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 [Duck
hunters with mallard call birds, probably on the North Platte
River. Courtesy Rosser “Ole” Herstedt.]
Deployment
Text by Jon Farrar
Published in NEBRASKAland Magazine, November 2010
Some hunters used only call birds to draw wild birds within
shooting range, but most also employed artificial floating-wooden
decoys or silhouettes, believing that from a distance they
would attract the attention of a passing flock and the live
decoys would assure them all was well and bring them down.
And just as an experienced hunting dog is more apt to spot
birds in the distance before a hunter does, a tethered live
decoy was even more proficient.
“As has been said, the value of a stand of ordinary wooden
decoys is many times increased if there are added to them a
couple of live decoys,” Grinnell wrote in his 1901 book. “These,
when properly trained, are usually on the watch for birds in
the air, and will quack vociferously at black birds, buzzards,
herons, or wild geese. If they are not trained, good work for
at least a part of the day may be had by separating them, tethering
the drake at the head of the decoys and the duck [hen] at the
foot. They will talk to each other at frequent intervals, and
when they see other ducks in the air, both will call. If the
weather is mild and still, artificial decoys which had no motion
loom up tremendously over the smooth water, and black ducks,
widgeon and some other species will not come anywhere near
them; but a single live decoy, moving about in the water, calling
now and then, and dabbling or splashing, will bring in a bunch
of birds at once. They seem to lose all suspicion and pin their
faith to the tethered bird.”
While some hunters simply confined their call birds in a chicken-wire
coop in a sandbar, most deployed them in such a way as to maximize
their effectiveness. Just having well-trained decoys, no matter
how they were deployed, greatly enhanced a hunter’s chance
of luring birds out of the sky. Getting the hens to sing their
entreaties to passing wild flocks with all their seductive
might required experience and ingenuity on the part of the
hunter.
“It is only the female that can quack,” Bruette continued.
“The drake makes only a little jabbering half whistling noise.
A most common ruse to increase activity of the decoys, when
the position permits, is to put a noisy duck [hen] in a clump
of rushes out of sight of the rest of the flock. Her calls
to them will keep them working. Sometimes a shooter has a caller
trained so that by a string attached to her foot and running
into the blind, he can stir her to calling by pulling the string.
When the ducks have been shot over for a time, they often develop
a demonic trick of calling the [wild] ducks, and on seeing
the shooter’s gun go up, diving to avoid the concussion from
the explosion of the gun, and coming up after the shooting,
quacking and screaming seemingly with delight at seeing the
dead ducks strike the water.”
“After you have all your drakes and two of your hens placed
in a conspicuous, and at the same time, natural position, take
your two hens that you have left and anchor them behind a log
or tuft of grass, or brush blind where they cannot see the
drakes, and they will call whenever they hear the drakes or
see wildfowl, or even a woodpecker fly over,” Griswold wrote
in his March 10, 1912 sporting column. “After a few times out
you can turn loose all the drakes and only confine the hens.”
Griswold admired the keen vision of call birds in his description
of a duck hunt on the Platte River in a December 7, 1919 column.
“We got our decoys all out, the wooden floats, head on, as
far out in the channel as we dared put them, the profile geese
on the windward sand bar, and our callers—a trio of live half-breed
mallards and one full blood a little nearer the blind; three
of them in front of us and one across the bar behind, where
she could not see her companions but could keep in touch with
them in a conversational way,” he wrote. “This isolated caller
was a beauty—a little full-blood, wild mallard hen, very dark
in plumage, and the very best caller I ever shot over. She
was wild as her native relatives while on the river, but as
tame as the rest of them when off duty. She is the keenest
eyed bird I ever saw, and her work is truly wonderful. Not
a singe crow could winnow his black shape across the river,
for a mile or more, up or down, but what she called our attention
to it, and so it was, even to the illusive little snowbirds
and juncos, which were always flitting in intermittent gusts
athwart our sand bar hide, or over our decoys.”
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