Three Reasons To Give Your Decoys A Twist

Practiced per a common myth "Your decoys should all be facing into the wind", or simply limited to a single tie off point located on the front of the keel, many duck hunters continue to face all their decoys in the same direction. Here's why we started to give our decoys a twist.

Having spent thousands of hours scouting and watching ducks in refuges and in other non-threatening situations, decoys facing in the same direction are not what real ducks look like or act like when they are in a relaxed or feeding environment. What you'll actually find when watching ducks when they are not in a threatening environment, are perhaps as many as 30% - 45% of the ducks are facing different directions than directly into the wind. Now contrast ducks in a relaxed or feeding environment to those that are in a threatening environment. What you'll find is that all of the ducks are facing into the wind with upright heads, ready to bolt at a moments notice.

Now we've killed thousands of ducks over our years with the vast majority (in fact all) of our decoys facing into the wind. But over the past 3-5 years we have changed our strategy and we now make our decoy spread look much more realistic by facing 10%-40% of the decoys we use in a direction that is not directly into the wind and we believe that our success on mid season and late season birds has definitely improved.

Reasons we have changed our decoy placement strategy:

First, a realistic decoy spread kills more ducks. Whether on land or water a relaxed group of ducks will not be facing the same direction. Only a spooked group of ducks ready to take flight will all be facing the same direction, or all face into the wind. Depending on decoy spread size and location, we will place 10% - 40% of our decoys in multiple directions. We accomplish this by attaching our decoy line and weight at the back of the keel and we will also drill decoy line attachment holes 2-3" from the front or back of the keel, which gives your decoy the appearance that it is swimming across our spread.

Second, it gives the ducks a head on view of your decoys regardless of which direction they circle. This strategy alone tremendously increases the visibility of our decoy spread to the approaching ducks as they will not only see the butts of our decoys, but they will also see the brightly colored breasts, heads and bills. Take for example a drake pintail decoy, placing pintail decoys in multiple directions not only gives approaching birds a view of the white and black butt, it also gives them a view of the white breast, head and bill. The same is true if you are using other brightly colored drake duck species in your spread.

Third, it differentiates us from our competition. Hunting public land in some extremely competitive areas we look for every advantage we can get. Changing our decoy spread to include decoys that face multiple directions helps set our spread apart from our competitors and as with re-painting our decoys (see Tailor Painted).

The next time you head to the field, try this approach to the degree that you feel comfortable and we think that you'll see an improvement in your success ratio much like we have.

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