Decoys of the Thousand Islands

Julie Rekai Rickerd is a Toronto broadcaster and public relations
consultant.

Jim Stewart, a chemical engineer and retired senior vice-president of
DuPont Canada, and Larry Lunman, born and raised in Brockville, Ontario,
where he has taught in a local high school for almost 30 years, share a
love of hunting, fishing, and decoys. Their collaboration with
photographer Peter Steer has resulted in a magnificent illustrated tome
on the history of decoy carving in the Thousand Islands area from 1870
to 1970.

The area examined stretches from Lake Ontario at Kingston–Cape
Vincent to Prescott– Ogdensburg on both the U.S. and Canadian shores.
Although decoys were used in all good hunting regions across North
America, they were carved to suit the specific physical requirements of
each area; water conditions along the coast of B.C. were very different
from those along the St. Lawrence, and the decoys were adapted
accordingly.

Gillian Stead’s design for the book is striking and attractive as
well as informative. Whereas the carving of the decoys is considered
very much a part of the art and culture of the area now, these decoys,
some of which bring as much as $4000 at auction, were originally carved
solely for personal use or for the use of relatives, friends, and
visiting hunters. The authors interviewed dozens of carvers and their
descendants, listened to oral histories, and scoured old newspaper
clippings and cemetery records to gather as much information as possible
about the people who gave birth to what has become a dying art. The
arrival of plastic has reduced decoy carving from a practical to a
decorative art, and most of the thousands of old decoys that used to lie
in wait in dusty garages for the start of each hunting season have been
lost, thrown out, or snapped up by avid collectors all over North
America.

Decoys of the Thousand Islands is not only the definitive documentation
of a century of decoy carving in Eastern Ontario, it is a superbly
gathered social history of a century in the life of one of Canada’s
most fascinating and naturally beautiful regions.