I'm kind of wondering if that won't be a plus to have a half dozen oldsquaw. Now another consideration is about drake to hen ratio. From experience, we decoy bufflehead better to hen heavy groups, my regular bufflehead spread is 9 hens, 2 drakes. It gets to the point that nearly every one that flies up the river comes in, not so with all drakes. It's a lot about the make up of brood groups and a three year maturity that makes the bufflehead seem like there are very few drakes. That's kind of the case with divers. When I designed buffleheads for Tanglefree I did both a drake and a hen, but they only produced the drake, it's just a fundamental lack of diver understanding. So on oldsquaw should I just do a two drake 4 hen set up or do you think that makes any difference?
All of the squaws we've seen over the years were singles by themselves amongst thousands of other divers and wigeons, it makes me think they are anti social like barrows or don't like some species like canvasbacks. We do try to give some space between species, but sometimes if you have the wrong duck blocking the approach of another species it can be a problem.
As you can tell, I probably overanalyze things,
We always have a few redheads around, some years more, some years less. The river is about 150 yards wide, so you always know the ducks are seeing us, that's why black and white is such a big deal, visibility. When ducks occupy our stretch of the river they tend to congregate on the other side of the river, it's a water depth thing, but access is limited over there without a boat, so we are actually trying to get the ducks to go where they don't plan to go. Decoying becomes that much more important.
When I'm making my own personal decoys, my primary concern is just being seen, not being pretty. When we used to have mallards around I would have a pretty light bodied drake and a black duck for the hen. Otherwise the hen would be invisible against the edge where they typically sit. Now days we don't see enough mallards to fill a limit if we killed them all.
We quit using mallard decoys about a decade ago, it was a waste of space in the bag and weight we didn't need to carry. The occasional mallard here sounds like how you describe a single redhead, they will land with anything and are way more prone to respond to a call than a diver. We saw one drake mallard this year and it decoyed right into goldeneye decoys with some calling by my 10 year old grandson. We passed on him as usuall, but I regret not shooting it just because the grandson had called it in.
