Ducks Unlimited Podcast

00:00 Katie Burke Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. Today on this show, I have Jerry Talton, Master Carver. Welcome to the show, Jerry. Glad to be here. Unfortunately, we had done this interview already at the Leland Little Sporting Fair back in February, but everybody in the background at the Sporting Arts Fair was having too good of a time and we could really hear them in our interview. So we're going to redo this in the studio so that we can hear you instead of them. Does that sound alright? Yes, ma'am. Sounds perfect. Like always in all my interviews, and we did this before, though your story's a little bit out there as a Master Carver. You've been interviewed a few times, but what is your introduction to the outdoors? Like as a kid, how did that become part of your life and what was that like for you growing up?

00:51 Jerry Talton Alright, so I grew up surfing and skateboarding and basically doing things outside but not associated with hunting and fishing. All of my brothers hunted and fished, but I did not. Later in life, I was making surfboards. I purchased a decoy for my brother as a Christmas gift and pretty much walked around with it until I was obsessed with it because I convinced myself and my wife that it was just a surfboard with a duck head on it and I could make them. So that turned in, I think I was 26 and I actually made decoys for about probably less than a year before I decided that I wanted to try duck hunting. Hooked up with a local guy who duck hunted. My brother and I went duck hunting with him and I killed my first duck in his blind, which was a green winged teal, which I had no idea that I had killed God's favorite duck to shoot and eat. Why is that God's favorite duck? Because it tastes the best. I mean it does. When he made a green winged teal, he made something that anybody can eat. People who say they don't eat duck, you can feed them a green winged teal and they say, man, that's

02:12 Katie Burke the best beef I've ever had. So tender. So you were carving for a year before that. What were you carving? Just all different species or do you know?

02:24 Jerry Talton My first duck or decoy, I guess, was a was a pin tail. You know, because everybody likes to start out with the easy stuff and I still have it. It is, we refer to it as old Nessie. It's got a body like a Canada goose and a head like a grebe. I went and bought a book. I actually went to, at the time we were living in Cedar Point, North Carolina, which is right on Bogues Sound, and we lived in a neighborhood next to our local foremost decoy expert. And I went to see him and he was kind of mean, which I'd known him for years, been doing business with him at his hardware store forever. His name was Don Walston and he had just had a stroke and he took his cane and kind of he pointed at a bookshelf up by the cash register and he said, you go buy Jack's book and you read that and you think you know something about decoys, come back and talk to me. So I went and bought a book written by Dr. Jack Dudley called Carteret Waterfowl Heritage. And I've always enjoyed history as well as anything outdoors. And it was a natural fit is what I would call it. My wife would call it a mental illness that immediately took effect. I read that book and I wanted to make those decoys and I wanted to hold them. I wanted to look at them. I wanted, I know it's very hard. I've been asked many, many times by different interviewers how to describe what it is that attracts a person to making decoys. And I honestly don't know for all of them, all of the thought and hours of dedication that I've given to it. I just can't tell you. Some people are attracted to things they see. Some people are attracted to things that they smell. When you hold a decoy, either you feel it or you don't. And I feel them. I think

04:29 Katie Burke about them. I lay in bed at night with ducks and decoys swimming through my dreams. I have a question about the transition from kind of backtrack a little bit from the surfboard to the decoy. Just because when you're talking about your first decoy and using a hatchet and a draw knife and things like that, what are you using in a surfboard? Is it anything

04:55 Jerry Talton similar? So the first decoys I made, I actually made with a hand power planer. You shape surfboards with a hand plane. That's going to mean something to some people and some people are going to have to Google it. It's a tool that has basically a flat table on the bottom of it with a rotating cutter head. And you shape surfboards with that. It's actually made for furniture making, door fit, cabinetry. That's what I'm thinking of. A Skill 100 is a preferred planer for surfboard shapers. And it's the type of planer that I had. And I use that and a Sureform rasp and an 8-inch disc grinder to make my first decoys. And I'm not proud of that, but I'm also not ashamed of it.

05:52 Katie Burke Well, I mean, that's what you had worked with before. So that's why I asked that because I didn't think it was the same thing. So how long did you work with those tools until you

06:03 Jerry Talton started trying to use the older decoy tools that are traditional? So I moved from using those to using contemporary decoy making tools of the time, 23, 24 years ago, which would be a rotary grinder, kind of like an industrial sized Dremel tool. It's made by the Fordham company. They've been around forever. I don't know what their initial use were. I don't know if they were used for pattern making. I know that they've been used in glass factories, but lots of people use them for making decoys. So I switched up to a rotary tool and I used that for several years. I ran into a guy at a decoy show and he looked at the decoys I was making. And decoys, they go through cycles. People get interested in them. They want to make decoys that look like ducks. You get into this homogenized plastic looking decoy and nothing against the guys who make those. There's artistry in all of it. But if you're making like a competition grade decoy in coastal North Carolina, it looks the same as a competition decoy made in Oregon. Well, Oregon has their own traditional style of decoy making. So does North Carolina. So does Illinois River. So does New Jersey. So does Long Island. So does Louisiana. Well, anyway, I'm rambling, but I met a guy at a show and he looked at my decoys and he said, man, they look great. You're doing pretty work. But why are you making these decoys that look like plastic decoys? And it hurt my feelings. But his name was Jamie Hand and we both share a love for hunting Martians, which is kind of a rarity these days. Not many people hunt them anymore. What's a Martian? I don't even know what a Martian is. So a Martian is, maybe I shouldn't have said Martian, but in New Jersey, they hunt Carolina rails, which is a Sora rail, S-O-R-A. The terms skinny as a rail is not referring to a handrail. It's referring to a Virginia rail. And it's Virginia rail. Clapper rail is what we mostly around here. There are birds that live in the marsh. If you're ever out on the marsh and you hear a bird and it sounds like a witch cackling off in the distance, that's a Martian. Did I dive too deep? I'm sorry.

08:45 Katie Burke No, no, no. I just didn't know. And I'm sure other people don't know. You know, it's so, I can't remember. When I was there, I can't remember what it was that y'all were calling something. And I was like, what is that? And then it's just like, you know, like just a regional way of like referring to different things. So we don't really have those. So I wouldn't know what that is

09:07 Jerry Talton in Mississippi. So y'all probably do have them in Mississippi, but it's really, if you look at old, I will reference North Carolina Wildlife magazines in the fifties. Yeah. That magazine that was put out by the Wildlife Resources Commission had Martian hunting on the cover. Oh, really? But by the seventies, it had dove hunting on the cover. And by the nineties, it had goose hunting on the cover. So it's just a bird that not many people hunt anymore. Okay. And Jamie and I share a love for hunting rail birds. So I went to New Jersey to hunt rail birds with him. He kind of preached me up on making regional decoys because he makes a traditional South Jersey decoy. And I came home and I went down East and I tried to find somebody who was still making traditional core sound decoys. And it was really only one or two guys that were making them. I mean, they're what I was attracted to just from reading Dr. Dudley's book. So I became obsessed with recreating this urge to hunt with core sound decoys. And I'm not giving myself credit for this. I almost credit the internet with it because of social media, because I had all these people reaching out to me, guys from South Carolina, guys from Oklahoma, guys from Alabama, Virginia. What are core sound decoys? What's a core sound? Because they're Googling core sound and they're getting like speaker companies. I'm like, well, it's a body of water in Eastern North Carolina that most people have never heard of. But at one time it was the premier waterfowl destination in the country. When Babe Ruth had time off, he went to core sound. So I'm rambling. You got to guide me, Katie.

11:10 Katie Burke Katie McNeil No, no, no, no, no. I have a lot of questions with this. So where is your hunting? When you meet Jamie, where are you hunting at this point? Ever since you started hunting, did you start hunting more or did it kind of teeter off and then come back as you made decoys? What's your hunting like during this transition to meeting Jamie?

11:32 Jerry Talton So the first time I went duck hunting, I was hunting open water, pretty much a brackish river. And you didn't know what you would see. We shot redheads and green winged teal the same day. Okay. Yeah, that's very different. After that, I hunted mostly on public land in the Croatan National Forest and pretty much shot wood ducks, mallards and teal. I did for a time probably 2007 time frame until 2011 or so. We hunted open water a lot. We hunted layout boats on the Neuse River, big rigs, mostly in salt water. We would put out three or 400 handmade wooden decoys.

12:28 Katie Burke Katie McNeil Okay, because that was my next question. As soon as you started hunting, did you start hunting over your decoys or how did that transition of making more realistic decoys to more of a gunning style North Carolina decoy go? I know you say how you met Jamie in that part, but how did the hunting part of it influence what you were making? If it be by species or a style like for open water versus shallow water?

12:55 Jerry Talton Jamie McNeil It didn't really. No, it's like this. I equate this. I have a tendency to create my analogies around surfing. So if you're a surfer, if you're riding waves, 99.9% of your time is spent paddling a surfboard. You will paddle a surfboard hours compared to the seconds that you spend riding waves. And hunting ducks is the same thing. You spend hours and hours and hours concentrating on duck hunting, decoys, guns, dogs, boats, environmental, what food sources are available to attract what ducks. You become a naturalist and a carpenter and a boat builder. And there's just so much in it for literally just moments of pulling the trigger. Shooting ducks is the smallest part of being a duck hunter. It's such a small part of the whole thing. And I don't know if I really properly answered your

14:06 Katie Burke question there. Jamie McNeil No, I like that answer. Yeah, it is. It is a small part. And if you're just out there to shoot ducks, then you're in the wrong hobby. Because you might as well just become a skeet shooter if you just want to shoot things. Especially if you're carving your own. That's a whole other thing. We don't do that. But I feel like it's more spending time

14:27 Jerry Talton with the people you're with and being outside. It's less of that. If you want to kill an animal, regardless of what animal it is, you have to get to know that animal and learn its habits. Once you've learned an animal's habits, the killing is pretty easy. We're using a firearm against something that's relatively unintelligent. It's running on instinct and we're running on reason. So the decoys, I have always considered them to be more for the people than for the ducks. You find out where ducks go and you go there and you wait for them. You don't need to put out three dozen decoys. You're doing that for yourself. You're going to make some people mad with that comment though. I kind of agree with you. There are some people who like to put out a lot of decoys, Jerry. At times I've been one of those people. I'll use this past year as an example. I dropped one out of the sled and of course it was dark. Wind was blowing. It was raining. It was the end of the season. We were guiding some guys. When you're guiding, especially, you're putting on a show for people. They think you know something that they don't. Probably shouldn't say that either. That might make some people mad too. I actually dropped a decoy. I shouldn't say we. I'm spreading blame. I dropped a blue winged teal out of the sled and we put the decoys out 75 yards away. Perfect setup. I mean just wind was right, sun was right, weather was right, conditions were right, there were birds in the area. I'll be daggling on if every bird that come in there didn't like that single blue winged teal. It was very frustrating watching all of the birds go to that single when we had this beautiful rig of handmade decoys out. So anytime somebody starts telling me that they understand duck behavior,

16:33 Katie Burke I'm dubious of anything else they have to say. I can imagine though, especially on you made the decoys that you're working on. I can't imagine what that's like, but it's got to be just even seeing them on the water has got to have its own amount of pleasure even if the ducks aren't

16:49 Jerry Talton coming in. Just watching your decoys out there adds to it for you. It's so rare that it all comes together, but when it does all come together, it's so much more special. Even if I'm hunting over decoys that I didn't make, which most of my rig are decoys that I didn't make. But it will. It's tough to keep mine. I got kids to feed. So somebody wants them, generally they can get them because I live at the factory. This past January, we had a photographer from a magazine with us. I'm sitting there. I've got my little 20 gauge side by side. I've got on my fancy little clothes that the magazine people sent. We've got the decoys out. Sun comes up. There's a single gadwall and everybody's opinion of gadwall is different. But that gadwall is circling the decoys like they're known to do. They'll fly in a circle for an hour and then go away, especially if there's 10 of them. But he's circling the decoys. My buddy's sitting over there pecking on a duck call. And finally that thing just decides and it comes in there just right. One shot with that 20 gauge, pop the gun open, pull the shell out, stick it in my pocket. Dogs coming back with the dead gadwall. And the photographer goes, man, that was awesome. Do you think we can do that again? Like, dude, that never happens. Never. Normally that thing would come in here and all four of us would empty

18:23 Katie Burke our guns and it would fly right out of here. You didn't get that. Usually if gadwalls are circling, they're not going to come in. And if they're going to come in, you better be looking because you wouldn't come in so fast. They're sneaky. They are. Then you're all going to fire at it and miss.

18:41 Katie Burke When it happens just right, there's no feeling like it in the world. Yeah. Oh, that is, that's perfection. Yeah. That poor guy. Was the rest of your hunt good or no?

18:51 Jerry Talton That day was tough. We did. He was with me for three days and we hunted twice one day and once another day. And it was, luckily for me, it was the best part of my season. The weather was right. We had a lot of birds. It was a good time. And we actually went on a snipe hunt.

19:14 Katie Burke Oh really? So are y'all still, this is not even, this is off topic, but we don't have like a lot of the, that like history with shorebirds or like snipe or anything like that, like the Martians and sort of thing in Mississippi. Like that's just, we don't have a big history of it like y'all do. I know a lot of those birds are protected, but I know snipe or not. Is that still, so I'm guessing you're hunting snipe. So it's still fairly, do a lot of people do that or no? I don't know.

19:45 Jerry Talton It's pretty rare. One of the guys that I hunt with mostly, one of the impoundments that he manages actually had a broken dike. So that, you know, it was just like a big muddy field and snipe. I mean, it's what they look for. They look for mud. They can easily stick their bills in and pull up invertebrates, worms, whatever. And just like a perfect storm situation. That big muddy field was right there by the lodge. We had enough guys to go out. We didn't even, I mean, of course we didn't have a bird dog. We're duck hunting. So we basically did like a driven hunt. We put some guys on one end of the field and some guys on the other end of the field. And, you know, we all cut our palms open and shook hands and promised not to shoot any low birds and just walk towards each other. And it was fun. It was, you know, the best hunts were not planned. We were sitting there in a parking lot and everybody's pulling dove shells out from under the seats of their trucks and trying to find orange hats for everybody. And everybody's wearing everybody else's clothes and shooting everybody else's guns. And it was an awesome time. The way it worked out, we were able to clean those birds and cook them

21:11 Katie Burke and eat them that night. Like a tender quail. Think Woodcock. Do you ever eat Woodcock? Yeah. Just like a Woodcock. Yeah. I mean, we get them in Mississippi. I don't know if I've ever seen them, like enough of them to do what y'all did. Like I don't think I've seen, because, you know, we have in the Mississippi Delta, we have these, I don't know if you know this, but we have, you know, lots of mud. Like our mud is known as we call it gumbo and it'll just like big muddy fields and they like them, but I've never seen enough of them to make it like. Well,

21:49 Jerry Talton I've hunted them before. A friend of mine, a guy I used to guide and hunt with Kent Hood, he and I would go out in the Croatan and you walk these hardwood cane break bottoms looking for beaver swamps. And I had a little bird dog at a time and we would always plan on shooting Woodcocks and we would, or is it Woodcocks or Woodcock? It's Woodcock, I think. I think it. Yeah. I don't know. But we would take our guns and wear orange hats like we were Woodcock hunting when we were actually looking for beaver ponds. And we would occasionally, you know, if we came up on an old beaver meadow where there was a lot of mud, we would find them. But I've never actually gone out looking for snipe. But last winter there were flocks of thousands of them. And I embarrassed myself. We had that photographer and my buddies like, those are snipe. And I said, no, man, they can't be not that many. And I tried my best to play it off, but I heard about it for a week, not knowing what to wear. That's the worst thing in the world for a decoy maker to not be able to

23:03 Katie Burke identify a bird. Well, I mean, have you made many snipe in your decoy days? I can't say I ever have. So there's your excuse right there. You're fine. I did save the wings off of a bunch of them there. Yeah. Well, now if you have so many, you might, I don't know if they decoy though, just type decoy. I don't know. I wouldn't think so. My question was before you said how you hunt on it was if they decoy, because I just assumed they wouldn't. And then you kind of said, well, you said how you hunt them. I didn't, that kind of answered my question. But yeah, I don't know if you would need a decoy. It's interesting. Let's take a quick break and then we'll come back in because I got some more kind of gone a tangent there. So we'll come back in and refocus this back on decoys. All right. Welcome back. So we talked about, you mentioned it a little bit earlier, but I'd like to kind of go back into, I guess it was you mentioned Kurt Salter and Walter Gaskell, right? The core sound guys. So did you develop a relationship with them and did that develop into you becoming kind of more active in core sound decoy carvers? What's the history of like

24:13 Jerry Talton that part of your life? A lady named Gail Jerringer, who owned a store in Betty, North Carolina, that actually sold nothing but decoys and decoy making supplies, actually sent me, she helped me probably more than anybody in the beginning. She sold me wood. She helped me draw patterns. She taught me some fundamental things that I've never really let go of. She ended up sending me down to the core sound decoy carvers guild where I managed, you know, life's all about timing. And I joined the carvers guild right at the time when a lot of those guys who were in their 70s and 80s were still making decoys, but they weren't making traditional decoys. They were making contemporary decoys. I didn't necessarily get them into making traditional decoys. I'm not taking credit for that, but my interest in traditional decoys did get them all back into making the kind of decoys that they made in their younger years. Mr. Kurt in particular, which he was more than a mentor, you know, not all of your parents are you born to. I mean, that man and his wife, Miss Martha, took me right under their wing and they were my Hawker's Island family. You know, Mr. Kurt was from sea level, went off to Korea, married Miss Martha. Miss Martha was literally the lightkeeper's daughter and they loved each other and nobody else for their entire lives. They meant a lot to me, not just decoy wise, but on a personal connection level. But Mr. Kurt, when he got back into making traditional decoys and to backtrack a little, he had actually made decoys in the 50s when he came home from Korea. So I have what I would call old core sound decoys that he actually made. And then I have decoys that I still hunt with in my hunting rig that he made for me as recently as 10 years ago. Wow, that's special. He didn't influence me so much as what I was making. This is a mouthful and I can't believe I'm about to say it out loud. I may tell you to edit it out, but I actually influenced him to make traditional decoys again later on in life.

26:37 Katie Burke My interest in it rekindled that in him. I wonder why, do you know why he veered from traditional decoys? Was it just because of popularity or what he was making,

26:49 Jerry Talton what was selling during maybe the 80s? I would say the 80s or so. He made decoys in the 50s and when plastic decoys came in vogue in the early 60s, there were guys who would ride around down east with truckloads of plastic decoys. And they would trade, they would go knock on your door if they seen a duck boat in your yard. And they would say, hey, I'll trade you these lightweight plastic decoys for that old wooden junk you got before you throw it in a wood stove. He didn't start carving decoys again until the late 70s. He grew up, raised a family, worked for Marine Civil Service a full career, retired and then got back into making decoys. And when he got back into it, all decoys were decorative. They were on the cover of Southern Living magazine. They were in movies, they were on TV shows. Even though I don't love those decorative decoys with the feathers, burned denim and stuff, if those older guys had not gotten into doing that, we may not have decoy makers today at all. All of that generation, they saved decoy making, depending on how you want to look at it.

28:14 Katie Burke Yeah, I mean, I could see that because that's what was popular because plastic kind of got rid of the gunning. And now we've kind of come back, like you and other carvers, people are re-interested in the old style decoys again and seeing those. So you had to have some sort, you're right, there had to be some sort of bridging transition where the plastic came in and kind of overtook because they were lighter and cheaper and easier to get to. You can replace them easily. You didn't have to paint them over. There wasn't all that kind of repair you had to do. You just bought new decoys. So the carvers, just like in everything, there has to be an evolution. So they evolved into selling the more decorative ones because that was what was popular in an art sort of way. And then I think now we finally just found a new appreciation for these older style decoys, which is great, especially, you know, like there's more, like you have your niece that's carving now, they're starting to be newer carvers. And I did know there would be new carvers. So it's kind of

29:20 Jerry Talton nice to see that. You and I have talked about this before, but social media, and I really think social media has played a pretty critical role in bringing back traditional decoys. In fact, I think it's kind of taken everybody back to older style guns, older style gear, handmade duck calls. A lot of people are just interested in the history of it, more so than space age duck killing technology. I mean, I see guys smoking pipes, wearing wax cotton,

30:05 Katie Burke hunting over wooden decoys. Do you notice that? Yes, 100%. Yeah, we're actually about to put on a history of DU camo exhibit. So yeah, that'll be cool. Yeah, because of the vintage camo has gotten so popular. It's interesting. I wonder, I'm trying, I don't really know. I think social media definitely has a play in its popularity. But I wonder why people have turned to it. So part of me thinks, and I'm just speculating, but like when we got the museum, Ducks Unlimited never collected their history. And then Johnny Morris was like, Hey, we're going to give you a museum. And we all of a sudden had to come up with our history. I mean, we knew what our history was, but we didn't have objects from it. Everything Ducks Unlimited ever done had sold those objects and put them back and sold them and the money went to conservation. That's just how we've always operated. And then he offers us this thing and we wake up and we're 80 years old and we're like, Oh, I guess people care. My point to say all that is, is maybe it's the first time waterfowlers, like I know that older, like the problem with collecting is that most of the collectors are older. So they are thinking about the history of waterfowling, but I think there's all of a sudden this, I don't know why, but this younger generation has gotten interested in the history of water fowling. And I don't know if that's because social media has made him more apparent and they can see it more or I'm not sure. I don't know if I have an answer to that, but there definitely has been a trend with this younger audience, these younger group of hunters that are more interested in the history of waterfowling or at least the look and feel of what it was like to hunt then. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that, but

32:08 Jerry Talton Well, I mean, I see everything and this is just one old backwater boys observation, but you see more and more people shopping at farmers markets, buying their food from the people who grew it. Everybody's got chickens in their yard. Music has taken a turn for the traditional, among the people on the radio, there's still pop music being sold to people, but nobody's buying it. Listen to the radio. Right. Nobody's buying it. There's not a record store. And it's the same way, I think, with hunting in general. I mean, you see people more and more guns with wooden stocks, more real, more tangible things. Nobody, when I'm one of my little redneck fortune cookies, as my wife would call them, when I'm talking to somebody about decoys, I tell them I try to make every decoy the best decoy I've ever made. And I tell myself that someday somebody's grandkids are going to sue each other over who gets to Jerry Touton decoys. Nobody's going to sue each other over who gets the plastic stuff. Everybody wants granddaddy's Parker shotgun. Nobody cares about Uncle Roy's plastic shotgun. No offense to all the Roy's out there hunting with plastic guns.

33:41 Katie Burke Yeah, no, it's true. That's a good point. So that brings me back to your carving. So was that always your mentality when you were carving? Or when did you start kind of thinking

33:52 Jerry Talton that way of making it like each one to be that special? I would say after I encountered Jamie Hand, I was of the mindset that I wanted to make 100 decoys. I wanted the old photos that Stuart Krister took of Ned Burgess, where he had five dozen decoys on sawhorses. That's what I wanted to do. And I never, up until that point, had slowed down to make one good one, not putting down my early work, even though I would burn most of it if I could get my hands on it. But something my grandfather used to say to me, he would say, I don't do fast work, son. If you do good work, you'll get fast. But if you do fast work, you'll never get good. And it's very simple. I mean, just kind of a backwoods country thing to say. But if you think about it, it's the truth. If you do the best you can every time you do it, eventually you'll be

35:05 Katie Burke pretty fast at it. Well, I also imagine you're not going to, just in terms of your client, they're not going to be disappointed that it took too long and it's as good as it is. You're not going to make too many people angry that you took too long, but you delivered the quality that

35:24 Jerry Talton you're delivering. Well, I don't know about that, but I could always be faster. But one thing I will say for myself is that I don't lie to people and tell them I'm fast. I tell them I'm slow and I tell them if they really want one, they better stay on me or reach out to my wife and

35:44 Katie Burke stay on her because she's the only one that can force me. All right. So I have a hard question for you that you might not like. So with that in mind, what do you see in the future of your decoy making? Like, where do you see it going? What goals do you have for it? It's a pretty broad

36:03 Jerry Talton question. So that's not, I don't mind answering that at all. I see myself making decoys for the rest of my life. And as far as where it's going professionally, I'm getting to the age to where I'm thinking more and more about making decoys as work. I have a lot of ideas. We have an old farmhouse that we're restoring. And this is me talking about me. I don't mean to sound like I'm promoting anything, but we're restoring an old farmhouse. And I can kind of see me turning that into a decoy carving school, like a destination kind of thing. Not for daily classes, but like if somebody, you'd be amazed how many people reach out and want to take lessons. But that's impossible to do in a non-residential situation. Right. So would it be like a residency type situation? Is that what you're thinking? I don't have a plan. I just have an idea. But yes, there's a guy, can I name drop somebody who I barely know? Through one of the events that I did with Garden and Gun Magazine, I met a man named Bill Oyster who makes custom bamboo fly rods. And he is in the mountains of Georgia. And he has basically a bunkhouse and a classroom on his property. And people come from

37:31 Katie Burke all over the world to learn to make fly rods with him. Nobody does that for decoys. No, it's a great idea. Where are you? Are you where you are now in the Core Sound area? Yes. I'm actually in Western Cartaret County on the White Oak River. I married a girl from this end of the county. So this is where we'll be forever. So a reason I asked that is that's significant. Because if you're going to have this place where people come and are residents to learn how to carve decoys, I think you want them to also be able to experience the area and the history of where these decoys were made and hunted and the marshes they were hunted in. It needs to be more than just being in one location and being with a carver. But I think it adds more to it that it's also the location it is in. It does. It does. And I don't have a plan. It's just an idea. I probably shouldn't even be talking about it. Well, maybe by saying it, you put it out there in the world and this will help people hold you accountable. So now people are going to hear this and they're going to be like, Hey, remember you said you're going to make that thing. Well, I'm working on it. I'm moving in that direction. So yeah, that's a really cool idea. That is what my little brother would call my old man plan. My old man plan. That's a good one. I like it. So we've been doing this for a while now and I've taken up a lot of your time, but is there anything that we haven't talked about that you would like to add? Now, see, that's a hard question. I know it's a big question. I don't know. Make decoys. I do have one that we didn't talk about because we mentioned your niece and a little bit of work with younger carvers. Can you speak on what that's been like? Because she's a good carver now. You talk about with residency carvers, I'm guessing you're going to get a different group, mostly adults, but I want you to talk about a little bit with

39:37 Jerry Talton your work with your niece and younger carvers. So the Core Sound Decoys Carvers Guild does a lot with youth and we also try to continually have classes that are just for ladies, which I know you're not supposed to do stuff like that anymore. But there's a lot of ladies out there who hunt. I mean, you're a fine example of that. And there's nothing for them specifically where they don't feel like they're in a boys club. And I'm just telling you what I've been told. I've never actually personally experienced it. But Camille actually, my niece Camille, she's my youngest brother's oldest daughter. She just turned 18. She started carving in a class for youth a couple of years ago. And she's kind of, she's growing up, she's farming, she's making decoys, she's growing micro greens, going around and selling them at different farmers markets and stuff. And there's a thousand people doing that. But she's this cute little girl at the farmer's market. And she's over there with a hatchet chopping out decoys. So she's really just doing her thing. And I took her hunting for the first time last year. She had tried to hunt on her own. They actually have some pretty good duck habitat on their farm, but nobody, she's had a couple of the local boys offered a teacher to hunt, but really they're just coming out there to hunt their swamp. So we went several times last year and she's really into it. She's really good at it. She's so good at it. I'm not allowed to

41:34 Katie Burke brag on how good she is here in this house with my daughters. So they don't want to hear me bragging on her. I'm glad to hear that, especially that she's doing it that way. There is a history of women in decoys. It's hard to know really how much, I mean, they're always known, especially in the Illinois river as painting the decoys, but I don't think we'll ever really know how much they really were involved. People say, oh, they weren't, but I don't know if they were going to be recorded that much to begin with, even if they were involved. So it's hard to say how much Carver's wives did in projects and things like that. So it's nice to see that they're doing stuff with women because it has been, you know, it's, they're very few. I mean, I can name the women Carvers on one hand and it's not a hard, I mean, I wouldn't even tell them Carvers, they just painted them.

42:31 Jerry Talton Well, I don't know a lot of, I guess Joe Heyman up in Curry Tuck County, his wife was known for recovering canvas decoys and painting them. I mean, people would bring, after hunting season, they would drop off 500 decoys to be recovered and repainted. And it was fairly well known that she was the one doing it. The other two I know are, Catherine Elliston painted all of his and then Edna Perdue. Right. Those are both super famous, right? Illinois River. Yeah. And they were, they painted for both of them. So. And here at our little decoy festival, we have a featured Carver every year, like most decoy festivals do. And we have had Joe and Sue Fulcher were featured Carvers and Gail Jeringer, the lady who kind of got me started, she was a featured Carver at our show. Jennifer Taylor was a featured Carver at our show. And this year, Miss June Bryan is a featured Carver at our show. That's quite a few. Yeah, that's great. Having two daughters and trying to raise them with the mindset that they can do anything a boy can do that. And Miss Gail, I can't oversell her influence on me in making decoys. She really, she was the first person that was nice to me and willing to talk to me about making decoys, about what to use, how to start, how to go about it, what to use as reference material.

44:12 Katie Burke She was good to me. And that may be why I feel so strongly about having the ladies involved. Yeah, that's great. All right. So with that in mind to finish, if you could just in a sentence give a piece of advice for someone starting out, what would it be? Gracious. I'm going to quote Captain Hurricane Pete Peterson. And such a small thing, but he says it all the time, full steam ahead. Perfect. Well, Jerry, thank you so much for coming on the show. It has been fun. As always, it's always fun. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Jerry, for coming on the show. Thanks to our producer, Chris Isaac, and thanks to you, our listeners for supporting wetlands and waterfowl conservation. you you you you