This got me thinking, has anyone ever used a hurt/half dead decoy? My buddy shot a jake this weekend and for 2 hours every tom in Louisa county came running in and beat on him for 15 minutes or so. He was yelling at them, whistling, throwing dirt balls and they stayed and kept whooping the dead jake. All of their heads were bright red. So if you dressed a decoy up with real feathers and had it lying down and made it move/twtch a little with fishing line that would work? I might try that since nothing else ever makes them commit
Some crafty thoughts there Breiner...I like them! I'll add this for consideration. A number of years ago a friend of mine had two pet turkeys, Flo a hen and Mo a big fat tom. (Granted, these were domestic birds and not wild, but stick with me here :grin:.) Mo was a true, well, um, butterball, :grin:, probably weighing in at around 50 pounds, serious. Well somehow or another one of us figured out that the tom, Mo, would freak out and attack anyone or anything with the color red in it or on it.
I digress here, but one of my all time favorite funny moments was when we snookered another one of our friends, who didn't know about Mo's propensity to attack red objects :grin:, into "trying on" my sleeping bag and running around the driveway. (Did I mention that we had turned my sleeping bag inside out so the RED side was out?
)
The rest of us scalawags, who knew very well that ol' Mo was about to put a country whuppin' on the boy who was ignorantly dancing around in the driveway in the red sleeping bag, watched with much glee as Mo saw the "red intruder" from a distance of about 100 yards away and proceeded to set the land speed world record in half running/half flying his way up to the driveway area. Shockingly, :grin:, once there, ol' Mo then absolutely lit up our friend inside the red sleeping bag with several volleys of wing beatings and spur gougings. Well in the span of about 10 seconds we were ALL laying on the ground in the driveway while Mo was whipping up on the red sleeping bag, only three of us were laughing so hard we fell down and our lucky "red" friend had been beaten to the ground by Mo's furious flurry of wing beats.
As youths, we saw nothing but humor in this royal beatdown, but our senses finally came to us after several minutes of bloodcurdling screams by our friend still inside the sleeping bag. Somehow we got Mo off of my now shredded sleeping bag and our friend came out crying like a baby, wimp!
Remembering this "red" event from my youth prompted me to paint an old decoy red a few years ago. My idea was to set this deke out and see if we could toms to run to it just because it was red and making them mad. (I even came up with a name for my deke, "Dead Red". Thank you, thank you very much. :grin
Since I painted this thing up though we have yet to actually try it out. My son even found it in the garage this year and was going to take it out, but that didn't happen, so my "red theory" is still untested. But reading these posts makes me think we need to develop this idea some more.
I suppose you could just skip the deke and go straight to the sleeping bag though.
