Fifth-generation Florida native Travis Thompson was born-and-raised Florida duck hunting. In the absence of mallards, their mainstays are blue-winged teal, Florida mottled ducks, whistling ducks, and–of course–ring-necked ducks, which are discussed in depth along with local hunting traditions, gators and cattle, where and how ducks are hunted. “But when you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” says Thompson, pivoting to the rapid loss of wintering habitat and hunting rights in Florida. Beyond Disney and Miami, an entirely other Florida exists. But for how much longer?


Hide Article

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere Podcast all the way down in Florida. And you know what, I was telling today’s guest, Mr. Travis Thompson, this is the first time we’ve done a dedicated story to Florida, which is, I mean, let’s face it, it’s all wetland. It’s surrounded on all sides by oceans. It’s got to be some duck habitat. Of course, there’s Disneyland down there we all know about that. Travis, it has been 10 years, at least 2018 since I last saw you. And of all places, we met, shook hands and talked at a boat ramp as I was going duck hunting and you were coming in. How the heck are you?

Travis Thompson: I’m good, Ramsay, and I’m sure you were going to mention it, but I told you the other day when we chatted, I straight up lied to you that day.

Ramsey Russell: I never trust nobody at a boat ramp.

Travis Thompson: How’d you all do this morning? Oh, man, it’s slow out there. We redirect them.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. But I had such an amazing time. On the one hand, Florida is not, it’s not Stuttgart, Arkansas, it ain’t a destination of epic proportion, but it is to a lot of people if you’re trying to shoot a lot of stuff. And I had shot coastal mottled ducks way back when down in coastal Texas. Seen them down in Louisiana. And I’m a splitter, not a lumper and I had the opportunity to go shoot Florida mottled ducks and took it. I’ve got some really good friends down there, the van hooks, and they offered to show me they’re part of the world. And we went out and shot our, what is it? One mottled duck a day. That’s fine. We just sat there and let the light get enough. And having shot a lot of Mexican ducks, where the sexes look alike, you just got to be patient, let those ducks work a little bit to pick the drakes, and we were able to shoot our drakes and then they said, hey, let’s go shoot some ringnecks. And we went out to some public water body and shot ringnecks, man. Which, I’m going to raise both my hands, who like to shoot ringnecks? I do. I love shooting ring neck ducks. God bless them. I love them.

Travis Thompson: You don’t duck hunt in Florida if you don’t shoot ringnecks and wood ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Travis Thompson: Like those are very common birds that we hunt a lot.

Ramsey Russell: Are ringnecks kind of like you all, is that you all’s primary species?

Travis Thompson: Ringnecks and blue winged teal, are the most harvested species in the state. Ringnecks, blue winged and wood ducks.

Ramsey Russell: That’s it. And you all had been hunting ringnecks that day.

Travis Thompson: We shot woodies at daylight and then we shot ringnecks after.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, you all had been out there a while then.

Travis Thompson: Yeah, we’ve gotten out there at daylight. We shot a couple of wood – he’d never shot a wood the guy had that day, so we shot wood ducks and then we went and shot a bunch of ringers.

Ramsey Russell: I believe we shot a couple limits and it was lickety split. I think it was midday, late morning when we saw you and he’s going out there and I shot my limit or we shot ours, I can’t remember which. Just a couple of us, and wrapped it up and went on back and it was a lot of fun. They showed me some of the habitat and showed me what was going on out there. And boy, you know the thing about a ringneck duck, for example, we had a member in our Mississippi camp one time from Florida and that’s what he shot a lot of Travis was ringnecks. And we’d be sitting in a blind together the few times we hunted and there’d be a speck, I mean, not a speckle belly, but a speck on the horizon. And you squint, he’s already popping up, getting ready, I’m like, what are you doing? That duck’s a mile off or something. He wasn’t used to hunting puddle ducks, mallards and pintails and gadwalls, he was used to seeing a speck at 30,000ft elevation and here down in the decoys they were 2.5 seconds later and 3 seconds later they were a mile off, gone. That’s what he was used to seeing. He said, man, I’m just not used to shooting these puddle ducks after a lifetime of shooting ringneck ducks.

Travis Thompson: I tell people all the time, Florida is really good for duck hunting as long as you don’t care about mallards. Which is heresy to say to most of the listeners of this, Florida is really good if you just like to shoot ducks. And we’ve got some really good public land opportunities between the STA’s and Merritt Island and they’re all quotas, so you got to compete a little bit to get in it. But when it’s right, I mean, but it’s hunting. It’s way more hunting than what you see on, like, your ag fields in the midwest. It’s a lot of days where it’s gangbusters, and it’s a lot of days where it’s, man, here come a couple, you better make your opportunities count. So you just got to hunt harder, I don’t want to say harder because I want to be reductive to somebody, but it’s definitely hunting. You just got to put the work in. And if you’re willing to put the work in, you kill a whole bunch of ducks down here. I think we added up 24, 25 species of ducks you could kill a season in the state of Florida.

Ramsey Russell: Including, if you’re in the right place, right time, with the right contact, some species, you’re practically hardly going to shoot many other places in the United States. The Florida mottled duck, for one, and the fulvous whistling duck, black bellied whistlers, a lot of them that are over in Texas, Louisiana, boogie on south about the time the blue wings disappear most of them, those whistlers are gone, too, to central Mexico or Latin America, but Florida, they hang around a lot, don’t they? Have you ever shot anything crazy that would jump down to Cuba and come back? Has anybody ever shot white cheek pintails they know to be feral?

Travis Thompson: I’m in most of the duck hunting community in Florida, we’ll see a white cheek every once in a while. We’ll see a cinnamon teal show up every once in a while that got bundled up someplace he shouldn’t have. But generally speaking, no, you’re going to hit those consistent species, blue wings, green wings, shovelers, mottled, fulvous, black belly, any of the divers. And we kill a lot of pintails. A lot of people don’t know that. Bill Cooksie and I met on a podcast with an End of the Line a few years back, we did a podcast, and he told me on that podcast that Florida at one point, was like 3rd in the country in pintail harvest.

Ramsey Russell: I had no idea.

Travis Thompson: Back in the 60s or 70s. And so we get a lot of pintails in. We don’t kill a lot of stud pintails, but we kill a lot of those early birds that come in and they, obviously I love to shoot pintail. I like to shoot ducks, that will work. That’s why you’ll hear me get a little snobby sometimes about those whistling ducks, because they don’t work as good as some of those others do. But the mottled, the pintails, the shovelers, the teal, they’ll do some tricks for us and come in and do what we want.

Ramsey Russell: How many duck hunters are there in the state of Florida?

Travis Thompson: So about 14,000 stamps are sold in the state. So whatever the knockoff of that is – I buy 2 a year, so I’m 2 of those. So I’d guess 12,000 to 13,000, give or take.

Ramsey Russell: That’s about half the size of Mississippi thereabouts, maybe a little bit less than half. That’s not very many, but you all are blessed with. You all know you got a lot of habitat issues down there. But that’s a lot of land to spread out on it. If you said there were 12,000 or 13,000 duck hunters in the state of Florida, how many of them are hunting public land? How many of them are hunting private?

Travis Thompson: So, I run the largest private waterfowl hunting operation in the state, and so I pay attention to this number pretty carefully.

Ramsey Russell: And that’s duck ranching.

Travis Thompson: Duck ranching. My guess is you’re talking about 1500, what is that, 16%, 18%, something like that? Less than 20% are probably hunting private. The vast majority of them are hunting public. Now, I will tell you, don’t underestimate the fact that we have coastal ducks, too. And you won’t kill a lot of teal. You will on the right day, they’ll show up. But coastly, we got the divers, the blue bills, and the redheads that like it out there. And if you go out, even on the east coast, you can kill scoters out there in places, kill sea ducks. So there is a lot of places to go, but it’s also a lot of places for birds to spread out.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. You talk about all the species possible, what’d you say, 20 something species?

Travis Thompson: 24, 25 I can’t remember. I counted them up one time, it was 24, 25.

Ramsey Russell: Some of those species are very niche. They’ll be found in several different habitats, some of them are not. Some of them are very specific habitat oriented. Let’s just talk about a few of the highlights. Tell me about the mottled ducks. What are the Florida mottled ducks like? What is their habitat? I know how we hunt them. We hunt them in relatively shallow water, it was natural flooded wetland, and they were copious amounts of them. Lots of them.

Travis Thompson: So Florida mottled ducks will probably be just about anywhere you can find south of Ocala. So basically Ocala, which is kind of north central, south to the everglades, you can find them. You’ll find a pair of mottled ducks in every lake. They’ll happily go be lake ducks, they’ll happily go live in somebody’s backyard and almost become like, we’ve talked about offline, like feral kind of house ducks. But generally speaking, they like that shallow kind of mucky bottom where they can filter feed. We got a lot of emergent grasses, they like diverse marshes.

Ramsey Russell: Natural type marsh habitat. Yeah.

Travis Thompson: They’ll feed on hydrilla like, every duck in Florida will feed on hydrilla, which is an invasive plant. But if I can find a marsh that has some hydrilla, maybe some chara, some spatterdock, like any of that kind of diverse habitat. So they can kind of move around, mix around and find stuff to eat. They really like what we call the farm fields. They really like those fields that have tons of – they got shallow water. If I was creating the perfect habitat, put about 12 to 18 inches of water, I’d have smart weed growing in it. I’d have any kind of grassy seed head, bahia grass to torpedo grass to West India marsh grass or any of those little seed heads. Mottled ducks love that stuff, man. And they’ll fight to get into it. And on duck ranching, we’ve killed, I want to say it was 500 mottled ducks the last 3 seasons, you can kill one per person per day. So I’ve touched as many mottled ducks as anybody you’ll find in the state of Florida, outside the biologists.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. When you say those ducks are feeding on hydrilla, are they eating a seed off hydrilla? I’ve always thought maybe hydrilla, which is an invasive is more of a substrate for invertebrates. And maybe that’s what was drawing all the – especially the divers or the puddle ducks too, that Hydrilla. Is there a seed on it?

Travis Thompson: Tubers is what they call it. It’s like the soft. I don’t know if it’s a seed or if it drops off, but it’s like the little curly things that kind of come off on the chutes is what I’ve been told they eat. I mean, when I’m looking at it, I’m cleaning a duck, and so it’s been kind of mauled up a little bit. It’s definitely not the leaves on top, it’s like something off the shoot of the plant itself.

Ramsey Russell: I see. It reminds me of a lot of the marshes we hunt down in Argentina are covered with giant salvia, which is also an invasive species here in the states. But by God, I think of it like a super sized, tennis ball sized piece of duckweed. And the freaking ducks love it. Boy, anywhere I find a lot of giant salvia, there’s a lot of freaking ducks and I don’t know if they’re nibbling on the roots, nibbling on something underneath it, and eating the bugs off of it, but it’s everywhere. And it’s not a problem or a detriment to wetlands down there, than it is here.

Travis Thompson: You bring that up it’s funny because so obviously duck ranching, and that’s a little bit of a play because it’s on a cattle ranch. In Florida, WRE easements, so wetlands restoration easements, the NRCs, the farm bill easements, we can graze cattle on those, and that’s the only state where you can graze cattle on them. And what we’ve learned is if there’s any kind of disturbance, both mottled ducks, shovelers, pintails and teal will go where that disturbance is. And by disturbance I mean cows, we drive a tractor through to drop people off or anything else, day or 2 later, there’s going to be ducks in where those tractor was driven through. Like, it’s 100%. Obviously, there’s plenty of seeds and stuff there, but if you can disturb that in some way, which I think I attribute that to both the seeds and the invertebrates that are kind of triggered when you stir that stuff up.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Travis Thompson: I mean, watch it with wading birds, too, they love to follow that stuff around.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I tell you what, that USDA program WRE would not be successful in the state of Florida where cattle grazing is not allowed. Because I’m going to tell you what, prior to the visit, I saw you at, if you told me, name a cowboy capital of America, I’d name somewhere between Texas and Bozeman, Montana, the Chisholm trail type stuff. Man, I have never seen the cattle in the size ranches and the freaking real deal cowboys with the dusters and bandanas on and clouds of dust and beating through the brush with horses that I’ve seen down in Florida. Cowboying and growing cattle is a big freaking deal in the state of Texas, at least up in that panhandle down around the place we were below Orlando. It’s unbelievable.

Travis Thompson: So, it’s funny, most people don’t know this, but cattle came to North America through Florida. That’s how they got in North America is through Florida. And they were called cow hunters originally because there were no fences until, like, the 40s or 50 in Florida, 1940s, 1950s. So you would just kind of let your cattle go, you’d brain them, and then you round them all up, ship them off. And I want to say of this number will be close of the top 25 ranches in size in the United States, I think 7 of them are in Florida.

Ramsey Russell: Things you learn on the podcast.

Travis Thompson: We are a top 10 cattle producing state and cows. The past president of Florida Cattlemen’s Association, Pat Dirt, his slogan was, Cows Keep Florida Green, and he ain’t wrong.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Travis Thompson: Cows are a huge deal for conservation in this state, because where you got the cattle is where, obviously, for me, that’s where you got the ducks. But you find somebody that wants to go shoot osceola turkeys, I guarantee you they’re doing it. If they’re doing on private land, they’re doing it on a cattle ranch. That’s where you’re going to see your endangered species. Like, we’ve done work with snail kites and bald eagles and all kinds of stuff like that. See them on cattle ranches. I mean, that’s preserving that habitat, conserving that habitat, we’re using it for grazing and then we use it for hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Because they create a lot of plant biodiversity with their grazing and they’re walking and they’re doing stuff like that. It’s just real consistent with a lot of the species using that habitat isn’t it?

Travis Thompson: 100%. And the first time I ever ran a hunt on private land, we didn’t know what we were doing. And so the rancher was like, he’s my partner, Matt Pierce, Pierce Cattle company. And he said, I’ll move these cows out of here so you guys can – Ramsey, we had more teal, it looked like something from Argentina or someplace. I mean, it was wild how many teal we had. He’s like, I’ll get these cows moved out of here this week. Well, guess what? All those ducks picked up and went where the cows were.

Ramsey Russell: You are kidding?

Travis Thompson: Because they went where the disturbance was. Wherever the cattle was, was where those birds were going to be. And I was like, we don’t want to do that again, because then we had to move our hunters to where the cows were. Like, it kind of fouled up my plans and we made it work. We wrecked the ducks that week, but we had to go where the cows were to wreck them because that’s where the birds wanted to be. They liked that disturbance. It was being created. And man, it’s a unique thing to Florida that a lot of people don’t know about how important cattle ranching is. And then you talk about Ducks Unlimited, we both talked about them offline. I love Ducks Unlimited wetlands restoration. You’ve got these easements that are holding water, you put cattle on them and you can use that water, uptake the nutrients out of the food, and you put cattle on them, graze it, and you ship the calves off to Oklahoma or someplace to finish them, we’re exporting nutrients and cleaning water, using cattle and shooting ducks over it.

Ramsey Russell: The things you learn. What a brave new world we live in. That’s good. We were talking about the mottled ducks, and I heard something interesting. Lately, we were visiting with Dr. Brazier and Phil Lavertsky and others there at Ducks Unlimited about the Duck DNA program first year results. And it was a terribly small sample size they had coming out of Florida. And I was shocked to learn that despite that terribly small sample size, they had only 9 birds, but if I recall right, but nearly all of them had been influenced or were hybridized with game farm mallards. If I said that to you, if you’d not heard it before, would that surprise you as a Florida duck hunter?

Feral Mallards in Disney’s Backyard: Impacts on Local Waterfowl.

Disney’s got plenty of park ducks. It’s got plenty of those feral mallards hanging around there. And you see those birds on lakes, like, up in the Kissimmee chain system, and that’s where you’ll see those hybrids.

Travis Thompson: Not depending on where those samples were taken. Because if you look – and I’ve had Phil on my podcast back when I used to do one regularly, I heard him originally with you, and I think of Phil as a friend, I love what he’s doing. This is so important to us. So if you look at the urban centers, there’s a lot of people duck hunt around Orlando. There’s a lot of people duck hunt around Tampa. And you got those urban centers, and you mentioned Disney World earlier. Disney’s got plenty of park ducks. It’s got plenty of those feral mallards hanging around there. And you see those birds on lakes, like, up in the Kissimmee chain system, and that’s where you’ll see those hybrids. And you can’t tell me that there’s not, like, another ring of the ripple that goes out from there, because what we know with mottled ducks in Florida is they don’t migrate north south, but they do migrate to nesting areas. So they’ll go to, like, the STAs, or they’ll go to a pasture like ours. They’ll go there and congregate up in the summer and nest or in the spring and nest, and then they’ll molt, that’s when we’ll catch them and band them and stuff, and then they’ll kind of disperse back out.

Ramsey Russell: Have you ever heard how big Florida mottled ducks home range might be? I’ve often wondered that because in the southern hemisphere, there’s no continental migration. And I’ve known rosybill will come out of the marshes way up north or up towards Brazil and come down into parts of Argentina. But most ducks, most places I’ve hunted, when I’m shooting name of species other than rosybill or Chiloé wigeon, most of those species are coming from somewhere nearby, but I don’t know how far nearby. And they’ll do the same thing, Travis. They’ll nest over here in this part of their home range, they’ll feed over here, they’ll overwinter here, they’ll find some fresh water, and they move around. But it’s a finite area they’re covering. But I don’t know how finite.

Travis Thompson: It’s funny. So I don’t know what their range is for nesting season for that kind of like, whatever I would call it, almost like a spawning type deal in fish where they just kind of move 20 miles, 40 miles, 60 miles, and then they go back. But it’s kind of funny. We do that with our hunters, we’ll tell them, make sure you stay out till 09:30 or 10:00, because if you don’t shoot your mottled ducks early, they’ll come back. We’ll get birds from another parcel or something else that hadn’t been here yet. They’ll come back later in the morning, and then all of our mottled ducks will come back this evening and we won’t shoot them. But you can hang out and birds from around the area will just kind of trade around. They’ll just kind of move around a little bit. And you shoot as long as you want to shoot them, they’ll continue to move around. You can quack one in.

Ramsey Russell: I sure would like to see some Florida mottled ducks throughout the state of Florida with geo trackers on them just to get an idea of how big their home range – how big is the home range of a non-migratory bird? A non-migratory waterfowl, a very localized waterfowl species, that’d be groundbreaking news to me.

Travis Thompson: Well, when we get done, I’m going to text Phil when we get off here and say, hey, we need to get a bunch of vials down there at the ranch, because I told you we’ve touched 500 mottled ducks the last 3 seasons, we could take a sample from every one of them get a really good sampling from that part of Florida, south.

Ramsey Russell: To be as imperiled as – I mean, because obviously, this is an important species. It’s got a very limited home range. I think it goes up into the Texas panhandle, it might jump across the state boundary into Alabama sometimes, but mostly it’s a Florida duck. It might get up to a little South Carolina, little South Georgia, but mostly it’s very localized species. It’s been there a long time. It is a subspecies of continental mottled duck. You’ve got the Gulf coast mottleds and the Florida mottleds. And in hand, they appear just slightly different. I think it’s the ones in Florida that just, at a glance, have a little more blind appearance than the dark appearance. They’re not quite as dusky as the coastal mottleds are. And if we’ve got some issues going on, it seems like they’d want to put a lot of vials in your hands and see if that sample of 9 was, if there’s something more revealing going on, you know? I would think so. Yeah, you need to call our buddy Phil, Dr. Phil, see if he gets you bunch of them vials.

Travis Thompson: I’ll call Phil and Mike, we’ll get on it. We’ll update at least the sample size and find out what’s really real down here. But, no, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit of. Because when I used to hunt around Lake Toho and some of those northern lakes, most of the mottleds we touched were hybrids. You could look at them and tell, like, they would have characteristics of greenheads in them somewhere. Either the green flecking in the head, or they’d have the double white bars or they’d have a little bit of a tail lift, they’d have another characteristic in them.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. You talk about Disney, you ain’t never put your hands on a Disney duck band, have you? That’s something that flies into your decoy. Because when I was at Disneyland, break, break, over my dead body was I ever going to go to Disney. And I kept telling my wife that if we had children and one day I’m sitting in the recliner watching TV, watching the news or something, and hear her talking to her mom about an upcoming Disney trip, and I walk in and say, we’re going to Disney? She goes, we are. Boy, she squirreled away some money. They were going to Disney. So I said, well, I guess I’ll go with you. Hate to admit I had a good time with them, but all those little park ducks walking around, a lot of them had leg bands on them.

Travis Thompson: I’ve never heard anybody shooting one. I’m sure it happens, because I guarantee you they get out of there because they got wings, and there’s always a breeding season, and you know how that goes.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Have you shot any of the Egyptian geese yet?

Travis Thompson: I haven’t. I mean, most of our properties are pretty remote that we’re hunting. They’re pretty far from an urban center, I’d say, as the crow flies, Palm Beach is probably, man, 60 miles from me. I mean, that’s probably the closest urban area to me. So we’re pretty far inland, and we are pretty far into the everglades almost. And we don’t see the Egyptians where I’m at, you see those again, more around like those urban canals or lakes and –

Ramsey Russell: They get all over the state near cities or is it mostly like Miami, Jupiter beach, over in Orlando?

Travis Thompson: They’re creeping north. So yeah, they’re starting to see more in Orlando now.

Ramsey Russell: Where do you think they originated? Out of a zoo or -? My gosh, we’re talking about the land of freaking feral everything. Plants and invasives and wildlife and boa constrictors and everything else, who knows where they came from? But I’m just guessing somebody turned their pets loose.

Travis Thompson: That’s what I think. I mean, farmstead is a real big deal now. And so everybody on my timeline and Facebook and stuff is growing ducks at their house. And you know how it is, you have those kind of birds and they get out and now you got something weird. I’m sure you can buy Egyptian geese and raise them in your backyard for eggs or meat or whatever you do with them. And a couple of those get out. And Florida is such a mild climate, stuff just seems to do well here.

Ramsey Russell: That’s something else. It’s going to be a problem, it’s going to be interesting to see how those birds displace other native species. It’s never good to introduce a feral anything into an environment that it does well. There’s got to be a downside to it.

Travis Thompson: We’re talking through Florida bird species and that’s always been a concern I’ve had about black belly whistling ducks is, are they competing with wood ducks for nest box usage, for cavity usage, et cetera? Because whistling ducks down here will have 2 or 3 clutches of babies a year. Like they seem to breed constantly, which is why they’re kind of hard to pin down in some cases because they’ll stay in an area till those young fledge and then they’ll even stay there a little while after that. I’ve always wondered like, are they beginning to compete? And I’d like to see a study done on that. Are they competing at all? Because I’m a big wood duck guy. We got a great wood duck population down here. They’re little, but they’re fun. And man, I’d hate for them to begin to out compete our wood ducks and us not have enough habitat for them to continue to thrive. Even though I have nothing against black bellies.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, I don’t have nothing against them either. And welcome all the opportunity for more shooting opportunities throughout the United States, where they seem to be going everywhere nowadays. But they are nest box competitors, and as beautiful as they are, anybody that’s ever rent been around whistling ducks in an enclosed environment, they are mean as a freaking snake. Those white face whistlers, especially. But whistling ducks are mean as a snake, man, and they’re a big bird. You can’t band whistling ducks while wearing short sleeve shirts, it’s just like cooch. They will lacerate you like little dinosaurs clawing at you.

Travis Thompson: My wife said, did you get in a fight with a bobcat? I came in one night, we banded a bunch of whistling ducks. She’s like, you get to fight with a bobcat. I had a long sleeve shirt on. They were scratched all to pieces. But we’ve put bands out, where we do traps for wood ducks down here like, the FWC does, but we volunteer with them and work with them everything else is all licensed and done through the US Fish, but they’ll put a trap out, and those whistling ducks will block the trap from letting the wood ducks get in it. They’ll actually kind of in a family group, the family groups will prevent the wood ducks sometimes from getting in the trap because they don’t want them to get to the corn. I can’t fit in this trap, but you’re not getting in there, by golly.

Ramsey Russell: Speaking of whistling ducks, you all have got black bellied and fulvous and I’m not asking for a location on a map because I know better than that. But in general, what habitats are you going to when you’re targeting whistling ducks? Black bellies and fulvous, are their habitat preference directly overlapping or slightly different?

Travis Thompson: No. In my opinion, and this is my opinion now, I’ve hunted dugs in Florida for a long time. In my opinion, fulvous like a little bit cleaner water. Pintails almost like a little bit cleaner habitat than, I don’t mean clean like, it could be –

Ramsey Russell: Not as mucky nasty as, say, a shoveler or a cinnamon teal.

Travis Thompson: Yes, exactly. Like, they just like a little bit cleaner water. So if I had my druthers, I would look for clean water. I would look for chara or hydrilla topped out. And I would look for them to be able to have, for fulvous I’d look for them to be able to have a clean entry and exit. They’re a little more skittish duck. Black bellies is like shooting chickens, man. You’ve shot them a bunch. Like, they’re kind of like shooting chickens. So black bellies, I always say that the best decoy for a black belly is a dead black belly and a whistle. If you can do that, you can get them to circle 3 or 4 times and get a shot.

Ramsey Russell: They’re both marsh birds. I think of them both as marsh birds. I really do. The white face whistler that you’ll see in parts of South America, it’s a marsh bird. Where I see them in Africa, they have transitioned heavily to big pans and shallow water areas adjacent to agriculture. You know what I’m saying? They like that natural. But they will avail themselves of agriculture a lot like the geese. But I have put a hurting, back in the day, I have put an absolute hurting on fulvous whistling ducks down in South America. And it’s always, at the times I shoot fulvous, it’s always marsh. Shoot them in Africa it’s marsh, it’s rank vegetation. And I’ve never noticed the water, you’re talking about the clean water. Shoot them in fulvous whistlers, shoot them in – I’ve shot a few now in Mexico, a lot in Argentina. And it’s like where I see the most fulvous in South America, there’s that heavy submerged aquatic that I dread walking through to get to them. But it’s not quite heavy like the little rails they can walk on top of it. The whistlers can’t quite walk on top of it, but that’s okay. They like to land in it, they like to hop around in it and they like to forge in it, whatever they’re doing. That’s where I like seeing those fulvous.

Travis Thompson: Here’s a thing that I’ve noticed with both fulvous mottleds and black bellies is there’s two types of smart weed. And I’m not smart weed expert. Like, we have a wild smart weed, we have the pink and the white. But we have one that gets like bushy big. It gets really thick and big.

Ramsey Russell: The pink one?

Travis Thompson: That kind of smart weed. Black bellies and fulvous use it, and mottleds will use it at the edges. If you can knock it down in patches or something teal will get in there and use it a little bit. But teal generally won’t use it if it’s undisturbed. Like, they just won’t. It’s too thick for them to kind of get to. And so we’ve noticed that if you got that real thick, smart weed which grows on the Kissimmee river, it grows in cow pastures –

Ramsey Russell: You’re talking about the big pink flower or some species there of it, just a big pink flower to get so thick, so course, so heavy. The other smart weed, the hydro pepper cordies, that doesn’t have a lot of seed production, but boy, it grows on saturated soils and it’s very thin and it’s very good for invertebrate type habitat, snails and things of that nature.

Travis Thompson: So we see those 3 Florida ducks will feed in that thicker stuff. They’ll get into it where you can’t see them. You’ll hear them whistling and stuff, and I mean, that stuff will be 18, 20 inches high above the water. And you can kick them out of it like quail some days. Like they’ll get in there thick on it. They’ll sit like you were talking about the vegetation being thick, we have a grass called torpedo grass, it’s an invasive down here, and cattle will graze it. So we have some growing on our ranch, and those ducks will sit on that torpedo grass to where you can’t see anything. When they get big, when they get older, they’ll get that bright orange. And if you get good at it, you can glass and you can see that bright orange periodically, just like pivoting a little bit in the grass, and you begin to pick that up and you can figure out where those birds are and you can go hunt them.

Ramsey Russell: Do a lot of people that contact you to come to Florida, I would guess that stud up blue wings, Florida mottled ducks and those 2 whistling species are high up on everybody’s list.

Travis Thompson: Absolutely they are. That’s what everybody wants to shoot. That’s what everybody wants to shoot, except the people from Florida. People from Florida want to shoot puddle ducks. Because as we talked earlier you can go shoot ringers on lakes just about any time. Well, it still work, but you can go do it. People from Florida don’t want to shoot divers, they want to go shoot puddle ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Were you born and raised in Florida?

Travis Thompson: 5th generation.

Ramsey Russell: 5th generation. How’d your people end up down there?

Travis Thompson: They left South Carolina after the civil war and came south. My great 3rd grandfather was an ammo maker in the civil war in South Carolina. And after the civil war, he came to Florida. And we worked in mostly lumber. So central Florida, the green swamp area is where they kind of settled. And we worked in lumber. And my great great grandfather was an engineer, that’s actually his training right there. He was an engineer for a lumber company. And so they go in and log Cyprus or they do turpentine. Turpentine was real big in Florida out of the longleaf forest, and so that’s what my family kind of grew up in.

Ramsey Russell: And what was your background that led you into commercial duck hunting and duck hunting in general?

Travis Thompson: I worked in corporate America and hated it.

Ramsey Russell: What did you do? What industry were you in?

Travis Thompson: I was IT Executive, believe it or not. So my dad was an environmental engineer for the Department of Environmental Protection. He retired about 3 years ago, Ramsey. And he was a state employee, so we never had a lot of money, and we went on vacation, we stayed in the state of Florida, and we either went fishing or we went hunting, that’s what we did. So I grew up kind of in it, and he grew up in a world of a little bit softer folks. A lot of those folks he worked with were environmentalists, they didn’t hunt, they didn’t fish, and he never shied away from it. But he taught me very early on, like, we need those people to understand why we do what we do and how much we contribute to conservation and how much hunting and fishing matters to keeping these places wild and free and special. So, we never shied away from keeping a redfish, we never shied away from shooting dinner. Squirrels, rabbits, quail, you name it. I got a Brittany Spaniel laying right here on the floor next to me that I quail hunted that dog. I mean, I grew up kind of just in it. Like, I fell in love with Florida at an early age because I didn’t know any better.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a lot to say about you. You didn’t know any better. What is the typical day hunting like? I mean, how specialized is duck hunting in Florida on public land?

Travis Thompson: So, the trick that we have that I think that most other states don’t, and you would get this because you’ve been around all over, is we don’t have fixed blinds typically. The birds are just going to be a little more fluid where we’re at. You take a 300 acre pasture, and if you can set the right blind up on the right path, you can get those birds to work. It’s not an X in that pasture, there’s just not. And so, when I’ve hunted Arkansas or I’ve hunted Louisiana or place like that, you’re generally hunting in a fixed type of situation. What’s different here is we’ll often walk into an impoundment with no blinds. Like, we’ll walk in there carrying palm fronds and stuff and just kind of make a little makeshift thing around you, and that’s where you going to hunt.

Ramsey Russell: That’s like marsh hunting in a lot of places I’ve hunted. Louisiana, but especially down in South America or Mexico, you just walk in and break the outline, go where the ducks are and get after them.

Travis Thompson: If you can be still and break up your outline, you can kill ducks in most places that we’re at. So I think that’s the thing that most people don’t – When they think duck hunting, they think, oh, man, we’re going to be in a blind, and we’re going to have the heater, we’re going to have the stove, I’m like, no dude, your feet are wet, you’re going to be sitting on a stool in a field. It’s almost kind of like dove hunting a little bit. It’s just we’re getting the birds to work. But Florida is unique because we do have a lot of habitat, you can go hunt out of a boat, you can go hunt the coast. But for what I’m doing, man, we’re hunting willow edges, we’re hunting palmetto edges. I got one place we hunt standing in oak hammock, and we’ve shot the mess out of blue wing teal and green wing teal. In fact, our friend Tory Loomis, you know Tory?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I know Tory.

Travis Thompson: Our friend Tory, you have to ask her, we stood under an oak tree in a palmetto patch and just wore the teal out one morning. I’m talking, like, an upland place where you can shoot squirrels, but there’s a little flag pond there. Flag is what we call an alligator flag or airhead. Duck potato. It’s a duck potato pond and it’s just a depression. It might have been 6 inches of water in that pond. And birds were just fighting to get in.

Ramsey Russell: They love duck potatoes. That’s a fact. Talking about alligator. You all deal with alligators and snakes during duck season? All duck season? Rarely do you get, I mean, I guess when you see on the 06:00 news that the citrus growers are having to light off propane fires around the trees, it’s cold, but normally it ain’t cold.

Travis Thompson: We run private land gator hunts simply to get rid of the gators, like to get rid of alligators to manage them. And I like to hunt them in the winter because on private land, we can shoot them. In Florida, you can’t shoot them with a rifle on public lands, you got to catch them with a bait or a cast on them. But on private land, you can shoot them with a rifle. And in the winter, on those cold days, they’ll get out on the banks so you can figure out what you really got and you can pick the ones that you got to get rid of. And they slow way down. And I don’t love gator hunting because they’re heavy, they stink, and it’s not to me, I’m not judging anybody that does, it’s just not my jam. Because you drive down the levee and you shoot one in the head with a 308 at 40 yards. It’s not that tough to do, but it’s still pretty neat to do it because you get to touch an alligator.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah. I mean, I’ve shot a few of them. It’s just not, like you say, it’s not my jam, but I’ve done it. It’s something to do. Make some mean ass wallet.

Travis Thompson: Yeah. You get all the food out of it. You get the leather out of it. I mean, you’re using that animal. I have no issue with anybody doing, it’s just not my thing. I wouldn’t.

Ramsey Russell: They don’t fly.

Travis Thompson: They don’t fly and they don’t quack.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Hunting with Dogs: Evaluating Safe Locations for Florida Duck Hunts.

There could be an alligator under my truck right now. But really speaking, we’re making the best guess we can. And in a farm field, he’s not going to be there, he’s going to be in the canals around that farm field. So keep your dogs off from canals, we’re going to drop you off in a blind and you’re going to do your thing.

Travis Thompson: But what will do is they will come to dogs. So we have an online form where people fill out to duck hunt with us and we ask kind of like what experience you’re looking for. And you can check multiple, because we do a lot of first time duck programs. Like, we need more duck hunters in Florida. So, we do a lot of first time duck hunting programs. But then we ask if people have dogs because there’s certain lines we just won’t put somebody in with a dog because if that dog gets into the deeper part of that impoundment, it’s a risk I don’t want on my conscience with those guys. So farm fields, 18 inches of water, there could be an alligator anywhere in Florida. There could be an alligator under my truck right now. But really speaking, we’re making the best guess we can. And in a farm field, he’s not going to be there, he’s going to be in the canals around that farm field. So keep your dogs off from canals, we’re going to drop you off in a blind and you’re going to do your thing. But some of the deeper reservoir impoundments will hunt those and do real well, but I won’t put dogs in them.

Ramsey Russell: Well, you say that, that’s the truth. It’s like hunting down in coastal Texas, southeast Texas during teal season, the water is shin, deep or less. But you don’t let your dog go into canals if you want to see it again. Because that’s where the gators are off in that deep water. And you can hear them roaring at times. You can hear them off in there. You just don’t send your dog to that kind of stuff.

Travis Thompson: It’s bad. Mating season is really late spring, April, May and we will hear them doing that mating roar, kind of grumble, rumble, whatever it’s called territorial bull stuff. September, October, November and I’m like, man, I don’t want to mess with one of those big old nasty guys.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve known people that have just been fooling them and got their finger just nicked or cut by an alligator tooth and it’s so rank and foul in their mouth they’ve gotten gangrened. That’s crazy. So even if your dog just got bit, it could lose a leg or lose an arm or lose something off of that, let alone get killed, never be seen again. Boy, I’d have an issue with something like that. In fact, I’ve got invites to go hunt places down on the coast. I’m sorry, I can’t go. Because if I can’t bring my dog, what’s the point with this duck hunt, right?

Travis Thompson: I’ve kicked 2 in my life and scared them both as bad as they scared me, and I know it’ll happen again, but it’s one of those things I just don’t think about walking in the morning. You got to kind of mind over matter it when you walk through that canal because once you get through the canal, you’re in 18 inches of water, 12 inches of water or something.

Ramsey Russell: Crazy as it sounds, Travis, I mean, have the snake, the big anaconda condition got such that you worry about your dog?

Travis Thompson: The pythons.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, the pythons.

Travis Thompson: No. So I’ve hunted pythons in the Everglades some, and the biggest one I’ve been able to catch is about 12 foot, but they are not – we’ve had one on our property that we’ve ever seen. So we’re a little bit north of where they’re at right now. They will get there eventually, but they’re also, one of them would not be a problem – if one of them got your dog, you could get it off, provided you saw it happen, and I’m imagining your dog’s going to go out there to retrieve a bird or something. If it happened, you could get that dog out. The problem is the alligators. If an alligator got your dog, I don’t think you can get to it quick enough. I don’t think you get to rescue it.

Ramsey Russell: No, it’d be over pretty quick, I’m afraid. All these years down here, all this duck hunt you’ve been doing, man, when you look at your resume, Travis, you’ve ran a huge podcast forever. Delta Waterfowl 2021 Conservation Legacy award winner. Tell me about that real quick.

Travis Thompson: Yeah, that was kind of right place, right time.  Delta Waterfowl has always been a great organization for duck hunters. And we had an issue come up, it was called the restricted hunting area issue, where they wanted to put a distance restriction in and allow development to continue on lakes. And it was going to create a pressure point for public land waterfowlers in the state of Florida. And we kind of led that charge, they absolutely, John Devney and Cyrus Baird and those guys over there, they absolutely had our backs on it and helped.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what they do.

Travis Thompson: That’s what they do. And then you can’t talk about duck hunting in Florida without talking about spraying. We were able to materially change some spray plans on lakes and get the agency to work with us on – I’m careful about this, I’m not anti-spraying, but I’m not pro spraying. I’m a big fan of, we need as much habitat as we can for as many birds as we can.

Ramsey Russell: Well, you talk about this. You’re founding member of the Florida Aquatic Plant Management technical advisory group.

Travis Thompson: Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: You all got that hydrilla, which is invasive. You’ve got torpedo grass, which is invasive. You’ve got non duck hunting related interest in Florida, like open waterways and fishing and boating and stuff like that. But surprise, this hydrilla can be real good for ducks. I mean, I’ve never talked to a duck hunter, Travis, hardly, I’ve ever talked to a duck hunter from the state of Florida that didn’t talk about the loss of ducks, I guess they’re talking about ringnecks with a lot of the spraying going on for hydrilla. So on the one hand, you’ve got federal and or state agencies that need to be controlling this stuff, but on the other hand, it’s duck habitat now, how do you balance that?

Travis Thompson: And that’s kind of what we work on, is trying to balance it. Again, I’m not anti-herbicide, in the midwest, guys use herbicide all the time for managing for ducks. I see it, it’s funny. You spend time on the duck forums anywhere in the country, and it’s a big thing. You spend times on the Florida ones, and it’s the devil. So what we try to do is encourage the agency to take into account, our duck season and water temperature and everything else so that we could kind of change the timing on some of these treatments. So that I don’t mind you spraying it, what I mind is you spraying it and it being gone in November and December, because I’ve scouted for it, I know where those birds are going to be, I know the patterns, and we don’t have a replacement for them. So nowadays, those birds that would land on a public waterway may come land on my ranch. This could be real good for me, but I’m a big, the more habitat you got, the more ducks you can hold guy like this isn’t tricky. I want as much habitat in my state to service ducks as possible, because that means there’s more ducks for everybody, including me and my clients. If all the ducks in Florida had to come to my ranch, we wouldn’t have ducks very long because we chewed them a few times and they’d move on. We got to have a lot more habitat on it. So we try to really balance that conversation and make sure that there is plenty of habitat on multiple lakes around the state. Lake Apopka has become a big one the last few years. And it kind of blew up with hydrilla as the water quality improved. And, man, they needed to go in there and treat it, and we didn’t want them to treat it, we wanted them to wait till after duck season. And for 3 years now, they’ve kind of worked with us. This last year, they got a little sideways, the state pulled a fast one on us. But for 3 years, we were kind of able to manage that. So where we had really good public land, waterfowling on that lake and we’re going to see if we can keep staying in that fight and keeping the balance on that so we can keep some hydrilla, so we have some duck food out there.

Ramsey Russell: When they’re fighting that hydrilla, Travis, do they have to spray it every year? And do they spray every acre every year? Because I would think, hey, this old word called hemi marsh, we’ve talked about a lot in habitat. If they just went out there and sprayed half of it, that’d be okay.

Travis Thompson: So the problem they run into there is a budget problem because it’s just like, there’s a guy mowing my yard, I’ll try to mute when he goes by. There’s a guy mowing my yard right now, if I just wanted him to cut me some trails out there, he’d charge me the same amount of money because he’s got to come out here, unload his trailer, go cut those trails, and load it back up.

Ramsey Russell: Good point.

Travis Thompson: Versus as mowing everything. So it becomes a budget problem a little bit there. And hydrilla grows so fast that it becomes almost cost prohibitive to manage it that wy, which is kind of attention that we’re working on trying to balance out. Hey, could we figure out ways to get more money, so you could spray trails more frequently and leave more hydrilla in the water column. So we got more duck food, more fish habitat, because fish love it, too. The bass guys will tell you straight up, they love fishing the edges of hydrilla, that’s where you going to catch your big bass.

Ramsey Russell: How’s that little old dog of yours do, swimming through hydrilla to find ducks?

Travis Thompson: You don’t put my dog in hydrilla, that’d be the last time you saw him.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t think I could throw char dog in some thick hydrilla or any dog. I mean, that’s some thick, nasty stuff.

Travis Thompson: People do what they want with their dogs. But even, like in the STAs where you’ve got some thick hydrilla or even thick chara and stuff, you got to have a big – I mean, we say all the time, that’s why labs are created to hunt ducks. And everybody wants to hunt ducks with something different, so they’re different, you can’t do that. That’s why labs so effective is they are built to do this thing, they’re a big dog, they’re able to charge through it, they’ve got the muscle mass and the weight and everything else to pull it off.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. You’ve been guiding for a long time, over a decade. You’ve been fish guiding since back in the early 2000s, 5th generation Florida. Along the way, you became concerned about a gap. I’m reading from some notes you sent me that you saw in hunters and anglers pay for conservation. We all say hunting and fishing is conservation. And your seat at the table, the hunters and anglers seat at the table in the state of Florida, what was concerning, what were you seeing? What kind of gap was being created between the hunters, anglers that are funding conservation and you all seated at the decision making table in the state of Florida?

Raising Awareness: Why Sportsmen Deserve a Seat at the Table.

And I said, where’s the sportsman on this table? And they said, well, you want the same things they want, so they’ll just represent you in this conversation. I was like, no, sir, that is not, and that was a group that was appointed by the legislature.

Travis Thompson: So what I saw happen there, Ramsey was, I told you I grew up in a house with a conservation dad. And so we talked about conservation and conservation funding and how important it was all the time. And over time, I began to look it around at kind of like our state as a whole, and you never saw hunting and fishing talked about what you saw was green space talked about, what you saw was environmental issues talked about, I’m not marginalizing those, those are important for habitat and everything else that we talk about. But I’m a North American conservation modal guy, and if you’re going to have conservation, you better dang sure have consumptive use as part of that story, as part of that narrative. And obviously, Florida is the fishing capital of the world, so fishing’s less at risk in that conversation than hunting is. But even then, you just didn’t see, you’d walk into a room, and I’ll never forget, I walked into a room where they were talking about putting toll roads in up and down the state, and they had somebody there from Defenders of Wildlife and somebody there from Sierra Club and somebody there from, I forget the other groups. And I said, where’s the sportsman on this table? And they said, well, you want the same things they want, so they’ll just represent you in this conversation. I was like, no, sir, that is not, and that was a group that was appointed by the legislature. This is back in about 2018, 2019.

Ramsey Russell: Were they wildlife commissioners or special committee?

Travis Thompson: No, this was a special committee that was formed. And I’m like, hold on a second. And then we’ve got a pretty good commission. Like, when you look at our commissioners makeup, it’s a little bit different than other states. Like, most of our guys are recognized names, but most of them are not going to be public land waterfowlers. They’re not going to be public land duck hunters or even publicly quoted deer guys or anything else. And so decisions get made way more around sailfish and mahi than it does around whitetail deer and turkeys. And we needed to change that narrative. And so that’s kind of where I got involved in conservation more heavily was we need a sportsman sitting at some of these tables that’s able to talk about habitat. Like, I’ll go toe to toe with anybody on conservation easements or water quality or any of the other stuff. But when it comes time to talk conservation, we’re also going to talk hunting and fishing and consumptive use. And we’re going to talk all the parts of conservation, not just the parts we like.

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know how you avoid talking about hunting and fishing in the context of wildlife habitat conservation. I don’t see how it’s even humanly possible. For example, on this committee, you were talking about what were Defenders of Wildlife or Sierra Club, what kind of time or money were they putting into habitat conservation other than legislatively designating an area not to be used for any reason?

Travis Thompson: That’s kind of what the logic was. Well, they don’t want it to be used, so that’s going to be the same thing that hunters and anglers would want. I’m like, no. They don’t have the same lens that they’re looking at this land through that I have or it doesn’t have to be me that somebody from Ducks Unlimited would have or somebody from Delta Waterfowl or have, or Safari Club or whoever. And so we just had this gap that formed, and I think it also formed Ramsey and we want to talk about the right to fish and hunt a little bit. But I think it also formed, because I always say the biggest threat to hunters is apathy. It is that we kind of just take our hands off, we want to go to the woods and hunt and fish, that’s why we got into this, right?

Ramsey Russell: Make a job and pay for the bills and do what we got to do, and be the responsible guy to take care of our family and then take a week or two or our weekends off to go hunt and fish. That’s describes 90% of humanity, Travis. But we really can’t do that anymore.

Travis Thompson: That’s what I was going to say. There is nothing wrong with that, because that’s kind of how most of my friends were raised. I happen to be raised by a dad that did not look at it that way. He showed up at the meeting. I mean, he was also, as part of his job, I don’t want making out of his – I mean, it was part of his job, too. But when you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu, is what I like to say.

Ramsey Russell: I like that.

Travis Thompson: And so what we noticed was sportsmen weren’t at the table. And so when you’d open a new piece of land, we never considered whether we should hunt on it. We have all kind of environmental land programs in the state, we don’t consider hunting on most of those lands. And that’s because no one’s asked for it. It’s not an anti-hunting movement, it’s kind of a hunting apathy movement. And so, we were talking about Lake Apopka a minute ago. There’s a marshal on the north shore of Lake Apopka, it’s 20,000 acres that I would bet you a $100 that’s the largest concentration of fulvous tree ducks you’ll find in the continental United States and you can’t hunt it. And so you got this concentration of thousands of these birds that are not being utilized as a resource that could generate a lot of money for conservation. Utilizing them as a resource. I’m not saying go shoot them out, but I think you’ve created a refuge where those birds don’t even use the Kissimmee chain and some of the other lakes that they used to use. One of the things we’ve been working on the last couple years with Delta Waterfowl and some others is getting some of that marsh open for quota hunts for duck hunters. Because the collectors want to come kill fulvous, they’ll come here, that’s an economic benefit, and it’s going to spread those birds out and those birds aren’t being touched right now. So we’ve got to get more representation in these rooms. And we sit in those rooms and we’ve got a whole bunch of anti-hunters or indifferent to hunters folks saying, well, we don’t want hunting there, this is more about bird watching. You don’t want hunting on a 20,000 acre marsh that taxpayer dollars funded that is just slapped full of ducks that could generate a revenue and an economic benefit to both the county, the state. I don’t see the other side of this argument. It’s crazy to me, man. So it’s a thing that we’re working really hard on, and that’s why I wanted to bring up the right to fish and hunt, which is something we’re working on here in the state of Florida this year.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, I tell you what, you’re opening a can of worms right there. I was trying to put my hands. I read some numbers just the other day and I’m trying to dig it up real quick. I read some numbers of great, I think it’s once a year publication called Greenhead comes out of Arkansas. I love this magazine. It’s very well written and thought through. But just the other day, I wish I had dog eared it. I saw some numbers posted up, billions with a B that duck hunting stimulates in the state of Arkansas. It is unbelievable the amount of money we’re talking about that could be in part or in whole purpose for conservation issues. And I cannot find it. Boy, I wish I had that, I’ll find it after a while we get done talking and put it up, but it was eye popping. I knew that we spent a lot of money and this money went into conservation. But when I saw those numbers summarized, oh, there it is right there. Duck hunting impact by the numbers. Measuring the impact Arkansas duck hunting take estimated to be $4 million daily. That is unbelievable. I’ll tell you what, they did a good job talking about this, too. This was a really nice article, broke it down on how much waterfowl and other migratory bird hunting represents as a total economic activity nationwide and in the country. And buddy, let me tell you what, long story short, we’re talking half of millions to several billions of dollars. And that’s something that the green movement is just, you can’t ignore it. And see, I really, truly, I’m earmarked, dog eared at this time, so next time I want to look at it, I can pull those numbers up. But when we get into the economic benefit of hunting is something that the anti-hunting movement is not going to take into consideration ever. And they’re not going to take into consideration that the time that you as the private landowner, spend taking care of just a little bit of property or me or them, how that benefits waterfowl hunting collectively. I think that especially the anti-hunters, but also the non-hunters, get bogged down into the individual or by the thousands or millions casualties instead of the tens of million benefit to the wildlife resource. And I’ll say this, I’m all about setting aside green property worldwide. I mean, some of my favorite places I’m hunting on the margins of areas that have never been accessed, cannot be accessed, maybe by horseback. And I love that wild concept. But the problem is there’s got to be some, especially in North America, there’s got to be some basis of monitoring and managing that wildlife resource and that habitat resource and drawing a line on a map and raise your hand and getting it voted and legislatively enacted, and then walking away and going back to drink your latte or go drink your, whatever you do in Miami or wherever these folks are from, you can’t just rest content and say, well, there’s stars in the sky and we set this resource aside and there it is forever. I mean, point and case, look at the pythons down in the most amazing wetland habitat in North America, the Everglades, and they’re destroying it leaps and bounds. Do something about that problem. And the hunters and the consumptive users are the one aware of the demise of the deer and the gators and everything else in this wildlife ecosystem, not the anti-hunters, they’re completely unaware of it.

Travis Thompson: You are spot on. And I don’t know how you see in the green movement, a little bit of like, if it’s green, it’s good. And when I look at it, I see Brazilian pepper, I see the invasive torpedo grass. I see land that’s turned into a monoculture because it’s got dominated by water hyacinth or whatever. And if you don’t have that diversity, you don’t like, man, that’s not good just because it’s green. Like stuff’s not going to thrive there. As you were talking, a couple of things kind of came to my mind. One is, I don’t know if you’ve ever done an interview with the turkey guys like Mike Chamberlain or Brett Collier any of those guys, the turkey scientists?

Ramsey Russell: Not yet. Mike and I went to college together, super guy.

Travis Thompson: But they will tell you that I think 90% plus of turkeys in North America are produced on private land.

Ramsey Russell: Private land.

Travis Thompson: And you know why that is, it’s because the private landowner is managing the land differently than the public land. And I’m a public land, I grew up on public land, cut my teeth on public land, and still hunt it to this day. But private land can be managed a little bit differently because the landowners got other things he’s managing for beyond just game. It’s like, in our case, we’re using cattle to keep the vegetation disturbed and graze down and everything else, which makes it more appealing for ducks. It also makes it more appealing for wading birds and all this other stuff. So that was one thing that kind of jumped in my mind. The other thing is that’s why we’re working a little bit or a lot on the right to fish and hunt in Florida. Florida is the only state in the southeastern United States that doesn’t have a constitutional right to fish and hunt. And part of the reason we want to get that in place is, we’ve seen a societal shift in the state, going back to that gap I talked about. We’ve seen a societal shift in the state away from consumptive use to where people are not connected to where their food comes from anymore and if that’s the case, you don’t need these wild lands and these wild spaces the way you wants did. Like hunting is such a crucial tool to ensuring that you have the WMA’s and the properties are full of deer and full of turkeys and everything else. But that’s also the properties for us where you see gopher tortoises and indigo snakes and scrub jays and all the other species that everyone cares about. So we’re working really hard to try to get this thing passed in November, a constitutional right to fish and hunt in the state of Florida, because I view it as a conservation movement. And I know you’ve been around the world and seen it other ways.

A Call for Common Ground: Working Together for Green Space and Hunting Rights.

But I’ve seen this, and on the one hand, I want to say at least I can find a little sliver of common ground with anti-hunters and that I want some green space. I want that. You know what I’m saying? But at the same time it’s got to be a 2 way street. I’ll see your side and you’ve got to see mine, and we’ll work together.

Ramsey Russell: No, I have been. And I’m sitting here thinking, I haven’t told the story, I haven’t been home long enough to tell this story. But recently we were in the Netherlands, and it had been 6 years since I was there. And my folks over there were talking about that a lot of folks in Netherlands are still talking about the American, not Americans in general, the American. They brought commercial hunting to their country and started a massive sensation that nearly 10 years later, still being talked about. And that blew my mind. But while we were there a federal judge with the animal party closed goose hunting in South Africa. He closed waterfowl hunting, primarily targeting geese, resident geese. And they’ve since got it back open with caveats. They can’t use electronic calls or whatever else. Understand, we’re talking about resident birds like those Egyptian geese in Florida. We’re talking about resident populations of birds here, and it makes no sense at all. But one thing I saw, maybe my rose colored glasses were off this visit, or maybe I’ve grown and matured or something. But just one thing I became aware of is that 5 days spent out in the field shooting geese, and it was an amazing hunt was, I can count on 10 or 11 or 12 fingers, maybe the total number of bird species I saw. And we were in a lot of different provinces. We were covering some ground now, touring around and seeing things besides just hunting. But think about that, and of those species, mallard game farm origins, the barnacle geese, the Egyptian geese, the gray lag geese, the Canada geese, all of them are resident species. So half the species I saw were just introduced species, and they’ve got this real anti-hunting movement, not just non hunting, but anti-hunting movement over there. And at the same time, we’re talking about a country that’s half the size of North Carolina that wall to wall is humanity or clean farms or productive ground. And what just dawned on me is it was like, the silent spring. There was no real meaningful wildlife, bird life there at all, except what was introduced and has coexisted in society. What a sad world that is. And there’s not enough hunters to really meaningfully affect it, to poke the bear and to challenge the government and challenge society. And the parallels here in America where it’s Florida or North America in general, there is increasingly a thought that we’re over harvesting North American waterfowl. I’m not smart enough, but I’ve had some real smart people on here to talk about adaptive harvest management, the modals and sustainable use and everything else we’re doing managing waterfowl. And I trust it. I’m going to trust. I have no choice because we’re shooting more ducks in the United States of America, Mexico, and Canada attached than the rest of the world combined. The United States is killing more than Mexico, Canada, and all the other countries combined under the math. But the reason that old timers like me are grumpy is we don’t see the ducks we saw 20 years ago or 10 years ago, and that’s all going down to the habitat loss, continental. And now we’re talking about in Florida. But I’ve seen this, and on the one hand, I want to say at least I can find a little sliver of common ground with anti-hunters and that I want some green space. I want that. You know what I’m saying? But at the same time it’s got to be a 2 way street. I’ll see your side and you’ve got to see mine, and we’ll work together. It can’t be one lopsided. You talk about the ideological shift down in Florida, and it’s no secret that you all are the snowbird capital of the world. And that really and truly, when you get around them, snowbird centers, whether they’re there temporarily or they’ve changed their mailing address permanently, they’re coming from urban areas up the Atlantic coast. I mean, a lot of the folks are coming from New Jersey, New York, inner city type areas. They just want the warm environment. They don’t want to shovel snow no more. That’s got to contribute to this ideological shift you’re seeing in Florida.

Travis Thompson: The other thing that we’ve seen, even at a national level, is in states without a constitutional right to fish and hunt, is where you see attacks on hunting and fishing. Because I completely agree with what you just said. What should drive wildlife policy is science.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Travis Thompson: And the best available science that we have is what should drive it, not emotional. And if you look at states that have attacks on wildlife management through ballot box biology or whatever they are states that do not have some kind of a constitutional protection to hunt and fish. Because what happens is we sit down and say, and this couldn’t happen because it’s federal, but we sit down and say, you know what, we need to cut the limit on ducks back to 3 per person in Florida because there’s not enough ducks anymore. If you do something like that, you worry about never getting it back. You worry about what the implications are going to be on that as people begin to fill in that vacuum around this stuff. And so what we want to do is make sure science drives this and you have this right to fish and hunt for forever. And science drives whatever the wildlife policy is within that framework. You’re looking for another number, aren’t you?

Ramsey Russell: No, I was making sure my numbers were right. State of Arkansas, $242 million, that’s in one state. And Florida could be that way with a lot of species we’re talking about, it could be that way. And we need that money in conservation, we need more hunters, but we need more, it sounds like you all got plenty of land for a lot of hunters.

Travis Thompson: We do. We got plenty of land. The problem becomes habitat. I think Florida’s got almost 9 million acres of public land. It’s a gigantic state as far as public land goes. Now, that’s not all. I think we have about 6 million acres huntable. When you consider that if all the birds are confined to 300,000 acres, guess what happens? All the hunters end up in those same places, and it feels like there’s 4 million hunters. So we see a lot of contention because the habitat, when it’s degraded or not good, you end up with people competing for the same birds in the same places. And what I’d like to see is us increase our habitat footprint across the state. So we got more birds everywhere that spreads the hunters out, spreads the birds out, and we got more habitat for more birds to take this, because as we’ve talked about on this episode, a lot of the ducks that we kill in the state of Florida are born raised here and never leave here.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Travis Thompson: Both whistlers, the mottled ducks and wood ducks. Most of our wood ducks are our local birds when you look at the band data.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Travis Thompson: Yeah. We’ll kill some migratory ones, and we’ll even have some that we banded here in the summertime they are killed other places because they follow in back. But generally speaking, most of the wood ducks that we harvest are resident, but we even have an early wood duck season. Think we’re one of three states that has an early wood duck season?

Ramsey Russell: When do you all open in mid-September?

Travis Thompson: Yeah, so what is it, the weekend closest to the 24th? So it’ll be the 21st this year. And you can kill 2 wood ducks for the first 5 days, you can kill 2 wood ducks a day as part of your 6 bird limit.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a heck of a nice – that’s nice. I wonder how you all able to get that and a lot of the states don’t.

Travis Thompson: he great Diane Eggman, who used to be our hunting and game management director years ago, she works with Ducks Unlimited now stuff, that’s one of the things she worked really hard on. We traded out, so we only have 9 days for early teal. We traded out some of those days so that we could have early wood duck. And then we had to do some tests on blinds to make sure people could identify birds, etcetera, so that we could – And it is nice, because up where I live, I live in central Florida. And around here, you just don’t see many teal, like on the ranches and stuff you will or the big lakes, you will, but around here, you don’t see many teal. So it is nice, early teal season. You could sneak out and shoot a couple of wood ducks. So, you’re going to go on a 20 minutes hunt, and it’s nice you get to knock the cobwebs off and go shoot a couple of birds.

Ramsey Russell: That’s fantastic. Talking about a lot of this, right to hunt and fish, the gap you saw with hunters and fishermen seated at the table, it led to you forming All Florida. What is All Florida? How long has it been around? What’s it do? What is you all’s purpose? What kind of progress are you making?

Travis Thompson: Yeah, so this is year 3. We’re an advocacy, storytelling, education organization. This is year 3 of the organization. And the goal there was, when I tell you, hey, is Delta Waterfowl a conservation group or sportsman’s group? Most people would default and say, it’s a sportsman’s group. When I say, is Sierra Club a conservation group or sportsman’s group? Most people would say Sierra Club is a conservation group. And in Florida, what I noticed is you kind of created these two piles. And over here you had all the people that carried guns or fishing poles, and over here, you had all the people that just carried about green space. And I’ve got friends on this side that are good organizations in Florida, they’re the wildlife corridor conservation Florida, like land trust type groups that are doing some – what I noticed, though, was we needed another conservation organization over here in this pile that got lumped in with the conservation groups that considered sportsmen because it wasn’t happening. And so all Florida was created so that we could be at the table to be the sportsman’s representation in those rooms. And it’s worked. We were instrumental in writing the right to hunt and fish legislation. We’ve worked diligently on quite a number of things across the conservation spectrum, from advocating for the wildlife corridor to the farm bill to figuring out how we could connect the farm bill to fisheries groups. Because if you don’t have the farm bill in Florida, you don’t have clean water. I mean, simple put, I mean, that’s absolutely connected to clean water is having that farm bill money coming into the state. So our goal was to try to kind of fill that gap that I talk about, but be a group on this side of the table that as stuff comes up, we’re not going to be the fisheries experts, that’s CCA Florida.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Travis Thompson: We’re not going to be the fishery science expert, that’s Bonefish Tarpon Trust. We’re not going to be the duck hunters organization, that’s Delta Waterfowl. If it’s a land issue, we’re going to take and get Ducks Unlimited involved. But those groups weren’t getting the information because it wasn’t getting out of the stack over here. So now we’re going to go sit in the stack over here and play well, because there’s a lot of stuff over there we do care about to. You’ve been to Florida, Ramsey, I don’t know if you know how quickly it’s growing and developing, but we add 800 new people to the state every day. 800 people to the state every day. So there’s a land race occurring. I live in Polk county, which is the fastest growing county in the country. It’s the fastest growing county in the United States of America. What I see are places that I grew up hunting and fishing that are now track home subdivisions. And I’m a private property rights guy. You should be able to kind of do what you want within a framework on your property. But I view hunting and fishing as a critical tool to ensuring that some of these landowners have other revenue streams to be able to keep their land wild. They can work their cattle on it, they can grow citrus on it, they can sell turkey hunts, they sell duck hunts, they can sell quail hunts, whatever. If we can stack that kind of stuff up and protect that stuff long term hunting and fishing become a very critical conservation tool to ensuring that Florida stays wild, at least some parts of it.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. You said you all drafted the right to hunt and fish legislation. What’s it going to take to get that passed? When and if is Florida going to be have the right to hunt and fish? Are you all going to have to cross some extraordinary hurdles to get there?

Travis Thompson: No. So we worked with a legislator who is just an absolute, she’s fierce. Her name is Lauren Mello. She’s out of Naples, she’s a state representative. And she put this thing on her back. She went and recruited bipartisan support. So we had republican sponsors and we had Democrat co-sponsors.

Ramsey Russell: Fantastic.

Travis Thompson: I mean, it passed the House and the Senate and the state of Florida, 154 to 1.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, so you all do have the right to hunt fish now.

Travis Thompson: So what that did is it allows it to go on the ballot this year. So, November 6th on election day, same day, people are voting on president and everything else, they’ll be able to vote on whether or not we have the constitutional right to fish and hunt in the state of Florida.

Ramsey Russell: What kind of feedback are you all getting?

Travis Thompson: So there’s a small group out there that is opposed to it that is just absolutely making stuff up at this point.

Ramsey Russell: Probably same ones that don’t want you shooting Florida panthers and black bears.

Travis Thompson: Well, and I don’t want to shoot either of them right now, either. I want science to drive. I don’t ever want to shoot a Florida panther, but I want science to drive wildlife management. So if there’s enough black bears to hunt them, let science decide it, and we’ll hunt them. And if not, so be it. But they are the same groups, and it’s the same groups that are behind, I don’t know if you paid attention or saw that Oregon initiative that did tried to criminalize hunting, fishing and animal, I forget how it’s worded, but it would have basically outlawed branching and farming, anything that harmed an animal would have been illegal in the state of Oregon.

Ramsey Russell: It would have outlawed force fetching dogs. It would have outlawed a retriever contest.

Travis Thompson: It was so egregious. And it came within 20,000 signatures of getting on the ballot. Like, that’s not a big threshold when you think about a state that size. So the same group that was kind of behind that is pushing against this, because wherever this constitutional protection exists, they don’t really have a leg to stand on. Which is why there’s a group we’ve been working with nationally called the International Order of Theodore Roosevelt, IOTR. And IOTR has done an incredible job. This is kind of their thing. They’re trying to create these in more states to stave off those types of things, because then we can work on real, true conservation stuff. What does the duck habitat look like? What does the deer habitat look like? Like we can focus on the stuff and not have to worry about somebody coming in and cutting our feet out from under us.

Ramsey Russell: Well, Travis, are you saying that a lot of the opposition to the right to hunt and fish in Florida is coming from out of state interest? Is it being funded? Is it being organized? I’m imagining an antifa bus coming up.

Travis Thompson: We got plenty of crazy people down here. Like you said earlier, they all were born somewhere else, but we got plenty of crazy people here locally. But what we’ve seen those groups do is Florida has a, back in the 90s, we passed a gillnet ban to ban gillnets in state waters, and it drastically improved our red fishing, our snook fishing, our trout fishing. And they’ve made up a story that this is going to reverse that gillnet ban. And I mean, it’s flat out false. It’s not true. We met with state legislators, we met with constitutional attorneys, we met with agency heads, and we’re like, look, we want to make sure this doesn’t impact the gill net ban at all. No, risk to it. They’re like, oh, no, this is going to undo the gillnet ban. So it’s completely untrue. It’s completely fabricated. But we were continuing with that kind of stuff, which, you see, there’s desperation, they are anti-hunting movement. They’re going to make stuff up to try to do anything they can to cause hunting and fishing to be weakened.

Ramsey Russell: Well, misinformation is such a powerful tool, especially in this day and age of social media, which is why I try to be, I don’t try to be, I err on the side of science. I’m going to stick to the science, you know what I’m saying instead of try and reject my opinions, because to do anything else would be some form of misinformation that reflects my personal bias.

Travis Thompson: It’s funny you say that, because one of their arguments was that this amendment. And then the amendment is two sentences, Ramsey, it’s two sentences. It says, hunting, fishing, taking a fishing game using traditional methods shall be the preferred manner for managing fish and wildlife in Florida. And this does not supersede the authority of FWC. That’s the amendment. The entirety of it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Travis Thompson: They said, well, this is going to undermine science. And I said, well, how does it undermine science? Well, when we wanted to not have a bear hunt, we all yelled at it, and they didn’t have a bear hunt. I’m like, science should drive whether or not we have a bear hunt, not who’s yelling the loudest. Like, that’s ballot box biology. That is not the way we should do wildlife management. That’s the opposite of conservation. This is protecting conservation to allow the wildlife managers to do this and to consider hunting. It doesn’t say is required, it says it’s preferred. When python showed up in the everglades, guess who they turned to? Hunters.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Travis Thompson: They said, can you guys go in there and start rooting these things out and get them out of here? That’s the best way to manage that issue. If it wasn’t, if they could, I’m making this up poison python somehow, and that was the best way to manage it, so be it. But the preferred man method was to use hunters to do. And honestly, that was the best way to do it.

Ramsey Russell: I wonder about these anti-hunters, this right to hunt and fish and dismiss information campaign. I mean, it’s very daunting. How do you fight something like this? They’ll say and do whatever they have to get their way. You know what I’m saying? We’ve had people on here before talking about these very topics, and it’s very scary what they’re really, they seem to be an interest to wildlife, but they’re not. They’re not at all. They’re against our way of life, hunting and fishing.

Travis Thompson: And that’s why I appreciate you having me on to talk about this a little bit, because it’s so important. I said this a little bit a minute ago. Let me back way up. My buddy Matt Pierce, the rancher, when he was the president of Florida cattlemen’s, he had a slogan, it was Share Your Heritage. And he said, cattle ranchers always wanted to keep their gate shut and not let people come past their gate, like they wanted to work their cattle and kind of live an insular life. They trade work with their neighbors, they go to church on Sunday and they spent time with their family. And his mentality was, I’ve got to show people what is behind this gate if they’re going to understand how important cattle ranching is to conservation, to clean water, to food security, to productivity, to steaks on your plate, to everything else. And that’s always stuck with me. As hunters, as sportsmen, as conservationists, we’ve got to share what makes this so important and why, like a right to fish and hunt matters. Which means that’s not a thing you necessarily go to church on Sunday and share with your Sunday school teacher, it’s not a thing you talk about with the cashier at Publix. It’s not a thing you talk about with your kids teacher, but it’s important enough that we need to be talking about it, because without those things, we don’t have the habitat where all of – Florida is also full of endangered species. Your crested caricatures, gopher tortoises, your panthers, you know where you see all those? Places you hunt. You know who takes all the pictures of the Florida panthers that you see? Turkey hunters, because they’re in a blind and a panther stalks their decoy or whatever else. We run a duck hunting operation last year, last year we had 300 everglades snail kites, which in North America are an endangered species. We had 300, with 10% of the entire population on our duck hunting operation because the water management was right for the snail population and they thrived there. And we ran a banding program with the University of Florida and banded them. We didn’t make a damn cent off of any of that. We did all of that because hunters, ranchers are conservationists first and foremost, and without us managing that land for hunting and managing it for ranching, those snail kites aren’t reproducing there. Like, that’s a benefit to society from a natural resource standpoint, that we are protecting these things that are benefiting everyone. It’s the user pays public benefits modal.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. That’s just crowdfunded conservation. You talked about hunters having a life and being just apathetic towards issues like this. Somebody was on here last year, and I don’t know where they got this number, but I want to say they have seen estimates way over half of the hunting population in America just doesn’t even bother to vote. And that’s unconscionable. Travis, how do you get people out about it? How do you educate the state of Florida, where only 14,000 duck hunt? How do you educate the rest of the millions, 800 persons a day coming in the state of Florida? How do you educate everybody to get out and vote? How do you educate the people, the stakeholders, those with skin of the game to get out and vote on this right to hunt and fish in Florida initiative?

Travis Thompson: Ramsey, I grew up a basketball player, too. I was a big basketball player, so I always watched basketball, and I liked Kobe Bryant because one of his things, he always said was, you get 1% better every day. That’s how I look at it. My buddy Matt Pierce, somebody asked me one time, how does he tell the same story every day? Because he would take people on his ranch and talk about his heritage, everything and the next day you could take him with people and he would tell it to him and he was telling it from his heart every time. It wasn’t rehearsed. He was telling that same story every day. And he’s like, does he ever get tired of telling? I was like, no, because that’s what he cares the most about is this place and this thing and this land, these resources. We have to get out of bed every day and get 1% better, and we got to tell that story over and over again. You’ve seen it, you’ve been around duck hunting a long time, you tired of it? No, because it’s the thing that makes you get out of bed in the morning and you get a little bit better every day. You keep pushing. It’s a billion little pushes on a giant concrete block, concrete wheel, that’s how you get momentum. It’s no one push that’s going to make it work. It’s a billion little pushes, and it takes everybody doing it. Somebody listening to this, hearing about this and calling somebody in Florida is a push on that wheel, it’s that simple, man. And that’s the most powerful thing on the planet is when people engage in care, you can’t stop them. That’s a force.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a dang good note to end on, Travis. You’ve thrown all kinds of one liners out here. When you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. I love that. I love that a lot. Travis, speaking of, when does your dove season open? You were telling me before the show, we’re recording right here after Labor Day, and you all have not yet duck hunted. And where does your duck season kick off?

Travis Thompson: Duck season is the 21st through 29th is early wood duck and early teal is overlapping in there. And then our dove season opens the 28th. So we don’t get to shoot a dove till the 28th. And I may dove hunt that afternoon, but it’ll depend. I got a women’s group coming in, first time duck hunters. So we may do an evening hunt that afternoon and then do a morning hunt the next morning, Sunday morning.

Ramsey Russell: That’d be fantastic.

Travis Thompson: Yeah. I don’t know if I’ll get to shoot doves opening weekend or not, but I’m blessed because I’ve got so many great friends out there in this world, I get to go hunt doves and hunt ducks and hunt snipe and everything else anytime. And I try not to get too – it’s like you said, you stayed home opening day, you could have, but you stayed home.

Ramsey Russell: I did. If it been a slam dunk, I might would have gone, but it was not. Getting home and going dove hunting 12 hours later just wasn’t in the cards unless it was going to be really tempt me to do something like that. Do you do any rail hunting or gallinule hunting or the purple gallinule during the bird season down in Florida?

Travis Thompson: Florida does not allow the hunting of purple gallinule. Because an environmentalist, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, did not want them hunted. And a conservationist hunter gave that up in negotiations to get something out of her.

Ramsey Russell: You are kidding.

Travis Thompson: No, I’m not kidding. That’s the story. The conservation is great conservation is great hunting advocate, his name was Johnny Jones, and I’m sure he thought one day we turn it back on. But you can’t kill purple gallinule in Florida. We can kill the common ones. And I’ve done that a bunch. I like to do it with kids because you’ve done it. It’s not that sporty. And you can drive out there, cut your boat off, come to a stop, and then shoot them. But they are dang good to eat.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I’ve gone out in Georgia and been in the bow of a small boat while somebody behind push pulled us through at high tide during marsh grass and basically jump shot like that. You’re talking about the rails. And I would have thought the purple gallinule would have been similar.

Travis Thompson: They don’t fly a whole lot. Like I said, you can drive up into a lily pad flap, cut the motor off, come to a complete stop because you can’t be underway making way, and then stand up and shoot them. I mean, they won’t get 20, 25 yards from you. And they don’t fly good, they kind of run. You could honestly go park there and they’ll walk around you. I mean, when we’re duck hunting in early teal season, we’ll have them walk up just about to the boat sometimes. I mean, they’re neat little birds and they’re really good to eat, but we can’t shoot the purple ones. And then we do a lot of, this is exactly the same, but we do, Florida kills more snipe than any state in the country.

Ramsey Russell: I did not know that.

Travis Thompson: We kill a lot of snipe. We get a lot of guys that want to work dogs on snipe because we don’t have the quail population. Housing’s kind of killed our quail population. So if you don’t want to do planted quail, a lot of guys do snipe hunting. And I mean, I think we killed 2500 snipe last year on our operation.

Ramsey Russell: Over bird dogs?

Travis Thompson: Yeah. People use labs, but a lot of people use like those German short hairs or the wire hairs or whatever.

Ramsey Russell: You all just going out through mud flat with some cover and just walking them up.

Travis Thompson: As our water recedes from our duck fields from like early teal season, we’ll have some habitat that we can’t hold water on it well enough, the soil’s too sandy. And we’ll just let it go down and you get a heavy rain and it’ll just load up with snipe and we’ll go in there. I mean, just wreck them.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve hunted them over. I’ve still got a 5 gallon bucket of decoys. I used to be an avid snipe hunter, but I would go find a mud flat like, like you say, when they start pulling water off of ag fields after duck season, Mr. Ian and I would go, go find a hotspot and sit on a little dove stool behind a little bit of cover and put, I don’t know, we had 3 or 4 dozen silhouettes. And you got your bird ID better be on, buddy, because the yellow legs are coming through and everything else will decoy to them. And it sounds easy, but man, those snipe come in so steeply and so quickly, kind of like if a ringneck or a shorebird, it’ll make an ass out of you sometimes, but good eating.

Travis Thompson: And when you’re hunting them with a dog like that, when they jump, they fly. And people think they fly like this, which is not possible. Like, they’re not really moving laterally, but they twist and turn. And so they give you the deception that they are jumping around as they fly. I mean, they will humble a good wing shooter.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah, they will. I like to be humble. Travis, I have so enjoyed doing a deep dive in all things Florida duck hunting, bird hunting. I like to hear what all Florida is doing down in you all’s neck of the woods. In a lot of ways, we’re all in the same life raft together. And when I compare 800 people a day coming into a state of Florida with a lot of the habitat issues you all are dealing with, a lot of conversion issues you all are dealing with, a lot of the anti-hunting issues or non-hunting issues you all are dealing with as reconciled with, say, somewhere far flung like Netherlands, it really brings it home. It really brings it home. We’ve got to fight the fight. And I wish you all the very best of luck in having the right to hunt and fish down in Florida. Thank you for all you’re doing.

Travis Thompson: Thank you for having me on, Ramsey. I appreciate it, buddy. It’s good to connect.

Ramsey Russell: Folks, thank you all for listening this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere Podcast where you all been listening to my buddy, Travis Thompson, Florida. See you next time.

[End of Audio]

LetsTranscript transcription Services

www.LetsTranscript.com

Podcast Sponsors:

GetDucks.com, your proven source for the very best waterfowl hunting adventures. Argentina, Mexico, 6 whole continents worth. For two decades, we’ve delivered real duck hunts for real duck hunters.

USHuntList.com because the next great hunt is closer than you think. Search our database of proven US and Canadian outfits. Contact them directly with confidence.

Benelli USA Shotguns. Trust is earned. By the numbers, I’ve bagged 121 waterfowl subspecies bagged on 6 continents, 20 countries, 36 US states and growing. I spend up to 225 days per year chasing ducks, geese and swans worldwide, and I don’t use shotgun for the brand name or the cool factor. Y’all know me way better than that. I’ve shot, Benelli Shotguns for over two decades. I continue shooting Benelli shotguns for their simplicity, utter reliability and superior performance. Whether hunting near home or halfway across the world, that’s the stuff that matters.

HuntProof, the premier mobile waterfowl app, is an absolute game changer. Quickly and easily attribute each hunt or scouting report to include automatic weather and pinpoint mapping; summarize waterfowl harvest by season, goose and duck species; share with friends within your network; type a hunt narrative and add photos. Migrational predictor algorithms estimate bird activity and, based on past hunt data will use weather conditions and hunt history to even suggest which blind will likely be most productive!

Inukshuk Professional Dog Food Our beloved retrievers are high-performing athletes that live to recover downed birds regardless of conditions. That’s why Char Dawg is powered by Inukshuk. With up to 720 kcals/ cup, Inukshuk Professional Dog Food is the highest-energy, highest-quality dog food available. Highly digestible, calorie-dense formulas reduce meal size and waste. Loaded with essential omega fatty acids, Inuk-nuk keeps coats shining, joints moving, noses on point. Produced in New Brunswick, Canada, using only best-of-best ingredients, Inukshuk is sold directly to consumers. I’ll feed nothing but Inukshuk. It’s like rocket fuel. The proof is in Char Dawg’s performance.

Tetra Hearing Delivers premium technology that’s specifically calibrated for the users own hearing and is comfortable, giving hunters a natural hearing experience, while still protecting their hearing. Using patent-pending Specialized Target Optimization™ (STO), the world’s first hearing technology designed optimize hearing for hunters in their specific hunting environments. TETRA gives hunters an edge and gives them their edge back. Can you hear me now?! Dang straight I can. Thanks to Tetra Hearing!

Voormi Wool-based technology is engineered to perform. Wool is nature’s miracle fiber. It’s light, wicks moisture, is inherently warm even when wet. It’s comfortable over a wide temperature gradient, naturally anti-microbial, remaining odor free. But Voormi is not your ordinary wool. It’s new breed of proprietary thermal wool takes it next level–it doesn’t itch, is surface-hardened to bead water from shaking duck dogs, and is available in your favorite earth tones and a couple unique concealment patterns. With wool-based solutions at the yarn level, Voormi eliminates the unwordly glow that’s common during low light while wearing synthetics. The high-e hoodie and base layers are personal favorites that I wear worldwide. Voormi’s growing line of innovative of performance products is authenticity with humility. It’s the practical hunting gear that we real duck hunters deserve.

Mojo Outdoors, most recognized name brand decoy number one maker of motion and spinning wing decoys in the world. More than just the best spinning wing decoys on the market, their ever growing product line includes all kinds of cool stuff. Magnetic Pick Stick, Scoot and Shoot Turkey Decoys much, much more. And don’t forget my personal favorite, yes sir, they also make the one – the only – world-famous Spoonzilla. When I pranked Terry Denman in Mexico with a “smiling mallard” nobody ever dreamed it would become the most talked about decoy of the century. I’ve used Mojo decoys worldwide, everywhere I’ve ever duck hunted from Azerbaijan to Argentina. I absolutely never leave home without one. Mojo Outdoors, forever changing the way you hunt ducks.

BOSS Shotshells copper-plated bismuth-tin alloy is the good ol’ days again. Steel shot’s come a long way in the past 30 years, but we’ll never, ever perform like good old fashioned lead. Say goodbye to all that gimmicky high recoil compensation science hype, and hello to superior performance. Know your pattern, take ethical shots, make clean kills. That is the BOSS Way. The good old days are now.

Tom Beckbe The Tom Beckbe lifestyle is timeless, harkening an American era that hunting gear lasted generations. Classic design and rugged materials withstand the elements. The Tensas Jacket is like the one my grandfather wore. Like the one I still wear. Because high-quality Tom Beckbe gear lasts. Forever. For the hunt.

Flashback Decoy by Duck Creek Decoy Works. It almost pains me to tell y’all about Duck Creek Decoy Work’s new Flashback Decoy because in  the words of Flashback Decoy inventor Tyler Baskfield, duck hunting gear really is “an arms race.” At my Mississippi camp, his flashback decoy has been a top-secret weapon among my personal bag of tricks. It behaves exactly like a feeding mallard, making slick-as-glass water roil to life. And now that my secret’s out I’ll tell y’all something else: I’ve got 3 of them.

Ducks Unlimited takes a continental, landscape approach to wetland conservation. Since 1937, DU has conserved almost 15 million acres of waterfowl habitat across North America. While DU works in all 50 states, the organization focuses its efforts and resources on the habitats most beneficial to waterfowl.

It really is Duck Season Somewhere for 365 days. Ramsey Russell’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast is available anywhere you listen to podcasts. Please subscribe, rate and review Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Share your favorite episodes with friends. Business inquiries or comments contact Ramsey Russell at ramsey@getducks.com. And be sure to check out our new GetDucks Shop.  Connect with Ramsey Russell as he chases waterfowl hunting experiences worldwide year-round: Insta @ramseyrussellgetducks, YouTube @DuckSeasonSomewherePodcast,  Facebook @GetDucks