Ryan Barnes for SPLIT REED
“Everyone needs a smile on their face and a drink in their hand,” says Brian Richter of Ranger Creek Goose Guides. Richter, an Oklahoma resident, makes it clear that laughter and a good time are a key part of enjoying a good waterfowl hunt- or more specifically to his specialty, a good crane beat down!
However, unlike most guides in the U.S., guiding isn’t what Brian depends on to pay his bills. He actually works in outside sales for a construction materials and fastener company. “What I actually do is work as a consultant to our sales team; so when they have a dealer or a distributor that wants to redo their store, I go in and analyze the data to tell them what products to have in their stores. I basically tell people what they need to have so they know what’s going to sell in their markets”. He also works in independent sales and marketing for different outdoor and hunting companies. Four companies he currently represents are Bill Saunders Calls and Gear, Dave Smith Decoys, Apex Ammunition, and SnoBot Motion Decoys. “Back before COVID, when we were having outdoor shows, I’d go and set up booths and do sales and marketing for outdoor companies as an independent contractor”, says Richter. However, come hunting season, Brian suits up for Ranger Creek Goose Guides in Haskell, TX, and fills in here and there for Blackfoot Outdoors in Lubbock, TX when needed, and helps put the smackdown on Sandhill cranes.
“I do all my guiding on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. When I’m in camp I try and make sure everyone’s having a good time. I fix all the broken stuff that comes up throughout the season, usually something I’ve had a hand in breaking, and I try to make sure that the other guides and clients all have a drink and smile”, he says. Richter says the thing that he prides himself on as a guide is making the experience fun and memorable for his clients. “When you’ve got lots of birds and you’ve got great spots to hunt, anyone can look like a hero. But when the days get slow or the birds get stale, that’s when it’s tough. That’s when it’s on you to endear yourself as a guide and to provide a quality experience. I try to have a lot of fun. I’m in sales, so connecting with people is a big thing for me,” Richter says.
His start into guiding came through his connections in the industry with some buddies who needed help during the season and asked if he could fill in. “I’m not a world champion caller, but I’m decent, but no one’s going to say ‘wow, that guy is amazing on a call!’. I get my birds killed and that’s all that matters to clients. But what’s important to me is I get a lot of repeat customers and a lot of the clients request to hunt with me because they have had fun and they have a good time, and I also try to be insightful at explaining the hunting situations. A lot of guys go on a guided hunt to either learn how to do it, or they just want to feel like they’re part of the hunting process, and I think with some guides out there you just get told to sit down, shut up, and shoot. Clients aren’t getting anything out of that. I try to tell guys my decoy strategies, and my hunt tactics. I try to involve them in the hunt as much as I can. That way it’s more than just showing up and pulling the trigger”. Richter mentions that anytime a kid is there on the hunt he makes sure he gets them involved and engaged during the hunt. “Anytime a kid is there I want to make sure they have a good time and that they are involved and know what’s going on and they’re learning about certain situations of the hunt,” he says.
While Brian has a passion for hunting and guiding, it wasn’t something that was a family tradition. His father was an aerospace engineer who helped design the bombing systems on the B2 bomber jet in Oklahoma as an Air Force Civilian Engineer. It wasn’t until high school when Brian went on his first duck hunt with some friends. “I always played sports growing up; hockey, football, wrestling. If it was a team sport I was in it. But I had some buddies take me duck hunting one day, we didn’t even shoot a duck, but I had so much fun with the camaraderie of the guys in the blind, and I was so intrigued by that chess game of decoys and calling and trying to get the birds in that I was just hooked,” says Richter. When he moved away to go to college, he worked on a horse ranch in Western Oklahoma that had two miles of riverfront property, and about 10,000 acres of wheat pasture that, according to Brian, always had some ducks, geese, and cranes around. “That’s really how I got into it. I had some really great buddies in college that mentored me and taught me, and I just kind of got into it from there”.
While most guides in the industry start their careers from a life-long desire, or to follow a childhood dream, Brian’s isn’t exactly so similar. “The guys down at Ranger Creek, I had been friends with them for a while, we were all staffers for Bill Saunders Calls and they were running a great outfit and I had been buddy hunting down there a time or two with them, and the opportunity came up where they needed some help to finish up a season, so I got down there and started helping out- and I just loved the area and the guys and the whole operation, and had so much fun doing it that I said, ‘If you need any help in the future let me know’, and according to them they had such positive feedback from the clients about their interactions with me that they brought me on to help as a regular”. Richter likes to tease everyone that he’s a weekend warrior that occasionally gets paid to do it. “I spend a lot of time down there in West Texas working for Ranger Creek and Blackfoot, but at the end of the day I’m still a sales guy and I’m still a father and a husband,” he says. A rare change from the other full-time guides you see out there in the industry that are going every single day, running 24-7 on 3 hours of sleep each day. “I like to tease the guys, that are inevitably getting worn down at the end of the season when I show up, ‘I didn’t do shit all week I’m ready to hunt!’. I show up on Thursday nights, meet with our clients, do my scouting, get the trailer ready and then head on to Friday bouncing around like the energizer bunny because I’m ready to go shoot some shit with my clients!” says Richter. He says that he believes it helps add to the fun nature of the hunts and that the clients feed off the upbeat energy. “I couldn’t do what I do without my buddies at Ranger Creek and Blackfoot, they deserve a ton of credit for allowing me to do what I do and any success I have doing it. They are some of my best friends and are some of the best Guides and Guys in the country, no one works harder to provide a top-notch experience than them.” Richter also adds.
Another part of the equation that is unique to Brian’s situation that not all guides get to enjoy is his ability to enjoy family life, along with a day job. “I get to enjoy the best of both worlds,” Brian says, “I get to enjoy my family life during the week, and on the weekends I get to enjoy the guide life and that guide grind”. It is made clear, however, that even though Brian may not be guiding full time, he’s still part of the grind. “There’s no calling in sick or taking weekends off. There are people who I have booked to hunt with me, or they want a crane hunt specifically, and that’s when you have to make sure you’re ready to go. You can’t just be like, oh too bad, I’m taking this weekend off. If someone is coming down to hunt cranes with me, I’ve got to be out there that weekend to take them out. So it’s very much still a grind, but it is also nice that I’m able to spend a few days of the week with the wife and kiddo”.
The work in the outdoor industry doesn’t just end at guiding for Richter, though. As an independent sales and marketer, he works with different companies trying to sell different products for the companies he’s representing. “Back in the day, pro-staffers would go to shows and try to sell and distribute products for companies. Now it’s more of a promotional thing on social media, staffing has changed drastically in the last 20 years. My position though is still needed, going to dealers, not the big box stores, but the smaller mom n’ pop stores, as well as shows and trying to sell these products, is still a valuable service for small companies”. Brian puts his ability to read sales data, industry trends, and knowledge of markets to good use and applies that to his selling strategies, for his outdoor partners. “I was trying to use strategic marketing and previous sales history to try to grow Bill’s brand into other markets. He had a huge following in the Pacific Northwest, you know, everyone out there knew about Bill Saunders Calls. But in the early 2000s, there were just a fraction of guides in Texas and Oklahoma that knew about the calls and had heard about them from their ‘Yankee’ buddies, if you will, but they really didn’t know anything about those calls or the brand, this was before social media made it so accessible for companies to grow. So I worked really hard going to shows and marketing the brand to try and get the name out there”. Another tactic of Brian’s was utilizing Ducks Unlimited and Delta Waterfowl events to grow and market. “At those events, and at those banquets, they love having vendors, because it adds to the event and it allows people to get up close and have a hands-on experience with the products that they may not otherwise have access too. I think that’s the biggest thing I’ve noticed working in the call industry and the decoy industry- selling works best when you can provide something that people can get their hands on”. Richter’s goal was to try to expand the footprint of the (at the time) “smaller” companies that he was working with, and get them into different markets and different demographics to help sell more products and grow the companies.
When it comes to hunting and guiding, it’s no secret that Sandhill cranes are Richter’s specialty and his favorite game to chase. When asked about the biggest difference between killing cranes and killing honkers, he responded, “You know, we don’t get a ton of honkers in Oklahoma, it’s mostly lessers, like Richardson’s and Hutchison’s here. Yeah, we get some honkers in the Northern parts of the state, and we have an early goose season for local golf course birds. But I have very limited experience besides going hunting with my wife’s family in Indiana or my family in Wisconsin. I’ve hunted enough honkers to know the similarities, but I’ll be honest I’m not a honker expert by any means,” Brain goes on by saying, “what I tell people is; snow geese and lessers, they like to work vertically, they like to get right over the top of the decoys, come straight down, and feed aggressively. They’ll land in tight spots, you can move your decoys close together, and those lessers and those snows will still land right in there amongst them. A honker, though, he doesn’t like to fly over the decoys necessarily. He likes a big runway and to fly around the edges of the decoys and then land and walk into the feeding area and muscle his way in there from my experience. Cranes are the same way in that regard, very warry birds. Cranes do not like to come over the top of the decoys and come down vertically. They’re a big bird. They average about a 6-foot wingspan, with over 4 feet of height- they like a lot of room to get down”. Richter talks about how some of the videos you see on social media can be misleading of what a Decoying crane hunt is supposed to look like. Widening the decoys and giving the birds some space to land is really the best way to go to give your clients (or yourself) the best shooting opportunity. A lot of guys are having to pass shoot when they could be landing the birds if they would just spread out in his opinion.
“We put hundreds of miles a day on the trucks to find the cranes,” Brian says, about what the daily task of a crane guide looks like, “they’re a big bird, and they eat exclusively grain in the Winter-time when they’re down here in Texas. So they’ll travel a long way to get to the food from the roost. It’s not like geese where they’ll only go a few miles away- cranes will go 20-30 miles away to get to their feed. So you really have to put in that effort to go find them,” says Richter. He also mentions that it’s important to take into account not just where they are, but how they are coming to the field. Are they coming in one big flock? Smaller groups? He also says that he spends a lot of time making sure that he and his clients will have a good spot to hide due to the fact that cranes have just as good of eye-sight as a turkey, making them even harder to trick into a decoy spread. The spread that Richter uses may consist of as few as 3 dozen decoys, it may range all the way to 15 dozen. It just depends on what the situation warrants. Brian says that he hunts out of either A-frames or layouts, his preference being the layouts, “I feel like the lower you are to the ground, the more stealthiness you have, and the more successful you can be”.
It’s clear that Brian has a passion for killing cranes, and for the outdoor industry in general. Even more than that, it’s clear that he enjoys a good time, and making sure everyone around him has a good time. Brian gets to enjoy both guiding for cranes and his family life. Brian’s all about not taking things too seriously and having a good time. If you can’t appreciate that, then, in the words of Mr. Richter, you “need a drink in your hand and a smile on your face.”
