When we lived in Utah we had lots of gadwall, but I didn't care for the way they tasted (I had hunted birds that were on an algae diet), and so I didn't shoot them or hunt for them. After being in Minnesota for a year or two, my son Ben shot a gadwall, and it tasted just fine. We had discovered that birds on a pondweed diet were alright.

When I took over aerial waterfowl surveys here, I noticed that when significant rafts of bluebills showed up in mid-October, there would often be small pods of gadwalls sitting out in the open water among the bluebill flocks. The big colored up drakes with their silvery tertials looked pretty sharp, and I decided I had to carve a gadwall rig.

This was one of the few times that I carved an entire rig of decoys at one time, rather than adding to the rig a bird at a time. These birds were done in 2009, and have bodies of western red cedar, rather than my more typical northern white cedar. All birds are self righting, hollow, and have heads of basswood with weighted oak keels. Painting was done in acrylics.