Guyette and Schmidt, Inc Antique Decoy Auction Firm

SOUTHOLD, N.Y. - At first the wooden decoys were simply a means to an end - primitive carvings just convincing enough to lure Long Island's ducks and shorebirds into the sights of hunters. Over the years, though, the outdoorsmen who fashioned them from blocks of cedar and cork grew more sophisticated, learning to evoke the anatomy of the birds they carved and growing more adept at applying oil-paint plumage.

Then, as the 20th century dawned on Long Island, commercial hunting was outlawed, a new environmental awareness brought stricter regulations on hunting for sport, suburbia tamed the wilds, and the decoys largely outlived their usefulness as tools.

"A lot of those decoys wound up as kindling, burned in the fireplaces and wooden stoves of bay houses," said Jack Combs, 65, who comes from a family of baymen who trace their Long Island roots to 1644. "No one thought of taking the birds and saying, `I want to preserve the heritage.' No one thought they'd be worth a lot of money."

How times have changed.

Last year a Long Island decoy sold at an auction at Sotheby's [in conjunction with Guyette & Schmidt, Inc.] for $464,500. It was Lot 207, a long-billed curlew carved in the late 19th century in Lawrence, just across the Nassau border from Far Rockaway, Queens, by a master carver named William Bowman. The auction catalog cautioned that it had "a few light shot marks."

"There is no price for that decoy," said the winning bidder, a 63-year-old collector from New Jersey who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to attract attention to himself or his decoy collection. "Who is to say what the value is? It really has a throne in the decoy world unto itself."

Decoys are very much in demand these days, sought after by a motley group of hunting buffs and folk art enthusiasts, compulsive collectors and nature lovers.

There are even decoy speculators. "Some people view them as investments, like stocks," said Gary Guyette, a partner at Guyette & Schmidt, a leading auction house in Maine that conducted last year's auction in conjunction with Sotheby's. "They hire advisers who go to shows to help them choose birds."

The auction at Sotheby's [in conjunction with Guyette & Schmidt, Inc.] netted nearly $11 million. And there are other indications that interest in the decoys is thriving. The Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages in Stony Brook recently revamped its suddenly valuable display of local decoys to make it more interactive. And this Sunday, Mr. Guyette will join collectors and traders from around the region at the Long Island Decoy Collectors Association's 30th annual show at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Patchogue.

Perhaps it is not too surprising that the birds, known to baymen here as stool (as in stool pigeon) have exploded in value. This, after all, was not art to be kept behind glass in cool, dry rooms. It was sculpture crafted decades and decades ago to be thrown into salt water and the line of fire. The well-preserved specimen is rare indeed.

Unlike the baymen who founded the association 30 years ago, its current president, Mel Phaff, 62, does not hunt. "I couldn't kill a thing," he said with a laugh. "I'm a former shop teacher, and I fell in love with the workmanship."

He educated himself and built up a collection, and has transformed the hallway leading to his bedroom here into something of a small decoy museum.

Mallards and yellowlegs and mergansers perch in floor-to-ceiling glass cases, a flock of shorebirds stands above his writing desk, a reproduction of an Egyptian painting of a duck-hunting Pharaoh hangs on the wall, and books with titles like "Floating Sculpture" line the shelves. He even has a tin veteran of a carnival shooting gallery.

"They are pieces of history," he said.

That is just what Joshua Ruff, the history curator at the Long Island Museum, is trying to get across in the museum's newly revamped exhibit, "The Baymen's Art: Wildfowl Decoys of Long Island." It is a little- known history these days, one almost unimaginable in the land of Amy and Joey, Levittown and the Long Island Expressway.

The room evokes an era when baymen lived off the land and the waters, and market gunners, as the commercial hunters here were known, used decoys to shoot vast numbers of birds and took them to the Fulton and Washington Street markets in Lower Manhattan, where they were sold to restaurants like Delmonico's. Others shot terns for milliners, who used their feathers to adorn the Victorian hats favored by Gibson girls.

Then there were the sports, as the wealthy industrialists from New York City who came to Long Island to hunt for pleasure were called. They often hired local baymen as their guides, and paid them to carve decoys for them to use on weekend hunts.

Exclusive hunting clubs proliferated. August Belmont organized the Suffolk Club in Wyandanch, N.Y.; W.K. Vanderbilt, Charles L. Tiffany and Hugh D. Auchincloss shot at the Southside Club, on the Connetquot River, which is now Connetquot River State Park.

Eventually the hunters, both the market gunners and the sports, were victims of their own success, and excess. Species were shot until they were endangered, or extinct. Hundreds of ducks could be killed in a day. Audubon societies formed at the turn of the century to protect the birds, and the state began passing ever-stricter laws governing recreational hunting.

The era of market gunning came to an end in 1918, when Congress passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which banned the commercial hunting of wildfowl. From then on diners who savored Long Island duck had to be satisfied with farm-raised birds.

The decoys fell into disuse. Then, slowly, they caught the eyes of collectors. In 1934 one of the first books on the subject, "Wild Fowl Decoys," was published by Joel Barber. Another enthusiast, William Mackey Jr., wrote his own book in 1965 and amassed quite a collection - including the Bowman curlew sold at auction last year.

After Mr. Mackey died, the curlew fetched $10,500 at auction in 1973, setting a record and astounding the decoy-collecting world. "That started it all," said Jackson Parker, 80, who has attended every major auction over three decades and written about them for publications like Decoy Magazine as the birds sold for five, and then six figures.

With many collectors priced out of the surging decoy market, Jamie Reason has started a business catering to decoy lovers of more modest means. He carves shorebird decoys in the manner of the great Long Island carvers - like Thomas H. Gelston and Obediah Verity - and he sells them at his shop in Eastport, the Seatuck Gallery.

"A real Gelston would cost you $25,000," Mr. Reason, who eschews power tools for old-fashioned rasps and knives, said in his sawdust-sprinkled shop the other day as he carved a dowitcher. "Mine will cost you $300."

Another modern carver steeped in decoy-making tradition has taken a different tack: Michael Combs, 30, a member of the fifth generation (at least) of Combs family carvers.

His great-great grandfather, George W. Combs, was a shipyard owner and market gunner from Freeport. His great-grandfather, Jack Combs, a bayman, worked as chief guide to the Guggenheims and ran rum during Prohibition. His grandfather, George W. Combs, patrolled for submarines during World War II on a Coast Guard ketch out of Greenport and was a founding member of the collectors association. His father, Jack, 65, worked on the Moran tugboats around New York. All carved decoys.

But Michael Combs's carvings are different. After carving his first decoy at 14, and winning decoy-carving prizes, he decided to become a fine artist, going to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and displaying his works at 57th Street galleries.

Most of the birds he carves these days are not meant to encourage hunting, but to question it. In his artist's statement, he speaks of being "repelled by the reality of killing." And his work explores the theme: "Trophy" is a sculpture of a very dead looking mallard, spread limply over a white cloth atop a tree stump like some kind of animal sacrifice or duck Pietà.

"I wanted to communicate my concerns about the environment," Mr. Combs explained the other day in his studio in Manhattan, where his family's carvings line the walls to inspire his own more experimental take on the genre. "I love my family's carvings, and the traditions, but I wanted to do something different."