Nature Trail
Iwatched another of those antique programmes on the television and was slightly surprised to find the estimated cost of a duck decoy, quite apart from its description. It was called a duck decoy alright but I had hoped it would be given its full description as being a drake pintail, just as a painting would be accredited, with the artist’s name, subject, place in history, and quality. ‘Here we have a glass bird’, the auctioneer might have said of a Lalique ornament. Or ‘There is some sort of rodent carved on this oak table’ in referring to the famous ‘mouse’ furniture.
Drake pintails are a favourite subject among the artists who carve these beautiful decoys. The bird is so readily identified by its white neck stripe and long thin tail, which gives it another name – ‘sea pheasant’. The female is very different, none of the male flamboyance: just a very sensible camouflaging all-over leaf brown.
The word ‘decoy’ was coined by the Dutch in 1650 from the word ‘de kooi’, meaning duck trap. Set on a dyke, this referred to a tunnel made of reed or mesh and about one hundred yards long, which curved round rather like a snail shell in a funnel which got gradually narrower, ending in a pipe with a trap door. The duck were enticed into the funnel by a small dog trained to run ahead then disappear behind screens. This raised the ducks’ curiosity, and they swam on deeper into the trap to find out what was going on. By the time they had got to the end they were trapped, and could then
easily be killed and sent off to market.
The presence of pieces of wood shaped into the form of a duck floating on the water inside the mouth of the funnel lured the duck down in the first place. In due course these became embellished into artistic works in their own right, and today are very sought after historic art forms, with a large number of books, museums, and societies devoted to them.
The pintail drake on that particular antique programme I was watching seemed to me to be an ancient decoy, and as such to be highly valuable, but it was given a rather conservative estimate of £40, which it did just manage to achieve. It may have been genuinely ancient, or at worst, a very clever copy. I have seen photos of one which closely resembled it, especially the way the head was placed. I also have a photo of the pintail drake decoy, with head placed back across its body, which achieved the world record price of $205,000 in Maine, USA, about forty years ago, as shown here in my photo.
Pintails can be seen in Pagham and Arundel Valley Nature Reserves, with about 500 in each location in the winter. They tend to keep apart from other species of duck.