Latest / Ducks Unlimited Podcast / Ep. 487 – Texas Waterfowl Habitat 101 with Thunderbird Hunting Club’s Todd Steele

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Ep. 487 – Texas Waterfowl Habitat 101 with Thunderbird Hunting Club’s Todd Steele · Ducks Unlimited Podcast

• 00:00 John Gordon Hello everybody and welcome again to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I'm your host, John Gordon, and my guest today is someone I just spent some time with. We're filming some DU Nation content again on the Texas coast. A lot of folks out there, you've seen his work. He's been a contributing photographer to Ducks Unlimited magazine for many years. So a lot of his images have been taken from right here and then that same Texas middle coast area that we were at. And he also runs what I consider to be not only in Texas but around the country, one of the top duck clubs in America, Thunderbird Hunting Club. So welcome to the podcast, Todd Steel. Thank you, John. Glad to be here and hopefully I can help some folks out there where there are duck farms. What we covered really in DU Nation, folks, was behind the scenes of habitat management, especially more soil unit habitat management, which is primarily the thing that Ducks Unlimited is involved in. And we've, through the Texas Prairie Wetlands Project, have been involved with quite a few projects, Todd, over the years. Do you remember how many that we've done with Thunderbird? 01:05 Todd Steele Oh, I'm going to guess it's probably at least two dozen. And when we talk about a duck pond, too, we have some projects that DU has helped us build that are probably knocking on the door of 100 acres. So, I mean, you go around the country and some people fish in lakes that are only 100 acres. So that kind of gives you an idea how big these things are. I want to say if you took all our habitat together right now, the wheat flood, which is close to maybe 2,000 acres, if you took all those ponds and stacked them side by side, you're talking about an area probably five to six square miles wide. 01:45 John Gordon So it takes a lot of effort to build them, maintain them, and keep them going. Isn't that the truth? Yeah, y'all have a tremendous amount of habitat down there and hold a tremendous amount of ducks. I've been fortunate enough to hunt on one of the properties, actually two of the properties in the past, and I can tell everybody out there that the hunting was outstanding. So I wanted to talk about the club real quick, just to start out with. 02:11 Todd Steele How long has it been in existence? Close to 40 years, and kind of give you a background on how it all started. I was a commercial diver back in the 70s and 80s, and there was a slump that hit the oil field at that time. And one of the friends that I was duck hunting with on another club, we weren't real happy with how the club was being ran. And he kind of looked at it and said, what was your ring club? And he said, you're kind of somewhat out of work. You know, what do you want? Would you be willing to do that if I financed you on the first go around? And I thought about it overnight. And it probably wasn't even overnight. It was kind of like immediately I said, yeah, that's what I want to do. I want to go out and try to form a club and provide not just good hunting for myself, but for others. As the years progressed, providing good hunting for myself was not as important as providing good hunting for others. It was a little bit of philanthropy, so to speak. I mean, you get so much more satisfaction out of watching a little boy and his father come in with this first duck hunt than I'll ever get by shooting another woman in the back, swimming 30 minutes. As the years progressed, that desire to provide good hunting for others just kind of manifested itself and got stronger and stronger. It's pretty much my driving force. And I need to include my family and the manor to the club. I mean, they're all in it with me. It's not a one-man show. 03:54 John Gordon Those guys help me as we go through this process every year. Spending some time with your wife, Nancy, last week was really great. She's a real driving force behind the club. 04:06 Todd Steele Well, the club wouldn't… She wasn't supportive of this. And a quick story on my wife, I actually met her in a rice field at the time. She was with another fellow at the time. As fate kind of happened years ago, years passed, we finally got together. But her first duck hunt, we had thousands and thousands of pintails coming into a flooded rice field. It was just phenomenal. 04:38 John Gordon I was back in the days when pintails were at seven, eight million birds. The glory days of Texas coast, right? 04:47 Todd Steele Yeah, I still remember those days. We had two hunts that year that were like that. The pintails just came in and your jaw dropped when you saw that. We went and ate her first hunt. 05:03 John Gordon I remember walking up the field and saying, well, that was kind of fun. She could only go downhill from there. 05:09 Todd Steele Well, she's had some good hunts since then. A lot of really good hunts. But I said, man, if you just watch something that maybe at one point in your lifetime experience to see something like that. 05:22 John Gordon So anyway, that's kind of a memory that my wife and I have. Right. And I know your sons are highly involved in it as well. And I know your son, Forrest, is about to be the chapter chairman at the Aggieland chapter, Texas A&M. 05:35 Todd Steele Yes, sir. He's getting geared up for that. He's actually heading down here right now to help me with some habitat. He work around the lodge, which never stops. And he'll be down here for three or four days helping me. And then off and on throughout the summer, both the boys are down here. And my wife is by my side throughout this whole process. She works remote. So you kind of saw firsthand she had a computer out there working at her other job. 06:04 John Gordon And she's by my side pretty much through this whole process. Yeah, it's great. It's great to have a family affair like that. You've got your wife, your sons helping you out. It makes it easier to get it all done. Plus, it's more enjoyable, I'm sure. 06:20 Todd Steele Oh, yeah. And she understands the trials and tribulations for doing this. You know, it's never a smooth road. It's got all kinds of curveballs throughout the whole season that you got to deal with. Not just from a habitat standpoint, but a duck standpoint, a hunter standpoint, you're dealing with a tremendous amount of variables that are thrown into a big melting pot. You got to deal with to keep this thing going. Right. And how many members do you have right now? Well, we don't really discuss that, John. But we have, let's just say we have over 70 members, put it that way. 06:59 John Gordon So that's what I thought. And most of these folks are from the Houston area, am I correct? 07:02 Todd Steele Yeah, there are a few that fly in, believe it or not, from South Carolina. We got a few from Dallas, one from San Antonio. But for the most part, they're from Houston. And as a club was kind of evolving, you kind of listen to what the members want. In other words, you're not going to survive if you don't provide them a good quality experience and something that they pay for. And this club does not exist without these members joining this club, because they provide the money. You know, I want to say we're probably our budget now is not from the world. Three quarter of a million dollars to run this thing is not cheap. And we won't be able to do it if the members weren't joining the club. So over the years, we've kind of watched what they like to do. And back in the heyday, we had snow geese all over the place down here. The members did not want to hunt snow geese. They wanted hot ducks. And so that was kind of the business model from day one is we want to shoot ducks. We need a lot of work. And we like to go out there and throw out some duck geese, shoot ducks, and not get up at three o'clock in the morning and put out a foul of a rat. And it hasn't changed. And of course, now we've lost all our geese down there for the most part. And so, you know, you take 40 years of doing this and just kind of concentrating on ducks. And to be honest with you, when the geese do move in, sometimes they're trouble because they're like a big lawnmower. And they can hit a duck pond and you get 30, 40 thousand geese on a duck pond and they can hit that food pretty hard within two or three days. And so now we don't really have that problem. And so it's up to the ducks whether they're going to eat themselves out of house and home. But boy, those geese can do it. They like to sit in two or three days. 09:02 John Gordon I've seen it firsthand. A pond basically disappears. There's nothing left but water because all the food is gone by the time they get done with it. And they can do it quick. Like you said, 20, 30, 40 thousand birds as ravenous as snows are, they'll just take it out quickly. Of course, I'm insane, though. I'd have been chasing those snow geese. I was chasing those snow geese around everywhere in that area in those days. You're guiding folks all over from Garwood to El Campo to Markham to Bay City and all over. Same area as y'all were in. Let's discuss something that's really unique about Thunderbird Hunting Club as well. From an aspect that I know from being in a couple of clubs in Arkansas and places like that, that's really unique. And I've only seen this really out more at West Coast and California. It's the three-day hunting model. Yeah. 09:46 Todd Steele So what we've learned, there was a time when we hunted seven days a week. And so you kind of as a manager, you sit back and you watch the behavior of your hunters. And everybody's heard of the 90-10 rule. Well, it applies to the death clubs, too. So what was happening is there were a number, not all of them, but there was a smaller minority of folks that were hunting seven days a week. Okay. The vast majority of the club was made up of guys that worked in Houston, you know, doctors, lawyers, businessmen. They can hunt Saturday. And so you've got that smaller group that's in there hunting six, seven days. Well, they're blowing all the birds off all the ponds. And so over the years, we slowly kind of watched what was going on. And it's kind of hard to make it where one size fits all. But I think we're kind of there. And that one size that fits all is a three-day model. And that three-day model is we hunt Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. So basically that gives a bird a Monday, Tuesday rest. And it gives a bird the Thursday, Friday rest. And nothing attracts ducks to a pond quicker than other ducks flapping around on the pond. Because one is when they fly over ponds, they literally can see if it's clear water with the food down there. And then if they see birds on the thing, they feel secure and boom, they suck other birds in there. So you'll have something on the other day. And with that said, down, and this applies to our area, it doesn't necessarily apply to Kansas or California or Montana or rivers or whatever. But the birds that we shoot are pretty much the birds we flush out of that pond that morning. And so you don't have birds sitting on that pond. Odds are you're probably not going to have a great hunt. And so it is imperative that we have birds coming in the pond, building up big numbers. And by big numbers, for us to have a decent duck hunt, on average, we need four to 500 ducks. And if we have 1,000 ducks on a pond, that's pretty much an indication that the hunters or game hunters are going to be able to shoot a limited number of birds. So you would take 1,000 ducks and it would be no sweat shooting 24 birds. But if you get some hunters and they don't understand how to hunt and don't set up on the X, they very well may not shoot a limited bird. So I've seen extremes of both. I've seen hunters go into a pond with 200, 300 ducks and a limited bird. I've seen newbies go into a pond and with 1,000 birds on that, not walk out with a limit. So part of the process too we do at the club is we try to educate everybody. And we educate them in a number of ways. John, you received my newsletters that I send out every week. We're warming people, you know, where we're seeing birds and how everybody's doing. Then we have these massive scouting trips that the managers go on every Tuesday and Friday and they literally will spend at least a half a day, sometimes a whole day, run out all these properties, finding out where the birds are, report that back to the membership. And we really want people to hop right on that X. And then there's another ingredient that's really, really important is we kind of, we're a mix of hunters that come together with different personalities and different backgrounds and different skill sets. And we have to manage them and put them all together and get them to get along. Well, because we shoot so many birds, what happens is it's not competitive. The members help each other. So that's a big part of the success of Thunderbird is this membership is, I don't like all the clubs they're doing, but this membership is great from the standpoint that we we had two openings this year. Those two new members that came into the club this year, I guarantee you, you know, all the old members are going to take them under the wing and they're going to educate them to the process where they're going to be acclimated to the system so quickly that they're going to know the program, how we kill birds, you know, and they'll come away with a really good product at the end of the day. And we couldn't do that without members working together with each other. 14:40 John Gordon Yeah, that's great. I said I've been involved with clubs before, but that's not the case at all. You've got people that are really at each other's throats sometimes. And it's pretty interesting how you're really able to manage that many people and keep everybody happy. It's really pretty cool. And I have to get a point to that three-day model in a lot of ways. Success because of the fact that you just keep the pressure off of them, again, which is, you know, can be relentless down there. Like you say, seven days a week, birds are just being pounded on and keeping that pressure off those ponds has got to really up the numbers in the long run. 15:18 Todd Steele Yeah, yeah. I mean, so here's a real simple statement that's kind of like a no brainer. Ducks don't want to be shot at. But there's a lot of duck hunters that don't get that concept and they will go out there and just hunt and hunt and hunt. And, you know, literally to get a pond to produce, you know, back to back hunts is a hard deal. I mean, it's kind of like we go into a fishing hole and you've caught all the rainbow trout out of the fishing hole and they can go back and say, can they catch more rainbow trout? Well, it's the same thing here. One of the phrases I coined in the early days is as we were trying to, you know, manage this club is we have a product that flies away. And unlike, you know, deer hunting where, you know, the deer are going to be, you know, in that pasture or in that wood lot and they may go hide and stuff, but they're still there. Well, our product can get up within 24 hours, be on Louisiana if they decide, you know, they don't like what's going on here. So we try to make them as happy as they can. And that caught me somewhat from the standpoint, but then on one hand, we're shooting at them, but on the other hand, these ducks are happy and kind of maybe getting ahead of myself a little bit here, but we're keeping, you know, I mentioned earlier that we started water wells up this morning. We literally have water on the ground for these birds nine months out of the year. So if you look at how many days we actually hunt ducks, which is probably about 45 or something like that, maybe even less than that. So, you know, a month out of the year, we hunt ducks and the other eight months, the ducks have free reign to eat, sleep and do whatever they want on these ponds. And it really, really helps the birds, you know, so it's not about the, yeah, we shoot a lot of ducks, but I can guarantee you we're providing a lot of good habitat to really help these birds and not just the ducks, but, you know, all the other wetlands type creatures that are out there from fish to, you know, the matatodes, the, you know, great grits and you name it, they're all out there using this habitat, like right yesterday I was out and there's all kinds of birds, black-bellied tree ducks and fulvus tree ducks and mottled ducks. We don't necessarily keep water on all our ponds at this time of year, but we left some of them on for various reasons. And one of the reasons we left them on that is to help the birds nesting down here, because right now we're in a drought 18:06 John Gordon and they pretty much like what we left for them. So that's a good point. And I got to see this firsthand folks on the D.U. Nation filming is all of the wildlife that is surrounding these wetland areas. That's a very important point. This is not just for ducks. This is for a myriad of species of different birds, you know, like you said, from frogs to snakes to all kinds of aquatic life. These ponds really hold it all. And like, and this is a big breeding area. Most of everybody thinks about Canada and all this, but for certain species, black-bellied, whistling ducks, fulvus ducks, mottled ducks, that's their breeding ground too. Yep. And we actually have some blue-winged tree nesting this year down here. So not real common, but they do nest down here. I did see a few blue-winged in the air. That's right. It's helping out a tremendous amount of wildlife in these areas. And so let's use that transition. I want to move into that and talking about the habitat management, because that's the whole key to y'all having all the tremendous amount of birds that you have. So take us through the steps, Todd. We were in a pond just last week that was being built. You've got maintainers and dirt moving machines everywhere. And just take us through, 19:26 Todd Steele start to finish on how it all comes together. Well, I'll back up a little bit on how a year can unfold. We get through the hunting season. And then the first thing I start looking at is where is the system failing? And by the system failing, I'm talking about nature damage going into water canals or spewing water all over the landscape where I don't want it to go to erosion, taking down banks on ponds. Sometimes we've had water drilling people come in and rework a water well to get it to flow better. So we're in this kind of, I'll call it the repair mode that occurs early in the spring that we're trying to make sure the infrastructure is up and running as best as possible so that when we do start flooding all these ponds, I'm not dealing with repair modes, I'm just dealing with making the habitat. And then new ponds being built, we typically build them in the springtime. If we wait too long, this ground will turn into concrete if we get into a bad drought that we're into right now. And the machinery will just bounce off of this stuff like we're trying to build ponds with concrete. We have literally had in the years past the midsummer where we can't build duck ponds or we can't do anything because the ground's so hard. And so anyway, so we go into the repair mode and then the prep mode, which we're just about to start any day now. And let me say this about duck ponds. Every duck pond is different and everyone has different teeth and you have to understand what those needs are. And it could be the depth of the water, it could be whether you burned it, you shredded it. There is no manual out there. If I wanted to write a book about how to do all this stuff, I couldn't do it because every single year is different. And I kind of look at what Mother Nature gives me and she gives me a bunch of sprangletop in a duck pond and I leave that sprangletop alone. Here's another type of aquatic or I leave that alone. Yesterday we literally had a pond that we caught all that rainwater earlier in the year and I pulled the plug on it because I had a plant coming up called burrhead, which is not a good plant for anything, not good for cattle, not good for duck, was taken over the whole pond. So we're literally draining that pond and odds are I'll probably bring a tractor in there and I'll just call that burrweed under, get water on top of it as quickly as I can and stimulate the aquatics to get up before the burrweed comes up and wears its ugly head again. And so, John, we talked about this a little bit in D.U. Nation, but within a handful of soil is millions of thousands of different seeds in there. And depending on what you do to that soil will determine what's going to pop up for the ducks to be. And like I said, every pond's different. I mean, you can't force one pond to grow something if it's not in the seed base. And a lot of people go out there and they buy food and they plant it. And I kind of look at it as kind of it probably worked on smaller ponds, but when you deal with half some hundred acre ponds and stuff like that, it's better to go into a pond and manipulate the environment. Like I said, it could be our main tool is bringing big big crackers and gask in it. But at times we won't do that at times all flood. We're flooding a pond right now that has a plant in there called Dwarf Spikewush, which the ducks just love to just, they eat the roots, the little seeds on it. Well, we're flooding out right now because it's all over the field and the cattle will benefit from it too when that stuff started growing up. And so in this particular case, I elected not to gisk it or burn it or shred it. Instead I went ahead and I'm just flooding it because I know what it's going to do for the ducks. Especially if we're able to deal with coming down, it's going to be, it may not be second crop rice, but it's going to be darn close. That's something that they like. And then after you're done getting all the water on the landscape, then you play this kind of dance going around trying to maintain the water at the proper levels. And you'll try to get it deep enough where the obnoxious grasses are going to come in and choke out the aquatic. And then if you're in a bad route like we're in right now, I mean, I'm just pumping and pumping and pumping on ponds, trying to keep the aquatics alive and the pond. And sometimes it's a struggle. At the beginning of the season, we calculate how many acre feet comes out of a water well and where we're going to flood. But sometimes mother nature puts us really behind and all that. And we just got to keep it going. And then as the season progresses and food comes up, then I'm looking at the different water levels. So a blue heron is going to want deeper water to kind of somewhat feed in. A snow geese wants a little bit shower water or a pintail wants a little bit shower water. A teal and a shoveler, they want to skim across really, really shallow water. So we're trying to provide kind of a good mixture of habitat down here. I mean, luckily we are down here. We have, I think one year we shot 18, 19 different species of ducks. And so we're not a, mallard is not our prime bird and pintails are not our prime bird, and teal are not our prime bird. It's a mixture of all the ducks coming down here. And so we're trying to provide as much habitat as we can with a bunch of diversity. And these birds will move around as water levels change and all that. And as the season progresses, one of the other things we've got to do is, and I'm talking about, we're in the middle of duck season that I got to watch the water werewolves. And so I got to be careful of two factors. One is I can't be running around on the duck pond, looking at all the duck ponds and spooking all the ducks off of it. So I kind of get feedback from the membership, what's going on in the pond, what's the water level, are there aquatics on the surface or have the ducks eating it all out? And as the season progresses, if the ducks have wiped out that first two or three inches of aquatics, then I'm pulling the water down so they can reach what's left on the bottom. Or we could get in a situation where mother nature dumps six inches of rain on us overnight. Well, then I'm scrambling trying to drain water off the ponds. And that's one of the hard things that people, people who spent all this money pumping up duck pond and then suddenly, they got to pull the plug. It's very rare for people to want to go pull a plug on a duck pond and drain off 16 inches of water. But we will do that if we have to make sure those ducks can reach the pond. So it's something that as we go into hunting season, we're still constantly maintaining water levels to allow the birds to get to the food. Plus they have to have that shallow water roost in. If the pond is a foot and a half deep, they'll go in there sometimes a roost. But ideally what birds, you know, ducks want to roost in is they want to put their foot on the ground. And so we're trying to provide, you know, a roosting area, preening area, all of the duck at the same time. That's the ideal duck pond, you know, where they don't have to 27:46 John Gordon go anywhere. They can just sit there and be content on one duck pond. Man, that's a lot of great information, Todd. That huge point that you brought up there in the water levels. I see it so much, like you said, it's so hard to pump up water and spend a bunch of money pumping water and then get a big rain and you'll, oh yeah, well, that's great. You know, just going to keep that water on that landscape. And then the ducks start to quit using it because it's too deep. They can't get to the food and, you know, it takes a while for them to get back because for the water level to drop. So that's a huge point is that you've really got to watch 28:22 Todd Steele the water levels closely. Yeah. And ducks will leave overnight. I mean, so you get a six inch rain. I mean, they intuitively know that it's raining somewhere and new food sources have been opened up warm, you know, like seeds and stuff like that. And they sometimes will just get up and leave overnight. And so you want to try to get them back in the barn as quick as you can by, you know, getting the water level down. One other point that I forgot to mention was muddy water. So down along the coast here, we have a lot of clay and sometimes that clay can get spend. Well, it's a kind of a kiss of death. If you get, if you're initially trying to start a duck pond and you got muddy water because that sunlight will not penetrate down to stimulate the plant. And in last year, there was probably at least two or three incidents where mother nature just turned up the winds and turned up the water and it all turned muddy on me before the aquatics got going. But I literally opened up the plug and drain the water off the landscape. And that's done or that's thousands of dollars going down the drain instantly, you know, and it's a hard deal to do. But I had to do it because some of these ponds were some of our best producing ponds and I had to get clear water on there. So clear water is really important. And I don't think anybody really has a lot of scientific knowledge about why these plants down here grow so quickly. But in talking with Todd Marindu, the regional manager with DU and stuff, he believes that when that well water comes out and it hits the landscape, which is like, you know, a Nercferno out there right now, and they get that cool water on there, you know, that sunlight penetrating that cool water just sets that whole food chain, you know, off with the aquatics growing up and everything. So it's that clear, cool well water is real important. Excellent. Todd Marindu, you know, that guy's forgotten more about ducks than I'll ever know. One of the things I always coin that Marindu said, he said, you know, habitat management is not rocket science. It's much harder than rocket science. There is some truth, you know, because a lot of people just think that, you know, once I got to get back to, you know, what do you do the rest of the year? And still to this day, I have members who come down and they just think that, you know, these duck farms are here all year long and, and, or we just, you know, turn on the water hose and fill them up and pull the plug at the end of the year. And, and they don't realize how much effort goes into it. And some of them do, 31:14 John Gordon but some of them don't, you know, and it's a, it's a lot of work, but it's a labor of love. Right. And on that, we're going to stop for a second, folks, and take a break, but stay tuned for more with Todd Steel. Hey folks, welcome back to the DU podcast. We're here with Todd Steel, manager of Thunderbird Hunting Club, Southwest of Houston, Texas, near the El Campo area. Would you say that's correct, Todd? 31:55 Todd Steele Yeah, El Campo, all the way down to the Palatial, we have kind of a swap of properties that we manage that through that region. And this is kind of a historic area. Of course, this was, you know, one time the great snow goose, you know, corridor, you know, inspection bullies too. And that ancient kind of flyway is Colorado River that they come, they come down on both sides of it. And I guess if you look back at the old books and stuff like that, you know, Colorado River used to just spew, you know, water out of its bank from log jams and everything else. There were swaps of land that were flooded beyond 20, 30 mile feet, the river itself. Migration is part fueled by learned behavior and is part fueled by genetic behavior that we don't quite understand. And still to this day believe that, you know, these birds are following, you know, ancient corridors where, you know, their ancestors followed. And, you know, proof to that is, you know, a cold front hits North Dakota and all of a sudden over overnight, all those birds get out. Well, they have genetically learned that they stick around for North Dakota, you know, blustery, you know, cold front that's going to freeze everything over. They're not going to have any water or food. So, even to this day, you know, birds will get up and migrate when they get hit by that big cold front. That's not necessarily a learned behavior. I believe it's a genetic behavior 33:33 John Gordon that they, it just didn't wire that we got to get out of Dodge. Yeah, that's got to be correct. Just know the way it happens, especially in mass migrations of birds. They've got to be wired that way that they're just going to go south. Okay, they really can't rely on their parents or whatever. I don't think they teach them that in a lot of cases. They just know and they head farther south. We were talking about flooding areas this time of year. You've already got the pumps going, the wells going down there at Thunderbird. Let's talk a bit about moist soil plants and aquatics. I know in this part of the world, stuff like pink smartweed, barnyard grasses and stuff like that are 34:13 Todd Steele really good. What's your favorite aquatic plant to see growing up in a project? So, there's basically two types of duck food down here. One is, you know, your Murdnuss, which will be your smartweed and your barnyard grass, your millets coming up above the surface. And then the other is aquatics. One of the problems that I have down on most of the properties is we have cattle on it. So, the cattle will come often. They won't hit smartweed, but they will hit, you know, some of your grasses that are trying to seed out and chop down. So, over the years I've learned it's probably better to try to put the efforts into managing aquatics than it is the emergence that come up. And then if you, over the years I've watched birds in this area come down and understand too that we're watching these birds every single day from, you know, this time forward. We're going to be out every day seeing what these birds do. We see massive migration. We watch where they're going to feed, where they're going to roost and all that. And their preference when they come down to this area, if you give them two food sources, you know, you give them one with a bunch of barnyard grass and seed it out and you give them one that's filled up with aquatics that's matted up to the surface, they're going to every single time go into the aquatics. That's what they like to eat. So, it's kind of like a buffet. You go into a buffet and there's steak and lobster and there's hamburger over there. You're going to go to the steak and lobster, the hamburger, you know, you'll eat that if all the steak and lobster's gone. And so I kind of look upon the barnyard grasses, the smart weed and stuff like that a little bit differently. If they have the choice, they're going to go to aquatic. Now with all that said, the top aquatics that we have now here, there's a plant called Southern Nade. It is a big one. Musk grass, which is actually an algae. They like that algae. Widgeon grass is another one. Widgeon grass is more kind of a coastal plant that comes up and likes a little bit of salinity in the water. Sagal and longney pondweed is another one. There is a plant called duck salad, which sounds like ducks are going to be going crazy on it. But that's kind of an emergent that comes up as a kind of a leafy looking lettuce type of plant. And they won't hit that immediately. But last year we had some big stands of it. And when they started chomping down all the other aquatics, then they started hitting that. And so the birds are kind of creatures of opportunity. And I've seen them going to ponds where we have a pond called, a plant called sumpweed, which isn't something that you can look up and say, oh, that's a great duck food. But I have seen greenling teal just clobber the sumpweed at time, only because that's what they had in that particular area to eat. And so they found it, they liked it, and they just started going. Another one is a plant called tooth cup, which is another emergent, has a little red seed on it. I have seen this in the near past, where gadwalls will get in there. And gadwalls are mostly kind of associated with the aquatics, but I have seen them get in the tooth cup and just hit it really hard. And so once again, it's kind of the opportunity exists and they go after it. Banyard grass is another good one. So greenling teal, more so than blueling teal, greenling teal like seeds, like pintails do at times. And so when the aquatic start getting low, they will gravitate towards new various millets and stuff that are real low where they can reach it real easily. And even some of the sedges, which I don't really like, but the sedges will sometimes drop, you know, maximum amounts of seeds on the ground and the wind will blow it up against one side of a pond and those birds will go in there and they'll eat that. And in fact, speaking of which, so if you ever, ever watch everybody tells you to hunt on the north side of a pond with a north wind, but sometimes you'll see all the birds on the south end of the pond and you're going, what's up with that? Well, what's up with that is all the seed has blown to that south end and the aquatics they've yanked up is all blown to the south end of the pond with a north wind and they're feeding heavily down there because that's where all the food is. And so sometimes you have to go to hunt the south end of a pond with a north wind. And, and once again, they go back to, you know, helping our hunters, our members by scouting and saying, you don't want to hunt the north end of that pond. You want to hunt the south end. I know it's not intuitive to do that, but that's where you need to go because that's where those birds are going to be. And the X, and I think you're going to cover this a little bit later, John, but the X is so important that I have seen it, that if you're off of that X by even a hundred yards, sometimes your hot wool will not be, those birds know going into downtown and, and you've got five or six different restaurants to choose. You go into that one restaurant. Well, the bird did the same thing. They fly over a pond. They know where the day before, where they had good chow sitting in that one restaurant and they will be aligned towards that, 39:46 John Gordon that one restaurant to eat. So real important to be on the X. Isn't it the truth? Yeah. Let's just go ahead and switch gears to that, Tom. You, I mean, you're a highly experienced duck hunter. I know that country, like the back of your hand. And as you said, location is the absolute number one key. And it can't be overstated that if you're off of the spot by any minute to be a hundred yards, 50 yards, sometimes it just, it's totally going to make a huge difference. Yeah. Yeah. Aside from location, what do you think is number two as far as duck hunting goes for success? 40:20 Todd Steele I would say, you know, we, we had world champion duck callers down there and I watched the birds behavior and it doesn't really matter. They're, they're more attracted to decoys spread down there than, than duck calling, you know, and, and this is me speaking, other people may argue differently, but I would say duck hunting, duck calling on our neck of the woods is probably a factor of maybe 15% of the time. I blow a duck call just because part of the game, but to be honest with you, either the duck coming or not, I think decoys spreads are probably the second most important. And, and I will often, I like big numbers. I mean, I know people out there write article about, you know, you know, you need to go to smaller spreads late in the season. That's not the case down here. I mean, you gotta give them a different look. They're, they're used to seeing six dozen decoys down through the whole flyway and late in the season, I would say, let's say the first, the second split, which is beginning of December, I'll start putting out massive spread. And by massive spread, I mean, you know, 200 duck decoys. And these are duck decoys that we don't leave out. We pull them up every single day. And so what I tell the members are like, they kind of grimace when they go to help. And they said, look, I said, we're going from your hundred duck decoys to 200 in that big scheme of things, putting out an extra hundred duck decoys is going to take them maybe 10, 15 minutes in the morning and maybe 20, 25 minutes in the app, you know, when you're picking them up. So I'll told maybe 45 minutes. I said, you, you spend all this money all this time. What's 45 minutes to have a superior as opposed to, you know, give them a dozen or eight dozen duck decoys that they see all the time. So, so decoys spreads and numbers, I think are the most important thing. And don't, don't come club them together. You got to, you know, if you're out, you know, watching ducks in a park and stuff, you know, that there are the ducks are not all, you know, gathered up around the duck line. They're scattered, scattered all over the place. And, and so you gotta, you know, you gotta spread your decoys out and you gotta make them look natural. And yeah, it takes a lot more effort to drag them out 50 yards behind your duck line. They get a big wad of decoys behind there, but it really kind of dupes the bird, you know, and the thinking this is a real McCoy down there. So, so I would say decoys spreads are probably your second most important, at least down here. Now, if you're 43:05 John Gordon up in Arkansas, that's different, you know, calling is probably not, you know, number one. Well, you're calling to a lot of Mallards in this part of the world versus down there. Most of the ducks whistle down there. Let's face it between the Wigeons and the green wings, pintails, you hear a lot more whistling going on. You do quacking, that's for sure. So you can really over quack a lot in, in, in Texas coast for sure. You can probably just, I think you're right about that Todd. And I can tell you folks that yet when Todd's talking about decoys, I mean, he is not a lazy decoy man. And he's, I think he's schooled a lot of his members into that same principle that the more decoys, the better. And it really makes a difference though in the success. 43:47 Todd Steele Yeah. And, and, and so here's another kind of evolution in the clubs, enter and watch the dynamic of the club as a ball of the year. And it's not necessarily me, you know, leading the pack. It's a pack with leading the pack kind of thing. And, and so there was a time when, you know, back in the, you know, the seventies and eighties to get to a duck spot when it was wet, you lock your big four wheel drive truck in there and rutted up the farmer's roads and did your best to get back there without getting stuck. And, and so let's fast forward to today. Well, you know, members in our club have these big monster Polaris that is working big bond tires on it. And they carry the kitchen sink with them out to the duck line. In fact, one of the things we do is we do have pipelines and kind of strategic spots, but what we're finding is that, um, taking temporary blinds, which are nothing more than a hog panel, the fast graph, maybe painted and some are stalled and sitting on that X, um, is important. And then taking all your decoys and carrying it on that Polaris, um, you're basically, like I said, take the kitchen sink out to the ducks. And that is part of the reason we shoot a lot of ducks is cause we can do that. And probably if we look back even 15 years ago, we didn't have that kind of technology with our eighties, these can be able to yank, you know, drag all that stuff in. And so we were kind of, um, you know, kind of chained involved to our pit lines that we met out there with, you know, our typical hundred duck decoys out there. And, and we were trying to force ducks to come into those pit lines. And, and so the evolution to today is now we bring what the ducks want to see to wherever they're feeding. And that's been somewhat key to our success. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why we're, we're, we're shooting ducks for that, that, that was one of the big ones. 45:52 John Gordon And it's a combination of all those factors. And you're right. The UTV, the four seat Polaris, the K and M's all that has changed the game in such a huge way. When I was a kid, right, the three wheelers first came along. We thought that was the most, the greatest thing on the face of the earth that you didn't have to walk everywhere. And then the four wheelers and then the six wheel Polaris is, and now the UTVs with, with big beds on them that you can, like I said, 46:18 Todd Steele you can really carry the kitchen sink into an area where before it was really impossible. Yep. Yep. Yep. That's a, and, and, and a good friend of ours, Shannon Hawkins, the outdoor writer of Houston Chronicles said, he said, these UTVs have extended the duck hunter's, you know, career or life, whatever you want to call it, probably about 15, 20 years, because if you think back, you know, how it was 30, 40 years ago, because the days of, you know, putting on, you know, red ball, you know, rubber waders and, and a big strap of duck decoys on your back and waved into the marsh, you know, with, you know, a good way to have a heart attack. 47:01 John Gordon That's a young man's game right there. That's right. That's right. Yes, sir. I like the blind concept that y'all have with the cattle panels in the, in the fast grass. It's, it's easy to deploy, easy to pick up. And I think more folks would have a lot of success if they would take a look at that because, and a lot of, there's a lot of portable blinds out there in the market that are good. It's just these, I think really lend themselves to, I don't know how to say it. I mean, just being able to put it on the X quickly, more so than having to put together frames 47:33 Todd Steele and everything else. Yeah. And so, you know, so that that's part of the secret too of getting on that X and carrying a, you know, say the kitchen sink out there that you want to be able to deploy the stuff as quickly as possible. Otherwise, you know, otherwise you're doing the a thousand, you know, rag spread, right? You know, you're, you're getting up at three in the morning to put all this stuff up. And so even the decoys, when you think about the decoys that have evolved over the years, so now they have, you know, lightweight, you know, decoys that, you know, have kind of heels that will, you know, flip up and we have tangle free, you know, line that really is tangle free that, you know, you just throw them on the water and you just start scattering them out as quickly as you can. Everything you can do to speed up that process enables you to put more keel out in the field and, and, and, and it helps you to suit more ducks. I mean, the amount of Polaris that I have, I have, I actually have fishing rod racks on the front rack and I can, I can load up, you know, six to eight, you know, Robo ducks on the side and they're all ready with wings attached and all I gotta do is pick them out and stuff. Well, think, think back 40 years ago, I didn't think they had Robo ducks 40 years ago, but, but trying to just drag eight Robo ducks on your, on your back and you're walking into a marsh was just nearly impossible. So, so, you know, deployment of Robo ducks and decoys and, you know, and, and all of that combined are, are real effective. And this step take the temporary bond a step further. So, so we, we camouflage them with, with fast grass. And so fast grass is kind of down here. Every, everything stays green for a long time. And so one thing you probably want to do is go on, there were some greens, flat green spray paint and try to get it to kind of match, you know, what a, a tougher grass looks like, you know, on an island out there or something like that. And we take it a step further that we cut fresh cane, which is green, and we put that around our duct lines that kind of even break it up even more. So it's just not a flat panel out there. And in fact, this year we, we bought our own six, $7,000 worth of bamboo. We planted it and we got an irrigation system and stuff. So we'll have, you know, two years we're going to have fresh bamboo here at our hunting lodge that, that I don't know how long it's going to last because we put through a lot of bamboo through the course of the year, but we, we've literally, the importance of bamboo is so good that, that we decided to go ahead and spend the, spend the money on planting bamboo, put an irrigation system in and having freshman bamboo 50:36 John Gordon right nearby at the lodge. So yeah, breaking up your outline is huge. If you can get away from the square, you know, so many duct lines, you can just pick them out and look out there and cross the field. Oh, that's a blind. You can see a plane, you say, so can a duck. 50:49 Todd Steele And, and your dog porch, right? So they think we have dog porches out there. Clearly the dogs can not be standing in cold water. And it's important to just not have your dog out there, you know, out there in the open, you know, like a coyote spinning there and no ducking is right. My wants to land next to a coyote sitting on a dog porch. Right. So, so you want to keep that. Of course your dog, I mean, you know, from such an experienced dog, he's going to be swinging his head 360 degrees, you know, throughout the morning, watch for ducks so he can get a jump on, you know, when he do shoot a duck, you've got to mark well, you'll find it and stuff like that. So you want to try to, you know, cover up that, you know, that dog kind of swing his head all 51:33 John Gordon over the place, looking, looking for where that duck is going to fall. So that's it. I love that Mo Marsh and Vizilab system with a, with a stand with a dog blind on it. I think that's one of the biggest innovations for retrievers have come along in the last 20, 51:49 Todd Steele 30 years, really. Yep. Yep. And, and, and so as early as, you know, two years ago, very few members had that. And, and now I'm starting to see more and more of them. We're trying to encourage more and more of them to have those, those lines out there. And it plus it makes your dog maybe a little bit more steady too, that he's inside that, 52:10 John Gordon inside that enclosure and stuff like that. So that helped a lot. It does. It does. Talking about dogs. I know you're a big retriever guy like me. That's such a huge part of the hunt to me is the dog and, and a well-trained dog is a really pleasant experience where a not well-trained dog is not. And, you know, I've seen your dogs in action, 52:32 Todd Steele they're top notch. Yeah. We've always said that, look, the, the duck line is not the place you need to be training your dog because, you know, any is, is you're going to get frustrated with it and your frustration is not going to change that dog. The training should have been done throughout, you know, you had all year to train the dog, have a trainer train it and, and trying to train it out in the duck line, it's just going to lead to frustration. Plus it's going to be, you know, very disruptive to the hopper others in there too. And, and they're just, you know, it's, there's nothing finer than, you know, having, you know, a couple of lab guinea duck line that are well-behaved and, and top notch retrievers. So. 53:16 John Gordon Oh, it's, it's huge. And nothing, nothing will get you invited on more hunts than having a really good dog and nothing will have your phone never ring again than having a dog that's no good. 53:26 Todd Steele That's, that's true. That's true. You know, so, and that's part of the process that, you know, we talk about managing hunters and stuff like that, but it's one of the things that we have to very subtly, you know, not just myself, but managers too say, look, you know, you may have politely hand you a rope breaking dog. It's a dog won't break anymore. I mean, and so you gotta, you know, make the member understand that, you know, you know, you're not going to get invited in that group of hunters. If your dog is a derelict dog going out there, doing, you know, running around with his head chopped off and breaking all the time. So it's important to, you know, have a, have a good companion out there. But like, like you said, it's just the, it's part of, you know, I don't know how people, well, I've had members stop duck hunting because their dog died. I mean, that's how important dogs are to people. And, and I've always, I've had lab my whole life. I had to put down a 14 year old lab earlier this spring. And if I didn't have another lab in the, in the red basket or in, you know, on, on the ground, there was a good likelihood. I just say, I'm not going to duck hunt anymore, but, but I've always learned that, okay. So as that older lab get on his last leg, you better have another lab, you know, ready to go. And it's kind of heartbreaking to, you know, leave your old lab behind and have the young buck out there retrieving birds. Part of the process of, I guess, part of the, the pain of having a, having a 55:07 John Gordon companion you've had for so many years out there with you. So. Yeah, that's, that's very true. I've gotten to the point where I like to, by the time my dogs like five or six, you know, have a young one coming up, just, you know, kind of time it out. Like I said, they don't, they, it's a shame they don't last nearly as long as you'd want them to. They give everything they got to you. And just, you know, retrievers are such great animals. Point dogs, I mean, dogs period are great animals, but retrievers have just, you know, the special bond that they have with the hunter is unbelievable. Man, it's been great, Todd. I'll tell you what, I'm going to close this out. I like to do this with a lot of the guests is talk about a hunt that really sticks out in your mind for whatever reason. It could be a great hunt, bad hunt, something crazy happened, anything that just pops into your head 55:57 Todd Steele right off the top. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you know, you do this every year and you think you've seen everything there is in the waterfowl world. And, and, and this isn't a duck run. I've had a lot of great time. My wife and I were down, say it was probably October and we were, you know, we were doing our typical run on all our ponds, checking water levels and plant growth and all that. And we witnessed a major migration of birds and we've seen lots of migrating the birds coming in, but this one was just absolutely phenomenal because we were in a drought throughout the Midwest. Texas was in a drought, not a lot of water on the landscape down here. So these birds were looking like I said before, when they fly over, they can see good habitat down below. And it was thousands upon thousands. When I say thousands, there were, there were times we'd look, we would look up at the sky this evening that we would see thousands of pintails and guide walled and redheaded. I mean, just plummeting out of the sky, just off and no circling. They just, we just, just roared to these parks because they just had migrated, you know, who knows where for, you know, 12, 18 hours. And they were exhausted. They want to get drinking water. And we watched this for hours. I mean, just, just watching this, the birds come in and then as we were walking out, the teal started coming in and they came in like freight trains, literally, I mean, waves of them, two to three hundred at a time, 30, 40 feet over our head. You know, the sun was coming up or the sun was sitting down and everything was red and you just cellulite of those birds and they were just pouring over our 57:41 John Gordon head. And, you know, like I said, you do it a long time and you sit there and go, well, I've seen it all. It is quite fascinating to see a mass migration. All the stars have to align for it to happen. That's the key. And I think this past year, like I said, the dry conditions in the Midwest really, they didn't have anywhere else to go. They just, they came farther south quicker than they have in the last few years. And you went, catching that mass migration is something special. That's for sure. Well, Todd, thanks so much for being on the DU podcast. This has been great and very educational. Well, thank you. Appreciate it. And folks, like I said, I'm not sure exactly when it's going to come out within the next couple of months or so. You can see that habitat film we put together with Todd and one of our guys on the ground down there for Ducks Unlimited, Taylor Abshire. He's a local kid down there and has really done a tremendous job working with the Texas Prairie Wetlands Project and local landowners to really develop some great habitat on the ground. And we really appreciate what he does. And we'll be back, Todd. It won't be too long. It'll be back in December. We'll be back down there filming with you again. Yes, sir. Looking forward to it. That's going to be fun. We can revisit some of the same places we filmed this past time in the summertime. Take a look at them now and see the birds on the ground and really see the fruits of your labor. It's going to be fantastic. Thanks everybody for listening to the DU podcast. And once again, thanks for supporting wetlands and waterfowl conservation.