The Core Sound Decoy Festival brings heavy traffic to a quiet portion of Harker’s Island, North Carolina. This weekend I spent some time exploring the festival with some friends. We had a much longer attention span for wooden ducks than we ever imagined. Although I have never spent more than a moment considering the quality of a decoy before the festival, the rapid exposure to hundreds of ducks made for a quick education in craftsmanship. We found numerous varieties of ducks and other shoe birds, whittled in a range of style choices. It became clear fairly quickly which carved decoys, and their vendors, had true character: the finest decoys had beautiful carved details, such as feather lines and a precisely shaped beak, while the most interesting vendors shared stories about the history of the decoy or the carver.
Decoys at the auction.
