Duck Deception

“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.” – Emil Mazey, secretary-treasurer of the United Auto Workers, 1946.

Every year, thousands of ducks follow the logic that the oft-quoted phrase implies, only to have their migration interrupted by a shotgun blast.

“Those weren’t really ducks at all,” they may realize in their final moments. 

The decoys my hunting party employed while duck hunting ranged from classic to sophisticated. At times we would have out about 30 plastic mallards, both hens and drakes, painted with correct colors, with their heads sometimes turned in different directions. We might also have out a cluster of about 10 teal.

Then there were the Mojos, which were decoys on a pole. They looked like landing mallard drakes. Their wings moved under power of a rechargeable battery. One ran intermittingly, the other was remote controlled.
We also used a battery operated swimming duck. It swam in a small circle around its anchor point out in the middle of the decoys. The non-swimming decoys could also be rigged with a jerk-line to create movement on still days, but we never had that problem.

For calls, Bill wore about half a dozen of them around his neck. He used them to speak to the ducks in a language that I didn’t understand. Apparently there’s more to it than just quacking away.