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Permission to use or quote from this transcript must be obtained from the Delaware Folklife Project. Ned Mayne
N. Mayne: His name was Tom. Real capable outdoorsmen. Very Capable. G. Jenkins: He managed Woodland? N. Mayne: He managed a private estate down near Woodland Beach, as far as maintaining water levels, crops, things of that nature. G. Jenkins: Now how many acres was that? Do you know? N. Mayne: Well over a thousand. I know that much. G. Jenkins: When you hear about these folks, I mean, you've heard about them in passing I guess or maybe even knew them. What are the characteristics of this guy who's such a good wildlife.... N. Mayne: I think it's just a real real keen awareness of the habitat and the occupants of the habitat, the birds, fish, rats, muskrats,the fowl, a real keen awareness of them and their habits. I think that's what it takes. G. Jenkins: Do you know that many folks who have done this and how do they even learn how to do that? N. Mayne: I would say that most of them, it's probably just a life long love of it and hence a very very deep rooted serious interest in it. It's kind of tough to expand on that. G. Jenkins: You know what I mean, it's kind of like, "what would it take to make a man like that?" or something, you know that kind of thing? N. Mayne: It would have to be someone who's just, has a very natural love of it and the intelligence to go along with it really. These people, you have professional game managers and professional biologists and things like this but then there are people like Bob Beck would be a good example. He spent his life involved in that sort of thing. He was I believe a biologist for the state, was he not? G. Jenkins: Yes. N. Mayne: So I presume he had some formal training. G. Jenkins: Not really, not much. N. Mayne: Okay, there you are. He's a man that.... G. Jenkins: But he was a biologist before they probably required degrees. N. Mayne: Sure he taught Clyde Knotts. There's another one. Clyde had that laboratory there and everything. Probably the one's that we know, probably just scratch the surface of the total number of these people around here. G. Jenkins: What do you know about Bob Pazenski? N. Mayne: What I know about him is strictly hear-say. I've only met the man one time, to shake hands with, briefly. I have just heard several people say how capable he is as far as that sort of stuff goes. G. Jenkins: One thing that I keep trying to get more... N. Mayne: Rusty Harvey might be another example, in his affiliation with Delaware wild lands, looking at it from another direction there. You know their purpose is acquiring land and then preserving it and managing it. He has the help of people like Jack Dukes. G. Jenkins: Oh, Jack, I didn't know that. N. Mayne: Jack's, I think he's a board member of Delaware wild lands and has to do with the farming and the cropping of their properties. G. Jenkins: I've been out on his property, it's incredible. It's really beautiful. One of the main reasons that I came up here, I was trying to go back over the tape. Is to talk more about decoy carving and styles. I guess you had mentioned before that you didn't really think that Delaware had it's own distinctive carving style. But how would you characterize your style, you said, at one point that it was exaggerated. N. Mayne: Well, I think, anybody who has carved alot will soon, either consciously or unconsciously, begin to develope a style or characteristic that is theirs. The Ward brothers did and their style was strictly theirs,it was not original, it was Ward. A lot of carvers, if you've carved a lot you begin to develope a particular appearance or if you have studied under somebody...now these ducks that Jeff's making here are going to resemble mine because this is where his pattern came from, he's been sitting watching me for a while, you can see the similarities between his heads and mine. My style, probably as I said once before, is somewhat of a characature. I like to take the prominent features on a particular goose or a duck and exaggerate them. I kind of tend to, the prominent forehead, exaggerate the little, it's not a comb, but it's the little thing back on the back of the head that kind of sticks out, and we exaggerate something of that nature. It becomes a bit of a characature. Harry Waite is another good example. G. Jenkins: Where's he from. N. Mayne: Harry's from Westchester. He has carved since 1958. Harry's ornacological study came from, when everybody else, after high school, was going in the service, or going to learn a trade, or going on to college, Harry apprenticed himself to Lewis Paul Jonas studios. The premiere taxidermy studios in the world. They have a studio in Africa and they have one.... G. Jenkins: Jonas!! N. Mayne: The Jonas brothers. G. Jenkins: They are the ones that made the elephants for the Natural History. I have been to their studios in upstate New York. N. Mayne: Harry apprenticed himself to them for a number of years and
got a real solid background in anatomy and structure and his birds today,
you could walk in a G. Jenkins: What do you think creates that style besides just time? N. Mayne: Personal preference in a way. What's aestheticly pleasing to you. I like to see a prominent forehead on a duck, some people don't. I like the kind of fanned out down turned tail on blunt tailed birds, like geese and swans and wood ducks. That's just my personal preference that it does that. G. Jenkins: Now who was, you mentioned somebdy down in Millville or Ocean View, that was carving at one time. N. Mayne: The only bonafide "old-time" Delaware carver was and I don't think the man's still alive, was Edison Gray. I have only seen one Edison Gray decoy in my life. It belong to Dick Dobbs who lives over on the Brandywine, over by the experimental station. It's a pretty nice bird. It was probably made in the some time during the '40's or 30's maybe and it was real serviceable, sturdy, well thought out decoy. If I was picking a rig of decoys to shoot over, yeah, I'd like to have a bunch of Edison Gray's. If that was, back then I could see where he would be well received. G. Jenkins: What else besides his aesthetic style could you pick up on it? N. Mayne: I like to think it was basic, no frills, no unneeded accutriments. Sturdy, durable, looked like it would hold up well under hard use. And on a true hunting decoy of course that's of paramount importance. G. Jenkins: There weren't really distinctive styles in Delaware, what say, the '60's and 70's was probably the last era of sort of cork in decoy made out of cork and wood. Do you remember what people were using back then? I mean when you were hunting back then. N. Mayne: In 1970, I made my first ones. People used, there were probably more homemade decoys around. A guy just made enough for his own use and people would take timbers over to Madison Mitchell and get him to turn bodies for them. G. Jenkins: Where was Madison? I'm trying to remember. Was he in North East? N. Mayne: He was in Havre De Grace. In fact, he was the dean of the Upper Bay Decoy. It was a popular practice in Delaware marsheries and I heard Summer's Headly say this one time. That he really didn't need, a whole lot in the way of decoys because everybody paid him. Everybody and their brother, it was not my thing. But everybody and their brother threw corn out in the marsh and I think that probably, the yellow decoy, if you will, probably account for and actually you used to see some pretty primitive looking decoys in Delaware. I mean some of them were pretty rough. You could credit down on the eastern shore of Virginia, not to say they didn't bait or didn't do anything like that down there. You began to see some decoys down there that were indicative of some thought. G. Jenkins: How were they characterized? N. Mayne: I can remember gunning, the first time I gunned down there, probably in '74 or '75, and seeing some boats with some real nice decoys in them. G. Jenkins: And this was Chincoteague. N. Mayne: Further down. Over on the bay side, Accomack and Ancock, Harberton
and G. Jenkins: Cigar Daisy? N. Mayne: Yes. His work is not that meticulous but it does indicate some life like qualities and some thought and a little bit of engineering in them. G. Jenkins: Fifty years from now, if you live fifty years from now, which you may, you never know, and you're telling somebody about what was going on with decoy carving, how would you characterize what was going on in the '70's as opposed to the '90's? You have got so many people carving... N. Mayne: I think what it is, I think the transition between working decoys and show birds. Decoy collecting, decoy carving, has for some reason that I can't fathom, gained a tremendous amount of popularity. There's decoy shows all over the place now and there are competitions all over the place now, and everybody's carving ducks. Very few of these will ever see muddy water. They are not going to see salt, you know they are gorgeous, they are beautiful, they are recreations of life, the closest thing relevant to working with decoys in a show is the North East Decoy Show. The North East Hunting Decoy Show which was held for the first time a month and a half ago maybe, where they took the decoys and you would bring them with a line and weight on them and they are going to throw them in the creek. A lot of these decorative carvers were suddenly upset to find out that these beautiful paint jobs, all this delicate brush work and fine carving, was going to have to revert back to it's intended...in fact, some of them picked their birds up and went home. G. Jenkins: So you were up there? N. Mayne: Yes. G. Jenkins: That's interesting. So who ended up winning? N. Mayne: I don't remember. I stood there and watched the judges for a while, and I didn't see anybody there that I knew. I didn't participate in it. G. Jenkins: Why not? N. Mayne: I don't, I guess because I didn't believe it was going to be as real as it was. I don't like decoy shows. I mean, as far as the competitions, I refuse to judge one, I don't care to participate in one. G. Jenkins: Why? N. Mayne: Because there is a practice right now of people entering these
decoratives and working decoy contests and the guy who makes an honest
working decoys gets nothing. There are people judging who have no business
judging, shouldn't be judging. People judging stuff they have never
seen. They have never made. The reason I won't judge is because you
have no choice or no effect over who you are going to judge with and
that's a very unpleasant experience to judge decoys with somebody along
side of you who, maybe he's a collector of antique decoys, well that's
very nice but these are contemporary G. Jenkins: The Rusty Show isn't working, is it? N. Mayne: It is but again it's not... G. Jenkins: I thought it was all decorative... N. Mayne: You put me in a spot, I don't want to get on the wrong side of Rusty. G. Jenkins: He does have different classes though. N. Mayne: They have different classes but they are still birds that are judged in a tank, no weights, no lines, they are not piled up in a boat. They are not made to ride in the waves. They are all obsessed with this self-riting, which if you make a bird so he rides the water properly, he won't upset to begin with. I can remember in the layout boat we put two hundred and fifty decoys out there. Not a one of them would self-rite, but none of them upset either. When you take a bird and make him so he'll flip, like this, you have to make him so he's, you can't help but make him so he's going to roll like this in the water it's very unnatural. But if you broaden him, keep your hard shine here, he won't upset to begin with and there's no need, every body has this thing decoys out, you don't throw them out, you just put them out. Somehow these people have this thing about throwing decoys out and it's, I've got a, I'm not in to these, I did it a long time ago. G. Jenkins: So would most of you decoys, would they be capable of working decoys? N. Mayne: No, no. Most of them are too fragile and the other thing is that if you're going to sit and make, now he's in the process right now of making a dozen green wing teal. He'd be of retirement age before he finished them if he was carving all the feathers and doing all the fancy, delicate painting to them, and so many of these carvers today have never sat down and made thirty, forty, a hundred, at a shot. G. Jenkins: So there's this sort of in between? Between a real rough rudimentary working decoy and the... N. Mayne: Then there's the other school of carving, that thinks that a working bird needs to be crude and primitive. You can still exhibit some workmanship and some neat craftmanship on them. It's just, what I have seen in working decoy contests lately, has just turned me off completely. And it's because... well a lot of people enter these decoratives in hunting decoy classes because they have not yet achieved the capability of winning in a decorative class but they can slip on into a hunting decoy class and a judge that maybe doesn't know what he's doing, looks at it and says, " man, that is beautiful, it's georgeous", they give him the blue ribbon. That's the way this guy got a blue ribbon. G. Jenkins: Well if you wanted to set up your own decoy carving show for working decoys, what would you be looking for and what would you want to see? N. Mayne: I would set up an event like... G. Jenkins: Like North East? N. Mayne: I'd say okay, you will enter a dozen. Lines and weights, we'll put them out in a pond, a creek and you'll be judged on the merit of your decoy rig, you know, your spread. The judges may pull one bird out of it to look at it more closely, and closely scrutinize it for durability and things of this nature. I would also like to see a pattern drawing contest. Three quarters of the decorative carvers are all using other people's patterns. They buy a book of patterns, Bruce Burke, Pat Godden, a lot of these fellows publish books of patterns. So really they are carving on something that was designed by somebody else. So if you had a pattern drawing contest, on the day of the event announce, you all have your papers, pencils, rulers, reference material if you like, we will draw a 17" black duck. Profile pattern, plan view and head pattern, you have an hour. Two hours. Head whittling contests, they have a head whittling contest at a lot of these shows but everybody sits down and carves the same pattern. It's one that's already been band-sawed out and you pick one out of the box. Bring your own, your own band-sawed head and you know. I'd like to see that. G. Jenkins: What do you think the reactions would be to carvers? With that kind of show. N. Mayne: I think it would be well received it would take, to enter a rig of decoys, you would have to hold your show in a close proximity to a big body of water somewhere, which is maybe impractical and that's why somebody can't do it. I don't see why the pattern drawing contest wouldn't be feasible to do at a show. G. Jenkins: Did you see that fire pond at Port Penn? The fire pond at Port Penn? N. Mayne: Where's that? G. Jenkins: It's just going out toward Augustine Wildlife Area, there's that little fire pond, it's probably about, sixty, seventy feet in width, maybe three hundred feet in length. Pretty big. Might be an interesting way to set up something. N. Mayne: If it can be navigated by boat or waded with hip boots. You can do it, as far as that goes, the beach front there at the Augustine boat ramp would be great. You could walk out with a pair of hip boots and put a marker here, that's rig number one, Mr. Jones, you're positions number two. Mr. Smith, number three, Mr. Marx, number four, Mr. Jenkins, number five, set them up. The judges come along and look, and then at their request, the steward would hand them one bird out of the rig to look at and go over like that. It would be a neat thing but... at Chincoteague and at Havre de Grace, they have to rig a five bird rig, which is, that's five is alright, I'd rather see a dozen. At North East they had a five bird rig. G. Jenkins: Did you talk to the folks up at North East, I mean, what were the.... N. Mayne: I spoke to the fellow, one of the fellows who was on the committee of that show and was very, very, involved in it. I told him I really enjoyed and appreciated the way that your show was conducted and expressed my displeasure with these characters enterning decorative decoys in hunting duck classes. They said they had had a number of favorable comments regarding that. G. Jenkins: Let me see if this will help me out too. I mean I guess you know I am going to try, what I'm trying to do is, like last year, I did those essays on fishing and trapping. What I want to do this time is a couple of essays on water fowl. One specifically on sort of call making and decoy carving in terms of what kind of styles, and what kind of things are going on and then another on, I think on guiding and land management stuff. If I can pull it off without making a full out of myself. How would you, I guess we've gone through it again, but I guess I need to do this over and over again half the time, a stranger comes in from Florida and says, you know, Ned what 's going on here, here's a decoy that's not as finely burned or detailed like a decorative but yet it's obviously not a gunning decoy or working decoy, hunting decoy, actually what even, what's the term that you use, do you use gunning decoy, do you use working decoy, you also said what, hunting decoy? N. Mayne: Well, they use all three in the nomaclature in these contests, they use traditional gunning, working, hunting, gunners. Then they go to super slicks, which is not texturing, but as fancy a paint as you can put on it. I don't mean to say that I, I don't want to create the wrong impression. Let's say a man that is going to make a dozen or fifteen birds for his own personal use, and I can understand him, just out of pride maybe wanting to do a little fancy brush work on them and some build up the eyelids maybe and do a little nice work around the bill and the face. That's just pride. I think that's certainly alright. But when you carry it, when you see a bird in a hunting decoy contest that the maker has obviously spent days and weeks on, it's hard to define and the other thing is when you are having a show, you have to structure it so that you'll get some interest. So maybe what I'm saying is not always practical. Very, very few people today are making any amount of decoys to hunt over. They go buy a dozen plastics or they go, if their pockets are deep, they go have somebody make them some. Once in a while you'll get a gunner that's doing that or you'll get probably over on the Jersey shore, you've got some guys that are still selling gunning decoys for an affordable amount of money. It really is, it's a difficult thing to lineate, the difference between them. I think back about the second rig of decoys I made, for myself, I got all harried and feathered on them, of course I wasn't doing it for money yet. Have little aluminum curly Q'd tails epoxied into the drake mallards and glass eyes and all this foolishness and by the time a bird gets together, or gets close enough to see all that, he ought to be either frightened or dead. The most important thing, like I said earlier, is how the bird rides in the water, because if he doesn't ride properly, the duck will never get close enough to see what he's painted like. He can't roll from side to side and pitch and yall on the tide, he's got to be, in Delaware here we gun most of our gunning's in fast moving tides. A bird has to ride properly in that, he can't yall back and forth, he can't dig in the breast and I think when you make one that's self-rite, you're defeating the way he rides when he's upright. G. Jenkins: So let me go back over this again so I can remember. The one that just rides right, not self-riting, usually is a lot broader, is that right? N. Mayne: It would be broader and have what is known in the boat building business as a hard shine. In other words, you wouldn't under cut him, under the bottom any. A flat bottom boat rides more stable than a canoe does, same principle. Same principle. G. Jenkins: Now what are they doing if you do these self-riting, how is that made? N. Mayne: Well if you make a bird to self- rite, you're going to have to cut under here some so that when he's got this lead keel, up here, it'll flip. See you've got to make it so, if you make it too wide he won't flip. The old time decoy maker in Havre de Grace, in fact he was a man from whom Madison Mitchell learned, a man by the name of Bob McGaul, before he began to use a copying lathe, chopped his decoys with a hatchet. They were extremely broad. They would not self-rite, but they wouldn't upset either. Then when he began to speed up production using a copying lathe, he couldn't make that bird on the copying machine. He had to make it narrow so that it would turn on the machine. So his new bird, newer birds, would self-rite but they rolled like hell in the water. G. Jenkins: It seems like to me, if it's self-riting it's almost like a canoe in that it's always going ot be moving around right? To stay up... N. Mayne: The self-riting, I think people are just they are obsessed with it because they haven't either experimented with, researched with, the way a bird ought to ride in the water. You know, you pay the same amount of attention to a true working decoy as you would if you were designing a boat hull. How's this thing going to behave in the water? Maybe it's a bit nit-picking but it's... fly tying is another good parallel. the real serious devoted fly tier will design a dry fly.... your rigged bait has got to ride right in the water. That's why these guys with these tuna ties, they want to get up high where they can look out and see how's that bait behaving in the water. Is it natural or is it flopping around out there? When you rig a squid, a ballahoo, it's got to ride properly. Otherwise, that fish isn't going to strike at it. The dry fly, the same thing. The same thing with a decoy, if he doesn't ride right than everything else is for naught. G. Jenkins: So what's the typical characteristic of these plastic decoys? I mean, they just right themselves and they're just bopping around everywhere. N. Mayne: Yeah, they... some are better than others, most of them look like the devil to began with, they look like the devil in the box. Most of them are too light, they bob around on the water. Then they come out with what they call the aquakeel which fills with water and supposedly stabilizes the thing and then when you pick it up water runs out of it. They are just not... how do I want to say it...it's like...it's like....buying a hundred dollar pair of running shoes versus slipping over to K-Mart and grabbing whatever's handy and has big bright color and lightning flashes on the side of and will give you fallen arches in six months. G. Jenkins: What are some of the better plastic decoys out there? N. Mayne: Let me rephrase your question and say what are some of the least worst? Probably flambow G-96. G. Jenkins: G & H N. Mayne: G & H. There really aren't any real good ones, that I can see. I've never seen any that I thought were.... and again I should look at the other side of the coin too. In some cases, where a man carries a dozen or two dozen decoys in a big mesh bag up on his shoulders to walk back in to where he's going to have to put them out. He has no choice, he's got to use that lightweight stuff. You carry a dozen corked black ducks like that, with wooden keels and heads on them, I might have done it when I was his age, I'm not going to do it now. You just can't. Or in a case where you've got to carry a big rig of decoys in a small boat and you've got to keep your weight down. That could be accepted then I guess. When I used to carry my goose rig in my nineteen foot sea ox out the gunning layout boat, being weighed on a truck scale, my goose rig weighed nine hundred pounds. You put that in the bow of a fourteen foot aluminum john boat and ...you can't. Nine hundred pounds is a lot of weight in a boat and that was just the geese, that wasn't the ducks. G. Jenkins: What were they made of? N. Mayne: Made out of cork. G. Jenkins: Now what kind of cork is this? I remember Harold mentioned something about it. It's not Portuguese cork, is it? N. Mayne: Well it's all Portuguese or Spain. There are three basic types of cork available today. The first is the black cork, which is heat processed. That's why it's black. They take the granulated bark off the cork tree and heat press it together. It's not very durable. It's also not as expensive. Then they take the cork for the other two types and grind it up very very fine and mix it with a binder. One company that I know that's marketing cork now, binds it with a urethane which I don't particularly care for. It kind of crumbles and it is hard to cut. The cork made by the Wiley Cork Company here in Wilmington Delaware is the ultimate in decoy material. This stuff here. It's put together with a fenol resin which makes it virtually weatherproof. G. Jenkins: Who do they sell it to? N. Mayne: It's extremely tough. I mean you can take a piece of it and (he throws it to the ground) you know you are not going to hurt it. It carves easily. They only limitation to how many bodies you could carve in a day, would be boredom. Monotony. It's not cheap, but it requires no sealer, no bottom board, and it, you know I'm fortunate to live here. It's the ultimate in decoy material. G. Jenkins: You can just fo up there and get it. N. Mayne: Yeah, just go right over to 14th and Church to Wiley cork company and you can buy it in precut sizes in a box. You can buy it in a sheet. It comes in four inch thicknesses which is good for any kind of duck except for geese and as you can see on that swan, I had to laminate but it is an ultimate in a decoy material. G. Jenkins: Who do they sell it to? What are it's uses? N. Mayne: It's primary use is expansion joints in concrete roads. G. Jenkins: Really? It's that durable. N. Mayne: Yeah, they also use it some for insulation, some for decorating, the shoe industry uses some in inner soles of shoes. It'll never split, it'll never crack, it'll never rot. I've been using it now for... G. Jenkins: You buy it that way? What size is that, say.. N. Mayne: They are 6 x 12 x 4. G. Jenkins: What does that cost a piece, or do you buy them by the dozen? N. Mayne: Those dozen blocks came out of a 24 x 36 x 4 inch block for fifty dollars. G. Jenkins: 24 x 36 by what? N. Mayne: By four. So we get a dozen teal out of one block. G. Jenkins: You get a dozen. I interrupted you, you said been using it since when? N. Mayne: I've been using it since 1970. G. Jenkins: Do a lot of people around here use it? N. Mayne: Yes, it's very popular. It's easy to carve, takes paint well, holds up indefinetly, takes glue well, I can't think of a single detriment to it. G. Jenkins: Do you notice, what do a lot of other carvers say in a different New York, or Pennsylvania, I mean are they ordering this stuff/ N. Mayne: They ship cork to carvers...it's becoming more widely popularized. There are still some carvers that are carving, you know, making working decoys out of wood, White Cedar. But we're running out of White Cedar. We're running out of Pine, decent Pine. Some are carving Cottonwood, Polonia, Cypress. Wood will ultimately one day, crack, split, and cork won't. Never. The only detriment that I have ever heard about this stuff is, if you store your decoys outside, I've not seen but I've heard, that mice will eat this stuff and bore into it. That's hearsay, I don't know that to be a fact. I would think that fenol resin would soon ... that they wouldn't but it's very easy to work. In fact, I'll show you just how easy it is. (He begins to carve. ) G. Jenkins: Now that's your, your sort or working on how it's going to right or how it's going to float in there. Now what kind of body are you making there? N. Mayne: It's a teal. G. Jenkins: That's incredible actually. What kind of cork is this? Is there specific types of cork trees? N. Mayne: I don't know the botanical word, I just know it comes from Portugal. I guess it's the bark off the cork tree and they harvest it every year. (Continues carving.) G. Jenkins: So you pretty much start at the back of the body. N. Mayne: I'll carve the back of it. Then put the head on and carve the neck and the breast and all the contour right up to him. G. Jenkins: What kind of wood are you using? N. Mayne: It's just a piece of Poplar. You can use Pine, Poplar, whatever you've got handy, really, for that tail and then after you've taken it to that point. G. Jenkins: Then start using the wrassler. N. Mayne: Yeah, after you've taken it to this point. Again, we're just going to take a little off that corner because we want as much flat surface as we can on the bottom. (Sawing in the background.) G. Jenkins: Even with taking the corner off you still want it to sit up. N. Mayne: Yeah, you just want to round, you don't want that sharp corner like that. G. Jenkins: That wrassler does sort of open up that cork. N. Mayne: It does a little bit until you sand it and put the dust back in it. After you finish this you sand it, run over it real quick with about 80 grid paper and again with 120 and paint it. G. Jenkins: I've forgotten, you use Jesso as a prime or you just use a primer. N. Mayne: I don't like Jesso too much. I use house paint primer for the first coat, usually. If it'll hold up on the outside of the house, it'll hold up on a decoy. G. Jenkins: It'd oil based though, right? All your paints are oil based right? N. Mayne: I've come to be using acrylic latex. It holds up as well, it's
a whole lot less G. Jenkins: How long does it take for the epoxy to set? N. Mayne: Five minutes. G. Jenkins: That's it and then you can start cutting the breast. N. Mayne: Yes, five minute epoxy is the name of it. I have to think of these old time decoy makers and carvers that had animal hide glue, I guess, paint was rudimentary, sand paper, I heard one time about old time carvers on the Jersey shore that didn't have sand paper and the scraped the bird's shell smooth with a piece of oyster shell. They didn't have anything like we have today. So you can see how fast, basically, what was that, ten minutes on that and then another ten on that and then you've got a body. G. Jenkins: What is the most challenging part of the bird that you like doing? Or do you like all parts? N. Mayne: I enjoy whittling heads more than anything. This is not much fun, this is kind of mundane. Painting, I like that. G. Jenkins: So if you had to characterize your style, going back to this.... N. Mayne: My style would simply be a bit of a characature. I like to see, and I try to put into birds, a bit of a poise or attitude. You know, these birds are all going to have, hand me a bunch of those heads, these birds are all going to have a different head position. That one's a high one, there's a low one. That one will be reaching out ahead of him, like such. This one will be snuggled down like he's taking a nap. G. Jenkins: Is he making a dozen of these? N. Mayne: He's making these for himself. G. Jenkins: Are you going to use those for working? N. Mayne: Yes. Jeff guns in the marsh down near Taylor's Bridge. G. Jenkins: Oh really, which marsh? JeffRight on Blackbird Creek. Right by Delaware Wildlands. G. Jenkins: That's not far from where Jack's property, Jack Duke's. JeffNo. no it's just a short ways. G. Jenkins: Do you know Covey Unruh? JeffNo, I'm not too familiar with people down there. G. Jenkins: One thing I wanted to ask you a quick question about, and I don't know if you know that much about it, is this whole situation where everybody's pretty much tied up leases to marshes for years and years and years. I mean, how difficult is it to... N. Mayne: to find a marsh to rent? There are marshes and there are good marshes. You know, marshes with natural feed in them, marshes that's blinds are spaced out sensibly apart, not too close together. No, I wouldn't say that people have tied up marshes for years and years and years. I think, it's just a matter of how much money you want to spend to go rent. A lot of pressures being taken off the marshes today, by these shooting preserves where you can come shoot pen raised mallards and that satisfies some people's interest in hunting. It would not interest me and as we become more affluent, there are more and more people who can afford to do that. If you spend, I don't know, what's a blind rent for a day, seven or eight hundred dollars, maybe for a half way decent one. JeffAt least. N. Mayne: Say, eight hundred to a thousand, you could take that eight hundred to a thousand and go to some shooting preserve and be waited on hand and foot and never ger dirty, muddy, and shoot as long as your check book could stand it and really if all hunting means to you is to go stack up a lot of meat, then that's a fine place for somebody like that. There has to be, to go out in the marsh in the morning and enjoy a... maybe an unusual looking sunrise, or see the birds behave in some manner that's unusual. Stacking up a lot of meat really is secondary. To see your dog make a real, real, difficult, challenging retreat. Jeff's a dog trainer and you probably enjoy the dog work at least as much as the shooting, I know. JeffShooting is the last thing I enjoy. N. Mayne: To answer you original question, no I don't think it's a big problem to go find a marsh as long as you are willing to spend a little money. Or to enlist the services of a guide. G. Jenkins: Exactly. N. Mayne: A lot of people today are, and it's again, it's people have more discretionary money in their pocket today. Gilbert would say, you know as a guy gets older he's not as physically able as he once was out in the marsh, he'll say, you know, I can afford it and I think this year I'm just going to book six or eight Saturdays with Joe Dokes and you ride down in the morning and climb in his truck, go down to the landing and get in his boat. He puts the decoys out. He picks them up. He works the dog. Takes your birds to the picker for you. Tells you a few war stories. Depending on the pre-arranged deal, he can arrange lunch, cocktails afterwards, overnight accomodations, night time entertainement, you know it runs the gammet, and a lot of people... G. Jenkins: Do you think guiding's been, has been popular for a long time? Or has it just been lately? N. Mayne: I think it's always been around, I think, particularly on the Delmarva Penninsula, on the upper Delmarva Penninsula, say as far down as Easton or Cambridge. I think that guiding became, when the geese began to build up in big numbers here. Everybody and their brother got into the guiding business. You know ads in magazines, arrangements with hotels and motels, everything from simply going out gunning with the guy in the morning and leaving him at night, to coming down the night before, dinner, cocktails, wake up call, breakfast, box lunch, being waited on hand and foot, picked up and moved to another spot if that one's no good. Your birds taken to a picker and stay for how ever many days you can afford. The Tidewater Inn in Easton had a guide service there, M&M down on Rt. 9, and lord knows how many more like them that had these services which ran everywhere from just basic so much money to come and hunt versus the vacation package. G. Jenkins: But you think that was because of all the geese coming in. N. Mayne: Ah, yeah. Everybody saw some big money to be made in the goose business. Just as, when the Canvas Backs and Divers were popular, back at the turn of the century, on the Susquahanna Flats. There were probably a number of fellows that carried sink box parties and bushwack parties and blinds to rent and all that sort of thing. The population of Havre de Grace, well the Bio Hotel, which is right there at the end of the...right across from the museum there. They say that in November and December, most of their clientel were gunners. Grover Cleveland came there to shoot. G. Jenkins: Who are some of the guys that you know of around here? N. Mayne: Well, he's dead now, but Burt Carl was probably one of the best known. Al Deggar carries parties, doesn't he Jeff? Who else? I don't know if Big John still does or not. Over in Maryland, Bobby Ewing, Butch Parker, he's the one that calls himself "water dog" and he's got an ad in a magazine. But you could pick up any of the Delmarva Heartland or when we had a lot of geese around here you could pick up Field and Stream and see, "Shoot Maryland's Eastern Shores". Dougy Hutchins used to carry duck parties. Carl Hammond carried gun parties and layout. G. Jenkins: Gun and layout, right. N. Mayne: Charged $100.00 a man and guaranteed them shooting. G. Jenkins: Now was he into doing sea ducks? I can't remember that. N. Mayne: He was going to get into that but that was when his health began to fail. G. Jenkins: What do you think, in terms of, how do guides end up to being guys who turn outsiders on to landscape and....do you ever think about that? N. Mayne: Most guides are in it for the money. The money, and I'll tell you something else that I've noticed, it's a bit of an ego trip to call yourself a guide. You're THE outdoorsman, you're Frank Buck, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Rook, you're a man among men. It's a bit of an ego thing with a lot of them. Then too, I've seen fellows who I know who guide, who had to be in it just for the money because they weren't that good. You know, a rag-tag buch of decoys and blow a goose call like a trombone in a high school band or something and they were guides. G. Jenkins: So do you think the situation with guiding is similar to the guy who's the land manager, in terms of style? N. Mayne: The person who's interested in .... G. Jenkins: A good guide. N. Mayne: Of a good one? A real good one, yeah, takes a lot of pride in it. Sonny Ayres was good enough that when people, he worked out of the Tidewater Inn, for somebody else that was actually booking the parties. People would come and say, "I'd like to gun with Mr. Ayres, if you please." I watched a man on a goose call one day, and he could actually communicate with the geese. He wasn't a show caller, I mean as far as going to competitions and stuff but he was, I know, the most effective man I ever saw behind a goose call. He was colorful, people liked his stories, but he was very, very good. There was stories all up and down the eastern shore about some of the things he'd done, legal and otherwise. His social life was...someone could write a book about that. He was a practicing bigamist at one time. But he was good, real good. I gunned with him, not, strictly on a social basis one time, in fact the first time I ever saw him, he had come down to shoot at a place in Virginia. I was there and ended up shooting with him the following day. He was good, real good. Real good. You'd be putting decoys out and he'd holler, "Ned pull that last string in a little closer. Open it up over here." He changed his decoys constantly, according to the weather and the wind change, the tide change. Shot like gangbusters but he was proud of that, that people would come from.... a gang from L.L. Bean would come down every year to gun at the Tidewater Inn and they always asked to gun with Mr. Ayres and always brought him a new down jacket and a new pair of hip boots, every year. That was his tip. G. Jenkins: Now how long ago was this? N. Mayne: Sonny's still in the guiding business but he's transplanted to Minnesota now. Gunning on lakes and rivers there. I first met him about 1975. G. Jenkins: So he's not that... N. Mayne: Sonny's only about three or four years older that I am. Great big guy, man he's a horse. As tall as I am, weighs... G. Jenkins: How do you spell his last name? N. Mayne: A Y R E S G. Jenkins: A Y R E S, Ayres. N. Mayne: Sonny's about my heighth and goes about..... |
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