![]() Even at that distance, I could see that they were attracted by his actions. ![]() For twenty minutes, I watched this mysterious and seemingly purposeless performance, but presently looking toward the ducks, I noticed that a few coots had left the main body and had headed toward the dog. Joe kept on throwing his chips, first to the right and then to the left, and the more he threw, the more gayly the dog played. But in went another chip just at the shallow edge, and the spaniel entered into the fun with the greatest zest imaginable. I thought it for a moment a great piece of carelessness on Joe’s part. The spaniel skipped eagerly in with unbounded manifestations of delight. He threw a chip into the water and let his dog go. ![]() said: “Try them now, Joe! Now boys, be ready and don’t move a muscle until I say ‘fire!’” They were between three and four hundred yards away when B. ![]() After nearly three-quarters of an hour’s patient waiting, we saw a large body of ducks gradually drifting in toward our cove. All remained perfectly quiet, watching the ducks. Joe, lying flat behind a thick tuft a few yards to our right and about fifteen feet from the water’s edge, had his hat full of chips and held the young spaniel beside him. The two dogs, Rollo and Jim, lay down close behind us. The ducks were swimming slowly up before the wind and it seemed possible that a large body of them might pass within a few hundred yards of where we were. Joe left the dogs with us and, going back into the woods, presently returned with his hat full of chips from the stump of a tree that had been felled. We made for a sheltered cove and were shortly crawling on our hands and knees through the calamus and dry, yellow-tufted marsh grass, which made a good cover almost to the water’s edge. declined to answer my question and said the only way to find out was to see it for myself. One such luring method was ‘tolling,’ a technique that hunters learned long ago by watching wild foxes draw ducks closer to shore.ī. They had two choices: crawl, wade or paddle closer to where the ducks were or, somehow, lure the ducks closer to shore. And even when the first shotguns did appear, they were too heavy and inaccurate to use for wingshooting, so hunters still had to somehow get close to sitting ducks so they could shoot them on the water. So for centuries before the invention of the modern shotgun, the main goal of waterfowlers was to get as close as possible to sitting ducks. Eventually, techniques were even developed to lure ducks into cages. They were caught with snares, shot with a bow and arrow or driven into nets. However, before the invention of firearms, ducks were not shot on the wing. Nowadays, when we think of duck hunting, we imagine scenes of wing-shooting mallards in a marsh or stubble field. Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retrievers with Grant St. Listen to more information on the Duck Tolling Retriever with Hunting Dog Confidential:ĭuck Tolling and the Murray River Retriever “I’d like to be told,” I replied, “what tolling is.” “Well,” said B., ” I suppose now you’d like to see some duck-tolling?” There were literally acres of ducks of all kinds, but “trading” was at an end, and shooting, except of an occasional single or stray duck, was temporarily suspended. A look into the unusual history of duck tolling and the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling RetrieverĪs far as the eye could reach, the middle of the stream and the broad water of the river below were covered with them.
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