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It is easy to imagine how hunters came to use live birds to lure those of their
kind close enough to kill. The practice has certainly been employed for centuries
and, in less refined ways, probably much longer.
Imagine, to put it in a Nebraska context, hunters in a willow blind on the Platte
River in the 1870s. They have half-a-dozen wooden decoys and a dozen or so sheet-iron
silhouettes. A small flock of Canada geese land on a sandbar two hundred yards
downstream. The next little bunch of geese coursing the river see the live birds
and hears them calling. Will that flock, and subsequent flocks, land among the
wood and iron counterfeits or among the live birds? The next step is obvious
– a wing-tipped bird is kept and tethered with the counterfeits to provide movement
and calling to the decoy stool. This proves so successful the hunters keep more
wing-tipped birds, decide to save them for the next season, and these produce
young even more docile and easily handled. Other hunters see or hear about the
great success the hunters with live decoys are having and do the same, and a
market develops for pen-raised call birds. Just as today hunters say they cannot
compete with a nearby decoy spread containing one or more wing-motion decoys,
hunters of earlier times saw they could not compete with hunters using live decoys
unless they had their own.
Or, imagine the hunters outdoor writer Sandy Griswold (for the Omaha Bee from
1886 into1898, and for the Omaha World-Herald from 1898 into1929) described in
his March 5, 1922 Omaha World-Herald account of a Sandhills duck hunt with a
doctor Bob Nichols on Hackberry Lake, now on the Valentine National Wildlife
Refuge.
“She was curling back over the blind, and, when she fell, it was in a narrow
strip of weedy water between us and the decoys, and seeing she was so badly hampered
by this tangly growth that she was unable to proceed but a few yards, we concluded
not to overshoot her, but let her remain where she was,” Griswold wrote of a
hen mallard dropped from a decoying flock.
“‘She’ll help the decoys,’ remarked the Doctor.”
“‘You don’t think she can get away?’”
“‘No, I don’t,’ he replied. ‘You see she is right in a sort of a little reedy
coop, and in her desperate condition she’ll be pretty apt to lie still until
she finally keels over dead. Anyway, should she attempt to get away, either of
us could stop her before she got a yard.’”
“At this juncture the hen lifted up her injured wing, and flapping it in spasms,
she began to quack softly, alluringly to a small bunch of birds hurrying across,
far above us, toward Watts lake. They failed to come down and whirling round
and round in her narrow confines, the hen began to signal to every bird she saw,
even calling frantically to a passing mob of ‘chucking’ black birds. Presently
a pair of her own kind came down to her entreaties and we killed them both, and
finally, day having broken broadly, the flight increased and for a short while
Nichols and I had our hands full.”
“A little later, our wounded hen set up a terrible racket,” Griswold continued,
“threshing about madly, and fairly screaming in her frantic efforts to lift herself
into the air, and then lay as dead apparently as any of her unmolested kindred
floating about her.”
Variations of such scenarios probably played out in eastern states and in Europe
long before there were sport hunters with shotguns in Nebraska. |
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