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?

[William H. Lemburg with Canada geese on his farm near Boelus. Courtesy of William W. Lemburg.] What to do with the Live Decoys? Text by Jon Farrar Published in NEBRASKAland Magazine, November 2010

In the blink an eye, live decoys could no longer be legally used. What to do with all of them? Some probably continued to live on the farm, perhaps crossing with domestic varieties until the wildness in their blood was hardly detectable. Some no doubt ended up on the dinner table at Thanksgiving or Christmas.

At the meeting of the board of commissioners, October 11, 1935, a resolution was passed: “RESOLVED that the Nebraska Game Commission will undertake to feed during the winter of 1935 and 1936 all wild geese and mallard decoys presented to them by sportsmen, it being understood that such birds are to be released on game reserves in the State of Nebraska prior to the breeding season in the spring of 1936.”

Many live decoys were given to game farms, city parks, zoos and other places that kept birds for public display. Many of the Canada geese used by North Platte hunters were given to Cody Park in that city, for example. And herein lays the afterword to the story of live decoys.

By early in the 1900s, the race of large Canada geese, geese that nested in mid-continent and weighed nine to 14 pounds, was believed to be extinct. In the 1960s, when biologists began looking for individual “giant” Canadas where did they find them—Cody Park and places like it in other Great Plains states. From these survivors, state and federal restoration programs raised and released goslings for more than 20 years, until today they are a self-sustaining population. They are, no doubt, the descendants of some old hunter’s prize Judas goose.