EP 419. Best-of-Best Alberta Canada Waterfowl Outfitter

 

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck season somewhere podcast, where today it was 11 degrees this morning. Winter is coming. I’m up here in central Alberta with today’s guest, Rob Reynolds, Ranch Land Outfitters. It is an absolute slice of heaven. It was cold outside, but once you shut the lid on that layout blind, that hot barrel kept me plenty warm. Rob, how the heck are you, man?

Rob Reynolds: Good. Good to have you up here, man.

Ramsey Russell: I’m glad to be here. I’ve heard so much about you forever, and we’ve got a whole lot of mutual friends, whole lot of mutual clients. I have no doubt in my mind you’re the top outfit in Alberta, and I’m proud to be finally sitting here. I see what everybody with the buzz is about.

Rob Reynolds: Well, why did you wait so long to come up here?

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know but I’m here now. That’s all that matters. I’ll say this, I talk about how great it is, the hunting was amazing this morning, but that’s kind of, let’s just say all things equal, beyond the hunt, man, last night’s dinner, you could have cut the pork chop with a spoon. It was delicious. The duck poppers were amazing and it’s no simple meals here. You all got a buffet line, and a man could hurt himself if he started at the front and went all the way to the back end loading up his plate. I guess so many people do hurt themselves, don’t they?

Rob Reynolds: Well, we try to over serve in the food department, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: You all know the guides work you all’s tails off scouting and guiding and putting out decoys and all that good stuff, but have you ever considered having a weigh in at the first of the season and a way out at the back?

Rob Reynolds: We considered that this year and then I was quickly talked out of it.

Ramsey Russell: Nobody wanted to do that.

Rob Reynolds: No. We work hard, but, we need a lot of calories to keep us all going, that’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: It’s not this cold all season, though. It’s like I was just here in Canada. 9,10 days ago, there were still yellow leaves on the poplar trees. It was highs in the 50s. I come back and, buddy, it is wintertime here. For a Mississippi boy, it is absolutely winter. You all just getting started, though, ain’t you?

Rob Reynolds: Yeah. It’s inevitable every year that, we have 5 months of snow on the ground, so it’s coming regardless. We hate looking at the calendar and seeing where we are, but, end of October ,winter’s around the corner. It’s been a warm fall, unseasonably warm fall.

Ramsey Russell: It was, it was very warm.

Rob Reynolds: I think our migration was maybe two weeks behind schedule.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rob Reynolds: Being so warm, but it roughly came to an end just a few days ago.

Ramsey Russell: You’re born and raised in Canada?

Rob Reynolds: Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: Here in Alberta?

Rob Reynolds: Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: Over near Edmonton?

Rob Reynolds: Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: Talk about growing up in Canada, up here. What was your upbringing like?

Rob Reynolds: Well, it’s maybe a tough question on the spot, but, we like to hunt. We like hockey. We’re outdoors. Everybody says, well, what do you do all winter long? Life goes on. It’s like I said, inevitable snow on the ground, so. We’re big outdoors people for sure. I grew up just outside of Edmonton and met my wife and moved out onto a farm and now I’m not in the city anymore and I don’t like going there too much. So, it’s rural life and we love it.

Waterfowl Hunting in the Great Canadian Outdoors

So I remember the exact spot where I shot my first duck.

Ramsey Russell: Did your people hunt? Did your dad hunt? Is that how you got into waterfowl hunting or big game hunting or probably hunting everything up here?

Rob Reynolds: Yes, sir. The first time I was carried on a goose hunt when I was 3 years old, my grandfather and my dad took me out, duck and goose hunting. Growing up as a, as a boy, that was one of the few reasons to miss school, was to go hunting. So I liked hunting for a bunch of different reasons, one, to get outside, but also to miss a little bit of school. I started at 3 years old, and every year I’ve got pictures growing up out in the goose spread.

Ramsey Russell: Do you remember your first bird? How old would you have been? How old do you have to be in Canada to actually pull the trigger?

Rob Reynolds: So they recently changed the law for age. It’s now 10, but when I was a boy, it was 12 years old. So I remember the exact spot where I shot my first duck. We were next to a pond pass shooting some ducks, and it was a green winged teal at with my dad.

Ramsey Russell: And you remember it like yesterday?

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, I had an old JC Higgins pump shotgun that my dad had cut down the stock to fit me and I remember him taking me out to the trap range and he knew I liked to shoot because every time a clay pigeon went up, I shot 3 times, no matter what. So he said, we’re going to have to slow the shooting down. He’d start giving me 1 shell at a time. When you get 1 shell at a time, you learn how to be a better shot. Then he said, well, these shells are starting to get a little expensive. So, it got a reloading kit, and I started reloading shells as a boy. We grew up hunting, for sure, duck and geese primarily. We do a bunch of big game hunting.

Ramsey Russell: Wait a minute, is that unusual? Because it seems like most Canadians are big game hunters, not primarily waterfowl hunters. Is that a fair assessment?

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, I would agree with that. Deer seasons right around the corner and everybody’s getting geared up.

Ramsey Russell: Load the freezer.

A True Sportsman’s Paradise

We’re in the Rocky Mountains, you come across, you get the agricultural grainlands. Southern Alberta, you get the Badlands. The north, you get the boreal forest. We kind of got a little bit of everything.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, but duck and goose is always my number one passion, for sure.

Ramsey Russell: That’s awesome, man. Alberta is truly a sportsman’s paradise. I don’t think you can say this about all the Canadian problems, is what I’m about to say, but here in Alberta, for example, there are very few of the North-American big game animals that you can’t hunt here. You all can hunt Bear, Pronghorn, Elk, Moose, Mule deer, Whitetail deer. I already said elk, Bighorn sheep.

Rob Reynolds: Cougars.

Ramsey Russell: Cougars.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah. It’s even from the west side of Alberta. We’re in the Rocky Mountains, you come across, you get the agricultural grainlands. Southern Alberta, you get the Badlands. The north, you get the boreal forest. We kind of got a little bit of everything.

Ramsey Russell: Everything right here.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what’s so amazing about it, and just a lot of birds. I mean, not only do parts of Alberta produce waterfowl in the wetter years, but it’s a major staging corridor.

Rob Reynolds: You bet.

The Flyway Advantage

I’ve hunted a lot of Canada, and I absolutely love Canada, Rob, but this flyway that you’re in is one of my favorite.

Ramsey Russell: I’m transitioning just a little bit ahead of schedule into talking about this area. I was telling the boys we were hunting with this morning, who were also some southerners, you all had driven about 22 miles back to town to park a truck. I’m glad you warned me off at that walk back, and we were just sitting there talking and watching a few birds fly around and stuff like that, getting ready. I’ve hunted a lot of Canada, and I absolutely love Canada, Rob, but this flyway that you’re in is one of my favorite. I think maybe I’m biased because I kind of started here, but I don’t think so. I love the inter lakes for the reason, there’s big Churchills coming off the Arctic, and my buddies over there. I love Saskatchewan. There’s a lot of opportunity, a lot of fun in Saskatchewan, and I love other parts of Alberta. Right here you’ve got the big geese, the little geese, the white geese, the brown geese. You got them all coming right here and it’s really that speck migration is a pretty serious tight little funnel, and it comes right through here.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Plus, the mallard, the pin tails, the divers and everything else.

Rob Reynolds: Right.

Ramsey Russell: It’s amazing.

Rob Reynolds: We are definitely blessed to be in primo spot. When I travel to go hunting other places, a guide is quickly reminded how fortunate we are because it is tough to compare to right here, for sure.

Ramsey Russell: Have you hunted many other places outside of Alberta?

Rob Reynolds: Yes, sir. We’ve been a bunch of different locations in Canada, and I’ve hunted a number of different states.

American vs Canadian Waterfowl Hunting

Ramsey Russell: Which states have you hunted and what do you remember most about hunting in America versus Canada?

Rob Reynolds: Yeah. I’ve been on the east coast. I remember hunting in Delaware on opening day. It didn’t feel like duck hunting. It felt like I was going to a war. There was booming going on everywhere. This season up here, I think I’ve heard gunshots maybe, maybe 2 or 3 days all season.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, it’s been different. That was in Delaware. Been through Maryland. We hunted down in Texas, Arkansas, California. Done a bunch of different states.

Ramsey Russell: What were some of the upside or the benefits? Like, here you’ve got naive birds. I mean, a lot of them still got eggshell on them, or they’re just coming off the Arctic. They forgot about last hunting season. Your bag limits are more liberal than most places throughout the United States. But what are some of the upside you experience down, like saying, what’s it like for you to go down to the tail end of the flyway and shoot birds? How’d you like hunting and weather that, didn’t require -40 oil to keep your gun cycling?

Rob Reynolds: No. Hunting’s fun, anywhere you go, it doesn’t matter. The experience of going hunting is getting together and having a good time altogether. So, for myself, it doesn’t matter what the hunting results are. I can have a good time anywhere, but it is different to see how people hunt in different ways.

Ramsey Russell: Exactly.

Rob Reynolds: We don’t use any boats here. We can drive right into any dry field and hunt. Driving a boat and parking it in a shelter and getting into the blind, that was pretty neat. Standing in the timber, all that stuff is really cool, and just to experience different things because we don’t have that up here.

Ramsey Russell: Right. That’s one of the reasons. Like coming up here and hunting these, these big agricultural spans, dry field feeding, not only is it very scenic, to me it’s very scenic up here, but it’s also just a whole different. It’s just magic up here, especially like a morning. That was everything you’d want. Those snow geese came off that roost and it’s like, from the minute you could squint and imagine that was a snow goose. They were coming in.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: They were hungry. They’re ready to binge feed on that waste grain and get the heck out of here for winter really gets here.

Rob Reynolds: Did you hear this morning when they started flipping and whiffling in? Everybody started giggling.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, my God.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, it was a good one.

Ramsey Russell: I love it. How did you get into this business? So you grew up with your dad, you were hunting outside of Edmonton. You’ve been doing this a long time and doing it well, but what was your start into outfitting?

Rob Reynolds: So when I was a young boy, late teens, was out hunting with one of my high school friends, and we’re out scouting because, the difference, you’re talking about hunting down us versus hunting here. We got to scout. Scouting is 75% of the hunt. We can’t go to the same spot every day. So we were out scouting and ran into this guy, seemed to be following me around and wondering, are you hunting here too? Yeah, I’m hunting here too, and his name’s Sean Mann.

Ramsey Russell: Sean Mann. Wow.

Rob Reynolds: Ran into Sean Mann on the back roads, and he said, I really like to hunt this spot. Would you boys like to jump in with us? I didn’t really know. We used to hunt out of brush blinds, and Sean Mann pulled in with all the latest and greatest gear and lay down blinds. I never even seen a lay down blind before then. We struck up a good friendship and, he said, how about you come work for me next year? So that’s kind of how I started getting into the guide business. To be honest, back then, I didn’t even know there was even an opportunity for being a professional guide. We were just out hunting for fun, it just happened.

Ramsey Russell: What did you think in your life at that point when you met Sean Mann, who invented a goose flute, what a great guy. What did you think maybe you were going to do for a career at that age? And then all of a sudden, some American with all these neat toys for killing ducks and geese invites you to come join him so that he can get the property you got permission to. What did you think you were going to do for a living?

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, I had no idea. I was just a young guy trying to figure life out. Getting into the guiding is tough because it’s so seasonal. Like it’s such a short season.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Snow Goose Hunting at Ranchland

Rob Reynolds: Right the time when a guy should be in school. I’d work in the fall and try and go back to school, but that didn’t really pan out very good school wise. So, I stuck with it and that for a number of years and then started Ranchland.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. When did you start ranch land?

Rob Reynolds: It was 2004.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. It has been 20 years almost.

Rob Reynolds: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Holy cow. I had no idea. I knew you’d been in business a long time, Rob, but not that long. That’s a long time. How has the industry and the area changed in the last 20 years around here?

Rob Reynolds: There’s been a lot more guides start up since then. Operations have definitely grown in size since then. As far as the birds over the years, we’re pretty consistent here. We’ve maybe seen a little bit of shift in migrations. This year it was maybe a little bit of timing with the warm weather, but we’ve seen a little patterns shift specifically on the snow geese.

Ramsey Russell: How so? Shifting east or.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, I don’t know if they’re-

Ramsey Russell: But can I ask you this morning, when I used to hunt up here, this is where get duck was born, right here in this flyway. We shot some snow geese at times. Most of we shot browns and darks, dark geese and ducks. That’s what we were here for. I asked you this morning, I said, are there more or less snow? You said you thought there might have been more back then.

Rob Reynolds: I remember in early 2000s, we’d picked the first opening day shoot, the one that had the most snow geese, and usually they were Ross’s at the start.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, boy. God bless them.

Rob Reynolds: It seems like the migration is getting a little bit later here for the snow geese. Oftentimes we’re shooting them the first week, but now it seems like after the 12th, 15th September, the white geese start showing up. We still get a good bunch of Ross and Snows as well, but it just may be on the timing more or less on the snow geese.

Ramsey Russell: When’s the peak time for speckle bellies?

Rob Reynolds: We shoot a lot of speckle bellies.

Ramsey Russell: You all shoot a lot of speck early on. A lot of them have already cleared here and they’re down south right now. They’ve been down the parts of Louisiana, Arkansas for at least a couple of weeks by the time we’re recording this.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah. Oftentimes they start clearing out here, maybe the 15th October, but we have them all the way for that month and a half from right from the 1st September all the way to the middle of October.

Ramsey Russell: So when you start the opener here, I guess first week of September. Is it mostly local rays, mallards, pintails, and then come the Arctic in just a week or two as the season progresses?

Rob Reynolds: We start the season off by shooting big Canadas and ducks, and then the little geese start coming, middle of the month. There’s some resident geese maybe at the start of the season, but it’s really weird, how the calendar works. That September first opener, even the last week August, we start scouting, we start seeing birds, and we’re like, are they going to show up? You’re looking at the clock to see, man, how many more days we got? I sure hope they come. September 1st comes, and it’s just like flick of the switch. They start showing up. So we shoot a few residents, but most of our birds through here are migrating birds.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. You cover a big area, and we’re not going to get into specifics. I don’t like to put people on map, but I want to say this. Your areas cover essentially, from the Boreal forest up in peace country to the freaking southern Canadian border. That’s a lot of area.

Rob Reynolds: Yes, sir. We have a few different locations that we operate. We can do an early season, a middle season and a later season opportunity. So we have vast hunting, for sure.

From Mallards to Geese and Everything in Between

Mallards and honkers, late season.

Ramsey Russell: You told me something last night. This is what I’m getting at. We talked about how your season started with the Big local geese, probably moat migrators, too, and then the ducks. You were telling me, when does the season end? How late do you all go shooting mallards up here that never cross the Canadian border? That’s what blows my mind.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, it’s just before Christmas, when the season-

Ramsey Russell: Just before Christmas? Mid to late December, you all are killing mallards in Canada?

Rob Reynolds: Yep. Mallards and honkers, late season. Last season, it was, pretty cold towards the end.

Ramsey Russell: After this morning I don’t want to imagine.

Rob Reynolds: I don’t want to say any negative degrees, but it was super cold and a bunch of snow. But the ducks and the honkers just eat it up. Yeah. So, it’s interesting. Right from, the boreal forest, where they first come all the way through the grain fields, and then you get into the irrigation district. There’s a number of rivers that they’ll roost on and stay open, and there’s a sizable population that don’t ever cross, the Canada US border.

Ramsey Russell: That just blows my mind. I knew that a lot of those birds would hunker down in parts of Wyoming and Montana, but I never dreamed. I just never got my mind wrapped around that while we’re celebrating Christmas, that there’s still birds up here in Canada. That just blows my mind, takes everything. Now, when you go out there, if a guy wanted to come up that late and hunt, surely you all run some haters in somebody’s blind. Surely.

Rob Reynolds: No, I have been known to put-

Ramsey Russell: Note to self- Bring a heater.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, I’ve been known to put a sleeping bag in a layout blind and just take your boots off and jump in. But it doesn’t often get that extreme. Maybe minus temperatures with a little bit of snow. Sometimes winter comes a little bit early, throws a little snow on the ground, but then a lot of times it’ll melt off and get, fairly decent.

Ramsey Russell: You bring up a good point though, because we were talking about this at dinner last night, all the southern boys and yourself how, 14 degrees Mississippi because the humidity is bone chilling cold, but this morning was not terribly cold. It was 11 degrees when we got out. It wasn’t terribly cold because it’s dry and it does something about that. It just makes a huge difference.

Rob Reynolds: We didn’t have a huge wind either. I know you guys calculate a heat index, up here it’s a wind chill factor. You get that wind on and it adds a whole another level of cold, but we’re fortunate to go from early season all the way to late season. We can almost have 3.5 solid months of hunting here in Alberta.

The Impact of American Hunters on Global Outfitters

We talked about this a little bit last night also, Rob, how to the average American hunter and a lot of outfitters around the world and in Canada, exists because of American hunters willing to travel and do this stuff.

Ramsey Russell: That’s nuts. We talked about this a little bit last night also, Rob, how to the average American hunter and a lot of outfitters around the world and in Canada, exists because of American hunters willing to travel and do this stuff. By Thanksgiving in the US, certainly by Christmas, all of the North American seasons are open. In fact, some of the northern tiers already starting to close out and those hunters a lot of times will migrate further south with the birds. It just seems to me that a lot of destinations I’ve considered listing in the past, like parts of Europe, Northern hemisphere, it’s going to be such a slow demand because the average American guy, he’s heavily invested in his equipment and in his game plan and in his friends and his family to go hunt public or he’s got more expenses than hunting private. I mean it’s a commitment. It’s real hard to get a guy to leave home to go on a hunt like this but at the same time, Mallards are the rock stars. That’s what we all want, the greenheads, and the fact that you got a whole bunch of greenheads sitting up here. It’d be like coming up to Disneyland for guys willing to climb into a sleeping bag if it was that cold. It’s a huge opportunity also.

Rob Reynolds:  Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: It’s almost like an untapped resource on the north American continent, if you ask me, because mountains are getting far and fewer between in a lot of parts of the United States, and the opportunity to come up here and shoot 8 big, huge, fat greenheads in December is a huge opportunity that nobody’s really tapping into. That’s amazing.

Rob Reynolds: I’d agree with that. I don’t want to let the complete cat out of the bag, but it is same thing. There’s no pressure. It’s kind of funny to watch them ducks come in to land in the snow. They’ll land in the snow, tuck their feet up, and almost melt a little patch of snow, and then start eating underneath where it’s melted but-

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Rob Reynolds: They’re trying to put on. They need to feed to keep up the energy.

Ramsey Russell: Do they still feed twice a day that time of year or do they just kind of come out on one big feed or is it like an ant trail? Just ducks coming out constantly depending on the weather.

Rob Reynolds: When it’s super cold, it’s like they hang back on the water and they’ll be paddling their feet to keep the water open. They’ll fly later. It’s a good maybe hour and a half, 2 hours after shoot time in the morning, they’ll fly and maybe just one feed a day, but they’ll get everything they need on that first, that one feed, then go back to the water to oftentimes leave and start trading back and forth. Some will leave to feed, go back, keep the water open, depending on where they are, depending if it’s running water or just standing water. They’re creative little creatures.

Ramsey Russell: Well they really are.

Rob Reynolds: They’re doing it for a living too.

Ramsey Russell: We talked about this dinner again last night. I asked you, if southern boys that come up here to hunt, they want ducks or geese.

Rob Reynolds: They love the ducks.

Ramsey Russell: We love the ducks because we don’t have a goose hunting culture to speak up back home. I like to come here because there is a goose hunting culture. That’s why I’m curious if somebody grew up in Alberta, been in his business for so long, what is your preference?

Rob Reynolds: It’s tough because I like both of them.

Ramsey Russell: I do, too.

Rob Reynolds: When a typical hunters phoning and saying, hey when’s the best time to come? My first question to them is, what do you like better, ducks or geese? and the answer all the time is both. Then they’d say, we like the ducks better, and that’s kind of where I say, if you like ducks better, maybe October. You start getting a little more coloration on the ducks. September, the ducks, early season, they’re all brown. We’ll shoot mallards and pintails in the dry field, they’ll all be brown, but we can get our birds, but they’ll be smaller bunches. Bunches 12, 15 in a group, which is easy shooting when they come. Once October comes, like you saw this morning, they start getting into bigger bunches, 50, 75, 300, like we saw this morning in a bunch, so it’s more of a wow factor for the ducks in the later season it goes and even so, later season down south, they’re now talking flocks of 500, 1000 and a bunch. You get a couple really good goes on there and you’re having a lot of fun.

Ramsey Russell: But it really doesn’t take much green. When those drakes first start molting out, they’re very easy to pick out.

Rob Reynolds: Especially on the breast.

Ramsey Russell: Especially. They’re very easy to pick the drakes from the hens. All they got to turn is just start molting a little bit. This morning, they’re so colorful. I could just tell by the, by the pile growing beside me, the char dog was bringing back, everybody was picking greenheads that they could. You might have to grab something on the second or third shot, but that first shot, everybody was raining down green heads.

Rob Reynolds: The lighting often, helps or hinders lots. We were staring into the sun this morning, and it would hinder you maybe a little bit to see the green. You put that light on them, and that green head just explodes in color.

The Magic of Hunting Snow Geese

It was a pretty sizable spins on the snows, but it wasn’t but one or two swirls, and they were sitting in our laps because they were coming. The minute they saw that spread here they came, and then the ducks came off.

Ramsey Russell: Now that we’re talking about the ducks, one of my favorite things about this morning is the Snows just came in. Like I said, just from a mile away, they were already starting to maple leaf. They were coming in. It was a pretty sizable spins on the snows, but it wasn’t but one or two swirls, and they were sitting in our laps because they were coming. The minute they saw that spread here they came, and then the ducks came off. It’s like every path they were picking up 100 more birds and they were working in beautifully. Limits were high pretty quickly. Then we sat there for another hour. Now 100 picks up, another 100 picks up, 500 picks up. Before you know it, you got 700 birds working around you spinning and landing, and you kind of want to reach up and grab at one. Just, just the opportunity to sit there. I’ve got my limit. I’ve had fun. Now I’m watching.

Rob Reynolds: Enjoy the show.

Ramsey Russell: Enjoy the freaking show, man. It was amazing.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: So you’re like myself. You just basically the next one. You like the ducks, you like the geese. What are your thoughts on snow geese? I’ll tell my thoughts off the bat. I love snow geese. I like to eat them.

Rob Reynolds: I’m kind of in a love hate relationship with them. Some days you love them, some days you hate them.

Ramsey Russell: Well, some days they’ll make you hate them.

Rob Reynolds: You’re either a good guide or you’re a bad guide, depending on how the snow geese treat you. You can have some really good days, and it’s all weather dependent. Oftentimes we hear from the south all the birds are weather dependent. Well, it’s weather dependent in a field too. You definitely need a wind. We love the overcast skies and with the breeze and, you can do quite well with the snow geese.

Ramsey Russell: I was walking around the main lodge over there the other day. yesterday, which is an old restaurant you all modeled into just a magnificent place to gather and eat and socialize. Your wife Lori and her mom has done a real good job putting stuff together. I call it interior decorating because it is, but they’ve just got a collection of stuff. And as I was walking around, there’s old saddles, there’s antlers. It’s just all kinds of stuff. Something that grabbed my attention was up towards the front of that room, there was a tiny little picture about 8 by 10 framed, sitting on a wall, and there was a spotlight on it. In that picture, it was a real rough. Looked like somebody had kind of planed it with a hand hatchet type cabin. With a man and a woman holding a baby. Now was that just a picture they found somewhere or is that go back to family ties?

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, that’s a lot of history on my wife’s side. That was the little baby was, if I got it right, my wife’s great grandfather.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, one of the old original farmsteads of when they first settled here.

Ramsey Russell: One of the first white settlers in this part of Alberta. Where did they come from?

Rob Reynolds: The first relative that came, he landed in Edmonton and made a homemade raft and floated down the river. When he got to this area he said, do you know what this most remind me of home, of Norway. He said, I want to call this home. He dug a cave and spent a winter there. See how much he liked our winters. There’s a lot of history.

Ramsey Russell: I bet that reminded me of Norway too, from the pictures i’ve seen.

Rob Reynolds: You bet. Those guys were tough back then.

Ramsey Russell: Tough as woodpecker lips. I really can’t imagine. Look, man, it’s cold but it’s nice out here in Canada but you got modern lodging and heat. I just cannot imagine digging a hole inside of a stream bank and winter.

Rob Reynolds: Back then their living was living. To make a living you were in survival mode. It’d be interesting to see how we’d all fare if we were just surviving and didn’t have a living to create. I’m not sure which way is better. They’re tough back then for sure.

Ramsey Russell: Now we’ll say the one that took a sled up and went ice fishing and caught all the fish.

Rob Reynolds: No, that was my grandfather.

Ramsey Russell: Your grandfather. Tell that story.

Rob Reynolds: My grandfather used to, when he was a boy, take a sleigh and they’d go a week and a half journey with a sleigh to catch some fish. They’d chop the ice with an axe and this is before limits and all that. They’d fill bathtubs full of fish and it was time to go home when the bathtubs were full of fish and they’d take the fish home and they’d barter with the fish and the lays would can-fish and that was their living, surviving and going back home. You can picture it on a little prairie farmstead. Everybody’s got chickens and pigs and cows. Fish was quite a delicacy, saying barter and trade and that was a way to make a living. My grandfather and his brother farmed together, and one of them worked on the farm, and the other one would coyote hunt, and the coyote hunter often produced, just as much income for the little family operation as the farmer. Just creative ways to survive and make a living.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, that must have been a heck of a time to live.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You talk about your wife from this community. Her great-great-granddaddy floated down a raft and wintered in a cave nearby. Your granddad’s a little boy over here, went up and chopped ice and traded fish. You all were born and raised here for generations as far back as anybody can remember. You’ve come to this community, and I like the way you operate. You all taken an old restaurant and turned it into a magnificent gathering place. Unbelievable. I mean, truly unbelievable. Even though it’s big and laid out like a buffet, like a restaurant, it feels like a home. That’s what blows my mind. It feels like a home. Your wife Lori was telling me last night that, because the families are all kind of scattered about, you all kind of convened there for I guess, Christmas or family meetings or family dinners or family get together.

Rob Reynolds: Yes, you bet.

Ramsey Russell: The way you lodge hunters is in this community. You’ve got these gorgeous little houses scattered about, and you’ve told me about some other acquisitions around the greater, larger area. It’s got to have an incredible impact morally and also financially on these rural communities like this.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, these small towns need some economic drivers, like areas where it’s just agriculture dependent, need other sources of income. A lot of these little towns in Alberta would not get any other tourism other than hunting. We had a meeting with our outfitting association, and they said the traveling hunter would be the highest net worth traveler coming to Alberta, and most of them would come for no other reason than to come hunting. Once they come, there’s fishing opportunities man, we need to come to Calgary Stampede. It opens up the door and, Canada definitely is a safe travel destination. There’s lots of different reasons other than just hunting, but it’s interesting to open up the door to these little communities to bring in people that wouldn’t normally come for any other reason.

Ramsey Russell: Agriculture has become such a deal that, for example, back in your granddaddy’s day, back in your daddy’s day probably, you drive out here in the countryside and you see these little schoolhouse markers everywhere. It was back in an era when every 160 acres to 640 acres had a family farm. All the kids went to that little schoolhouse within, say, a 3, 4, 5-mile area. They all went to this one little school house, and now it’s nothing but just itty bitty markers. The schools are gone because all the farms have been sold and aggregated into massive farms. It’s such a thin, marginalized profit that you’ve got to scale huge, and it really doesn’t leave a lot of opportunity for just a regular young man to be a farmer or live like in the past, because you can’t just have 160 acres and be a farmer no more. You got to have maybe 160,000 or 16,000 acres to be a meaningful farmer and make a great living, it seems like. I guess a lot of these communities are drying up. Folks are going to the city and getting city jobs.

Rob Reynolds: Well, it seems like the population goes down on the weekends in a lot of these small towns. Everybody head to the city. The rural life seems to be fading away a little bit but, I can tell you one thing, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Canada is Open to Hunters

Ramsey Russell: My whole point was there’s a lot of folks in modern society today that say that hunting is bad, that we’re all taking no gift. My point is it’s the complete opposite. Just like you said, the number one tourism of Alberta is hunters and what it does in a little community like this. A couple of your guests were saying, they walked around town, everybody waved, and they used all five fingers, and they were just as friendly as can be. I see the same thing throughout all of Canada. Everybody I meet is just as friendly and nice as can be. It is a safe destination.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah. It’s nice to have guys up here in the fall, that’s for sure. Where Canada’s open for travelers. That’s for sure.

Ramsey Russell: I want to hear the story. Tell me a story about that mojo story. That was pretty dang funny. Here’s the deal, Terry Denman and Mike Morgan have been coming up here forever. The late Mike Morgan and. They’ve been coming up forever. They introduced us, and one day, of all people to be out and spread with you was Mister Dimmon and he was busy bent over doing something when a couple other guys had gotten permission from somebody and showed up. What happened then?

Rob Reynolds: It was kind of funny. It was a guy who had mentioned something about a robo duck, and Terry kind of shook his head and he did, it’s not a robot duck, it’s a mojo. Anyways, we run into these two old fellas that, tried hunting in the same location, and they pulled in and I said, would you guys like to come and join us? They said, oh, no, I was starting to set up the mojos. He looked over and said, the ducks won’t come here with those robo ducks.

Ramsey Russell: What did Dimmon say?

Rob Reynolds: He kind of chuckled and laughed, and those two old fellows watched an incredible hunt.

Ramsey Russell: Did they go somewhere else and hunt nearby.

Rob Reynolds: They went off, 450 yards away. They had good view of a spectacular duck and goose hunt. Actually, that morning it started snowing too, and Terry, he’s a big Diet coke guy.

Ramsey Russell: He sure is.

Rob Reynolds: His diet Coke froze, and he says, okay, it’s time to go.

Ramsey Russell: He’s a coke zero guy.

Rob Reynolds: He switched.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. We were down in Peru one time, and they had diet coke. Coke light, they called it. He didn’t want coke like he wanted coke zero.

Rob Reynolds: Okay.

Ramsey Russell: The one in the black can. That’s his flavor.

Rob Reynolds: We’ll have to stock up. He’s coming next week.

Ramsey Russell: Heck yeah, he’s coming.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I think they come just about every year, don’t they?

Rob Reynolds: Do you know what I think? I think they’ve been coming for the last 14 years. I know my oldest son is 13, and the first year they came, Lori or maybe the second year Lori was pregnant with Remington, and they’ve been coming a long time. They’ve watched both my boys get older and also my hair turned a little bit more gray as well.

The Best Duck Recipes

My wife does it a couple different ways. She’s got her famous Sauerkraut and duck. She pan-fries the duck breasts, breaded a little bit, and then adds some sauerkraut and onions, and it’s awesome.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I bet they have. The food’s amazing. Your wife cooks some. You’ve got a lady from North Carolina here helping. I’ve seen some local ladies. It’s quite a staff back here in the kitchen. It’s not just one person out there. They’re turning out a lot of good food. It looked like a Shawnee’s buffet when we came in from hunting today. I mean, everything from French toast to praline bacon cleared down to poached eggs and it just kept on going. Man leaves hungry, it’s his own fault. It’s funny because I googled something about you one time. Just googled, I think I was looking for your address or something and of all things that come up was a duck recipe. It was in a sporting magazine. It was kind of a big deal and it was funny because when I came up here, I needed to write something down. You handed me a piece of paper and it was that duck recipe.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You almost give that duck recipe out a lot.

Rob Reynolds: We get a lot of requests for our duck. My wife does it a couple different ways. She’s got her famous Sauerkraut and duck. She pan-fries the duck breasts, breaded a little bit, and then adds some sauerkraut and onions, and it’s awesome.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Rob Reynolds: She does another dish with cranberries and that’s, that’s another favorite, and of course, like dove poppers in the states, we do duck wrapped in bacon, jalapeno popper cream cheese.

Ramsey Russell: Well, everybody likes that. That’s a no fail recipe. The cranberry recipe is what I found. It said saskatoon berries. I guess it’s the same thing. Yeah, but it’s a breasted duck with the fat on pan seared both sides, put in the oven, let it finish, make a sauce, basically. What do you got in that sauce? It’s the cranberries and a wine reduction and something else.

Rob Reynolds: A little bit of onions.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rob Reynolds: It kind of caramelizes, but it just.

Ramsey Russell: When the duck comes out and it starts to rest, drizzle it with that sauce.

Rob Reynolds: Yes, sir. Yeah, cook it to medium rare. On the buffet line, when the hunters start seeing it, it goes pretty quick. Usually we end up, oh, we’re short on the. It’s tough to portion that because it goes so quick.

Ramsey Russell: Does Lori make her own sauerkraut?

Rob Reynolds: We don’t.

Ramsey Russell: That’s kind of a big deal up here with you all’s heritage.

Rob Reynolds: There’s a lot of ukrainian descendants in this area, and sauerkraut is, definitely a staple in that culture. We don’t make our own, but we can maybe try homemade sauerkraut. Maybe next year?

Ramsey Russell: Why not? Tell me a little bit about the cleanup crew, because this morning I noticed somebody called or chirped on your phone and you floored it to get back to the lodge quick. We got in there and ate good. And about this time, the cleanup crew came in.

Rob Reynolds: It’s kind of funny. We chuckle and we like to see the boys show up. We got my oldest boy, the school’s just down the road, and he’s got a bunch of good buddies and hockey teammates and there’s one football player in the crew, and 12:00 sharp, in walks the cleanup crew. It’s a herd of little 8th graders. I said to them the other day, you guys like going to Subway? No way, we want to come here. So, they come and they clean up whatever’s left. They’re the cleanup crew.

Ramsey Russell: I’d say the largest one weighed 100 pounds, and the smallest one weighed maybe 75 pounds and they all got hollow legs. They cleaned up.

Rob Reynolds: It was comical, though. Last week, I asked one of the hunters here, I said, do you think you can pick out, think you could pick out the football player in the crowd? It was very easy to pick him out. His plate was about double the size, double the height of the hockey players. We’re getting ready for a busy hockey season as well for these boys. So they’re putting the pounds on.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a big deal, isn’t it, up here? I mean, hockey really is a big deal.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah. We love our, we love our hockey. Of course, with the length of our winters, there’s something a guy has to do all winter.

Ramsey Russell: When does hockey season kick off.

Rob Reynolds: The young kids, they start in October.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Rob Reynolds: Every little town has a hockey rink across Alberta. Like our family, one parent is in one town with one boy, and another parent could be 4 hours away in a different town. All the rinks are filled up every weekend.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve never seen a hockey game, but if I ever come up here to shoot those mallards down the southern part of your area, I think I’d like to go see one. I like youth sports, youth college. Once it gets professional, it’s just a little too professional. I like raw talent. Just out there, everybody doing their best.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah. It’s special to even watch the boys. My youngest boy, he wanted to be goalie, so he tried that out for a year. And now he’s a centerman. He knows what it took to stop the goals, now he’s trying to score them. That’s interesting to watch the kids grow up.

Ramsey Russell: We were talking about cooking. We talking about some of the food you all cook. You got any gumbo stories?

Rob Reynolds: We got a number of groups that come from Louisiana every year, and they usually, they like to take over the kitchen. They’re big into cooking, of course.

Ramsey Russell: Do they bring their own ingredients?

Rob Reynolds: They bring. Well, they got to bring their own roux because you wouldn’t find a roux for 1000 miles around here. They take over the kitchen and last year, I committed the ultimate sin. The guy was making gumbo, and the instructions were given to me at such and such a time, we need to add the rice. So that was what was given to me, so at such and such a time. I wasn’t in the field that afternoon. I added the rice right into the gumbo that had been simmering for hours and it looked good.

Ramsey Russell: I bet it was good.

Rob Reynolds: I didn’t know the difference between gumbo and jambalaya up here, jambalaya is more common than gumbo. The hunters showed up. I was so proud. I had followed the instructions. I added the rice and-

Ramsey Russell: So, you dumped the rice into the Gumbo Pot, stirred it in good.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, they said to add the rice.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, boy.

Rob Reynolds: You should have seen the look on their face when they came and realized that it was not gumbo anymore. Some places like to add the rice and pour the gumbo on top. Some like to put the gumbo in and add the rice on top and. Yeah, I just added, I cooked it all together. The gumbo was so dry, it wasn’t gumbo anymore.

Ramsey Russell: What did they do the next time they came?

Rob Reynolds: They strictly gave me instructions to stay out of the kitchen. They said, leave it to us. We’re going to handle it. We had gumbo again and it was awesome. Now I know exactly how it’s supposed to be.

Ramsey Russell: How do you find good staff up here? I met a lot of your staff last night, and you’ve got a lot of staff because you’ve got such big areas and a lot of different things going at one time. How do you find good staff? How do you keep good staff and tell me some staff stories about some of your people.

Rob Reynolds: I don’t know about any staff stories. I got a really good crew. I really like to take care of my guys. I don’t like training new people a whole bunch. I just as soon, keep regular staff year and year out. I’ve had some people, over ten years.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Rob Reynolds: I know you build up that relationship. They know what to expect from me and I know what to expect from them. Outfitting is a people business, dealing with people every year and that includes your staff-

Ramsey Russell: They’ve got to have people skills.

Rob Reynolds: Yes, sir. We take care of everybody and everybody’s a spoke in the wheel and with everybody coming together, the wheel works, really good.

Ramsey Russell: I sure had a good time. I tell you that everybody’s done just a wonderful job. The scouts do an amazing job and it just couldn’t be any better. Do all of your guides scout or do you have scouts and guides? Yeah, everybody just kind of coordinate in a text message or what?

Scouting the Birds & Shaping the Hunt

The more that they see how birds react from the road, I think it makes a way better guide and they can learn the area and learn what the birds are doing routines.

Rob Reynolds: Everybody scouts quite a bit. There’s some designated spotters. The designated spotters are our guides in training. The more that they see how birds react from the road, I think it makes a way better guide and they can learn the area and learn what the birds are doing routines. It’s interesting to take a hunt and you can visualize when you’re looking at a shoot and seeing how the birds are coming in. I want all the guys to picture, this is the best place to set up, because a lot of times in the morning, our guides haven’t seen the shoot the day before. We get a location on where to go, and we use all the information we’re given from the spotters, which way they’re coming from and terrain, and a lot of times, we are going into it a little bit blind, but the good communication back and forth with all the crew, it works really good. I got a good crew.

Ramsey Russell: I noticed this morning, Caleb pulled up and stopped, and you pulled up right beside him and said, hey, you’ve hunted that field a lot of times over 20 years. You said, this is exactly where we’ve hunted a lot of times before. We’ve also hunted 400 yards over there and you all talk. He said, no, this is the place. We weren’t on the y. We were on the x this morning.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, you bet. There’s a number of fields where the birds will land in the exact same spot and even walk to different locations of the field or even land in a certain spot and jump over to another area. That just goes from years of watching them do certain things. It’s definitely interesting with the experience over the years to see that and be able to be in certain fields. There’s still a lot of fields that we hunted this year that I’ve never, ever set foot in, depending on what crops planted or whatnot. When you’re on the x, when you’re giving all the information, and when we’re setting up decoys, did you see how many little white cheetos are laying around? You bet. So, all that goes into it, I think scouting is easily 75% of the hunt.

Ramsey Russell: It is, isn’t it? Yeah.

Rob Reynolds: Take a look from an airplane, you see, all our fields are in perfect squares. They’re quarter sections for each field. It looks like a checkerboard. If you’re just picking a spot at random, that’s how successful you’re going to be. It’s not very successful because there’s lots of different food sources around, but when a bird settles in there, they’re married to a spot, and they’ll come back to the same spot there they finished feeding.

Ramsey Russell: It’s all about the details, isn’t it? I’ve been. I’ve been working with Outfitters for 20 years now, Rob, and I think it’s all about the details. We started off talking about what a great hunt, and that’s what we come for, great hunt. Great hunts don’t happen by accident. That’s where the scouting and the knowledge and all that stuff comes into play. One thing I find myself looking at when I meet with new outfitters and new people around the world is more than just the bag. I look for details. I find myself gravitating to the kitchen, and I can hear a lot and see a lot and get to know stuff behind the scenes. but in all the years I’ve ever done this, I saw a detail this morning that I’ve never seen. We picked up the decoys, we laid the birds out. We got everything sorted. We got the trailer loaded. We did this, we did that. Not one, but 2 or 3 freaking mojo pick sticks, going to pick up all the shells, kicking through the straw to make sure we didn’t miss none. Then when it’s all said and done, we’re ready to load up. You all brought out a couple of buckets, and we walked downrange about 20, 30 yards and combed the field for spent wads. Not one time in 20 years have I seen that level of detail.

Rob Reynolds: Our farmers are everything to us, and we want to be welcomed back. So, we want to leave each location the same way we find it. There’d be nothing worse for us than to lose permission, lose access to a farm on one of our bads. So after the hunt, it’s very evident to find the wads in a pea field. Pea field is completely flat. Stubble fields, you really have to look for the wads, but we put the extra effort into, leaving things as we find it, because, quite frankly if it was my place, that’s how I’d want someone else to treat my place.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely, and it was a bunch of them. I couldn’t believe it how much it filled up that big box we had. It was a bunch of them. But that was an important detail. I’ve always felt like that people that disregard little details, disregard big details. That’s just me. When I’m looking and getting to know folks, and I really appreciated you doing that. It makes me cognizant of how I can do a better job when I’m out in the field. What do you do for fun when it’s not hunting season? So you’re hunting 3 months a year, 3½ months a year. What do you do the rest of the year? What do you do up here when it’s bone chilling cold and how does Rob Reynolds entertain or relax or what do you do for fun?

Rob Reynolds: We talked about hockey already, but I really enjoy watching my boys grow up and play hockey. Most weekends they practice twice a week and games on the weekend, that’s top shelf. We work all year long. We enjoy working. So I got a little ranch with some cattle. I got into wagyu. We’re raising some wagyu, on the menu next year we’ll have some wagyu beef for our customers or our hunters and we work all year. Hockey is pretty special to our little family.

Ramsey Russell: Alberta is beef country, isn’t it?

Rob Reynolds: Yes, sir.

Ramsey Russell: It really is beef country. Yeah, it’s Canadian cowboy country.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah. Imagine Canadian beef be Japanese beef because the wagyu are Japanese, and no, it’s-

Ramsey Russell: You said something about a wagyu pig last night. I missed it because I was doing something else, but what were you saying about that?

Rob Reynolds: We started raising these mangalitsa pigs. It’s kind of the wagyu of pork. We’re dabbling with a little bit of a meat market, and if we can eat our way out of it, no matter if it works or not. Talking about things that I like doing for fun, I like eating, too I’m a healthy size, so, I’m good at that.

Ramsey Russell: Wagyu pork.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: There’s a place in Mississippi, as if pork doesn’t have enough fat, they inject it with lard. You want to talk about fine, but now we’re taking a whole other level, going to some kind of wagyu style.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, it’s a Hungarian pig.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve never even heard of it.

Rob Reynolds: A hairy pig that does actually quite well in the winters. You need a hairy pig to live outside in the winters. It’s a little fun thing that my wife and my boys help with the chores and. For fun, we do chores. Kind of sounds simple.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s wrap up the episode Rob, just hammer out just some of the details of your package. What’s the standard package up here? 3-days, 5-days?

Rob Reynolds: Typical hunt is 3 days. So it’s 2½ days. So we’ll hunt either Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday morning and the half day on the third day. So Monday to Wednesday or Thursday to Saturday.

Ramsey Russell: So, mornings and afternoon.

Rob Reynolds: Yep.

Ramsey Russell: Unless you live it out on everything in the morning, which could happen.

Rob Reynolds: It happens often.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Rob Reynolds: So 2½ day hunt.

Ramsey Russell: What’s included with your package? First, let me just say this, guys. I love this setup you’ve got. I’m staying in, ‘the pink house.’ I love this. This will sleep 6 people in their own beds. It’s a little house.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah.

Best All-Inclusive Waterfowl Hunting in Alberta Canada

Yeah, we look after everything once you get here, just need to find your way up here. Flights are easy. 

Ramsey Russell: Beautiful little family home, well appointed, warm as can be, comfortable as can be. You got a pool table out here. It’s awesome.

Rob Reynolds: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Then a quarter mile away is the main house where we go and eat and recreate and don’t step on scales while we’re here. You’ve got little houses all over the place. So lodgings included?

Rob Reynolds: Yeah, we include meals, lodging, license shells, bird cleaning, guides are included. Yeah, we look after everything once you get here, just need to find your way up here. Flights are easy. Almost everybody flies into Edmonton and rents a car to come out to our place and once you get here, we look after you.

Ramsey Russell: Done deal.

Rob Reynolds: Yes sir.

Ramsey Russell: Rob, I appreciate being up here. I appreciate everything you do. I really enjoyed this morning and everybody at camp is having such a great time and I just know good times don’t happen by accident. It takes a lot of planning and a lot of work and a lot of experience.

Rob Reynolds: There’s a lot of behind the scenes efforts that, maybe goes unnoticed. We like to control the things that we can control and like to treat people the way we’d like to be treated ourselves.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you. Folks, Rob Reynolds, Ranch Land Outfitter central Alberta. Come and get some. It is awesome. It is top shelf. It is everything that you want or have dreamed of your Canadian duck hunt being. Come try the geese. I promise you won’t be disappointed. Check out ushuntlist.com for more information or get online and Google- Ranch Land Outfitters. They also have social media. Thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. We’ll see you next time.