(soft guitar music) (knife carves) - Here's a smaller draw knife.

Pulls off those nice curls of cedar that are so satisfying.

(soft guitar music) I've always kind of enjoyed whittling, and when I was a kid I used to carve little dioramas of wildlife and stuff like that.

By the time I graduated from college, my folks bought a new house that had a stone fireplace, and it had a shelf on it that just looked like it was made for an old-style duck decoy.

Being a rabid do-it-yourselfer like I am, I thought, "I think I could make one," and I did.

And it was a lot of fun, and I just kept going from there and getting more and more over my head into carving detailed birds and then ultimately duck decoys.

My name's Joel Huener.

I'm a wildlife biologist by trade.

I'm retired now.

I like to carve decoys, mostly duck decoys.

And used to carve more detailed birds, and now I just carve birds that have more detail than is necessary to decoy a bird.

But when I'm out duck hunting, it makes me happy to see 'em floating in front of me.

Since I was really young, I was interested in animals and nature.

I especially got interested in waterfowl when I started learning about them because you could have a whole bunch of different species in one place rather than just one species at a time.

And I found that fascinating.

And it just means you get more excuses to carve different kinds of decoys.

That's part of the attraction.

The earliest duck decoys, I think, were from I don't know how many thousands of years ago in a cave in Nevada, and they found recognizable canvasback decoys woven out of bulrush.

And back in the 1800s, when people were using punt guns and everything else, it became a way to make market gunning more efficient.

And that's when decoy carving really took off.

And it was mostly along the east coast, a little bit along the west coast.

Not as much in the middle until later.

And even today you see that the big carving competitions are in Maryland and along the eastern seaboard or up in Seattle or California.

To carve a wooden decoy, the first thing you gotta do is you gotta have a plan.

You gotta have something that you're going to cut out and figure out where everything is.

I've got a whole notebook full of plans of birds that I've carved in the past, some of which I like, some of which I think I've grown beyond and I won't repeat that pattern.

If they're gonna be working birds, you gotta be cognizant of the grain of the wood 'cause you want the grain running along areas where the wood is thin.

So you want it running along the bill, you want it running along the tail feathers.

When I'm carving heads, I typically carve them out of basswood.

Basswood is a very even-grained wood.

It takes detail well.

The bodies I do out of northern white cedar.

I will cut out a block in two pieces and lag bolt 'em together.

A real hazard that beginning carvers have is they're reluctant to take off too much wood, and so they end up with kind of a square profile block.

And of course that's not natural, the bird is round.

And what I do is sketch in high points that I wanna round to and also sketch in a waterline.

Here comes one of the funner parts, carbon decoy, and that is using a draw knife.

I rough carve them to get to the approximate shape, and take those two pieces apart and hollow 'em out from the inside and then glue them together.

So I've got a hollow bird, and then I give 'em an oak keel that's weighted internally with lead.

What I wanted to end up with is a decoy that self-riding, which means you can throw it out, and it'll turn right side up.

It won't float on its side or float upside down.

And once you got it all glued up and glued together, varnish 'em, base coats, and then finish coats of paint.

I paint in acrylics.

There is some drying time, but nothing near what there is with oils.

On the other hand, you have to use some special techniques to try and blend things with acrylics that you don't have to do with oils.

And you can just hit the medium value for that color, and that'll be fine for a working decoy, but it's more fun if they actually look more like a real bird.

And so it's fun to monkey with vermiculation.

Vermiculation is very fine, wavy lines on feathers.

On dabbling ducks, only the drakes have it.

The hens don't have vermiculated feathers.

It's way to tell birds apart when you've got them in hand.

The way I do it is I use heavy-body acrylic paints, and I actually have a comb.

You paint this stuff on fairly thick, and then you pull the comb through while moving it back and forth, and you end up with a wavy line.

And then once you let that dry, you've got peaks and valleys.

And you come and dry brush that.

And then dry brushing is using a brush.

You load it up with paint and then take most of the paint out with a paper towel, and then lightly draw it across the top of it.

And then you end up with a dark on light pattern of coloration that matches those parallel markings.

(soft guitar music) These are a couple of the bags of my working birds.

This case we have the mallard bag and then one with redheads and canvasbacks.

I enjoy hunting over detailed birds.

And, you know, even when the duck hunting's really good, you're not shooting the whole time.

You're sitting there watching birds float.

And they look good in the bag.

Have been hunting for years.

I got some that have hunted for over 40 seasons.

I've got a few decoys that like I have the ashes for my first and second lab inside, so they get to keep hunting with me.

That's a little bit more work, but it's worth it.

I probably do a dozen in a year.

I could, you know, do more, but right now that's about what I'm comfortable with.

And ultimately I'm carving most of my birds to go float out in the marsh and go duck hunting with.

And that gives me satisfaction.

When you've got birds working the blocks and they're the species that you carved, that's pretty gratifying.

(soft guitar music) - [Announcer] Funded by: the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008.

And by: the members of Prairie Public.