The Era of Live Decoys

Thumbing through an equivalent of WILDFOWL Magazine 100 years ago or more, you’d have seen snappy black and white images jump from the pages of articles on a variety of long-gone hunting practices, such as battery guns, sink boxes, ways to use corn and other bait, and informative tips on hunting over live decoys. I was first introduced to live decoys in Harry Walsh’s seminal 1971 Outlaw Gunner, and was mesmerized by the tale of “Old Pete,” a Canada goose toller. Decades later, I researched a piece on Texas live decoys, but admittedly, at the time, I didn’t grasp just how big live decoys were in America. Until now.

Live duck, goose, brant, and swan decoys, or tollers, were a staple in every flyway across the US and Canada. Properly trained tolling flocks were prized, their demand giving rise to a nationwide industry in decoy rearing and training. Gentlemen hunters traveled with their personal flocks, stacking tolling cages on the decks of schooners and steamers or shipping them by railroad before a hunt. Most market hunters, private clubs, and guides shot over tame decoys, and countless numbers of their wild brethren were killed over those Judas birds. It’s the reason they were outlawed by many states in the early 1900s, and finally by the federal government in the 1930s.

Live decoy shooting was immortalized by writers such as George Bird Grinnell, Nash Buckingham, and Gordon MacQuarrie. It’s easy to understand why. Flapping and flying tollers that “lifted up their voices in sonorous calls” were irresistible to wild birds that often decoyed so close “one can see their eyes twinkle.” Before wingshooting was popularized, shots were taken on the water, in part to protect the live decoys, and because it “largely increased the count.” The outcome of a single discharge on swimming birds could be the destruction of the whole flock. Few serious gunners ever considered hunting without live decoys.

Some of America’s sporting language originated with live birds. The word “decoy” we use today for fakes came from Holland and initially described tame calling ducks. “Toller,” the traditional term for a live decoy, was derived from the Middle English word “tollen,” meaning to entice or lure. I grew up with old timers who always referred to their decoy spreads as “stools,” which came from the use of staked platforms, or stools, for live bird placement.

Tollers arrived in America from the Netherlands and England. The first documented live decoys were Canada geese used at a chain of lakes near Plymouth, Massachusetts, by 1842. From there, they were introduced to new hunting audiences by wayfaring sportsmen, and in outdoor periodicals and newspapers. Tollers quickly reached Long Island, Chesapeake Bay, and Pamlico Sound, and by the mid-1880s were popularized on the Oregon coast. In Southern California, live mallards “were a relatively new thing” in 1897. Arkansas hunters appear to have brought live decoys to the Illinois River region in the late 1800s, and the Illinois practice of filling poultry wire pen enclosures with mallards and corn later spread to North Texas.

Hunting over tollers on the chain of Massachusetts lakes was done from mammoth structures, called “shooting stands.” Here, sportsmen lived in first-floor rooms for days at a time, their comfort interrupted by the signal to clamor up to the top-floor shooting platform with the approach of a flock. The most famous Massachusetts shooting stand was Plymouth’s Silver Lake, a remarkably sophisticated tolling operation that ran as many as 300 to 400 live geese. One gunner remembered that “it was a marvelous sight to see them put 60 flyers in the air at one time.”

The Silver Lake tolling technology was impressive, even by today’s standards. The stand manager controlled the decoy family “by holding the gander,” and carefully tracked each bird to capitalize on “the strength of the bond between the old pair and the brood.” Female geese were tethered in front of the stand and fastened to pulley lines that ran to the shooting platform and through “goose holes.” This system allowed family birds to be taken out or pulled in, “and thus secure the right note at the critical moment.” Nearby was a watch house “where a man sits night and day.” If all went to plan, the watchman yanked a cord connected to the sliding door of a pen filled with young flyers. “Their sudden appearance aroused their parents, and called loudly to their young,” while the flyers, answering the call of the gander, circled and returned to the stand.

Although they were not as easy to train as Canada geese, snow goose tollers appeared in spreads in the Midwest, Texas, and Northern California’s Sacramento Valley. California outfitters targeted Canada, snow, Ross’s, and white-fronted geese over crops of barley, and later wheat and rice. In the 1890s, an outfitter opined that “since live decoys have come into use, it seems to take no effort on the part of one man to bag 200 of these birds each morning.” Thousands of geese were shipped throughout the state and even to Nevada each week.

The most popular breeds of live duck decoys were domesticated mallards, sometimes called Rouen ducks, and the English call duck that reached America from England in the 1800s. The advantage of English call ducks over mallards was their wide range of notes and volume, and they were easy to socialize and train. Warren H. Hulburt, an Oregon decoy supplier at the turn of the century, raised only special gray call ducks “that helped in luring thousands of wild ducks to their death” on the Willamette River.

Gamekeepers occasionally raised other duck species. East of the Mississippi River, black ducks were common. On the Wisconsin Great Lakes, fishermen raised mallard flocks mixed with divers for deepwater hunting. The Pocahontas Club at Back Bay, Virginia, called “the famous rendezvous for Washington D.C. sportsmen,” kept canvasback, redheads, mallards, pintails, and wigeon tollers in their manicured duck pens.

There are a few references to Atlantic brant and swan decoys. The use of wing-tipped brant tollers on the New England coast dates to at least 1862, and Nathan Cobb, of Cobb’s Island, Virginia, hunted over them by the 1870s. According to George Bird Grinnell’s 1901 American Duck Shooting, Cape Cod longshoremen originated the practice of attaching a line to a bird from the blind that was jerked “to show wing.” Brant that shared pens with barnyard fowl were said to be “cold, dignified, and reserved, especially toward other fowl, and [they] never became fully domesticated.” The use of live swan decoys, like brant, was not widespread, with most of the big white bird references from Currituck Sound.

Snipe and curlews were hunted over crippled live birds. The best-known curlew “killing device” on the Atlantic Coast would raise eyebrows today. A gunner held a cripple by both legs, then “began bobbing it up and down while pinching the back of its neck, which obliges it to cry out.” The moment a flock spied the fluttering bird and heard its cry, “they swoop down upon it,” and “return again and again.”

At first, those who raised and trained waterfowl in America went by the Massachusetts-inspired title of stand manager, but this soon evolved into the English term “gamekeeper,” or just “keeper.” Monumental labor went into their training and raising of live birds, then their gathering and tending before, during, and after the hunt, when the keeper “called in the decoys,” as it was termed.

Collected from wild nests or raised from eggs, the first duty of a gamekeeper was to “pinion” a wing, a minor surgical procedure that included an incision and stitching that was preferred to clipping a wing. Next, the keeper started decoy training with taming, in which each bird was handled and fed every day. To teach restraint, a band was wrapped around one leg and a cord attached to a stake. During the next lesson, they were exposed to the discharge of a rifle or shotgun. Successful students were then introduced to water.

Most hunting clubs kept their ducks and geese in large coops or pen enclosures, some so expansive that they surrounded entire ponds. Currituck Sound keepers had “goose yards” with enough inventory to supply each of their blinds with 25 to 30 tollers. Before each hunt, the keeper and crew selected their birds, coaxed them into burlap sacks or wooden cages, then transported them by wagons or boats into small coops near the blind. Tollers were set out in the shooting area well before daylight.

Putting out a spread of live decoys involved precise strategies. To prevent tollers from being shot, keepers placed live birds to windward and wooden decoys to leeward. Geese and ducks were usually separated. Decoys were rested during a long day by rotating in new birds. Hen mallards were usually staked in front of the blind while drakes were separated because, when they were out of sight, they immediately began calling. Corn or wheat was spread to keep them excited. When flyers were used, they were always drakes kept in the blind or a nearby cage, and at the proper moment, the flyer was thrown into the air.

Tollers needed a system of restraint to prevent their escape, and it included leg bands or neck collars, straps, cords, and anchors or stakes. Keepers either cobbled together rigging systems locally or purchased them from sporting goods stores and catalogs. Materials for leg straps, or tethers, were oiled leather, wool sheepskin, cloth, and even lamp wicking. Neck collars were usually cloth fastened with a small brass snap hook. Currituck Sound gunners are credited with popularizing the use of a bridle attached to both legs, an improvement over a single leg band because it reduced injury in choppy water.

Leg and neck collars were connected by rings and snaps to up to ten feet of twine or plaited oiled cord. Line length had to be long enough to allow movement, but not so long that it tangled with other nearby ducks. Lines were attached to anchors weighing from two to five pounds, or stakes made from wood, lead, or a metal alloy. A version of the stake system, called a stool, was fitted with a board so that, in water too deep for birds to stand, it appeared as if the tollers were resting near the surface. Vermont black duck hunters had a unique stool system in which they tethered a single tame hen to a floating log in front of the blind.

A keeper’s prized birds were old ganders and well-trained mallard drakes that rarely had to suffer the indignity of being tethered and staked. Instead, these were the birds that took their positions as soon as the cage door was opened. During the hunt, they were trusted to swim towards a lighted flock, escort it within gun range, then separate from the wild birds just before the volley. The oldest drakes were usually the first to spy incoming birds, their calls alerting both the hunter and the other decoy ducks.

Duck hunters in agricultural land adjacent to the Illinois River developed a unique approach to live decoys. Rather than the labor of staked or anchored birds, they built wire poultry pens surrounding natural and artificial ponds that they filled with tame mallards and corn. Called field pens, their live decoys were fed and left for the season. These operations spread quickly, with some 450 field pens counted in the Illinois River Valley by the early 1930s.

One of the most challenging tasks for any gamekeeper was keeping his flock alive. The threats were many, starting with eggs and young birds that fell prey to minks, foxes, raccoons, and skunks. Foxes were said to have killed most of the caged tolling birds on Long Island in 1901. Tollers were drowned as turtles dragged them underwater by a foot. Lead poisoning from spent shot sometimes killed birds as they dabbled on shallow shoals – an Oregon hunter in 1900 lost 76 ducks to lead poisoning in a single season.

Hunting introduced more risks. Inexperienced shooters aiming at wild targets decimated tame flocks in their line of fire, and tollers were sometimes killed by the blow from shot birds falling from the sky. Anchored decoys were easy prey for owls, hawks, and eagles. Pot hunters often snuck up and shot what they suspected were wild birds. After gasoline engines made their appearance, keepers watched in disbelief as speeding runabouts ran through their flocks, shooting as they went.

Theft of whole penned decoy flocks, often worth hundreds of dollars, was very common. Famed Illinois duck call manufacturer Fred A. Allen had an entire flock of his carefully trained mallards and wood ducks stolen in 1899. The theft of a single trained mallard wound its way through St. Louis courts for two years in 1908 before the judge ordered the bird to court, figuring that the man to whom it waddled would be considered its owner.

Some tollers met their end on the table. A constable on the trail of a stolen Canada goose on Kent Island, Maryland, tracked it to the shanty of an oysterman who was stewing the bird. The goose still had the owner’s tag on its leg. In 1910, the manager of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis ordered a cage of tollers, but the hotel chef assumed the birds were for his kitchen. “Fast the ax began to fly on duck necks,” the manager arriving “just in time to jerk the last of his high-priced decoys from the falling blade.” Twenty years later, the famous Duck March at the Peabody originated with decoy ducks when the general manager liberated his flock of English call ducks in the hotel lobby fountain.

Sometimes tollers sought their freedom. A Philadelphia hunter in 1878 who lost a Canada goose toller to a migrating flock watched, the next year, as a single goose circled down toward the barnyard, calling to its mate. It was shot by a neighboring farm boy. Ducks were famously more delinquent, although most found their way back within a few days. When a Southeast Texas sportsman lost his best hen mallard, it returned in the night, and “brought home about 75 wild mallards with her.”

Only a few hunters thought that live decoys were “a decided nuisance” and not worth the effort. Poorly trained tame ducks, like today’s version of an untried retriever, could ruin a hunt. “They persist in tangling themselves up,” a California hunter complained, and “are bulky and hard to handle and often flap about on the water at the end of their tether.” Another hunter groused that ducks not trained to return to their coop “are likely to slip and flutter,” and end up “dodging about the blind, which is very annoying.” Still another was critical of ducks that called to any bird that flew over, like kingfishers, herons, seagulls, and crows.

The business of raising tollers for the market probably began with a Massachusetts stand manager who hatched goslings from the eggs of a pair of wing-tipped geese in 1854. Thirty years later, shooting stands on five Plymouth ponds boasted an inventory of 250 tollers that sold for the lofty price of $20 to $40 each: ($40 in 1854 is roughly $1,500 in 2025 dollars). This was likely the highest price that decoys reached, as by the 1900s, geese averaged about $5 to $10, and ducks sold for $2 and $6 a pair. Anyone with a chicken pen in their backyard could make money raising tollers they advertised for sale in local newspapers, and thousands of them did. One enterprising Missourian even promoted his business by training his decoy flock to fly over town each morning.

At the other end of the spectrum were commercial game farms that shipped birds throughout North America, and it became big business by the early 1900s. Wisconsin, for example, had 15 licensed game bird operations in 1930. In Chincoteague, Virginia, Thomas J. Reed shipped about a thousand live decoys to hunters across America every year. Reed and John Cowieson of Toronto, another big decoy supplier, transported railroad cars of decoy ducks to Coral Gables, Florida, where they promoted their decoy businesses as ringmasters in a nationally advertised five-act wild duck show.

By the late 1800s, the effectiveness of live decoys was blamed, in part, for America’s declining migratory bird resources. Probably the first law prohibiting their use was a 1896 statute passed by sportsmen-lawmakers in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, aimed at clipping the wings of local market hunters. A 1906 Nantucket County law banned shooting black ducks over live birds. When Kansas passed a statewide law banning both duck and goose tollers in 1911, it was met with outrage. Other states, including Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, California, and Nebraska, introduced legislation between 1913 and 1929, but most never overcame opposition to become law.

Conservation organizations increased their lobbying and support for migratory bird hunting restrictions during the late 1920s and early 30s. One vocal proponent was William T. Hornaday, whose 1931 Thirty Years for Wildlife included a chapter titled “The Bad Ethics of Live Decoys” in which he railed against “training captive geese and ducks to render compulsory service in calling to and luring to death their own blood relatives.” Part of his attack was aimed at Massachusetts shooting stands where, he wrote, some hundred stands “unmercifully murdered” countless Canada geese and some 16,000 black ducks every year. Hornaday’s description of a Massachusetts “stand gunner” is timeless:

The stand gunner is, to say the best of him, a picturesque creature teeming with pond-lore and weather-wisdom, half goose, half philosopher. At the worst, he is a lazy, Rip Van Winkle sort of chap, carrying about with him a disdain for all things modern, and having not improbably a taste for drink. As a rule, he is harmless, though more or less frowned upon by upland shooters of a more sprightly and progressive type. He lives from week to week, hoping for a big storm that never arrives, or a great shot that he surely will pull off if he lives long enough. He sees many things as he leans over the board fence of his blind, and has some tall stories of such remarkable happenings, many of which are true.

Attempts to prohibit shooting over live decoys got a boost in the 1930s from a seven-year drought, known as the Dust Bowl, that decimated nesting grounds in the US and Canada. The federal response to the waterfowl emergency was swift. In 1931, President Hoover signed a law banning the use of more than 10 live goose decoys, and the next year, limited live ducks to just 25. Then, in 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt approved a long list of hunting restrictions that included using any live decoys.

Sportsmen by 1935 had witnessed the end of legal market hunting, spring shooting, crane, swan and shorebird hunting, sink boxes, bait, unplugged shotguns, and declining daily bag limits. But outlawing live decoys probably struck the deepest nerve. Stacks of letters reached conservation officials with pleas such as: “Don’t deprive us of live decoys and force us to associate with a batch of wooden decoys forever,” and “Without live decoys, the hunters would have small chance of killing any wild ducks.” Sportsmen predicted the end of the world. To a degree, they were right. By 1938, most of the Massachusetts gunning stands were abandoned, and all the approximately 450 field pen operations in the Illinois River Valley folded by 1941.

Some hunters kept using tollers and ushered in the era of the outlaw hunter, with federal and state game wardens continuing to make live decoy cases for fully three decades after they were banned. If violators suspected game wardens were nearby, they shot their decoys. A Texas man said: “We’d slip an English caller in with a bunch of carved ducks and let her work a bunch of ducks in. Then if somebody come up, you had to kill her.”

A Louisiana game warden, in a single month, made a dozen live decoy arrests in one parish. But the lawman didn’t finger 12 different hunters. They were the same four outlaws, caught on three separate occasions. Old habits, it seems, die hard.

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