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Ducks Unlimited Podcast is a constant discussion of all things waterfowl; from in-depth hunting tips and tactics, to waterfowl biology, research, science, and habitat updates. The DU Podcast is the go-to resource for waterfowl hunters and conservationists. Ducks Unlimited is the world's leader in wetlands conservation.
Katie Burke: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. Today's episode is the second part of my interview with Joe and Donna Tonelli. If you haven't listened to that, be sure to go back to the episode that released earlier this week. I hope you all enjoy. I want to hear more about your finding these decoys a little bit more and some of the, so when you would hear from somebody that would have something, like, how often were you expecting that it wouldn't be that great versus being something special that would be there? Like, what are the percentages of Great find versus nothing.
Joe Tonelli: You'd go. Okay. You'd hear, I mean, I was obsessed finding decoys. So, you know, one year I must've found 2,000. And I mean, again, but you knock at the door and they're talking to you. But in Illinois, they stored most of their decoys in gunny sacks. And you were there, and you'd just walk down, and they'd say, yeah, here's some. And they'd reach up and pull down a gunny sack from the rafters, and clunk, clunk, clunk. And your heart would start beating. What the hell's in there? And you'd dump them all out. And they could be beat up masons, victors, or they could be Purdue's or Ellison's. It was a good high, man. It was exciting. It was a high. I mean, I found… Her and I, early on, we went to Lake, and we looked up a guy by the name of Boob Nool. They were guides in Lake, and him and his brother. And I seen him, and grouchy old guy come to me, and I said, I hear you got some decoys. Yep, a lot of them, kid. And I says, could I see them? He said, you got the money to buy them? I says, I think so. He said, they're expensive. I said, yeah. He said, I got about a hundred of them, 125, but they're a buck a piece. I don't think you got that. I says, I got that. And there we go. And he, he lived in a half house. They just built the basement and he lived in the basement. They never built the house. He had all those decoys in there, haul them all up. And that, that, that was a lot of fun. And I've had them stop, people throw them at you in the gunny sacks, just clunk, clunk, clunk. A lot of decoys, a lot of them.
Katie Burke: Yeah. So when, how did you start, I'm guessing just time with decoys, but learning the different carvers and knowing what you'd found. Like I'm sure in the very beginning you really didn't know what you were finding.
Joe Tonelli: It sounds like I'm bragging. I don't know anybody knows more about these Illinois River decoys than me. I don't think that's really… Honestly, and I studied and I talked and I studied and I memorized them and I studied and studied them. And I had so many go through my hands, like literally 10,000 of them went through my hands. And so, and you got to know them. and you got to meet peoples. And then people started writing books about them and more decoy shows and more decoy shows. And then along comes the auctions. That changed a lot.
Katie Burke: So what about the auctions changed things? For the good or bad? Both. I'm just curious.
Joe Tonelli: I work for Guyette and Dieter. I've worked for him for 40 years as a representative and I help him. If, if you're selling things and you want to, you don't know what you're doing, they're great. And you didn't have the opportunity to knock at doors. That's over. Uh, I mean that knocking at doors, finding gunny sacks of decoys for a buck or two or a piece is over. So the auctions have brought them to a point, a high point of value, extremely high point of value.
Katie Burke: Which definitely changes, of course, like who the collectors are. Right.
Joe Tonelli: Well, some people don't like the auctions because of the prices they have to pay. Well, don't go.
Katie Burke: Yeah. I mean, there are other ways, but then there are, if you're not you, you too, and you don't have the knowledge, like it's not as safe as it is if you are at an auction, right? Like you have more of a guarantee.
Joe Tonelli: Right now, the greatest collection of decoys privately owned is by Jim Cook.
Katie Burke: Okay. Yeah. And he, he bought quite a few last. Oh, yeah.
Joe Tonelli: No. Around 1980, I was living here, had a whole bunch of decoys and I was a cop in town, which I had it made cause I was Sergeant on a second shift, eight to four. And I could go duck hunting every day. I loved it. And I could run around by decoys and you know, and along come Jim Cook. 1980, and we were at decoy show on Oshkosh, Pioneer Inn, and I'm watching him. He's buying decoys, buying decoys. Pretty soon, I said, how many decoys you buy, Mr. Cook? He said, about 125. What do you think? And I says, not much. He said, what do you mean? I says, not much. I says, you got a lot of money. evidently you got a lot of money. He had a black coat and gold. He was, he was a gold, gold and silver broker. Okay. And, uh, he says, okay. And about an hour later he come back and he said, what do you think of this? And he had an Ellison canvas back. I said, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. He says, guy wants a lot of money for it. I says, yeah. How much? He says, $400. I says, well, he said, what do you think? I says, I think you better buy that. And, throw away all that other garbage you bought." And he said, what do you mean? I said, just what I said. I said, that's worth more than those. Huh. And he walked away and she says, well, you sure screwed that up. You're never going to hear from that guy again. I said, well, okay. About a week later, the phone rings and it was him. He said, you know a lot about decoys, don't you? I said, yeah. I think I, and I was a smart ass then. Excuse me. Sorry. You know, you're young. I said, yeah, I know more than anybody. Oh, I shouldn't have said that. And nobody knows more than anybody. That's a wrong statement. He says, you know a lot about ducks too, don't you? And I said, yeah. He said, I've been asking around about you. I said, yeah. He said, like duck hunting? Yeah. He said, I just bought 12,000 acres in Northern Minnesota. How would you like to come to work for me? running it, make a duck refuge and a hunting club, and you can buy decoys for me." And I said, uh-huh. I mean, what's this? Am I dreaming, guys? Long story short, today I'm still working for him.
Katie Burke: Oh, really?
Joe Tonelli: Yep. He's got the best decoy complexion in the country, and he had a place called the Willow Sippy Club, in northern Minnesota, we had 12,000 acres and we dug… Nicole Rottenberg, J.D.:
Katie Burke: : Where's he based out of? Jim Stegman, M.D.:: Pardon? Minneapolis. Nicole Rottenberg, J.D.:: Oh, he's at… Okay. I don't think I realized that. For some reason, I assumed he was… Jim Stegman, M.D.:
Joe Tonelli: : Well, there's other parts. He had 12,000 acres there, about 1,500 in Minnesota and another 3,000 in North Dakota, which he just gave to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And we dug potholes after potholes after potholes and blasted them with ammonium nitrate and wide pad cats. And this lasted till the mid-1990s when things went bad in his business and he had to get rid of that 12,000 acres. And he's still collecting decoys. And he's got the finest collection in the country. Sometime you should go up there and see that. If you thought Ellen Hayes' collection brought a lot of money, wait till Jim's comes up.
Katie Burke: So this is I don't know when you say that it brought a question to my mind like when these Collectors come in through the auction for the most part I find That have a lot of money and they're starting out and they come to these auctions, right? And there's there's a few people in mind that I think of Jay Coochie, for example was one they show up and they just buy a ton said you said Jay Coochie and Oh, he's a fabulous stuff. Yeah, and they just come in and they buy everything, right? They're just buying. Well, he bought collections. Yeah.
Joe Tonelli: I mean, he bought collections big time. Yes. Yes.
Katie Burke: Yeah. I believe Howard Harlins is an infamous one. Yeah. And then, so why do you think these like big money collectors come in and just kind of, Instead of, instead of like figuring out what they like, they just kind of accumulate, right? So is there a reason why they do that? Or is there just like, do you have any idea? Cause that's, well, it's something specific about them.
Joe Tonelli: Cook bought a lot of them with me. with the exception of two or three deals we did where we got a bulk one at a time. Jay Cucci bought one at a time, but he bought whole collection, like Howard Harlems, Timmy Webster's, and so on. He'd buy truckloads at a time.
Katie Burke: Do you just think they don't really know it? I'm guessing your job in that with Cook is that you're then figuring out what he wants as a collector and then helping him find and refocus that, right?
Joe Tonelli: Well, early on, he didn't know where to go. I knew all the old collectors. I mean, you know, he had his own jet and everything, and we'd get in the jet and fly out east, go and visit this collector with a whole bunch of cash, go and visit that collector with a whole bunch of cash, and he'd buy the best, the very best. I would only let him buy the best. Now, decoy collections, it's not how many. It's how good. And he's got about 600 of them. the best that there ever was, and he's picked them out. Now, we did a couple of sweetheart deals. I did a big sweetheart deal with the Audubon Society collection of Shang Wheelers, and so on. But, you know, the auction houses are good for people. Some of the other, this is, there's huge collections.
Katie Burke: Tudor Jones.
Joe Tonelli: Never been to a decoy show or an auction in his life and has one of the fabulous collections of decoys. Because he just bought them from the auction companies or piles them. And that's a good example. A lot of other people, there's Mr. Peterson. I don't think he's ever been to a decoy show.
Katie Burke: No, he was supposed to come this year to Chicago. It was supposed to be his first one. He didn't come. And he's got a spectacular collection. Oh yeah. Spectacular. You should go see his Native American collection.
Joe Tonelli: Oh, I know it's endless. I was in Tudor. Tudor had a hunting club in Cambridge, Maryland.
Donna Tonelli: Yep.
Joe Tonelli: And he had to donate and got a little trouble with the state over some crap.
Katie Burke: Yeah.
Joe Tonelli: Yeah. It was spectacular.
Katie Burke: I know. I haven't heard anything about his collection of wine.
Joe Tonelli: Well, he isn't doing anything, but he's got a collection of crulls and other things that are just unreal.
Katie Burke: I don't even know where it's at anymore. It's in Georgia. I do know that. Yeah.
Joe Tonelli: At his plantation or whatever.
Katie Burke: Yeah, so when it was at, when the museum opened, we had it and we basically, we were the holding place until the property was built. And then once he built, because he built display for that. So it's there. No.
Joe Tonelli: I mean, he's got a million dollar decoy.
Katie Burke: Yeah. It's, yeah. It's a great collection. It was fun to have. I got to look at it for like a whole year. But the Audubon, Shane Wheeler. So how did that, is that a deaccession that they did?
Joe Tonelli: All right. I'm sitting around here. I'm working for Cook. This is like 80. Oh, I got it there. The exact date, 80. When was that Don? 83, 4? And Alan Haid, who they did Souls Collection, he was a great friend of mine. And I think Alan probably knew more about decoys in general than anybody I ever met. And Alan used to come here and stay and hunt ducks with me. He hunted ducks here with me in Illinois, he hunted ducks with me in Saskatchewan, him and Frank Schmidt for 20 years in South Dakota. But he loved decoys more than anybody I know, more than me. And Alan called me up one night and he says, hey, I heard something. And I said, yeah, what's that? He says, the Audubon Society is going to sell all those Shang Wheelers they got. I said, ah, BS. He said, I'm telling you, it's on the QT. They're taking seal bids. And this was like on a Monday or Tuesday. He said, we got to have a seal bid in for the whole collection by Friday at 8 a.m. or 10 o'clock a.m. I said, are you serious? He said, yeah. So I talked, called up Cook. Cook says, buy them, buy them, you know. So I said, Alan, what do you think it'll take? And there was how many, Don? 80 some? Yeah. Yeah. And Alan says, I don't know. He says, they're taking bids on them. And the only other guy I think that had wind of it was Donald O'Brien.
Katie Burke: So I had Alan draw- Which makes sense because he was pretty involved with Audubon.
Joe Tonelli: Oh, he was involved. Yeah. There's a lot more to this. Yes. So Alan draws up this proposal. We're going to pay them $286,000 for the collection and we're going to put it on display. We're going to sell half and keep half and put it on display and they get to keep one duck. And we, Alan presented it to the board and Alan called us up. He said, they took it. I says, really? The next day I got in a plane, flew out there. I flew out. One of the ex policemen from here helped me. We went to the museum. The museum was no bigger in this room. It wasn't a museum. It was a shed. They had all these decoys. on shelves, not the glass cases or nothing, behind plywood. We had to take the plywood down. There they were. So long story short, We sold off a bunch in about a week, 10 days later. Mr. Cook had all his money back and 40-some Shang Wheelers for free. And then all the bolognese stole up. Oh, man, new articles called Mr. Hate a carpet bag, me a young punk from the Midwest, steals the crown jewels of the decoy world out of Massachusetts and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It worked out good. It was a good, great deal.
Katie Burke: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's nothing. I don't know. I guess as someone who like did the whole museum thing and, um, have a background, like that's what my, my master's is in museums and Philadelphia. And there's always like, Whenever anything gets deaccessioned, right, people get so upset about it. There's nobody, which I think it can be silly, and I won't get into that on this, but there's, and I'll probably make some people mad if, I don't think any museum people are listening, but they get really upset about deaccessioning, but it's kind of reality at some point. If they need, if you don't have the endowment or the funds to keep something running, then you shouldn't have, you shouldn't take care of something you can't take care of, right? It's better that Cook has it and is taking care of it than being somewhere it's just going to sit in the back room and get dust on it, right?
Joe Tonelli: They were never taken care of. They never bought them.
Katie Burke: They never bought them. So they were a gift. Given to them.
Joe Tonelli: Yeah. Shane Wheeler died. Yeah. In, in, uh, Remington Arms Bottom.
Katie Burke: Remington has quite a collection of art too.
Joe Tonelli: So Remington Arms Bottom. And there was two guys went over and picked him up. This was like in the forties, right after the war, maybe 1950. They gave them, they gave the state a thousand dollars for him. So Remington didn't know what to do with him. So they gave him to Audubon. And these two guys, I know him. One was Bill Johnson. They're driving over there. with them, and they looked at each other, they said, they were both hunters, and Bill Johnson says, I'm gonna make some decoys, I'm gonna take a couple of these for patterns. He took a cork black duck and a cork bluebill. Now, who was the other guy, Walters or something? Anyway, he took a couple decoys, but one of them he took was that sleeping canvas backhand that just sold in April. at Guyette and Dieters, and they gave the rest to Audubon. Audubon got them, never did nothing, but put them there and put the things on them. And so they could have got way more money if they would auction them, but it worked out for us. But I'm affiliated with a couple of museums. There's museums, I wish they never had the decoys. One of the worst ones is the Milwaukee Public Museum, and this is gonna make people mad. Unbelievable collection of guns and decoys. They're not out. They'll never be out. The state of Illinois, Joe French, he gave decoys to the state of Illinois, St. Louis Museum, Henry Ford Museum, they're not out. Now the state of Illinois said we don't want them, we can't put them out. They gave them to the Peoria Museum. Peoria Museum is fabulous.
Katie Burke: Yeah, that exact does a great job, yeah.
Joe Tonelli: Now if you take the people who gave those decoys at the Ward Foundation, I have to tell you what happened at the Ward Foundation.
Katie Burke: Yeah, I know. It's sad. All that stuff is, where is it?
Joe Tonelli: Exactly. It's on storage somewhere. Shelburne Museum. Wonderful. The Long Island Museum. There's a Long Island Museum with stuff's buried.
Katie Burke: Yeah. And this is not a popular opinion. Now, if I was going to be devil's advocate, but this is what the museum argument would be. But when you know the decoy community, it kind of is a mute point, right? So the museum argument is that, well, we're preserving the objects. Caretaker. We're caretaker, making sure they last. But obviously they don't know the decoy community in that the collectors are caretakers, right? So it's not that they're not gonna just go. So in this community, that's a mute point. It doesn't really, it doesn't work. And then with my museum, unless it's our history, Ducks Limit's history, I try not to collect much because I don't have a big space. So I don't want it to sit in a back room, right? And I have found with collectors and loaning things, I haven't had a problem with loaning collections. And it works for both of us, right? They take a lifetime of work that they've done, they've put all this passion and resources into collecting these birds, and then they get to show it off to the public for a year, and then they bring it back.
Joe Tonelli: I don't mind them de-assessing at all.
Katie Burke: I don't either. I don't, I don't either. That's not my. These other museums. I'd rather them do that than stick them in a storeroom.
Joe Tonelli: They're in storage in basements. I'm telling you, I know where there's, oh man.
Donna Tonelli: Yeah.
Joe Tonelli: Just it's, I get it. They won't talk about some, they won't show them to you. You got to make an appointment. Maybe they'll show them to you and they won't.
Katie Burke: But that, and I can say, That's how we've been taught. And it took me, I think I'm lucky in that I grew up in Ducks Unlimited, and I grew up hunting, and I grew up around all of this. And then I went and got the museum education. Because in museums, when we do education, that's what they… Like I had a whole class about this legal stuff and deaccessioning. And you're taught that you're not allowed to let people in. And it's definitely a culture that's happened. But then I got lucky in coming here and coming to you and being a part of, and getting to be a part of Decoys. And I just, yeah, I just don't have that mindset at all. And I'm glad I never. had it. I think it's good. I don't know, but I don't think it's, it's a shame sometimes. I mean, I get it with certain things. Like one thing I'm trying, I want to do is, um, I don't know if I'll be able to, but kind of make an extensive archive, right? Because paper materials and research, is easily destroyed, right? It's harder to take care of, and not everyone has the resources to take care of that stuff. And I'm sure it would be nice for Donna and other people, historians, to have a place that has a lot of it that they can access easily and get to, right?
Joe Tonelli: Well, the Peoria Riverfront Museum. They're doing it at Zach's. Yeah, well, and they paper stuff. Zach loves it. Yeah. I mean, I had all that Purdue stuff. I had so much Purdue's literature, record books, rule books, this letters that he wrote from 1890s, that all went to them. Oh, that's great. They take care of it and they want it. The Illinois State Museum, they didn't even want it. They didn't even want it.
Katie Burke: Yeah. And that's, I think that's like Zach and then Corey at Shelburne, you know, they're very focused on their areas. And whereas with Ducks Unlimited, I get the opportunity, I can expand out. Absolutely. I do all things waterfowl. So the things that can't go to them can come, we can manage too. So that's, it's nice. Yeah, I think the collector is honestly the best place for some of these things to kind of make their way around and then continue. I think it's hard for museums to wrap their head around the fact that of the changing of ownership and how that's actually fine. Right? Because it's fine that things go to auction and then go to another collector because the collector is going to take care of it. The auction house is going to take care of it. There's not, no one's going to intentionally get rid of anything. And I think they have a hard time, like, I guess it's just a new way of thinking about it. Sure. Yeah. I have a question about the research stuff and when you're going back for some of these things. So now that these carvers are not around anymore, for the most part, and you're having to write. Well, first of all, how do you pick what you're going to write about? Okay. Is the joke kind of… Yeah.
Katie Burke: I mean, I find little things that I find interesting.
Katie Burke: Yeah. And does he give you ideas? Sometimes you're like, nah. Oh, he's my source.
Katie Burke: Nah. I mean, I've been around, but like I said, I had three kids, one, two, three. And so I wasn't free to just go whatever. Yeah. But he's got that information in his head and he loves, he's probably the best public speaker I know off the cuff. Yeah. I mean, obviously.
Katie Burke: He's done a very good job.
Katie Burke: Research, you know, the stuff that's been written before, even stuff that I wrote in the 80s. Right. When I started working with Joe Ingers, that I was just picking out stuff that I heard and what have you. With the internet, all of a sudden you have it. You can correct things that have been made. Charles Walker. They always said he died in 1954. And I'm looking for him in 1954, there's nothing. He died in 1953. Changes everything. One of the best and most exciting thing and research that I ever did was the story on the G.K. Schmidt Purdue. This was a rig that was found, it had been stored in a bank, came out in the 60s, and they were sold for what, $3?
Joe Tonelli: That wasn't the best. The research? No, the best story you ever did was the Mr. X.
Katie Burke: Oh yeah, that's another one. Okay, we'll go to Mr. X then.
Katie Burke: But what happened with the Schmidt decoys though? I want to know.
Katie Burke: Okay. G.K. Schmidt, they have these Purdue's and he's got G.K. Schmidt burnt on the bottom. And they came out. Well, who was G.K. Schmidt? Nobody knew. Maybe it was a guy that owned the Schmidt Water Company that was found. Yeah, but that was the one from Wisconsin. Through research, I found that he was city comptroller for the city of Chicago when they had bootlegging. Everything was outlawed. He was going to, Big Jim was going not to run for mayor, and he was going to. Well, that blew up because Big Jim changed his mind. You're in the middle of Prohibition. He was a banker, G.K. Schmidt, and he was a hunter. He had a fabulous gun collection, but there was a rich man. Nothing was mentioned about decoys. He moved from Chicago to Lodensport, Indiana, bought an old brewery because he was German and a brewer during the Depression, so obviously it was bootlegging. And the decor's turned up, but nobody knew anything about him. I was able to track him down. The way I tracked him down, when Tandy Lacy was working on the Purdue book, and Dave Gallaher was buying up everything, and he had these rule books, and we were there and flipping through them. And there was address for the original order that George, it was George Schmidt from Chicago with his address that he ordered 144 produce. He had every species, a dozen of every species. By having his address and the date of him being in Chicago, you get into all this history. and find out I couldn't find anything about him in Chicago. And then I found an obituary that he died in Indiana. And then all that comes up. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. And he ended up having, when probation was over, he had the brewery. Huh. All right. Mr. X. Who's Mr. X? Mr. X was his decoys. Not his decoys. That's the other story. No, the producers were all.
Joe Tonelli: from the beginning of time, like when Joe French was the first guy here collecting decoys. He started in the fifties in Illinois. And he founds little birds and they showed up all over. From then on till, I don't know when I found that Donna, when was that? Eighties? Everybody called him Mr. X. Hollow bird, inletted bill, patent applied for on the bottom, weight in the inside of the decoys. Nobody knew who made them or where they come from. Well, one day I'm someplace over there in Hennepin, I'm digging around. I found some decoys. I found a couple hunting magazines and one was from like 1905. I open it up and there's a folder. There they are, the George Sibley Decoy Company, Whitehall, Michigan. And they were the makers of the Mr. X decoy. And from then on, Donna wrote the whole story on them, and George Sibley, and he belonged to the Hennepin Shooting Club. That was a big gun club in Illinois that don't exist anymore. One of the finest one there ever was. And he started making those decoys right in Hennepin, then moved to Whitehall, Michigan, and started a little factory making them. So that's the story of the Mr. X.
Katie Burke: How long were they being traded around before you found that?
Joe Tonelli: I don't know, 40 years? 40 years. Yeah, nobody knew who they were. They were called Mr. X.
Katie Burke: That was from the article that Joe French wrote. He had three decoys, X, Y, and Z. Yeah. The Mr. X was the only one that hadn't been identified.
Katie Burke: Okay. Let's go back to, we'll put a pin in it. Fish decoys. Let's go into the fish decoys a little bit.
Joe Tonelli: So the fish decoys, that's something a lot of people don't realize.
Katie Burke: Oh, wait, I'm from Mississippi. I didn't know what a fish decoy was.
Joe Tonelli: No, all right. Fish decoys were made in Minnesota, Michigan, some in New York, very few in Wisconsin. All right, getting back to Jim Cook. So I go up to northern Minnesota. 1980, I'm running this hunting club and refuge and digging potholes and planting well rice, rice paddies, and putting up wood duck houses and started our own Canada goose flock, our own bands on them, Willis-Ippie Refuge bands on ducks, releasing canvas backs, all this stuff. I'm looking around for duck decoys. Well, Northern Minnesota duck decoys, Again, two two-by-fours or silhouettes painted black. The good ducks in Minnesota come from the southwest corner. But I started finding, looking for these duck decoys, these carved fish. And I says, boy, these are nice. I started buying them and buying them and researching them and researching them and buying fish decoys. It's a whole different field. It's limited because they're only made in three states. And they were made for spearing under the ice.
Katie Burke: Yeah. They're cool. And they're so colorful and so different.
Joe Tonelli: And there were literally thousands in Minnesota.
Katie Burke: Okay. So, cause I'm dumb about fish decoys and ice fishing. Okay. Explain to me how, I don't think of how it works.
Joe Tonelli: Okay. You got to, first of all, the water's got to freeze. Right.
Katie Burke: Yeah. And you have to cut the hole in the ice. All right. All right.
Joe Tonelli: What you do, you get a, they call it a dark house. It really looks like an outhouse. Now you could, some of them are really elaborate, nice wooden ones. Some of them are just a tent. And you go out there and you figure out where a good spot is in the water. You wouldn't try to get in deep water. You might try to get in water under six feet. Okay. You cut a hole in the ice. Now you're in it, call it a dark house because you're in there, there is no windows. And the sunlight comes down from outside into the lake and you look down in that hole, it's all bright. So you get this fish decoy and you put it on a stick, I call it a jigging stick. and you sit there and you pull it up and down, and the fish decoy, a good one, it'll swim in a circle. You pull it up, it'll go down, let it down, and it'll go in a circle. It's supposed to stimulate a wounded small fish. Now, some are colorful, red, white, blue. Some look like fish. Now, the ones that attract the most fish don't attract the decoy collectors. So then you sit there with this big spear and you got a rope on it, a lot of them, Now some brave guys tied it on their hands, other guys tied them on a concrete block. And you sit there and wait. Sometimes a walleye will come in or a muskie will come in or that. You're only legally supposed to spear northerns. But spear fishermen are meat hungers. They're not supposed to spear a big muskie or a big walleye. and the fish will come in. Sometimes they come in fast. You throw the spear and you miss it. The spear is weighted. It goes through the water like a knife cutting butter.
Katie Burke: Do you lose your spear?
Joe Tonelli: No, you gotta tie it with a rope to the concrete block. Even when you spear hit a fish, you let go of the spear and the spear goes. A lot of times, northerns come in slow, real, just slow as can be, and boom. Now, the expert on that is Jim Kreisbach. I mean it. He's a big-time expert on spearing fish, and he spears some big ones. It's exciting.
Katie Burke: Yeah, I've never… There's a big, like, DU thing about ice. They do, like, a big event. But, yeah, that's completely foreign to me. Okay, so Oscar Peterson, right? Oh, fabulous. Yeah, Northern Michigan. What about him, just because I know nothing when it comes to fishing. Why is he so renowned in fish decoys?
Joe Tonelli: Was he just really prolific? His fish decoys, they're good, but they don't bring the money with some of his other stuff, does they?
Katie Burke: Yeah, I mean, and his big plaques.
Joe Tonelli: Oh, yeah, I've got one in the other room. But he was, again, up in northern Michigan, carved fabulous things. Vases, plaques, wall plaques, fishing around. And he made thousands of fish decoys. And they're good ones. but Minnesota made some dandies. Now the most valuable ones come from Lake Chautauqua.
Katie Burke: Okay. Early. What is it because of like the, the like prolific of the lake or?
Joe Tonelli: They're painted natural and they're old leather tail. They're all made before 1900 and you know, he got the most famous maker was Seymour and I got a number of them in there, but uh, They're the oldest and then Peterson and of course you get in Michigan you got the Jenner's I mean a Jenner fish sold $165,000 Jim Cook bought it
Katie Burke: Yeah, so, okay, do the fish decoys, or I mean, not at this point, but did they last? Like, were they, they lasted pretty well?
Joe Tonelli: They didn't repaint fish decoys like they repainted duck decoys. Yeah, so you're not having to deal with as much like… Nah, they repainted some of them, but, you know, you find 10 repainted duck decoys, find one repainted fish.
Katie Burke: You know, I never thought about this until you just mentioned that, like, repaint duck decoys. I can't imagine being the person to repaint, like, an Elliston hen. That one downstairs. I know, I just, but I just, I mean, I know why they needed to, but still, like, it's just, like, you can't do it justice. Well, I guess they didn't care.
Joe Tonelli: A lot of them got repainted because they had to be repainted, but some of them didn't. Yeah. Now, when they, In Illinois, when they outlawed spring hunting, they shot a lot of divers here in the spring. High water in the spring, they shot a lot of bluebills, redheads, and camps. When they stopped the spring hunting, they turned all of those diver decoys into mallards.
Katie Burke: Yeah, which makes sense. They would just switch the paint on them. Yeah, and then there's more divers in the spring. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. So, um, I'm trying to think if I can think of anything. Is there anything we haven't talked about that y'all want to talk about?
Donna Tonelli: that we haven't touched on. I don't know.
Joe Tonelli: We can look through the decoys. It's been a great run for us. It's been my life. Ducks hunting, Ducks Unlimited, and decoys. I like it.
Katie Burke: I do have a question. Speaking of, this is more hunting. Do you have a favorite place that you've hunted? Duck hunted?
Joe Tonelli: I like the Princeton Duck Club, and I like Saskatchewan. Now, I used to belong, the greatest mallard, one of the greatest mallard clubs in the country. I hunted there for 50 years. My best friend owned it, Randy Root Mallard Farms, and it got sold two years ago. And the hunting there went from 3,000 ducks, mallards, drakes. He wouldn't allow no spinners. You shot drakes. If you shot a hen, Hunter Bucks went to DU and he run that, built it from scratch. The hunting there went really downhill, big time.
Katie Burke: So when did you start hunting in Canada? And did you go to Saskatchewan first? No, Manitoba. You went to Manitoba. When did you move over to Saskatchewan?
Joe Tonelli: And why? Well, first of all, I started going to Manitoba. Manitoba was easy when you're living in Minnesota. Yeah. And I'd just go up to Oak Hammock Marsh or go over to the Delta and hunt it with Torrey Ward and Hawk Bomb. Okay. Okay. You know, that was only from where I was in northern Minnesota there, six hour drive, not even. Well, I was going up there and it was good. And then I slid over to Oak Hammock. I mean, Oak Hammock Marsh for the goose, honey. It's right there by the prison. Fabulous. But then it got a little bit and the limits dropped and I got looking. So I went there from 79, 80, 81. And I got looking at Saskatchewan and I said, one day, I'm going for a ride. And I went for a ride. And I went up there and where I am and I've been up there for 40 years, same town, same hotel, same room. Everybody knows me and they think I'm crazy and the natives love me. And I really, I really like it up there. And you know, you got the seasons, the limits. And you're there six weeks.
Katie Burke: At least.
Joe Tonelli: And this year, I don't think I'm going to come home till it freezes or snows because I don't have many of those years left because it's just her and I. And, you know, every morning you got to go scouting yourself and find us birds. I've got it down pretty well. And the farmers take care of me and I take care of them. And we're good friends.
Katie Burke: Yeah. And, and being there as much as you are, like you built those relationships with the farmers. Oh yeah.
Joe Tonelli: I mean, they look for us. The people at the motel, the people at the restaurant, and you spend a little money. You spend money at the gas station. But, uh, and I hunted Ontario Bradley marshes. That's fabulous. But that don't exist no more.
Katie Burke: Yeah. So, did you move to Minnesota full-time?
Joe Tonelli: Yeah, when I was running that place for Cook, I'd live up there, what, six, seven months, Donna?
Katie Burke: Yeah, made it work. So, you stayed?
Katie Burke: I'd stay here with the kids, and as soon as the kids got out of school, we'd go up there.
Joe Tonelli: And I had it, and hunting was great in Minnesota, because we were shooting, it was a point system, and you could shoot bluebills and ringbills 10 a day. And they were on that Rice Lake Refuge by McGregor. There were 400,000 ringbills and bluebills there every year. And they'd come across the Mississippi River was small. That's where the Mississippi started come through there. And boy, we shot a lot of ringbills, bluebills. That's when they were 10 a day.
Katie Burke: Because you were in Minnesota during that time because we're doing that Canada goose project and we're doing a lot of the hunting history and conservation of the Canada goose. So you're going through there when I'm guessing there were not very many giants there at all. Okay. So did you see that transition of there being none to them coming back?
Joe Tonelli: God, they're back, they're up there in my place now, like crazy where they were.
Katie Burke: Well, yeah, they're crazy, but, you know, I don't think people realize, because giants are kind of a nuisance at this point, that there was a point in time that they were no, they were none.
Joe Tonelli: I started with, I bought 20. Okay. And I put the bands on them, our bands, Willow Sippy bands, and the, you know, and I took care of them, and come freeze time, they, The next spring, here comes some. And you could tell the ones, the mated pairs that come in, and if the goose was there with a gander, it wasn't there, they'd walk right up almost into the yard looking around for corn. And the ones, the wilder birds, they brought back with them. But those 20 in five years went to almost, what, 500 Donner or more? And of course, we'd have nest box out in islands. We built a lot of scrape outs and put an island right in the middle. And boy, every one of those islands had a nest on them.
Katie Burke: So where'd you get your giants from?
Joe Tonelli: You know, I'm trying to think. Place in New York?
Katie Burke: Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah, we've been, you know, writing about the Silver Lake story about the, you know, the story about when they got the two guys shot, the first discovered the giant. Yeah. And he had to go buy like bags of flour to weigh it. Yeah. But yeah, I don't think people really realize, yeah, they weren't there.
Joe Tonelli: And now they're everywhere, yeah. And they become really, they become really nice in the yards and they'd run around and the dogs would chase them and then they'd swim back. But they started, I got all these, I don't know, I must have made 200 of these dugouts to put an island on each one of them. And boy, in 10 years, there was a pair on every one of them almost.
Katie Burke: And they did well every year.
Joe Tonelli: And they're still doing well right now.
Katie Burke: Yeah.
Joe Tonelli: Yeah. You know, the predators don't get them. No. And they're very protected of their young.
Katie Burke: They're good parents.
Joe Tonelli: Yeah, better than, well, the ducks, they only have us to hand unless you're with the wood ducks, so.
Katie Burke: Yeah, and they're not, yeah, they're not, but they'll, and they'll re-nest, I mean, Canada's will re-nest, too.
Joe Tonelli: They're very territorial and they'll come back. Boy, they come back.
Katie Burke: We have two pairs by Hy-Vee Grocery Store. They have a pond about the size of this. Yeah, right in the middle of town. Yeah. For the last six years, they come back every year and have young.
Joe Tonelli: There's a brood there today.
Katie Burke: Yeah. We have them too. Yeah, it's crazy. Okay. All right. Anything else that I wasn't thinking? Nope. All right. I enjoy it. Yeah. Thank you both.
Joe Tonelli: And I enjoy the work DU does. Thank you. Everybody should join. Everybody should become a sponsor.
Katie Burke: Go to an event.
Joe Tonelli: Yeah.
Katie Burke: Go hunting, take somebody hunting. Pardon? I said go hunting and take someone hunting. Yeah, I do.
Joe Tonelli: But you know, a lot of people, it's, I don't know what, what, what the future is in it, really.
Katie Burke: You know, it's, at times it can seem not good, but I can say one thing just by being at DU and maybe that gives me goggles, but when I was a kid hunting, I was always the only girl. Like there was never any other girls there. I actually don't think I hunted with another woman until I was in my twenties. And that was my now sister-in-law. So, but, Now, with this younger group, there are a lot more girls. It's not uncommon. So I think in that way, there are people hunting, but it may not look the same as it did before, which is not.
Joe Tonelli: You know, Jenna Herrick, she works for DU. She's a biologist.
Katie Burke: Oh, she's a biologist. Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Tonelli: I need to look her up. She hunts hard.
Katie Burke: Yeah. And it's getting to be more and more of us hunting.
Joe Tonelli: Her husband runs, is the manager of Rice Pond that Doug owns. Yeah.
Katie Burke: Yeah. Well, that's good. And we're, we're working on, I'm working with trying to get, you know, help other people at DU that, especially cause we've hunted, um, one of the biggest things like in the last few years, there's more women in science than there ever is. And like the higher percentage coming out as biologists. So we're hiring a lot of younger women at DU for biologist positions and a lot of them haven't hunted but they're all very interested in hunting and as I have access to hunting and a few other people are trying to start taking people and introducing them and growing that.
Katie Burke: That's a thing that you do with Peoria Museum now. Oh, really? They've done a couple of them now where they have… Oh, the duck calling. Duck calling with the kids. You bring your kids with and Joe goes around and gets the duck clubs like Princeton, Mud Lake.
Katie Burke: give a day shoot. Oh, that's awesome.
Joe Tonelli: They donate it. John Stevens. Yeah. Wonderful hats, free duck calls. And we get 20 young kids in there and they all, we talk about the history of the hunting and duck calling demonstrations. I got a guy by the name of Joey Perez helps me. Wonderful. And again, John Stevens gives us the calls, gives us the hats. The kids get a day hunting at these clubs for their father and son, and so it's a good deal.
Katie Burke: The Peoria Museum does it. So Peoria Museum, and what's it called again? Duck Calling.
Joe Tonelli: No, it's something that ducks us in the summer.
Katie Burke: Okay. And they can just sign up through the Peoria?
Joe Tonelli: Yeah, you sign up there. I don't know if they're going to do it this year. We've did it in the past and the last three years and it worked. And the kids again, like Rice Pond, Princeton Duck Club, Mud Lake Duck Club, gets the father and son get to a place to go hunting one day.
Katie Burke: And it's not limited to sons. No, daughters too.
Joe Tonelli: But I think there are only two girls showed up out of the 18.
Katie Burke: Yeah. My dad used to do one in Mississippi, like when he was state chairman, he started a camp. And they did kids though, all over, up and down the flyaway. So it wasn't necessarily, but he handed it off to the state. So I don't, I'm guessing the state still runs it. I don't know. I don't know. But that's awesome. Yeah. So if you're in the area, that's a good one to look for. Yeah. Alright, well, thanks again. Thank you very much. Yeah, this was great. Thanks for having me in your home. You're more than welcome.
Joe Tonelli: I appreciate it. Anybody wants to come and see all this stuff, they can.
Katie Burke: You should. It's cool. Thanks again, Joe and Donna Tonelli. Thanks to our producer, Chris Isaac, and thanks to you, our listeners, for supporting wetlands and waterfowl conservation.
Katie Burke: Ta-da! Ta-da!