Show us your first decoy

Andy Hildreth

Andy Hildreth

New member
I started this same thread on another site last year after I had completed my first decoy and Westlake was around the corner. Lots of carvers participated in the thread. I am asking everyone to post a photo of your first decoy you carved. The purpose is twofold. #1-To allow new carvers to see that very few of us started out with great looking decoys. It shows that most everyone had to take that slow path to attain the skills needed to carve and paint properly and gives the newbies(myself included) the confidence to keep trying. #2-Its good laughs to see those first birds!!!

I had a problem posting a photo but somehow Steve Sutton was able to help. Thanks Steve! Here is a photo of my first decoy and my dog Scoter who just turned one year old. This decoy was the first redhead pulled out of the pool at Westlake last year. I guess if my redhead this year is the second bird pulled from the pool it means I am twice as good a carver as I was last year!!!
View attachment 102_0193_1.JPG
 
Last edited:
I used the "Onlne help" for posting pictures. I followed all the steps. When I get to the last step with the window box that appears I click the online bubble and nothing happens. I even have trouble with the clickable link. I go through all the steps to get the clickable link and I can see the jpg at the bottom but when I post it no link shows up. I don't want to tell you how long I have spent trying to get this to work, it would be embarrassing. Please pm me if you have any advise as I don't want to bore others with this issue. Thanks for your help!!!
 
got to appear on the orignal post by doing TWO things?.......

Don't worry about it....its really simple once you've gotten it right once or twice....

Here's the TWO STEPS you missed.....

once you have the photo uploaded and ready to insert place the cursor where you want the upper left hand corner of the picture to be......leave the cursor there and move your mouse over to the next to the last icon on the tool bar.....if you use your imagination, and a magnifying glass, it will look like a picture of mtns in a frame.....click on that........a pop up will appear appear asking you the location of your photo.....click ON LINE and the picture will appear, as if by magic, in the field of your post.......

TAHHHHH DAAAAHHHH you are now a card carrying picture poster on the Duck Boat Page......

PREVIEW for the first couple of times to make sure you have it right.......and if you have multiple pictures make sure you space between them.....

EASY PEASY PICTUREPOSTANESEY.....

Steve
 
Yea...I did those two steps numerous times. Got the box to show up...clicked inline...box disappears and there is no picture, no nothing. Thats why I think it is my computer. I did Ebay for years and used HTML before they made Ebay user friendly. This shouldn't be a big deal for me but something is wrong. Thanks for your help though...greatly appreciated!
 
Eric, I'm sure, will see this and he might have some idea as to whats wrong.....

For the meantime if you have more to post you can send them to me and I'll do them.....or you can do the saem thing you did on this one and then send me a note telling me what thread to go to and I'll fix it...

Steve
 
Here's one of my early mini's. It is one of the only mini's i have. This is the one my grandfather held before he died. i made them out of boat scraps and painted them in all kinds of bottom paint, and some paint i brought home from school to "coincidentally" finish art projects and didn't have paint for. I used to make them with the real birds eating out of my hand, and i'd set them adrift durring slow days hunting. Sometimes i'd practice my shooting on them! I'd do anything to get them all back. It's a real shame. They were made with a 1 in pocket knife and a hacksaw that i picked up. I painted most of them with my fingers, duck feathers i saved, or the hair that the dogs sacraficed for a make shift brush. I made this one 10 years ago when i was 7 years old. Those were the days!

The mallard is the one i was talking about, the widgeon was probably one made a relatively soon after the mallard. I made so many of them, i lost track of when i made them. However these have dates on the bottom with backwards numbers and spelling problems on the names of the months.

View attachment minis.jpg
 
Last edited:
Spencer...thanks for sharing and I am sure you will always have that decoy with all its sentimental value.

David...good job, I started with one of Willy's kits but it didn't turn out as good as yours!!
 
Last edited:
canvasbuffy1.jpg


Made about 10 years ago from things I learned on this site. It didn't leak...too much.

Tim
 
buffie002-1.jpg


Solid basswood, painted with acrylic. I intended to hallow it, but I carved it first, and had seen pictures of how to cut the bottom off after shaping, using an extended rip fence. I built a fence, and half a second after the blade hit wood, the deek was ripped out of my death grip, lodging at an angle, forcing my brand new blade into a hard bend. I had a wierd tingle in my thumb that lasted at least 3 months. I still hunt it, when I get on water that warants diver deeks.
 
This are my first two birds, Mergansers that my buddy had a pattern for.They are hollowed jersey white cedar hollowed. I am on bird number three right now.


preenbuffy003.jpg

 
Last edited:
Cool thread. I hope to someday be able to show my first decoy, but for now I will watch and admire.

Tight Lines ... Fred
 
This was my fist decoy, a solid basswood "putty duck". By the time I was done there was as much wood putty as basswood. If you look closely, I even textured the head with wood putty.
I have had an itch lately to draw up a pattern and carve another one just to get a "before and after" type comparison. I may make that my next project after I get the workbench cleared off.

ruddyrepaint.jpg

 
As much as I'd like to show you my first bird, a bull Can made from Willy's kit, it was given as a gift, along with a couple bottles of cheap wine, to a guy that did some boiler work for me. Nothing worse than your heat going out on one of the coldest days of the year.. .a holiday. That #1 can and the wine cost a heck of a lot less than the quote I got, just to have them come out an LOOK at it. I do have a couple pics of #2... #3... etc.
From a few years ago after a hard days work...
jasonpics085.jpg


A mini that I did a few years ago...
misci079.jpg

 
Well, I can’t show you the actual decoy for several reasons.
1. It wasn’t an actual decoy, it was just the head.
2. I don’t have any actual pictures

I can do the next best thing and give you a picture of what inspired me to attempt my first wooden decoy, but first, a little background.
In 1972 at the tender age of 9, I was really getting into the great outdoors. My parents had moved back to the family homestead from the Oklahoma City suburbs a few years earlier and those 160 acres became my own personal wildlife Mecca. My parents had made a deal with me that I could have my first real gun (a Stevens Crackshot, single shot, rolling block .22 rifle) when I turned 10 in February the next year.

To ready myself for entry into the manly world of being a big game hunter prior to the arrival of my new .22, I convinced my parents to get me a Sports Afield subscription. The first issue to arrive was the September 1972 issue. On the cover was a very simple wooden Canvasback decoy. Wow…. I needed one of those, for I saw myself doing lots of waterfowl hunting with my new .22, after all it was a real gun.

I found some kind of board from the pile of scraps left over from our new pole barn, traced me a pattern from the magazine’s cover, and then used a coping saw to cut out the decoy’s head until my hands bled. I then used a simple pocket knife to round the edges just like on the magazine’s cover. I thought I’d captured the likeness down to the last detail, to include the lack of eyes. That was simple enough, a little painful, but simple none the less. Now what to do for the body? Mmmmmm that was going to be a bigger challenge in that I couldn’t find a board that large. Dad used all the big round boards to hold up the barn.

Off to the woods I went with an ax in hand. It must have been a pick-ax or had similar cutting characteristics because I chopped and chopped until my hands bled again. Finally the mighty black-jack oak tree that seemed the size of a California redwood succumbed to my efforts. In reality it was about the size of an ornamental shrub which was probably a good thing since dragging it the length of a quarter section was again no small task. Somewhere at about the invisible line that officially marks the “back 40” of our farm, I realized I was getting nowhere fast and gave up that particular carving adventure in an effort to let my hands heal.

Shortly thereafter, I discovered basswood on a family vacation to Silver Dollar City in Branson Missouri. In those days, it was less Theme Park and more of an arts and crafts village with a few small rides thrown in for us kids. That’s where my carving bug took off. Since I learned the hard way that there was no such thing as free wood, I bought small basswood scraps at the woodcarving shop. With those I made lots of miniature decoys. They were mostly “mallards” in that they had a green head and gray body and little blue patches on their wings. I got that color scheme from pictures I’d seen in my Sports Afield.

Fast forward 26 years to 1999. I bought and trained my first lab pup, Gunner, and together we began our journey towards real waterfowl hunting, this time with a Benelli Supernova shotgun and not a .22 single shot. Plastic G&H decoys from the factory showroom in Henryetta, Ok were my chosen lures.

Now jump to 2009. While I’d carved some things on and off, I’d never attempted a full sized decoy. After buying a few books, and finding several web sites. I started on my first hunting decoy, a hollowed basswood, you guessed it, mallard. After I finished carving it and started the painting phase, I decided it would be easier to “assembly line” paint so I started my second full size hunting decoy in cork with a basswood head and again, you guessed it, of a mallard.

I had to do a little internet searching and some of the details were a little sketchy, for example the exact issues date of the magazine, but in my mind’s eye I could vividly see the Sports Afield cover with the decoy. At age 9, I didn’t know a canvasback from a, you guessed it, mallard. But based on the knowledge I have now of waterfowl, I knew it was a canvasback on the cover of a magazine that was prior to my 10th birthday that I was looking for. Finally buried deep within a Google search, I found it just as I remembered it.
View attachment Sports Afield 1972.jpg

Maybe when I get home, I’ll visit my old room in my folks house and see if I can find my first full size decoy carving attempt from nearly 38 years ago. If I can, I think I’ll finish it. Right after I finish, you guessed it, my mallards.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top