View the Photo Gallery Intro to Live Decoys First Live Decoys Raised to Deceive Call Birds For Sale Domesticating and Training Tethering Deployment Flying Decoys Rigging Geese Beginning of the End Play it Again, Sam? What to do with the Live Decoys?

[Leg and neck tethers sold by the Pattent Decoy Duck Collar Co., Little Rock, Arkansas. ] Tethering Text by Jon Farrar Published in NEBRASKAland Magazine, November 2010

Most hunters tethered at least some of their call birds, usually the hens, and some tethered all their birds, depending on how well-trained and reliable the birds were when it was time to be caged.

“When used as decoys on the shooting grounds, the birds are placed according to the habits of the birds on such grounds,” Bruette wrote. “Generally the ducks [hens] are tethered by a ring around the neck or a cord attached by a loop or preferably a rawhide device around the leg between the hock and ankle. The drakes are left loose to swim about freely. They will not leave the ducks [hens]. Sometimes they circle or make short flights in the air, and attract passing ducks.”

Long-time waterfowl hunter Ralph Kohler of Tekamah started hunting with his uncles on the Missouri River in the years when live decoys were still legal. He recalled they would use about 35 English call ducks. This, of course, was in the years before the Missouri was channelized and still laced with sprawling sandbars.

“The hens had a harness on 'em, with a strap, and you tied them,” Kohler recalled in a 1989 interview. “The drakes, you just turned them loose. They'd stay right there. They'd just swim around. You know on still days, when it was sunshiny, those drakes would kind of get in a ball, ball up and of course [with] the current on the river, you'd watch 'em, and pretty soon they'd be floating down and they'd be a nodding. Pretty soon they'd wake up and they'd be down there a hundred yards. And, boy, boom, back up they'd come [to the hens].”

“We made a [leather] harness for 'em,” Rudy Fick, who grew up hunting the Missouri River near Blair and was a state game warden in the late-1930s and early-1940s, recalled in a 1987 interview. “We had a little old iron ring [on the harness] and made a trot line, just like a trot line, with a lot of little snaps on it, that's the way I had mine, and iron stakes, you could drag one end and the other end would hold. I used to go up there all alone and set out 50 live decoys.”

On the Platte River, or the Missouri River of old, live decoys were staked out in shallow water far enough apart their tethers would not become entangled. Some hunters allowed their birds only two- or three-foot long cords, while others, probably those using fewer birds, allowed 12- to 15-foot cords, giving the birds enough line to paddle about and splash, attracting the attention of passing flocks of wild birds. Deploying live decoys in deeper waters was more complicated.

“In many waters, as has already been stated, it is desirable to provide the live decoys with a stool to rest on,” wrote George Bird Grinnell, in his 1901 classic wildfowling book, American Duck Shooting. “This consists of a long leg—sharp pointed, to be thrust down into the mud—supporting on the upper end a table six or eight inches in diameter, to which the duck may resort after it is tired of being in the water, and on which it can stand, cleanse its feathers and dry off. While a duck, if it is free, can rest on the water for a long time without inconvenience, one that is tethered is likely soon to get wet and chilled, and may become sick.” Grinnell recommended similar, but larger, stools for call geese. “As soon as the bird has been put out it begins to bathe,” he wrote, “and for a time is busily engaged in dunking, shaking itself and swimming about, so far as its strap will permit. After it tires of this, it is likely to swim up to the table, climb on it and stand there preening itself.”

Providing roosting stools in a Sandhills marsh or Missouri River oxbow, where water depth and muck depth on the bottom varied, made the use of resting stools impractical. That, perhaps in part, is why live decoys were most often employed on shallow rivers like the Platte and Missouri. Obviously there are other explanations. Competition between hunters was probably not so keen in the Sandhills, and hunters there were able to secure all the ducks they wanted by jump-shooting or pass-shooting and so saw little need for decoys of any type, wooden or alive. Waterfowl hunters coming to the Sandhills lake country from elsewhere probably found the complications of transporting live decoys not worth the effort. That does not mean live decoys were never used in Sandhills lakes and marshes.

“In their 1982, self-published book, Meat in the Pot, Charles and Anoma Hoffmeister (Charles dictated most of the book’s content into a tape recorder and Anoma assembled it into book form), Charles told of using his call geese while hunting on Crescent Lake in the western Sandhills. Lakes in the western Sandhills are often alkaline, Crescent Lake being one of them, hence have shorelines with sparse or no shoreline vegetation and hard sandy bottoms rather than mucky bottoms as found elsewhere in the region.

“The third morning we were back early and the lake had rafts of geese on it that flew in continuously. I know we didn’t see less than 10,000 geese. Our 10 decoys out on the point seemed insignificant but we did get a few geese.

“Although there were thousands of geese going over,” Hoffmeister continued, “we had a difficult time getting our limit of four each. Our few decoys didn’t have much pulling power for the geese in flight when there were rafts of geese on the lake calling to them.”

DeWayne Magnuson, who died in July 2010, recalled in a 2005 interview that his father, Buster, leased Diamond Bar Lake west of Tryon in McPherson County for trapping, fishing, and hunting in 1927. In 1931, when DeWayne was nine years old, Buster moved his family to the lake and opened a store, selling ice and meals, and renting cabins and boats to sportsman, especially those coming up from the Platte Valley, North Platte in particular, as Diamond Bar was the first good fishing lake in the southern Sandhills. Buster hunted over live decoys he raised from wild mallards, and he probably loaned them to friends or rented them to sportsmen staying in the cabins.

“Dad had a whole bunch of them,” Magnuson recalled. “They just nested around the lake. We knew where they all nested, you know, when we was kids. After the little ones [were hatched], we would just take a boat and drive them into shore and clip so many of them, whatever we wanted to keep. The rest of them, we would just let them leave the country.”

Magnuson said the birds were tethered with leather harnesses and staked out. When live decoys were being used, wooden decoys were not necessary. He recalled his father using about 25 to 30 birds and more drakes than hens. At least one of the hens was staked away from the other birds and “she would be the bird that did most of the calling.”

Twenty-five to 30 call ducks was probably more than the average hunter deployed. Hunting clubs with paid help, though, could and did use more. The Hit-and-Miss Hunting Club located on the Platte River east of Yutan, Griswold reported in a December 23, 1923 Omaha World-Herald column, had 50 English call ducks and three live Canada goose decoys in addition to over 100 wooden decoys and “numerous profiles.”