Last week there was thrown open to the public, for a single day, one of the strangest sights in the Fen District -- the Borough Fen Duck Decoy. Set in the middle of miles of flat fields is a beautiful wood of some sixteen acres, sheltering in its heart the Decoy Pool, a lake of two-and-a-half acres which has been, for three hundred years, the winter home of thousands of wild-fowl. Secure from invasion, since at normal times no one but the Decoy-man and his assistants is allowed within the wood, the ducks return here year after year from their summer in the Arctic, covering the lake and sleeping on its banks.

Here the Decoy-man captures many of them by a method which has been used since the time of Charles II. Running off from the lake are eight curved channels, wenty feet wide where they join the lake, and tapering to two feet wide, each being roofed with a framework of semi-circular hoops. Over this ids stretched a net-work, forming a tunnel, which gets gradually ee and lower till it ends in a small hole and trap-door at the farther end. This is the channel down which the ducks are enticed. Its shape makes it impossible for the ducks still swimming on the pond to see what happens at the far end, and it is further screened on each side by a series of over~lapping reed screens, behind which the Decoy-man can move unseen, or show himself when necessary to cut off the ducks’ retreat. 

But why, you will wonder, are the ducks foolish enough to swim down the channel when they have the whole lake to themselves? Like the "Elephant's Child" in the "Just-So Stories", they are "full of 'satiable curiosity", and the Decoy-man knows this and uses it. He brings his little terrier-dog, adorned with a frill round his neck to make him look strange, and sets him on the narrow path at the edge of the channel, just inside the screen behind which he is hiding. The ducks come gating up to see this strange beast and, discovering it to be dog which begins to run away from them, they follow it, quacking,’ believing that they are chasing it away. When they reach the bend, some of them begin to realise that the channel is narrowing, and turn to retreat. Then it is that the Decoymen shows himself near the channel's mouth, cutting off their retreat but sill, because of the clever arrangement of the reed screens, invisible to the ducks on the pond. Quacking excitedly, the ducks turn and hustle down the channel to the narrow end. Now everything depends on the skill of the Decoy-man. He must slip silently and unseen to the narrow end, and as the dog lures them into the detachable tunnel-net, which closes it, he must drop the trap-door at precisely the right moment to secure his catch. If he shows himself a moment too soon, the ducks will turn, a moment to late and they will heave discovered the trap  and be fighting and struggling their way out. 

Only long experience makes the timing perfect, and it is said that the reason why most of the decoys in the country have now fallen into disuse is mainly due to the difficulty of finding skilful Decoy-men. Borough Fen is proud of its three-hundred-year-long succession of ‘ Decoy-men, and not less proud of the old craftsman who, with swiftly moving shuttle, still makes by hand the sixty yard nets which roof in the decoy-channels.