| Randy "The Flagman" Bartz |
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 | Have you ever noticed how, when you're putting out or picking up your decoys, geese and ducks seem to come flying in from nowhere? Your gun is in the blind or back in the boat, of course, so no shots are fired and no birds fall. We look up, the bird see our shining faces, flare, and fly away. Are the waterfowl gods mocking and tormenting us? Or, is there some other reason for these geese and ducks to show up at these inopportune, frustrating moment? |
Gods aside, there is a reason for waterfowl to arrive when we're walking or wading through our decoys. The reason is actually very simple: it's motion. The birds from far off see the decoys, then see us moving through them, giving the impression, from a distance, that these are live geese or ducks, not just dead still decoys.
In the past, some hunters took this "motion notion" and added to it with simple things like waving their hats or arm at a distant geese or ducks to catch their attention and bring them closer to the decoys. Other hunters went even further with this movement concept, using strips of bird-wing colored cloth attached to long sticks for waving at waterfowl.
Then along comes Randy Bartz, an avid water fowler from Oronoco, Minnesota with the idea of putting these motion simulating flags on a vertical plane to make hand operated bird wings. With the appearance of the live geese in the air landing or stretching their wings on the ground, Bartz created the illusion of real geese moving over and in the decoys. Waterfowl bought the concept and so did goose and duck hunter. "I've never had a single product returned," Batrz says, "because some hunter thought it didn't work." And now 20 years later, Bartz is still producing the most popular, least expensive, and most effective motion decoy available to modern waterfowl hunters.
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