WORKS RELATING TO DECOYS. | |
| If the ducks were not in sufficient numbers or had learnt to avoid the nets, or the mere on which the nets were placed was not at the disposal of the fenmen, or the law forbade the catching of wildfowl in summer when young or moulting, then they set to work to entice what fowl they could into the nets during the winter, and so substituted trickery for brute force. How completely they succeeded is well known. Instead of driving the fowl with a mob of assistants into a net at the end of a large lake, they now preserved the ducks on a small pool, from which one man could lure them into a pipe or pipes attached to it, and take all the profit to himself in a quiet and methodical manner. | |
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WORKS RELATING TO DECOYS. | |
| I possess numberless quotations from early and later writers who, whilst professing to describe a Decoy, knew nothing whatever of the subject. All they were aware of was, that the ducks were in some way caught in nets connected with a small piece of water. The operation of catching, and the arrangement of the Decoy, they never saw. But as they could not ignore the subject in the sporting and topographical works of the day, they drew upon their imaginations, or eagerly copied one another's statements. Some of their conjectures were ludicrous in the extreme. One writer affirmed that the whole Decoy and its enclosure was surrounded and covered in with a huge net. Another, that a dog was sent into the water at dusk to allure the ducks by swimming among them, and that the ducks swam at the dog to eat him, thinking he was a shoal of fish, and were so led into a net. A third contended that a dog was required to alarm the fowl off the water in the first instance, and afterwards to drive them into the net like a flock of sheep. The earliest attempt at a true description of a Decoy for enticing ducks occurs in the Universal Magazine of April, 1752. The writer really narrates with tolerable accuracy the general outline of a Decoy and its management. He evidently on one occasion paid a visit to a Decoy, but doubtless was rather puzzled to remember aright all he saw therein when he wrote up his notes at home. Still his account has a vein of truth throughout. L Blome in 1686, Bewick in 1804, Pennant in 1812, and Oliver Goldsmith in i8r6, also each give some sort of an idea of a Decoy, as does Nicholson in "The British Encyclopedia" (1809). | |