“We raise weeds, most folks try to grow corn,” says renowned wildlife biologist and Arkansas Waterfowler Hall of Fame, Jody Pagan, who among other things has so far laid hands on over a million acres private-lands waterfowl habitat during his career! Life-long Arkansa duck hunter Pagan talks about his background in hunting and habitat management before barreling full steam ahead into need-to-know advantages of natural habitat management. Building on previous waterfowl habitat management episode topics, we discuss habitat changes and shifting waterfowl distribution, favoring historic habitat ecosystems, working with nature instead of against it, matching management with soil types, fertilization and plant nutrition, managing properties with respect to surrounding properties and features, common mistakes and management pitfalls, waterfowl imprinting, holding water and managing water levels, disturbances, and much, much more. Landowners, managers, club members, and duck hunters in general–everyone will appreciate the insightful, hard-eared perspectives shared today. Listen and let us know your thoughts below.


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Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where we are wrapping up an epic year of habitat management topics, waterfowl management topics. Where the hell are the duck topics, especially down here in the Deep South. Thank you all for your comments and for participating in a lot of these past episodes. If you haven’t heard them all, go all the way back to January and start digging. Today, I’d like you all to welcome Jody Pagan, a well-respected, renowned habitat manager from the state of Arkansas. Jody, how the heck are you? Cool, I hope.

Jody Pagan: Man, it wasn’t cool today, brother. I’m good, I’m real good.

Ramsey Russell: What a small world. It seems like just yesterday, but it was decades ago that me, you, and our mutual friend Jim Baker were grilling duck breasts and talking ducks. Back when we were all in college. But that’s been 30 years ago now.

Jody Pagan: We were a lot younger. Better looking, too, probably.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know about better looking, but we were damn sure younger.

Jody Pagan: We were younger. We were younger. That’s for sure, brother.

Ramsey Russell: I’m going to start this introduction like this. Here’s what I want to know, who is Jody Pagan as a duck hunter? First and foremost, we’re going to do a deep dive into habitat, but who is Jody Pagan as a duck hunter? Where are you from? How’d you get started? What were your earliest introductions?

The Five Oaks Experience

Became a biologist at Five Oaks, using it as a laboratory for implementing and testing advanced wetland management techniques.

Jody Pagan: Yeah, so I started duck hunting in 1976 as a five-year-old boy in Felsenthal. A lot of folks know where that is. It wasn’t dead then. So, running the Ouachita River above Monroe, around Strong, Arkansas, that’s where I grew up. Hunting Cutoff Overflow and Felsenthal, moving on up to Montrose, and some of those places like Jonesville, Louisiana, which was at one time an incredible waterfowl area. That’s changed over time, but, you know, kind of that southeast Arkansas area, Ramsey. You know, that’s where I grew up. And then moving up, went through college, got out of college, went to work for NRCS, was named the waterfowl wetland biologist because there wasn’t any. That looks like old Names. He and I got assigned to something we didn’t really know what we were getting into, but it’s been a 30-year ride of working for NRCS, either Ian or myself outside, working cooperatively with them, building wetlands, planting trees, and talking to landowners about managing moist soil and forestry aspects of the reforestation. And then kind of transitioned because they sent me to Washington, D.C. And that’s like living in hell. I went to work for George Dunkin, and so then I was the bottle washer, the duck guide, the duck biologist, the forester, the farmer of an enormous amount of land there in Arkansas and Jefferson County, which really grew me because as running an operation where every day at that point in 2005, we were running up to 25 people a day, and I had to look at everybody that walked up on the porch after they hunted and say, “How was your hunt?” And if they didn’t have a good hunt, at least kind of that “Oh man, I got to do better” kind of attitude, something that I learned from George early on and the kind of outfit and business. And we don’t really call it that. We call it, “Yes, come to look for an opportunity to hunt with us,” and we use all the money to put back to the resources. So he’s, of course, a very unique individual that I’ve been privileged to work with and for I guess 20 years. And riding the hole every day, you’re sitting there thinking, Man, what could I do better? Not all about the duck hunting, but my mind’s going to the biology, and going to the management and the science every day. Even though I’m calling and killing ducks every day, I think I missed three days, two to three days a year for 20 years until I quit guiding at 50, and now I still guide about 15 days, sometimes more, depends on how good the duck hunting is, Ramsey. But started my own business in ‘15, and it was Ecosystem Protection Service, and we still run several men at Five Oaks. I’m still the biologist there as far as shot-calling on what habitats we’re doing or how we’re doing it. This is kind of the unique thing about Five Oaks, and I’ve said this on several podcasts. It was like a laboratory where someone with a science background could go, okay, Kaminski said this, Lee Frederickson said this, Hotmaier said this. I’m going to put it to action, and I’m going to see, because we had unlimited resources. Really, we did, because we’re taking hunting money and putting it back, “Let’s try this.” George, very brilliant man, said, Let’s try something different. All right, let’s try something different. And so, over the course from 2005 till last year, and last year was a difficult year, but nothing like 2007. 2007 was the worst mallard year in the South for Arkansas, and it caused a lot of issues. Agencies wanted to lower the limit, quit shooting hens, shoot one hen, go back down at Biomedo, and only shoot three ducks. A lot of different things happened, and we said, why? You know, he’s the guy that’s like me. He steps outside the box and says, looks in and goes, what’s going on? And it was large-scale change in the agriculture. It was degradation of the bottomland hardwoods due to over-flooding. And that’s just compounded more and more, and we can talk more about that through the course of this podcast. But at the end of the day, I’ve been fortunate, God blessed me, to work for the ducks and for human beings that own the biggest properties really in, I think I’ve worked in 30 states and two provinces in Argentina. And what’s unique about working in South America was the rice went away, and the cows came, and the rosy bills left and went to the agriculture, and that, right there. And you’ve been down there a long time, hunting, and those ducks, they chase rough, rugged, weedy, nasty ag land because it’s so opportunistic and marsh, and marsh.

Ramsey Russell: Because they don’t have, you know, I don’t want to go too far off this rabbit hole, but you make a good point that we are going to get into later. Rice is a surrogate of marsh. They don’t have the clean farming practices in South America that we have here in North America. And it is, right. It’s like stepping into a 1960s rice field where it’s slapped full of moist soil aquatic plants. You see what I’m saying? It’s just totally different.

Jody Pagan: Oh, I love it. Because when you go to the co-op, it doesn’t say Carhartt and it doesn’t say Red Wing boots, but they’re the same thing. And it’s like, as you said, going back in a time capsule and looking at what our ag looked like when we were boys. And that dirty Ross watcha, is what me and the Argentines call it, dirty rice. That dirty rice is phenomenal. But that’s what we had, Ramsay. That’s what we had in the 1970’s and 1980’s when we were out there in a cane blind in the mid-Delta, either Mississippi or Arkansas, and wearing that old cane blind, and the ducks are just fogging it, and you look at it today and go, is somebody actually hunting in that cane blind out there. These young guys are so, read the magazine. “Hey, the ducks are going to hatch. It’s a big deal, we’re going to kill them.” Well, if the habitat’s not there, we ain’t going to kill them, okay.

Ramsey Russell: All right. We’re getting way on down a rabbit hole, hey listen, you talked about growing up in southeast Arkansas, duck hunting at a young age. Who were the giants whose shoulders you hunted with? Tell me about the people that brought you into this. Was it your daddy? Was it your family? Was it family friends? How were you raised into duck hunting?

Jody Pagan: All right, so Ramsay, you know, today we do a lot of work at the church, and we see a lot of young men that don’t have a dad that does a lot of things with them. And I was fortunate. My dad, he was part of a gang, you know, kind of like the old gangs of these duck killers. That if we had a day off, or if duck season was open or we had a Christmas break, we were in the woods hunting. And honest to goodness, until I was about 22 years old, I had never hunted anything but trees, none but a willow oak, flat shindy. You know, that was the deal. And so, one of my dad’s best friends, Bill Saunders, he had the hole that everybody would die for today. And Jimmy Waller, who was a policeman, but they ate, breathed, and loved duck hunting, and we would go up there. I remember at one point in my early days, you know, we could kill ten pintails. We went up to Montrose, and we were in a cane blind, and we were literally in a mud hole in a very saturated rice field. And we used sacks to bring the ducks out of the woods, you know, or the field where we hunted, and we just shot a toe sack full. You know, it was legal, everything was good back then. So, in Felsenthal, there were only two duck calls that you could get your hands on, okay, because we didn’t lift up at Stuttgart. So, you could get your hands on a P.S. Olt, or you could get your hands on a Phil Robertson Duck Commander. Both great calls, and I still run a P.S. Olt today. And I’ll hit a Commander every once in a while just for old-school. But that was my entire life. And so, by the time I was graduating college, I said, look, I don’t know how, but good Lord willing, I’m going to work for the ducks my entire life. And He opened a lot of doors and let me do that. But, you know, it was my dad. My dad taking me every inch of the way. I just got inducted into the Arkansas Waterfowl Hall of Fame. And they asked me a question like that, and I said, you know, just like every really good guy that has a kid, that steps up and takes him to the great outdoors. Most of you old-school hunters, mine and your age, either it was your daddy, your granddaddy, or your uncle. It was somebody very close to you that took that initiative to bring you outside and teach you the hunting sports.

Ramsey Russell: Amen. Now, since those golden days, how has the landscape, the habitat, the duck hunting changed? How has it changed since those good old days? Let me interject this because, I mean, we all know stuff’s changing. I mean, it’s death by a thousand cuts, it seems like. Somebody recently posted on Instagram, on a thread I made. Here’s what they said, and I’m going to see if you agree or disagree: “Habitat’s got much worse in southeast Arkansas. Most of the old honey-hole low spots have been laser-leveled. Not half as much natural moist-soil low areas, fields drained overnight, whereas an old rain event would keep fields flooded for a week. Not near as much rice left behind. Delta looks like the surface of the moon. But even with that in mind, we wouldn’t get the mallards, even if old habitat were there, because the weather’s changed dramatically. I personally think the mallard is going to be the next Canada goose farm duck. Genetics, more crops than ever in the North, and average temps keeping water open is going to make it hard for mallards to move like they used to.” I think he touched on a lot of high points. Would you agree that habitat, back in the old days with your daddy when you got started in this thing, versus now, that the landscape has changed at that level? Not just the Arkansas landscape, but the entire North American landscape?

Jody Pagan: I’d agree with every point but the mallard being a Canada goose. Because even last year, the hardest year we had since 2007, we killed 100 more mallards than we did the year before. And it’s because we don’t raise row crops, we raise moist soil. And I’ve got 10,000 acres of moist soil or some kind of marsh, semi-permanent marsh, at Five Oaks. That’s dictating the population there. And I say that not braggadociously, but as an example, that I take care of properties in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas — that little strip in southeast Kansas that Roy Carter, who’s one of your good friends.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Jody Pagan: I’m right on that island there with him, with my best buddy, Barrett Satterlee. And we raise weeds, and everybody else raises corn or millet, and it’s as good as it is anywhere in the world. But I’ll tell you two stories. One is, I want to interject this, because I don’t think a lot of people really think about how deep this goes, but the Atlantic Flyway had a lot of mallards in the 1800s, okay? Even up to right at the break of 1900. And that was a rice culture over there in the Ace Basin. And they raised a crop, a rice crop called the Madagascar Gold. And I’ve had an opportunity to hunt with a lot of guys from that area, old Charleston guys that talk with the real, almost Mississippi South accent. And they’re in their eighties, and even some were in their nineties, and they tell me about that. So picture this in your mind that in 1898, yeah, 1898 and 1899, there were two back-to-back catastrophic hurricanes that took the lower Ace Basin out of production. Saltwater intrusion and catastrophic levee loss. Because those things backed right up, you know, it’s either brackish or it’s freshwater, and that’s where the rice was raised. About that time, around 1900 to 1903, Stuttgart Arkansas, came online raising rice, with the Germans clearing the Grand Prairie, which was 550,000 acres of grass. Burn it off, disc it up, do a lespedeza rice rotation. All of a sudden, we’re cutting shocks of rice, leaving it out there on a dry field, and the ducks are a nuisance and a menace to the rice culture. And Arkansas Duck Guard, Sugar Town, as we call it, because I lived there for a long time, came online as the duck capital of the world. So I would tell you, man, on that thread, if you put the groceries there, they come. And the reason I say that is we’ve both hunted Canada, we’ve both hunted Argentina, we’ve hunted all over the United States. And here’s the deal, wherever the easy food is, ducks are lazy. If you give them a free ride, they’re going to take it. So wherever the free ride is, they’re coming. And that’s where I think, Ramsay, the Halloween Tribe came from. I think they said, “Hey, I can get up here in Saskatoon, and I can ride the currents down, and I can eat all winter for free at Stuttgart,” okay? Now, another phenomenon was over around Wichita, Kansas. Hooray Ranch. If anybody on air knows that name that was all rangeland, that became no-till corn, and then it was dry-feed corn and go to the mud holes. And when I tell you mud holes, some of those places that they had developed were fish ponds. I was there, and all of a sudden, let’s kill 8,000 mallards. So it’s opportunistic. Ducks are opportunistic. They sample, they find feed, they stay there until the resources are low, then they move to the next place. And so I say this, I’ve done a couple of SIG grants where we’re trying to get some of these lower areas that this guy’s talking about. Let’s, if this field sucks for agriculture, let’s pay, like a CRP payment, but it would be a different type, to graze weeds in the bottom of that field and flood it up for the ducks. We would see a lot of change in the landscape if we had some of this. Take the poor ground and put it in moist soil and emergent marsh and semi-permanent marsh. Let’s have a mosaic of habitats instead of, you got three choices, you can go to the field that’s been row-cropped and flooded, maybe, but it won’t last long, you can go to the woods that are being sick because the rivers are staying up because of discharges on the dams, or you can go to a moist soil that Pagan or Ramsay or Kevin Nams built and sit out there and raise wild weeds and feed the ducks. So, why I say all that is that when I looked it over and over, we said, let’s raise some corn. Okay, well, it didn’t get cold, so the ducks didn’t go to the corn. And so I was like, well, let’s raise weeds in the corn. That’s old Kaminski dirty corn. So we did that. Well, you know what? They ate the barnyard grass when it was hot, and then they ate the corn when it got cold. I said, oh, we’re onto something here. So then we just started wholesaling these massive farms, Siberia, 600 acres, and it’s all red weed right now. It’s just Pennsylvania smartweed from one end to the other, with the higher portions in barnyard. And that’s the epicenter, that’s the rest area, and they’re living there. And the boys over there that do all the science can show you, with backpacks on them, they don’t even get out of two miles for two months. Because they’re going to live there. It’s warmer. So when people go, I raised corn, I’m going to spray the smartweed and plant corn, well, you’re not hedging your bet if it’s a warmer year because if it’s a warmer year, you lose and I win. So I’m going to say, have a blend. And so all my hot food fields, which would be rice, really, rice, milo, or corn, I’m going to have those fields, but I only turn them on when it gets below 28 degrees and they’ll go to them. But if you’re going to sit there at 70 degrees all fall like we did last year, I’m going to beat you with moist soil every time.

Ramsey Russell: Well, you’re not going into some of these heavy clay soils like Alligator and Dowling and planting corn, are you?

Jody Pagan: No, but people do it every day. And you and I know that, they’ll go in there and plant a buckshot field. And I said, hey, you all, the low ground, the alligator, dowling clay, it ain’t going to grow good corn anyway. Corn likes to be in loamy soil and not with its feet wet. And what happens a lot of times, and you and I know this because we’ve seen it, they go out there and plant the corn, and it gets up there, and I call it fake corn. So it never does make an ear. But it rains two or three times in the fall, and the barnyard grass comes up in there, and they go, well, they really like that corn. Well, no, they didn’t. They liked the barnyard grass.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Jody Pagan: So, you know, it’s really funny, but I still say that everything about habitat boils down to education, education, education.

Ramsey Russell: Well, that’s what we never get into. That’s exactly why I’ve got you on here. I want to talk about, quote, that free ride, okay?

Jody Pagan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You raise weeds, and a lot of other folks grow corn. To hell with the site. How does a bean counter or a banker or whoever’s a member of this duck camp, how does he know about the soil manual? He ain’t no farmer. And let me say this, we’re talking about Argentina, and only in the United States and dry fields up in Canada do I hunt agriculture of any kind. You know, you get off in the rest of the world, Argentina, I don’t hunt the rice, man. We’re hunting the marshes that are just like they were a thousand years ago. Worldwide, people are still hunting natural wetlands. And there’s ducks galore, there’s food galore. And I just see this massive transition from wetlands to row-crop agriculture. Because the average duck hunter, that club member who’s too busy being the banker or whatever he does besides farm day in, day out, when he’s driving to his duck camp, all he sees is row-crop agriculture, that landscape of row-crop agriculture. And, hey, there’s a flooded field, it’s got ducks in it. Maybe not because they want to be there, but because they have to be there, or maybe just ain’t getting shot or something like that. But, you know, I have hunted in Arkansas and elsewhere. I have been on property, and somebody said, “This Jody Pagan designed this.” And honestly, Jody, I ain’t ever been on a row-crop agriculture field that Jody Pagan established. It’s all been moist soil. So where did your thought process, your favoring of historic habitats, historic ecosystems, raising weeds instead of just growing corn, where did that come from?

Jody Pagan: 1987. So, right up above Felsenthal, there was a lot of Deltic timber and Potlatch ground. And they went in there and they clear-cut our favorite woods. It came up, I didn’t know what it was at the time Randy came up in barnyard grass over your head. And anytime they did a timber cut and had a set, there were weeds in the set. So, in 1987, you know, we could kill what, three? Look here, we wore them out all Christmas break long. So, Kevin and I, around the same time, got into NRCS, and then we got introduced to Kaminsky in Hot Marm and Frederickson. There’s another guy named Phil Covington, he passed away, he’s my greatest mentor. He was a practitioner. He’s the guy that taught me how to raise the weeds and clipping and spraying, and putting 50 units of nitrogen on the billet to jump over the coffee weeds and all those kinds of tricks. He spent his entire career, 40 years, with MDC up on Ted Shanks and Bush Conservation Areas in Missouri, who perfected moist soil, man. I mean, there’s no question about it. Frank Bellrose brought it up, Frederickson keyed on that portion of the world, Kaminsky down south. They were old-school farm boys that knew. They weren’t PhDs, they were farm men that got it. And so, I just had a great opportunity to spend about 20 years with those guys, mining their brains for that. But it all goes back to when the light bulb came on, and I said to my dad, he was real healthy at the time and I said, Dad, you know why we were killing all those ducks in that clear-cut? And he goes, because they was there. I said, well, I know because he was just a killer. I mean, he just liked to kill. But he says,  was it all that grass? I said, Yeah, Dad, it was all barnyard grass and smartweed, tooth cup, spangled top, you name it, red root sedge. All these things that now we’re even getting better at because we’re doing this metabarcoding DNA where we can take the feces out of the ducks, and they can spin it in a centrifuge out there at Arizona State, and say, ‘That duck ate red oak acorns. One actually ate water oak, willow oak acorns. He ate Pennsylvania smartweed, red root sedge, rice field sedge, and barnyard grass. And I go, well, if that’s what he’s eating, then that’s what he’s preferring.”

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. That’s exactly right.

Jody Pagan: Then I need to go out there to raise it. And so, here’s the best one, people think about chufa. Well, chufa is yellow nutsedge, okay. It’s just a cultivar of yellow nutsedge. So, years ago, George and I, we’d get out there and we’d raise this little rice crop in the corner of the Five Oaks, and we’d say, we got to get that permit out. We got to kill that damn red root sedge or that yellow nutsedge. So, one year, it broke out down at Siberia. And I mean, its 45 acres of the yellow nutsedge, belly button deep, and those ducks we don’t hunt, that’s the response, they get up and they roll over to the wood. We’re shooting these ducks, and their bills are so covered in mud that you can’t really recognize the end of their bill because it’s clay. And I go, they over in that south field at Siberia. So, we get out there and start digging around, and those tubers, it’s tens of thousands of tubers in that 45 acres. And I said, they’re rooting the chufa up. And so I said, I ain’t never spraying for chufa again. So now, not only emergent marsh and semi-permanent marsh and moist soil, but we raise strictly sedge fields.

Ramsey Russell: You know, I’ve seen that. I’ve seen sedge, nutsedge especially as easy a management technique as holding the water on till about right now, late July, always letting it come off late, and it’ll just come up almost solid nutsedge.

Hemi-Marshes as Global Habitat Models.

The world’s most productive marshes maintain a 50/50 mix of cover and open water, supporting a plethora of species, from ducks to gallinules.

Jody Pagan: Yeah, that old Fourth of July kind of has Arkansas latitude there at Stuttgart. We can run a little light disk over, we can put the planter down, we can add a little bit more, you know, plant it with a planter just to kind of build it up, flush it, one little shot of fertilizer and boom, you talking crazy. We got a couple of fields right now that are just crazy. And it seems the old turkey guys been doing that chufa for years, and they say we got to have a good sandy soil. No, you got to have a silty soil or a well-drained soil. And so, some of my chufa fields were some fields that just kept beating me up. I was like, I can’t get red root, I can’t get my Pennsylvania smartweed, lady’s thumb smartweed. What am I going to do here? Well, it was great for corn. Well, the coons ate it and the deer ate it. And I said, look, I ain’t doing no more corn in that field. So, we started doing that chufa, and we only put about three inches of water on that field, its zero grade. And we put about two inches, and they walk around on their feet and they root it up. And most of the time when we bring the new students each year that Ryan kind of raises, they go, you all have hogs. I said, we call them hogs down here, boys. But no, that’s the speckle-bellies and the mallards eating those tubers and that chufa in the yellow nutsedge patch. I think what we’re really getting at, as we have this conversation, is that mosaic. And what we’ve done is we’ve taken that mosaic away because we have land-leveled a lot of the ground. And I’m not against that as a production farmer, but some of it that floods out, you need to think through and go, you know, that floods from Cache River or White River or whatever. I need to say we need to do some other aspect of management on that, and maybe I can get a duck hunter to pay me a gazillion dollars for that. And then we keep our production farms. I had this dream a long time in my life that if we were here in the 1800s and we had us a soil scientist, and we said, this is what we’re going to clear to feed the world, and this is what we’re going to do for the wildlife, could you imagine what we would have today that wasn’t government assistance and us throwing dollars at stuff that drowned it out and it’d be pretty damn cool, man. It would be unbelievable. But we missed that. So now we mitigate loss of food, loss of habitat, through different things, like, you go to California, they have some of the finest moist soil areas in the world. I’ve been out there. I’ve spent 15 years out there working workshops. But it’s either that or its rice. There’s not really any willow wetlands. And that’s something we haven’t covered, is willow wetlands that are mostly 50/50 moist soil and willows with the invertebrate populations that are in the willows during January or February that the old mama hen needs so much calcium. Those are unbelievable. And a lot of our WRPs went too far in succession. And we’ve done a lot in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi on reclaiming, but leaving that kind of 50/50 kind of habitat. You go to your marsh, the most productive marsh in the world, whether it’s in Argentina or here, is a hemi-marsh, which means it’s 50% cover, 50% open water. And that means not just ducks. That means wading birds and gallinules and all these plethora of species that exist in those habitats. And what do we do? If we could drain it? By God, we got rice and soybeans on it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. And I think that’s the mentality of a lot of managers. I want to pick your brain a little bit. Recently, I don’t know, back in late June, Dr. Ryan Askren, Five Oaks Ag Research Education Center, you all’s director, talked about how at Five Oaks, you all favor historic Arkansas ecosystems as waterfowl habitat. Clearly, you think the same way. Could you elaborate on why you favor these natural habitats, their values, and their benefits? How do they compare to conventional modern-day row crops, sterile agricultural habitats?

Jody Pagan: Well, I’ll tell you that before 1900, we started really row cropping and, of course, that jumped exponentially in the 1960s, the Good Lord was feeding them ducks all that habitat way before there was ever a grain of crop.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Jody Pagan: And I go, you know, you ain’t going to beat the Good Lord about what kind of habitat a duck needs. The only thing that made the Mallard so specific on using agriculture was what? They’re generalists, not specialists. And so I’ve tried to instill that in Ryan and Doug as scientists that, look guys, if we got a block of woods, we want the best block of woods, and we want that heterogeneity among species as far as red oak and even, like Delta post oak, which we now know for sure, we always, I’ve shot them with them in it, but Delta post oak is a white oak group that the mallards and wood ducks do eat.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jody Pagan: And so we’re not going to say, all right, we just want red oaks. We’re going to cut the 270, which we did a thinner cut with Jeff and that bunch over there. They gave us some money to do a demonstration and said, we’re cutting every Delta post oak out of here because ducks don’t eat Delta post oak. Well, no, we didn’t take that approach. We took the approach of a lot of heterogeneity through the stand, trying to hit the target basal area, canopy openings to get regeneration, all those kinds of things. Well, here’s the other thing that, let me harp on this just a second,  not only does everybody just want to raise corn or milo or rice for the ducks, they don’t ever want to cut their woods. And look, the shop you grew up in, in Mississippi State, we know wildlife comes, habitat comes from using a chainsaw or a feller buncher.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Jody Pagan: And we have seen such drastic differences in usage in those areas for up to five to seven years, till we get canopy closure again, on doing forest management. I think I’ve probably been in damn near every green tree in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and at least I’ve been in the finest ones. And they go, what’s wrong, why is this 50 acres right here not producing? I said, the basal area is too high, species composition sucks. You’re leaving the water on too early. You know, all those kinds of things. And then we change that, and it just enlightens them and they go, I get it. OK, so I got them. And I’ve had some guys, 80 years old, that I changed their minds. And all it takes is not killing a dadgum duck in it, and then killing ducks in it, changes people’s minds.

Ramsey Russell: That’ll do it every time, Jody.

Jody Pagan: I tell everybody, I say, look, nobody calls me or any of my cohort of buddies that’s got cutters and track hoes and all that, until they don’t kill anything. I said, I’d like to come when we’re killing a few and we could make it better, or we could continuously make it better. But I also want to tell you this story. So, a big tract of land in Louisiana that me and one of my best friends bought is in Marksville, Louisiana. And all the Louisiana guys say, we don’t kill any mallards, everything’s going to Hades. And I say, look here, we’re fixing to build a farm. So 21 years ago this fall, I started working for my best buddy down there, and we started developing 15,000 acres next to Lake Ophelia Refuge. It’s, in my mind, the most historic refuge because that’s where Swampbuster was born. And that’s why they couldn’t clear the entire Delta. OK, Dr. Dale Hall, that was past director of Fish and Wildlife, he was the first biologist on that tract when they started this — remember, regulatory wetlands. OK. So we start this journey, Ramsey. And so it’s 6,000 acres of zero-grade rice. And then they see cypress breaks and willow breaks and some more soil areas that we develop. And the hunting is phenomenal. And people are trying to pay an absorbent amount of money for that land. And there wasn’t hardly a duck on it because it was row crop drained or row crop crawfish, right? The crawfish, you know, you got 18 inches of water. Well, you ain’t feeding ducks in 18 inches of water because 82% of the water birds in the world, being a duck or a shorebird, feed in 10 inches or less. So let’s don’t go there, but let’s think about them. So Paul Link, good friend of ours, Chad Corville, we wanted to do a banding project about five years ago. And so nobody else had any mallards, so we went to do, guys, what we’ve been working on this. We banded some mallards. We put a backpack on them, put a backpack on a note, put 40 backpacks. That duck got up in February and came to Five Oaks without stopping. One of them did. Then that duck got up and went to Calhoun, Missouri, where I worked for Johnny and John Paul Morris on their place there in Calhoun, Missouri. Then that duck got up and went on up to the pothole. He made a couple of hop skips and jumps on the way. He went to Swan Lake. You know where that is? Chillicothe, Missouri. Epic place. Low Jeff Saron, all that bunches up there. OK, Habitat Flats, all up through that area. All right. So then another old boy’s down in Texas, one of my other clients, best friend, OK, got three best friends. All we do is drive a jet, shoot ducks, shoot out. That’s our deal. Best friends. So Bart Ballard, he’s a scientist down there in Texas, and he says, I want to band some pintails and mallards. You know, you see 10 mallards down there, it’s a big deal. But we got plenty of pintail. I said, let’s see where they go, because I got my buddy Barrett. You heard about that? That’s Neosho County, Kansas. That’s over there in that sweet spot, Brown Roy. And then we got another old boy that was the lead guitarist for Mister named Steve Ferris.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I know, Steve too. Yep.

Jody Pagan: He’s up there, Sakshaks was, Nebraska. So I worked up there with him a whole bunch over the last 20 years. So I call him Rocco. So OK, we got us some mallards. They went from DuQuoin, Marchville Louisiana, made a track over Winchester, down southeast Arkansas, where the guy’s talking about ain’t no duck, goes to Five Oaks, then he goes to Johnny Morris’s. All right. Then we got these pintails that we got tagged and got the backpacks on. So that duck jumps up off of Alan Williams’s St. Crisp Ranch, goes to Barrett, sadly, Moisture, in Neosho County, Kansas. I said, “Whoa, man.” I said, “Whew.” So a month later, he jumps up and he goes to Rocco’s hole up there in Garden County, Nebraska. I said, this ain’t no bragging on Jody, but whatever we’re doing with these weeds, these ducks are jumping states and going to the same places that we’re living in, managing. So we’re doing something right.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jody Pagan: And then Askren and Osborne start taking the poo poo out of them. And we got red roots edge. We got pink smartweed. We got, you know, Pennsylvania smartweed, lady’s thumb smartweed, toothcup. We got all signal grass. We got all these plants that these ducks are selecting, and we’re raising them all on all these places.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Jody Pagan: So, I tell everybody, if you want to lose, grow corn. And I’m going to raise weeds and win. I’ll preface that with you.

Ramsey Russell: Now, I’m going to ask you this. You made a great point, but why? What are the benefits that you’re looking for? What are those ducks getting in terms of benefit and value? What is the value to a duck? What’s the value to a habitat manager in growing weeds versus growing all corn on these alligator dallon type soils?

Jody Pagan: Okay, well, it’s real simple. One’s money, okay? I’m raising all those weeds for pennies on the dollar, and they’re raising them for $10 per dollar, raising corn, rice, and milo, and those type plants. Now, we’ll get to the end of this because I’ve got a punch at the end. But here’s the deal, the mallards, the pintails, the species that we manage for, there’s vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and bugs that are out there on the terrestrial-aquatic side, right on that feathered edge, that they’re getting, which they can never get from a carbohydrate. This is from my buddy, Phil Covington, God rest his soul. If you ate pizza every meal of your life, you’d die. And if all the duck ate was corn, he’s going to die. Okay? So, if he can’t find everything that he needs in a local area, what we call juxtaposition among habitats, in a very tight circle, then he’s going to leave and find those resources when they’re available. So, if it’s warm, hell, he’s going to stay up there in Missouri. I think I helped them old boys with 100,000 acres just there in Granddaddy River Bottom with those Doug Helmers and that bunch up there, Bill Moore, so ponds. Well, if it’s warm and he’s got plenty of feed, only that DNA in that duck, that’s that early tribe, is going to come down here and exist. And we get a push, and then you go, “Oh my God, we’re overrun with ducks.” Well, yeah, that’s the way it works. You’re only going to go as far as you have to unless you’re that early tribe of ducks. And I’m telling you, we need to focus on better habitat, more rest areas. I tell everybody this today, if you rest your ducks and you feed your ducks, you’re going to win. I was just in Shreveport yesterday. We’ve been developing a 4,000-acre property. It just started with 5,000, now its 20,000, now its 25,000 ducks living there. All winter it was cow pasture, Ramsey, cow pasture. Put wells in, put structures in, built levees, moist soil, and row crop mixture, and they live there. And he goes, what if somebody builds 2,000 acres over there? I said, well, if they’ll go with our program, we’re going to hold twice as many ducks. But they won’t, they’re going to raise only hot food. And when it’s hot, you’re going to win all day, every day.

Ramsey Russell: And we got a lot hotter winters and colder winters here lately.

Jody Pagan: It is. It’s real weird, you know. We got down to seven year before last, froze everything up. We’re beating and banging and all that. And you get a big push down, and then when it lightens up, they’re going to start moving back up. We watched them. Here’s the beauty of what Aspirin and Doug are doing, and Koen over there in Tennessee, because I manage some land over there in Tennessee. You see them hunker down on those state refuges in moist soil, which is that passive method that you were talking about, like pull the boards and hope for the best, and then flood it back up. Well, they congregated in tens of thousands over there, in that south of Real foot, and just held. And then there’s clubs. You know, if you go to Tennessee, what is it? Square forties of corn? It’s corn, corn. I did a thing with DU for the director of Tennessee. And over there, it’s real ridge and swale topography. So, it’s almost like, you’ve got a Tinsaw alligator dallon. It’s a different soil over there, but you know what I’m saying? It’s ridge as well. I said, let’s raise the bottom half in weeds, and the shoulders, you all can plant all the craft you all to planted all, I don’t care because by the time you get up to there, it’s going to be cold in January, and they can eat the hot foods. But all during November and December, till Christmas, we’ll be managing moist soil, and the ducks are going to be here. That sounds good.

Ramsey Russell: I like that idea, I like that approach. That’s kind of like working with nature instead of against it. Now, you keep talking about these Halloween mallards. Mississippi Flyway mallards are interesting because they’re not all the same. There’s a subset of those mallards that are going to fly south to historic winter grounds, late October, boom. They’re coming to Arkansas, parts of Mississippi. Wherever they’re going, they’re coming like a bus gauge, boom, here they come. And based on some recent research, when Heath Hagee was on here talking about it not too long ago, 60 years of band data, a lot of the Mississippi Flyway mallards they’re seeing are beginning to trend 500 miles north of the historic area. So, a lot of birds that went down to Marksville, Louisiana, not all of them, but a lot of them, are migrating later and staying further north. And it puts them really around St. Louis somewhere and right around there. But as we got to talking, me and Heath, you know, it’s like, it’s interesting that back in the1960s, a lot of my Greater Canada come down south. They figured out, hey, we can sit on ponds and rivers and heated, whatever, those industrial waste ponds, and go out there and feed in harvested corn and mallards can do the same thing. But what’s so interesting about that 60-year data set is that a lot of your wetland obligate-dependent type species are coming further south earlier. All your teal, your gadwalls, and I love a dang gadwall ducks, your shovelers, your divers, they’re all starting to come because of the conversion at the landscape level of those wetland-type, marsh-like habitats being drained and tiled to plant row crop agriculture, which has left them without an alternative but to come south looking for it. And so, then again working with nature instead of against it, whether it’s a semi-permanent marsh or some form of wetland like that, or, I know gadwalls, to get down in my part of the world, they love a cypress break with all the coontail, all the coontail moss. I mean, favoring some habitats like that seems like a good strategy beyond the mallard duck. And I know in Arkansas, the mallard duck is the end-all, be-all. And lord have mercy, I love a mallard duck above all else, but I will go after gadwalls and wood ducks if that’s what’s there. And I begin to wonder if maybe, this far south, I shouldn’t put some eggs in those baskets and start managing for some of those species to come down. You know, that’s my thoughts on it.

Jody Pagan: Oh, no. I mean, it’s no question about it that, you know, a lot of the WRP, we needed to leave 10 to 20% semi-permanent to permanent marsh and focus on the coontail and the duckweed type. You know, try to mimic or emulate those cypress breaks and those tupelo breaks, like over in Mississippi. And to me, we’re duck managers. Well, we’re all duck managers. We’re not just mallard managers. We see a great deal of diversity in there. And what I’ve seen in 30 years is that even though we may be managing a green pond, which is what Paul Dixon, I don’t know if you’ve ever been involved in this incredible man. He’s got an average that’s one of none. Okay. He actually raised some lesser scaup bellies that nobody else had ever hatched an egg out of in their life, and he put photo lights out and made them breed. Okay. And so, he’s right there at Shreveport. I’ve worked with him for 20 years, and he calls them green ponds. And so he loves sago pondweed. And people are like, “What the heck is sago pondweed?” But he literally plants sago pondweed. And there’s duck potato in those ponds, in the upper reaches of it, and there’s coontail and many of the submergent vegetation types that the gadwalls and blackjacks love. And, you know, I was like, some people are mallard snobs. A lot of Arkansans are mallard snobs. And he’s not. He’s like, “Alright, today we’re going out here and shooting gadwalls and jacks.” You know, all the ducks need love.

Ramsey Russell: I want to ask you this question. You talk about juxtaposition. You do plant some agriculture. There is, in a greater wetlands complex, value in having agriculture, be it rice or dirty corn, dirty rice, dirty corn. There’s value in that, especially on those cold days, planting them sides or something like that you’re talking about. But, you know, when you start working on a lot of duck club properties. Water runs downhill, it collects in the lower places, that’s where your ducks are. Some of the lowest places on topography, generally speaking, here in the Deep South. And so you’ve got site limitations. And some of these limitations, though we talk, beating up on them alligator and down on soils ain’t worth nothing except for holding water, you know, on these heavy clay soils, these buckshot, man, it’s hard to carve out a living. The wetlands reserve program was built on the back of the fact that it’s hard to farm marginal farmland if you do it for a living, let alone if you’re just a regular dude trying to grow some duck habitat. It’s very dope. You got severe site limitations. I wanted to ask you this question. You mentioned something very important recently about juxtaposition of these different habitat types. How important is it that my wetland complex be just on my property, or should I get just a little bit higher up, like a mower duck looking down on earth and think, you know, where does my property and those site limitations and what I can best produce, what those soils are capable of producing, what I’m capable of making them produce cost-effectively, relative to my surrounding landscape by the 15 miles radius? Because you know what, the way I look at it, Jody, if I’ve got some neighbors over here that’s got two foot higher ground than me, that can grow corn, that they can flood. Why don’t I do something and focus on another aspect of that complex? Why don’t I offer those ducks something different? How important is that?

Resetting Habitat: The Role of Agriculture in Wetland Restoration.

Hunter management, water management, vegetation management. Vegetation management covers everything from agriculture to mature hardwoods, but I want to put it in the best place at the best time that’s conducive to provide everything in a close proximity. I use a ten-mile circle radius in my juxtaposition among habitats.

Jody Pagan: Dude, it is the key. And when I tell you that I went last year, when we killed 100 more than the year before, on the bad, hot year, we were 82% on the agricultural portion, which people don’t understand, but agriculture is the first phase of moist soil and semi-permanent and permanent wetland management. It’s the start of it. And if we want to go back from that semi-permanent to scrub-shrub, marsh, we go back to agriculture, which means we set everything back to zero.Okay, so what you’re saying here, I would say 2008 or 2009, maybe 2010, Chuck Sites and I did a duck management 365, and I hit, I tried to put the cornerstones of waterfowl management in a triangular box and say there’s vegetation management, water management, and hunter management. That’s the three cornerstones, just like we do in DMAP. And what I want everybody to do on each property is fill each one of those spaces. Hunter management, water management, vegetation management. Vegetation management covers everything from agriculture to mature hardwoods, but I want to put it in the best place at the best time that’s conducive to provide everything in a close proximity. I use a ten-mile circle radius in my juxtaposition among habitats. And so if Joe Blow is growing 400 acres of corn across the ditch, guess what? I ain’t raising no corn, because I’m keeping them right there in that little tight circle. So on our properties, we try to lean anywhere from 75-25 on the open lands, from hot to moist soil. And then the rest of the whole landscape is our green tree reservoirs. So I think a 70-30 mix between agriculture and woods is kind of the epitome of mallard habitat in Arkansas, even present day. Of course, historically, it was about 70-30. Why? 30% was in beaver ponds up and down the White Cache and Biometa and all that, and there’d be a deadening. And I can send you a picture from Belzoni, Mississippi, last week. There’s a beaver deadening, and they cut the dam on it in February, and its barnyard grass and smartweed, 7 feet tall. I said, “Alan, plug it back up, it’s going to be good.” So that’s what God intended, that’s how beavers kind of operated, Pre-settlement, 30% of the landscape was in moist soil, emergent marsh kind of habitat. 70% was in the extent 24 million acres of bottomland hardwood. That’s why WRP and all the people that own them, that’s why 70% planted the bottomland hardwood and 30% moist soil, because that’s a known scientific fact. Back from the days looking at aerial photography and even at the General Land Office survey, they would go in and anything like a prairie, they would map that. And you would see, I’ve got some of them that we did some reports on for the Corps that it showed, like when the Land Office survey, they surveyed the sections, and in each quarter section, they took a witness tree, or they described the habitat. And so you know what that looks like as far as township ranges, sections. And that’s what the landscape looked like in the 1800s. And that was before rice, right. Okay. At least it was in Stuttgart, Mississippi, Louisiana. I worked on a place on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, and the first year of rice was 1778. You remember when we had our independence day?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jody Pagan: So that fella cleared all that back up. He was the fourth generation, and he bought the farm back, and we raised moist soil over there. And I’m going to tell you, there’s 100% corn, those red redheads, jacks, black ducks, and they get a little bit of everything. But it’s just up from the Santee in South Carolina. I’ve worked there a whole lot. And we raising red weed over in Wilmington, North Carolina. And they got W ditches in those moist soil areas. And so we raised moist soil down the W ditch, and on the shoulders, we raise a little corn, and it’s difficult because of salinity problems, overdose. But, so we flood early up the W ditches, shoot teal pintail, all the dabblers. Then when we bring it up to the deep water, we shoot the divers. So what you’re saying is, take what you have and work with it, not against it, and that’s going to win every time, every time.

Ramsey Russell: Every time. I guarantee you it is.

Jody Pagan: If you got a sandy field that will hold water for a week, like the west side of Five Oak, put you some chufas in there because they going to come, and they going to grit, and they going to eat chufas all at the same time. But nobody is connected to the land –

Ramsey Russell: See, I’m just fixing to lead up to that. You make a great point. Because I wonder sometimes, with a lot of the habitat I see, which, man, look, it’s kind of like it costs as much money to feed a bad dog as a good dog, you know what I’m saying? And it costs a lot of money to go out and spend your time and your money doing any kind of habitat, just cranking up that tractor and doing anything on the landscape. So shouldn’t we focus it on the best opportunities that we have for attracting ducks? And so the million-dollar question is, what are those? And I’m just increasingly in this conversation has even made me more so convinced that the closer we begin to mimic those historic ecosystems, the better off we’re going to be. Because it’s a very limited resource on the landscape.

Jody Pagan: I tell everybody, it’s the limiting factor. So if you’re in a landscape, look in that circle and say, “What’s the limiting factor?” Which is what we did in Tennessee. I swear to goodness, its 40-acre clubs or 80-acre clubs. It’s not like Maryland, I’ve worked there a lot, and it’s a five-acre club and a ten-acre club. And they lost their weeds up there because I had been up there 15 years previous. And we just sent Brandon up to kind of start that process over. What they’re doing is they’re spraying those pre-emergents on the corn, and they deplete the seed bank.

Ramsey Russell: Exactly.

Jody Pagan: And so, listen, if you’re running a duck club and you spray pre-emergent, you’re setting yourself up for disaster.

Ramsey Russell: Setting it up for failure.

Jody Pagan: I have fired a miniature biologist that worked for me who sprayed pre-emergent on a milo or cornfield. Because what if we have one of those 15-inch rains in June or July. Guess what? We can’t go back. We can’t go back with millet. We ain’t going to get any weeds back because of that pre-emergent. So stay away from the pre-emergents on your impoundments. That’s a no-no. I just went through that with a guy over in Boswell, Oklahoma. But kind of the premise is this, we watch our moist soils progress and our green ponds, which I call green ponds, are emergent marsh from when we dewater or leave it going until the 1st of June around my birthday. And that’s Mid-South. So go two weeks, every hundred miles south, two weeks earlier, or two weeks later as you go north, as you dewater. And what we’re looking at is, are we having invasive problems, Alligator weed, coffee bean, or cocklebur that’s just off the charts, that we can’t control. That is when you plant the agricultural crop. Okay. And that can be millet, milo, corn, or rice. That’s what’s in my toolbox all the time. Chi-wapu, golden millet, Jack millet, brown top millet, those kinds of millets later. And that’s what we’re doing today, right before I got in here, and is planting the last of the millet crops. The worms are crazy. We’ve had the airplane up for three days, besiege, nailing all the worms because of the issues we’re having. You go real wet, then get real dry, and you have that problem. But the only reason we set that wetland back was because we had invasive plant problems or fertility problems.

Ramsey Russell: When does it become a problem, Jody? I’ll just take a sideline on this. When does coffee weed become a problem? Because, man, I’m telling you, give me a moist soil impoundment like I’m used to hunting over here in Mississippi, and this guy 40 or 50%, I’m all in on coffee weed. But now, if it’s solid, I’ve got a problem.

Jody Pagan: When it goes over 50%. Remember that Hemi-Mars 50%-50%. When you go over 50% and you get 100% coverage, then you get no desirables underneath. But if you have that 50-50 patchwork, it’s almost like a button-willow thicket, right?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jody Pagan: Mallards love a button-willow thicket. So I don’t get tore up on and you can do top mowing if it’s early on. You can actually cut the coffee beans’ heads off with the bush hog instead of spraying Blazer or 2-4-D, depending on where you are. You don’t want to spray 2-4-D in cotton country, but you can deal with that cosmetically with a bush hog. But once you exceed that 50%, you get 75%, 80%, 90%, or 100% coverage, then it shades out the sprinkle-top, toothcup, barnyard, any other thing. But, no, I’ve always said this, Ramsey, A lot of people have asked me, “Is coffee weed bad?” And I said, “Well, it depends on the percentage of coverage.” It’s just like a forest. If it’s too thick and you don’t get sunlight to the ground, then you don’t get groceries.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Jody Pagan: And so what I want to do is deal with those plants as I watch them. That’s why now we take care of 16,000 acres at Stuttgart, seven different clubs other than Five Oaks. Because you got to be there every day, man. Yeah, we used to always talk about cotton scouts. Well, you got to scout your weeds every day. I was down at Georgetown Sunday after church at one of my buddy’s places, Fowler’s Point, a historic place that I built in 1996. Bob Miller owns it, and David Thames and some other fellas. Look, the armyworms were eating the coffee beans. That’s how it went from drought to flood to drought, and we’re dealing with armyworms in a capacity that’s just insane. But so what I’m saying is, you got to frequent your property. If you pull the boards, like you were talking about some old boy back in the early nineties, he said, “Just pull the boards and see what happens.” Well, we know that’s not exactly how to do it. But if you don’t go down there except once every three weeks and check on your weeds, the chances of you having a good productive food plot for the ducks are pretty low. So you got to stay on top of it. And that really, that kind of window I’m talking about, from June 1st till the 4th of July, you got to make some decisions on whether to set it back with tillage or let it go, spray it, irrigate it, fertilize it. And listen, we had some really phenomenal results the last couple of years where we’re looking at fertility in these moist soil units. And Kevin helped me over there at Belzoni. But it was literally, they hadn’t put potash on the farm in 20 years. And so the phosphorus levels were so low. And what you really need to know about moist soil is that it’s not just the N, P, and K, but it’s also the molybdenum, it’s the manganese, it’s the potassium. It’s so many micronutrients that we’re dealing with because, understand, most of these WRPs were the poorest ag land in the world, that’s grounded out. So if you were raising beans on it, what I call it, they mined the ground. So they never put a soil amendment back. So we were seeing this red top agrostis. It’s a little grass, and it’s very low-quality food for the ducks. We went in, we did tillage, we got all the bushes off of it, we went in and did soil sampling, we put potash and lime back. And, Ramsey, when I tell you, magna cum laude, freaking graduation of smartweed, barnyard grass, toothcup, signal grass, everything under the sun for the ducks. And they had a banner year last year, and it was soil fertility. So as you get the ebb and flow of the floods, that’s different ground. That ground is just above that floodplain. Because, you know, you get a lot of nutrients coming in and out, transporting in and out in a floodplain. But this was just above that floodplain, and they were disking it and farming ag. And then they wanted to have productive moist soil. And so we said, “Look, let’s look at the soil fertility.” I did one over in Oklahoma a month ago, and I was like, “Well, it’s going to be low in P.” Hell, it was off the charts. So, you don’t know until you study it. But there’s a science to this, it’s not just growing a bunch of weeds. I fought those weeds rice farming, and now I know how to take care of them on the backside. So the other thing is, yes, we talked about dirty corn. We talked about dirty rice. I’ve seen some things on podcasts, very misleading on dirty corn. Understand that we use Roundup Ready corn, Pioneer, you know, or Lando, Asgrow, whatever. We’re going to use a crop. It’s going to be a tall field corn. It’s BT-resistant so the worms don’t get it. We’re going to use Roundup, but we’re going to make that crop of corn before the weeds ever come. And I’ve seen things on podcasts that said, “Well, why would you let grass grow in your corn?” Well, I’m not letting it grow until it’s already cured out. So back about 15 years ago, I said, “I’m going to grow millet in a cornfield after I grow the corn.” So I did some skip-row planting. In the bottom box, I’d skip-row plant it and I’d have an alley. I’d spray it two times, and sometimes three, and then it comes around or I irrigated that cornfield after the corn’s done, and I blew up jungle rice underneath it, which is one of three or four, well, actually four species of barnyard grass that we deal with and, unbelievable. Dry, hot year, Duncan and I shot 700 ducks in that field, and it was because they were eating the grass. It was February before they got on the corn.

Ramsey Russell: Golly, wow.

Jody Pagan: You just got to be processing. And the best thing that we could tell anybody on this podcast is work with it, not against it, because you’re not going to beat Mother Nature. She’s going to beat you up every single time. So if she’s giving you really good moist soil, then put your corn over in another patch that sucks if your buddy next door is not growing 400 acres and spending $400, $500 or $600 an acre.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Jody Pagan: I mean, that’s what really got us at Five Oaks to push me to go more was I had a limited budget. This is the money we take in, and we’ve got all these projects. We’ve got to manage for 10,000 acres of habitat, and, you know, 10,000 times 400, that’s pretty serious money. So, we started leaning towards those weeds, and the ducks have responded with the warmer weather. And, I mean, it’s been real good to us. But not only there, but Marksville, Neosho County, Missouri, Kansas. We can rattle it off. I’m not practicing after 30 years, and I’m sure not being prideful or smart aleck. It works, it works.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I do want you to wag your tail just a little bit now. Come on, I’ll ask you a question. I read something online about the number of properties, the number of landowners, the amount of acres, and then your lifetime goal you hope to achieve before you die. Talk about, just real briefly, talk about how many club owners and landowners, private land properties, and the amount of acreage, and what your final goal is before you die that you’ve been involved in doing this kind of stuff.

Jody Pagan: My long-term goal has always been a million acres, and that’s not only restored, but managed and consulted on. And whenever I turned 51 that would have been in 2023, I met the million-acre mark across the world that I’ve worked on. But as far as restoration, I hope we’ve been working very diligently to get at least 10,000 acres a year, and we’re doing really good on that. I told somebody in that Waterfowl Hall of Fame thing, I said I’d like to be known as the guy that anybody that wants to build a pond, build a property, that we go to. We got one last year at Stuttgart, we’re still working on it right now, 800 acres of non-molested CRP that’s 15 years old that came out. And we’ve developed that thing into something that I think will be the future because it’s on higher ground and it doesn’t flood. And so, we’ve done that in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Arkansas now, where we took 30-year-old, 15 to 30-year-old CRPs, turned them into the new green trees, do the forestry work, do the drainage, do the pump-in, pump-out kind of scenarios where they’re healthy. Because we’ve had such a hard run with the Corps, with the withdrawals on the dams hurting the timber in Black River, White River, Cash, where we’re losing enormous amounts of timber, red oak timber that the mallards come for and the wood ducks. The only way we can replace them is to put them up higher on the terrace and artificially create that riverine system. And they’ve just responded like, unbelievable, like that 800 acres had never been flooded, except for during rice culture. So, it’s been laying there 15 years non-flooded, its 4 miles north of Five Oaks. Guess what? The 23rd day of December, 10,000 ducks rained down on that thing, and they spent the rest of the winter. The guy’s an awesome guy. We never hunted it. We let them imprint. That’s another thing people don’t understand about new ponds, is that it can take three to five years to really ancestrally imprint those ducks on a new property. But what do people do? They go build a new property, and they start shooting the heck out of them. And some of my more patient clients spend time to imprint them. That’s what we did in Marksville. It was ten years before we hunted ducks. We let those ducks get happy. And that’s because that’s my best friend, he’s sitting there going, if you say it, I’m going to do it.

Ramsey Russell: That imprint is so important. I remember you telling me one time, you go in and do some major habitat changes. Shelter wood cuts, doing cuttings on timber is good, but it might not be an immediate response of good. And it could take two or three years before those ducks get back in there. And I’ve wondered sometimes, if you keep jacking around with your habitat and doing the wrong thing and the ducks ain’t showing up like they used to, will they ever come back? I mean, you know, if you’ve got this property being heavily trafficked and mismanaged, and you’ve gone from killing 700 to 1,000 ducks a year to 300, will they ever come back.

Jody Pagan: So I’ll give you a good example of that. Down near Texarkana, on the Red River, I renovated a property with David Toms and Allen Williams. And we were averaging 14 ducks a group a day on that property. Which, in that part of the world, is pretty good hunting. It ain’t Stuttgart, but it’s good hunting. And, uh, the next-door neighbors bought the tract there, or some guys bought the tract next door. They rode the wheelers up and down the levees all day, every day that we sold because of that disturbance. I think disturbance, see, people go, “Are you doing all this moist soil?” But the properties I’m most successful with, our disturbance is very low.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Jody Pagan: And that’s because we’ve dealt in the last seven, eight years with some really old mean ducks. And you and I hunted those mean ducks in the 1980s. And these new fellas don’t know nothing about mean ducks. If you pick your duck call up, you lose. You better be where they want to be.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. That’s right.

Jody Pagan: And so, I think there’s a lot to that, Ramsay. I would hang my hat on disturbance and food right now. In our era, right now, if I had to tell anybody, I’d say, if we’re resting ducks and we’ve got plenty of feed, you do what you need to do, get in, get out. Everybody says, “Well, I just hate these moral elitist guys at Stuttgart. Let’s shoot them by seven.” Listen, I’m going to tell you the reason I retired from guiding. When I turned 50, every time I went to the Raft Creek hole with George, we had this epic habitat. Siberia was all red weed. We had a few hot food fields on the other side of Raft Creek. They were trading. And I killed a limit of mallards every time I took somebody to the hole. And that’s not a lie. That was my life goal. I ain’t never done that, all the years of hunting. And I said, “George, I’m done guiding. I’ll guide 15-20 days a year, but not every day” because I met my goal. And I say, why do you understand that, I think we hunted it 39 times that year, and 30-something, 35 days, 32 days, we were done by 7:15. Then we went to 08:00, then that last day or two, we went to 08:30, dang near 09:00. And it was over.

Ramsey Russell: Yep.

Jody Pagan: Because those ducks are trading back in that woods and getting happy from 07:00 to 09:00, you know, and it was like, it was resting ducks. It was just in a different capacity.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Jody Pagan: A lot of clubs will hunt, what, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then leave them alone on the weekends. You know, there’s all kinds of variations of that. But resting ducks and feeding ducks, good groceries, a balanced diet. It’d be like if you could, in your mind, draw out and go, “I’m building a buffet here. I got green potatoes, cornbread, turnip greens, purple hull peas, chicken fried steak, and chicken.” If I can build that from what a duck eats, and I’ve got it in close proximity, I’m going to win today. And I think the most valuable club, people talk about shorter seasons, or the ducks aren’t doing this and ducks aren’t, well, look, if you build that hub, because if you ever study the telemetry, those ducks, some of them hop skip, and jump. Some of them jump big distances. Some of them will radiate in a small circle. But I’ll guarantee you this, it’s always going to be where all those habitats are in real close proximity because they don’t have to burn as much gas. People don’t think about a duck getting up. If you burn gas to go get something that’s not there, you’re not going to go back and get it. That’s how ducks work. People go, man, there was a thousand ducks in this woods yesterday morning. I come back today, there’s not any.” You know why? Wasn’t no food there, they figured it, they sample, uh, teal are the best at sampling, but mallards are samplers, so when they find it, they go until it costs too much to go there, than what they get back. And so we got to wake up every morning go, I got to think just like a duck. And so that’s kind of how I’ve lived my whole career, managing and hunting this. What are they going to think this morning, I’ve even taken woods, and a cold front comes in, and we’re going to get a couple tenths of rain. Start the pump right ahead of the front, and when that skinny water gets in the woods six inches deep, but it looks like it rained six inches deep, the whole rest pond gets up and goes into that woods. And that’s not a lie. That’s emulating what Mother Nature does.

Ramsey Russell: It goes back to something you said earlier about, what you just said it, thinking like a duck. And I wonder sometimes, and we get a guy to get up every morning and think like a duck. And I wonder how many just regular, well-intended managers, habitat managers, think like a duck instead of thinking like what their neighbour does or what they’ve heard their buddy did or what somebody else did. You see what I’m saying? Oh, I got to make habitat, I got to pour it out of a sack. And I’m going to ask you this question, you work with a lot of landowners, over a million acres under your belt managed. What are some of the most common mistakes and pitfalls of just regular duck club habitat managers?

Jody Pagan: Too much hot food, not incrementally flooding, meaning keeping your water depths right. Not stagger flooding, which means feed a field, let them eat it out. Flood another field, let them eat it out. Flood another field, let them eat it out. Where I see a lot of clubs in my career, they go in and go, well, I mean, it’s a duck club, so they pump everything level full. Well, one in most woods, they cover it up. If a mallard varies, if he reeally thinks every day that I want to eat in toenail deep to ten inches of water, and I’ve got it four feet deep to run a motor, then I just covered up whatever third or 50% of that woods that the ducks would never even get to use. So that’s the incrementally flooding. Too much hot food means no weeds, no marsh, deep flooded woods, and they’ve got this whole flood everything to the gills mentality. That’s probably the worst thing I’ve seen, Ramsay. That’s the worst thing. They’ll have a water line on the boat dock at the green tree, and by the first day of duck season, hell or high water, that dang thing’s got to be at the water level.

Ramsey Russell: But at the same time, you know, like, uh, maybe in a green tree reservoir, maybe in some of that, uh, real zero to 1% grade habitat. Man, you start getting over here to Mississippi Delta, where you’ve got a six-foot riser holding ten acres. It’s a bowl. And, it’s like my idea would be, if I’m going to manage some of that water, let me get it in early season. Let me get some of this low-lying ground, early, early season or hold it, hold it permanent, semi-permanent, and then come duck season, I’m going to flood up the edges, where it’s shallow on the edges,

Jody Pagan: Work the shoulders, work the feathered edge.

Ramsey Russell: Work them shoulders see that makes sense to me. It just depends on what kind of habitat I’m dealing with, which I’m going to ask you, I said I was going to ask you. That’s going to be my last question. But I’m going to ask you this right now. How important is early season water?

Concerns About Delayed Season Openers

Later duck season openers risk neglecting early migratory species like teal, wigeon, gadwall, and shovelers, which rely on early habitat availability.

Jody Pagan: Well, you know, last year the agencies tried to have a later opener, and I told you that my biggest fear in my career as a duck hunter was to take care of the early tribe of ducks. So I’ve always, from teal season, there’s water on Five Oaks. Halloween, there’s water at Five Oaks, and there’s water all the way to May. And they’re stagger flooded all the way from when I told you in October, all the way to the end of duck season, it’s the private owners are the ones that provide that habitat. And nothing, the photo migrators like the wigeon, gadwall, shovelers, and the teal, nothing’s more important. Are we going to just cut off their water? Because look, you know, not everybody’s Five Oaks. They’re going to go, well, hell, season doesn’t start for a month, so I won’t start pumping. Maybe I can get some rainwater. It will be catastrophic. Last year I went down there, I won’t drag this out, but last year at New Year’s, I went down to Oak Grove Club down in Lacassine Parish. And that bad drought, you’ve seen it. You know people. Okay, the marsh was dry, though, of all my years, the highest count of pintails at Five Oaks at Stuttgart has always been Halloween. Anywhere from the 1st of October to Halloween. I mean, if you wanted to come and have a Disneyland look at pintails, it’s unbelievable. That’s what happens when that cold front hits. They push on down to Lacassine. And the marsh down at Whiteville, at Gueydan and all, that’s where they live. Ramsay, when I tell you there were 20,000 pintails at Christmas at Five Oaks. And I go, golly. So I get in the truck, me and the wife, we drive down there, we hunt the marsh, have a good hunt, kill a few teal and some mottled ducks and whatnot. But I’m like, where are the pintails? I mean, I thought I came down here to kill some pintails. Because they’re in Arkansas because there are no resources. So you see my point? If we don’t provide that early transient, that’s transients, those photo migrators are transients. We’re keeping them healthy on their flight down to the marsh in Louisiana. So I don’t know if a lot of these people on here understand the hydrology of the United States, but when we’re dry, the further you go north, it’s wetter, wetter, wetter, wetter, wetter. And it works its way down because the reason the mallards came in November, December, January, and February to Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, is because that’s when the Mississippi Valley was flooded. So they’re opportunistic. That’s when the resources were available. And so that tribe of ducks has learned that from Halloween to Thanksgiving, those early months they got hooked on the rice. Back in the 1900s, they’re coming down, thinking, I’m going to follow the water, right? And so it’s our job to have that water for those ducks as they come down because they’ve basically imprinted on that habitat. And let me tell you this story. We had a board of engineers’ green tree reservoir that I worked on for a decade. And the club members, they said, we got to leave it dry one out of three, or three out of ten, okay, One out of three years or three out of ten years, right? So they flooded it seven consecutive years. The Corps came in and said, you’re going to leave this green tree dry, or we’re going to prosecute you. So we let it dry three consecutive years. That was a 1,200-mallard-a-year woods. That seven years, it was kind of poor, a little better, a little better, all the way to that seventh year, 1,200 mallard ducks dead in that little block of woods. We let it dry three. George leased it where we didn’t have any neighbours, you know. It took me four years to get them back in there.

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Jody Pagan: So understand, this is my other thinking, and Kaminski kind of got me thinking this way, years ago. Those ducks come down to the same ponds the same week or so, those early tribes, and they’re the core. They kind of set a central hub. So they’ll go to Hampton’s Reservoir, they’ll go up to Big Ditch, they’ll go down to Radella, but that’s the central. And the reason I go to that is I hunted Georgetown for ten years every day, and I never killed a band. And I go, why are we never killing any bands here? All right, so the tribes that were banded, like Arkansas County—Arkansas is the highest band recovery in the country. And that circle, wherever that bunch of ducks is tagged up there in Saskatoon, they’re coming right there. You see, its families, cohorts, tribes, its cohorts of ducks. And so when we took out water, that they’d been coming there every year for seven years, and they go, Oh, where’s home, they panic, and they move over to Hampton’s or back to Five Oaks or wherever it is. And they say, hey, the resources aren’t there. We tagged, I was in on the first satellite work in 2005 with Game and Fish, with Naylor and Mark Hooks, Mark Barbee, some of those guys. We shot the cannon, picked the ducks up, had 400, put backpacks on them. The commissioners named them after their kids. I had that same duck, look, 77956, came to the same pond. I caught her the next two falls, the same day.

Ramsey Russell: Golly, wow.

Jody Pagan:     I said, whoa. There’s some deep migratory things going on here that we got no idea about. And so my point to that is some of those ducks, they’re coming to the same place the same year, and they’re looking for home. And you better have home for them. If you don’t have home, they’re going to go find home. That’s the way they work. They got to get up every morning to make a living. We’re the ones trying to kill them.

Ramsey Russell: Jody, that’s a good note to end on. Tell everybody how they can get in touch with you.

Jody Pagan: You can call me at 870-830-5742 or email me at jpagan@eco-sps.com

Ramsey Russell: There you go.

Jody Pagan: I love, I love working with human beings.

Ramsey Russell: I know you do Jody. I tell you what, I am greatly, greatly appreciative for you jumping into air conditioning instead of out in that hot field today and sharing your wisdom with us.

Jody Pagan: You saved me. You saved me. I almost had a heat stroke, man. So it’s good. Ramsay, I appreciate you, man. I appreciate you having a podcast that’s talking, not no nonsense. You understand that? I think the other thing is that some people with a handle are misleading people. And you’re a scientist. You have an education. And I appreciate you doing this because Lord knows I wouldn’t have enough sense to turn on the microphone, okay? But I do appreciate you for doing that.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you, Jody. Folks, you all have been listening to my buddy, Mr. Jody Pagan, Arkansas Waterfowl Hall of Famer, habitat management accomplished, experienced extraordinaire. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Duck Season Somewhere. There’s a lot of information we covered today. I bet you need to go back and listen to it a second or third time to catch it all. We’ll see you next time.

[End of Audio]

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