Project Mallard

The night before the last day of duck season, 2023. Mike Callian and Scott Sprecher are urging me to come out the next morning and try to be the first person to shoot a duck over the prototype DSD mallards. Besides the forecast calling for calm winds and over 60 degrees, I have Covid. And not “the sniffles” Covid; I’m like, wiped-out. I go to bed that night, and with God as my witness, I didn’t sleep one minute. I was just miserable. But at some point you realize you can be miserable in bed, or miserable outside. I’ll take outside any day. Everything was “OK” until I grabbed a rope and pulled a Marshrat across a dry field. That was a big mistake, but to make a long story short: mission accomplished; a mallard pair saw the decoys and bombed right in. The 28 gauge loaded with BOSS 3/5’s folded the Drake neat as can be, and I was ready to head back home and sleep. 

This project started so long ago, and has many more years to go before being “completed, it’s hard to call it a “2024” project. But the official launch is just a day or two away.

Where to start? My friend Don Guthrie was making cool custom mallards around the same time I started making geese. I was working alone then; 1998 and 1999. It was a great relationship because we rooted for each other and admired each other’s work and weren’t competing, but were cooperating with each other. My sweet wife would buy me six of Don’s Columbia River Decoys each Christmas, and most of the time, Don wouldn’t accept any money, which was helpful because we were dirt poor.

I was getting a ton of requests to make a mallard floater. I would direct people to CRD’s, but they were getting harder and harder to find. Our friend Mario Friendy took over their production, and then eventually started to oversee another company that has always been a friend to DSD: Final Approach.  

I decided to wait before making a mallard. A quarter century in-fact. But the time came; we were ready, the world was ready, and we got the blessing from good friends. I had been playing around with designs and prototypes off and on throughout that time. Since there hasn’t been a decoy made by the same process as the A.C.E. Mallard, I didn’t have a “market” I was trying to break into. People who have tested the decoy always make comments that it rides and swims like a cork or wood decoy, and that it will save them money over a custom spread of carved decoys, while still allowing them to be different and stand-out in high-pressure areas. That’s great, and I’m happy about that. But I really, really intended for it to “ride” like a real bird. And I think it does, after testing several keel designs. It cuts through waves and chop, instead of bobbing. The downside of this? The weight. It’s a heavy decoy. Maybe the future holds a lightweight version for calm water, but for now, this is a durable, no-nonsense, ultra realistic decoy, with the single most important thing; in some case, the ONE thing people care about: our A.C.E. finish on a mallard decoy. 

Let’s be honest, that’s what your buying when you buy a DSD A.C.E. decoy. The reason I say this is, there are already some beautiful mallard decoys on the market. Many carved by world-champion carvers. Yes, A.C.E. material and coating is insanely durable, but the durability only equates to a minor convenience: you won’t have to replace your decoys every few years. A small cost savings if you hold onto your decoys for long enough; no big deal. I’ll bet most people will still bag them and keep them clean; I know I will. We have customers who still have their decoys from 24 years ago in great shape. I guess in that case, they really have saved a significant amount of money, and can pass them onto their kids. Cool!

But our finish; the final coating; the surface reflection, is the magic of DSD. Oh, how I’d love it if the demand for our decoys was due to my sculptures lol. But I always try to think in terms of what I would want, and what I would buy, if I was outside of all this. I would want A.C.E. mallards! The finish is so damn effective on birds; it’s crazy. We mostly “stumbled” onto it. Again, I’d love to say it was our genius minds who dialed-in that finish. But some of it was dumb luck. I’ll take it. I’ve dreamed of having duck decoys that have the same effectiveness of our goose decoys. Whatever waterfowl decoys you buy, domestic or imported, buy the best finish you can afford. I personally feel there’s not enough effort put into a realistic finish on most decoys, and it’s a huge difference-maker. We try to keep that in mind and make efforts towards that with all DSD decoys, domestic and imported. Do our imported decoys have a finish that tests-out on the spectrometer as good as A.C.E.? No. But over time, we are getting closer, and that’s exciting too.

Dave’s duck hunting advice that no one asked for 🙂 

Don’t toss your decoys unless it’s already raining; keep them dry!

Hold STILL; people underestimate what a difference maker this is!

Small spreads rule; they are more believable as motionless.

Dial-in you feed chatter; listen to ducks; random, throaty, whiney, with voice!

Contented feed sounds and soft quacks trumps strings and highballs a LOT of times  

Decoys in grass or under trees, in spreads larger or smaller than what most people are using kills. Mixed spreads of 3 to 5 dozen “out on a point” is a dead giveaway it’s the boogieman

Don’t shoot a hen pintail in 2024 the population needs fewer drakes, but more hens to expand

Have fun! Take a kid or two! Buy the best decoys you can comfortably afford; in numbers you can comfortably afford. Protect your hearing. Chose your shots carefully. Let’em work!