“It is often a great advantage, when shooting
over wooden decoys, to have a live duck to throw in the air when
wild ones are approaching,” Long wrote. “She should be secured
by a light, strong line, of from fifteen to twenty-five yards
in length, to the blind to prevent escape, and should be blindfolded
by a hood drawn over the eyes; then, not being able to see how
far she has to fall after being thrown up, she will spread her
wings and allow herself to drop gradually with feet extended
as is the usual manner of ducks when alighting. The attention
of the other ducks being attracted toward the decoys by her motions,
they come in without hesitation. In the absence of a live duck,
dead ones may be thrown up to attract attention, but do not answer
quite as well, as they fall too quickly; for this reason should
not be thrown too high, but rather in a nearly level direction.”
Not all hunters found Long’s advise about tossing up duck with
a string attached practical or humane.
“I read an article in Outdoor Life about a fellow who
had a trained duck on a string,” Earl "Goldie" Haworth
of Sidney recalled in a 1987 interview. Haworth hunted ducks
and geese on the North Platte River from the late-1910s into
the 1990s. He died in 1994.
“Well, I said, by gawd I'm going to do this,” he recalled. “I had
a little English call duck then, she only weighed about six or eight
ounces. And, I said, I'm going to make a trained caller out of her.
So I got some of that yellow calk line and tied her on a 50‑foot
chalk line and had her in the blind and as soon as a flock come in
and I threw her up and she flew out to the end of that line and said
aughhhhhhh and down she come. Oh, she made the gawd-awfulest racket
when she hit the end of that string and fell to the ground. So I
never tried it on the poor little thing anymore, I was afraid I would
hurt her.”
Although often taken to be no more than call bird mythology, some
hunters did in fact use free-flying ducks as decoys. McNeel said
some hunters used pinioned ducks, but he and those he hunted with
had flyers in addition to the birds they put in the water in front
of their blind. “If they would have wanted to have left, they could
have left at any time,” he said.
“We took mostly hens to the river because they called more and raised
more of a rumpus than the drakes,” McNeel said. “You didn’t get much
of a call out of a drake other than that ‘sh-sh-sh.’ But that old
hen abellering out there, everybody heard her. A lot of times those
old ducks will start calling when birds are down the river a mile.
You didn’t need to stand there and watch for ducks like you did after
they took the call ducks away from us. Very few ducks that went up
and down the river didn’t decoy, very few of them.”
One of the call ducks McNeel used was an “old peg-legged duck” that
had lost a foot in a muskrat trap.
“She was a wild duck at one time and she got with the other call
ducks and just domesticated herself,” McNeel said. “She was one of
those birds that would come and walk back into the blind and we used
her as a flier. We would throw the drakes first. That old drake will
make a couple of circles and [then] sit in those decoys, and that
bunch of [wild] ducks maybe was a mile off at that time and, hell,
you could just feel what went on with those ducks when they seen
that duck circling and all those ducks acalling. About half a mile
away from the blind, we’d pitch that other drake up. He makes a couple
circles and sits in those decoys. When you threw that third duck
[the old peg-legged duck] up, I think that you could have stood right
up in the blinds and those ducks would have still lit or tried to
light. They had made up their minds that three ducks sat in there
and we’re going to sit in there. I don’t know of anybody that had
birds that would work like ours did. But, hell, we hunted with them
every damn chance that we got, which was real, real often, like some
of the times, heck, we was in the river every day hunting.”
Fick recalled that when he was young and hunting on the Missouri
River he “had a pen full” of English call duck hens crossed with
wild drakes.
“I had some of the damndest callers you ever heard,” Fick said. “They
just continuously called. I use to get sick of 'em calling, they'd
just call all the time….”
Fick said he trained his call ducks for use as flyers by taking them
to the depot in Blair and releasing them. “I’d throw ‘em up and they’d
fly back [home] and light right back in the pen. I done that all
fall. Then, of course after you handle 'em so much, they get real
tame. I had competition but it didn't bother me.
“In those days, when the flight started,” Fick continued, “generally
just ahead of a storm, and you could look up all day long, day in
and day out, several days anyway, ducks by the thousands, every 100
to 150 to 200 yards a bunch of ducks going south, looked like sparrows,
so damn high. Well, I'd take and throw up a couple of these call
ducks, I'd have the decoys out there, and I'd take and throw 'em
up back of me and they'd fly around and [the tethered] ducks would
cut loose calling. So, I'd give 'em two more. I had six that I'd
trained that way. And so, we'd throw two more. They'd just make a
circle around like that. I'd just take and toss mine over my head,
back behind the blind, and they'd fly over the river and come right
in and light with your ducks staked out. Oh, it was fun.”
Ralph Kohler recalled that his uncles had “two flyers” and they would
throw them up when a flock of wild birds was giving their spread
a look. Live hens were tethered in shallow water.
“You'd throw one up and if that didn't get them you'd give them the
next one,” Kohler said. “Usually the next one was it. It really worked.
They just threw 'em up and they'd just go up and glide out [from
the blind] to the hens. And that was all there was to it. But I've
heard guys say they had 'em that would go up and circle around. I
always thought that was a little too much. To be real frank about
it, I never did believe that, but I would never say that it wasn't
so, [just] because I never saw it.”
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