Body Language Decoys originated out of necessity several years ago during the fall duck season. We were having trouble decoying birds in one of our favorite hunting spots, and came to the conclusion that we needed to make some design changes to our decoys. Carving and painting has been a part of Don's life for over 40 years, and making hunting decoys was the obvious answer to our decoy problem. Our first efforts were put into observing ducks; we watched the behavior of ducks in several of our hunting spots, and made decoys that exhibited the same type of body language the ducks were exhibiting in each area. Some of our hunting spots were great feeding areas for wigeons, so we made feeding wigeon decoys while other areas were resting or loafing areas, so we made resting and sleeping decoys. We discovered that if the ducks didn't see realistic body language in the decoy set up, they were not nearly as likely to work our decoy spread. Since then, we have continued to pay close attention to the ducks in our area, and our approach to decoying ducks is much the same as our approach to fly fishing for trout. When a trout refuses a fly, we make a change in the fly or the presentation until we find what works. When the ducks are refusing our decoy spread, we make adjustments until we achieve success. We base all of our decoy designs on 5 basic concepts: distance visibility, species recognition, movement, light diffusion and of course body language.
Don Mintz's Body Language Decoys