duck habitat if it doesn’t come out of a seed bag. Would that be a fair description of a lot of the landowners you meet?

Corn, Japanese Millet, and Other Waterfowl Favorites

And if it wasn’t corn, maybe it was trying to save it with Jap millet, and something like that. And infrastructure was a big thing. A lot of our wetlands may be smaller here, and they were built a long time ago.

Josh Cussamanio: Yeah, I think we got a lot of guys that are very knowledgeable, and I don’t want to categorize anybody. And I think that there was probably a failure on maybe the whole biology community or manager’s community in general. I think we missed a generation in here where we didn’t educate people. So at least in our area, we kind of skipped a generation where we just didn’t have great events coming down the pipe. And for me, growing up, a young man going to college, going to graduate school and reading these papers by people, Mickey, Lee Fredrickson, looking at all these names that are in the field right now, those guys were at the peak of studying moist oil management and researching, what was going on in duck biology, waterfowl biology. And so I knew about that stuff, but we missed educating all these guys, and I got to go to all, Lee Fredrickson had the workshop regularly for agency personnel down in the boot heel down there and associated with the University of Missouri at that time, and those are phenomenal to go to. It was talking about waterfowl ecology. I basically got a free college course out of him on waterfowl ecology. Sat there for 5 days and got to listen to him talk to a bunch of biologists, and it was really cool. But we could talk about invertebrates. We could talk about moist soil management, green tree reservoir management. And so I was fortunate to grow up in that area. But that stuff went away for a while. And the landowners have been kind of reinvigorated, I think, by social media, by stuff that’s going on with Cohen labs and Osborne and University of Arkansas, Monticello. Man, you can see what’s going on with these ducks now, it’s visual. And so I think that timing was right, but for us to do this, but there was a great need for it. These people were hungry to manage their wetlands, right. And what I was seeing is that, yes, a lot of guys wanted to manage out of a bag. They wanted to get it dry as they possibly could right after duck season to maybe plant some corn on their property, because, man, their neighbors got corn and they got to have corn. And if it wasn’t corn, maybe it was trying to save it with Jap millet, and something like that. And infrastructure was a big thing. A lot of our wetlands may be smaller here, and they were built a long time ago. Some of these are 20s, 30s and 40s even here. And I’ve got a couple wetlands the guys own that they say were built with mules and slips. And so trying to get some infrastructure in place, these guys can manage them better. It all comes together when you add the education and all this infrastructure and helping them manage it, right. But they still didn’t have the knowledge. And so that’s where we came in, is they just trying to educate them a little bit on how to be better managers to have the infrastructure in place.

Ramsey Russell: I asked that question because Jeff said earlier about, how he perceived the areas he hunted. And it just made me think, here I am, an old geezer, 58 years old now, and everybody listening, like myself, has hunted soybeans and rice and flooded corn and flooded millets and some form of row crop agriculture from Mississippi, from the Gulf coast clear up to Peace river country, we’ve all hunted row crop agriculture. But ducks have existed for millions of years, row crop agriculture in North America has existed for about 150, and I think outside the US border. Some of the most magical hunting experiences I’ve had worldwide, that there was no row crop agriculture to be seen. We were just hunting a natural, vibrant wetland. And so that’s where it is difficult, Jeff, to see something like a swamp, say, well, that must be duck habitat, because it’s not, for the past 50 years, most of us have been habituated to duck hunting. We’re habituated to hunting some form of agriculture, and it’s hard to get our mind wrapped around that. Just a natural wetland that ebbs and flows and has desirable vegetation can be as productive or as desirable to a duck or a goose as something coming out of bag. It is like an education gap that has existed for decades now.

Jeff Watt: Yeah. And I remember, Josh, when we started talking about it, you said there hadn’t been one private landowner education waterfowl education plant ID event on the western part of the state, and you don’t know how long. Maybe there was one at Swan Lake or Sumner or somewhere else, but there sure as heck hadn’t been one over here. So that I don’t disagree that there was a generation that got missed on it. And I do think social media, it helped kickstart some of it for sure. I mean, you go back to several years ago, Tony Vandemore showing all of this wild, these just acres and acres of wild millet that they were cultivating. I mean, you talk about cultivating, and Jody says it all the time, we’re weed farmers. We’re not corn farmers, Ag farmers, we’re weed farmers. And I’m telling you, there’s some magic to it. And I mean, I was talking to Chase one of my sons is working on a place, and he was asking me, well, I want to get more barnyard grass, wild millet to come up. And so this why I want to do this now. And I said, well, that’s all great that you’re wanting to do this now, but if you’re going to base seeing barnyard grass, wild millets come up right now, that’s not going to and that’s not normally going to happen. It happens normally later in our neck of the woods, and you’re going to see more smartweeds here. Okay, yeah, I forgot about that. And it is a reminded or a reinvented way to look at it on the chronological timeline of when these plants germinate and all this other stuff. And, I mean, Josh will tell you, I bust him all the time. Hey, man, here’s what the hell is this? I can’t figure out what this is and then you go farther to these invertebrates, that are in the water that nobody pays attention to. And we both sent pictures back and forth look at this. And those ducks love, especially after a certain period to when they start, where the hens start preparing to the egg cycles and building all of that stuff up, they are hard on the invertebrates and all that other stuff in there. And that’s why they’re there. You say, okay, that’s amazing. I didn’t think they’d be there. And they’re there, and that’s why you go look, you can see it.

Ramsey Russell: I was talking to somebody recently from Belzoni, Mississippi. They managed some old catfish ponds, and one of the particular ponds, they plant a lot of Jap millet just reminded me of something, Jeff, when you said that, and he’s my veterinarian, and we were sitting there talking over a dog one time, and I said, it’s funny because I’ve slung a lot of Jap millet in my lifetime over mudflats, and I’ve never killed a duck with a crawl slap full of Jap millet. He said, well, it’s funny you say that. And they had somebody come and sweep a lot of their ponds doing invertebrate surveys, and the most invertebrate biomass they had was in their Jap millet planting. He said, we think the ducks are getting in there not for the Jap millet seed, but for the invertebrates that are attracted to all that grass. I thought that was kind of interesting, seeing beyond the bag into what it was producing, which wasn’t so much the seed as the invertebrate biomass.

Josh Cussamanio: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Jeff, why is a lot of you all’s focus seem to be around moist soil? You seem to be really educating a lot of your co-op members and preaching a lot of those moist soil values.

Jeff Watt: Well, and Josh, you’ll have to – I’m going to do it from the, from the non-scientific PhD. Yeah, we all know that ducks attract corn or corn attracts ducks. There’s really no correlation between corn and killing the ducks, whereas the correlation that I’ve seen is we kill a lot of ducks in our moist soil. We see the ducks longer in the moist soil. They could technically eat moist soil every day of the year. Moist soil or every day that they’re there in our area or our region, but they can’t eat the corn every time that or for every day that they spend. So duck use days, corn, yes, it provides vertical cover, which I think we need. It provides thermal cover. It provides cover for us to hide in and hunt. And we’re actually going to use that in certain situations on blackacres because we have a lot of openness. And ducks have a tendency to go to the center, they go to the center to get away from pressure. It’s probably pounds per acre and more duck use days. But I’m going to pass it on to Josh because he’s going to give a better answer, I’m sure.

Wetland Management Techniques

We’ve got a term, hydrogeomorphology, putting the right plants and the right infrastructure in the right place. But I think what we’re looking at with the moist soil is ducks evolved on this.

Josh Cussamanio: I may not who knows? You know what we’re focusing on, especially in our neck of the woods, we’re in the upper reaches of the Truman reservoir flood easement we can flood ten times in one year. We could be flooded for 3 months in one year. And what we’re wanting to try and teach is these guys that are planting corn all the time. There’s not a lot of resiliency in your habitat with corn, you’re creating a monoculture if your corn grows, right, yeah, the ducks are going to use it if it doesn’t die because it’s been flooded. And you may not be putting the best habitat and in the best place. We’ve got a term, hydrogeomorphology, putting the right plants and the right infrastructure in the right place. But I think what we’re looking at with the moist soil is ducks evolved on this. Moist soil habitat is diverse, Jeff mentioned Biden’s and two or three types of smartweed and wild millet. And you even get into the nuts edges, yellow and red nutsedge, and so you’ve got all these different plants and they’re different leaf structures. They grow in different elevations, at different times of year. We have a wetland that may dry up, the center of it may dry up at the end of the summer and you’ll end up with tooth cup in there. And so we’re creating diversity, diversity of seeds, diversity of invertebrates later in the year. But with that diversity come, it’s just like going to a buffet. And we all like going to buffet, we can all find something we like. And you get a little salad, you get a little this, and in the end, you eat way too much and you add some pounds on. Well, that’s what we want for ducks. I mean, we’ve all read the studies where you feed a chicken corn for 60 days straight, and it eventually just withers away and dies. And corn is very important. We need corn, and we know this carbohydrates was big, quick, easy to get energy sources on a cold wintery day. But it’s the steak at your buffet. You can have some steak over here, but you got to have everything else with it. And so creating this diversity of plants, and let’s face it, this is what ducks evolved on. They’re going to go right back to what they learned, and they’re going to go eat these more soil plants and these seeds are available and they persist in the water for a long time. So we are investing basically like the stock market. Another analogy is we’re diversifying our habitat management, so that it’s more resilient to the conditions we’re given that year. Whether it’s flooding, drought, you name it, we’re prepared for it. And so, that’s why we want to expose people to the better management practices to get moist soil plants on their property with us, a slower drawdown, holding that water later, when to put the disc in the ground, and when those manipulations come along to give them what they want. Because there’s a lot of people that fail in moist soil management. If you’ve been growing corn on the same acreage for 5 years and you’ve been spraying atrazine on there, you’re not going to see a great moist soil response for two or three years because you got atrazine in your soil that’s built up holding on there, and you can do it side by side test, and it’s evident where the atrazine was for, especially year one and two. So, yeah, that’s why we’re kind of going towards, hey, we’re going to expose them to this, learn how to make their properties more diverse, attractive throughout the season. You plant your corn late in western Missouri, and we can plant corn all the way up to July 15 here and have a really nice crop in our wetlands. We got really good soils here to hold moisture late in the year. But you can’t put water on for that September teal season if your corn’s green, if your corn is green in October, and we’re getting a push up in Canada and going to move some birds south, we’re going get those ducks that are migrating on the length of day more than anything else. You can’t put water on it. And so then you’re losing some attractiveness to your wetlands to make them. You want some ducks in there for opening day, maybe you need to have that water on there earlier, so you got to have a little spot in the lowest area that’s moist soil or a whole pool that’s moist soil. So, yeah, we’re kind of just trying to build some resiliency in there on these guys, create some diversity and make their hunting better, and in essence, making their biology better on the property.

Jeff Watt: So, Ramsey, every year at one of the duck club meetings, annual meetings that I have to go to every year, a couple of members. So what are we planting this year? And Grant, and let me tell you, this meeting was just two, three weeks ago. So March, I said, I say the same thing every year. I have no idea what we’re going to plant, where we’re going to plant or if we’re going to plant. I mean, we haven’t even started taking the water off. And then I say, but what we’re going to do is, as we do the drawdown, we’ll look and evaluate each one of these properties and whichever one has the least or the lowest potential to grow great moist soil, that’s where we’ll put a food plot in. And that’s what we use as food plots. So they’re anywhere between three to six, three to seven acres of these food plots in there surrounded by moist soil. And that’s that diversity thing. There is no way in hell that I’m going to go and burn down a field of wild millet or smartweed to put corn or milo in there, because I know damn good and well that it through, through our summers and all that stuff that wild millet and smartweed is going to survive or has a better opportunity to survive than anything I plant in the ground. And Josh said we could flood up to six, seven times a year.

Ramsey Russell: When you think about habitat relative to the surrounding landscape, the vast landscape that we now see ducks gravitating towards in the deltas along these floodplains and stuff, a lot of it is predominated by a roundup ready row crop agriculture landscape. And all of a sudden I’m going to take parts of it and make it more natural, make it more what the ducks have evolved in, to put it in Josh’s words, you know what I’m saying? And to me, it’s like trying to fit. There’s a lot of kilo calories in landscape. There’s a lot of habitat value landscape. We can’t negate that because it certainly is, it’s got its place. But at the same time, when you take a bird’s eye view and look down at the landscape, it’s almost like looking at the pieces of a puzzle. The ducks don’t need just corn. They don’t need just this, they’ve got a lot of various life cycle requirements. What can I offer them on my property as it fits with the surrounding landscape? That seems to be what you all are saying.

Jeff Watt: Yeah. And I mean, you said it, what you were doing on yours. You got a guy who’s just next door to you planting corn, and he’s in a great place to plant corn. Your property, elevation wise, isn’t great for harvesting or producing corn. I mean, do something different. Yeah. You’re going to probably have some days they go to the corn and you’re going to have days they come to you and they don’t go to the corn, and there are probably going to be days they were in the corn and those guys pushed them out of the corn and they came to you.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, well, there’s days that the days of ducks going to use timber, there’s days they aren’t. They’re going to secretly just being where they want to be when they want to be there, but they’re going to push around and use the different habitats.

Jeff Watt: One other thing, Ramsey. I think one of the things that we also strive for, even if we’re planting corn or even if we’ve got a food plat of corn, is we want dirty corn. And we very rarely, once the corn comes up, we very rarely spray herbicide to round up in there to kill any of the weeds coming up, because we want that diversity that comes up. And I don’t know how many times we’ve had great wild millet, the corn comes up and it starts going and it’s well along. And then we get a rain because we’ve created that seed bed. We get a rain come in June or late May, early June, mid-June and July even. And all of a sudden, it just kickstarts our moist soil that’s in our moist soil, wild millets and all that stuff those seeds are in the soil and they go bonkers. And now we got both in the same food plot. We got moist soil and Ag.

Ramsey Russell: Josh, you said something just a minute ago about used example, if I’m planting corn, maybe I can’t flood it in time for the teal. How important is early and late water? Because I tend to think, like a lot of duck hunters, I think a lot of us duck hunters tend to see our habitat management in terms of a 60 day season in the Mississippi flyway. Okay, duck season is two weeks off, let me pump it up, get ready for those ducks come down. Okay, duck season’s over. Boom. Let me pull it down, let me get my crops in for next year. But really and truly, how important is viewing that habitat beyond those 60 days before and after?

Drawing Waterfowl to Wetlands

And holding water on your property attracts ducks. And that’s a message that people can take home.

Josh Cussamanio: Well, I mean, when you start talking waterfowl, there’s benefits to wetlands way beyond waterfowl, and we don’t need to dive into that. Those benefits are going to be there due to the landowners owning the property, managing for ducks, for duck hunting experience, so we’re going to get some sideboard, some side benefits out of that. But creating duck usage on your property, if it begins with blue wing teal in September, and then that transitions into green wing teal, and then that transitions into pintails and then that transitions into gadwall and shovelers and maybe some early migrant mallards, you’ve created this continuum of use, whereas you’re waiting to one week before season to flood your cornfield and say you’re waiting till October 25th here to flood your cornfield or maybe even November 1st in this part of Missouri, you’ve lost all that traction. So if you don’t have that diversity on your property where you can put some water on there and attract those birds early, you don’t create that continuum and attraction, I think, and then that continues through season where even if you’ve got corn, nobody’s planting corn in Missouri from January 15th to April 15th in the bottoms especially, you probably extend that to May 15th. So why are we taking our water off when we know we’re going to probably get a flood? We’re going to turn around and we’re going to have rainfall events that may add, you get a 2 inch rainfall on some of these bottoms, it’ll refill your wetland immediately, just before it gets out the tube, your soil saturated, you’re not going to gain anything by draining that place early. Now you need to fix some infrastructure every few years. Maybe you need to go in, you need to do a disturbance and you want to go in and it’s dry, you disk it in February, shut your boards again. But what I’m getting at is that philopatry that everybody keeps talking about. We’re keeping your water on late, gets these ducks in there and they learn about it and just new properties. One of them, we didn’t really have much done the first year and it flooded and right at the end of season and just like 35, 40 acres of water. But we didn’t have many ducks on it, but we held it, and I pulled in one day and there’s 7000 ducks in his woods. And if we would have had that water off there, those ducks didn’t know that water, that those woods are even existing. It was just another patch of timber they were flying over. It happened again the next year, didn’t have a lot of water during season, didn’t have great hunting, didn’t really have any habitat, even on one side of the river. But come spring, we had 5000, 6000, 10,000 ducks in there, depending on the given day. And this year, finally, we saw the fall birds showing up in there. And so holding that water is great late in the year, get those ducks to know where your property is. Because we’ve proven with this data from Osborne labs and from Cohen, work Brad’s doing is we know these ducks are coming back to these places. That’s what I love. I got to meet Brad a couple weeks ago and talk to him. And I said, man, this is just so cool the way it has evolved with what you guys are doing on social media and the Mississippi flyway. I said, this is visual. People understand this, people are following you, you’re educating people. And so we’ve tied that data into our workshops even. And this last year, Doctor Osborne came up, Ethan Dittmer was here. The first year we did a 3 day workshop, it was really intense on moisture management and habitat diversity and designing stuff, right. And we tied in some GPS work from Arkansas where the ducks are spending 75% of their time in moist habitat. And so now, this year, when we did our 3 day workshop, we kind of took it to the scientific side a little bit and mixed it up and we tied it to management. But we brought in those guys to start telling you why you need to do things. And here’s the evidence where these ducks are going. And had several people say, I never thought I would have come to western Missouri to Prairie City, to Lutheran Church and heard four doctors on waterfowl biology, ecology and management sit here and give presentations. They said, this is pretty darn unique and cool to have the opportunity to hear of them among all the other people. Our Vets team was there, MDC and NRCs wetland team for Missouri and us Fish and Wildlife Service all these people were there, Ducks Unlimited, Delta waterfowl. But so we’ve tried to tie some linkage into all this habitat stuff. And holding water on your property, laid attracts ducks. And that’s a message that people can take home.

Jeff Watt: Josh, you and I just got finished talking, I think, last week after driving through is we’re getting water on all of these properties earlier. We’re not going to meet. And that’s what I think one part of your question was, Ramsey, is we’re going to get water on all of these properties earlier to create that, to create more habitat for them. I’m not worried about getting the ate out. I mean, everybody talks about, oh, if I put water on that, they’re going to eat us out. That might happen in the St. Charles bottoms or something like that, it ain’t happening down here. And so then what happens is you get those blue wings started, you get green wings in there, and now you get those early flight mallards that if there was no water there, they would go to the refuge or go somewhere else. Now I think, hey, there’s a bunch of birds down there, I’m going to go down there and check that out. And then you add water to the rest of your pools or step it up into the rest of your properties. You’ve created something that’s just momentum, to me, that’s what it is. So then when we flood our woods the middle of November, those ducks have already been using our moist soil areas and bam, now they’re going to hop over and loaf in our woods or whatever.

Josh Cussamanio: And that water management’s key. When we banded ducks this year, we did it over a little wider swath that we did last year, but come it had been dry in western Missouri for two years, and there’s about a 2000, 2500 acre wetland unit here that hadn’t seen water for 2 years. And when we were getting ready to band ducks, it flooded and it’s right across the river from Jeff’s property and two of his properties and we lost all of our ducks. So we had a natural flood event in February, add water to a moist soil unit and the ducks responded overnight. And so that’s stepping that water up, and increasing your available habitat throughout the season that is a case where it happened after season and the ducks responded to it. So Lee Frederickson once told me, because you want to kill ducks the last week of duck season, he goes, have the guts to not flood one of your units until the last week of your duck season. He goes, you will own every duck in that country.

Ramsey Russell: Did it work?

Josh Cussamanio: Well, the public land hunters are not real fond of that when they can’t have a pool out here.

Jeff Watt: We need to try it.

Josh Cussamanio: Yeah, we’ve never tried it on public land other than we have a shortage of water, when we can’t get enough water pump, or in this case, where it flooded now. And I’ll tell you, some of our best hunting here is when it floods and around Christmas and you’ve got 2 weeks of season left, and then you get new habitat here, the mallards are here, big numbers and you got moving water, even if it gets a little icy, you get some current in the flood water and it can be just knocked on drag out good. And so, yeah, that year, you could hold water in the property from September until May, our latitude. So you’re looking at June, July, August without water. So you’re really creating a wetland in the right scenario. It’s truly a wetland for 9 months out of the year. And we often think of it as the opposite of that, where we want to have a wetland here for 60 days.

Citizen-Led Conservation Efforts

We were dealing with the guy that’s going to make a decision on what he wants his property to be, what he wants it to look like, what he want, how he wants to manage it. 

Ramsey Russell: The Osage Basin Wetlands Co-op is a citizen led conservation model that is really taking root. You have hinted at this so far, but can you tell me when and where you all’s workshops are held and what other projects you all have going on?

Jeff Watt: Well, I mean, we normally hold them around Pipersville, Prairie City, Rich Hill, excuse me, Butler area south of Butler. And those are the ones that really focus and concentrate on the Osage basin and that kind of group of people and landowners. And we did, the Osage basin reaches across the state line, we don’t play with state lines, but we did go into Kansas this fall just to test the temperature over there to see if there was, we had an attendee this summer, this last summer from that area that said, hey, these guys would, would really eat this up over in Meredith, LaCygne area. And so we did hosted a cocktail party over there, and we have 40, 45 people there, Josh?

Josh Cussamanio: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Jeff Watt: And so a lot of interest in that part of the country. The whole key is both of us have full time other jobs. And so to try and, number one, get the venue, number two, get the time to make sure that, get the example or the clubs or farms that we’re going to use as our test areas to show them what happens if you do it. It’s a pretty big endeavor. And so we don’t know how that’s going to go, but we’re going to continue to try and do something in our home region, which is Rich Hill, 4 Rivers area, Shallow sage that area. The last two years we’ve ran late summer or mid summer courses we were talking about. So that is the after, you get to see what the plant looks like when it’s up, you get to see what happens when you do a slow drawdown. We’re considering running one a little earlier in the summer to say, hey, this is what, wild millet, smartweed, Pennsylvania smartweed and lady’s thumb and all this stuff looks like, now, this is what Cocklebur looks like before it has a cocklebur on it or bur on it. And so this is what we got to get rid of, this is how we get rid of it. And do that kind of stuff on that side, I doubt we’re going to run 3 day courses anymore, 2.5 day courses, they’re going to be shortened because I think we’d lose some of that and Josh can allude to that also. But, I mean, the main thing is, is that it’s trying to balance how much time we have and what we can do and still be able to work on our own property.

Ramsey Russell: At a broader landscape, though, Jeff, Josh, you all seem to be stretching clear down into Arkansas through some of your partnerships and relationships 5 Oaks you mentioned, that’s Arkansas, is it not? I know you’ve mentioned Doctor Osborne, Mickey Heitmire, Josh Pagan, I mean, this is a lot bigger than just Missouri.

Jeff Watt: I think you’re seeing some adoption in Arkansas of what we’re doing. I attended an event down there last year, last September, that not only did that – So in Missouri, it’s more rare to have a landowner and a waterfowl or land manager. In Arkansas, it’s very common, maybe Mississippi it’s very common. And so here we were dealing with the decision maker. We were dealing with the guy that’s going to make a decision on what he wants his property to be, what he wants it to look like, what he want, how he wants to manage it. In Arkansas, the landowner is paying the land manager to determine that. And sometimes, though, in order to institute change, is you got to have both of them there. And at the event, one of the events in 5 Oaks in September, they had both the landowner and the manager there. So not only instead of the manager just saying, oh, no, we’re not doing that, the landowner was there and thought, you know what, maybe we are going to do that, and I own the land, so I’m going to tell you we’re going to do it. So, I mean, it stretches to Arkansas, and I think they’re adopting some of the stuff that we’re doing up here, not adopting, but they’re kind of taken, just like we’ve taken some stuff from them, they’re taking some stuff from us. And I think looking at it on a more broad scale as everybody working together because of habitat loss in the Mississippi Flyway or Mississippi river valley pressure populations, the whole shooting match is trying to make it better all the way around.

Ramsey Russell: Jeff, what have you learned personally through this whole process, and where do you hope that Osage Basin goes from here?

Jeff Watt: I’ve learned patience when it comes to managing places. I mean, like, we have a lease, like Josh mentioned that I own some land, and then we lease some land. The land we lease is in a WRP, and you can only do so much in a WRP to manipulate it based on the regulations. And so my partner in the lease, he’s like, well, man, it doesn’t look like there’s stuff growing. I said, well, no, there is, and we need to get in there and do something. I said, no, we’re not going to do anything until January 25th or June 25th. When June 25th hits, the week of June 25th, we’re going to determine what we’re going to do, because we got a lot of good signs here. All we need is a couple timely rains to help something happen. Lo and behold, we got those timely rains, and we had everything in there. We had wild millet, we had pigweed in there, we had barnyard or smartweed both the good species, the pink and the lady’s thumb. Pennsylvania and the lady’s thumb. We had tooth cup in there. We had a plethora of food in there, and it’s because we waited, it’s because we had enough patience because we knew that if we waited till then and it didn’t look good, we could go in and manipulate a portion of it and broadcast some Jap millet in it or just do some disturbance and hopefully get something else in there. So patience is one. Where I would like to see, I would like to see Osage Basin spread out and be a much bigger entity. I’d like to see it go from just being something that is an LLC, that is a 501C3, that we can help US Fish & Wildlife or other conservation entities determine or get some funding and determine a project to help a landowner that maybe doesn’t have the money or the wherewithal to get something accomplished on their property, so we can help facilitate that. No different than a cost share program that MDC has or a federal program like, I mean, we can’t do something like WRP or anything like that. But just to where we’re expanding the conservation habitat building in the basin. And I’ve got a very good friend that’s a farmer down there and in the area, and farmers don’t like trees, so they’re taking trees out all the time, to where you maybe say, we’re going to help, you not want to take these trees out by subsidizing a little. You leave the trees because it’s good right here for this area and whatever. And that might be far fetched, but doing that kind of thing, instead of somebody wanting to go in and farm and just get production out of their land, let’s not do that. And yeah, you had some income off it, let’s try to facilitate and subsidize that. So that’s where I’d like to see it. And I mean, we’re never going to an Ottoman society, Ducks Unlimited, Delta Waterfowl, but I think we could definitely, especially when shallow sage gets online, because they’re redoing that, remaking that state area that we can just create more habitat to where they stay in these bottoms longer.

Ramsey Russell: What advice would either one of you all have to a listener that wants to start a cooperative like this in their own watershed? I mean, you all started this thing from scratch. What advice would you all have to listener or listeners, trying to start a cooperative like this in their own watershed?

Jeff Watt: Josh, you’ve been around.

Josh Cussamanio: I think I’ve seen cooperatives come and go, fail to get started up. I mentioned kind of our circle of influence for both of us, and it overlapped. I mean, it’s almost like when you overlay two circles and you look at that little area that meets in the middle. And so we met in the middle on this, and that certainly helped us. And it was purely organic. I mean, we really had the model on the ground with what Jeff and those guys were doing at the Pipersville area, and so we didn’t have to force this and it’s the social aspect that’s really what it comes back to, its relationships and everything else. You need to have good relationship with your neighbors. You need to view them as your ally. And if that’s the case, you can’t force your opinions on somebody. But all we’re trying to do is be a conduit to educate people, and we create that education and thank gosh, I mean, I told Jeff, I said, I really want to do this. I hope people respond to this.

Ramsey Russell: We both were.

Community Education on Duck Hunting

They were hungry for that knowledge. And from my standpoint, I told Jeff, these guys have access to me email, call the office, text me, all these local landowners have access to me, shoot, almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week anymore. But I want this to be about, hey, I want somebody else to come in here and talk about it. I want the education that I had available.

Josh Cussamanio: Yeah. Going back to our first one, we said, well, I said, if we get 25 people, I’ll be happy, 35 will be great, and 45 will be exceptional. And we just came up with the idea. Lee Kjos started working on some media for us and some designs and stuff, and our logo, and Jeff and Lee really stepped that up. Our literature is top notch, our logo is great, and that helped create an identity for all of us. But, boy, when we got this out that we’re going to do this, the numbers went up like, it started, I think 27 before we even announced it, we had 27 people signed up. And then the word got out, we had 37. And then we sent a few letters out and a few emails, and we had 47, and the next week we had 57, and we’re like, we got to put the brakes on this thing. And like, holy crap, and we’re thinking, we need a freaking bus, how we’ll get around in the field. And so it was like, it was purely organic, it wasn’t forced. We had great relationships, and we presented it as a way to educate people, and they responded very well. They were hungry for that knowledge. And from my standpoint, I told Jeff, these guys have access to me email, call the office, text me, all these local landowners have access to me, shoot, almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week anymore. But I want this to be about, hey, I want somebody else to come in here and talk about it. I want the education that I had available. Reading the papers that Mickey did going to CN Lee Fredrickson at the workshops, Gaylord lab, I wanted to bring that to western Missouri. And so that was our goal and people responded to it very well. And then I’m here after the fact, the wetland team is here after the fact, whoever, Fish & Wildlife service to provide some additional input and help them. Because you go to these workshops, your mind starts whirling, you’re like, holy crap, what can I do on my property and people are just taking notes. And then all of a sudden, afterwards, they start calling me, hey, you talked about this or you had this, and so it’s been a good process. I like where it’s went. Like Jeff said, it can get really big, and we could do several of these a year, but it’s very time consuming. And between the meals and the logistics and getting everything lined out.

Jeff Watt: It’s time consuming because we want it to be perfect and we’re not going to put something out half assed. So that’s why it takes more. But Josh, you said something in there that I wanted somebody else, I want them to hear it from somebody else. Because it’s no different than teaching your son or daughter sports. You go in there, talk to them about pitching or hitting or fielding or all this, and you’re telling them this and they’re not doing any of them. And then they end up going to a camp or something like that. And somebody, they come back and they said, hey, dad, man, look what I learned here. And I’m like, that’s the same stuff I’ve been telling you for the last 5 months. And so it’s hearing it from somebody else because that somebody else is neutral, that somebody else is from somewhere else that has a PhD. They’re the expert. What was that name of that older group up there in Pipersville? What’s the name of that group doing this? You were calling us this, Josh, was naming us.

Everyday Angels

This is a bright spot on the horizon that a group of just regular folks got together, my buddy Jeff Watt started catching a little religion out there in his wetlands, and it spread and turned into the Osage Basin Wetlands Cooperative.

Josh Cussamanio: Oh, the Sitka Silver Slayers. Is that what you’re talking about?

Jeff Watt: So he just threw the sika in there, but it’s a bunch of us old guys that are up there doing it. So he called us the Silver Slayers. And I just laugh every time I think of it because then there’s some younger guys, I don’t know, what you called them, but they need to be on the bridge.

Josh Cussamanio: That’s right. Yeah. Every day, what do they call themselves? The Everyday Angels or whatever.

Jeff Watt: Yeah, Everyday Angels.

Josh Cussamanio: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Boys, I tell you what, it’s so much doom and gloom in the headlines, habitat loss, yada, yada. This is a bright spot on the horizon that a group of just regular folks got together, my buddy Jeff Watt started catching a little religion out there in his wetlands, and it spread and turned into the Osage Basin Wetlands Cooperative. I just think it’s a wonderful thing you all have done. And I appreciate you all both coming on today and sharing your stories. I’ve learned a lot and I’m inspired. Thank you all.

Jeff Watt: One more thing, Ramsey, so in April, Josh and I will be in two different places doing either, I think we’re on a panel discussion in Jefferson City at a Missouri grasslands event, and then there’s a private landowner event in Des Moines that US Fish and Wildlife and some other people have some touch with that. They wanted us to up there to tell the story on it. So, yeah, it’s definitely getting out of Missouri. And now it’s going north a little bit.

Ramsey Russell: How can listeners connect with you all or plug into Osage Basin?

Jeff Watt: Well, we got a Facebook page. Josh kind of manages Facebook page. And then we have an Instagram, that’s just Osage Basin. It might be Osage base, I think it’s just Osage basin.

Josh Cussamanio: Just at Osage Basin.

Jeff Watt: Yeah. And I’m not a marketing guy, I’m not a social media graduate. I mean, we put stuff on there when we think it’s relevant, and we probably need to be better. We had a bunch of stuff on there when we were doing the GPS and duck banding here. And I had some TSI work that we did, we put on there. So we’re going to get better at that.

Ramsey Russell: But they could reach out to your social media platforms and somehow get on an email list or connect with you all to become plugged into some of this stuff. Right?

Jeff Watt: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Josh Cussamanio: And Jeff and I are here representing this, and I’ve said this for a long time, this isn’t just Jeff and I. When we started this, people like, my gosh, you’re charging $350 for a workshop. And then we got done with the workshop, had a survey, and people are like, I would pay $350 for the food, the materials, Jeff, he loves to cook. But this is truly not, I mean, this is a non for profit. Everything, after the books are cooked and done and we look at it all this money has been given back for the last two years to our GPS project and supporting Doug Osborne and Ethan Dittmer and our own effort here. And it’s truly a partnership that, not only involves the landowners here that are participating, but the people that prepare their properties for us. All the corporate sponsors that Jeff has had contact with and have just wholeheartedly jumped on board, and all the agencies, MDC and NRCs, Corps of Engineers, Fish and Wildlife Service, Delta Waterfowl, Ducks Unlimited, you name it. Doctor Osborne, and even 5 Oaks, and George sending people up here and the students up here to help. It’s been truly phenomenal to see everybody’s response to this because even our duck banding project, mentioned Johnny Morris and J.P and their foundation getting really the impetus to get this thing started in western Missouri and get these backpacks and these implants done on these ducts for the study. And so it’s been a whole hearted effort from a whole lot of people. And then my boss even supporting me from the MDC side and giving me a little flexibility to get this thing going. And so it’s just not us, it takes a true community to do this because I mentioned Lee earlier, and all he’s done, he’s putting hours into designing stuff for us and making edits for each workshop. And so it’s been good to have everybody’s input and see everybody excited and to hear that other people are kind of wanting to use this as a model. And we’re just a bunch of guys from western Missouri, like, shoot ducks, and things were right at the right time in our life to do this.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you all very much. Folks, you all been listening to Jeff Watt and Josh Cussamanio with Osage Basin Wetlands Cooperative up in Missouri. Man, what a great idea. In the same way it takes a village to raise a child, it really does take a landscape cooperating to manage continental waterfowl. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. We’ll see you next time.