Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Katie Burke: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I'm your host, Katie Burke, and today we have a special guest, Jamie Hand, carver here, and we are actually here in Cape May County, New Jersey, at his shop. So that's a little bit more special. If you are listening in the car and stuff, you might want to Save this one for later and go to YouTube and watch this online, because this is gonna be a little more visual video one that you'll get to miss a lot of stuff. So, Jamie, welcome to the show.

Jamie Hand: Well, thank you. I'm glad you can come down and see me.

Katie Burke: I know, I'm excited. Well, I started doing this last year, you know, with Pete and Grayson and we just had audio then. And then it's just so much more fun to get to actually be in your shop and see what y'all do. And especially because a lot of our listeners like are hunters and stuff and are in the outdoors, but they don't really necessarily know that much about the carving history and that there are carvers and what it's like to be in a carver shop. So now we kind of get to bring that to other people, which is really cool. and I know you're all about teaching people, so.

Jamie Hand: Yes, I am.

Katie Burke: Yeah, we'll get into that. Let's not skip ahead. So let's go back. So how did you get introduced to the outdoors? Did you grow up here or how was that like transition for you?

Jamie Hand: Well, my family's been hunting waterfowl and deer and everything else down here in Cape May County since the 1690s. Oh, wow. The original, settlers here were what they called Whaler Yeoman, Anglos that came down from eastern and western Long Island or New England in the late 1600s and came down here for more whales to hunt and cheaper land and what they left behind. So my family's been hunting here, you know, again, about 330 years. And the county's only about 10 miles wide and 35 miles long. So it's a good part of it. I knew my backyard. And I had an interesting route to the Corbin decoys. My grandfather, Harold Teelhan, how's that for a middle name? It's a surname. He was a famous local hunter. My father was a war hero from World War II. He hunted a little bit, but I think he lost his taste for hunting after killing guys in Italy. My father died young. When I was 14, I bought my first shotgun off the street for $14, a single-shot Harrington and Richardson goose gun. And my teenage friends, we duck hunted. We had no decoys, we had no boats. We were lucky to have a pair of red ball hip boots. No neoprene waders yet. Red ball hip boots, a box of shells, and a gun. And we'd go what we called jump shooting. Or we'd sit on a freshwater pond here in this maritime county. Ducks are feeding on a salt marsh all day. Right before dark, they come into freshwater ponds and then we'd be there. We knew where the ducks wanted to go.

Katie Burke: Are there a lot of hunters in this area? Were you stepping on any toes?

Jamie Hand: Not like it used to be. There's a pretty well-known article from Forest and Stream magazine from the 1880s and it shows It lists all the waterfowl guides from Cape May County, both the Delaware Bay side and the ocean side, all the way up to Tuckerton and Manahawkin. And Cape May, this is late 1800s, Victorian days. Cape May County had about 30 hunting guides, waterfowl guides, including about 17 at the city of Cape May, the oldest beach town in America and a tourist town. And when I started, I hunted for quite a few years with my friends, just jump shooting ducks. And then I decided I needed decoys that would benefit me. I didn't have the money to buy them. And I wasn't that into working yet. And so I started carving on my own. How old were you? Probably 18 years old. and I worked by myself for a couple years. In fact, Grace and Chester, the famous carver from the Eastern Shore, we both come from a region with a rich waterfowl and carving tradition, and both of us used the same book to get started, How to Carve Duck Decoys, by a Connecticut carver. And we interviewed him for a documentary, my filmmaker and I did, and I couldn't believe it. Eugene Conant was the author. And here, he's from a rich eastern shore of Virginia, and here I am from the Barnegat Bay, Jersey Coast region, and we both had that influence on us in the beginning. After carving for a few years, I met Harry Shewitz III, a Tucker family that moved to Cape May County, and he became one of my mentors. A few years after that, about the time I started carving, I also started collecting, which is usually the case in this day and age. I, a few of my friends told me, people in the decoy business said, you ought to go meet Hurley Conklin, up in Manahawken, an hour from here by car. And I've never gotten an award or given a talk related to decoys where I don't first mention my two mentors, Harry Schwartz III and the late, great Hurley Conklin. They're both long gone. And I always include with that, I say, Harry let me watch him, Hurley took me under his wing. And that makes a difference. So a lot of what I do today, nobody mistakes my ducks for Conklin decoys like they did in my earliest work. But to this day, my simple stylized paint patterns are influenced by him big time.

Katie Burke: Yeah, so, all right, so since you're here in Cape May County and there's so much history, were you seeing wooden decoys as soon as you were start, like, before you even duck hunting, or were you always knew there were wooden decoys? Like, you were seeing them constantly. So that was natural for you to think, oh, I'll just make them.

Jamie Hand: Yeah, starting out, duck hunting here at 15 years old, that was probably the last thing on my mind, you know. We hunted ducks and, did other things teenage boys in those days, but I I never thought about decoys much until I decided to make them. Nobody ever hunted with these decoys, even though Cape May County has a rich tradition. Two of my distant cousins from the past, Ephraim Hildreth, a well-known decoy maker from 120 years ago, I guess, and Amos Wheaton, two Cape May County carvers. They're the two best-known Cape May County carvers. They're both relatives of mine. but I started carving on my own, that's all.

Katie Burke: So at what point then, yeah, you're carving them for use, right? Yeah, I was carving them to use. And then when did you realize people might want to buy them?

Jamie Hand: Well, I went to a decoy show that didn't last long up in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, about an hour and a half from here, up the coast, and I sold my first decoy, a redhead drake, off of Harry Sheward's table. So that was the first sale.

Katie Burke: Did you know him already at that point?

Jamie Hand: Yeah, that's after I'd met him. We became good friends. How much did you sell it for? I can remember selling decoys when I was in my early 20s to Cameron McIntyre's father. To Dick McIntyre? Dick McIntyre. I'd sell him teal three for $100. That's actually not too bad. Mowers, Black Ducks, $40. And again, I like to say that I was, the reason I make decoys, I was too lazy to work and too nervous to steal. So I decided to make decoys. But the truth be known, there's nothing else I wanted to do. for the rest, we have to make a living. And my friend Bob White, my friend George Strunk, my friend Pete Peterson, my friend Grayson Schesser, one thing we all have in common, if you ask us, whether we've been carving 50 years, 60 years, or 40 years, or 15, 20 years, like the master carver Jerry Toughton, We never get tired of it. We still look forward to going out to our shop. We may not like what you want to order from us, we want to make what we want. Fortunately, once you get a reputation, pretty much anything you make, somebody's going to buy it sooner or later.

Katie Burke: I talked to George this morning, we talked about it. Eventually, you don't have to do that anymore. Whatever you want to make, somebody's going to buy, right? You're not having to do that. But for a while, yeah, you're having to make to start building that reputation. I guess, how long does that take? Are you visiting shows pretty often in that early days?

Jamie Hand: Well, it's not something that happens… I've made a living most of my life as a carver. I've been carving 52 years. I haven't had a job for 45 years. That's the last time I got a paycheck. But it's not something that happens overnight. I worked as a carpenter pounding nails in the summertime. In the wintertime, I'd trap furs, muskrats and raccoons, which was pretty lucrative back in the 70s and 80s. When Ronald Reagan was president, that's when I made the easiest money I ever made in my life. Little fact you don't need to know. I started carving and I mentioned all the hunting guides in Victorian and early Cape May County. When I was a young decoy maker, even making a living at 27 years old, I'm carving full time, there was no such thing as a hunting, waterfowl guide in Cape May County anymore. And one day somebody walked into my shop you know, two miles up this road from here, and said, can I hire you to take me hunting, duck hunting? What? You know, you might as well ask me, hire me to play pickup basketball or play catch with you. And so I started taking out a handful of gunning parties. I never wanted to make it a business like Grace and Chester did. I didn't want to take the fun out of it. And so I would take out, you know, a dozen customers a season, you know, early season wood duck hunting. And later we have, on the salt marsh, we have black ducks and brent. But our ancestors, as I like to say, I don't care where your ancestors are from, at some time in history, they ate anything that moved. And I had ancestors that were market hunters here, professional duck hunters. They'd kill all the ducks they could and ship them in barrels up to Philadelphia and Trenton and New York, just like they did down south to Baltimore. And they ate mergansers, they ate everything. Nowadays, all my career, I've encouraged my gunners to only shoot what takes good.

Katie Burke: Right, yeah, I have funny stories with my dad about that.

Jamie Hand: You know, a teal and a mower trumps a black duck. Oh yeah, don't shoot a shovel. A black duck in freshwater is as good as a mallard.

Katie Burke: Yeah, in Mississippi we shoot a black duck, it's a mallard basically.

Jamie Hand: In a salt marsh environment, I call black ducks the frat boys of the duck world. I didn't even realize that until I was here. If we have a hard freeze and the only open water is a hole in a tidal stream along a bridge or a culvert under a highway, they'll gorge on minnows.

Katie Burke: So you might as well be eating a red breasted merganser. So last year I went hunting with Cooper, who we were talking about, and John Dieter. You know, my brother killed a black duck. I remember when he killed it. He got a double-banded black duck. I think I was probably in the ninth grade, and he was like a senior or a freshman in college. And I'll never forget it, because this big group of Mallards coming in, and all of a sudden, we saw a black duck, and all three, like we all, his friend was there, like, black duck, black duck. And then all of a sudden, he takes like four steps in front of us, and we're like, and shoots the black duck, blocks us. And we're like, what are you doing? And he comes back, he grabs the double bands. I'm like, I'm so excited. And we were so excited. So when I came here to come hunting, I was like, oh, I'll get to shoot a black duck. And then Cooper's like, they don't taste good here. And I was like, what? I didn't even think that there would be a difference. And I ended up shooting gadwalls of all the things that I shot.

Jamie Hand: And you don't know. Again, they can be, as I always like to say, a black duck can taste like a London broil or a skunk. Okay, you don't know. You don't know.

Katie Burke: Do you know when you breast it what you're going to get or no, not until you cook it?

Jamie Hand: No, not until you cook it, but early season, warm weather, they're going to be pretty good. Okay. Here in South Jersey, you could go 45 minutes from here and be hunting black ducks in a flooded cranberry bog or a cedar swamp. Yeah. or a pond with corn on it, and they're gonna be tasty. Usually it's just bitter weather, cold weather, if they're eating minnows. We're in the same, you could shoot a teal, and a mallard, and a black duck at that same time, and the teal and the mallard will always be good. It's just the black, again, it's like a college boy eating cold pizza for breakfast.

Katie Burke: Yeah, okay, I get it. All right, so there's two things I wanna go back to. So let's go first. which is kind of more of a history of the area. So if you had a lot of market hunters here and you're talking about like, sometimes you had a lot of guides. So were there any like, are there any famous lodges and stuff down here? Like that would, they would come to, I'm guessing the train came down at one point and brought hunters. And they would hunt in the winter and then maybe they'd switch over to like resort stuff in the summer, right?

Jamie Hand: They not only did all of that, but they, I'm a historian, as well as a folk artist. I subscribe to a site that has millions of historic newspaper articles, and I can show you dozens and dozens of articles. They had sports writers, just like Gray's Sporting Journal, back in the 1850s. And so we know what they did. And we had, We even had a couple of United States presidents come down to Cape May, and they'd go down to Cape May and shoot shorebirds on the beach in August. Their wives and children, tourists, their wives and children might be on the beach doing what they called sea bathing, going to the beach, while they're on the end of the island or out on the marsh, which we call meadow, salt meadow, We don't call it salt marsh, it's a… Salt meadow? We say salt meadow, most old-timers call it meadow with an A on the end of it. Bob White and I hunt rail birds in a wild rice meadow.

Katie Burke: Yeah, yeah.

Jamie Hand: Okay, so it just means marsh. Yeah, yeah. But it's something that's been that way for 300 years here. Yeah. But they not only would hunt shorebirds in Cape May or any of these barrow islands, but predominantly Cape May, because that's developed already. And then they could take a carriage or train up to Morristown, which you would pronounce Mor-ree-stown,

Katie Burke: I say Morristown.

Jamie Hand: Yeah, but it's spelled Maurice. It's named after a Dutch prince, Maurice. And they would, you could go up there and push for a sewer rail, which the old time was called Carolina Rail, as opposed to Virginia Rail. And what we also hunt on the salt marsh here, clapper rails, which we universally call marsh hens, excuse me, mud hens, the southern boys, call them marsh hens, all the way from Carolina around to Texas. They call them marsh hens. Up here, it's a mud hen. And they're better eating than most ducks, rail birds, by the way.

Katie Burke: You can still hunt. Those are some of the few you can still hunt.

Jamie Hand: Sewer or rail, the old name is Carolina rail. You're allowed 25 a day. And clapper rails, you're allowed 10 a day. They're a lot bigger.

Katie Burke: Yeah. When are you hunting those now?

Jamie Hand: We hunt those September 1st. A generation ago, from my generation, They tell me in September 1st, there wouldn't be a boy in school around here. Because they're all out mud hunting. And now a lot of them are on skateboards and playing with their computers. But there's a lot of, I've had old guys like me say, ah, it's a shame, it's dying out. You know, these young guys. I say I have young guys collecting decoys, I have young guys getting into hunting.

Katie Burke: I got a little five-year-old boy who can't wait.

Jamie Hand: And by the way, DU has a lot to do with that because there's, I've told people, go online and anywhere you go in this country, there's probably some chat room, forum, whatever you guys call it.

Katie Burke: Oh yeah, and now the huge thing is… You can meet a local. Yeah, do y'all have the trap teams up here? Like down there and like at public schools, we have trap shooting teams.

Jamie Hand: No, not that I know of.

Katie Burke: Yeah, and that's huge.

Jamie Hand: My 24-year-old son loves to shoot skeet and rifles and hike mountains. He just had a Halloween party a few weeks ago, and he had 25 people. I've watched him teach girls how to shoot of all ethnicities, suburban kids that never touched a gun in their hand.

Katie Burke: No, it's definitely, yeah, it's definitely not going anywhere. And yeah, no, I got a five-year-old right now who, actually, I FaceTimed him this morning, and Andrew, he texted me back, my husband texted me back, and was like, oh, I think Russell made your dad's day today, he said. He started crying, saying, don't go look for ducks without me.

Jamie Hand: That's great.

Katie Burke: And he was like, I think it made his day. He started crying, he thought he was gonna get left. Yeah, that's great. So he's like, do a scout for ducks today. But no, it's definitely going. The other thing I want to talk about, you mentioned all the carvers that are around your age, and you had obviously mentors too that were older than you. There's just such a prolific amount of carving along this eastern shore, and this not even, I mean mile-wise, it's not that long. How did that influence you as a carver, and how did that community kind of I guess, spur you along to keep going at this? And what's that like to have that? Because you have carving in other places in the country, but for the most part, they're fairly solitary, but here it's completely different.

Jamie Hand: And I'm sure the decoy shows have a lot to do with that. I have, I teach, for Jerry Townton's Coors Sound Carvers Guild, I teach a carving seminar every June. And I've done, George Strunk came for the Philadelphia Maritime Museum, which you've heard of.

Katie Burke: Yeah, I used to work there.

Jamie Hand: I used to work there. I did at least one year, maybe a couple years, I did a weekend seminar, and they'd carve for two days on a weekend, and another weekend they'd come back and paint them. And one year I brought George Strunk as a guest painter so they could soak up his aura. and learn a little bit from him. And he's not crazy about doing demonstrations like that, but he had a good time. But the shows, decoy shows, helped spread that camaraderie. And me personally, Again, any time I gave a talk, I always mentioned my two mentors, Hurley Conklin and Harry Schwartz, but I also say I've made thousands and thousands of decoys. I never wanted to make them, I wanted to make gun and decoys. I don't have much ego for a decoy maker. There's a little bit of ego out there. I just wanted to make a good, pretty gun and decoy, just like Pete Peterson does. He's not making slicks, he's making gun and decoys. But what always meant more to me was the people that I was able to pass it on, pass it forward.

Katie Burke: Yeah, that's part of my next question.

Jamie Hand: Like Herloy and Harry did to me. And there's a woman in Ohio, Laurel Dabbs, a Navy wife, I taught her to carve 38 years ago. And Cooper mentioned in the podcast with you, it made me blush when I listened to it, because I almost believed everything, nice thing he said about me.

Katie Burke: Nice thing he said.

Jamie Hand: But he said I probably taught more people to carve than anybody alive, and he's probably right.

Katie Burke: Yeah, so I have a question about that. So what was it about Harry and those two guys that they did that make you want to pass it on? Like, was it generosity of them, like, helping you, and then you felt that on?

Jamie Hand: To be honest with you, I just think it's my nature. Hurley, I work with a guy that's up in Ocean County, Tuckerton and Manahawken area. And he mentioned to me at our Tuckerton and Dequay show this year, he said, I didn't know this guy five years ago. And he says, it amazes me that you were pretty close to Hurley Conklin. He said, I heard he was a miserable old guy. And it shocked me to hear him say that because he said he had a reputation for being a grumpy old man or whatever. And I said, he couldn't have been nicer to me. He'd drive down here an hour to go out to dinner with, with me, and maybe he just liked me, but he always shared, he wasn't afraid to share what he, and most people are like that. Grayson shared with Cameron. Everybody's influenced by somebody. And so, for me, it's just my nature. I like helping people. And so, yeah. George Strunk has helped plenty of people get into carving, and some of them will do it for a little while and give up on it. Others will stick with it. You don't know ahead of time, but you still do it.

Katie Burke: Can you tell if someone's gonna stick with it?

Jamie Hand: I sure can. What I used to do 30, 35 years ago, I would teach in a decoy-making class at a local elementary school a few miles north of here, an adult night class. And I remember one year, I had about 12 students. Among them, I had a physician, I had an architect, and miscellaneous good old boys, and one little housewife. And I would have, ahead of time, I would have said the architect has the edge. He's used to doing his thing. Well, the natural in that group was the little housewife. And so you never know. And one thing I've noticed, and I didn't mention it, besides formal classes that I've done in the past, now I only do the one for Jerry Toutin. aside from the former ones, I have people that find me here and they ask me to help them. And I call them my stray cats. And they become friends. So I might have three, a week and a half ago, I had three guys sitting here carving. That young policeman that was just here, I taught him to carve eight years ago. And now he's selling decoys and honeydovers and decoys. But they get to be friends with each other. So.

Katie Burke: Right, you're creating all these communities and bringing people together.

Jamie Hand: Yeah, and… So how did you get to know Jerry?

Katie Burke: Did he come to you? Jerry… Because that's, you know, he's all the way down there.

Jamie Hand: The National Endowment for the Arts, for some years they gave the Ward Museum grant money to hire master carvers from the mid-Atlantic states at the time, New York and North Carolina. our contract, we picked, we chose six students of our choosing, and we had to do a 16-hour seminar, two eight hours, four hours, whatever. I went down, and in the contract, we had to take our students' project, whether it's a curlew, a black duck, or whatever, take it to an open show in October, not the nationals, but the nationals, a decoy show they had in the fall. And we had, each master carver had to enter his six students' work in their contest. Probably the first year I did that, I also, you could tailgate there, so I was tailgating. My wife and eight-year-old son were there, and I had two full-size swans on the roof of my truck, and we make our jersey coast ducks around on the bottom. Mostella River, Philadelphia-style water as well. And they can roll. And so my son's jumping in the back of the pickup truck and Jerry Towns sees a swan ready to roll over. I was in a tent yapping with the other master carvers like this. And she talked to him and said, come back, Jamie, we'll be here later. And that's how I met him. The next year, they hired me again. I picked six students. One of them was Jerry Town. But he had been there with Brother Gaskell, master carver from down there. And so one year, he was one of my six carvers. And he says this in our documentary, From the Marsh. He was making wooden decoys like everybody else in the country made that's competition grade. And wooden decoys that look just like plastic decoys. And I said, why don't you make decoys like your heritage, your tradition. I told George Trump the same thing a thousand years ago, as did other people. Yeah, he said that today, that you told him to start making Delaware River. Make what your area does.

Katie Burke: How many people do you think you've taught at this point?

Jamie Hand: Oh, that's hard to say. I'm sure maybe 150 people. I'd say dozens and dozens, but I know it's more than that.

Katie Burke: So of those, say, 150 people, how many do you think are actually still keeping it up?

Jamie Hand: Well, some of them actually make a living at it. I mentioned Laurel Dabb. She's not real well known in the decoy world, at decoy shows, but she's found her own niche. She's listed as a folk artist in Early American Life magazine, and she does high-end craft shows where she's the only carver, and she does well. She makes a lot of shorebirds and songbirds, but she can make a gun and decoy just like anybody else. And a lot of people make decoys part-time just for theirself or gifts. And if you're a decoy maker, you never have to buy anybody a toaster for their wedding. They usually want a decoy.

Katie Burke: Alright, so let's go into all this right here. I want you to walk us through a little bit of what you've got. You've got doves in front of you, correct?

Katie Burke: Yes.

Katie Burke: You hollow out everything, right?

Jamie Hand: Yeah, traditionally we hollow out ducks, anything bigger, a duck or bigger.

Katie Burke: So you would say, is it, you do Barnegat Bay style?

Jamie Hand: Yeah, Barnegat, and I don't like that term because the three most famous carvers from that region are Rolly Horner, Lloyd Parker, and H.V. Schwarz, the first. And they were all from Tuckerton, they gunned Tuckerton Bay. Barnegat Bay's a little further up where my mentor, Pearlie Copeland's from. So it's not accurate, right?

Katie Burke: Yeah.

Jamie Hand: Just like when they refer to a rail skiff, a lap strike rail skiff, as a Delaware ducker, you'd think it's from the state of Delaware. It's a Philadelphia, a Delaware River boat. The tributaries on both sides of the river are mostly New Jersey. and that's where they're built. But anyway, I make a Barnegat decoy. If I make my great-grandfather Ephraim Hildreth copies, they're a little different. A lot of carvers will make reproductions when they feel like it. So I'll make Hildreth shorebirds sometimes and, or ducks, you know, brand off of his pattern. But as a rural miner, basically, you know, what we call Barnega Bay decoy hollow made out of Atlantic white cedar. Here we call it swamp cedar or Jersey cedar. Down South, they call it juniper.

Katie Burke: Oh, I did not put that together at all.

Jamie Hand: Yeah, even though juniper is the eastern redcedar that you have in a blanket chest made out of, or a closet lining, and it's what we use for fence posts, and it's a lot more rot-resistant than whitecedar, but it's too heavy for decoys. So they call it juniper. They call it juniper. That's not the proper name, but up here we call whelks, conchs. We have a conch industry. It's like a giant snail in the ocean. We don't have conchs. Florida does. We have two different kinds of whelks, but they're sold as conchs. You can call it whatever you want. But anyway, I make a I've been carving for over half a century. If you asked me 30, 40 years ago how many of my ducks are used for hunting as opposed to being used for their folk art value, I would have said maybe 20% are used in hunting, 80% of them are bought for decoration. And I can't say that now. Now I'd say probably half and half because a lot of people buy my decoys to hunt with. They may hunt with them for three months and put them on a shelf or hang them from a beam the rest of the year, but they're buying them to hunt with, especially my dove decoys. And here I just happened to be working on a dozen of my deluxe model doves. And again, Jersey decoys and Philadelphia and Delaware River decoys are made hollow, but usually shorebirds or anything small, we didn't bother doing that. I don't know that I make my doves hollow. It's just a novelty. It makes them lighter. people appreciate them more. But it also, instead of using three-inch cedar, I use two-inch-and-a-half pieces for the body. But here's what I end up with. And these are a deluxe model. Both of those are six pieces of wood joined together. The body's two heads, the wood's scooped out in the center, glued together because I turned the neck on them. The head and neck is a separate piece, that's three. There's an oak dowel up through the neck for strength, that's four pieces of wood. Oak dowel for the bill, that's five pieces of wood. And then one wing will be inserted One wing will be carved in around the body, and the other wing will be inserted out of a harder wood. This is sassafras wood. It's a hard wood, but it's lightweight. And so that makes it a stronger decoy, you see? And I sell these. I made 14 doves a while back in the beginning of the summer and I don't have any, that's why I'm making these.

Katie Burke: That's going to be a flyer.

Jamie Hand: See the flying bufflehead up there that needed a repair I made years ago? That's going to be a flying dove. And I could just make flying birds and make a living at it. The flying decoys, which Ira Hudson was probably the first one to make. I could probably just make a living just doing flyers if I wanted to, because people like them, and they don't need a shelf. They don't have any shelf space.

Katie Burke: Yeah, if they don't have shelf space, they have a spot they can hang it on the wall, right.

Jamie Hand: Yep.

Katie Burke: Yeah. So did you go to make these? Did you get an order for a dozen, or did you just were like, I want to make a dozen, a little bit both?

Jamie Hand: I always encourage people, Never make one. Make two, and you have one to sell to somebody else. When you're a novice carver, you don't want to make too many at one time. The quality will drop. Forty years ago, if I made a dozen teal, I think the 11th and 12th one might not be as good as the first. You might not spend as much time on each one. Any more, I can make a dozen teal, and it's as good as if I made one. I'm still at the point where I think I'm getting better. If I live long enough, you start to decline in your skill. But that hasn't happened yet, fortunately. I would recommend any novice or intermediate carver, once you master, learn the basic skills of how to make a decoy, it's a waste of time. It's not efficient to make one at a time or two at a time. Make four. And especially in painting, because you're mixing up colors. When I make a green-winged teal, there might be 11 colors on it. I don't have one hanging here. You're mixing, everything's custom mixed in oil paint. It's not efficient to mix up paint for one duck.

Katie Burke: Yeah, I'll grab one.

Jamie Hand: Yeah, see here's a pair of Greenwing 2 out of my gun and rig. This pair I just made. you know, a month or two ago. I made 14 of them. I had two left. I'll give these to my son. I haven't had him stamp his initials and the date underneath, but I will, so I don't sell them out from under him. But these, again, my paint patterns are stylized, very simple painting. The concept was that decoys could be made to where the average hunter could repaint them in time. most equities got repainted. That's why the ones going off at Guy and Dieter's auction, as we speak, the ones in original paint are worth so much money. Because the paint wears off.

Katie Burke: You get banged around, get shot a little bit.

Jamie Hand: But again, when I mix that dark green, hunter green, you might call it, that pale yellow, that gray, everything is, that's three colors, that's white, black, and a little bit of brown. So it wouldn't be efficient to just make two.

Katie Burke: Yeah, and I'm guessing how, you go back over paint, like does it take a couple of days, because you have to wait for it to dry, or do you go through all at once?

Jamie Hand: A lot of the guys that make slicks, they use artist oils. A lot of times they'll mix it with Ronin or Rust-Oleum. So you're using Rust-Oleum for the most part. I use Rust-Oleum and Ronin. Sometimes I'll use Rust-Oleum gloss or satin to give it more body.

Katie Burke: Yeah, Pete does that too, right?

Jamie Hand: Yeah. But, So this is pretty quick drying. Japan is a type of paint. It's not a brand name. It's a type of paint. Yeah, I learned that today.

Katie Burke: It's the first thing I learned. That's what I learned today.

Jamie Hand: It's fast drying, where artist oils can take a long time. And remember, some of the Philadelphia decoys, and probably the only decoys, antique decoys that are painted in artist oils, or some of the Philadelphia school, like Arthur Vance and John Blair, and probably, or perhaps, Elmer Kroll up in Cape Cod. The rest of those, all the Schuertzes and all those other ducks, they were painted with house paint.

Katie Burke: In fact- Well, a lot of them were house painters.

Jamie Hand: Yeah, the earliest decoys in Cape May County, there are two of the earliest, chronologically, the two earliest carvers, Amos Wheaton and E. from Hildreth, their ducks almost look like they're painted in dead flat milk paint. They're not using lead-based oil paint like H.V. Schuer's and Rolly Horner guys are. And you don't see a lot of color on them anyway. You know, one thing, I tell all my students, you think black and white make, what color does black and white make? Gray.

Katie Burke: Well, it's supposed to make gray, but I paint and I know it doesn't.

Jamie Hand: You have to add a little brown. A little brown in there. Black and white makes bluish gray.

Katie Burke: Yes, it makes bluish gray.

Jamie Hand: So there's a little brown in there to take the blue out. Yeah. And so when H.V. Schwartz painted bluebills, blackheads as they call them down your way, he probably didn't have to add any blue in the building.

Katie Burke: Yeah, we call them bluebills too. Do you?

Jamie Hand: Yeah, yeah. Carolina, then Virginia going blackheads. But he probably didn't have to add any blue to the, he just used black and white paint and he gets a bluish gray build. Yeah, that's right. So these aren't even from the same, that's a Barnegat top view, that's a Barnegat pattern. That's my great-grandfather Ephraim Hildreth's pattern. It's like a teardrop. But they're both 10 inches long. One of George's, not a carving mentor, but a counselor, if you will, from up in Delaware, told me that he used big oversized black ducks and mowers to hunt with, cork decoys, big ugly cork decoys. But he said, you got to make teal small. Teal won't come in the big decoys. And I think plastic teal might be 11 inches long. I used to make mine 11 inches, like Hurley Conklin, long and skinny. That's his style. When I cut them down to 10 inches, they work better.

Katie Burke: Yeah.

Jamie Hand: Yeah.

Katie Burke: I wonder why.

Jamie Hand: Well, just the way they are.

Katie Burke: We can't really ask him, can we? Yeah, you can't ask him. Okay, so you make extra every time you do it. Yeah.

Jamie Hand: I never make one, there I'm making, I had somebody order an Osprey last, I drew an Osprey pattern, that wing will fall off, that's just tacked on. This, Here's an osprey. About 20, 25 years ago, I drew a side view pattern of an osprey freehand, because I felt like making one. And for the last 20 or 25 years, I'd occasionally find that pattern, and I'd put it on my carbon bench or on a shelf to get in my way, to remind me to make one. And I never did. A year ago, a young couple that are friends with my wife and I asked me to make her husband, if she could order an Osprey for her husband. He likes, he's a fisherman, hunter, he likes Ospreys. So I made three. And before I, I was making one for her, before I finished them, I had the other two sold. And I made three, then three more people wanted them, so I made three more after that. And so here, these aren't sold. I'll take these to North Carolina in a month. The Harker's Island decoy show. It's one of the few shows I still do. Tuckered in, and if you see one of these, Grayson Chesser or Pete or George Strunk in a decoy show, they're going because they feel like it, not because they need to go. They can make as much, we can sell a decoy without leaving our shop. but it's a camaraderie, it's a continuation of when we started.

Katie Burke: What did you make the bill out of?

Jamie Hand: That's really hard cherry wood.

Katie Burke: Okay.

Jamie Hand: And again, I've seen amateur carvers make a songbird with the bill or a shorebird with the bill out of the same softwood. It'll break in a day. If you're a decoy maker, you're trying to make a a handsome product, but at the same time you want to make something functional that's going to last.

Katie Burke: Right.

Jamie Hand: Okay, and so that's why that bill, it's a lot of work. That isn't just glued on there, that's carved down to a round dowel. It's a round mortise, it's sunk in there. And especially where that goes across grain, that's why that would break off really easily.

Katie Burke: Yeah, is it hard for that, since it's so hard to carve across that cross grain?

Jamie Hand: It's hard because it's hard wood, it's tough. But sharp tools,

Katie Burke: Yeah, tell me, talk to me about your tools and why, how long have you had this and all that stuff? Because I don't think people realize the importance of y'all's tools.

Jamie Hand: Again, it's real traditional, even the carving bench we use. Behind us, you can't see, I have a What is called, a lot of people call it a schnitzelbank, that's a German word. In America, in an Anglo community, it's called a shaving horse. And they use that for making cedar shingles, they use it for making the backs of chairs. Barrel makers use it, you clamp down on it and you'll see people carving that way. In South Jersey, nobody that I know of ever used that historically. They use this, my mentor Hurley Conklin and Harry Schwartz III both use the same bench. and they didn't know each other until later years when they were doing decoy shows. And if you ask three generations of Shords, Rolly Horner, Lloyd Parker, Harry Hurley Conklin, why they use this bench, where it came from, they'd probably all say, damn, define that. But because I'm part good old boy and part academic, I do my research, and Roy Underhill, the master housewright at Colonial Williamsburg, in one of his books, he shows this bench with the little, I call it a stairway to heaven. See this little step? We all have that. in Jersey, he calls this a chairmaker's bench, from an old tool catalog in Europe in the 1600s. And in any city in the coast of America, and even any big town, you're gonna have a guy that makes chairs for a living. And so somebody up in Barnegat Bay area, Tuckerton area, said, that'll work for making decoys. And we only use this ledge for one thing, when we're spokeshaving, and, When I spoke shave this bird, and by the way, we use a spoke shave forward. A lot of the Southern boys do it backwards.

Katie Burke: Oh, do they? I haven't even thought about that, but you're right, they do.

Jamie Hand: Whatever works. But that's all that ledge is for. On my Instagram page, I show me spokeshaving a swan, and there's one showing me spokeshaving an osprey. If I'm making a teal, I'm sitting up here. A teal body, you put it against my belt and there, and it holds it in place. George Strong's is a little different. He has a secretary's chair, and he rolls over and he has this.

Katie Burke: On the wall, yeah, it's on the wall there.

Jamie Hand: And Pete Peterson has a U-shaped one so it doesn't get away from you on his bench. He stands up and does it. But if I'm spokeshaving a teal, I'm here. If I'm making a black duck, I'm here. A goose, I'm here. If I'm spokeshaving a swan after I chop it with a hatchet, I'm standing here. I'm up here like this, spokeshaving. So the traditional way, the old timers didn't have a bandsaw like we have today. Most of them didn't. I suspect my great-grandfather, Ephraim Hildreth, he was a pretty wealthy farmer and ship owner. In the 1850s, he could take a cedar plank stand to Cape Island, the beach town. They had, in the 1850s, steam-powered millwright shops making Victorian 10-foot doors and all this fancy stuff. And I have a brand by him that the seam is plain so tight, I don't think it was done by hand, especially not by a farmer, a rich farmer. And a lot of guys, they would just draw the top views, saw it out with a handsaw, and then we use a hatchet, a spokeshave, and a knife in that order. And a curved gouge to scoop them out inside. Where nowadays, I can take a Forstner bit and a half-inch heavy-duty drill and drill, take out half the wood, then I clean it up with a gouge.

Katie Burke: Yeah, you can drill down.

Jamie Hand: But it's nothing like a light hollow decoy. You know, even cork decoys are heavy, solid cork decoys.

Katie Burke: Yeah, and then where do you chop out your decoy?

Jamie Hand: I chop them right here. I chop right on this bench. So I chop, smoke, shave, and whittle on this bench. My mentor, Harry Schwartz III, he would have a pine stump next to his bench, and he would chop, he'd turn and chop. My mentor, Hurley Conklin, would chop right on his bench, and you could eat a bowl of Cheerios out of the hole he made in his bench here. And I did that on my first bench, so now I make a little block that you can see. I chop on this. That saves the bench.

Katie Burke: Yeah. I didn't think about it yet because George, he has a stump. And Pete does his outside of his shop. I saw when I went to him, he had like a stump outside. So yeah, so you're chopping right there. And then, so I'm guessing the bigger, you're also having to stand up too, like if you're doing a swan.

Jamie Hand: And yeah, if I was doing a swan, I'd just be standing here chopping on this board. Yeah, we were talking about the tools I use. Traditionally in South Jersey we use a saw out the rough shape with a handsaw or bandsaw. Then we use, from there it's a hatchet doing a lot of the work. Most of the wood removal is with a razor sharp hatchet. Then we use a spokeshave where Maryland guys might use a draw knife.

Katie Burke: Okay.

Jamie Hand: We use a spokeshave instead of a draw knife, and then a knife. But I also, my mentor Hurley Conklin taught me to use a round wood rasp. Most old decoys, especially plain gun decoys, we're not talking Elmer Crowls, you'll see a saw kerf where they sawed out the profile of the head. That's a little line that didn't get carved out or sanded out. And Hurley taught me to use a rasp. to rafts, and even on these doves I'm doing, you can see I already rounded the neck and the front with a wood raft. So I do that on every, if I'm making a swan, there I'm making a copy of a Lloyd Parker Canada goose. Anything I make, I use that wood rafts as well. And here's, this is an old black duck. George Strong bought this about 15 years ago at a yard sale about 15 miles up the road from here in a little old boat building town. And even though it was here in Cape May County, he and I could tell by looking at it, it's not only from the Barnegat Bay, unknown maker, it's from the Barnegat Bay, but it's from the upper Barnegat Bay. That's how regional this stuff is. And he paid $20 for it, and he gave it to me, just to be nice. And so I've been showing people this for the last 15, 20 years. And the point I wanted to make out, the man that carved this 100 years ago, He never thought anyone would see inside it. But look how clean that is, the craftsmanship. He used a skinny curved gouge, skinnier than I used, I can tell by the footprint of the grooves. And we leave extra wood at the front because we make a raised neck shelf. So we purposely leave extra wood here.

Katie Burke: Okay. And I guess that keeps it a little sturdier, too?

Jamie Hand: Yeah, yeah. But he didn't have a planer, so when this stock was put together, it didn't fit tight. So he would put cotton caulking that they use in a boat seam and white lead or red lead paint, which is extra thick paint, to seal that. And he used iron, look at all the iron nails, they didn't have good glue. You can see the cotton, they called it cork.

Katie Burke: Yeah, you can see it, it's like coming off.

Jamie Hand: They'll say, an old guy, an old timer would say, a cork and iron, that's what you hammer the cork. It's caulk, but they call it cork. that's the nails rusted out. Now I use stainless steel. I still glue, we have good quality glue now, but I still glue everything, but I also nail them, but I use stainless steel nails.

Katie Burke: They're never gonna change.

Jamie Hand: Old timers had better, good wood, better wood and better tools a lot of time. What they didn't have was good sandpaper and good glue. So some things in modern life is bad.

Katie Burke: Some things have gotten better, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like, because y'all keep the same tools forever too, don't you?

Jamie Hand: I've had this spoke shave for 45 years. And I don't use this hatchet much anymore. I've had that my whole career. And when I was maybe 19, 20 years old, I was working as a mason's laborer. And this is a good, small, plum hatchet, plum brand. They make different size. Harry Sheward's hatchet was heavier model. I like this lighter one, and I worked for a stone mason, a bricklayer, and we used this hatchet to chop the dried mortar out of a gas mortar mixer, a machine that mixes cement to put between bricks and stone. And I said, hey Nick, can I have that hatchet? And I've had that ever since. I've worn about three quarters of an inch off the blade. And I haven't been carving with this for the last 15 years. I use a more modern hatchet. But I had an old carver gave me one identical to it about 20 years ago, and I was using that for a while, and then I gave that to Jerry Towton, so he has it. So he's like me, we both love artifacts.

Katie Burke: Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm guessing just because you're from here and your family and stuff, like you have this connection to the history here, which that helps a lot. Yeah. All right. So before we wrap this up, is there anything we haven't talked about that you want to mention on?

Jamie Hand: Let me see. One thing that's interesting, people don't think about a lot. Most decoy makers are, not all, but most decoy makers are duck hunters, but they're also bird watchers, which today we use the term birders. That sounds cooler. And remember, here in this county of mine, that I'm proud that my family's been here 330 years, full-time. It's only 10 miles wide, 35 miles long. They hold the world series of birding here. Every year. Do they really? Yes, they do.

Katie Burke: I didn't know that.

Jamie Hand: And there's a precedent for it. That famous Scottish immigrant, Alexander Wilson, he said, If birds are a good judge of climate, then Cape May has the best climate in America, for it has the largest variety of birds.

Katie Burke: That's crazy. Do you know why?

Jamie Hand: Well, he came here. He didn't go to Texas or California. But also, in our documentary I'm going to send you on your phone, it's my baby. It's called Winnegunning on the Meadow. It's a quote out of my Ephraim Hildreth's The First Journal. Okay. He said, when a gunning on the meadow shot one duck, but the ice carried it away. This is 1790. And then he spends the next two weeks making a skiff for the meadow to hunt ducks. Building a duck boat. A skiff means a small duck boat. But anyway, Alexander Wilson came down here. The city of Cape May is known as America's first seaside resort, but up until the Civil War, it was called Cape Island. When someone like Alexander Wilson referred to Cape May, he meant the county. Cape Island was the town, Cape May is the county. And so now you have the city of Cape May in the county of Cape May. But anyway, I wanted to point out that most car decoy makers and most hunters are bird watchers as well.

Katie Burke: Oh yeah, and we were talking about Cameron earlier. We talk about this a lot. And I think about this with my dad, too. Especially the older you get, the more you hunt, the more ducks you shoot, you tend to stop shooting as much and you start watching a little more.

Jamie Hand: Unless you're Bob White.

Katie Burke: Unless you're Bob White. There are some duck hunters who can never get enough.

Jamie Hand: Yeah, anymore. The only gunners I take out are friends and they don't pay, or my son. But I can remember 40 years ago when I'd go to a lot of work and, you know, put hunters in a, guys that most of them don't hunt a lot, but I'm putting them in a situation where they can really have a good day. and they screw it up some way or another by missing or shooting too soon or too late. And I might keep it to myself because I'm getting paid, but it would aggravate me quite a bit. Well, now the times I go out hunting, I get soft hearted in my old age, now a lot of times I root for the ducks. So I don't mind when they miss. They just scare them a little bit. You know, I feed ducks on my ponds out back year round. You know, wood ducks, I'll get a few black ducks on my ponds in the woods back here. But I'm happy to watch them.

Katie Burke: Yeah, me too. I like to shoot them too.

Jamie Hand: If you put a shotgun in my hand and there's teal flying, I'm 14 years old again.

Katie Burke: That's true. You know, that's true. You think, oh, I like to watch ducks, but a certain day, you've got a perfect day.

Jamie Hand: Yeah, yeah.

Katie Burke: I like to shoot them.

Jamie Hand: Yeah.

Katie Burke: Well, Jamie, thank you so much for doing this. This has been great. Well, it's my pleasure. Yeah. Thank you so, so much. All right. Thanks, Jamie, for coming on the show. Thanks to our producer, Chris Isaac. And thanks to you, our listener, for supporting wetlands and waterfowl conservation.