This must never be spared in a Decoy, and should be strewn about the landings and in the water near the pipes overnight. The wild birds soon spread the good news, and more and more fowl will collect in the pool in consequence of their being, as Decoymen say, "tethered by the tooth."
    Decoymen profess to specially prepare the grain they use when feeding up the fowl, but it is more the way it is thrown and used than the actual food itself.
    It is necessary that the first handfuls of food thrown in should be light and dry, that it may float 'well, and so attract the attention of the birds as it drifts along the surface of the water. Some Decoymen use bruised oats for this reason, when first commencing to feed in a pipe.
    Buckwheat is as good as anything to use; also oats, with some hemp-seed oil sprinkled on them. Malt grains, or coombs,^* flavoured by aniseed, will sometimes draw fowl up a pipe when they refuse other food.
    Hempseed or canary seed is also very attractive to wildfowl as a change, and especially so to Teal. Decoymen also place great faith in what is well known in the fens as "Willow-weed." The Essex men prefer it to any other food, especially for Wigeon, and take no little trouble to obtain it from Norfolk or Lincoln. This weed is Polygonum persicaria (spotted knot-grass). It grows in fenny soil among the corn, and has a small black triangular-shaped seed, and a black horseshoe patch on its leaves- Farmers when threshing often save it to feed their poultry and pigeons with.
    But Ducks will feed on barley, wheat, or maize, in my experience, as well as on anything else, and some acorns thrown into and near the entrance of the pipes overnight is an admirable device, for there is no stronger attraction to wild duck than acorns.