EP 506. Coast-to-Coast Perspectives with Shawn Swearingen

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I’ve got my buddy Shawn Swearingen. Some of you guys that have been around Instagram and on the Internet and reading various and sundry different waterfowl stories know the name well. Shawn, how the heck are you?

Shawn Swearingen: Thanks for the invitation to be here, Ramsay.

Ramsey Russell: Heck, yeah, man. I love to have storytellers like yourself on anytime I get a chance. I want to have guys like yourself on. And it’s not uncommon, it’s not unusual that I find myself on the other side of the interview with you. But let me ask you this. Where are you from? Where are you right now? Where am I talking to you from?

Shawn Swearingen: Right now, I’m in my call shop in my house in northern Virginia. My wife and I live here in Virginia with our two boys, and we both work in Washington D.C. But I’m originally from the great Willamette Valley of Oregon. That’s where I was born and raised.

Ramsey Russell: That’s almost frying pan into the skillet now, because Oregon is, no offense, one of the craziest places I’ve ever been to. And I know when you get outside of Portland, it’s like country, it’s hunters, it’s loggers and you get around Portland, it’s crazy. It’s like the epicenter of wokeness, am I right?

Shawn Swearingen: Portland is certainly an interesting place. I mean, as far as food goes, Portland’s a great city for food, but it’s definitely a little crazy. But once you get outside the metropolises of Portland and Eugene, it really is God’s country for me. Where I grew up, you could be an hour to the coast, which is definitely different than the beaches here on the east coast or you could be an hour into the mountains, real mountains that hold snow year round, a little bit further, you’re in the high desert. So it’s definitely some changes in topography and beautiful place to grow up.

Ramsey Russell: Well, put me on a map of where you grew up in Oregon.

Shawn Swearingen: Salem. Right there in the capital city.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. Fantastic. And you grew up hunting? Hunting ducks, specifically.

Shawn Swearingen: Yes, sir. I joined my dad and his hunting buddies along the Willamette River and one of my uncle’s dairy farm fields from a very early age. Actually, I was just talking to him about it this morning. We can use the term, we rounded out just to 30 years, but he thinks it’s definitely been joined since before I was ten years old with him and his buddies.

Ramsey Russell: Do you remember those days? Do you remember being a child either hunting or not hunting? Do you remember some of your first experiences in the duck blind?

Shawn Swearingen: Oh, yeah, most definitely. Some stories I can’t share for those old timers, but they probably prefer me not to on the World Wide Web. But, yeah, I remember putting on those old grain hard rubber slicker raincoat and rain pants and knee boots that were too big for you, walking down about three quarters of a mile, a mile in the mud and the slope before headlamps, through the trees and the cornfield and getting down to the floating blind or riding the john boat through the old beaver sloughs to be right there along the Willamette River and got her old propane heater keeping you warm, and plenty of snacks or cinnamon rolls from my mom, hearing the old timers bullshit and tell stories and taking breaks for the birds and mallards coming in, working off the river. Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Do you remember your first duck?

Shawn Swearingen: I do. Pretty sure it was a mallard that fell to my old 870, which I still have.

Ramsey Russell: Is that what you all were targeting? Because I know you all got a lot of wigeons, you’ve got a lot of cackling geese. Were your people, were they duck hunters? And were they targeting mallards?

Shawn Swearingen: Mainly mallards, mainly the grass ducks, I mean, the pintails, too, later in the season. Geese was kind of funny, I do need to do some research. We didn’t target geese. Cause as Ramsey, they have the special permit zone, you had problems with the dusky Canada goose is endangered, you can’t hunt those there. So they changed the season and opened it back up. It was right around my freshman year, high school, or later on in high school. Cause I remember you had to take permit test in order to hunt geese. As you mentioned, you have the cackling geese, which they have way too many of now, but you had to take a goose identification course in person, just like high school exam. You write down, take the test, sign off by ODF –

Ramsey Russell: Even 30 years ago, you all were having to do that.

Shawn Swearingen: That was probably closer to 20 years ago that we did that. Yeah, because the dusky Canada goose populations are still extremely low. And they want to try to preserve those populations, but cackling geese, your taverners, your great westerns, there’s plenty of those, and I think the limit was reduced from 4 to 3 but they have a special dark goose season that you can go at the end of season. It’s not a conservation season like snow geese, they just extend it from February to about mid-March. And that’s a lot of fun.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I took that test last year, and I don’t know how you would come from back east and be not too familiar with a lot of those species and take that test, but I mean, 8 or 9 species of Canada geese there in Willamette Valley.

Shawn Swearingen: I think they’re 7.

Ramsey Russell: It’s more than a few. Yeah, it’s a bunch of them. And they’re all subtly different. And it’s crazy.

Shawn Swearingen: Yeah, it’s funny because here hunting in the Atlantic flyway, you really have just the lessers. I mean, they all have different shapes of lessers, different sizes of lessers, but they’re all really just lessers. Every now and then again you may hear of a giant being taken, or actually, I know somebody that took a speckled belly in the northern neck of Virginia last season.

Ramsey Russell: Crazy.

Shawn Swearingen: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: He was lost, wasn’t he?

Shawn Swearingen: Oh, definitely. I mean, I’ve heard stories about it going years back that they’ve had them on the farm, but I don’t know, I wouldn’t be too broken heart to have a few speckled bellies and what they call them, giggle chickens here in the Atlantic flyway.

Ramsey Russell: Do you ever get into the snow geese, the greater snow goose, over in your neck of the woods where you live on the Atlantic coast now?

Shawn Swearingen: Yeah, certainly. No, I’ve had some good snow goose hunts with friends. The nice thing here is geographically, everything is fairly close. I can do a day trip to Delaware where I snow goose hunted on the eastern shore. I can wake up my own bed, get up a little bit earlier, but drive to Delaware, snow goose hunt all day and I can be back to my house that night.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic.

Shawn Swearingen: But yeah, you get on the refuge forums or you may know a friend of a friend that knows they’re putting a snow goose party together. And as long as you can be flexible from the guide says they’re here, get here tomorrow, you’re on them.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What do you remember as some of the most indelible influences your dad and his friends had on the you as a hunter? What are some of the life lessons they taught you in a blind? I would have a hard time thinking that you deviate very much from how you all hunted back then in terms of your approach, seems like those lessons last a long time.

Shawn Swearingen: Certainly. That’s a good question, sir. And as far as just like, hunting philosophy, bird ID obviously is very important cause you think about the conditions you’re mainly hunting and when you think of Oregon, especially the west side, it’s cloudy, it’s rainy, it’s drizzly. You’re trying to ID birds against those gray skies, it can be very tough. So you look for other identification, the sound of either the wings or how they’re calling, the speed of the wings, how they’re flying, other ways to pick up on it. As far as hunting philosophy, realism, I think you kind of see that from others that come from the northwest, realism in your spreads, kind of matching the hatch, if you will, use a fly fishing terminology, setting the decoy spread for what you’re seeing when you scout and are you hunting wigeons and set up wigeon in spread? Are you hunting mallards, spread mallards?

Ramsey Russell: Did you all target wigeon back in those days?

Shawn Swearingen: I mean, we really didn’t specifically target, we certainly shot them. I mean, they’re just going to happen to be around and the cow pastures, the dairy pastures where I hunted as well. Pintails were tough to try and target because they liked being in the big open water and where we hunted, you didn’t have big open water unless the river came up. And then you’d almost really need to do like a body booting type of strategy, set up along the tree line and standing, and waders, or maybe almost a sink box method to try and get to them because the river was certainly deeper but standable, those pintail really liked to be in that big open water. At least there, they did.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. How does that compare to hunting in Virginia now? I mean, that’s just complete polar opposites to go from what I know about that part of Oregon, the Willamette Valley, out to northern Virginia difference night and day.

Shawn Swearingen: Oh, certainly. I mean, where I hunt here, I was fortunate to, I think, when I first moved out here and I started doing some marine, I read in a DU magazine, because you have those little inserts in the magazines for your flyway news, that they had announced that DU partnered with Virginia Fish and Wildlife, that they’d opened up a new WMA so checked that out and started hunting it the first year it opened with my buddy, and we kind of discovered it a bit more. But it’s all hardwood bottoms. A couple of beaver sloughs in there. We have some of that in Willamette Valley, but not a lot. I mean, almost Arkansas type, flooded timber, a lot of wood ducks. You get some mallards in there, and then, of course, you got the black ducks cruising through there, too. I mean, that was completely different from how I grew up, but some of the same mentality transitioned over where I used, I like to hunt smaller spreads, maybe a dozen doesn’t have decoys at most. Some of these spots I hunted on public land, another couple spots, that’s all you could, which you had is what you packed in.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that makes big difference, doesn’t it?

Shawn Swearingen: Yeah. So, I mean, that certainly transitioned over, but then if you hunt, like I mentioned, body booting or you hunt some of the big diver ducks, you’re putting out a lot of decoys to kind of match, again, what you’re seeing for spreads. A lot of guys called really hard and heavy here, which is not something I grew up doing.

Ramsey Russell: Totally different. Just totally different approaches to duck hunting, isn’t it? Totally different habitats, totally different approaches to duck hunting in terms of their calling style and even the cadences and stuff like that is just totally different.

Shawn Swearingen: Yeah. I mean, my dad and his buddies bust my chops whenever I go back, saying, I must be that east coast calling when I go back and hunt with them and they hear me calling. It’s all that good humor in the duck blind, chatting each other. But, yeah, definitely the calling strategy and how you hunt’s definitely different from the coasts and the different flyways.

Ramsey Russell: What about the competition, Shawn? Is it much more competitive out there in northern Virginia than it was out in Oregon?

Eastern Shore Development and Its Effects on Waterfowl Habitat.

You got a lot of houses being developed further up and down the Interstate 95 here in Virginia and Maryland. And then you also got the expansion on the eastern shore, too. A lot more traffic, a lot more houses being bought up, big mansions being put up.

Shawn Swearingen: Oh, certainly, yeah. I mean, you can’t knock on doors in Virginia or Maryland or Delaware to try and get permission to hunt someplace. Usually it’s only going to be locked up by leases or clubs and stuff like that. I mean, you have some old clubs in Oregon, but you can certainly knock on doors on a farmer’s field. And hey, I saw you had some geese while I was driving by here. Is okay if I come out? You’re not tomorrow or this afternoon? Hell, yeah, come on and shoot them all up, we don’t want them eating our grass fields, go for it. You still do that today, but you’re starting to get the lease mentality is starting to transition further west and you kind of see that in the central flyway, too. And I mean, it’s good. I mean, I certainly understand leasing where I am now because frankly, that’s the only place you can get on property unless you hunt public land. You also got the suburban sprawl out here, too. You got a lot of houses being developed further up and down the Interstate 95 here in Virginia and Maryland. And then you also got the expansion on the eastern shore, too. A lot more traffic, a lot more houses being bought up, big mansions being put up. Anybody that’s got 20 acres is putting a flooded corn impoundment on it, which certainly changes the bird behavior out here as well, which we don’t have out west.

Ramsey Russell: No. I’ll share something recently is my wife grew up in northern Virginia, just kind of outskirts of the Beltway and going up there and as we were dating, going up to visit, and later, after we were married, going up to see the grandparents and everything else, it’s just a real woke, different city fide removed from nature type world, compared to my growing up in the state of Mississippi. And recently we were over in Europe hunting geese, and it just dawned on us, we’re out there in Holland and we were hunting, and it’s very civilized. Again, the contrast between, say, Mississippi or Oregon versus anywhere in the country of Holland, which is half the size of North Carolina, and just very civilized, you know what I’m saying? Just houses everywhere. It’s just remarkably different. But I noticed something in France and again, most notably in Holland, that I’d never noticed before and it was very unnerving to me, Shawn, and that was the fact of a sheer and complete absence of songbird life. When I go to out the state of Mississippi, I mean, if I look hard enough out my back window right now, I’m going to see cardinals and thrushes and mockingbirds and bluebirds, and we’ve got 15 or 20 birds just living practically in our backyard, and but to go over to that part of the world and see the geese we were hunting were resident birds that had ceased migrating and lived there permanently and just camp out on all these, on all these farmers fields and the mallards are all old game, farm mallards, old world genetics that lived there year round, no migration. Saw some crows big and little saw a handful of herons throughout the week’s time, saw 2 or 3 lapwings, saw some English sparrows. I’m kind of running out of bird life, I didn’t see any songbirds, none. And it just dawned on me that, holy shit, man, this is all contrived nature. And it reminded me of the only reference I had was your neck of the woods. Growing up, taking my kids up to the grandparents house and spending some time up there, they had a little nature center in the neighborhood, unbelievably funded and all kinds of cool stuff, trails and lakes and ponds and exhibits up in the nature center and everything else. But we were out feeding the mallards and Canada geese one day, and they read us the riot act. They read us the complete and other riot act about these Canada geese, which were resident birds, and these mallards, which were no doubt park ducks, game farm mallards that we should not be feeding them, that we shouldn’t be feeding them or interacting with at all. They were wild birds. And it was a real parallel to me that, my gosh, these are not wild birds, these are contrived. These birds wouldn’t be here had somebody not put them out originally. Now you do see songbirds and squirrels and chipmunks and things like that around those subdivisions. But still, this perception of nature that really isn’t real, both in the Netherlands and in northern Virginia, is almost disturbing to me, you know what I’m saying? And you could argue with the lady that there was a so called biologist all you wanted to, she didn’t get it. We know that game farm genetics don’t exist and feed and thrive in natural environments. They need to be subsidized. They need to be fed food. They don’t do well in wild environments like a new world genetic type mallard would do. And so I don’t know why I thought to go off that trail right there, but it was just interesting to me. Virginia is real woke. So many people and so much going on and so much development that they carve out little niches, little parks that is a surrogate of nature. And here comes the perception as contrast to Mississippi or the Willamette Valley of Oregon, very different.

Shawn Swearingen: Now, it’s interesting observation because you do some reading, I think if you hunt, you’re going to be on to be some type of a little bit of a bird nerd. You’re going to want to find out more about what you’re targeting and hunting. And I was reading somewhere about the song life species and how obviously it’s much more decreased now. Looking at the Atlantic flyway and the Appalachian area in the mountains and stuff, and how much is much more decreased. Thankfully, I think there are still some good pockets, you still have songbirds migrating through here. If you watch a little bit more closely, the cardinals are moving through. There’s a lake not far away from where my wife and I live. And this last spring, I don’t know, I saw probably about 20, 25 ringnecks on the lake migrating back through, which is great, but there is a big resident population of Canada geese sitting on the lake.

Ramsey Russell: Nobody’s hunting them.

Shawn Swearingen: No, you can’t. Trust me, I’ve tried investigating that to try and help out the population. They’ve tried to decrease of people feeding them, because you get people out there feeding them bread and then you get like the whole the angel wing, part where the wings get all messed up and stuff like that. And so if you don’t feed them the bread, you’re not going to have that as much. But we still have geese that do migrate through. The geese, finally, knock on wood, are starting to get a little bit ripe for fall migration, you starting to get the big family groups. This is kind of a bit of a stepping stone here at this lake, but there is a population that do not leave here. They stay here year round, unfortunately.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. So, how did a guy like yourself migrate from Oregon to Virginia? Was it the black ducks? That would almost do it for me, not entirely, but I can see a man moving from the west coast to northern Virginia for black ducks. What ended up, you told me before the show, the first time you ever flew was the move out to east. How did that come about?

Shawn Swearingen: I’ll do a quick addition to that. My first commercial flight was when I moved out here in December of 2008. My first flight was earlier that fall on my friend’s grandfather’s float plane. We took on and off the Willamette River just out of Portland. Flew over Portland, where it is as a piper cub Alaska bush plane. So as a world War II trainer. So actually my first flight, I actually got a flight a little bit because I was in the backseat in the training seat, and so I got to do the rudders and steered a little bit. But I moved out here in December of 2008 for a day job, went to Oregon state Beavers, for political science and us history and worked the state legislature in Oregon. And then, that string kind of ran me out here to work politics and government affairs and trade associations here in DC, kind of dried up on our side of the aisle in 2008 in Oregon and DC, of course, has a for better or for worse, a good job bubble when it comes to political lobbying type work.

Ramsey Russell: There’s a lot of legislative opportunities in DC, that’s for sure.

Shawn Swearingen: Yeah, I’d certainly join the swamp, if you will.

Ramsey Russell: So what exactly was your part in the swamp? What did you do? What did you move for DC to do?

Shawn Swearingen: Mainly working state legislative monitoring. So you take a track and see what’s passing across 50 states for certain clients. Right now I work for a national trade association doing similar work. A little bit of federal affairs monitoring and tracking. It’s for lack of better terms, herding cats. You take information from certain legislative bodies, you try to distill it down. Legislation being passed help educate members whether whatever kind of vertical you’re in, whatever type of service you’re in, try and mobilize them on any legislative efforts and get them engaged. Then you kind of take their messaging from their businesses, their livelihoods and trying to educate members of Congress or state legislatures on, why they need to be a bit more proactive on passing things to help business and livelihoods.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Shawn Swearingen: Or try and stop bad legislation.

Ramsey Russell: Do you like that kind of work, Shawn?

Shawn Swearingen: It’s interesting. I’ve worked a couple different fields and worked in the healthcare field, I’ve worked in the chemical industry, I’ve worked with same day delivery vertical. And it’s a lot of great people, a lot of great businesses and companies that help keep America moving, working, keep a lot of livelihoods, keep saving lives. For example, in the delivery industry, a lot of guys did medical deliveries, delivering the heart transplants or organ transplants, you got to get those there obviously on a certain time, otherwise it’s not going to be working right for the end user, for the patient in the hospital. So it’s great working for folks like that in industries like that.

Ramsey Russell: It’s all kind of the same. It really doesn’t matter what you’re working on, it’s kind of the wheels turning is all kind of the same, isn’t it? You could be working on any product or any cause or any lobby, and it’s all the machine of it all just kind of operates the same.

Shawn Swearingen: Yeah, certainly. And you see that even in the conservation issues, too, understand the machine, trying to educate the machine so you can help the end user, whether you call it, was it rook bellies getting back home for their constituents. If you think of, like, right now, I just finished an article with a buddy of mine on the Klamath basin on the refuges. I don’t know if you saw the avian botulism outbreaks.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, again.

Shawn Swearingen: Yeah. Once again, I wrote about that an outbreak in 2020 and unfortunately, I have to write about it again. And unfortunately isn’t all preventative situation, if you get a periodical summer release of water on the system, keep the water flowing. But you need to educate those elected officials and that bureaucracy that is kind of holding up some of that water for the broader ecosystem. In this case, it’s not just about the ducks. Obviously, it helps the ducks. But I know you talked about the songbirds and bird life. It’s all being affected by avian botulism and avian influenza back there in the refuge system.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Education is so critical. It’s really not the hunters or forget the anti-hunters we need to talk to, it’s the middle ground, especially the politicians. And Shawn, somebody sitting up in DC right now, what the hell does a politician or another lobbyist care about ducks or songbirds? How could they possibly care with all the topics and money flowing through the system up there that doesn’t involve migratory birds? How or why would they care? Or do they? I don’t think they do.

Shawn Swearingen: I don’t think they do, unless you try to somehow put it on their relation. They like taking their kids, like we mentioned, like all these parks out here, all these systems, you go out there, you take your kid out there, Congress is on recess, they take your break, they take their kids out there, let’s go out to the park, let’s see some bird life. Well, if you had avian botulism there, you’re going to be seeing a lot of dead birds on the water.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Shawn Swearingen: Isn’t going to smell pretty. It’s not going to look pretty. So how do you fix that?

Ramsey Russell: Does it wear you out being in that environment and I’m going to share this with you in a former life, a former career, many years ago, right after I got married, we were in Europe recently celebrating our 30^th wedding anniversary, that’s how long ago this has been. I went on detail in Washington DC and I look back at those days getting up in northern Virginia and driving 30 minutes to the metro and getting on a metro and going an hour. I could read the entire Washington Post or whatever newspaper I was reading on the ride to work and spend a supercharged day in the office and then read a whole another paper on the way back to where my wife would pick me up. We’d go eat dinner, and I’d had gotten up at 5 in the morning, gone at it hard all day, and I would collapse in bed at 09:00 09:30 at night, just exhausted. But it was on the energy, the energy, it was electrical, it was unbelievable. Working in a national office and working on those things that seem so important, it sucks you right into it. I mean, it’s like, on the one hand, maybe it ground me down, but I wasn’t there long enough, but on the other hand, it was unbelievable, the energy levels I had approaching each day because it was so much going on in that capitol. And I almost, I really, I got offered a job to come back up there. And just like my father in law had counseled me, don’t say no, don’t say anything, but yes, if you think you want to come. And I said, yeah. And then I got home 2 weeks and was home for 2 weeks afterwards and thought about it and said, nah, I never even called them back to go. But I really enjoyed seeing how it worked and being a part of it. But, man, it was just tapping into this energy like I’ve never felt anywhere else. A lot of moving and shaking going on, on Capitol Hill.

Shawn Swearingen: Oh, yeah, it is. And there’s a great saying that, nobody’s ever really from here. My wife’s from Maryland, so it’s pretty close to being from here. Either you hear a very short time, you’re here for a couple of years, or your life, or you getting sucked in. And so you meet all kinds of folks from all around the country, all around the world that care about certain things. If you’re lucky, you’re in a niche issue area that really drives you and interests you, that pulls that energy that you talked about. The first time my dad came out to visit, the week my wife and I got married, we jumped on the metro train after they flew in, I took them to a steakhouse for dinner. And I thought, oh, they really liked that. He’s like, man, he says, I could not ride this train with all these people every single day. So it drive me nuts. Just too much people, big city people everywhere, big city.

Ramsey Russell: What got me, though, it wasn’t all the people, I was fine with that. And I’ve not had time to read a paper or read like I did since then. But I did the math one day, and I was young into my career, I was 2 or 3 years into a federal government career. I stepped off at 15, 16 years into it, and I just did the math. Had I spent to retirement in there, I would have spent the equivalent of 8.5 years of my life just commuting back and forth to the office. I’m like, man, that’s a chunk of time that could be spent doing something else.

Shawn Swearingen: Yeah, certainly. And honestly, I think the putting and short terms COVID kind of frankly, helped my mentality a little bit. The work from home policy.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Shawn Swearingen: I was obviously fine going into work 5 days a week. It obviously was tough, we had two young boys going to school and day care and all that, moving around, getting activities. But my wife and I have a pretty decent work from home policy to where we work, Mondays and Fridays, work from home. But Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, if you be in the office, you got meetings, you’d be in there. So, I mean, like you said, you save an hour going into the office, hour coming home from the office. When I go into the office, I got plenty of podcasts like Duck Season Somewhere to listen to and catch up on. But I mean, I can work in my shop, I can listen to a conference call for work for somebody that’s in Europe and do other things, run the dog or do some training in the yard or something else like that, or get the garden going. It certainly helps, I think, your mentality to kind of have those different avenues and outlets when you live in a place such as in a city.

Ramsey Russell: And I’ll tell you what, for all the people and everything else in the metro, however you want to say it, the traffic, man, there’s a lot to be said for living in an area like that. You talk about the meals, anything you want is right there. Anything. Name a meal it’s there. And especially in your neck of the woods, you got a lot of fresh seafood. But it’s unbelievable. Some of the best oysters I’ve had are at restaurants around the Beltway. Unbelievable.

Shawn Swearingen: Oh, yeah. I mean, there’s some of the Chesapeake Bay and the New England oysters they’re pretty good. But again, you’re talking to somebody from Oregon, we had really good oysters, too.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, you all did. You talked about educating, doing a lot of educating in your current job. Is that how you got into outdoor writing? Did that come with the territory? Or did you bring that from back west with you?

American Waterfowler Feature: Honoring Mentors and Home.

But in 2020, like I mentioned, I did that botched article that was for split read, kind of got my start there, my feet wet riding a lot of conservation issues, talking about the PPR, the US, Canada, differences in conservation policies. I’ve been fortunate to interview a lot of great people around the world, different subjects, biologists, scientists.

Shawn Swearingen: I think it was kind of a mold of both, to be honest with you, Ramsey. We were talking about commuting in the trains, my wife and I were living in a townhouse at the time, and so I was taking the metro train every day, and I was riding the Metro home. I was listening to Steve Renell on the Meat Eater podcast. I had my roulette of podcast, and they were interviewing Tom McGuiren, the famous writer from Montana. And he was talking about writing the process of memories growing up and I think Jim Harrison was still alive then. So they were talking about their friendship and just kind of, just a little spark of trying to remember, because you’re riding that train every day, you’re in the city, you’re in the burbs every day. Duck Season wasn’t going on right now, so you kind of probably Duck Season doldrums. I thought, I’m going to start writing down memories of growing up hunting and fishing and working on the farms or anything else. And so I just started opening up my notes app on my iPhone, started jotting notes of different things, memories, that old camouflage netting smell like when you’ve been had it all rolled up and bundled up, you got that kind of, that moldy, musty smell. You know exactly what I’m talking about. And you don’t know that unless you’ve duck hunted and you’ve been in that environment. I’m honored to say that that story, that kind of memory, that one specific memory launched into an article being published by American Waterfowler last October, kind of about going home hunting and about my mentors growing up. But that’s kind of what really started it. But in 2020, like I mentioned, I did that botched article that was for split read, kind of got my start there, my feet wet riding a lot of conservation issues, talking about the PPR, the US, Canada, differences in conservation policies. I’ve been fortunate to interview a lot of great people around the world, different subjects, biologists, scientists.

Ramsey Russell: Who are some of your favorite people you’ve interviewed?

Shawn Swearingen: Dr. Nikolai Delta Waterfowl, he’s been pretty great. I reviewed Chris several times. I had him on my own podcast last year talking about hunting. And now he’s got his daughters in hunting and doing taxidermy and stuff. And that’s just fantastic to watch.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic.

Shawn Swearingen: As a father, as a parenthood.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Shawn Swearingen: As well. Gary Kramer photography. He’s pretty great. I did an article on Pacific brant that I interviewed both of those on and that was pretty great. I’m working on something right now for our buddy skip for the November issue of waterfowl on diver hunting and some of the old salt. He called them old timers. I’m going to be a little bit more gentle. I’ll just call them old salts.

Ramsey Russell: The diver hunters I know will welcome both of those descriptions like a badge of honor. I mean, they’re not woke at all. They appreciate being an old salter, an old timer. And the duck hunting world needs more of them. But anyway, how do you find these stories then, Shawn? Do people come to you or do you cogitate on this particular topic and say, I’m going to write about this, let me find somewhere to publish it?

Shawn Swearingen: It’s a little bit of both, honestly. So the diver story skip was looking for and came to me on, I did something on how to maintain your calls, your duck calls out of season. I interviewed a few different call makers and that’s going to be published with any creek. So they’re doing some more articles, doing some writing for them. But if I get something creative like the one I talked about growing up hunting with my mentors, it’s something I wrote and worked on pitching elsewhere. I’ve been told past plenty of times, I’ve heard non replies plenty of times as well. Just kind of strives me to be a bit better of a rider and just find the right home for a certain story. I do some writing on fly fishing as well because I’ve enjoyed fly fishing. I didn’t fly fish until I moved out here. But I grew up fishing spin tackle and other things. I don’t remember a time not fishing growing up.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Shawn Swearingen: But funny story enough, a coworker of mine, I think you know Nick as well. Nick Gardner. We worked together in DC, and he knew how to fly fish. So I picked up a secondhand fly rod, and he’s like, we’ll bring it into the office, we’ll go down to the National Mall, and we do a couple lessons fly casting right there at the base of the Washington monument. And we ran into George Clooney stepping off the elevator. Nick and I have fly fish quite a bit all over the country. And there’s some great little spots around here. But there’s some good creative stories with southern culture on the fly. I’ve published and Tom Beckbe Field Journal, I’ve had some good creative pieces there. One time about diver hunting, Dan and the outer banks with some good friends of mine, Wade and Cam, and Cam’s dad, Lawrence, and when you think about some of the nastiest weather that you always like hunting in, you think of as a waterfowler that was pretty rough weather, right out in the middle of the Pimlico sound, about 3 miles out. We were in one of those stilted lines. It was too rough to be in the sink boxes or curtain blinds out there. So we were in the kind of box blind, but we got our limit of big bills, blue bills, and then a couple of redheads as well. And we got out of there, we went back to my, in laws have a place there on the sound. So we had a free place to crash, which was nice. But we made a big old bowl of gumbo with some smoked duck legs and some goose andouille sausage. And I mean, that was fantastic hunting, a good memory. But that was a story I had published with Tom Beckbe Field journal as well.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Talk a little bit about the old waterfowl hunting. The old waterfowl hunting article, the old ways. Let’s talk a little bit about it. Because we were talking about old timers and old salts. And I think it’s interesting, and I’ll say this, I’m not a fly fisherman, but I have fly fished. Gosh, it’s only so much time a man’s got in this world, you know what I’m saying? I’m so in one direction, I can hardly do anything else sometimes. But I remember one time I was going through Montana in 20, had a two week break, and was kind of just road tripping with a buddy of mine, we’d stop and go bicycle a little bit and get back on. He and I had ridden across the country way back when, and it was kind of a 20^th year deal. But we stopped and we’re drinking coffee and just kind of hanging out, enjoying the sunshine on our way to Bozeman to meet with meat eater. And I sat there and watched some guys fly fishing. And heck, it was entertaining just watching them, just the process. And it almost like they approached it, whether they caught a fish or not, it was all about the methodical cast and just the way the string would arc and you see a little splash, you know what I’m saying? It was just the hole, the way they would mend it. It was just like this process, this approach. And it made me think about how I’m no fly fisherman, but I’m not a spring chicken in the world of duck hunting anymore. And I’ve seen where my approach to duck hunting today is more like that than what it was 30, 40 years ago. You know what I’m saying? 30, 40 years ago, I was crude and just wanting to pull the trigger and kill everything. And now I’m not out there to watch the sunrise. But I do appreciate delivery. I want the presentation. I want the birds to present themselves, and I want everything just right, because if you go out and shoot just one duck or more, it’s all about the way those birds present themselves with respect to light. And I see a lot of similarity between a real classical fly fish approach to a very traditional form of duck hunting like that.

Shawn Swearingen: Yeah, no, I like that analogy. I haven’t thought about that. But it makes sense. It’s your method. It’s the system is you’re being methodical, your thoughts going through it. Like you said, you want the birds to work, right. If you’re sitting in the timber, you want the birds, you want those mallards to be – I think you said in that article when I interviewed for you, there was an old timer you hunted with. He’s never shot a duck on the wing, and he wasn’t about to start, he had him light on the water. For him, that was a complete method of fooling bird on the water.

An Old-School Approach to Waterfowling.

And you had written a paper, the ethical ways of old waterfowling. And that’s totally different.  it’s like somewhere along the way, you mentioned, we’re talking about pass shooting, and there’s a lot of historical duck passes, especially up in the Midwest, Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas. I mean, fabled duck leases and land ownership that exists because you go and stand up in the morning and pass shoot ducks coming over.

Ramsey Russell: That was Mr. Golden who shot a single shot shotgun and had come by the office when I worked in refuges and came out, we got to talking. And he had been hunting that public property in the state of Mississippi for longer than I was old at the time and since before World War II. And, man, he knew the history, knew everything. And there was a little bottleneck at the time getting into where I wanted to go and hunt. You kind of ran across some open cypress timber and got through this real tight little bottleneck. And once you ferreted your way out, you came back out into some more open cypress. I had like a battery operated light that died right in the thick of things. And he calmed me down, said, oh, just relax, let my eyes adjust. And he had hunted so long by going by starlight, he took me right where we wanted to go. And the ducks were flying. We had our second choice, and the ducks were flying that day, and we had a wonderful hunt. In fact, the last black duck I shot in the state of Mississippi was that morning. I remember it like yesterday, and it’s been decades ago. And he would not – I kept saying, are you set up good? Do we need to change? We need to do something? And he finally said, son, I’ve not ever shot a flying duck in my life, and I’m not going to start this morning. And by the time a duck landed, because it was public land, there was so much shooting and commotion going on around us that that duck may or may not give him a shot, on the water and before it landed and looked around and flew off. But it was just interesting just an older approach to duck hunting. He was all about roasted duck. He wasn’t about to sport. He wasn’t about the great shot, he was just all about going home with some ducks to cook. And it was very rewarding. That’s the only time I ever shared a blind with that man. I don’t know whatever came of it, but it was a good way of doing it. And you had written a paper, the ethical ways of old waterfowling. And that’s totally different.  it’s like somewhere along the way, you mentioned, we’re talking about pass shooting, and there’s a lot of historical duck passes, especially up in the Midwest, Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas. I mean, fabled duck leases and land ownership that exists because you go and stand up in the morning and pass shoot ducks coming over. And I posted some videos. One of my favorite, I love to pass shoot, and I’ve done it all over the world, and I just wasn’t expecting it, I should, you post anything in social media, you better get ready, boy, somebody’s going to disagree with you. But we posted up, I past shoot, and the birds are 20, 30 yards, if you’re patient, lots of them coming over, and they’re so vulnerable because they got all their belly looking, belly and neck just all exposed to you. And we posted up some volleys and, man, people come out of woodworks. One guy listened to my podcast and listened to me on social media, he was quitting and never coming back and didn’t understand, and I’m like, man, I pass shot ducks all over the world. In fact, there are some parts of the world I’ve been to, they scorn decoying, they’re all about. That’s how they’ve hunted forever. And we do a place in Africa, Shawn, that sometimes, now that we’ve worked together a little bit, we’ll put decoys out and shoot them a little bit more like we would shoot them here. But at the same time, there’s a lot of times, just because the way the wind and the flight and the situation and the cover is, we’ll put the decoys 100, 150 yards behind us and pass you, the Egyptian and spur winged geese, belly up right at us. You know what I’m saying? Just sit there patiently and watch them coming. And I find a lot of enjoyment doing that. I love to pass shoot properly.

Shawn Swearingen: It’s funny. Everybody’s got the ideal way for the way birds work for them. And that’s great, but you shouldn’t, unless it’s completely unethical, you’re not sky busting these birds as they’re passing over at 50, 60 yards because they’re working a group behind you on public land, that’s a little bit different than how you’re talking about, as they’re moving from fresh water to salt water and they’re flying over at 20, 30 yards, you would take that 20, 30 yard shot. Is there a planted in front of you?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Shawn Swearingen: So as long as you’re not crippling a bunch of birds and it’s ethical, then, of course. But it is funny. You look through some of the old writing, you look at the very early articles and stories more well to do folks, it was doing the writing at that time because those are the folks that were doing the hunting, the sporting of the time in the late 1800s, the 1880s, 1890s. And I think it was Forest and Stream, it wasn’t Field and Stream at the time, but you can find some of these collections of the articles, and they talk about their hunting. They would do a wagon train, or they take a wagon to a train and then they take a wagons off the train spurs in North Dakota, South Dakota, or the Dakotas at the time, because I don’t think there were states yet in Minnesota, in the midwest. And they’d hunt those famous passes because that’s the way the birds worked from any large lakes.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Shawn Swearingen: So they may dig a pit. And like you said, if they shot something, they’d set up decoys for the birds behind them, like you said, with the Egyptian geese and they’d shoot more as they come over and they look at them. So they get down a little bit lower through the pass.

Ramsey Russell: No, I enjoy it done right. And right about the time, I think I’ve seen it done at all in waterfowl, we do something different. And this coming season, I have got a trip planned going to the United Kingdom, and we’re going to plan for the full moon because we’re going to shoot geese at night by moonlight. Lights are illegal, but shooting them at night by moonlight is legal. You can sell ducks, but you can’t sell geese. And they’ve got around about 10 day bumpity bump hunt all over the United Kingdom, lined up to include punt gunning and which is still legal over there. And I don’t yet know, we don’t yet know if we’re going to have time or if the birds are going to be doing right or whatever the case may be, if we’re going to actually go get to pull the trigger on a flock of birds with a punt gun. But worst case scenario, I’m going to get to pull the trigger on the water. That’ll be a consolation, just to pull the trigger on a punt gun and hear it go boom and watch a pound and a half shot go out. And I told him, I said I would absolutely love to lay around and crawl around and work to get into position for a day or two just to pull the trigger one time on real ducks. It’s hard to believe that practice still exists somewhere in the world, but it does, and it’s real underground, it’s real old. There might be 3 or 4 dozen punt gunners still around that do it, that practice it. And they’re deep underground and off the radar, but I’m kind of looking forward to that.

Shawn Swearingen: That would be an incredible experience. So I imagine you would use a skull boat for them.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. The boat itself is called a punt. And then the gun is the cannon like thing up front that doesn’t have a trigger, it’s got a stringy pull that ignites it. And I’m really looking forward to this just to put my hands on one, crawl in the boat and all that good stuff will be in and of itself, a lot of fun. I think. it’d be a good experience to do something like that. I’ve got this thought with a lot of different aspects, not necessarily punt gun. And I don’t think we got ducks in the world, let alone the United States, to bring back punt gun in full form. I mean, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think it would take too many punt guns crawling the big water refuges before we’d be bereft of ducks in the United States. But other than that, I’ve just got this feeling. The reason your story about the old waterfowl and hunting ways and ethics appeals to me is, a lot of parts of me think that the future of waterfowl hunting lies in its past just an approach. The approach, whether it’s a fly fishing approach or just a more gentlemanly conduct, or just we all got to get along and a shrinking landscape. But I think a mindset like our ancestors had would be the right approach as we go into the future of waterfowl hunting.

Shawn Swearingen: Yeah. And I think some of you asked were kind of where the writing came from for me, and I think I’ve always been interested in history, and I think you’re drawn to that. And if you hunt, especially waterfowl, because we have such a rich history, but you kind of have to know where you’re coming from to know where you’re going. And everything seems to be cyclical when it comes as far as hunting tactics. Right now, silhouettes have obviously gotten big and a frames have gotten big for how folks are hunting and a lot of folks still do that out here, but not a lot of folks are using full bodies anymore. And I’m sure full bodies and layouts are going to come back around. I think probably land X is probably going to prevent us from doing a lot of pass shooting out here in the historical sense. But if you have a big spread out there in the Dakotas, I’m sure you could still set up and do that. But yeah, I think you got to know where you’re going to know where you’re from to know where you’re going historically here.

Ramsey Russell: Where did that story come from about the ethics of old school waterfowl hunting? Was that an idea you had? What triggered that story for you?

Shawn Swearingen: I think we’ve talked about enough, but actually came from the associate editor, Ryan Barnes, who we both know out there at Wildfowl. Ryan and I, we’ve known each other from a days with split read and writing and Ryan’s a great writer himself too. And we’ve talked about plenty of collections of books and stories and he pitched that idea. He’s like, Shawn, I think you’d really sink your teeth into this one and research and then write about it and interviewing. And he was right. I really enjoyed that. And I think, I don’t know if it’s the most clicked on, but I know it’s a pretty well clicked on article for them, thankfully.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. How has digging back in some of these old topics, how has it changed how you approach duck hunting today, whether back home or on the east coast?

Shawn Swearingen: I think it’s made me probably appreciate some of the older ways a bit more of hunting and trying to get some of those experiences. I have a couple of handmade decoys here I’ve been fortunate enough to get my hands on and collect. I’d love to get a few more to hunt over. Like you said, we only have so many hours in the day between day job for our two kids writing, call making, gardening, there’s only so much we can do. But I’d certainly like to try making some decoys. But I’m thankful enough, I know enough decoy makers now, I could probably pick a couple here or there to hunt over. I think that’d be a great experience of taking something from the older days to today. Thankfully, there are some guys that do make commercially as much as you can, handmade decoys for you to hunt over. Honestly, the plastic decoys have gotten pretty good, too. I think they’ve gotten better. I’ve tried hunting a few more places, kind of historically, I’ve been fortunate enough to hunt the habitat flats area, the golden triangle of those refuges, a couple of times. Also body booted up on the Susquehanna flats outside of Havre De Grace twice this last season with some good friends and had two remarkable hunts and wrote about that. I wasn’t planning to write about it, but I was emailing skip about something else, and he made the remark of, you must be pitching it someplace else because you haven’t pitched me the story yet. And I was like, well, if you want me to pitch it, I will skip. So put that together, and actually, I’ve gotten some of my photography as part of that piece, too. But then again, that’s an experience it goes, Havre De Grace in the Susquehanna flats. Historically wise, there isn’t much more richer history spot in the country in Atlantic flyway than that.

Ramsey Russell: There’s a lot of decoy carvers right there in your neck of the woods just drive across the bridge into Maryland, there’s all kinds of carvers. So it may be the greatest concentration of carvers in the nation, still.

Shawn Swearingen: I mean, it still is. Obviously not nearly as what it was back in even the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s where it started. The Ward brothers is probably about starting the decline of it because he had the cheaper plastic. But there is still, like you said, there’s a lot of decoy carvers around here. But I’d like to go and hunt a couple more different salt marshes and spots like that along the eastern United States and even on, the West coast too. Mention the black brant, they’re not migrating quite as much at Eisenbeck, but there’s still some going to Mexico. I know there’s some spots, you can still find them down there when they migrate. And then there’s a couple of spots along California, I think it’d be great. San Francisco Bay Area, never hunted California, but, yeah, there’s a lot of great historical places you can look up and find the hunt that still have good birds.

The Artistic Value of Hand-Carved Decoys Over Plastic.

Plastic is practical, it’s light, it goes out, it’s bulletproof, it’s disposable. Great. But, boy, I tell you what, there’s the times I get to hunt over real decoys. It just drives it home at a whole another level.

Ramsey Russell: I love hand carved decoys. I wish I was better at it. I had this idea as I was traveling a lot, I wish I’d done it for the past 20 or 30 years that everybody I’d hunted with, I’d gotten a sign as travel decoy, but I had this idea a few years ago and reached out to. Reached out to a plastic decoy maker and said, hey, would you sponsor this? Would you do this? I think it’s a great idea, and they just blew it off. And I said, well, I guess that’s a lousy idea. And Bill, a freaking world renowned carver from Connecticut, just out of the blue, reached out to me and said, hey, I’d like to make you a travel decoy. And he sent this gorgeous black duck decoy. Gorgeous. And I traveled around that year worldwide and had it signed to before I could settle down and think about next year, Joshua Henson from Chickasaw Indian Reservation, called up, made a gorgeous gadwall effigy. And last year, world renowned world champion caller Luke Castillo called up and sent me this magnificent cork hen, hollowed out hen decoy that traveled beautifully. And this year’s decoy will be another black duck by Ian McNair up in your neck of the woods up in coastal Virginia, I think about my idea of traveling around with a plastic, excuse me, but piece of shit plastic decoy, you know? And now I’ve got this beautiful collection of handmade decoys, and I think the hand carved decoy is a greater tribute to what I’m trying to accomplish with that project, just than a piece of plastic decoy. I’m sorry. It just is. Plastic is practical, it’s light, it goes out, it’s bulletproof, it’s disposable. Great. But, boy, I tell you what, there’s the times I get to hunt over real decoys. It just drives it home at a whole another level. And we just don’t need – most of the places I hunt, I could get by with 6 to 15 hand carved or cork decoys. My old buddy Jim and I, we go out to his cypress break every once in a blue moon, and when I’m there and he’s there and we’re there together, we hunt his break with just his collection of my collection of carved decoys. And it adds just a whole another level to it. And trust you me, my decoys aren’t nothing special, but they kill ducks.

Shawn Swearingen: Honestly, when I saw you do that, I thought it was a fantastic idea, because when you’re highlighting different carvers, different people that do this in the different history and the different styles, I mean, the handcarver has got character. One of my buddies, Rory, you get a shout out here, he told me, the difference in the acrylic and wood when you make calls is the acrylic calls like listening to Pink Floyd on digital, whereas, a wood call, probably like a hand carved decoy, it’s like listening to Pink Floyd on vinyl. There’s something different about it.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, that’s a good comparison, digital versus vinyl. And I’m a wood call guy, I have got acrylics and plastics and things of that nature, but I like the wood calls myself. And it’s just something so uniquely personal about that call that makes it different than something turned out by a CNC machine. It’s my call, tuned for me, not for the masses. It just makes it different. I think that duck hunting, at some point in time, in every duck hunters career, it becomes personal, it becomes beyond just the trigger pull and the straps and the pictures and whatever. It becomes way more personal and interpersonal. Personal meaning, my subjective filter, but interpersonal being the people I share those times with. At some point in time, if you’re lucky, duck hunting is going to become more that than what it may be in a stage you’re at right now, at least it has for me, Shawn. What do you see as the greatest problems facing duck hunting in your neck of the woods or throughout the United States right now?

Shawn Swearingen: Unfortunately, I think it probably has to be habitat and habitat management right now. If you look at it on the east coast, yeah, there’s some good projects I mentioned, the impoundments at 20 acres and an impoundment that’s changed. Habitat management has then directly affected bird behavior and how they’re moving and feeding. Everybody talked about birds going nocturnal. They may not be the case in certain some flyways, but it certainly made it this way in the Atlantic flyway, habitat management has directly affected bird behavior. They’re not using the salt marshes as much unless they start getting froze up and they can’t get into the food, then they start moving differently. But we don’t get, the winters as much as we used to here as often.

Ramsey Russell: The climate’s changing. There’s no denying climate change.

Shawn Swearingen: Even in the time that, the short time that I’ve been here since 2008, I remember before COVID days, my wife and I driving into DC from Virginia for work, Potomac rose over it is locked up solid for a couple of weeks. We haven’t had that for a few years now, and we have a couple of brief cold snaps, but nothing directly. But you take that habitat management and you move it, going west, you have the way the rice production is in Arkansas, I think Brent Birch shared it or somebody shared it down in Arkansas. They just harvested the first patch of rice last week rather than like in September, October, where then you get some waste grain on the field for the birds are migrating down. It’s first week of August, that’s crazy early.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Shawn Swearingen: So are those farmers putting winter weed or something over, over top of the field to help bird feed when they migrate and you keep on going further west. Some of it is, how corn is being harvested or different land management practices. We see it out west as well. And coming from a farming background, I see a little bit more closely, but you’re farming every square foot down to the foot as you can on the fields and you see it on waterfowl, but we saw it in upland, too. The Willamette valley was the first place pheasants were introduced in the United States and used to have, they’re not obviously not native, but used to have a pretty good wild population of pheasants, plenty of fence rows for them to hide in and everything else, and quail, too. And now, you’re farming right up to the ditch, there’s no fence rows, so you don’t have a wild pheasant population. So, I mean, it’s upland, but it’s a good example of land management.

Ramsey Russell: I agree with everything you just say. I think habitat’s a real problem. We don’t have as much habitat on the nesting grounds or on the wintering grounds. We have neither the quantity nor the quality that we had 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. And break, fast forward 100 or more years, I think Holland represents and France represent the future as we continue to lose habitat, it just becomes a very sterile environment with everything on the landscape that’s artificial. Artificial matters, artificial geese, artificial everything. And what a sad world to live in.

Shawn Swearingen: You’ve brought this up on other podcasts, too. But our research isn’t, and I think the world of our researchers and biologists that are out there, but I don’t think and they probably even see it, too. They’re not keeping up to the differences in habitat management as fast. So if you look at the pintail and mallards, you talked about the PPR, not as much nesting habitat. So those birds are moving elsewhere, specifically when the Prairie pothole regional got dry, those birds keep flying further north, specifically the pintails that are nesting elsewhere. But we’re not capturing that in our surveys.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Shawn Swearingen: So I think we need to have our research be able to adapt to those changing structures.

Ramsey Russell: I think they’re aware of that. I heard a conversation just a couple of weeks ago, I think, at Delta Waterfowl Expo, that they’re realizing that continental population of pintails, as expressed in the counts, are probably reflect an undercount of what kind of pintail numbers we may have. But that’ll remain to be seen. It’s all about – again, heck, you’re the guy sitting inside the Beltway, not me. I mean, it’s just a function of money. Back when I did work for US Department of Agriculture, I got in trouble, from talking to a landowner that didn’t get funded. And I’m like, he threatened to call his congressman. I said, well, you tell that son of a bitch to give me a checkbook, and I’ll fund all you all. I mean, yeah, give me a checkbook, I’ll write all kinds of checks, but that ain’t the way the world is. We’ve got to get those politicians on board with this. I’ve learned that endangered species has commands 5 times the budget of US Fish and Wildlife Service as migratory birds, under which ducks and geese are just a small part of it. So it could be that endangered species has 10 or 15 times the budget as ducks and geese, we need more. I’d like to see ducks and geese have 20 times, the budget for management and better counts and stuff like that as anything else, I don’t make the decisions, or that’s the way it’d be.

Shawn Swearingen: I think part of that, too, is we talked about this earlier with the unfortunate Klamath basin issue. Some of it is recognition of how critical wetlands are to the overall ecosystem. They’re not just helping the ducks. You’re recharging your groundwater system and your aquifers by putting water on the wetlands. That there then goes helps to the fish population and endangered species. We learned it very early in our educational careers of life sciences. What was that 5^th or 6^th grade of the ecosystem and the water cycle? It’s like you kind of forget about that when you get so far up in your bureaucracy.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I may take it a step further, we look at the average American that doesn’t hunt. Why do you need to duck hunt? Why do you need to hunt anything? You can just go to the grocery and buy it. Well, to everybody, what do we need wetlands for? You just go to the sink and turn on the faucet. But if you look at where a lot of real estate development is happening nationwide, especially up in your neck of the woods, where is it? It’s right there on the waterfront. Everybody wants waterfront property right up next to those wetlands. And boy, I tell you what, the Chesapeake Bay is living proof of civilization hurting those wetlands like that. My gosh, Susquehanna flats and it’s like, I’ve increasingly believed that if we want to have better habitat conditions nationwide, have better science, have better whatever to help waterfowl, we need to quit preaching to each other, us preaching to the choir. And forget the anti-hunters, I don’t even count them in the equation. We need to preach to the average city guy, your average neighbor up in northern Virginia, the average guy that walks around that park, not allowed to feed and interact with the wildlife because they’re wild. We need to start expressing to them that, yeah, I’m selfish, I’m a duck hunter. I want ducks and ducks need wetlands, but humanity needs wetlands. We need wetlands. When I look at the problem over in Europe, a silent landscape, except for what’s propagated and put out there, artificially habitat. Wetlands would have helped all those species, not just the waterfowl. And that’s where the focus, I think, needs to be. That’s where a lot of these NGOs, myself, you others in the hunting community need to focus in earnest is, why the hell don’t we have – instead of showing some of this stuff on hunting channels or hunting magazines, why don’t we collectively put together a PBS broadcast about the benefits of hunting and come from a hunting perspective to give hunting value, but at the same time try to explain to the average 75 year old woman living in an urban environment why they’re being wetlands enough for Ramsey to go out and have a good time on Saturday mornings, benefits her and her kids and her neighbors, likewise. That’s where I think the focus needs to be. Because if we don’t get, if you look at all this habitat loss, we know that we hunters are putting time and especially money into the system, but we’re irrelevant. We’re putting all we can put and we’re still losing, we’re still losing ground. That’s just because we need more money. We need more checkbooks. And the only way we’re going to get a bigger checkbook and have more money is if we can recruit all of American society into the fight to save habitat and save wetlands. And you know what, some of us going to go out and shoot them and some of us going to go out and walk around and look at them. But it’s all the same as a win for everything and everybody. I think you’re the man to do right those stories, GGQ magazine.

Shawn Swearingen: No, I appreciate that, Ramsey. Next, I got a couple of projects I’ve been working on. Hopefully get them, get them out there to some wider audiences.

Ramsey Russell: Last question, tell me about your duck call company. I did not realize until earlier today that, that you made duck calls.

Shawn Swearingen: Yeah, BS Calls. BS as in bullshitting.

Ramsey Russell: I know what BS stands for. I think it might stand for something different.

Shawn Swearingen: Well, actually it stands for – my buddy’s last name, Bevere and my last name Swearingen and we grew up hunting together. And he made calls when I moved east, and then I started making more calls when I had the space, and I started doing some woodworking when I was out of college, when I lived with my folks first year or two. And my uncle had a tree fell, big ash tree, and he said I could have it as long as I got it out of there. Long story short, I was going to make some baseball bats. My dad said, well, why don’t you start with something smaller, a little bit easier. So I made duck calls for my buddies. I’ve yet to make a baseball bat, but I’ve been making calls here for a while in the shop. And I got two different styles of stingle reed duck calls and I got my own short reed goose calls. And again you talked about differences of coast, I did not grow up with short reed goose calls. I had the old olt, I have it somewhere here in the shop old olt goose call is what I call geese with, but with a buddy of mine, guide buddy of mine out here, he helped me kind of tone in and were focused on my sound for the short reed goose call. So make all the guts and inserts here myself on those. But yeah, it’s been a lot of fun, all handmade, mainly wooden, about 99% wooden. If I do occasionally make an acrylic call and special requests only for special friends because I hate turning acrylic on my lathe. It’s tough. I don’t do a CNC machine, but I do a travel call for the last couple of years based off of the highwayman. The first one was Waylon Jennings and I travelled, a little bit inspiration from Josh Raggio there in your neck of the woods because he has one call that just goes around year after year. I’ve done one for each year. Then it was Waylon, it was Johnny Cash, and the last year was Chris Christofferson, and this year is Willie Nelson.

Ramsey Russell: Amen.

Shawn Swearingen: And then I donate. I give it to a friend or somebody I think, in the industry that’s very fitting and well deserved of it. Let’s see here. The first year I gave it to a good friend of mine, fellow writer, but mainly artist Bob White, up in Minnesota. He got Waylon. And then I gave the Men in Black to Brent Birch down there in Arkansas. Last year’s Chris, I haven’t given it up yet, but I plan to. I’ll make that posting later. And then Willie, I’m not sure yet, we’ll see where Willie goes. But as my buddy John told me, it’d be kind of cool to get all the calls together at one point in time for a hunt.

Ramsey Russell: It would. It definitely would. The highwayman. Shawn, I appreciate your time. I’ve enjoyed our conversation. Tell everybody how they can connect with you. Yeah, I know you’ve got a podcast, you’ve got social media. Let everybody know how they can connect with you online.

Shawn Swearingen: You can get a hold of me on Instagram at Shawnswearingen or via my calls. Instagram handle BS calls and also do my postings for my highballs and BS podcast there as well. But then feel free to shoot me a note, if you’re looking for a call or got a story idea or somebody that’d be cool interested on. I also post the stories and articles that I published online as there as well.

Ramsey Russell: Good. I appreciate you, I really do. And that’s Shawn Swearingen and Swearingen like Deadwood, he told me. And it is spelt exactly the same. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. We’ll see you next time.

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