How Do You Catch Wild Ducks Without Firing a Shot? Persuade Them to Follow a Dog

The arrangement centres on a secluded pond with several curved channels leading away from it, each narrowing along its length and covered by netting on hoops so that it forms a tapering tunnel ending in a small trap at the far end. Screens of reed run along the sides of each channel, with gaps between them, positioned so that a person can move along the outside without being seen from the water. The whole site is planted and sheltered to be attractive to wild birds and quiet enough that they settle on the pond without alarm.

The method exploits two quite different pieces of duck behaviour:

• •Tame birds kept on the pond attract wild ones to join them
• •Those tame birds are trained to swim up a channel when fed
• •Wild birds follow them into the tunnel
• •A small dog is shown at gaps in the screens, further up the channel
• •Ducks approach and follow it rather than fleeing, which is the odd part
• •The operator then appears behind them and drives them to the trap

The response to the dog is the element that seems least plausible and is well documented. Ducks mob a fox, approaching and harrying it rather than simply leaving, which makes sense as a defence, since a predator that has been seen and followed cannot ambush anything and a fox in the open is not a threat to a bird on water. A small russet-coloured dog trained to appear and withdraw repeatedly along the channel provokes exactly that response, drawing the birds further in each time it shows itself. The dogs used were bred and trained for the purpose, and the behaviour was described in detail by people who ran these sites.

The method is Dutch in origin and the vocabulary records that directly. The English word derives from a Dutch term meaning a cage or trap for ducks, and the structures were introduced to England in the seventeenth century by Dutch engineers already working on draining the fens, which is why they concentrate in exactly those low wet districts. The design travelled with the drainage expertise and the two industries overlapped. Dutch sites remain the most numerous and several are still worked. The word entered general English from there and then broadened to mean any lure, which is how a term for a duck trap became a word used in advertising and in warfare.

The structures were serious commercial operations supplying urban markets, with the best sites taking tens of thousands of birds a year and records surviving from the seventeenth century onwards. They declined as railways brought cheaper meat, as wildfowl populations fell, and as legislation restricted the taking and sale of wild birds. A small number survive in Britain and the Netherlands, and several of those are now run for conservation, catching birds to be ringed and released rather than killed, which uses exactly the same structure and the same dog for a completely different purpose and provides data on migration.

Curved netted channels leading from a quiet pond narrow into traps, with reed screens letting an operator move unseen alongside. Tame birds trained to swim up a channel draw wild ones in, and a small dog shown at gaps draws them further, because ducks mob a fox rather than fleeing it. Surviving sites now catch birds for ringing rather than for market.