Live tame ducks make probably the best decoys to be had for mallard and black-duck shooting, but they are such a nuisance to take care of and transport that they are seldom used in the West. It would almost seem as though they took an especial delight in seeing their kindred killed, from the continuous calling and quacking they keep up whenever a flock of wild ones come in sight; and they seldom call in vain, for on the wild ones hearing them they immediately turn and come in. – American Wild-Fowl Shooting by Joseph W. Long, J.B. Ford And Company, 1874.

Glance at waterfowl harvest surveys from recent years and it is clear a relatively small percentage of hunters kill a large percentage of the ducks and geese. The explanation is obvious – the majority of waterfowl hunters are casual hunters, they only hunt a few days each year or incidental to hunting other game; and not always when the hunting is apt to be the best but when they can. Those who kill the most birds probably hunt most days the season is open, have the best places to hunt, the best equipment and work the hardest hunting.

Back in the late-1800s and early-1900s, when wildfowl was still exceedingly abundant and laws regulating the taking of ducks and geese, if they existed at all, were unconscionably liberal, it was probably the same – those who could hunt the best places the most often, and worked the hardest, killed the bulk of the birds. That was certainly true of market hunters. One of the key tools of the trade for wildfowl hunters in those days was live decoys, also known as call birds. Wild ducks and geese found the sight of a live bird moving on the water and calling skyward irresistible, just as Joseph W. Long wrote, and dropped down to their death far more often than they did to bobbing wooden decoys, sheet-iron profiles and the mixed-bag of noises hunters sent skyward from their mouth callers. But raising, keeping and deploying live decoys were onerous jobs, hence only the most serious wildfowlers did it. Having a place to keep call birds the year-round probably explains why their use was more common among rural hunters that urban hunters. Lucky was the city hunter who had a hunting friend living on the farm, or in a small town where poultry were allowed.

Because live decoys were so effective, it is not surprising that in the mid-1930s, in the heart of the continent’s worst historical drought and plunging waterfowl numbers, they were declared illegal; along with other restrictions designed to reduce the killing – such as the prohibition of shotguns of a bore larger than 10 gauge or holding more than three shotshells, sink boxes and baiting. There was a hue and cry from hunters not wanting restrictions on the way they had always hunted, but most sportsmen knew it was necessary and demanded, or at least supported, them. Of all the new regulations imposed on waterfowl hunters, probably none had a greater impact reducing the kill than the prohibition of live decoys. It was a practice rich in lore. Rare is the wildfowler today who can look back without wanting, just once, to shoot ducks or geese over live, breathing, squawking or honking birds.

Jodi McNeel of North Platte, who died in 2006, hunted over call ducks and call geese when he was a young man and recalled there being so many pens of call geese in North Platte when he was a boy that, when the migration was on and flocks of wild geese were passing over the city, he could open his bedroom window and hear birds in pens calling to them from all directions.

“I know why they banned them,” McNeel said in a 2004 interview. “They was just too damned effective, that’s what it was.”