EP 528. For Seventy-One Years a Duck Hunter (Part 1)

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MoJo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I’ve got a very, very special guest. I’m very pleased to have Mr. Worth Matthewson from Oregon on the line, 81 years young, killed his first duck in 1953. The man has seen and done a lot since 1953. You all hang on, and give a big welcome to today’s guest, Mr. Worth Matthewson. Worth, how the heck are you?
Worth Matthewson: I’m doing just great, Russell.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, you know, I had my clock. I get my time zones mixed up. I called you two hours ago thinking it was time to go. I got my east and west messed up on these time zones, and here we are. Worth, tell us a little bit about who you are now. I know you to be a very publicized hunter, a very worldly hunter. You love duck hunting. You’ve come in contact with a lot of people over the years. Gosh, I’ve got several of your books on the bookshelf from way back when, back when you were affiliated with Delta Waterfowl as their editor. I believe this would be the right period of time.
Worth Matthewson: It was field editor.
Ramsey Russell: It was a field editor. It was about the time that my oldest son, now 27 years old, shot his first duck two weeks before his sixth birthday. And at the time, there was a first duck pin. And we’ve still got that first duck pin that you sponsored and did. He was very, very proud. That child was very proud to receive a token of accomplishment for having killed his first duck.
Worth Matthewson: Well, Ramsey that was one of the highlights of my life when I started that first duck program because for years the kids wrote directly to me. And I mailed the pins out to them, and the high point of the week was getting these letters. A couple of letters that I really remember, they were kids that were too young to hunt, but they’d gone with Dad on a duck hunt. And a couple of them sent me Crayola drawings of ducks that they had done. They were just classics.
Ramsey Russell: Did any of those letters stick out that you just remember the most?
Worth Matthewson: Oh, there were quite a few, but, you know, I couldn’t bring up one in particular except for the one that the little girl sent me with the Crayola drawings of a duck.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Worth Matthewson: Nine different colors on it.
Ramsey Russell: Boy, I tell you what, nothing is as honest as a child. Let’s talk a little bit about you. Who are you? Where are you from? How’d you grow up?
Worth Matthewson: Well, I’m originally from the South. During World War II, Mother and I lived in West Palm Beach while Dad was in the service. And then we moved to Asheboro, North Carolina, where he was city manager. From there, we moved to Martinsville, Virginia, where he was city manager. And in 1956, we moved to Salem, Oregon. I’ve been in Salem ever since. But since all my family was in North Carolina and a lot of my old childhood hunting buddies were there, I made a lot of trips back into those regions to visit with people and to hunt.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What entertained young Worth Matthewson when he was a child growing up in Florida, North Carolina? How did your younger self, your childhood self? How did you entertain yourself back in those days? What kept you busy? What interested you?
Worth Matthewson: Ramsey, I had an early interest in birds. Mother said that when we lived in West Palm Beach, I was fascinated with seagulls. Then, for some reason, when we moved to Asheboro, I was fascinated with buzzards and would watch all the buzzards. When I was about six years old, Arm and Hammer baking soda used to put a free bird card in each box.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.

It All Started with Birds of America

On Christmas afternoon, when we were living in Martinsville, Virginia, we went down to Smith River, and I got a black duck. That was my first duck. I got that in 1953.

Worth Matthewson: And there was a woman up the street who learned that I was interested in birds. So she gave me one of those Arm and Hammer baking soda cards. Bless her heart, I think she must have ended up with a lifetime supply because every time I came to her door, she had a new card for me. Really. I asked for my sixth birthday, a famous old book, Birds of America, which was first published in 1917 and republished in the 1930s. That was still at the age of Dick and Jane reading. So each night, either my mother or father took turns reading me different chapters of that book. So my first interest was solidly birds. Dad was a Bobwhite hunter, and I helped him pick the Bobwhites that he brought back. That was when we were in Asheboro. Then we started, in 1947, going down to around Lake City, Florida, to spend Christmas with my uncle, my dad’s brother. They took me on those big southern dove shoots every time we went down. We hunted peanut fields where they had let the hogs in after harvest to get what peanuts were left. The doves just flocked in there. I started out with a double-barrel pop gun, and I was scared to death of the pigs because one of the other shooters told me to stay close to my dad or the pigs would eat me. So I had a double-barrel pop gun in 1947 and 1948, because I think I got a BB gun in 1949. I loved that because I could shoot at the pigs. So the rest of the guys would be shooting doves, and I’d circle around and try to ambush the pig herd and shoot them with my BB gun. Actually, probably in 1949 or 1950, I can’t remember, there was a dove sitting on a fence, and I hit it with my BB gun. But it didn’t quite kill it, and it fluttered on up the fencerow. My uncle killed it, and I went up there and said, “Well, I hit that dove first.” So he agreed to share that dove with me.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Worth Matthewson: That’s all-time stuff because there were a couple of real elderly gentlemen in there, Ramsey, who still shot robins and meadowlarks along with the doves.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Worth Matthewson: That was one of the things I did. I would pile the robins in one pile, the meadowlarks in another pile, and the doves in another pile at the end of the hunt.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Worth Matthewson: Just all southern stuff.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Worth Matthewson: But my dad borrowed a .410 double for me in 1951, and that’s when I got my first dove. I got my first dove in 1951 down in Florida. Then in 1953, on Christmas Day, there was a Stevens Fox Model B 20-gauge double. Now, that’s not like the old Ansley Fox guns, but it was still a good gun. I still have it to this day. On Christmas afternoon, when we were living in Martinsville, Virginia, we went down to Smith River, and I got a black duck. That was my first duck. I got that in 1953.
Ramsey Russell: Golly. Tell me about that first black duck. That’s a special first duck, I think.
Worth Matthewson: Well, I guess it is because I’ve only killed two others in my lifetime.
Ramsey Russell: You’re kidding.
Worth Matthewson: Yeah. I got one in New York, and I got one in New Brunswick. So that’s just three black ducks I’ve killed in my life.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Worth Matthewson: The way we hunted that hunt, we had a secret place. We’d sneak down and look down the river to see if there were any ducks there. If there were, I would stay behind a tree, and Dad would circle around and try to jump the ducks. They would always fly upriver. That day, when I got my first duck, he shot when they jumped. I waited just seemed like a second, and here they were over me, a flock of about six black ducks. And I got one.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. That’s great. I’ve shot a few more black ducks than three myself, but I’ve got a thing for them. I don’t know what it is. They’re so uncommon in the Deep South anymore. We see very, very few. And I don’t know what it is about that bird I like.
Worth Matthewson: Well, Ramsey, you probably said you like black ducks, and since you’ve hunted in Australia, you probably like their Pacific black duck down there because it’s almost totally like our North American black duck.
Ramsey Russell: It is, it is. But I think it works a little bit better. I was telling this story the other day about the similarities and differences here versus the rest of the world. On the one hand, you’re in Australia, and it looks surreal with these massive ancient red gums in the swamp. And, you know, they’ve got to be 10–12-foot diameters. It’s just incredible. There’s kangaroos and cockatoos up in the trees. But then you break out, call them, and those birds pitch in through the leaves and come right down just like Arkansas mallards. It was just, wow, you know? But I do like, I find myself gravitating toward mallard-like species worldwide. I do like a mallard duck, Worth. If I only had one species, if I were sentenced to hunt only one species for the remainder of my life, it would probably be a mallard or mallard-like duck. I just—I love, I love, I love to hunt them. But the black ducks, I guess, are just so unique and rare. I’m actually in the middle of a North American tour. I’m in Calgary right now. I leave tomorrow morning, heading east into Ontario, New Brunswick, and PEI. So I hope to put my paws on a couple of black ducks between now and the end of my time in Canada in a few weeks.
Worth Matthewson: Well, I’m envious of you.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yes. Well, hey, fly on out here and jump in the truck with me. We’ll do it together. I’d love to have you. So, how did you go from a black duck in Virginia, you ending up down in Oregon eventually? You grew up, I guess, in Salem, Oregon. What was the duck hunting like there in, let’s call it, your formative years? I’m assuming that from that black duck in Virginia, you continued on down the path of becoming a savvy waterfowler.
Worth Matthewson: Well, that was an amazing thing now in Martinsville is in western Virginia, and there were hardly any ducks there at all. The bobwhites had started disappearing by the mid-1950s. I mean, there were still bobwhites around, but it was going downhill then dad had to work half a day on Saturday, and there was no Sunday hunting. So we only had half a day on Saturday to do outdoor things or hunt during vacations like Christmas. When we moved to Oregon, the limit was nine ducks a day, as long as only four of them were pintails or wigeons.
Ramsey Russell: Golly, man. Talk about the good old days. Nine ducks a day.

A Game Bird Hunter’s Dream Come True

Not much in the way of geese, but ducks, pheasants, valley quail, grouse if you wanted to go up in the foothills, it was just like a dream come true.

Worth Matthewson: We lived in the Willamette Valley, which basically stretches from Portland, Oregon, to Eugene, about 110 miles long. The valley is probably about 45 miles wide. It’s sandwiched between the Coast Range Mountains and the Cascade mountains. In the 1950s, the Willamette Valley had ducks in unbelievable numbers. Of course, we had a lot more ducks then. We were just flabbergasted when we moved to Oregon. Not only the ducks, we had a pheasant population. This is where the first successful release of pheasants was made by Judge Owen Denny down around Lebanon, Oregon, in the early 1800s. I mean, in the 50s, there were so many pheasants in Oregon that in Salem, Oregon, three blocks away from the State Capitol building in Big Bush’s Pasture Park, we used to have pheasants in Bush’s Pasture in downtown Salem, Oregon. The ducks, the band-tailed pigeons, the doves, we used to have a tremendous amount of mourning doves in the Willamette Valley. Having come from the South and the big dove shoots we had back there, we had as many doves here in the Willamette Valley as we were accustomed to in the southern states. Not much in the way of geese, but ducks, pheasants, valley quail, grouse if you wanted to go up in the foothills, it was just like a dream come true. And we could hunt on Sundays.
Ramsey Russell: You say “we.” Who were your influences? Who were you hunting with back in those days?
Worth Matthewson: My dad.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Worth Matthewson: He and I were the partners. When I got to the age where I could drive, I had a couple of other hunting buddies, my schoolmates, and we started hunting together a tremendous amount.
Ramsey Russell: When did your lust for travel start? Where did that travel bug originate, Worth? How did you go from a paradise like the Willamette Valley with nine ducks, band-tailed pigeons, quail, and doves to discovering the world was a much bigger place Willamette Valley?
Worth Matthewson: Well, it was just interest. There was a desire to see and do as much as I could. Then it was compounded by my interest in the various birds, not only to hunt them but to look at them, see the habitat, and meet the different men who hunted these different birds. It all just sort of went together as a package. I started doing some trips, and that led to more trips and more trips. That was a good time because, at that time, some outfitters, you might be familiar with this, Ramsey, if they had an outfitting business, they could place an ad in a magazine and maybe they could get some customers. But if they could get a writer to come. What are you chewing Snooze.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Duck Hunting in Siberia

Pintails. Almost entirely pintails.

Worth Matthewson: I gave that up. I got bladder cancer from Copenhagen. But anyhow, they can place an ad in a magazine and gets some customers, but if they had a writer come and write an article about their outfit, they got a lot more customers. As a consequence, they offered free trips. I was with Wildfowl magazine at that time, and I got a lot of freebies. The best one was when we got to go to Siberia.
Ramsey Russell: What’d you do over there?
Worth Matthewson: Pardon?
Ramsey Russell: What did you do in Siberia?
Worth Matthewson: Hunted ducks.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Worth Matthewson: Yep, a hunting trip. Frontiers asked me to go along on that trip as a journalist. Actually, the Soviet government wanted journalists to be on that trip because it was billed as the first duck hunt by Americans in Siberia. That was sort of the title for it. So the government wanted a journalist. I was lucky that Frontiers called me up and asked, Do you want to go to Siberia duck hunting? I said, yeah!
Ramsey Russell: I’ve hunted over on the western side of Russia several times but never on the eastern side. What species were you all hunting back then? Put me on a timeline pintails?
Worth Matthewson: Pintails. Almost entirely pintails.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. And what was the bag limit?
Worth Matthewson: Oh, about as many as you could shoot. But it turned out to be, a lot of things went wrong on that trip, Ramsey. I’ll tell you that. There was a lot of water that year, and the ducks were spread out. There just weren’t very many ducks where we were. Several groups got pretty irritated because they were told they could probably kill 100 ducks a day. By the second day, I’d killed a teal and a pintail, and three or four of the other members of the group hadn’t even shot their guns.
Ramsey Russell: Welcome to eastern Russia. I’ve heard those stories.
Worth Matthewson: Most of the party just left, they quit. But my wife and I and Doug Larson, who was with Frontiers back then and now writes the last page of Ducks Unlimited magazine now, a good guy.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right, he does.
Worth Matthewson: Doug and Marge and I stayed with an old guy from Florida by the name of Walter Ziggler, who I thought was going to die any day in camp. He was so old and feeble, and just to get him down to the lakeshore, Siberians had to get on each side of him and help him down. But the four of us stayed, and we did really well after that because I noticed out in this big lake we were shooting by, there was an island probably about a quarter mile out that ducks were just pouring by. So I talked to the guides. They had little kayak-type boats that I think they made themselves. I didn’t trust one of those things, so I said, “Is there any way to get out there?” And they produced a rubber raft that, Ramsey, must have been left over from World War II.
Ramsey Russell: Probably was.
Worth Matthewson: They blew that thing up, and Marge and I paddled out to the island, and we did really well. After that, Doug would take Walt in the afternoon and paddle Walt out to the island. Doug and Walt would shoot. I shot about 20 pintails, got a Baikal teal, and a couple of greater scaup, but it was primarily pintails.

The Changing Art of Outdoor Writing

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, no complaints there. No complaints there at all. What was it along your formative years that compelled you to get into outdoor writing? How did you become an outdoor writer that opened up the world for you?
Worth Matthewson: I wrote for my high school newspaper and for a little local newspaper while I was in college. By that time, I had switched over to writing mostly about natural history. Then I became interested in trying to write an article about band-tailed pigeons. So, I got more and more involved in that and the writing of outdoor things. I was exceedingly lucky that the first article I ever submitted to Field and Stream was accepted. Interestingly, it was on band-tailed pigeons. Of interest, exactly 50 years prior to that, my grandmother Mathewson had written an article for Field and Stream.
Ramsey Russell: It just came naturally, didn’t it?
Worth Matthewson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And it worked out good for me. I kind of hit that outdoor writing at the right time, when it was a big thing. Outdoor publications aren’t what they used to be.
Worth Matthewson: No, they’re not.
Ramsey Russell: But now they are. Everybody consumes their media online now. But you wrote a lot of books and wrote for magazines. You owned your own printer at one time, didn’t you?
Worth Matthewson: Yeah, I had a publishing company called Sand Lake Press. I’ve written eight books and compiled or edited 10 more. Several of those were published by Sand Lake Press, which worked out pretty good, Ramsey, because what I did was I’d do a printing at Sand Lake Press, and that would sell out, most of it to individuals. So I wasn’t giving dealers a discount for handling the book. But on four of those titles, after I got through with my Sand Lake Press printing, I sold the rights to bigger publishers. They republished the books, like Safari Press and Stacktale, Country Sport Press about the rights to the book and reprinted them.

Ramsey Russell: I see. What was your favorite book you wrote or your proudest accomplishment?
Worth Matthewson: I think its Big December Canvasbacks.
Ramsey Russell: That’s the book I’ve got! Yes, sir. Do you have a thing for big December canvasbacks?
Worth Matthewson: Yes, I do.
Ramsey Russell: Tell me about that. Who influenced you along that line?
Worth Matthewson: Well, I was real lucky early on to become friends with Dave Hagerbaumer, the artist. Dave and I got to be best friends. I actually looked at him like the grandfather I never had, both my grandfathers died way before I was born. Dave was sort of my grand farther. Dave was probably the most complete waterfowler I’ve ever been around. He got me started in Barnegat Bay sneak boxes, hand-carved decoys, and all that type of thing. Dave was a big canvasback man, and he influenced me on that.
Ramsey Russell: You claimed David was the best waterfowler you’d ever known.
Worth Matthewson: Absolutely.
Ramsey Russell: How so?
Worth Matthewson: Just the way he approached it. Being as famous of an artist as he was, he got invitations all the time to shoot at clubs. Dave always hunted on his own. He would accept some invitations, but not many. He hunted on his own, he hunted natural settings instead of clubs. He used Barnegat Bay sneak boxes, scull boats, and hand-carved decoys. He approached duck hunting in as classic a way as a person can do it.
Ramsey Russell: What do you think it is about that classic approach? Because what I know of Worth Matthewson, he also has classical approach side-by-side shotguns. I’m sitting here looking over your shoulder at an old wooden brant decoy I bet has seen some saltwater before. What is it about that approach, I know that you have hunted in Europe with punt guns and you have taken deep dives into more into the roots and ancestry of waterfowl hunting versus the conventional big box store approach today. What is it about that approach, that classical approach, Worth?

Worth Matthewson: To me, it’s more enjoyable. It reminds me a lot of fly fishing, where the guys are tying their own flies, matching the hatches, and fishing in a more, I hate to use the “refined way,” but that old-style classic approach. It’s not being so concerned with how many birds are shot. I’m like anybody else, I like to have a good shoot. Just like you were telling me the other day how well you did on snow geese up in Alberta. Marge, my wife, has been my number one hunting partner for over 50 years. We used to go to Alberta and Saskatchewan every year. In fact, we ended up buying a little house in Lucky Lake, Saskatchewan. We’ve had tremendous shoots up there, and I’ve shot my share of birds. But starting about 10 years ago, I started cutting back. Oregon’s got a seven-bird limit on ducks, I shoot five. I figure five is enough ducks and don’t go for the seven. When we used to hunt Saskatchewan with Ross’ geese being so much dumber than snow geese.
Ramsey Russell: God bless them.
Worth Matthewson: We started limiting the number of Ross’s we killed. You know, we could legally shoot 20, but we’d usually shoot six to eight and then just call it good on the Ross’s instead of going all the way out for the limit.
Ramsey Russell: But how do you articulate that? I mean, how do we talk about it? Because I like to hunt over homemade decoys. I like to shoot a 28-gauge, semi-automatic though it is. I love to shoot a 28-gauge. The other day, we were picking up with my buddy Ryan Yarnell. I call him Red Beard because he is. He broke out his turtle box and turned on some music while we were picking up decoys. He said, “Ramsey, this song is for you.” And it was old Hank Williams Jr.’s “Dinosaur.” You know, because I’m a dinosaur of the bunch, not just because I’m the oldest guy anymore, but because I like my waxed cotton. I like the small bores. I like my leather gun sleeves. I like my leather gun strap. I like just a little more personal touch than the big box stuff everybody’s got it. I don’t know how I got down this rail. Well, I do know how I got down this rabbit hole. One of the first hunts I ever went on after I got married, I went to Maryland and hunted with a guy. Right there in his mobile home, where we got dressed in the morning before we walked out to the creek to hunt, he had a bunch of old cork decoys and a bunch of old wooden decoys. He described how he and his dad had bought them when he was a young man for five bucks. Later, he described burning all those decoys because they got new plastic ones. All the old-timers cut the strings off the wooden decoys, threw them in the fire, and strung up the plastic decoys.
Worth Matthewson: Terrible.
Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that crazy? I convinced him to take some of those old decoys out the next day. He threatened to bury me six feet deep right there by the blind if I shot a low bird over them. But I came home and started cutting away with a butcher knife and a hacksaw on some cork blocks. They don’t look good, but I killed ducks over them. There was something profoundly satisfying about taking those old chunks of cork that I turned with my own hands, painted while thinking about ducks, and connecting with them at that level. It was just something, you know, more akin to how my grandfather hunted. For some reason, the closer I can get back to hunt like they did, compared to how the modern hunter hunts, it’s just somehow more satisfying. I can’t articulate it any better than that, worth.
Worth Matthewson: Yeah, well, that’s got a lot to do with it. I made quite a few decoys, but I made a point, Ramsey, to only use them when Marge and I were hunting. I’ll tell you why. My decoys were so crude they were embarrassing. In fact I took some down, we went down to California to hunt black brant, me and another guy from Oregon and hunted with a guy from California. Both those guys were really good carvers and had some beautiful brant decoys. I brought mine, and I was throwing them out. One of the guys, Dave Boyce, took a look and he said, “Where in the hell did you get those things?” I played it to the hilt. I said, “Look real.” I added, “Well, I made them myself.” Dave, quick on his feet, said, “Well, they’re the most unique decoys I’ve ever seen.”
Ramsey Russell: The first time I broke my cork decoys out, I was with a guy old Benny, who had no filter. We sat on Oxbow Lake. He said, “That’s your decoy?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “They’re kind of square, ain’t they?” I didn’t care. I was proud as could be of them, you know, and by God, they’ve killed some ducks. You talk about hunting with your wife, Marge, for 50 years. Did she hunt when you all met all those years ago, or did you just bring her into it?
Worth Matthewson: Just brought her into it. She was raised in New Mexico, out in the desert. She had a horse and used to, when she was a girl, ride out there, shoot rattlesnakes, skin them, and try to make hat bands out of them. So she had some interest in that to begin with. I took her to eastern Oregon chukar hunting on one of our first dates, and she really liked that. It just grew from there. Also, what she did when I was doing a lot of writing, she was a photographer.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, really?
Worth Matthewson: Yeah. She took a lot of the photographs while I was hunting.
Ramsey Russell: Team effort.
Worth Matthewson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: That’s fantastic.
Worth Matthewson: We worked as a team.
Ramsey Russell: After 50 years, who’s the better wing shot?
Worth Matthewson: Well, she has her problems. Some days, she can hit the birds, and some days, she might as well be pointing the gun straight up in the air.
Ramsey Russell: That sounds like me, Worth. I can miss with the absolute best of them. Some days I’m a hero, and some days I’m not. What I’ve learned is, when my timing’s off and I’m not making the hits I want to make, I’ve just learned to be patient, unload the gun, shoot less, and observe more. I don’t let it get in my head.

Best Guns for Waterfowl Hunting

 I have to work harder, aim smaller, miss smaller, you know, that kind of business. I just appreciate it. 

Worth Matthewson: Ramsey since you like 28 bores, there’s a guy you might want to contact and discuss. His name is Norm Saki. He’s a retired biologist for the Department of Fish and Wildlife in Nevada. He’s an avid 28-bore shooter. I went down there once to Stillwater to shoot swans and canvasbacks with him. I took my 10-gauge down for the swans. He tried to talk me into using my 28 for swans, but I refused. After I filled my two tags, I switched to the 28 gauge for ducks. He was doing hot home loads, and I was surprised what I was able to do with it 28 gauge.
Ramsey Russell: Yes, sir, it will surprise you. I think most of the people modern day that don’t shoot a 28 gauge just because they’ve never shot a 28 gauge. I don’t know why. The older I get, I’ve become more recoil-averse. I want less recoil. I want that, you know, to go back, kind of circling back to a more classical approach. I like the marginal handicap that comes with shooting a smaller bore. I have to work harder, aim smaller, miss smaller, you know, that kind of business. I just appreciate it. And not to say I don’t shoot a 12 gauge. I shoot a lot of 12 gauge ammo over the course of a year. There are a lot of countries where that’s just the only ammo you’re going to get a 12 gauge. So I travel with it most places, but I do really like that little 28 gauge. You know, I was hunting out in your neck of the woods over in Puget Sound last year, and we went to shoot scoters. The man I was hunting with, Mr. Dave Drury, he’s probably listening, really didn’t like the idea of me bringing that 28 gauge. “Well, pack a 12 gauge.”
I finally convinced him that a number four pellet was a number four pellet. I just had to hit the bird. It was the same exact thing, just a little bit smaller pattern, a little bit, you know, this, that, and another little change. But I made him a believer. Number four pellets are number four pellets, no matter what size bore they’re coming out of.
Worth Matthewson: Well, I like in waterfowl, and one of my interests is big bore guns. So I’ve had this old Ithaca double barrel 10 for a zillion years. That was the first three-and-a-half-inch 10 Ithaca made. But I also have had several eight bores that I’ve taken over to Scotland and shot the eights over there where they’re legal, and they’re a real goose whopper.
Ramsey Russell: You pull the trigger on an 8 gauge.
Worth Matthewson: Yeah, it’s misleading. My double eight weighed 13 pounds, so a lot of the recoil was taken up by that weight. It wasn’t much more than shooting a three-and-a-half-inch 12 on that particular gun. I shot a 4 bore once over there. A Holland and Holland single-shot 4 bore with a 40-inch barrel. That lifted my foot off the ground when I touched that thing.
Ramsey Russell: You saw stars, I bet. Yeah, yeah.
Worth Matthewson: Hello, Mr. Geese.
Ramsey Russell: Somebody told me one time about a W.C. Scott three-inch 12-gauge shotgun that you put on the bottom of Swan Lake in Oregon.
Worth Matthewson: Yeah, I sure did.
Ramsey Russell: Tell me that story or whatever happened with that gun.
Worth Matthewson: I got a brand-new little go-devil motor for my Barnegat, and Swan Lake had a tremendous amount of weeds in it. It was almost impossible to get a boat through it. I put that gun down on the side of the Barnegat instead of handing it to my wife. And while it was dark, we’re roaring out, and I’m lifting that go-devil and telling Marge, I said, “God, this thing really goes through the weeds. Look at this.” You know, got out the night before, I had put a layout boat and the decoys out. So the plan was Marge was going to let me out, and I was going to be in the layout boat, and then she was going to take the Barnegat back into some reeds and photograph the action as the birds came into the layout boat. Well, we got out to the layout boat, and there’s no Scott. It slipped off the back while I was doing that kind of stuff. We had another gun back in the truck, but it was like the death of a dog losing that gun. I just, we got back, and I said, “That’s it.” We packed up and went home. I used to do a moderate amount of trapping. I had a trapline up in the Cascade Mountains for martin, and I had to check that trapline. Well, I was actually living in my truck up there along the trapline. I had two buddies come down from Portland. We were going to hunt Upper Klamath for geese. We went out that morning. I didn’t have to check my traps for another day. We went out on Upper Klamath, and it was nothing happened, just a bust. They were deciding to go back to Portland, and I didn’t have to be back up in the mountains until the next day. I said, “It’s been real dry lately. I’m going to go over and see if Swan Lake has any water.” A lot of those lakes in, say, the Great Basin eastern Oregon, Nevada, et cetera, either have water or they’ll totally dry up. It was an exceedingly dry year. When we got to Swan Lake, there wasn’t a drop of water in it. It was just an alkali flat. They asked me, “Do you know where the gun dropped off?” I said, “I don’t have a clue.” But there was a point of land over there. I said, “We were heading for that point of land.” So we spread out on that dry lake bed and started walking. Ron, over on the left, called over to me. He said, “Well, I found something. I don’t think you’re going to want to see it.” It was my gun. The barrels were as orange as the fruit, and the stock had a crack in it. But I picked the thing up, hit the fore lever, and the action opened and shut perfectly. The gun was sentimental enough to me that I spent much more money than the gun was worth to have it re-barreled and restocked.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Worth Matthewson: When I started getting rid of all my stuff and gave it to Delta Magazine, I sold some of the things ahead of time. I sold that gun to a guy in, I think, South Carolina.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. I bet he still hunts with it.
Worth Matthewson: Yeah, well, what it was and what I liked to do with old 10 gauges, 10 gauges that just can’t use modern shells. Briley used to do the job, and a gunsmith down in Texas, whose name’s not coming to me, they would sleeve, in other words, they would put new 12-gauge barrels on a 10 bore and do the chamber reduction. So I was turning these old 10s into three-inch 12s.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Worth Matthewson: I like a heavy gun for ducks, so most of those guns weigh nine, ten pounds. I did it to five different doubles, had that modification done.
Ramsey Russell: You know, I’ve got an old family heirloom. I’m not nearly into the old doubles and old guns as yourself. But I inherited a family heirloom. It must have belonged to my grandmother’s granddaddy, is who we figured it was. And it was a Colt side-by-side Damascus barrel hammer gun. And it had bad bores. It got put up at some point in time in history with black powder, and the bores had rough spots, rusted. I talked to somebody that knew a little bit more than I did, and he said, “Don’t ever shoot conventional shells, and for that matter, don’t ever shoot this gun. It’ll burst at some point in time.” And I got talking to somebody else years later. He’s like, “Well, you know, I get the sentiment of it all.” He said, “Why don’t you sleeve it? Why don’t you send it down to Briley, get it sleeved, and you shoot 20-gauge conventional loads out of it.” I said, “Really?” And that’s exactly what I did. Boss shot shells made me concerned. As old as that wood was, a real good, golly-whopping modern-day steel shot load would maybe compromise the wood, you know, splinter the stock or something. So they made me some very low-velocity sixes and seven copper-plated bismuth. I took it out, and pointing it, it was just weird. It just had a weird drop and feel to it compared to every other shotgun I’d ever shot.
I was talking to my buddy Jim Cruz on a remote cypress break, and he told me on the ride out, “We don’t have many ducks. It’s not what you’re expecting. I just hope we get one to come in.” And I’m gonna tell you something about it. I just always say my duck ancestors were overjoyed at me shooting that gun. They woke the duck gods up that morning. I feel like every gadwall and mallard in Cahoma County wanted to be inside that break over the decoy. I could scarcely miss with the gun. I shot it just that one time and could scarcely miss with it. In fact, the only two shots I missed were when I just pushed it, you know, 45, 50 yards, just to see what the old gun would do, you know. And I missed those two birds. But everything over the decoys just kwump, died, you know.
Worth Matthewson: It was 20 bored then, huh?

Duck Hunting is a Perilous Sport

 We get off into some crazy places when guys like me and you start going to pursue birds around the world. 

Ramsey Russell: I was shooting 20-gauge, but it was a 12-gauge. A big long gun, I’m gonna say the overall length of that gun is probably four and a half feet long. Big, long gun with those rabbit ear, click-click. You pull them hammers back, you know, and double triggers. It was completely foreign to me, but it was a pleasure to shoot. You know, there’s always been some green paint on the stock of that gun. And it could have been a barn, it could have been anything. But I like to think of it as being a duck boat or something the old man did. When I sent it to get it redone, it needed new springs. The gunsmith in Jackson, Mississippi, had to build them himself. He couldn’t find any anywhere. And he asked me, “Do you want me to refinish this wood and get this old paint off?” I said, “No, sir, not at all. I want it just like it is.” And I still take that gun out and clean it every now and again and look at it and hold it, but I haven’t hunted with it again. And again, we had our cork decoys out. Jim had his, I had mine. Of course, we were using a mojo decoy. They just work good on those gadwalls and the brakes. But it was just that approach, you know, that just really a very memorable event to have taken what must have been my roots back out to the field again like that. It just felt so satisfying to get down to that level and do it like that. You’ve done a lot of traveling, you know. And I’m reminded of a quote I read one time, of all people, Walter Cronkite. He said that duck hunting is a perilous sport, especially if you’re a duck hunter. I mean, especially if you’re a duck. But it also can be, I mean, it’s a big world. It’s a gnarly world. We get off into some crazy places when guys like me and you start going to pursue birds around the world. We can get into some hairy situations. What are some of the most dangerous situations you’ve ever been into, duck hunting?
Worth Matthewson: Well, like on all our trips, they were pretty mundane. For a lot of years, I did almost all my duck hunting on the Oregon coast, Washington coast, in the bays. And I had some real nail-biters, especially when I was using my sculling boat. There were a couple of times that I’m just real lucky to be here, getting caught out in the big storms and that type of thing. And, of course, I was part of a tragedy in 2006 when one of my best hunting buddies and I were hunting black brant on Tillamook Bay, and he went after a crippled brant with a little small duck boat. And subsequently, I came real close myself trying to get.
Ramsey Russell: What happened Mr. Worth?
Worth Matthewson: Well, his son still sells them. They’re an excellent little small boat called a Marsh Rat. But they’re meant for sheltered waters. They certainly weren’t meant for coastal duck hunting bays. We had Dave’s 17-foot TDB anchored behind us. We were hunting off an island, and when he crippled that brant and jumped in his little Marsh Rat, we had taken the Marsh Rats from the TDB and paddled them over to the island. When he started after that crippled brant, I yelled for him to come back and get the big boat because, number one, we were hunting late in the afternoon, and it was going to be dark soon. The brant was going with a strong outgoing tide and was making good progress. I didn’t think he could catch it by just paddling that Marsh Rat. So I yelled for him to come back and get the big boat, and he just kept on going. After about half an hour, it was starting to get dark, and I was concerned for him. And a storm hit. That was the finishing touch. A big squall came off the Pacific, and I had trouble getting back to the TDB. I fired it up and went down bay, but I thought Dave probably had gone. There was a big sand spit that ran parallel to the bay, and he wasn’t 50 yards off that sand spit when he went down. I figured he’d just go on in because things were getting real white-cappy in the bay. I figured he’d just gone on to the end and was walking back up to where we had the decoy spread. So I turned the boat around, went up there, no Dave. He had really good hand-carved decoys, so I took the time to bring in his hand-carved decoys because I was sure that, once he showed up again, he wouldn’t leave them out overnight. He’d be adamant about going out in the dark and getting his decoys. As I went down bay, it got dark, and I couldn’t see a sandbar. So I grounded that boat on the sandbar. By now, the storm had really hit. It was nasty. I sat out there. I wasn’t that far off the docks, so I sat out there and shot up just about a box of shells in three series. I was sure that somebody on the docks would hear me out there on the bay, shooting three times, you know. But nobody showed. I had towed my Marsh Rat down behind the big boat, and I had his lab, Angel, with me. There was a channel that I had to go across to get to the Coast Guard station. I pulled the Marsh Rat across the sandbar to the channel and got Angel in the bow of the boat. She was facing forward. I had to time it between the waves to jump in. And when I jumped in, my knee came down and smashed her tail. She jumped up and tipped the boat. We took a wave, and the boat started sinking. I had my gun in a floating gun case and used a kayak paddle to paddle these things. I was trying to grab my gun case, hold on to my paddle, grab the boat, and try to pull it back up. I didn’t have anything to bail with, so I went back to where the big boat was and found an old milkshake cup. I went down and finally bailed enough water out of it so I could flip it over. Then I thought, well, Dave’s probably on the sand spit, and I’m not going to, because the channel was real bad. It was white-cappy too. So I went back and sat in the big boat for about 10 or 15 minutes, saying, “Well, I’ll just wait it out till midnight till the tide comes back.” Then I started thinking, “Well, maybe Dave isn’t okay.” So I went back down and took Angel with me again. This time I got her in the boat, and I made her face me. I had to do that business of riding the waves and jumping in real quick and start paddling. Things were going okay, and when we got about halfway across that channel, there must have been a whirlpool or something because, all of a sudden, the boat just swayed over, and a wave came in and hit us. Angel jumped up, and I’m pounding her on the head, trying to make her sit down and trying to straighten the boat out with the paddles at the same time. Had a second wave gotten us, that would have been probably the end of me. But I made it over to the beach by the Coast Guard station. Ramsey, I was in a state of shock by that time. I got out, sat down for a little bit, and hugged Angel hard enough that she squirmed, then went to the Coast Guard station. Those guys are, of course, real professionals. You know that, they had a boat out. They brought a helicopter down from Astoria. They have flares that they sent up that light the whole bay. It was amazing how they could light that bay up with those flares. They found Dave floating out toward the Pacific, and he was dead of hypothermia.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Worth Matthewson: And you know, that was in 2006. I have not hunted the coast since then.
Ramsey Russell: Wow. It’s just too hard a feeling for you. And I guess you understand the vulnerability of it all.
Worth Matthewson: Oh, boy. But I had a couple of times in my sculling boat, and actually, Marge and I had a bad time in our Barnegat.
Ramsey Russell: Excuse me. Word. How old were you? How old would you have been when that event happened?
Worth Matthewson: Well, I’m not good at figuring math in my head. If I’m 81 now and it was 2006, what does that make me?
Ramsey Russell: You’d been in your 60s, late 50s.
Worth Matthewson: 60s, closer to 70, I think.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. I’m not good at math either.
Worth Matthewson: Yeah, well, let’s just say I was in my 70s.
Ramsey Russell: Okay. I can just remember being in my 20s, late 20s, and starting to hunt the Mississippi River with a small boat that helped us get around the back channels and back bays and around. But sometimes you have to run across that channel. I stopped by with a whole bunch of greenheads one time. My dad was not a duck hunter anymore, but he made a lot of coffee, good coffee. We stopped by and showed him all the ducks, and he asked where we were hunting. He’d grown up with my grandfather running up and down the river. He looked at that boat, and he said, “I just want you to promise me one thing.” I said, “What’s that?”
He said, “Don’t ever get on that river in a south wind.”
Worth Matthewson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I said, “Yes, sir.” Well, doggone, boy, we weren’t on the river. We were in the back channel in a hard south wind. It was lickety-split getting across where we needed to go up into what we call Broke Foot at the time to kill all those ducks. But, man, when we came back, his words came flashing to me. When that second wave came over the bow of that flat-bottom boat and everything in the boat was floating, and when you start grabbing decoy bags because you know you’re going down, things get serious real quick. But we managed, somehow managed, to get the next hundred yards and bail the boat out. And let me tell you what never happened after that, worth. I never, ever got back on that Mississippi River in a south wind again. It was that close. But anyway, I was just curious. I was young and bulletproof and rash and temperamental and everything else at the time and lacked the experience. But, you know, it just goes to show that Mother Nature and nature itself is in different to our experiences and to who we are as people and human beings and duck hunters. I mean, anything can happen at any time. It is a dangerous sport. It can be.
Worth Matthewson: Yes, it is. Yes, it is. I was salmon fishing on Yaquina Bay here in Oregon a couple of weeks ago, and we had to go up the bay to where we were going to fish. I looked out on that bay where I used to be in my sculling boat an awful lot. I just thought to myself, I can’t believe you did that. Because my most nervous personal experience happened on Yaquina Bay. I had launched my scull boat from a place called Idaho Point on the south side of the bay. The birds were over on the north side of the bay. So I spent most of the morning or afternoon over there, and a storm blew in. Common sense would have been just to beach my boat on the north side, walk into the town of Newport, and see if I could get a ride. Somebody would take me back to Idaho Point, pick up my truck and trailer, come back over, and get my boat. But I decided, no, I’ll go across the bay. In those days, I used just a pair of oars when I was rowing the sculling boat. I got out there in that bay, and the tide was going out strong. The waves were bad, and I had to keep the bow of that sculling boat into the waves. I wasn’t making much progress. I was making a little progress, but not much. Then I started getting tired because I was having to row about as hard as I could. That’s when I first started thinking, oh, you got yourself into trouble. Well, fate was on my side. There was one boat left on the whole bay. He was a crabber that had trouble with his outboard motor and finally got it started, and he was coming down the bay. I saw him coming, and, boy, I’ll tell you, I wasn’t calm. I yelled help at the top of my lungs, dropped the oars for a little bit, and waved my hands. He came over there, and I was able to get in his boat. Then a wave came and half-filled the sculling boat. I had some flotation in the bow, so it didn’t really sink. But then he towed me over to Idaho Point and got my boat on the trailer. He didn’t want to go the rest of the way down to the public boat ramp, so I drove him back around, he got his truck, came back to Idaho Point, and we loaded his boat there. Then we went to a tavern, and I bought him about 30 beers and shook his hand for about five minutes.

Best Places to Hunt Waterfowl in the World 

Tell me, as someone that also travels the world because it is duck season somewhere, what are some places I need to have on my radar?

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Tell me about some of your world travel hunts because you’re very well-traveled. Tell me about some of your world travels. Tell me, as someone that also travels the world because it is duck season somewhere, what are some places I need to have on my radar?
Worth Matthewson: Well, you know, one of my favorite hunts is that wood pigeon shooting in Scotland. Two reasons: it’s an excellent game bird over decoys, and you’re hunting in Scotland, which is, you know, an exceedingly nice country to be in and dealing with the people. Now, my wife’s son and I took our first trip to Scotland, I think, in 1983. I did some in August, and we did walk-up grouse and got rabbits with ferrets, which was my son’s favorite, and did some wood pigeon shooting.
Ramsey Russell: Yes, sir.
Worth Matthewson: Oh, you’ve gone off the screen.
Ramsey Russell: That’s all right. Go ahead, keep going.
Worth Matthewson: The wood pigeon shooting appealed to me over decoys because it’s somewhat like duck shooting.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right. I love shooting decoying pigeons down in South America. I love it, love it.
Worth Matthewson: So we started going back over in 2006, and we’ve gone about every year. We haven’t missed very many years. We’ve used the same guide and stayed in the same wonderful hotel. Ramsey, I limit myself to 30 pigeons a day, and I feel that’s enough dead birds. There’ve been lots of days that I wanted to continue shooting. I could have shot 50, 60, 70, 80, 100 maybe. But I figure 30 is enough for a good day. For example, this year, a duck-hunting buddy of ours came over and joined Marge and me, and on his second day, he shot 122. But I quit at 30, and I’d say my average, we shot for 18 days this year. Usually, it works out. I usually shoot about 15 pigeons a day.
Ramsey Russell: Right.
Worth Matthewson: What’s the average is.
Ramsey Russell: That’s the second time you’ve mentioned something along the lines of numbers. You know, the limit is seven in the Pacific Flyway. You go out and shoot five. The limit’s unbridled on wood pigeons because they’re crop depredators, or spot-wing pigeons down in Argentina. Crop depredations, they’re plague species, and you can shoot to your heart’s content. But your heart’s content is much less. An average of 15 or 20 or 30 a day, five ducks instead of seven. What’s going on there, worth? What is it about the numbers game that you play close to your vest?

Worth Matthewson: You know, a lot of people disagree. A lot of people disagree with me. Let’s talk Argentina. I went down to Argentina, and I was very disappointed with what I saw, on those pink-eared doves, you and I both know they’re uncountable. I’m sure that in the sunflower seed field we were hunting, there were 20,000, 30,000. I don’t know. When they came off the roost in the morning, they looked like a storm cloud coming. I limited myself to 50 eared doves a day. And when I shot my 50, which I shot real quick, I quit. That’s just enough dead birds. And I feel strongly that sportsmanship plays a part in that. To me, a sportsman has a great respect for what he is killing and consequently should limit the number of birds he gets a day. Now, very few people that I’ve encountered, and I mean good guys, really good people, just totally disagree with me. That’s just my feeling.

What Are Waterfowl Hunters After?

What I’m trying to say is this, to me, the hunting experience, whether it’s Argentina, Azerbaijan, Scotland next year for geese, or somewhere else, is as much about the context of that experience as it is about the trigger pull. 

Ramsey Russell: Yep. I mean, there’s no wrong answer to that because hunting is so subjective. Well, I guess there are some wrong answers. I’ve seen myself go from the guy that would shoot till I just couldn’t shoot anymore, I was just worn out. I have shot way more than 50 doves a day. Back in the day, I went to Cordoba 15 times. Now I shoot four boxes, five, six boxes. If I’m going crazy, if it’s the last day on a long hunt, I may go ahead and shoot 10 boxes. But it’s not so much about that. I mean, they’re ad libitum, you shoot what you want. But at the same time, I just find myself being content, like, I’m going to hunt over in Prince Edward Island. I was talking to my host this morning. He’s not a full-time outfitter; he does a few guided hunts but isn’t really a commercial outfitter. And I find myself on these North American tours or worldwide hunting with just regular folks, just hunting with, like I say, regular people. Because of what I do, what I post, and where I’ve been, it can sometimes be a tad intimidating to them. What I try to tell everybody that I crawl into a duck blind with, “You know, it’s not going to be my best hunt, it’s not going to be my worst hunt, it’s not going to be my first hunt. And God willing, the creek don’t rise, it won’t be my last hunt.” What I’m trying to say is this, to me, the hunting experience, whether it’s Argentina, Azerbaijan, Scotland next year for geese, or somewhere else, is as much about the context of that experience as it is about the trigger pull. You know, I think back to some of the most memorable hunts I’ve ever had. Of all places, Pakistan stands out. The most ducks I ever shot in a three-hour period was in Pakistan, and I quit because I was tired of shooting. But the numbers really don’t matter. It’s everything else about that day and that experience. When I start telling the stories, when I look back, some of my favorite hunts, recently in the last few weeks or years ago, are with somebody. I can’t remember the numbers. The numbers don’t matter. You follow what I’m saying? The numbers are just inconsequential to what made that a very memorable life event.
Worth Matthewson: Yeah. Well, I like birds. I like all birds. I’m an avid bird watcher. I’ve seen 554 species of birds in Canada and the U.S. and probably another two to three hundred outside the U.S. I haven’t listed those, but I like birds and appreciate birds and just frankly don’t feel like killing an awful lot of them.

Ramsey Russell: Mm. To your point about being a birder, I was surprised to learn last year, I don’t know, I’m a biologist but don’t really work in the diver or sea duck world and even in the past. But I was surprised to learn while hunting in Washington state last year for golden eyes, I was surprised to learn that the genus Bucephala, which are your barrows and common golden eye and buffleheads, are cavity nesters.
Worth Matthewson: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And it was actually people speculated that the wildfires out in Canada last year, the ones we all saw on cable news, might be beneficial to their populations because they could create an abundance of cavities for them.
Worth Matthewson: Well, you know, the bufflehead’s best friend is the flicker.
Ramsey Russell: Yep. Talk about that a little bit.
Worth Matthewson: Well, it’s one species that kind of depends on the other. The flicker makes the nesting cavities that the little buffleheads can use. In theory, if it weren’t for the flickers making those cavities, the buffleheads wouldn’t have anywhere to nest. It’s just interesting how those two species go hand in hand.
Ramsey Russell: How are the flicker populations doing?
Worth Matthewson: Around Oregon they’re doing fine. I don’t know about up in the nesting areas.
Ramsey Russell: Mm. We talked about Scotland. Pigeon hunting, wood pigeons is high on my radar because I do love to hunt pigeons. What other hunts in the waterfowl world have stood out as memorable for you?
Worth Matthewson: Well, my times down in Australia are probably the high points.
Ramsey Russell: Boy, mine too. What took you to Australia in the first place?
Worth Matthewson: Well, it was a good story. I wrote a book on snipe called Reflections on Snipe. Incidentally, my favorite flushing bird, no contest, is the snipe. I love snipe hunting. Well, I’d written this book, and some guy from Australia by the name of Kevin Warshaw wrote me a nice letter. He said he’d read my book and that he used to shoot snipe in Australia and loved it, but they’d since become a protected bird. He was a trainer of bird dogs and a field trial judge. He said, “We’ve got a good quail down here called the stubble quail, and if you want to come down, I’ll take you stubble quail hunting.” So I said, yeah. I went down, and we went stubble quail hunting, but we also did some duck hunting. I had to take that test that they require before you can get a license.
Ramsey Russell: The Wildlife Identification Test, they call it WIT.
Worth Matthewson: Yep. I took that. We hunted some ducks, but we mostly stayed with the stubble quail. We stopped by a Field and Game Duck Challenge, where all the different Field and Game chapters met, camped out, shot some ducks, and hoorahed around, drank a lot of beer, and barbecued. Good stuff. This is a good story. That was in 2002. I found a lodge in the state of Victoria, I found a lodge along a big lake there. It was basically a fishing lodge. I talked to the guy and for $8 a night, you could get a room that had a bunk for your sleeping bag, a stove to cook your own food, and a shower. I made plans to go back down and stay at that lodge. But they had a drought in 2003 and another in 2004, so there was no duck hunting available. They reopened it in 2005. I went down and had a bunch of Herter decoys, Model 63s, repainted into gray teal. And so I had a set of decoys and that I brought them down with me. Kevin Warshaw and I went to Victoria, hunted stubble quail for about a week, and then the plan was he’d leave me at the lodge for two weeks and come back because he lived in Canberra. But when we got to the lodge, it was closed and locked. I went across the street and asked a guy what the deal was, and he said, “Well, Jack had a heart attack.”
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Worth Matthewson: And the lodge is closed. Oh, also, I had phoned ahead and talked to the lodge owner, Jack, and he said I was welcome to borrow his truck if I needed to go to town to get groceries. He had a canoe I could use to hunt the ducks from. So there I was, left with going back to Canberra for two weeks, which I didn’t have any interest in, or changing my tickets and going home. I talked Kevin into driving into a town, and they had a sporting goods store. I went in there and started asking about truck rentals, motels, and places to hunt ducks. It was getting to be more expensive than I had money with me for. The guy that owned the sporting goods store said, well, wait a minute. Let’s see if we can help you out. He went back in his office, got on the phone for a while, and came back out. He said, “We got you all fixed up, mate. You’re going to stay with John Byers for two weeks.” John turned out to be the major duck call maker in Australia and also carved beautiful decoys. So I stayed with John, who at that time was still a full-time police officer. I stayed with him for two weeks, and either John or another guy by the name of Don Rhodes or Gary Howard took me duck hunting every day of those two weeks. I saw what the possibilities were down there, and it was really something. In 2009, I took one of my Barnegats up to Portland, put it in a container, and had it shipped down to Melbourne. John went over to Melbourne and picked my Barnegat up. I used that while I was down there.
Ramsey Russell: I’ve had some great times down in the States. Did it surprise you that being so far from home, halfway across the world, did it surprise you how utterly, on the one hand, otherworldly, you talk about the habitat, you talk about the species. That little pink-eared duck doesn’t look like it’s even from Earth. But on the other hand, it feels totally familiar to North American duck hunting, their duck hunting culture is. That’s what strikes me about Australia the most, how I just fall in with my Australian buddies, and it’s just like being at home, except for that Crocodile Dundee accent.
Worth Matthewson: Yeah, it’s wonderful, isn’t it?
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it really is.
Worth Matthewson: Great guys down there.
Ramsey Russell: They really are. Mr. Worth, do you still duck hunt?
Worth Matthewson: Well, I’ve got Parkinson’s, and that has really slowed me down to a major degree. I’m going to have to clarify between duck hunting and duck shooting. I honestly don’t hunt ducks anymore. What I have been doing basically since 2006 is duck shooting. And what that means is I’m shooting in a club and not in natural situations where you’re oftentimes using a boat and have to put out your decoys. The club I belonged to until last year, where I could not do the walking and wading needed to get to the blind, isn’t like a lot of clubs here in the Willamette Valley, meaning they don’t plant anything for the ducks. It’s just a natural 550-acre section of land that he pumps water into in several places. To a certain extent, the decoys are thrown out at the beginning of the season, and they stay there until the end of the season. So, you know, it’s just a matter of getting to the blinds. It’s about as close to duck hunting as a person could get shooting in a club. But I couldn’t do it after last year. In fact, midseason, I had to call it quits. One of the other members, Marge is an avid, avid, avid hunter, so one of the other guys in the club would stop by the house and pick up Marge and go with her out there. But I had to quit. This year, Ramsey, we found a different club. Now, this guy plants corn and millet for the birds. I’m able to do the walk to the blind. In fact, yesterday we were out as a trial, that’s the first day we’ve tried this year, and I was able to do the walk okay. So I’ll be shooting ducks, I hope, for several more years.
Ramsey Russell: There’s a good point to stop. Episode one, Mr. Worth. Folks, you all been listening to my buddy, Worth Matthewson from Eugene, Oregon, 71 years and going as a duck hunter. We’ve just scratched the surface, you all. You all come back next Monday and listen to a continuation of Mr. Worth Matthewson, Big December Canvasbacks and more, on this episode of Mojo Ducks season Somewhere podcast. We’ll see you next time.