A delightful story about art and nature with a wonderful closing quote that all who get out there will resonate with, "There's really something about being out in a primeval marsh at dawn..."
And who knew that decoy carving was begun by the Indians at Pyramid Lake in Nevada, one of my favorite spots in years gone past.
An excerpt.
Wildlife art takes wing
Master carvers, painters of nature's masterpieces
By Matt Weiser -- Bee Staff WriterPublished 12:01 am PDT Monday, July 17, 2006
The longtailed duck was exquisite in Jim Burcio's hands, its brown and white plumage, dark cheek patches and delicate tail all rendered perfectly by the carver.
Well, that's how it looked to a neophyte.
Burcio saw more.
"This bird would have to have broken shoulders to look like that," he said. "Sometimes it will float straight or even, but the butt's too low in the water."
He put the decoy back in the test tank to demonstrate. It sagged in the water, then bumped into a showy harlequin duck, which wobbled in a seasick way but soon returned to floating true.
The harlequin was judged best floater.
Burcio, an Antioch resident and past president of the Pacific Flyway Decoy Association, was judging novice entries on Sunday in the waterfowl decoy carving competition at the group's 36th Annual Classic Wildlife Art Festival.
Held for the 25th year at the Doubletree Hotel in Sacramento, it is one of the largest waterfowl art events in the nation. The show featured hundreds of exquisite waterfowl and nature paintings, plus a variety of other wildlife carvings, from fish to songbirds.
The decoys were the stars of the show, and their seaworthiness was the main event.
Judges sat in metal chairs around two steel tanks, nudging the colorful wooden birds and muttering comments as a scorekeeper took notes. One species sat too low in the water, like an overloaded steamship. Another leaned drunkenly to one side.
Big mirrors mounted at an angle overhead allowed the crowd to see the action in each tank without straining.
"As soon as you put it on the water, that's the big test," Burcio said. "We're trying to make sure it projects the essence of the species."
Decoy carving, he said, is a uniquely American art form. It traces back to the Paiute Tribe at Nevada's Pyramid Lake, which made the first documented decoys out of reeds and feathers to lure waterfowl within hunting range.
Settlers picked up the trick and improved it so much that by the 1960s, factory-made plastic decoys were driving the centuries-old handmade craft to extinction.
