Located between massive lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba, the fabled Interlakes Region has been an important stop over for migrating Canada geese since forever–especially for that population of big honkers known locally as “Churchills.” The region annually attracts goose hunters like myself that can’t seem to get enough of them. Sometimes the stars align and we’re even there at the same time. Following an action-packed week and a big ol’ celebratory T-bone steak, I meet with Manitoba friends Troy Bennet and Dustin Dola to recount the week’s highlights.
Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, mile 5200 of this year’s North American tour finds me between the big lakes here in Manitoba. Man, it’s my 3rd trip coming by here, I don’t know if these boys would have invited me, the first time if they’d known I was going to keep coming back or not, they can’t get rid of me now. Joining me today is my buddies, Troy Bennet, Dustin Dola. How the heck are you all? I’ve had a great time.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, we’re doing good, Ramsey. How about yourself?
Ramsey Russell: I’m good. Pull your mic up a little bit closer there, Troy. Yeah – I got myself for one minute and you mess up.
Troy Bennet: There you go. Did it get Better?
Ramsey Russell: Yes, a lot better.
Troy Bennet: I didn’t want to breathe into it too much, so –
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, don’t breathe, you got to breathe with your nose, can’t be a mouth breather.
Dustin Dola: No, we’re doing good, Ramsey. We’re glad you’re back here for the 3rd year.
Ramsey Russell: Man, it was a great year, 3rd time’s a charm, I had a great time this time. I mean, I really did, there seemed to be like, I got here, there were a lot more geese than maybe what I was expecting but they were scattered everywhere across the horizon, but we found some concentrations of them.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, we did.
Ramsey Russell: After getting kicked in the absolute cojones the first morning, you all remember that? It seemed like a month ago, 5 days.
Dustin Dola: Yeah. No, time to write, Like I said, just previous to that, I was driving around doing some scouting and it seemed like we lost birds right before you showed up and then within like a day or 2 of you showing up, it showed like the next wave of birds seemed to move in, so we put together a pretty good few days of hunting there.
Ramsey Russell: And all the weight fell on you to scout because we’re going to talk about Troy, Troy chased a girl over to west of here somewhere.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, out to Calgary.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, out in Calgary. How’s that going for you?
Troy Bennet: It’s going good, I’m enjoying my living life out there now, but I definitely enjoy this time back here in Manitoba and I get to hunt and –
Ramsey Russell: A week.
Troy Bennet: A week and then I’m slowly going to start moving stuff out there and hopefully –
Ramsey Russell: So, you all there for good.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, I’m there for good, I think so.
Ramsey Russell: What took you? I mean, you were born and raised right here, right, Troy?
Troy Bennet: Born and raised right here in Manitoba for my whole life.
Ramsey Russell: I mean, just 5 miles up the road.
Troy Bennet: Yep, 5 miles up the road from here.
Ramsey Russell: And now you’re clear over in Calgary. What’s that like? What’s it like going from the Interlakes out to Alberta?
Troy Bennet: I’ve never really been a city liver, so I’m living in the city now which is a bit different.
Ramsey Russell: In the city?
Troy Bennet: In the city.
Ramsey Russell: Pull your mic a little bit closer, go ahead, in the city.
Troy Bennet: In the city, yeah. Living right in the city, it’s a little bit different when I am used to –
Ramsey Russell: Where you got neighbors.
Troy Bennet: We got neighbors, yeah. I grew up my whole life and the closest neighbor was half a mile away from me.
Ramsey Russell: Wow, that’s got to be an adjustment.
Troy Bennet: It is, yeah. I can’t shoot squirrels off my back deck anymore.
Ramsey Russell: The good thing is you’ve got a skill set that you can go anywhere in the world and work, that’s a good thing, how did you get into that anyway?
Troy Bennet: When I got into that plumbing as a younger kid there, I’d known a few guys who were doing it and they off said do you want to come try this? When I got out of high school and I decided to give it a try and I was good at it and I liked it.
Ramsey Russell: It’s not rocket science.
Troy Bennet: No, I just kept –
Ramsey Russell: But it’s a good trade that too few people know how to really do.
Troy Bennet: Yeah. So I kept with it and that’s what I’m doing now.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, you’ve been doing that a long time. Was it hard finding a job when you just showed up to the big city of Calgary?
Troy Bennet: No, I had a job before I got there.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Troy Bennet: Yeah, I started the day I got there.
Ramsey Russell: And what is your girlfriend doing that you told me she was making a lot more money in Alberta than she could make out here.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, so the Alberta province recognizes her line of work a little bit more than they do in Manitoba, so she works – she’s a recreational manager at a 55+foundation.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Troy Bennet: So out there it’s recognized a lot more that like getting these old folks on their feet and just taking them out and letting them do stuff is beneficial to their health and here they don’t really recognize as much yet, so the pay cut she would have to take would be quite a bit.
Ramsey Russell: Life changing.
Troy Bennet: Life changing.
Ramsey Russell: It’s worth moving, like you were telling me, coming back and forth, it blows my mind, you can fly from Calgary, Alberta to Winnipeg for 100 bucks, something, nothing.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, I paid about 180 Canadian to fly there and back, return trip.
Ramsey Russell: That’s unbelievable. I’d be coming back more, more than just one week, Troy, I ain’t going to lie to you, man, the goose hunt is just too good out here, but the goose hunt’s good out there in Alberta too.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, it is. I got to work on connections out there and as I build them, I’ll start moving some of my stuff out there and hopefully do a little bit of hunting out west.
Ramsey Russell: Dustin, you had a handful because Troy’s coming back, Ramsey’s coming through, we’re going way lay them for 5 days, you had to get busy scouting, but man, you were pretty busy already, elk hunting.
Dustin Dola: I was, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Holy cow. I mean, that’s what blows my mind about this part of the world is you’ve got elk, you’ve got big white-tailed deer, you’ve got bear, you’ve got ducks and geese and all kinds of cool stuff.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, it’s pretty fortunate, like I can pretty much do it right out of my backyard. Elk, I have to drive a little bit further for it’s about an hour drive, 60 minutes from my house to where I was parked with the camper and we’ve hunted them as close as about 30 minutes away, bears right out the back door, the deer I harvested last year was about 5 minutes down the road and geese landing in the backyard, basically and –
Ramsey Russell: Tell me about this elk hunt, I kept up with it on social media, it wasn’t just like a go out there and climb a mountain, sling an arrow, you laid in with it to get this elk.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, I wouldn’t say, Manitoba has a crazy elk population and I hunt all public land, so it’s not like I have a nice concentration that I know where they’re going to be or what it’s going to be, so started hunting or started scouting, I should say, in the beginning of May and moved into hunting season, which started September 3rd, I dragged the camper up there and I was there for 16 days straight, I had about 180km walked from when I actually released an arrow and was lucky enough to harvest a bull and it was anything but easy, it was the hottest year I’ve ever had, the temperature was really warm, abnormally hot, abnormally warm –
Ramsey Russell: Weather hot like summertime hot.
Dustin Dola: It’s the only time I’ve ever put the air conditioning on in the camp, while I was elk hunting.
Ramsey Russell: Were they still bugling?
Dustin Dola: They were, they weren’t bugling crazy far into the day, but when I was walking in the day that I harvested mine on September 19th at 6am he was bugling, I was already 2 miles deep in the bush at that time and he was bugling right until I released an arrow and shot him, but that was about 15 minutes after Legal Lite and then that was the only bull that I heard that morning calling to –
Ramsey Russell: You laid in on one property and went at it for what 2 weeks? Longer?
Dustin Dola: Yeah, I started off, it was actually like 12 miles –
Ramsey Russell: What made you move?
Dustin Dola: Just not seeing what I wanted to see, hunting pressure, when I got in there, there was elk everywhere, fresh sign, rubs, wallows, everything and with it being public land, it’s no different than anybody else, they can be in there, there’s no restrictions, really. It’s public, so anyone can go and its competition other hunters to some degree, if somebody else knows what you’re in there and that was just kind of what I seen happening and seemed to be seeing more and more human sign and they were calling in there when I first got in and a few real calm days lets other people hear them from a distance and my hunts just kind of started getting worse and worse. So I at one point kind of made the decision to let, hey, let’s pick up and move somewhere else and I did that and 3 days after I did that, I shot my elk.
Ramsey Russell: Crazy, I’d rather be lucky than good, but you got to be both and then last night over at your house, eating dinner, you got some great whitetails, you got some sheds off one that is still out there, I’m guessing that’s who you’re going to target this year, that big boy.
Dustin Dola: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: But then the black bears, I mean, you got some fantastic bear, you got a Boone Crockett bear right there in your back door.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, I’ve been fortunate, a lot of hard work put into stuff –
Ramsey Russell: Do you have to draw for all those big game animals.
Dustin Dola: Just elk is pretty much draw –
Ramsey Russell: I’m sure it’s open to residents only.
Dustin Dola: It is residents only, yeah. And some parts in Southern Manitoba, moose’s draw, some is general and then Northern Manitoba is general moose, but all elk hunting, I believe is all draw in Manitoba and residents only.
Ramsey Russell: How do you find these deer in this thick cover? Because these woods are thick, they don’t look thick, till you try to walk through them, but they’re thick.
Dustin Dola: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: How do you find those deer? You can’t – But you don’t lawfully bait here.
Dustin Dola: No. I do feel a little bit in the wintertime to help molt in our really hard winters and that’s actually where I found the most sign and most pinpointed them was in the wintertime because they leave a trail, they leave a track, you can see it easier and I started walking all those trails through February and March on the down season and tracking on my – I’m an eye hunter and then when I pull my map up, I can see all the tracks and trails and everywhere that they’re going and then plan an attack like that, try to figure out where they’re bedding a little bit more, but I find – in winter there’s no leaves on the tree, so if there’s a rub down there or it’s easier to see, I find scouting in the wintertime is actually really good. The downside is you can have 6ft of snow here and minus -400 Celsius, so that part’s not exactly –
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, that’s why you haven’t seen me pull up what you had with the other howdy neighborhood, I really do, I’ve said this before, I love Canada, period. I like it from the east to the west, I just like the people, I like everything about it except the prospects of – it’s like that movie The Shining from back in the 70s, that would be me in the wintertime up here, only a lot colder, I would be cold, but I love it up here, I really do. By comparison, Troy, you’re not a big game hunter at all. Dustin, I’ve learned, is a hunter and he takes everything like that guy that eats everything on his plate one at a time, I’m eating my peas, I’m eating my carrots, I’m going to eat my toast, he just takes it all in stride, not you, buddy. You’re all in on the waterfowl, how is that?
Troy Bennet: I don’t know. I fell in love with it as a young kid and it’s just what I want to put my time into.
Ramsey Russell: Were you ever introduced to bear and deer and elk?
Troy Bennet: I’ve shot a couple deer in my life. I think this the – I don’t have the patience for it, I don’t think.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it’s not social.
Troy Bennet: It’s not social.
Ramsey Russell: You’re not interacting with them?
Troy Bennet: No.
Ramsey Russell: And you’re an interactor.
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Well, you got that goose call. How were you when you learned to blow that goose call? Who taught you?
Troy Bennet: I kind of taught myself and through some videos and stuff like that, but we were hunting and I was young, maybe 14 years old and we had a group come up and they left a short reed goose call, it was kind of the start of the short reed when they were getting popular and he handed this thing to me and he said, you learn how to blow this, you’ll learn how you’ll be able to kill geese.
Ramsey Russell: Really.
Troy Bennet: So I took that call and I learned how to blow it.
Ramsey Russell: You learned how to freaking blow it, didn’t you? How did you learn, Dustin?
Dustin Dola: I taught myself. My dad had, like, the long flute calls and that’s what he grew up and he doesn’t know how to blow a short reed call. And I went to Cabela’s, bought a couple goose calls and I ordered Scott from Molt Gear Call, I believe that DVD is bad grammar and sat and watched it and taught myself how to blow it and that’s where we are today.
The Draw of the North: Experiencing the Flyway’s Headwaters.
When you start started scouting this year, you got your elk, he’s at the butcher, Troy’s coming in, Ramsey’s coming in, what are you looking for besides, okay, there’s some geese, but what specifically? Because I noticed scouting with both of you all in the afternoons, there’s some geese, there’s a bunch of geese.
Ramsey Russell: Get a little bit, somebody told me the other day I need to do just a touch on kind of a how to part and I find this so interesting because so many clients come from the south to Canada to kick off the headwaters of the flyways and come up here and experience and when I talk to a lot of – I talk to Bob, I talk to any outfitter up here I know they all say the same thing, man, these freaking southern boys want to shoot ducks and I don’t, but I’m not going to lie to you, when I’m out west, I want to shoot white birds, I’m after those freaking snows and rosses, but over here we’re out there out there scouting and we see the mallards flocking around, I mean, if mallards come dumping the decoys, yeah, I’ll shoot them, but that’s not what I’m here for, I’m here for those great big B52 Churchill as you all call them, that are coming in. When you start started scouting this year, you got your elk, he’s at the butcher, Troy’s coming in, Ramsey’s coming in, what are you looking for besides, okay, there’s some geese, but what specifically? Because I noticed scouting with both of you all in the afternoons, there’s some geese, there’s a bunch of geese and we drive by and you’re sitting there just taking mental notes, all of a sudden, you pull up and you go, aha, what is that aha moment? What are you looking for? What do you see in a field that says, because I know – Add just a little bit, there were fields we hunted this week that had a bunch and there were fields we hunted that didn’t have as many but that was the all in plan, what was it about that field, that setup, that flock of geese that you say, boom, this is how we’re going to do it?
Dustin Dola: Troy can probably go in a little bit more depth than this, just with his experience, waterfowl, the one thing that I or 2 things that I like looking for is birds that are comfy with their head down eating and number 2, the big canadas, I prefer to hunt if 100 to 200 of the big honkers comfy than a 1000 cacklers and that’s personally me, he probably can go more into depth on this.
Ramsey Russell: And the reason I’m going to ask you, Troy, about this question is because the other, day before yesterday, we were out scouting, me and you and Trevor and we came to a crossroads and there were geese, a bunch of geese right there on that corner in 3 different fields. We took a left and went a few miles and you pulled the truck, backed it in, I call it the fox field because we saw that little old fox and those geese weren’t scared of him at all. But that was the field, there was something, I mean, I didn’t see any more geese, I didn’t see nothing, I mean, it all looked the same to me, why there instead of what we looked at previously?
Troy Bennet: What we like in those kind of spots there where we hunt close to the water, where they’re roosting, is that those geese when they’re flying and they’re only a mile, half a mile away from their roost, they’re not really getting up high, flying far.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Troy Bennet: When they come into that field, they’re already low, they know they want to be in there, they’ve been in there for a few days, it’s different – Even this morning, when we hunted like those they were coming from a couple miles away, some of them were coming out like when they got over the field, they were 100 yards in the air. These geese that we hunt kind of up here when we’re looking for these soft feeds by the lake, we just want something close, something where the geese have been in there for a few days, they’re flying over through towns mostly, right over top the whole town, so they’re never going to get high. They’re not scared of anything, it’s the same town they’ve flown over every day.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Troy Bennet: They’re flying 10 yards over the top of the houses and they pretty much stay at that elevation the whole way and it just makes it a lot easier when they get to that field and they’re already ready to come into it.
Ramsey Russell: The hay bale field was to me the highlight for a lot of different reasons, but you’re right, like when I was using my hunt proof app and kind of monument the spot, I got to looking at the map and I was thinking we were a mile from the big lake, we weren’t, we were maybe a 3rd of a mile or quarter of a mile, so they lift off and they fly right over those woods for about a quarter mile and they’re already in, just set your wings come in.
Troy Bennet: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: I mean they’re not altitude at all.
Troy Bennet: No, they don’t fly very much there, like they probably get up and they coast most of the way over top though those –
Dustin Dola: Lots of times they clear the trees and they’re already locked up.
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Think about that, that field was probably a section, I think it’s a section.
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: But around it, like through the woods, through a little narrow cut up against the highway is a 40 and I’ve been driving by that all week long and seeing a dozen birds, 2 dozen birds and they never would build up, it’s just a few little birds right there, but just right around the corner of the big side is where the concentration was.
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: It’s crazy how those geese would just get into something like that.
Troy Bennet: And the thing about that good spot, about that one is unless you all know that field’s there, you’ll never see those geese go in it.
Ramsey Russell: No.
Troy Bennet: Do they go?
Ramsey Russell: Because they never get high enough to show it –
Troy Bennet: They never get high enough for you to see them. So you’ll never – we have a lot like that that are very close to the lakes and if you don’t know the fields are there and you don’t go check them you’re never going to be able to see birds flying into the field.
Ramsey Russell: What about when you all get away from the lake, get away from the water? Because I mean this morning we were 2 miles from a big, well known body of water. Other mornings we may have been 2 or 3 miles away from where they’re – what is it about those areas you see that just, I mean, do you drive by and see a certain number? All of a sudden you see it build up and go, okay, time to stick it or have you ever even driven by like yesterday, Dustin, we were looking at a field, a lot of birds in the hay bale field kind of overflew us, it’s like they came over cruising altitude, but they didn’t even checkup, they had something else and then we found a field about a mile away, they were piling in yesterday, cacklers and Canadas, but I mean, do you all feel good? Would you go after a field, you just see them hit the first day? Like we looked at your field –
Dustin Dola: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And they weren’t in there this year, we’ve beat the brakes off of them in the past. I mean, if you drive by there this afternoon and there are 200 birds in there, are you going to stick it or you going to let them get in there comfortable for a while?
Dustin Dola: That day or 2 would be ideal than hunting it the very first time and I think you and I have talked about this, like 2 to 3 days kind of thing is like perfect, you got to get a little bit more comfy in there and even the ones we seen yesterday when we watched them go in, they weren’t just coasting in, they were kind of checking it out and they were a little bit more fidgety and whatnot. So I like a couple days or 3 days, something like that, get them a little bit more comfortable, let them get their kind of their plan all checked out.
Troy Bennet: Another thing is also when you’re scouting in the mornings I find is, if you’re driving around you’re seeing a lot of spreads hunters, you don’t know if those geese even want to be in there or do they just get shot at by 2 or 3 groups and they’re like, hey, we’re going to feed here for the morning because it’s close and we’re safe, but are we going to fly back to this area where we just got shot at 4 times this evening? Probably not.
Ramsey Russell: Well, the windy day and boy was it windy, the first day we hunted, there wasn’t no wind. I mean it was terrible, it’s the day you dread, which is not a breath of wind. Now the second day, it’s like old Forrest Gump said and boy, did it rain, it freaking rained, I mean, it not rained, it wind, I mean it was gale force wind, it’s like I was walking 3 steps quicker going to the truck with a tailwind.
Troy Bennet: We’re having trouble keeping decoys up.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, it was windy.
Ramsey Russell: And you remember those geese, we were on the X, but they wanted to land between F and U because they’re like, they were tired of – They would flap and flap, finally say, screw it, 100 yards, we’ll stop right here and they started short stopping because they got lazy and didn’t want to get – but golly, that was a great trip, a lot of geese, we limited a course, I think there were 5 or 6 of us and then we went back there this morning and did it again.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, that field’s going to stay hot for quite a while.
Ramsey Russell: What is it about that you think? Just the proximity to that big roost or something.
Troy Bennet: It’s in a good location. That field hasn’t been hunted at all this year, I think when we hunted it was the first time it’s been hunted, the farmer didn’t want it – they swathed it, it was a wheat field they swathed.
Ramsey Russell: Yep.
Troy Bennet: And she didn’t want anybody hunting in there in the swaths.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, really?
Troy Bennet: Yeah, she said they’ve had problems before with a lot of people don’t clean up that well in the swaths, it’s easy to hide everything underneath.
Ramsey Russell: Always easy to hide.
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Oh, you forget to leave something under there and it tears up piece of machine.
Troy Bennet: Exactly.
Dustin Dola: Yeah.
Troy Bennet: Yeah. That’s what they don’t like, so I guess it’s happened to them before, so now they want all the swaths out before they let anybody hunt.
Ramsey Russell: I do like hunting in swath and I like a swath feel because to me it’s more of a yesteryear technology, they cut it and put it all in these rows and then when they come by and combine it, I think there’s more waste grain than if you got a modern day combining. I think it’s a lot more waste grain out there for those birds.
Troy Bennet: We talk about that too is out here when we’re hunting some spots we have quite like, there’s definitely quite a few older farmers in our area and you can tell that they don’t have the big, brand new combines. When you get out in those fields, sometimes you’re kind of thinking, like, they must only got half the grain out of this field, the rest is sitting on the ground here.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Troy Bennet: And you can really tell when they’re combining with older machinery.
Ramsey Russell: I want to talk a little bit about the spread, because you all got your pattern down, but you all have got a – as compared to going out to a lot of places, everybody gets rid of the old and in with the new and they all look and look, it’d be all this brand or all this brand and you all don’t – you all got a core of bigfoots and I love a bigfoot decoy, I don’t know if your bigfoots are 3 years old or 30 years old, that’s the way every bigfoot decoy on got dirt can be described, you grab it, stand it up and it does its job, it’s just a great big decoy and then you all have got some with stakes and some with pedestals and then you’ve got a lot of big owl silhouettes and some more silhouettes. And a lot of times, we’ll just kind of layer it up and put it out, first I’m going to ask you, what formation are you all looking for? What are you going for? And how are you approaching? How you want those decoys to look?
Troy Bennet: Pretty much just as natural as possible, you want it to look like kind of how they were in the field.
Ramsey Russell: Not really a horseshoe, not a really a V.
Troy Bennet: No, you kind of want them, like, get a good base down and then kind of just build some holes into it, a couple in here, make sure, depending on wind, if you’re going to get some wind switching, you can leave them a couple different spots to land, that’s going to work with each wind direction.
Ramsey Russell: And it really doesn’t take much of a little cubby hole for them to want to tuck into. Today, you remember today, they were sliding just kind of towards one end of the spread and we went out and moved 8 decoys and that’s where all of them started landing. I mean, it may have been 3ft, 3 yards deep, but that’s where they hit, it doesn’t take much, does it?
Troy Bennet: No, it doesn’t. Just a little for them to feel safe in there.
Ramsey Russell: But I will say this and I know there’s a time and a place for everything, but I am a fan of silhouettes, I mean, I like them because they’re easy to go out, you can put a whole bunch out real quick, you can pick up a whole bunch real quick this morning, other than we may have put out a dozen just because – but we went almost a full silhouette spread a day and did just as good as any day we’ve hunted.
Troy Bennet: They were landing in the silhouettes and standing in them, they didn’t know anything –
Ramsey Russell: Didn’t bother them a dang bit.
Dustin Dola: No, not at all.
Ramsey Russell: And you did that, you all said you all did that this morning because I know one day, especially we got blistered by the frost. The frost just frosted, it may be the first day.
Dustin Dola: It’s the first morning, right? Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: It frosted up on those decoys in the and the half hour it took us to walk to the truck and get back and shoot time come around and they were just gleaming in the sun with that frost on them. Is that why you went off silhouette?
Troy Bennet: Yeah, we try to. If we don’t – if we know it’s going to be cold, like kind of that spot in there where it’s just that frost temperature, it’s kind of a little bit better if you don’t use them and then you might not get a frost, but if you do, it’s just one less thing to worry about.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I really, it’s like – But then on the flip side, we had that gale force 23 mile an hour wind a few days ago. Man, I’m silhouettes, we’re doing some flopping and doing some carrying on, I mean they really were, that was a little bit of – Some of them were coming undone, you remember some of them flocks started kind of bouncing and we got up like golly, we had 2 dozen silhouettes laying flat, that flared them.
Troy Bennet: Another thing that doesn’t help out here right now is it’s so dry, you can’t get the silhouettes in the ground in half the places.
Ramsey Russell: Oh my gosh. Man, that ground was hard today.
Troy Bennet: It’s like concrete.
Ramsey Russell: It was like concrete. You had to kind of hope you could find a crack, stick it in.
Troy Bennet: Yep.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, the ridge too, the other morning was really tough.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Every year I’ve been 3rd time showing, first – every year I’ve been here, they must band a shit pile of these Churchill Canada’s, they must. Because everybody I know that hunts from here to the US border, straight south of us a few hours, everybody picks up bands and that’s not a big thing to you all, you all both got lanyards full of them and every year I’ve been here, I picked up one or 2.
Troy Bennet: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: But yesterday was a – And so when the dogs are bringing in the bands, I’m looking, I mean, I’m like, God, they allowed to be one on these birds, they band a bunch of these birds, but yesterday was kind of a banner day. I remember the first time I hunted with you, I remember distinctly that Dustin did not shoot a band and he said, oh, I’m in a band funk, I don’t have the band luck, Troy’s got all the band luck and I’m in a funk and then the second year, he got one, you got one, I got one, Cole got one over the week. Yesterday was insane, I mean, it’s like, it was insane, 4 bands and just bam and it’s like all I can think is the ones we didn’t shoot –
Dustin Dola: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Because in 2 plays, we killed 2 bands out of 2 plays, out of a pair and out of a flock, and Dustin and I, like I got one out of the pair, one out of the flock. Dustin got one out of the flock, you got one out of the pair and 3 of those came from the same 100 string.
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: And then all of them came from a place up in Hudson Bay. I’ve never seen on a certificate, Thompson Town or something.
Troy Bennet: Thompson Point. I was talking to Bob Bodie yesterday, too, he said he hasn’t seen a band that said Thompson Point either.
Ramsey Russell: They must have kicked off a project up there.
Troy Bennet: They must have kicked off a banding project because those are all banded this year 2024.
Dustin Dola: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Troy Bennet: In the summer.
Ramsey Russell: But ours were – 3 of those birds were too young to fly when banded, but yours was not, that’s what’s so crazy.
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: It was banded this a year previous but I guess they’re all just sitting there, wherever that little project is and they’re flying to this little –
Troy Bennet: And they go back to the same spot every year for a –
Ramsey Russell: Go back to same spot, migrate the same spot. Where do you think these birds go from here? I wonder where those birds come from here?
Troy Bennet: Well, they go south from here –
Ramsey Russell: It’s like, the birds eventually leave here, I wonder where they go.
Troy Bennet: They go to like, Fergus and stuff.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Dustin Dola: Some of the big ones don’t go that far.
Ramsey Russell: Minnesota.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, like that down there is where they shoot lots of these rivet bands.
Ramsey Russell: In Minnesota?
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I’ll be darned, I did not know that. But the rivet bands are really not those birds coming out of Churchill, the rivet bands are the birds coming out of Winnipeg and –
Troy Bennet: And Oak Hammock, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: All those city birds.
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: They are crazy.
Troy Bennet: They end up down there like Fergus Falls area and stuff like that.
Ramsey Russell: Boat migrator type stuff. That was a good fun hunt. But this morning, to me, this morning that we ended on a great note, put out all silhouettes, there weren’t massive flocks, it was smaller flocks we could really work with and to me, it was a perfect pace.
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Dustin Dola: Yes.
Ramsey Russell: We all got to shoot a little bit, the dogs had time to pick up a little bit, it wasn’t so crazy, you had to leave dead stuff out there, you could let the dogs work, go do their things and then we got to just hang out and do our stuff, but then I got to film a little bit, got to shoot a little bit, everything was going good. I’ll be with you in a second. Oh, thank you, we’re sitting here at this favorite little hotel, I like this a lot better than the big hotel I stayed at the first few days, I can back up to my door, it’s an old school hotel and the maid just came in to tell me she put my clothes in the dryer and threw some air fluffs in there with it.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, you’re a local, you’re a regular here now.
A Community That Cares: Embracing Pets as Family.
The next day she came up with this big old bone and every time I stay here, Char gets a big old bone, she brings a bone from somewhere, I think her daughter works at a pet shop or something. But that’s what I love about this small time, it’s like coming back to Mayberry RFD around here.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, they made me feel at home, well she even, I freaked out when she walked in the room and seen old muddy Char dog sprawled out on one of the twin beds in there and she didn’t care. I said, well, I’m sorry to get your linen’s dirty, she goes, I don’t care, it washes the same as everything else. The next day she came up with this big old bone and every time I stay here, Char gets a big old bone, she brings a bone from somewhere, I think her daughter works at a pet shop or something. But that’s what I love about this small time, it’s like coming back to Mayberry RFD around here. But what – change the subject just a little bit. What’s it like for you having grown up here Troy and coming home for just a week? Because this was a big part, how many, you were guiding for Bob. You were hunting with your buddies, you and Dolan have become best goose hunting buddies and now change a life situation, you ain’t getting no younger, ain’t be long, you’re going to have some little chores, run around, have a bride, but one of these days what’s it like now coming back to home for just a week?
Troy Bennet: It’s definitely, it’s fast, it’s a quick trip, I’ll tell you that much.
Ramsey Russell: It ain’t long enough.
Troy Bennet: It ain’t long enough. I’m used to, yeah, I’ve been doing this a long time out here, but I really do like it in Calgary. I’m happy there, though, but it is very great to be back here and get to hunt.
Ramsey Russell: Well, you got a lot done while you’re here. We went to Bob’s and had beer and had supper, we spent time with Dustin out in the field and then you had a family reunion, I guess your family just came up to – they knew you were back in town.
Troy Bennet: They knew I was in town, so they were like, yeah, we’re all going to come down for brunch and about 10 of them came down and we had brunch and stuff at the house.
Ramsey Russell: Do you wish you could stay long?
Troy Bennet: I wish I could stay longer, yeah. But I don’t think – I got to go back to work, real life stuff.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. That’s the sad part about growing up.
Troy Bennet: I got to win the lottery and then I just, all I can do is hunt.
Ramsey Russell: What did you enjoy most about being home?
Troy Bennet: I enjoyed the hunting, that’s what I came here to do and I needed to get that fixed, needed to get out there and pull the trigger a bunch, get out in the field.
Ramsey Russell: What’s the rest of your season going to look like, Dustin? Because you said yesterday we were out there scouting and you talked to Troy and then you were talking, I think, to yourself instead of me, but you said, well, my buddy’s going home tomorrow, I won’t get to see him till next year. What’s that like for you coming? You all been tight for what, 5, 10 years? You all been going at this stuff pretty serious and of course, you’re getting old, your careers are getting more important, your relationships are getting more important, but at the same time, in the past 5 to 10 years, you had a lot more time and you all were mad at these birds and going at them full scale all the time. What’s it like when you – (a) number one hunting buddy? You only get to hunt with them a week now.
Dustin Dola: It sucks. There is really – that’s the best way to describe it. Yeah, it sucks. You go from scouting and talking to each other every day and making plans and meeting in the field and dropping pins and comparing each other’s notes and they’re almost exactly the same and we’re on the same page all the time and I’ll get some hunting in and like, I got Cole and he joined us on the one hunt but as I get older, my hunting group seems to be getting smaller and smaller.
Ramsey Russell: Best friends are hard to come by. I’m going to tell you that, it don’t get no easier as you get older. Best friends, good friends are hard to come by.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, you nailed it right on the head there, it just becomes so easy hunting with him and I remember when he said, yeah, I’m moving to Alberta and it’s like I’m what? Why? Where are you going? We got stuff to do here. But, yeah, no, I mean, glad he’s happy and I’m glad his life is as good as it is out there and life is changing to some degree and hopefully he can come back for 2 weeks next year, not just one week.
Ramsey Russell: Or maybe come back to one week sessions or something like that.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, I have to bring him back in late October and we can maybe put a beating on some mallards or something, do a goose week and a mallard week.
Ramsey Russell: I just had this thought, Troy, like, as a US Resident, I can now apply and get up to 7 days. As a Canadian resident living in Alberta, how many days, can you hunt the whole season if you wanted to?
Troy Bennet: I can hunt the whole season, my license just cost me a little bit more.
Ramsey Russell: Okay, but you’re having to pay like a non-Manitoba, non-resident, whatever.
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Isn’t that crazy?
Troy Bennet: I think my license went up, I think usually it’s like 40 bucks something for the game bird permit and this year it was 100.
Ramsey Russell: That’s not too bad. How did you all 2 boys meet? I’ve heard this story before, but I want to hear. How did you all – Because you told me a story the other day, Dustin, I was scouting around with you about how when you all were younger in high school, you went to different high schools, but there was a little bit of goose hunting rivalry.
Dustin Dola: Yeah. The start of it all, I mean –
Ramsey Russell: What’s you all’s earliest memories of each other back during that rivalry period. That’s some, he going to try to kill my geese.
Dustin Dola: Before that –
Troy Bennet: We played hockey together when we were young.
Dustin Dola: Yeah. We were playing each other’s team –
Ramsey Russell: Same team or opposite team?
Dustin Dola: Opposite team.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Troy Bennet: So, then we play on the same team.
Dustin Dola: We played on the same team for a little bit, but originally, yeah. I’m in school in Toulon and you’re in the beach and we’re playing against each other and then we played, eventually played on the same team a little bit. But the kind of like part that I remember exactly was when we were over on Pollock’s field and there was all those mallards in there and you didn’t get permission and I did get permission and then I remember you, like, you ended up finding another field and then I hunted that one and you did really good, I did okay and then we got the fields next weekend and then we decided to hunt together and then all the mallards left and we never got too good hunts out and it was just like, why didn’t we hunt together all 4 of those hunts? And we would stand and it was like, right from there forward, we just don’t not hunt together now. Like, it was just like, what are we doing? Let’s just do this together and do it right and I can go back to that day when we first hunt and we didn’t even kill that many mallards. And I remember going home to my dad and going, we’re going to kill a lot of birds, we’re on the same page, we didn’t even talk to each other, we didn’t make a plan, we didn’t do anything and we hit the ground at the exact same pace and our plans would be the same –
Ramsey Russell: You all’s hunting style, I’ve noticed that the 3 years I’ve hunted with you all together, you all’s hunting style is a lot alike, you all think alike, I’m going to put the decoys out like this. I mean, there’s really not a lot of communication, just like the trailer door drops and you all just kind of each go to each end and meet in the middle and it’s all set up just like you’ve always done it, but right out the gate, you all were thinking a lot like that.
Dustin Dola: It’s never been any different than how you just described it. The very first time we ever stepped in a field together, it’s been that smooth.
Ramsey Russell: Have you all ever gotten any rough patches in this friendship?
Dustin Dola: No not all.
Ramsey Russell: About geese or ducks?
Dustin Dola: Nothing.
Ramsey Russell: Nothing, just lifelong hunting buddies now.
Troy Bennet: Yep.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, you bet.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, we’ll definitely be hunting geese together for the rest of our lives.
Dustin Dola: Oh, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: What was your favorite hunt together? What was one of the most memorable, before you met that boy from Mississippi? What was your most memorable hunt together, growing up or just if – I’m just curious if you all going to come to the same conclusion or if it’ll be a different hunt.
Dustin Dola: Mine’s still the snow hunt in the blizzard.
Troy Bennet: I like the snow one, too, but I remember we hunted –
Ramsey Russell: Wait a minute. Tell me about the snow hunt first, so then we’re going to hear about this one.
A Snowstorm Opportunity: The Perfect Setup for Mallards.
I were going to go shoot some Canada geese and we both kind of hummed and hawed and we had done fairly well already and so we decided, we’ll take a rain day and then it was like a week or 2 later, we got a snowstorm and there was a bunch of mallards and I don’t know, I don’t even remember if we had even killed many mallards before that.
Dustin Dola: I’m going to back up just a little bit. So, we stopped on the field about a week before and it was kind of raining out, it was just him and I were going to go shoot some Canada geese and we both kind of hummed and hawed and we had done fairly well already and so we decided, we’ll take a rain day and then it was like a week or 2 later, we got a snowstorm and there was a bunch of mallards and I don’t know, I don’t even remember if we had even killed many mallards before that or if it was just – that was the next big wave and we both drove into and it was like a whiteout snowstorm and we both drove into the field and we were, like, didn’t even contemplate it, didn’t talk about it and from when Legal Lite hit until I got back to the truck was 7 minutes on the dot. And it was, the show started like 10 minutes before Legal Lite was and I got footage of just mallard just giving it up, like, backpedaling, at the end of the foot of my layout blind and then we literally sat there and was like, okay, when are we legal? We’re legal, go and I remember the first few flocks flew in and we I don’t think we both shot a triple or something like that and we were done, like, half, one of our limits, basically or half of each one of our limits on the first, like, flock or two. And then I remember Troy going over and he goes, how about we try shooting some drakes and not just getting so trigger happy and I’m like, nope, that’s a good point. Yeah, then, I mean, the pitcher is still one of my favorite pitchers, too, the tailgate of the trucks all snow, we’re all covered in snow, the blinds are snowy and yeah, just –
Ramsey Russell: It’s just something about snow that makes ducks and geese go bonkers. They don’t want to fly when it’s heavy snow, they want to land and they want to be somewhere, one of my favorite memories in the Deep south, it was ice cold and I had a blind, it kind of stood up Avery blind and I’d left it wet before the freeze and it wouldn’t unfurl the next day, so I basically had no blind, I pulled in next to a cypress tree with a buddy of mine and here come the freaking snow, great big, wet flakes. And the minute it started coming down, every duck in the universe just started finding somewhere to land and I can remember somebody shot at a duck on the water, missed him 2 foot and he still just sat there, they weren’t going to fly if they couldn’t do it. So to hit it just right and be out there in that field, that must have been magical.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, it’s a good memory.
Ramsey Russell: And you were telling me yesterday, Dustin, that like I came up here and we shot a lot of ducks the first season I was up here and we’ve shot some, I don’t think we shot one this stretch, but you were saying something that shocked me, you said, no, that 2 years ago was abnormal, you all really don’t shoot a lot of ducks? What made that first year 2 years ago so abnormal?
Troy Bennet: So we do –
Ramsey Russell: 3 years ago.
Troy Bennet: We do have a lot of ducks that come into our area. The problem is in that refuge there, they ball up so big that they find one field and 20,000 and 30,000 of them just use it.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Troy Bennet: And there’s – none are going anywhere else.
Ramsey Russell: And when people, when the guys that go after the ducks, you were saying this at dinner last night, when the guys go after those ducks, they’re kind of hunting the same duck and the ducks get real adverse to the pressure unless something crazy like a big snow event happens.
Troy Bennet: They definitely get hard to hunt, like I’ve seen it in this part of the province before where the same ducks will be hunted every day for like 45 days.
Ramsey Russell: The last 2 years have been much drier than the first season, the first season I came up here, just about every agricultural field had non planted spots in it to where the water it’s at for so late that may have had something to do there being just an overabundance of ducks that year.
Troy Bennet: Yep, for sure in it, I think another thing that really is when they stop here, is there the food they want to eat and is it easily available? Because if they don’t find anything they really want to eat, like say they come through and all our fields are all tilled black already –
Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.
Troy Bennet: They don’t want to eat in that, so they’re going to find something else and they’ll just go up towards Oak Hammock and if they find food they want to eat up there, they’ll just start roosting there.
Ramsey Russell: That’s one thing I don’t like about this part of Canada is the farming practices here is to disk the site, you can’t hardly hide in it, it disks under a lot of the food, which is probably what they’re trying to do, is get rid of last year’s seed.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, that’s no regrowth. That’s a thing over there.
Ramsey Russell: And it makes it very tough and I would think, I don’t know, but I would think that the ducks right here, just like the geese, that they’re wanting a high carbohydrate grain to build fat reserve because they got a migration coming up.
Troy Bennet: They’ll really start hitting the soybeans soon when they all start coming down.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Troy Bennet: Yeah, I’ve shot a lot of ducks in soybean fields here.
Ramsey Russell: I’ll be darned. Now you were going to say, talk about a favorite hunt you had different than the snow hunt, what hunt has that had been?
Troy Bennet: I think this one might be my favorite too, but I was just – we hunted together, how long ago was that, when we hunted down by Netley there, with Troy and Cole –
Dustin Dola: When we did the double limit 4 of us, that hunt?
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Dustin Dola: That was one of the – that’s like 15 –
Troy Bennet: That must have been 15, 20, I don’t know if in 20 years ago.
Dustin Dola: No, we started filming in 2012. So it would be 2013.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, 10 years ago.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, something like that.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, we had a really good one there. That was a fun one.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, I forgot about that hunt. It was like what, 64 birds or something.
Ramsey Russell: Well, tell me about it.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, I didn’t hunt with them that much.
Ramsey Russell: Ducks or geese.
Troy Bennet: Both. We killed the double and we killed 64 of 32 ducks and 32 geese. But I didn’t know them that well and we were talking, I was like, yeah, we should hunt together sometime. So I got this field and I said, yeah, I got a field, you guys want to come? And they’re like, yeah, we’ll come and I went to bed, somehow I unplugged my cell phone in the middle of the night and it died, so my alarm didn’t go off, so I woke up and it was like, oh my God, it’s like – So I started getting ready and then I finally get my phone charged and I got messages from all them and I’m like yeah, it’s like, I’m on the way, I’m late, I’m sorry, so we got out the there and we just put a hurting on them, killed 64 in about an hour.
Ramsey Russell: Golly, big down.
Dustin Dola: And then the big waves of mallards came, too. like the numbers in that field in general was crazy.
Ramsey Russell: When do the – If you all are going to get a big surge in mallards, what time of year is that going to happen? It’s because it seemed like the first year I was here, I came and we stuck it to the geese real good and then I had had a few days off, came back and then we stuck it to the ducks real good and I mean, do the geese normally come first and the ducks come later?
Troy Bennet: It depends, I think it all depends on the push and what kind of weather’s up north, a lot of – Sometimes at the start of the year that September 1st to September 10th is some of the best duck hunting like, a lot of ducks are here.
Ramsey Russell: How common are wood ducks? Because the other day on the fox field, I just tell this story, we’re sitting there and I thought – I didn’t have my binoculars. I thought it was a coyote and he stepped out, kind of started walking and slinking towards all these flocks of geese out there and you’re like, no, that’s a fox and then Dustin got there to binoculars and confirmed, oh, for sure it’s a fox. But because he kind of run at those geese and they fly 5 or 10 yards and land back down, I’m like, golly, I thought they’d vacate.
Troy Bennet: They weren’t that scared of him.
Ramsey Russell: I don’t know what that little fox would have done had he got hold of a Canada goose. The other day, Char brought in a Canada goose and when I grabbed his neck, take it from her, that dead gum wing, his elbow hit my wrist bone, let me tell – I let out a yelp, it hurt like somebody hit me with a baton, I don’t know what that fox would have done.
Troy Bennet: I don’t think you.
Dustin Dola: I don’t think it’s much. Yeah, I don’t think much.
Troy Bennet: No.
Ramsey Russell: He’d have been better off getting one of them little Ross geese or something that’s so uncommon. I have seen more snows and white birds around here this year than the normal, more cacklers than I remember seeing, a lot of little geese this year, we shot a cackler, yesterday that was the side of a baby Ross goose.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, we should –
Ramsey Russell: Tiny.
Troy Bennet: There’s some small ones here.
Ramsey Russell: Is that normal?
Troy Bennet: Yeah, they’re always here, the prob, we don’t get them in like, so you’ll see that we don’t get them in the big abundant numbers, though, so they’re hard to hunt because they come in in such big flocks and so early. So if you got 200 in a field, they’re probably coming in and one or 2 flocks.
Dustin Dola: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: I want to talk about Rogue a little bit, I never met your last dog, I knew you, Dustin, to have a dog. You always had a dog, but you never brought him to the field, that I recall and then this year you brought, how old is Rogue? 2 years old? 3?
Dustin Dola: Yeah, he’s about 2 and a half.
Ramsey Russell: You brought your dog and I hunted his first 4 hunts.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, this is a start of his hunting career.
Ramsey Russell: He’s a field trial dog.
Dustin Dola: He is, yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Now what compelled you to get into field trial?
Dustin Dola: Honestly –
Ramsey Russell: I don’t really know any, I don’t got any hunting buddies that actively field trial.
Dustin Dola: So when I bought Remington, which is the dog that you didn’t meet, I bought him from a breeder and from here in Manitoba, Razor Labs and he does lots of field trialing and he breeds hunt tests, field trial, specific labs and he honestly was the owner of Razor Labs was like, oh, why don’t you come out and train? And he helped me kind of get my feet wet with Remington and just my love for dogs and watching what they can, how well they can actually get trained like, some of the field trial stuff that we do is, it’s crazy. Like, you wouldn’t even think of a dog being able to do it.
Ramsey Russell: Like, for example, what’s the difference in field trial versus hunt test? I know Char and a lot of the dogs I have run hunt tests, it’s just so I can have a report card, but what is the difference in a field trial versus a hunt test?
Dustin Dola: A hunt test, you either get a pass or you don’t, a field trial is a competition against the other dogs. So there’s 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th and then distance, I know here in Manitoba, I think a master hunt test is max 125 yards and if you get a big field trial, like you’re 300, 400 yards on a long bird, your short bird might be 175, 200.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Dustin Dola: It’s big, it’s real big. Yeah, it’s really big and it’s a competition where a hunt test, you can have 15 dogs and they all can get a pass where they’re not competing against each other. So, yeah, there’s a little bit of difference here and there, I mean, at the end of the day, the dog has to get the bird and bring it back to you and it still has to run a blind, but distance is huge in it too.
Ramsey Russell: Rogue obviously, well trained. Did you train him yourself or did somebody help you?
Dustin Dola: No, Rogue, I did everything from bringing him home at –
Ramsey Russell: 4ft, collar condition, everything.
Dustin Dola: You start at the top of Lardy’s list and he’s got his flow chart and you start number one and you go down it and I did both my dogs, the first one, I had a little bit of help just because I was getting my feet wet and he was the first dog I’ve ever owned, but both my dogs I’ve trained myself. Remington, by the time he was 3 years old, he had finished his first open and qualified for his first national and I’m hoping to get Rogue qualified for the national because we’re actually holding it here in Manitoba in 2025.
Ramsey Russell: I called my buddy Alan Sandifer down at Gator Point Kennels in Tylertown, Mississippi to check on Char because like, I don’t, she don’t get time off, I’m not going to let her be a couch potato, if I’m home for more than a week or 2, I’ll take her down there and he’ll run her and just to keep her fit, he’s not training, just running and I’ll call to check on her, he’ll say, she don’t like my game anymore, she used to love it. He said, now she don’t want a frozen bird, she don’t want old stinking dead duck, she don’t want a bumper. He said, anything short of live flyers and I get, I get half out of that dog. She’s just going through the motion, she doesn’t want it, I don’t see that out here in the field, buddy. When the birds are flying, I mean, you see her, she just she’s off like a light. How hard is it going to be for a dog like Rogue to transition between the games constantly?
Dustin Dola: I’m about to find out I guess, my previous dog, Remington, it didn’t matter, you could hunt him, you could do a 40 bird goose hunt.
Ramsey Russell: Because it’s real different.
Dustin Dola: It is. And then you could take him to a field trial the next day and he’d go out and punch and hit it and you’ll step on a 400 yard bird and mark like he had it. Rogue’s a little bit more wiry and wild and a little bit more crazier personality, where Remington was all business, it didn’t matter what he was doing, he was business, even in the house, he was business, he’d sit down and look at you, where Rogue is a lot more excitable, so we’ll see.
Ramsey Russell: I wonder if that’s a function of age because he is a very young dog still.
Dustin Dola: That one I’m pretty sure is a bit of part of his personality too. He just seems like he’s having a blast, no matter if you’re going for a walk outside or if you’re sitting on the couch, he comes and wants to love up with you and stuff like that, so we’ll see. Hopefully, when I go back to it, it won’t be that much of a change, but I have all winter and spring before I run a field trial again anyways.
Ramsey Russell: No matter how well trained a dog is, what his achievements, ribbons, passes, whatever you call it there’s no substitute for hunting and like when I watch some of those drills these AKC dog hunt tests go through or what you describe field test, that’s one thing, but 99% of every duck and goose we shot the past week fell within 15, 20 yards, we sell one out there 150, 200 yards sometimes, but that’s just not the norm, most of them are dying right in the decoys, which is a lot of short sprinting and coming back totally different game.
Dustin Dola: Oh, and you could see it those first few hunts, he’d run right past the bird sitting in the decoy and was looking at one 100 yards out and whatnot and it’s cool watching them put it together though, like you do your training and you give them all the tools to help him through it and keep him in check and have control of him. But like today, I was watching him as you’re sitting there calling and you look over to him and he’s picking the geese out of the sky.
Ramsey Russell: That’s right.
Dustin Dola: And he’s watching them and he’s watching them come all the way in and he’s getting ready and he know he’s figured the game out. It doesn’t take them very long and they just keep getting better and better at it, too.
Ramsey Russell: If you had to pick one, if you could only do one field trial or hunting, what would you choose to do with Rogue?
Dustin Dola: Oh, that’s a tough question.
Ramsey Russell: Because my – I mean, I’m going to hunt, I get my dog to hunt and Alan tells me all the time, I train them, you ruin them. Because I do let them slide, I do let them get away with things I do want them to do differently. For example, last time I was at Alan’s, he was running all his dogs and they had to be 5ft off this levee running in shin deep water to go to a mark and there was a levee right bite and of course Char he said, now I’m just going to tell you, I’ll let you handle her, but I’m just going to tell you for the past several weeks, she does what she’s supposed to do on this line, I want to see what she does for daddy. What do you think she did? She went right down the middle of that freaking levee, got the mark coming right back down the levee, said, blow that whistle. I said, I ain’t going to do it, the dog’s doing what she’s supposed to do, which is return with that duck as fast as humanly possible, ain’t nobody grading her but me. So, yeah, I ruin them.
Training Dogs in the Field: A Learning Process.
But yeah, I got into dogs hunting first and field trials kind of snowballed out of control and now I’m neck deep in field trials, too, but finishing up a hunt when there’s like 40 Canadas or whatever you shoot and the guys in the blinds are like, wow, you have a really good dog, it feels absolutely great that all the hard work that you’ve done is paying off.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, no, I’m watching stuff already in the field as he’s, this first few hunts and you kind of let him get away with a few things because you’re trying to get him to learn to hunt and I’m like mentally noting already, it’s like, well, I might have to fix that later on. But that’s at the end of the day, when I got Remington and actually Rogue was supposed to be a field trial dog, I was supposed to have Remington still, but that’s another story, maybe for another time. But yeah, I got into dogs hunting first and field trials kind of snowballed out of control and now I’m neck deep in field trials, too, but finishing up a hunt when there’s like 40 Canadas or whatever you shoot and the guys in the blinds are like, wow, you have a really good dog, it feels absolutely great that all the hard work that you’ve done is paying off, but standing on the line in a field trial and you watch a bunch of dogs that are having –
Ramsey Russell: All the eyeballs rolling.
Dustin Dola: And you’re standing there and your dog comes back for the last big long punch bird and it’s retired and he comes back and stares and locks right in it, you know he’s got it and no dog’s done it yet and you send him and he goes out and steps on it, that feeling’s pretty good too.
Ramsey Russell: But all dogs are just dogs. Every dog has its day, but they’re just a dog and I mean, thousands of retrieves, thousands of birds landing and walking in the decoy and I’ll be damn if that damn char dog didn’t catch me off guard break today. Yeah, I think it’s because it fell kind of, it’s one of them birds you shot to fail behind you and before you released her, but released Rogue Char said boom, she was gone before I could even get my out of my jacket to nick her. I mean, she was gone like its mine.
Dustin Dola: Oh, yeah, that was Rogue’s 2nd hunt.
Ramsey Russell: That dog will do that to you every single time, I don’t care how well trained they are.
Dustin Dola: And I had somebody tell me one time when training dogs and whether it’s training them or in the field is take the emotion out of it. Because when you get upset, you do bad handling or you make bad corrections and like you just said, they are dogs, they’re going to mess up.
Ramsey Russell: They’re just dog, we’re just human kids are just kids, things like that happen. The US is in an election year and twice now I’ve been in Canada and seen Trump signs. What is it about Trump up here in Canada? Do you all either one have a – I’ve seen Trump signs on 2 different plays, you all neither one have a thought about that.
Dustin Dola: I’m not a big political person when it comes down to it, but there is a lot of people that support Trump up here, I think, though.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, there really is, isn’t it?
Dustin Dola: Yeah. You see a lot of the –
Ramsey Russell: Because here the American news media, myself and 2 others are going to vote for him in the United States, but I don’t think that’s the case, I think throughout the United States, everybody’s going to vote for him and if Canadians could vote, they’d vote for him too, is what it seems like, I can’t believe how many Trump signs I’m seeing in Canada, not even in America, it’s amazing. Has it always been that way up here? I mean, has it –
Troy Bennet: I think ever since Trudeau got in here and nobody just wants to deal with any liberals anymore.
Ramsey Russell: He broke you all of everything, didn’t he?
Dustin Dola: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: On a conservative continent.
Troy Bennet: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy. What for the rest of you all now, we’re wrapping up our annual visit, what’s for the rest of you all? What’s you all season look like the rest of the year? You going to try to do some hunting in Alberta?
Troy Bennet: I want to try, yeah, we’ll see if I can make it happen, but we’ll see if I can do it.
Ramsey Russell: I’ve got some friends I’m going to try to introduce you to over there, I really think the 4 of you all, 2 of them, 2 of you all would hit it off and boy, they could maybe introduce you to their part of the world up there, they like the white geese. They are big on the white geese and I think they might be interested in coming over here and sampling some of this Interlake stuff you all got over here for the dark birds, I’m going to try to make introductions, I think the 4 of you all would just hit it off like nothing.
Dustin Dola: Yeah, it’d be a lot of fun.
Ramsey Russell: It would be good, it would be great. I’ve enjoyed it, I said something to you the other day, Dustin, we don’t talk but once a year, really and then we visit and I guess now you all ain’t talking every day, you all live in different areas, but you said something about real friends not having to talk every day, how’d you articulate that?
Dustin Dola: I said real friends don’t need to talk every day and that’s my beliefs on that. A good friend, you don’t need to check in and make sure you’re still a friend with him, if you’re a friend, you’re a friend and yeah, I mean, I talk to Troy on and off throughout the year, I don’t talk to him every day and we pick up right where we left off and it’s no different with you now, we pick up right where we left off and you keep going.
Ramsey Russell: I mean, it’s crazy how life – Troy out in Alberta now doing his plumbing and in a relationship that he followed out there and you are getting hot and heavy in a relationship and you’ve got a career going on and I’m freaking who knows doing what, but the cries of wild geese just bring you together, you get to hang out and be yourself with people you can count on for a week or however many days you’re blessed to do and then go back and live your life, that’s what I love about this thing. I really did not like staying up in that – This hotel was sold out, I had to stay in that other one, I didn’t like it because it wasn’t familiar like this one, I didn’t have old Val washing my clothes and drying them.
Troy Bennet: It’s a tourist town there.
Ramsey Russell: It’s a tourist town and I really like being down here, I’m nowhere from you all place, we can go eat dinner, we can go do this, we can come right here and get breakfast in the morning and I just – It’s so familiar, I hope you all don’t – Don’t think you’re getting rid of me anytime soon.
Troy Bennet: No, we know.
Dustin Dola: We know.
Troy Bennet: We’re waiting for next year already.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I talked to Franz Schnabel, Delta Waterfowl yesterday, I had a beer with him in the bar right here.
Troy Bennet: And he just got in yesterday, Franz did.
Ramsey Russell: And he’s not even hunting.
Troy Bennet: He never put in for his draw early enough because he didn’t know he was going to come.
Ramsey Russell: I said, what are you doing? He said, Ramsey, I’ve been coming for 25 years. I wouldn’t know what to do with my fault if I didn’t come up here and see everybody. But he’s been coming for 25 years.
Troy Bennet: Yep.
Dustin Dola: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: It’s funny how you go somewhere a long way away from the house and you just fall in with your tribe and it just clicks, boom, here I am.
Dustin Dola: Yep.
Ramsey Russell: Thank you all very much for a great week. Thank you all for sharing you all corner of the world, I really do love this Interlake region and man, thank you all, just thank you all for being here and thank you all for letting me into your life, I appreciate that.
Troy Bennet: Yeah, we’ve really enjoyed it, Ramsey. It’s been a lot of fun the last 3 years and it’s just getting better.
Ramsey Russell: And we are just getting started, Troy.
Troy Bennet: We’re just getting started.
Dustin Dola: And we’ll see you again next year.
Ramsey Russell: Thank you. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode a MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast from Manitoba, kind of one of my homes away from home, as you can tell, this podcast is now over 500 episodes into it because of people like you all. Thank you all for listening to Duck Season Somewhere Podcast, see you next time.
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