WAUSAU - Growing up near the Mississippi River in northwestern Illinois, Mike Pierce of Wausau developed a deep and abiding fondness for duck hunting. First, it was calling that struck his fancy. His ...

BURLINGTON — The novice decoy carvers listened intently Wednesday to the instructions being given at the Burlington Community Center. The Washington Brant Foundation’s Kurt Benson was telling them how ...

Jerry Simmons picks up his decoys after the end of their first hunt. He carved the decoys by hand, making them from tupelo and cork. Mike Marsh A hunter headed into the darkness in a 17-foot boat, his ...

BURLINGTON — It’s not your normal migration. Duck decoys are returning to Holiday Sports starting at 10:30 a.m. Saturday in Burlington for an annual carving competition. It’s the fourth straight time ...

The imitation waterfowl, made to resemble their living counterparts, have been used for centuries to lure birds from the sky to within shooting range for waiting hunters. The first decoys, made from ...

Duck hunters are cut from a rare cloth. The sport is expensive and time consuming, pushing marriages and work to their brink, and the birds we pursue move best in the very conditions that keep most ...

There's something almost ethereal about the humble duck, says Eliot, Maine, resident Jim Higgins — its beauty, its wanderlust, its calls, its many hues. From the time he was a young man, he has been ...

It was an ordinary log from a paulownia tree, a seasoned slice of timber that, in another life, might have gone up in smoke in the fireplace of the Carson home in Havre de Grace. But Dan Carson had ...