WORKS RELATING TO DECOYS. 7 



nets, or the mere on which the nets were placed was not at the cHsposal of 

 the fenmen, or the law forbade the catching of wildfowl in summer when 

 young or moulting, tlicn they set to work to entice what fowl they could 

 into the nets during the zviiiter, 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. 



Works relatinc; to Decoys. 



I possess numberless quotations from early and later writers who, 

 whilst professing to describe a Decoy, knew nothing whatever of the sub- 

 ject. 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, ami 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 Univc7'sal 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. Blome in 1686, Bewick in 1804, Pennant in 18 12, and Oliver 

 Goldsmith in 18 r6, also each give some sort of an idea of a Decoy, as 

 does Nicholson in " The British Encyclopedia" (1809). 



