Decoy Trapping

Comparison of Lesser and Greater Scaup in photo.

I arrived in Fairbanks and was met by my boss Brandt. If you don't know birds, Brandt is the name of a cormorant and Brant is a type of goose, so having a boss who is a duck PhD student named Brant is hilarious. Actually I worked at a goose camp in the Canadian Arctic with a fellow named Drake! What's crazy is his sister is named teal and his brother Woody!...Anyway Brandt looks like Corey Feldman, but blond and also he looks like he's 19. He got carded when we went to a bar later.

I spent the next few days gathering up gear and food for camp. We loaded up Brandt's huge pick up with decoy hens from UAF's animal quarters and 10 rolls of welded wire to make traps. We drove up to Murphy Dome to meet the helicopter. Here I became acquainted with Troy, a true Greek God of chopper pilots. He has a tiny machine and it took three sling loads of welded wire and the hens went in the machine in kennels.

I flew out the next day with the satellite Internet guy in his Cessna 206 on amphibs, which are pontoons with wheels. We took off from tarmac at the Fairbanks airport but landed on the waters Big Minto Lake.

When I arrived at camp we put away the food and gear and aided Will as he set up the Internet system. Then we build traps for a week. We built 20 of these welded wire decoy traps. These traps consist of a center pen where a captive hen sits with food, she has a platform where she can get out of the water. The hen is surrounded by four pens with trap doors, that have a treadle that trips a fishing line set to the trigger of an old leg hold trap. When a duck comes into the trap to investigate the hen it depresses the treadle, trips the trigger and the door swings shut.

Mostly we catch males of whatever the species the hen is but sometimes we get territorial hens or even other species of ducks and even grebes and gulls.

We have hens of four species, pintail, lesser scaup, greater scaup and wigeon. We also have a pintail-mallard hybrid we named Blondie, who could barely attract anything.

For the next three weeks we checked the traps twice a day after breakfast and then after dinner. We wear stocking foot waders, which are breathable neoprene chest waders, but with booties that you wear under a wading boot. We do so much walking that rubber boot-foot waders would be too hot.