With nature and a camera

Chapter IX. The art of duck-decoying

A man of notions

The decoy-man quickly detached the receiving net, and, taking the wildfowl out one by one, dislocated their necks by a dexterous turn of his wrist.

He was distinctly a man of notions, for he told us that he had invented a method for making up for his decline in speed (the result of thirty years' hard wear and tear at the pipes and gamekeeping) when running from one show place to another along the side of the pipe. He had fixed a red handkerchief on a stick at the next show place to the head one, so that directly he frightened the birds by his appearance he could pull a string and hoist it, and thus prevent any wildfowl in the pipe from turning round and flying back before he reached the place. He also told us that he sometimes uses a tethered lure Duck at the mouth of the pipe, and has an idea that, if a long, narrow mirror were hung across the decoy at a certain height above the water, the birds outside, seeing themselves in it, would swim up, thinking that their reflections represented other and bolder members of their species.

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He was, in addition to being a skilled hand at the pipes, a most kindly, good-natured fellow. One morning we visited his cottage at six o'clock, and found him bustling about and feeding some poor old wayfarer, who had dropped in to see him, with liberal supplies of rum and milk and cake. The old fellow, who evidently belonged to the neighbourhood, told us that he remembered the time when smugglers used to hide their contraband goods in the middle of the wood we were then in. One Sunday morning, whilst out for a stroll, he came upon a man guarding a cargo of spirits which was to be taken further inland, and the smuggler begged of him not to inform the authorities.

"Did he give you any, bor?" inquired the decoy-man laughingly.

"That he did," answered the old man; "an' I didn't tell on him nayther."

Wild duck on her nest