Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I’m at Oyster Bayou Hunting Club, way down in Chambers County’s, Texas, I have got a very special guest. Thanks to my friends Rob Sawyer, Gene Campbell, Joe Briscoe for making this interview come to fruition. Today’s guest folks, listen up, today’s guest has significantly influenced during his career, significantly influenced Texas Gulf coastal habitat, the entire Central Flyway, in fact, a lot of the science and technology and information that he brought to bear, really influence what you all recognize as duck hunting today. I’d like to introduce you all to Mr. Charles Stutzenbaker. Charles, how the heck are you?

Charles Stutzenbaker: I’m doing really well, a nice, comfortable place to sit.

Ramsey Russell: Good.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, I need to complain, it would be a lot better if we were outside around the fire.

Ramsey Russell: I agree. You don’t sit around fire midday this time of year in Texas, do you?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Oh, if you get a little bit sleepy.

Ramsey Russell: Mr. Stutzenbaker, how old are you?

Charles Stutzenbaker: I’m going to be 90, the 1^st week in October.

Ramsey Russell: Congratulations. Where did you grow up? Where are you from and what was your childhood like? Now, 90 years ago, would have put you back in about the mid-30s.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, I was born in 1934 on a small cotton farm in Fort Bend County down below Houston and I grew up doing a little bit of cotton picking and cotton chopping, but we moved into town, into a little town or it was a little town back in those days called Rosenberg and we lived in the last house on the edge of town and everything was surrounded by rice fields and corn fields and of course, my whole family were hunters, so it was no problem at all to take a gun or a fishing pole and go out the back door and enjoy an afternoon outdoors and that’s been the most important thing in my life, I think, other than family, is the fact that I could get out where the grass is green and the water’s clear.

Ramsey Russell: Back in that era, times were a lot different than we recognized them today, especially for kids. You grew up, I mean, close to the land like that, what did you do for fun? What did Mr. Stutzenbaker like when he was just a little boy? What did you like to do besides chop cotton and go out with your dad? How did children like yourself entertain yourself back in those days?

Charles Stutzenbaker: We were not the boys. Now, I can’t speak for the girls, I think that was a different set of circumstances, but there were 2 kinds of boys, there were those that were, we call sissy boys that stayed at home and played with marbles and things like that and then there was a group that I was associated with and we were the outdoor people. We were spending as much time as we could on the river or the creek, we build a tent and get a lot of firewood and take a gun or the fishing pole and cook what we caught or killed and that was the enjoyable part of life for us and for many of us and especially me, it’s continued, it’s stuck to me just like glue.

Ramsey Russell: Still a little boy at heart.

Charles Stutzenbaker: That’s right, still barefoot boy.

Ramsey Russell: Still barefoot little boy. I asked you when you first got here if you had grown up hunting, you said you did and you told a story about your people coming from the old country to Texas.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, that’s right. I’m a 1^st generation American, my mother was actually born in Russia in 1903 and my grandfather came across some really poor circumstances and so he took his family to Moravia, which is a part of the Czech Republic and he sold everything he had and left the family with friends and relatives and he came to America and worked for 2 years doing anything he could, sleeping anywhere he could and he was able to eventually send for the family and they emigrated and came to the US and settled in Texas and they couldn’t speak English, didn’t know the American culture very well, but the first couple years they worked for farmers and then they graduated to renting land from farmers and doing their own farming and then finally they were able to purchase a small farm.

Ramsey Russell: The real American dream.

Charles Stutzenbaker: The real American dream and the grandparents never did live to see the land paid off, it was nearly paid. But anyway, my whole life is associated with things outdoors, I have no desire to drive in Houston or Dallas.

Ramsey Russell: Me neither.

Charles Stutzenbaker: I tried to avoid all those roads as best I can.

Ramsey Russell: Did your granddad ever say what it was like coming from Moravia, the old country, now Czech Republic, to Texas, the transition from there to this kind of freedom, the freedom to own a firearm?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, that’s an interesting part of the story. When he came to the US he found out that anybody could own a gun whereas in Europe at that time, you didn’t have a gun and you couldn’t, if you had one, you couldn’t use it for hunting. But anyway, grandpa scraped up a little bit of money and he bought a single barrel 12 gauge shotgun and the most delightful thing he could do, he told us, was go into the cotton patch or corn patch late in the evening and shoot a wild rabbit and bring that rabbit home and to have grandma cook it as a special meal. And so the whole family was associated with that kind of thing and the entire family developed into outdoor people that enjoyed hunting and fishing.

Ramsey Russell: It really wasn’t a recreational pursuit, though, was it? It was a way to feed the family.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, it was, but he enjoyed it so much because he felt he was a little short man with a white beard and mustache, but he felt when he had that gun and could kill a rabbit, he felt like he was just a good person, like the ones he knew, the wealthy ones in Europe that lived in big houses and could shoot a rabbit if they wanted to.

Ramsey Russell: What an amazing story, we talk about that and Migratory Bird Treaty Act came in, not too much 1918, 1920 in that era, you’d have been a little boy shortly thereafter and it was so interesting to me when I look back in history, market hunting and it’s got a big, bad boogeyman demeanor now but it really wasn’t, it was a way that you serve a society. There was a market not just for waterfowl, but for mockingbirds, for tanagers, for anything people could eat and did eat and then shortly after the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the regulation of commercial harvest, you kind of entered this outlaw gunner era, which has really got this negative stigma to it and the times I’ve spent in Chambers County and over in parts of Louisiana, it was a slow transition from there to now, where hunting has become just almost purely recreational for a lot of people, but what did you see in your lifetime in terms of, like when did the night hunting and the robin fries and all that good stuff, how was that transition back then?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, it was a real –

Ramsey Russell: Was it as bad as we make it out to be?

The Impact of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.

And they allowed everything there were, small birds and there were ducks and geese, but it was considered really an important part of society and that in 1918, when the Migratory Bird Treaty came in, that eliminated, that made that illegal.

Charles Stutzenbaker: I think in some very few small circumstances, yes. But then on the other side of the page, no, for a very large part of our country here, in the early days, there was no refrigeration, you couldn’t keep wild game more than a day or so hanging out in the shade and if a person went hunting and killed 4 or 5 birds, all he needed was 1 or 2 to feed his family, so he would take the other birds and give them to the neighbors there on the farm. So really, there wasn’t any really negative thing where I grew up, but before my time, when New York City and Chicago were – well, they’re still gigantic cities, but when they were really big by those standards then, there was a commercial hunting program where hunters in the south, where the ducks and geese spend the winter, would kill as many birds as they can and they would put them on a train called an express train and the express train did not stop from the beginning point to the end point and so these commercial hunters would put those birds on an express train and within a day or less than a day, they were in the kitchens of the many restaurants in these big cities and you can go back and you can look at some of the, what’s the term I’m looking for? Menu. You could go back and you can go back and look at the menus of some of these really elegant places where the President of the United States and the leading senator had their meals and wild game was a top marker on the menu. And they allowed everything there were, small birds and there were ducks and geese, but it was considered really an important part of society and that in 1918, when the Migratory Bird Treaty came in, that eliminated, that made that illegal. But as a boy growing up, I can very well remember in the late 1950s, I had a real good friend who operated a restaurant and he told me that as late as about the early 1900s, that they would keep frozen wild game in the freezer and that affluent people would call the day ahead and order roast duck for a Tuesday evening meal and when the diners arrived, well, there was that baked duck that took several hours to cook and my friend said that that just eventually faded out, but that was the last of the people who had a real appreciation for eating wild game and especially eating wild game at a first class restaurant.

Ramsey Russell: Unbelievable. I can understand growing up a barefoot little boy and spending time out in nature and fishing and catching snakes and frogs and developing this biophilia, just this want and this need to interact with nature, I myself was that barefoot little boy that ultimately eventually became a wildlife biologist. But what led you, is that what led you, because back in those days, back in the era, my understanding is you became the first full time wildlife biologist for the state of Texas, what happened between that barefoot little boy and you becoming that full time biologist? What prompted you along? What led you into that field?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, when I was in high school, I don’t remember exactly which year it was, it was towards the end of the curriculum, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do and I had an old uncle that I didn’t like that was a barber and he offered to send me to barber school if I would work for him for a year, but I didn’t want to do that. And one day I was sitting in the classroom before the 8 o’clock bell rang and we had an intercom system where the principal could talk to all the kids over the intercom phone and when he got through making all of his announcements, he called my name and he wanted me to come to the office. Well, just a few days before that, some of my friends went out and killed a jackrabbit and they came and put that jackrabbit in the mailbox of the principal. So when the principal, Mr. Traylor, called me and on my way to the office, I thought, he knows that I know who killed that rabbit and he’s going to ask me and put pressure on me to squeal and tell. So I came into the office and he said, close the door and my heart just sank again and so then he pulled out a Texas A & M curriculum and he said, I have just discovered that a young man can complete a 4 year course in A & M in wildlife science and with that degree, get a good paying job working with Fish & Wildlife, he says, I know that that’s what you’re most interested in. So he folded the page over and he gave me the curriculum guide and said, look at it tonight and just see if you might be interested, so I got home and I opened up that page and I started looking at the names of the courses that I was going to have to take and there was agrostology, entomology ornithology, mammalogy, Botany, Taxonomy and every one of those titles dealt with plants and animals. So I thought, boy, this is good for me, so I went on to A & M and I split that with some time in the Army, but when I came home, I finished A & M and I got the job from the state of Texas that dealt with migratory birds.

Ramsey Russell: About what year would that have been that you started?

Charles Stutzenbaker: I finally finished college in 1960.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. What was it like being – What was it back in that? I mean, that’s pioneer days, I mean, in terms of pioneering of actual what we think of now as wildlife management, what was a job description like for Texas Parks & Wildlife back in the 1960s? What was your job description? How did you spend your time? What did you do?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, we worked under a federal aid mandate, there was a – let me get this straight, the US Government placed a tax on firearms and ammunition and they held that money in Washington and the state, the various states, 48 states could write up a program, a research or a management program and they could send it to the federal government and match the federal government money and that money then came to the state and you, as a project leader, would be able to spend that money, but you had guidelines how to spend it, about how many hours you spend on a job, how many hours you put on an airplane, what building materials and things like that cost.

Ramsey Russell: Your job description was Migratory Birds for Texas, did you get to kind of pick and choose what topics or which area or where that focus needed to be in terms of what the output was of what you were doing? Like, okay, you’re a migratory bird game biologist for the state of Texas, did you have a job description?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Yes, we did.

Ramsey Russell: Or did you make your own?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, it was made before I came to work.

Ramsey Russell: Okay.

Charles Stutzenbaker: But the agency was so small at the time I came to work as compared, I have no idea how many people are working today, but it would be many times what it was when I first went. But you had a job outline that told you what you were going to do, where you were going to do it, how you were going to do it, how much time it would take to do it and then you sent that in and that was your estimate and then at the bottom there was the amount of salary that that job would cost and you might have 10 people working on this project, but some of them may work 2 days, some of them work 3 days. But anyway, you had this job outline that was turned in and it the Fish & Wildlife Service in Albuquerque and they oversaw the thing and you went ahead and did those things, as an example, one of the jobs could be flying aerial surveys, so you had to list where you were going to fly, when you were going to fly, the type of airplane, what it was going to cost, how you were going to record all this information and again, what it was going to cost and that’s how you got that one job and there were half a dozen jobs, one of them was putting leg bands on wintering birds to find out a lot about where those birds were going and how many were killed by looking at the reports that hunters submitted after they had killed a bird wearing a leg band.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll be darned, oftentimes budget offices, their budget lists don’t really reconcile with reality, especially if you’re a wildlife biologist having to, whether flying aerial surveys or going out into the resource itself, I mean, what must have been a daunting to try to conform what you needed to do and what you felt like you needed to do with a budget office out in Albuquerque.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, when I look back, it was a simple life and we never had any serious discrepancies, the work that we proposed to do was work that needed to be done, the work showed you what was happening to bird populations and so I don’t know how the programs are going today, I would suspect that they’re pretty much tied up in a bureaucracy, but it was so simple when I came to work. Back in those days, you drove a government vehicle, but you could carry a fishing pole in the back of the truck and if you were on a big ranch and if the rancher had invited you to come fishing earlier, if you had a little bit of extra time, you stopped and you caught a mess of fish and put them in the sack, took them home and had fish for supper.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of your fondest memories as a young biologist in the state of Texas back in that era? Just the field work, what are some of your fondest memories looking back at those days?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, you mean the specific jobs that we did?

Ramsey Russell: I don’t know, just, I think back when I was a young biologist and as hot and sweaty as I was, boy, I sure loved cruising that timber, being out in the middle of those woods and things I’d come across and I’m just thinking the Texas I know now today, the year 2024 versus the 1960s and 70s, it must have been just a different time, in terms of bird abundance and development and habitats and all the rice that was out here, I just wondered what you remember, what you enjoyed most about your job, when you think back, maybe it was fishing with them fishing poles, I don’t know. You’re a young biologist and now you ain’t a barefoot little boy, you’re putting your hands on the resource, on the ducks and on the numbers and the data.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, I mean, there were so many things that I enjoyed about my job. I thought many times that there’s no way I could be happy selling insurance and making a lot of money, but I was so happy being a biologist and working for a very poor salary, but I enjoyed flying, when I was a boy growing up, I wanted to fly a P-38 Lightning and get into a formation of Japanese airplanes and be a World War II pilot, so flying was really important to me and I learned to fly later on. Flying was just a great thing to do, setting up traps for banding birds was another really neat thing to do, investigating die offs where a disease would run through a population of birds, it was my job and the job of others to go out there and find out what killed those birds and try to remediate the situation by either draining the area or moving the birds out and then I was the representative to the Central Flyway, which was a group of 10 states in 2 Canadian provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan and then through the Dakotas down to Texas and we worked as a group, met several times a year as a group and we put together the investigations that will allow us to assess the bird population. And most people don’t understand that under the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, all migratory bird hunting seasons are closed and they have to stay closed until the flyaway groups can come together in August and present the information that shows that the type of hunting season being asked for would not jeopardize the bird population and that was a real hard obligation, I mean, the federal government stuck to it. But we would meet once a year as a group and I developed some wonderful friendships and we’d meet that once a year and we’d work out the length of the hunting season, the bag limit and lots of other things like steel shot –

Ramsey Russell: We’re going to get into some of these topics. I promise.

Charles Stutzenbaker: But anyway, that was probably number one project that all those faced was getting that stoppage of migratory bird season open where we could have duck season.

Ramsey Russell: Well, let’s go here then, I’m down here at Oyster Bayou making my annual stop with Mr. Gene Campbell and blue winged teal, I love blue winged teal, I’ve got friends now over Louisiana that take off the entire blue winged teal season, that’s their duck season, we love these little birds, they’re coming. Somebody told me that back when you started your job there wasn’t a blue winged, early blue winged teal season in the state of Texas, what involvement did you have with blue winged teal hunting in the state of Texas?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, I worked very closely with the Central Flyaway group and people don’t understand, but the main thrust of my group of biologists was to try to provide the very maximum hunting season and to be as liberal as we possibly could without jeopardizing the population.

Ramsey Russell: Maximum sustained yield.

Challenges of Teal Migration and Hunting Season Timing.

By the time the hunting seasons opened in Alberta and Saskatchewan and the 2 Dakotas, the birds were already pushed through and they were already here in Texas and Louisiana before a lot of them pushed on first further down into Mexico and South America, so the Central Flyaway group got together and we decided that what we needed to do was an investigation to see if there was any possibility of having a special blue winged teal season.

Charles Stutzenbaker: That’s a good point. But we looked at the harvest records for all the birds and blue winged teal, while they were so abundant on the breeding ground, made up such a small part of the annual kill because by the time the hunting seasons opened in Alberta and Saskatchewan and the 2 Dakotas, the birds were already pushed through and they were already here in Texas and Louisiana before a lot of them pushed on first further down into Mexico and South America, so the Central Flyaway group got together and we decided that what we needed to do was an investigation to see if there was any possibility of having a special blue winged teal season and we got out and we banded a lot of teal and we flew a lot of surveys and looked at a lot of kill records and we came up with the recommendations to hold a 3 year experimental teal hunt. And my memory is weakening now. I can’t remember the processed years, but it was either 64, 65 and 66 or somewhere in there. But anyway, we did open the season and it was open to only the blue winged teal and it was open for 9 days and the teal season in the Dakotas was real bust because when the season was open in the Dakotas, there were still young birds on the water and so the teal season was not held in high regard, but down here in Texas, Louisiana, all the birds were fully flighted and fully feathered birds and there were lots of them and the 3 year experiment here in Texas, Louisiana showed that we could have a teal season, so what happened was, in the next years, the federal government would allow the northern states to take a few days of their season and change it where they could kill more ducks other than blue wings, but they continued to give us our blue winged teal season.

Ramsey Russell: That’s fantastic, blue winged teal are one of my favorite species because I find their migratory behavior and their life cycle so interesting, for example, we’re recording mid-September and as we speak, I’ve been hearing about blue wings, mostly adult non breeders down here in Texas since mid to late August, I got a report last week from an outfitter out in Western Mexico, he’s already seeing blue wings show up and I talked to somebody yesterday in Saskatchewan that still have blue wings, it’s this big long little continuum, 1^st year 9 breeders come, some of the breeding birds are still raising babies, they got to get ready to fly, they got to get their wings up on them and they start coming, it’s this long, elegant pipeline of these birds coming and I just, it’s something to just – I love these little birds, I love them, they’re good to eat, they’re fun to hunt, but they’re so interesting and it’s created a tremendous opportunity at a time that we need hunting opportunities, so I thank you for doing that, that’s my favorite bird.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, it was most enjoyable.

Ramsey Russell: What about the whistling ducks? Mr. Gene Campbell told me one time, he’s an avid birder, he’s an astute observer of nature and wildlife and he told me one time and I hope I don’t, I know I’m close, but he told me one time that the 1^st whistling ducks he saw in the state of Texas was back, would have been in the mid-80s, back in the 60s, were you seeing a lot of fulvous and black bellied whistling ducks down here in these coastal habitats?

Charles Stutzenbaker: The fulvous, the brown colored one, the cinnamon colored one was extremely common and the rice farmers hated them because those tree ducks would come into a field that had been planted several days before and as soon as those seeds began to sprout, those fulvous tree ducks would come in there and eat and they did some damage and of course the farmers obligation was to get in there and try to scare them out. Now the black belly tree duck, I flew all those surveys through those years and I never saw a black belly tree duck above Lake Corpus Christi and a number of years later, I was out in the marsh in the airboat and I came over a little clump of grass and out comes a hen, black bellied with about a dozen ducklings had hatched and that probably wasn’t the only one, but they were beginning to move, the black belly was beginning to move up the coast and they have made that move and now they’re found way over in Louisiana around the Atchafalaya Floodway and they have become the dominant bird and the brown colored fulvous has faded away to where there are very few of them.

Ramsey Russell: I wonder, I’ve encountered the fulvous a lot down in South America and it’s usually marsh, deep marsh with a lot of floating type vegetation, a rail can walk across that vegetation, the fulvous can’t, but that’s what I seem to find a lot of them in and rice industry is a surrogate for marsh, very close, look at how the snow geese transitioned into it and I wonder if just a lot of the rice industry along this Gulf Coast area beginning to fade a little bit is why those birds may have began to go elsewhere instead of here, I just wonder. And I was surprised to learn this, Mr. Charles, I was very surprised to learn this, that after Hurricane Katrina and Rita, back to back years around 2005, we started seeing a lot of black bellied whistling ducks in the Mississippi Delta using wood duck nest boxes. And just a few years ago, I never see them after this time of year, just a few years ago I go out in January, it was a little warm and we shot a lot of them in the Mississippi Delta, half our bag that morning was black belly whistlers and in a podcast like this, I mentioned it one day and said, I wonder how far these things are starting to range north and I’ve since learned that there are now breeding black bellied whistling ducks, I have heard reports in Ohio, Delaware, I heard a report last year that there was a nesting pair in somewhere in Canada. Their range is really beginning to expand, maybe because of these warmer winters and these, I don’t know, it’s just, it’s an interesting development to me.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, I don’t think anybody knows, we all have our own thoughts. My look at the black bellied is the fact that in the beginning they nested in cavities like wood ducks and the number of cavities that were available control the population.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Charles Stutzenbaker: And I think that somehow the bird himself developed the ability to avoid a cavity and instead nest in the grass and if that’s true, then that’s the reason why the tree duck has expanded all the way, perhaps eventually to get into Florida.

Ramsey Russell: Wow, you wrote a couple – change the subject just a little bit, but you wrote a couple of definitive books on the mottled duck, what was your interest in the mottled duck? And you’ve written a couple of very definitive books about the mottled duck.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, when I was a boy growing up, I would get a summer job pulling weeds in rice fields, the rice farmers would hire us for 45 cents an hour and we’d just go pull all the noxious weeds that they didn’t want. But we would get out in the rice field just as it was cracking daylight and we would work all day and early in the morning, I’d hear mottled ducks quacking across the field and occasionally we would find nests, sometimes with little wet ducklings in there that hadn’t dried out yet, but I developed a real interest in mottled ducts and when I came to work, I started looking around and there were only 2 people that had ever done any mottled duck work, one was deceased and the other one I came to know and I started looking at what was really known about the mottled look, so I was able to insert some of the jobs that we talked about earlier about an estimate of mandates and cost and I was really interested in that and I started collecting some really neat information and I stretched that out over a 20 year period, not full time, but a few hours here and there and at the end of 20 years, I had the photographs and the paperwork, the measurements and I was able to publish the book on the mottled duck in Biological Services, it’s considered the definitive work, if you tried to find something out more about the mottled look, you have to scrape really hard because what’s known is pretty much in that book.

Ramsey Russell: If you had a favorite duck, I know it’s kind of a bad thing for a biologist, but if you had a favorite duck, would it be the mottled duck?

Charles Stutzenbaker: It’d be a toss up between the mottled duck and the blue winged teal.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, that I understand. I want to ask you, because you were out there running around at a different time as a young biologist, times were different and Rob was telling me last night that you spent some time or came to know out in some of these areas, these Gulf coastal areas, some of the old muskrat trappers, some of these, like I’ve been in parts of where you go by these fishing communities and they’re out in the middle of nowhere, almost a tent camp city of commercial fishermen, but Rob described to me that you came to know and understand a little bit about these, which is a bygone culture, it’s now gone, but he said there were these communities of muskrat trappers out around here. Who were they and what was their culture like? Who were these people?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, they were hard working people. They were tied to the land, they were able to trap from October until March and then the rest of the year, it was already too warm to trap, so they had other jobs, some of them were carpenters and some of them did farming work, but they were able to feed their families and they didn’t live in plush brick homes they lived in homes built with a saw and a hammer, but they took advantage of the world as it existed before drainage and the construction of canals, the coastal marshes produce tremendous populations of muskrats and the muskrat’s a little low furry animal about a foot and a half long, but it has a highly desirable type of fur and so there was a large industry where there were buyers in large cities who would come out and visit with the actual trappers and negotiate a price and they would buy the fur and then the buyers would take the fur and then they would sell it to the people that made clothing out of the fur and there was a big exchange of money and the individual landowner, the ranchers, charged people for all the muskrats that they caught on their property. And if the truth were known, back in the 30s, 40s, into the early 50s, the ranchers made more money from muskrat capture than they did off a lot livestock, off of grazing and they were ranchers, that was their identity. But there were so many muskrats and it was easy for a few people to go out and most of them built them a camp, some were built out of tar paper, but they would go out there in March and they would trap muskrats, they would go every day in trap and every week or so, the buyers and the ranchers would send the boat out to these remote camps and pick up all the fur and give them a receipt for the fur that they picked up and they take the fur back into town and dry them properly and then invite the buyers to come over and buy the hides, but those hides were, at one time, they were about $1.75 per fur, but if you had a job in town, $0.95 to a dollar was a pretty good salary. So for a short time period, an active fur trapper couldn’t nearly make enough money to subsist the rest of the year, most of them were young men that went out there and spent the winter, there were a few, I knew one family really well where the trapper took his entire family out, took Grandma, his wife and the kids and they spent the entire winter out there in the little shack and trapping muskrats.

Ramsey Russell: How’d they live? What’d they eat?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, they hated geese because geese were trying to come in and eat the grass that the muskrats needed to –

Ramsey Russell: White geese, I guess.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Yeah, white geese. So they hated geese and every Opportunity they had to kill a goose, they did. And they ate a lot of geese, a few of them ate some of the muskrats, a lot of them didn’t, but they had arrangements made with the people that came out to pick up the fur. The people would come out carrying the grocery list that they wanted more bacon or they needed more syrup of some kind, so they got by with living off the land and also living on the grocery list that they gave, the guy that was called a runner that ran the fur back to town.

Ramsey Russell: But I’m assuming they didn’t have refrigeration or power, I mean, you go out and shoot a bunch of snow geese, how would they store them? How would, they shoot what they wanted to eat that night?

Charles Stutzenbaker: That’s right. That’s one of the fallacies about these people that write and talk about people that killed too many birds, there simply wasn’t any use in killing more than you could eat, if you killed more than you eat, you used up shotgun shells and it was a tight economy dealing with that.

Ramsey Russell: What was their world like? You talked about them exploiting, there’s natural surroundings that were very much different than today, what was the world they lived in like, the ecological values or how would you describe it back then compared to now? What was it? What was that world they lived in?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, it was a large remote marsh with no evidence of civilization other than a small shack every 4 or 5 miles distance. But you couldn’t see any power lines, there wasn’t an intercoastal canal, so there weren’t any big boats coming up canal, once you left dry ground and got 5 or 6 miles back into a muskrat marsh, it was just an endless picture of round muskrat beds that the muskrats made in short grass.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. I wonder how many muskrats they would catch in a season.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, I don’t, yeah, I can’t tell you. I don’t know, on the best trapping night, all the trapping was done at night with killer type traps, but in most places, the highest catch of muskrats per night came where there was a frost or a real cold spell and I think that when it got really cold that those muskrats, because it was cold, they got out and they ate more. But going back to, you asked earlier about how people lived out there in the camps – well, let’s talk about something else, I forgot what I was going to say, oh, all I was going to tell you is those camps that they lived in had kerosene lanterns and they had a little wood heater and they brought firewood in to burn in there and they lived like that, they had a comfortable sleeping area and the water was fresh enough to go ahead and use the water, but they had a catchment system where they could catch rainwater for drinking water and cooking.

Ramsey Russell: Wow, were they happy people?

Charles Stutzenbaker: That’s right and they enjoyed it.

Ramsey Russell: They loved it. But when you met them, they were just happy people, happy to be there, they loved their lives.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, they did and of course I was a single boy, I didn’t get married until later in life, but on weekends I’d go get me a couple loaves of bread and a couple jars of peanut butter and some other staples and I’d get in the boat and I’d run out to some of those camps and when they’d seen me coming, everybody was on deck waving come on, come on. Well, anyway, I’d give them the bread and the little things like that, they’d invite me for supper and they let me spend the night.

Ramsey Russell: What would you eat for supper sometime?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, it could be anywhere from ducks and geese to fish or to store bought foods, but they did well, they lived pretty simply but very comfortable.

Ramsey Russell: That’s okay. Simple is okay.

Charles Stutzenbaker: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: You had an important role in the conversion to non-talk shot. You had a very pivotal role in the conversion of shooting lead shot to nontoxic shot, how did that come about?

Investigating Lead Poisoning in Waterfowl: A Personal Experience.

I still feel some of the lumps from that program, but it was known throughout the scientific world that the lead pellets that were deposited by hunters in the marsh when picked up by waterfowl would cause their death because the lead was toxic.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, I still feel some of the lumps from that program, but it was known throughout the scientific world that the lead pellets that were deposited by hunters in the marsh when picked up by waterfowl would cause their death because the lead was toxic and the lead would travel down the digestive system along with the native plants that the birds were eating and the gizzard is a grinding device and that gizzard would grind up the food and it would also grind up the lead and all of that was absorbed by the bird’s digestive system and 2 or 3 lead pellets would cause the bird to die. They would continue to eat, but they would fail, they would just wash away until the point that they were so weak that they couldn’t fly and I knew that there was such a thing as lead poisoning, I’m forgetting the year in 51 or 52, I took my dog with me and we went out in the marsh to look around at the type of plants that were beginning to come up, this was in, I guess about in March of that year and I took my dog with me and my dog kept running out and bringing back mallards and pintails and snow geese that were alive and when I picked them up, I could feel that they just, there was no weight to them, so I picked up about a dozen of those birds and I wrung their necks and I actually have a picture of that, of the birds, but I took the birds back to the office and I put them in our lab and I opened them up and took the gizzards out and started looking in the gizzards and every one of those birds was just loaded with lead shot. And so, I started doing a lot more looking and a lot more talking and I began to find lead poison birds everywhere I went.

Ramsey Russell: How many? A few, a bunch?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Oh, I mean you probably pick up a dozen or 2 dozen just walking across some marsh, but you’re only covering a 30 foot wide swath because your dog is staying right there with you. But we found out later then in reality you could go out and find 2 or 3 lead poison birds, but really that may have been several thousand and when they got weak and couldn’t fly, the coyotes and the coons worked on them and took them right on out and hawks and owls and there were a few eagles in those days, they would pick those birds up and just about destroy all evidence of them. Well anyway, I took pictures and records with me to the Central Flyway and told everybody that we needed to do something about lead poisoning birds and the northern people really weren’t interested, so I kept collecting birds and analyzing for lead and unknown to many people, the government was actually doing a little bit of experimenting with using steel shot or making it because it was better for the hunting process. Anyway, things were going along and I wasn’t getting much success and then all of a sudden, bang, in the TV appeared the story of a group of golfers who were playing golf along the edge of a lake in Wisconsin and when they went out there and looked, there were dead and dying Canada geese laying all over that lake, there were several hundred dead birds there, so they picked them up and they took them into a professional person, I think was a veterinarian and he looked at those birds and told them, so these birds are dying of lead poisoning. So they’ve been eating those lead things. So the television station came out and the television station photographed that, he interviewed the expert who was telling what was happening and they put it on the evening air and the next day newspaper, TV stations all across the nation picked up that little short 20, 30 second blip and anyway, all of a sudden people started saying, well, if you’re killing 100 and something Canada geese in the lakes, you can’t do that, you’ve got to do something. And anyway, then a little bit later the boys in South Dakota were walking along the edge of one of the really big lakes in the state, they started finding dead ducks and geese all over the place and then they found a few in Kansas and then everybody started looking for sick and dying birds and everywhere they looked they found a few. Now they didn’t find as many in North and South Dakota as they did right here where we’re sitting in Chambers County, Texas. But anyway, the animosity towards going to steel shot began to get washed away and they couldn’t defend themselves and we came on into a non toxic shot program where it became mandatory to use steel shot.

Ramsey Russell: Approximately what decade were all those dead birds down here in Chambers County, up in Minnesota, South Dakota, Kansas? What era would all those dead birds been found? 50s, 60s, 70s?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, oh no, birds started dying in the late 1800s, but nobody knew anything about it and if you killed a duck in my life, if you killed a duck when I was 16 or 17 years old and you picked him up, you just took him and threw him over your shoulder because it was what they call the straw hat, that’s what the hunter and if you talk to some old hunters, you may find the term straw hat.

Ramsey Russell: Meaning what? I don’t understand what straw hat means.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Light, there’s nothing to it.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, light, I see.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Light, nothing to it, just to take a duck and he’s just about dead because he has consumed all of his fat and all of his body flesh, a bird in final stages of life from lead poisoning will just be a small semblance of what he was originally. Well, back in the early 1900s, there still is a lake called Lake Surprise in Chambers County, not very far from where we are right now. But there was an extremely wealthy businessman in Galveston that set up a market hunting program for canvasback ducks and he had hunters out there every day shooting canvasbacks and they would take them by boat to Galveston and then put them on a train and they’d send those birds to the very affluent restaurants and we talked about this a little bit earlier, I think, but this fellow in Galveston was an ex, I guess a colonel in the confederacy, but quite a businessman and one day there was a shipment of birds going through Galveston and a couple people made a comment to the inspector that those birds just didn’t look good, they didn’t look healthy and so the inspector went over for the first time and started looking at some of those birds in those barrels that they had them in and a lot of them were just straw hats, there wasn’t anything to them. So the inspector ran some tests, they opened up some gizzards and they, I think, confiscated that ship of birds, but that was the first episode of lead poisoning that was advertised and what had happened is that that Lake Surprise had been one of the finest places to shoot ducks in the world as Galveston and Anahuac were beginning to develop and it had been hunted, Lake Surprise had been hunted since the 1800s and there was, there still is a load of lead pellets down in that mud and thank goodness, generally through time, pellets have a tendency to sink a little bit and if the birds are skimming along the top, eating their food or lifting their heads up to get their food, lead is not a problem. But Lake Suprise will be a problem for wintering birds from now on out in every location in this state where a shotgun shell has been exploded and those pellets came down is a potential place for a bird to pick it up and be killed.

Ramsey Russell: Even to this day, 30 years after.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Even to this day and in some cases, there are a few people that are still using lead, not many, I couldn’t tell you, I don’t know anybody who would be using –

Ramsey Russell: I really think initially back when non toxic shot was initiated, I think there was a lot of folks that had a hard time giving it up, I don’t, I’m sure there are somebody out there doing it, but I don’t know anybody anymore. I mean, I now know duck hunters, Mr. Charles, I now know duck hunters that have been hunting for 20 years and their entire lives, it’s been nothing but non toxic, they’re used to it, I’ve actually had, in countries where lead is still legal, fly slower than steel, I’ve actually had clients bring steel shot because they’re so used to the speeds and stuff, but anyway, I find it very – What do you think? I read something one time, I thought I read something, I remember having read something that as early as the 40s there was talk about prohibiting lead shot for those environmental reasons and at the advent of World War II, they just threw the idea on the back burner because the United States needed steel to build fighter planes and go to war. But to hear you talk about the market hunting days and lead casualties turning up at the market and then the 50s and 60s, why did it take so long to the late 80s, 90s before this came to pass, that’s almost 100 years that we knew that lead was killing these birds.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, the reasons for that were just the fact that a lot of people weren’t interested, they wouldn’t take a step further to say something. And then I’m trying to think of the name the late senator from Alaska who was killed in an airplane crash, a number of years back, it’s terrible, I can’t remember his name, but he attached a rider to the Fish & Wildlife Service appropriation bill and that rider made it stop the Fish & Wildlife Service from doing any lead shot research, so he killed it and it took a long time to recover from that and at that time, the shot shell companies were opposed to it.

Ramsey Russell: I bet they were.

Charles Stutzenbaker: And they were opposed to it very quietly in the background and then when the steel shot program came in mandatorily, if you look in the sporting magazine today, those shotshell companies are advertising their steel shot is the best thing in the world, there’s a lot of competition among those 3 major manufacturers and a lot of smaller manufacturers.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. You talked about feeling some lumps, what kind of lump did you feel over your research and your findings and your advocacy for non toxic shot? I mean, was there public feedback that was just, I mean, because people don’t like to change, I mean, nobody likes to change, I don’t like to change blue jean brands, I mean, I don’t like to change nothing, but I mean, was there a lot of animosity towards this conversion?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Oh, there was, sure. I mean, there were threats, I received a number of threats if I didn’t back away from it. Back when the non toxic shot program was beginning to build, there were newspapers that still exist today, some don’t, but the newspapers all had an outdoor editor, now today there’s no such thing as an outdoor editor in a magazine, but these outdoor editors were competing against one another for information and I had a really good friend who was the outdoor editor in Port Arthur and he was always wanting to get ahead of people and when there a little bit of information about non toxic shot would come out, he’d come to the office and he’d devour it and he was a straight shooter, honest, good, clean cut straight shooter fella and he presented the truth. And all these other outdoor writers were competing against him and trying to be like him and we had just a wave of positive information coming out about steel shots. It was, they were broadcasting or writing, showing what we were finding, when we opened up the gizzards and did things like that.

Ramsey Russell: I know, this may not be a scientific, quantitative answer, but in your experience, extensive experience dealing in this subject matter, what percent of mortality might there be secondary to having shot lead? That a great – You understand what I’m saying? I mean, if you just had to guess what percent would it be closer to 5%, 1% or would it be closer to maybe 20%?

Charles Stutzenbaker: I just will have to say, I don’t know.

Ramsey Russell: Could you say it’s a whole bunch? Probably more than we think. I mean, I’m just curious, it had to be substantial.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, let’s back up just a minute and rephrase your question, I don’t think I understand what the actual first question –

Ramsey Russell: I guess my question is, what percent, if x percent of the known population of ducks is being harvested, brought to bear, put on a strap, eaten, what percent of that remaining population might have suffered mortality secondary to that shot sitting out there in the environment? I mean, it had to – Do you think it could equal, like, would it have doubled the estimated harvest? Could it have been that significant?

Charles Stutzenbaker: I don’t think I can answer that, I just really don’t know.

Ramsey Russell: I think it could. I mean, I’m just guessing, I’m saying, yeah, I bet it could be twice what the known harvest was because if 3 or 4 of that ounce and a quarter pellets hit that bird, well, there’s still a whole lot of that ounce and a quarter left out there in the environment to be ingested, it didn’t take but 3 of them pellets to kill one that was down there dabbling, that’s crazy.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, that’s the way it is, though.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s why you fixed the problem.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, I hope that we’ve, I don’t know that we’ve completely fixed it, but I hope we put a big dent in it.

Ramsey Russell: I think you did. Thank you very much for that, you talked about central, being a member of the Central Flyway technical committee involvement and this was a different era, I mean, I’m guessing that back when you were involved on that committee, pintails were 10 point ducks.

Charles Stutzenbaker: During the 10 point season, they were, yes.

Ramsey Russell: What issues did you all wrestle with back in those days? What other topics did you deal with? I mean, it’s just crazy to me that pintail at one time I could go shoot 10 of them and for the last long time I can only shoot 1 or 2, although that might change next year, but were there just so many pintails and so much habitat?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, the 10 point season king of got a little bit of a kickstart from the teal season where we digressed away from the old standard hunting season that we had from 1918 through and there was a push to utilize more of the population. If a population of birds could stand more harvest, then the bag limits or the season lengths should be higher and so the Central Flyway was largely responsible for developing the hunting season, called the 10 point season and each bird was given the value a mallard drake could be 90 or 100, gadwall could be 50 or 75 and a blue wing down there could be way at the bottom and so I don’t know how familiar you are with the point system, it’s kind of hard to explain, but you had to go out and you shot enough birds to accumulate 100 points, if you shot a mallard drake and he was 100 point bird, you were through, but if you shot a bunch of blue wings and the last bird that you shot was a 100 point mallard, you had over 100 points, so you had to quit hunting.

Ramsey Russell: You were done.

Charles Stutzenbaker: It was a real popular season, but there was a lot of animosity, particularly from law enforcement, because they saw people cheating where they would shoot the mallard drake first and hide him and then they go through their hunt and when it was time to quit hunting, they’d grab that mallard drake and say, we killed him last, so the whole bag limit was –

Ramsey Russell: It was a little before time that my daddy and granddaddy especially explained it to me one time that they like to hunt mallards and in Mississippi, as I recall, the mallard drake was 25, the mallard hen was 100. So if you shot a hen mallard right off the bat, you’re done for the day, unless you cheated, but you might shoot 3 drakes and then give it up, shoot a hen, well, that’s it, stop or you might just shoot 4 drakes and they talked about people mixing around and doing stuff like that. But you know what I always found interesting and I’m not smart enough to know this stuff, there’s 165 waterfowl species worldwide and there are some species of ducks, canvasbacks, maybe nowadays, redheads, maybe nowadays that they don’t have the population that mallards do, mallards are very general species, they’re abundant, they’re everywhere throughout the northern hemisphere and I just always found it very curious, Mr. Charles, that the hen mallard, that mallard’s number one, have a hand limit, no other waterfowl species does. And I wonder why that is, I’ve never understood why, I mean, if there’s way more mallards than redheads, but it don’t matter if we shoot redhead hens, why does it matter if we shoot mallard hens? I’m just thinking out loud here, stumbling through this question, but there’s always seem to be a tremendous amount of emphasis placed on hen mallards, I mean, don’t shoot them, which nobody does, I don’t think nobody really goes out and targets hen mallards, but they seem to have really skewed it, what were your thoughts on the point system? You liked it, obviously, do you think it was a great system and why did they transition?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, I was one of the ones that helped bring the thing to life and I thought it was great for honest people, but there are a lot of people that are not honest out there and so the hunters themselves, there were enough of them got caught by law enforcement and it became just open knowledge that a lot of them were cheating on the number of birds, so it had to die. Boy, I’d like to say that I sure wish that I had not said anything and yet you had covered the entire points because you’ve done so much better job than I have.

Ramsey Russell: No, sir, before my time and I just I always wondered, I think you answered the question of why they changed, I never really understood why they changed the point system and I guess it was a law enforcement problem.

Charles Stutzenbaker: That’s right, it just proved that it was not an honest bag limit.

Ramsey Russell: It’s just been, but it’s been my experience and maybe I’m naive, I don’t think so, but I really, I’ve just got this long held belief that most people worldwide, most people, 99% of people are good people and they’re just, there’s that 1% bad apple and if you got something that’s working, it’s too bad that the bad apples mess it up for everybody.

Charles Stutzenbaker: But that’s the way life is.

Ramsey Russell: That’s the way life is.

Charles Stutzenbaker: And that’s what happened in that story about the type hunting regulations we had.

Ramsey Russell: You’ve written textbook plural. I’ve got one right here, one of your bibles, you’ve got a bible, a book entitled Aquatic and Wetland Plants of Western Gulf Coast, Charles Stutzenbacher. I’ve got a copy that was a gift from Gene Campbell, I’m going to have you please sign for me, I went through this book last night, it’s amazing, it’s now being printed again, I’ve seen where it’s for sale on Amazon, you’ve got all these plants, you drew that. You drew these pictures and accompanied with a photo, how did your interest in wetland plants and ecology and wetlands management, how did this develop?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, it started, not that I know much now, but it started when I didn’t know anything at all and wading through the marsh, stepping on plants and had no idea what they were, so I got interested years ago in identifying plants and I would collect them and bring them in and dry them and go to, there were a few botanists who could identify most of those plants. And anyway, there wasn’t anything out there for people like me or people like you as a reference to what that plant was and what its value was.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, sir.

Charles Stutzenbaker: And so, I thought, by golly, let me put something like that together, so I put that book together that covers all the wetland plants from the Mississippi down to the Rio Grande and I worked nearly a full career doing those collections and you’re looking at a copy now, but you can see I did the pen and egg drawings and then the black and white photographs I had, I made the photographs myself. And anyway, I took it in and we published it and it’s probably one of the better used books on the market today, there’s a new group of kids coming along every day that don’t know one plant from and this book is pretty easy to use.

Ramsey Russell: It’s all about the habitat, I just opened a page randomly and opened it right up to duck potato, one of my favorite plants and it’s a – you’ve got a drawing, you’ve got a description, you’ve got a lot of diagnostics that anybody could take a look at and then on the opposing page, you’ve got a brief summary of habitat, wildlife values, propagation, management, similar species and I would recommend anybody listening, because we know Mr. Charles, we’ve done a lot of habitat management to include Mr. Gene Campbell right there giving us some pointers on it, we’ve done a lot of stories on that and everybody’s always asking for a resource and I’ll put a link to this in the caption of this podcast, refer everybody to it. Basically, you just being a young biologist and climbing out through all these wetlands and biologists, migratory birds and taking all this interest like you did, you developed a personal interest in what these plants were and like a naturalist, I just imagine a young naturalist like Audubon or somebody coming and learning his environment and becoming to master it and understand it and has that habitat from when you were just that young biologist beginning to sketch and learn these plants, has that habitat changed a lot since then?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Yes, it has, it’s changed in volume, there are so many wetland areas that no longer exist.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Charles Stutzenbaker: A highway or a subdivision occupies that space and then there’s been so much development work, the drag line and the bulldozer, digging ditches, building levees to control water and practically all those things have been negative towards growing the type of plants we want to grow and we’re at the point now where we really can’t go much further, we’ve lost so much habitat right now and the government has a lot of land under management, under wildlife areas and refuges and the people that operate those things need to do a better job.

The Tipping Point: Habitat Loss and the Future of Waterfowl Conservation.

You listen to a lot of duck hunters, how things have changed in their lifetime, how things have changed since their daddy. And I mean, it just we can talk about all the symptoms we want to, but I think ultimately it boils down to habitat loss, habitat quality, habitat quantity.

Ramsey Russell: I worry about that tipping point, I really do. Just how it’s changed in my lifetime, how it’s changed just in the last 10 years, 20 years and we duck hunters, we think, well, we need more nesting grounds, we need more wetlands, we need more production grounds. Well, we need more wintering habitat and the thing about these amazing creatures that we hunt from the Arctic, some of them, like snow geese coming off the Arctic from the prairie potholes clear down to the Gulf Coast and back, it’s got to be a continuum of habitat, different habitats that sustain their changing life cycle requirements, and to me, this critical coastal marsh habitat down here, that’s their historic wintering grounds. They’ve got to get what they need to fly back and make those babies to come back and it’s a continuum and I worry so much about, I think there’s a lot of – You listen to a lot of duck hunters, how things have changed in their lifetime, how things have changed since their daddy. And I mean, it just we can talk about all the symptoms we want to, but I think ultimately it boils down to habitat loss, habitat quality, habitat quantity.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Oh, you’ve hit the nail right on the head.

Ramsey Russell: And we’ve got to do something, which leads me up to another question I’ve got for you, I learned last night that you and others had done some research and made some proposals that were readily accepted and applied to all US Fish & Wildlife Service habitats in the Texas Gulf Coast area, what were those proposals? What did they accept and what precipitated? I just learned that you had written a paper and made some proposals that a lot of the refuges down here just readily accepted and implemented into practice as a form of management down here.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, we just looked at all the refuges, at the acreage and the type of habitat they had and the kind of birds that use the thing, the place and the goal was to develop management plans that would protect those acreages from further damage by human encroachment. And then we also ensured that the hunter had an opportunity to hunt, that each one of these areas did have a public hunting program and those 2 things right there, proper management and then access to the public or in short, description of what we tried to do.

Ramsey Russell: And why was access to hunters? Why are hunters so important to this habitat conservation model, in your opinion?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, if you didn’t have hunters, all you need is 10 acres per state with a few birds in there and you’re going to satisfy some people.

Ramsey Russell: Satisfy the bird watchers.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: that’d be a pretty sad world to live in, wouldn’t it? It really would be.

Charles Stutzenbaker: It’s very true.

Ramsey Russell: Very extensive career, you’ve been involved and are continuing to be involved, I’m looking at a manuscript of a book you’ve got coming out of a lot of these topics we’ve covered today and a whole lot more, we’ve only scratched the surface in a short amount of time. What are some of your proudest accomplishments as a biologist, a waterfowl biologist?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, I was involved in a lot of things, successful in some, not so successful in others. But I guess if I look back at my career, I was able to continue adequate hunting seasons for the hunters, not only in this state, but through the rest of the flyway and then I was able to ensure that the governmentally owned habitat was managed correctly and then I had done some work, not always successful, in trying to ensure that private acreages, private ownerships would do the same thing, would aim their management of that land towards being favorable for wildlife.

Ramsey Russell: It’s important, it’s as important now as ever, it’s probably more important now than when you first started it.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, I think more important now, yes.

Ramsey Russell: Do you have any opinion as to what some of the most critical issues are facing migratory birds in America right now might be or in North America, let’s say. Is there anything on your radar that you say, man, any specific causes or issues that you feel practicing biologists today, federal agencies, state agencies, researchers should be looking and paying better attention to?

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, the big issue is changing landscape, in Canada, the farmers in many places when there’s a dry year, a drought, they plow right through the little pond where 2 or 3 tribes of ducks nested and raised their young and that’s happening all over the United States and what’s happening in so many cases that you have a nice refuge that holds a lot of birds and those birds spill off the edge, but the spill off edge area is smaller, it’s shrinking and it’s squeezing the acreage that has been set up by law to not be changed, so it’s loss of habitat is what it is and deterioration of habitat.

Ramsey Russell: Right, quality and quantity.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Mr. Charles, I greatly appreciate you taking the time to share some of these stories and give us a very nice and historical perspective, I really do.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, I appreciate the opportunity to come visit, maybe next time we will sit around the fire.

Ramsey Russell: I think we will, do you still duck hunt?

Charles Stutzenbaker: I haven’t hunted the last couple years, but I intend to go back and do a little bit.

Ramsey Russell: Well, let’s do this, let’s plan on being here next year and share a duck blind.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, that might be good.

Ramsey Russell: And when the sun goes down, we’ll step outside and go build us a fire and talk about that duck hunt.

Charles Stutzenbaker: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: Thank you very much.

Charles Stutzenbaker: Well, thank you for letting me talk to you.

Ramsey Russell: Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere Podcast, you all been listening to my friend, Mr. Charles Stutzenbaker. I will post a link to his wetlands book, any of you guys that are interested in these wetland plants and management ought to really take a look at it, it is for the first time in a long time, it’s back available again and I know my friend Rob has been working, Mr. Rob Sawyer has been working on a book, a very big and detailed book, a very informative book that starts with the land and goes through a lot of these topics we’ve talked about today of Mr. Stutzenbaker’s life and times as wildlife biologists. See you next time.

[End of Audio]

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