Randy Root is a master of mallards. As a kid, he grew up on the south side of Chicago, but in 1960 his family bought several acres along the east side of the Illinois River not far from Peoria. Root ...

Jake Bakken from Laporte was selling multiple styles of decoys. Some were realistic, others were made of multiple layers of ...

Until he carved his first decoys, Jerry Talton was, by his own description, a “wild-ass redneck surfer dude” from the North Carolina coast. His brother was actually the duck hunter, and one year, ...

This Saturday and Sunday, the Fine American Craftsman Show, put on by the Wilton Historical Society, will be celebrating it’s 25th anniversary. Wilton resident Glen Heller said this will be his first ...

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“Hard to tell this thing from a real crappie,” said my friend Dan Scherer, as we passed around the glistening decoy. “Except for we can’t clean and fry it.” In my hands, the crappie was solid, but its ...

Decoys carved after 1950 for solely decorative purposes hold little attraction for Shaw. "They're very realistic," he says, "but I find them dead." Nineteenth- and early 20th-century decoys, on the ...

The reputation of the carver, the clarity of a decoy's provenance and, to a lesser extent, the stature of former owners also affect value. If, for example, Teddy Roosevelt shot ducks over a decoy, ...