In this episode of the Ducks Unlimited Podcast, host Katie Burke and co-host Dr. Mike Brasher are joined by decoy expert Colin McNair of Copley Fine Art Auctions, marking his fifth appearance on the show. Together, they dive into the captivating world of decoy art, focusing on the groundbreaking practice of x-raying decoys to uncover hidden details of craftsmanship. Discover how visual aids and cutting-edge techniques bring new insights to this timeless art form, and hear Colin’s expert take on what makes these pieces so unique. Whether you’re a seasoned collector, an art enthusiast, or simply curious, this episode is packed with fascinating stories and insider knowledge you won’t want to miss.
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Swell AI Transcript: Colin McNair NO MUSIC.mp3
Katie Burke: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Ducks Unlimited Podcast. I'm your host, Katie Burke, and I have my co-host, Dr. Mike Brasher here. How you doing, Katie? Hi, Mike. And we also have our guest today is decoy specialist from Copley Fine Art Auctions, Colin McNair.
Colin McNair: Hey, Katie, Mike. I think we counted up to this is the fifth time on, so really honored to be back here and with the video format. And great to meet you, Mike.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, same here, Colin, and it's a pleasure to be in sort of the layperson component of this particular discussion. I'm really excited about what we're going to see here. Get to learn some stuff today.
Katie Burke: I know, I know. Yeah, so this is exciting because, Colin, we actually did this as a podcast a few years ago, and obviously it didn't do it justice because we didn't have video, and this is going to be much, much better now that we can actually see images and see what we're talking about. This is an exciting one.
Colin McNair: Here in the art world, we are an image-based group. So anytime we can get pictures in front of everyone, it's going to make a lot more sense. So glad to have the opportunity. Quick disclaimer, this is something I usually get up in front of a big audience at a decoy club, and I'll stand up and give this as a lecture. So I might click through a couple of things that aren't for the decoy club audience. But we've got a lot of great x-rays and decoys to look at. I think even the doctor here is going to learn a few things about x-rays. It'll be fun to turn that around.
Katie Burke: And just to let our audience know, that's what we're talking about. So we're talking about x-raying decoys, which I'm sure a lot of people don't even know that's something you do. And I know you'll go into like why and all that, but I just want to kind of…
Mike Brasher: My experience with x-rays is it was like broken bones and sprained ankles and things like that. Dentist, yeah. So, I have seen, obviously, reference to the use of x-rays in, I guess, examining decoys, but why we do it, how it's done, what we discover, all that type stuff, this is all new to me.
Katie Burke: Can I embarrass you really quick?
Mike Brasher: It's not too difficult.
Katie Burke: I have to give a little, a fun x-ray story about Mike. Mike had this decoy in his office and he shook it. And you know, he's like, thought there might be treasure inside. And I told him, I go, I hate to tell you, it's probably like a nail head or a, like a piece of like an eye of like wood came off in there, like maybe, maybe like shot. But he was like, it rattles. We need to x-ray it. We need to x-ray it. No, you don't.
Mike Brasher: You don't need to x-ray that one. She shattered my dreams. She shattered my dreams, Colin. I thought I had something precious and priceless, and she's like, no, pretty quick. Nah, it's probably nothing too special. Looking at that decoy.
Colin McNair: You don't know until you look. We never stop learning when we keep x-raying these things. We shot about, I don't know the exact number, but it's in the thousands now of decoy x-ray shots, and we'll be doing a few hundred more over the next month or so. So, yeah, you never know what to expect. So go ahead and get that shot if you get an opportunity, Mike.
Katie Burke: Make friends with your local veterinarian.
Colin McNair: There you go. Exactly.
Katie Burke: All right, go ahead. Start us off. Why do we x-ray?
Colin McNair: All right. Well, just look at what is a decoy and what does the inside of a decoy look like? Just to cut to the chase, this is a Mason Black Duck decoy premier grade and we're going to learn what we're seeing in that cool blue image on the back half. There's a lot of materials inside of decoys and they're going to vary by maker they're going to vary by time by region by the history of that decoy what's happened to it. So there's a huge story to tell underneath the paint, and x-rays are a great tool for doing that. If you think about the tools that we have for decoys, it's pretty big. We've got all sorts of history tools. I'm in a very well-lit room here that's deliberate because we use sunlight, daylight for looking at decoys anytime we can. We use ultraviolet light. This is just a nice little UV light that I use all the time. We keep a case of batteries for this thing in the closet as we burn through them. I've got actually a black light room in the other room. Magnification. You were telling me that there are better versions of magnifying headsets than this, and I'm glad to know that. And then x-rays obviously are a big part of the list. Comparables, you know, we handle thousands and thousands of decoys and comparing them is going to be really helpful for learning more. But today I'm going to kind of lean on my experience and exposure with x-rays just to focus on one tool out of the toolkit. I did not come up with the idea of x-raying decoys The most prominent person to promote decoy x-rays is one of the most famous decoy collectors of all time. He set the world record price for a decoy in 1973. It was at 73, 74, 50 years ago at $10,000. When his collection came up in 2000, it set the new standard for what high-end decoys can go for. We'll talk about some other collectors that have built on that. But he said, I think there will come a time when expensive birds up for auction may have an x-ray film available at the time of the sale. And it was back in 2018 that we made that come true 100% when we did the first decoy auction where every single bird in the catalog was x-rayed. And I actually have a copy of that here. This was not your average catalog. It was a hardcover book. This was the first sale to really rival the McCleary sale in terms of Hitting some new high watermarks blew away some records there. And so, you know, the market has given us an opportunity and the resources to say, all right, we can go further. We can do more with these tequoise to have a better understanding and serve our clients better and to sort of honor the history of these tequoise better by understanding them more. So here's a quick outline. We're going to look at where did x-rays come from, what kind of materials are we going to be looking at in the x-rays, and then really I just want to look at a ton of x-rays and talk about some of the different features, maybe put a couple of those together, tell some stories of how we've applied that and, in the most fun cases, added some value or really richened the history.
Mike Brasher: So, Colin, can I, I guess, interrupt you here? Yes, please. And it gets to that quote where, was it James?
Colin McNair: James McCleary.
Mike Brasher: James McCleary foresaw a time when this was going to happen. So obviously at that point he saw value in this technology for one reason or another. And is it At that time was the thought that we need x-rays so that we can ensure that, I mean, obviously you're going to be influencing the market value, but was it, is it more likely that you devalue a decoy as a result of an x-ray and finding something wrong inside of it, something fraudulent perhaps, or is it more likely that there is some additional story that brings added value to it?
Colin McNair: Yes, I would say that usually in the context of the marketplace, the biggest concern is going to be around condition, authenticity, repaints, repairs, and that kind of steals the headlines. But I can tell you, you know, Here in the decoy lab, we're always looking out for that. That's an important part of what we do. We offer a decoy guarantee when we sell birds at auction. So we want to know exactly what we're selling, and we want you to know exactly what you're buying before the auction. But the most fun part of x-rays is just learning more about who made what and when, and we've done a lot for attributions of birds going back to before the Civil War, and we'll talk about that. So there's a lot of fun, positive upsides that are running perfectly parallel to looking out for repairs and such.
Mike Brasher: Okay, so for a lot of different reasons is kind of what I'm hearing there.
Colin McNair: Yeah, there is no shortage of things that you can take away from looking at a bunch of x-rays and also looking at the birds in the hand. It's just, again, one way that we're going to look at it. So I had fun going back and looking at, all right, what are x-rays and where did they come from? They were invented in 1895. A scientist put his hand in front of x-rays, in front of an x-ray, and then noticed that there was a picture of that hand on this fluorescing tube behind him. So you have immediate application. But what was cool is we had within a year, x-rays had been applied to art. So it goes back to the 1800s and the birth of x-rays. What is an x-ray? It's kind of like visible light, but we can't see it. I talked about ultraviolet light. That just hits the surface of things. X-rays are at a shorter wavelength, and they can actually pass through objects. And depending on the density of that object, they'll pass through at different rates. So we can put a picture together. And then if you want to look at the history of decoys and birds, back in 1918, you have the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. And in 1919, probably no coincidence, Joel Barber begins collecting. So that's the first time that somebody looked at a decoy and said, hey, this is something worth considering beyond just the tool that I'm going to go hunt over. So you're seeing the first interest in collecting there. And then the market advances, I mentioned McCleary set that $10,000 mark in the mid 70s. There was a very prominent doctor who began promoting decoy x-rays at the time. But it was a lot harder to get the images back then. So understandably, people weren't utilizing it much. It was mostly doctors, veterinarians that were doing it kind of as the forerunners. And this is just to give you an idea of what a decoy auction catalog looked like when McCleary was buying the $10,000 curlew. It's a pamphlet where some of the birds are pictured in black and white, and the descriptions might be one sentence, where today, again, we're literally producing books on these things. So we've come a long way, and the market's allowed us to do more. In the 1980s, decoys start to take off. Everett James is promoting it more. There's books coming out that'll show an x-ray here or there. But I think there's always been a little bit of resistance or there was a lot of some resistance even when I first started 15 years ago because of what you mentioned before of you know if I look inside of this thing and maybe it's not as good as I thought it was. But fortunately we're kind of getting over the hump there. And now here in the 21st century we've got digital X rays and we've really been able to open things wide open.
Katie Burke: Do you think, I guess it kind of would go both ways, like you have a decoy that you think is worth a lot and then you're nervous to x-ray that, right? So maybe it's not what you think it is. But then because of the market, decoys are more expensive. To have the faith to spend that money on that decoy, you would want the x-ray. So it's kind of double-sided in that way.
Colin McNair: Yeah. So you know we here at Copley have always tried to be on the absolute cutting edge of how can we make this a better more fun safer marketplace. And X rays have been a part of that because yeah. when you buy a bird from us, you don't have to trust me, the specialist, that I know what's happening inside, because I can show you an x-ray of it, and we can talk through it and figure it out together. And so you get a much higher degree of confidence there. Overall, it's just a no-brainer. McCleary was 100% right. He was one of the geniuses of decoy collecting, and it's been a great positive move forward. And when I first started doing this presentation back in, I guess it was around 2018, it was a different audience, a different reception than what I get now when I go to clubs. It's really been happening very quickly. And when you pump thousands of x-rays into the marketplace, people are forced to kind of get up to speed. So we've been on a great track and to decoy market continues to improve for all sorts of reasons.
Mike Brasher: I can't help, but my mind is still back on that one of those earlier images of the doctor, whoever it was, sort of experimenting with an x-ray and just kind of putting his hand up in front of it. I just cannot get this question out of my head. Like, what did that hand end up looking like afterwards, you know? That's what I thought, too. How strong was that x-ray back then? Because we didn't have any understanding, I guess, of some of the consequences there.
Katie Burke: I thought about that, too. I was like, I wonder what kind of cancer did he die from?
Mike Brasher: I knew that's one of your last things.
Colin McNair: Yeah, yeah. Was it Mary Curie famously? Great scientist, didn't end up so well for her personally in the end. Fortunately, with digital x-rays now, the radiation levels are so low compared to what has been used only in the last few decades that health-wise, there's virtually no risk. You get more radiation flying over to Tokyo than you'll get shooting x-rays of decoys all day. Yeah.
Mike Brasher: Do you guys have your own x-ray machine in house there in your shop?
Colin McNair: We don't have one in house. We work closely with a contractor. And so, you know, we shoot every image that we possibly want and can think of. So we're shooting hundreds a year. There's still some regulations around it as the technology advances. The regulations may start to come down a little bit more. So I look forward to the day that that might happen. But yeah, because of the regulations and some of the technical concerns, we still outsource it. But we're doing it on a really large scale. So yeah, looking at evaluating decoys, there's a lot of ways to look at a decoy and x-rays are going to help us out with a few of them. So primarily we're going to focus on authenticity, age, who made it, what's the condition, and what are we going to look for specifically in these images that I keep talking about. We're going to have all sorts of different materials that birds are put together with, A lot of paint, a lot of wood, a lot of nails and screws, and then some other oddball things. And then as we put those together, again, we'll be able to really see a story within these birds. And we've been reading the stories of birds from the outside for years, and now we just have a lot more to put into that picture. And it's less talking, let me show you here a couple of examples. So just a quick introduction to how these x-rays look, because there's a lot of different ways to present them. If you see something in white, that means the x-ray is being absorbed. So lead paint, iron, lead shot is going to be picking that up. If it's black, then the x-ray is just going straight through. So just air or really thin wood, black paint. And then you get all the shades of gray, depending on the intensity of that. You'll see eyes, you'll see white lead putty showing up, you'll see different types of wood, like a hard oak is going to show more than a soft cedar, for instance. So there's going to be a lot of shades of gray that we're looking at here. One of the biggest challenges that people have in looking at these images is understanding that you're looking at the left side and the right side of something at the same time. Here's a shorebird decoy like the one in the image, and you can see one side of this bird, I'm seeing the other, but when you're looking at the X-ray, you're getting both sides. Right now, you can't tell if that shot is on the left side, the right side, or both, but we shot this one all the way around.
Katie Burke: You can tell by the eyes that you're seeing through, because the eyes are slightly off.
Colin McNair: Yeah, so you'll have eyes that are slightly offset. And as we turn it around, we say, oh, it's pretty clear this bird was shot from the left side. And you can see where that shot's in the wood, where it pierced through the lead paint, and so it leaves those little entry holes. And, um, but yeah, that you have to keep in mind when you're looking at these, that you're seeing the whole thing and it's just not how our brains are, uh, used to, to seeing objects in this sort of, uh, translucent state. That's really cool. And that's the, that's the last, that's the last cool animation I have because that thing took a while to shoot.
Mike Brasher: So that was a short, that was a shorebird. Gosh, what's it going to be the date on that? Because there's shot shell pellets in it. So the predate 1918.
Colin McNair: Yeah, so a lot of the waterfowl hunters out there today are still using decoys similar to what was being used in the beginning in terms of waterfowl. But shorebirds, yeah, 1918 was a big year. There was still some shorebird hunting until 1928. I think yellowlegs and plover, is my understanding, could be shot by sport hunters. But yeah, a bird like this is going to be about 1980. That's where a lot of your good early shorebirds are. 1880? Thank you. Yeah, that's right. No, we're not down in Barbados. We've dated shorebirds back to pre-1850, and we've got some pretty good hints all the way back to the 18-teens. The history gets pretty fuzzy back there. And by using x-rays, we've been able to push some dates further back, and we've actually had to pull a couple forward a little bit. But it's fun because we're still figuring these things out, and there's a lot more to learn. What you're going to see in virtually every bird is going to be wooden paint. So here is one of the most basic birds you can see. It's a Mason decoy factory bird. It's a solid piece of wood, and it's been painted over entirely with white lead paint. Except a little bit on the bill, we might talk about that later. So this is the most standard decoy you could possibly look at. You'll notice with that lead paint on the edges, you get a little bit of a white halo around the outside. And so that's how you can tell the difference between if something is just on the surface, like the lead that you'd be seeing right through here, where you're stacking it up. versus maybe just a dense piece of wood, which is going to come across much more flat. It's actually going to be a little more white in the middle, where you have the thicker piece of wood. So that's one way to tell the difference between a surface, what you're seeing on the surface, versus what's on the inside. We'll see a lot of grain in wood, and if you think of wood as leaves in a book. You just have all these layers of grain stacked up. And if you're looking at the cover of that book, you're just going to see one leaf, the cover. And if you look at the side of the book, you might see all those pages of Moby Dick. And when we're looking at the side of this Ward Brothers 1936 canvas back, we're looking through all those slices of grain. in the body, but we're not seeing that in the head. Of course, if we change our angle, and there's a line showing the grain, but if we change our angle and we look down on the top of the head, the Ward brothers knew what they were doing. They're lining their grain up the right way, so you're getting the maximum strength through that thin neck, and there's the grain lining up again. So just because you do or don't see grain in one place or another doesn't really mean too much. You really have to look at these from two or three angles if you want to tell every story.
Mike Brasher: And so, Colin, do those details matter in the valuation of a decoy? The grain, the orientation, that conveys some information about, kind of as you said, sort of the skill of the maker?
Colin McNair: In this case, some people who understand how a decoy is put together will have a greater appreciation to see how a bird's put together from the inside, because you'll have higher levels of craftsmanship. One of the primary, so that's kind of a much higher level heady way to look at it. One of the primary ways that we apply grain is to have consistency of grain. And let's say that this bird had a replaced bill. If a restorer is putting a new bill on, he might be able to do the best job ever of matching the paint and the shape on the outside. But if he can match two organic pieces of grain coming together, we still haven't met him yet. It's nearly impossible. So it's here where we're focusing on grain. It's more about seeing the consistency of something that's all original. So we can see that this head is all original from the back of the head to the tip of the bill.
Katie Burke: And I'm guessing it helps a little bit with authentication, too. Like, you know that the Ward brothers constructed their decoys a certain way, so you can say, like, if the grain's the right direction, well, that's one notch in that. It's definitely to that direction, being a Ward.
Colin McNair: Yeah, we will see. One aspect. Yeah, we'll see instances where you can literally read the wood quality and say, well, that doesn't really make sense for what this maker would have been doing. And what's really interesting is these guys 100 years ago, they were working with old growth wood that had this beautiful tight grain, not a lot of knots in a lot of places. And now we do not have access to that wood so easily anymore. So a lot of later birds, you'll see the grain start to open up. So yeah, you will be able to kind of understand birds and when they were made sometimes more because of that. When we're looking at wood, it's not all perfect grain. Every tree has got branches, and with those branches come knots. So here's a bird with a knot running through it. It's not a problem, but you just want to know it's there, and you don't want to see an x-ray and say, whoa, what's this line going through my bird? It's perfectly natural. So, on top of that wood, still look at this wood canvas back end, you're going to have lead paint, and sometimes you'll actually be able to make out the line of where that lead paint starts and stops, and you can see that beautifully here where she's got a little white cheek patch, and you can make that out in the x-ray, and you want to see that white lead paint. If that had been stripped down and repainted, say, after when lead paint was available, all of the white paint and the black paint would look just the same. So lead paint is always a good indicator that, yep, that's one of the pieces you want to see in old paint. Then there's, you know, starting to apply that knowledge of, okay, I want to see lead paint, but where is it supposed to be? And if you were to look at this x-ray of a, let's say this is an Elmer Kroll merganser, and here's an Elmer Kroll black duck for comparison. it kind of looks like it's re-headed because okay it's all nice and lead paint on the body you can actually make out a little bit of that wing patch there where he's you're getting more lead paint in that where that merganser has a cool wing pattern and then the head just goes black and say what was it re-headed and nope merganser heads don't have white in them so he wasn't using that paint if you zoom in here you can see oh there's a little bit of that paint creeping up around the base of the neck So you do have continuity between the head and the body. So just because it looks like one thing right out of the gates, you zoom in a little more and say, OK, that does make sense. And you don't want to just get lost in the x-ray. You've got to think of it holistically. Pick up the bird and look at it in your hand and go back and forth, and that'll help. Then you start to see other interesting things, like here's a place where the grain of the bird, and you can see the grain of this bird in my hand here, the grain pops more on the dark lines. and so of that grain pattern. And so you'll start to see that in decoys and x-rays as well, where here we can make out the surface pattern of the grain in the paint. And you can actually see the painted speculums. I think he had something like a paint pen where he's putting down this perfect little white line. You can see the left and right speculum there showing a white lead or something with a heavy metal like cadmium or something.
Mike Brasher: So Colin, do you have to get pretty specific with the x-ray settings to pick up those subtle differences?
Colin McNair: Yeah, so we're really fortunate. I've worked with a lot of x-ray techs over the years, and we're really fortunate to have somebody that's kind of an artist, you know, technician, but he knows the settings to work with roughly, and then he knows how to make the adjustments. And yeah, you can take a, you know, somebody could take an x-ray unit and say, okay, I'm going to put it in here and hit click, and the whole bird might just look white. And so you've got to play with your exposure and power. Unfortunately, the images that we're looking at here were shot by somebody who is absolutely dialed in. The way you know migratory bird patterns, this guy knows how to get these things calibrated. I couldn't begin to do what he does. Very cool. And then not all birds are made out of cedar and pine, which is the primary material. You also get stuff like balsa. This is a Ward Brothers balsa decorative, and so balsa's got different qualities. You're not going to be seeing the grain. Balsa is also usually a composite block of wood, and so we can see a line going through this bird, and that's totally normal because usually a balsa block's going to be made of multiple pieces. Also, again, here we can see the variations in the lead paint showing that pattern. Then, just to cover all the types of decoys we come across, here's a cork decoy. You're probably not going to x-ray a lot of them, but believe it or not, we've sold cork decoys for many tens of thousands of dollars by Lou Rathmel and Shang Wheeler up in Connecticut. So here's one example of that. Then this is a fun one. This is a canvas bird stretched over wooden slats. This was made by Lothrop Holmes in my hometown of Kingston, Massachusetts. He was one of the early makers in the 1800s. He's probably the most celebrated maker of the 1800s. And he worked in the iron industry, actually had a, I think he worked at a tack factory. And you can see all these little tacks in here where that's holding that stretched canvas onto the wooden frame. That canvas is holding a ton of paint, so it just soaks it up. You can see where it's much more white than on that wooden head where there is no canvas. You can also make out where the white lead caulk is going up into that neck there. And then down at the tip of the bill, you've got a little bit of wear. There's no paint there, so that goes back to black. But yeah, fun variation. His decoys were made in a lot of different materials. And then, yeah, this to me gives me a greater appreciation for Lothar Palms' technique and how fastidious he was that this bird was made, let's see, 160 plus years ago, at least. Have you counted the amount of tacks that are in this thing? I have not. I'm sure that people have counted their tax. I think Steve O'Brien, my boss here at Copley, he's done some things like that before. We had a Charles Safford Canada goose made with laminated construction, most complicated laminated construction you can imagine. And I think there's, I'm just going to guess, 20-some pieces of wood built out from this core, and they're all nailed on. And when you look at it, it's just filled with nails. I think he actually did some estimations on that one, but there were probably a couple pounds of nails in that decoy. Then I said I'd cover all the materials, paper mache. I didn't do this. I got this from a museum. But yeah, I think now we can zoom in on a couple of the materials that is going to hold those nails or hold those pieces of wood together. And these materials can tell us a lot because the history of nail making and tack making and screw making has some really specific changes in time. And looking here on the left side, you've got early cut nails. These are going to go until 1800. They continue after that, but in 1800, you get the wire nail, which is the common nail that you would usually see today. It's a round piece of wire. It's going to have a pointed tip rather than a cut square tip, and it's going to have this kind of rounded end here. So those are the two nails you'll usually see. Every once in a while you'll get these L head fine finish nails. You'll also see brads. Those are just a subset of wire nails. They usually don't really have heads. You'll see some tacks like you just did in the Lothrop palms. And then wood screws, the pointed tip on the wood screw only starts showing up around 1850s because of the technology of how they were turning those to make them. And that was actually a big tell in cross-referencing one of the oldest lines of provenance that we've ever confirmed for a decoy, and I'll touch on that later. Um, so. We'll touch on that right now. So here we've got a bird that it came with sort of a word of mouth story that it was from the Philadelphia area and that it was from the mid 1800s. But there wasn't really anything to back that up. And when I sent images of this off to a friend of mine who works on old houses and some part of what you do when you're inspecting an old house is you pull nails to see what you can learn from them. So, he literally just studies nail types and screw types. And I sent him the x-ray. I just told him that the bird was from near a urban area and was wondering what his take was. And what was really fun is this is an early machined screw. And at this era, they'd learned how to make this type of screw, but they hadn't learned how to make the point. So he cued in on that, and then the nails were also a little bit particular as well, and he cued in on that. So his estimate, just based on the x-rays, was 1845 to 1860. When we cross-reference that with the brand on the bottom for Richard Wistar Davids, And his cousin, Casper Wishtar Morris, one of them died in the Civil War in the Wheatfield Battle of Gettysburg. We cross reference with those guys, we can say, all right, we have a pretty good idea that this was in fact made around 1850. And having the physical history of the bird tell the story and confirm what the spoken history was was pretty important. And then, aside from all that, we actually reconfirmed it through another line of provenance. I had this bird out at a show, and a guy walked in and said, you know, I've got a few of those and know a little about their history. So we actually came at these from three different angles. And that was very important. I think it was a big part of the bird's value. And this equally ended up selling for tens of thousands of dollars, and it would have been much harder to promote at that level had we And if we didn't have the confidence to put it back as, yeah, this is one of the earliest decoys known. So that was pretty exciting.
Katie Burke: All right, Collin, let's get back into this now that we're back from break. Are you ready to kick back in?
Colin McNair: Yeah. We were just talking about applying an understanding of nails and screws and where that can add a lot of value to a bird and really enrich its history. While we're on nails and screws, you can see all sorts of bizarre sideways things. Here's an old, old, old bird. It's actually made by a cousin of the last bird we looked at. This is a Albert David's Lang. This bird is hunted over saltwater. It was put together with iron nails, iron rusts, and these nails rusted out. We might be on our third generation of nails here, but you can see where they're so faint. You've got a mix of wire nails and square nails, but this is a bird that's Yep, it was probably literally coming apart and had to be nailed back together again. So that is not the way the maker originally made it, but it is an interesting part of the bird's story. And it was hunted for actually multiple generations, we know.
Mike Brasher: So, Colin, a question on that particular decoy. It's two-dimensional right now. It's taking a three-dimensional object and flattening it, essentially what we're seeing. I'm trying to sort of figure out where on the bird those nails are. Is the decoy hollow? And if that's the case, then the nails are kind of around the edge of it. That's the way that… I'm not a carver. I don't do anything with decoys.
Katie Burke: Well, yeah, and you can see that if you look at that dark space right there, that's letting you know that it's hollow.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, that's… Okay.
Colin McNair: Yeah, so Katie's spot on. That's a hollow decoy, and then you're getting this really tight oval right in the middle. That's the white lead caulk in the seam there, and then the nails are holding together the seam. So yeah, here in this bird I've got in my hands, you can see, all right, here's the body seam. This is almost certainly a hollow decoy because of that. And yeah, this is what it would look like in person. But yeah, that's a hollow decoy and you're just looking at the core of it. For whatever reason, I cropped off the head.
Mike Brasher: Okay, and so that's in that hollow space is where the treasure will lie. That's where your treasure, your so-called treasure.
Katie Burke: Hey, just like fun fact, some people have put, well, a lot of people put dog's ashes in there. Yes. But there is a known person and one out there in the world. Really? Yes. He's in a museum. Oh, okay.
Colin McNair: We'll have to compare notes, Katie, and see if we're talking about the same person. It's in the Illinois River area. Oh yeah, no, mine's on the East Coast.
Katie Burke: Oh, so two people. Okay. So would that, the lead caulk, would that would have been originally there for construction or would that been when someone repaired the decoy?
Colin McNair: So that would have originally been there. Okay. And then, you know, where this one was probably put back together, re-secured, they might've gone in there and hit it again. But yeah, that's a totally normal thing to see is that seal around the seam. And then, you know, when you're looking at nails, we've been looking at you know, nails where they've rusted out, nail holes that are still there. Sometimes you get what I call ghost holes. So it's where a nail was in a hole, it rusted, it left that rusty imprint in the hole, and then it's been taken out again. So this is a bird that I'm only showing you a tight detail of it because I don't want to give the whole thing away. But I know from handling this bird in person that even though it has all these pulled nails, it's actually all original pieces. And I know that because you could match the paint, literally the cracked lure and the paint strokes on the outside. But what happened is it broke in a couple places in this really thin neck and had to be taken apart, cleaned, and put back together. Essentially, it was just the original pieces were reset. So this one is showing us that, yeah, something's happened here. In this case, the bird is still very valuable. But the X-ray would certainly make you want to ask some good questions.
Katie Burke: So would that have been from hunting wear? Is that what they're thinking, why they'd have to get that out?
Colin McNair: Yeah. So in the case of this decoy, it had a really thin neck. It's got iron nails in it. When iron rusts, it expands. And so the rusty nail literally just break the wood apart around it. And if it's a big piece of wood in the middle of the body, the wood can kind of absorb that expansion. But it's in thin neck, the wood just pops apart. So yeah, you've got ghost holes are a fun thing to look for in x-rays. And then of course, shot. You can learn more about a region's hunting strategies based on what they did to their decoys. The bird on the right here is from Long Island, and it is not uncommon to see Long Island shorebird decoys that look like a starry night. They'll be shot from multiple angles. This wasn't just one errant shot. This was a hunting strategy employed here. You'll see different size shots coming in from all over the place, and that's just part of the charm of Long Island shorebirds. On the left we've got a Virginia shorebird but it tells me that they were taking some pretty low shots and probably deliberately just taking raking shots of birds once they were down because again a lot of these guys were market hunters early on and it was not sport for them it was survival.
Katie Burke: Okay, I have a question, and this is an odd question. Are Long Island birds particularly detailed in paint, if they're knowing they're going to shoot those birds?
Colin McNair: So Long Island is a really interesting region. It's one of the top shorebird producing regions in the country, and there are several different schools of carving that are very different from each other. The bird we were looking at here was from the Verity school. It might have even been an Obadiah Verity.
Katie Burke: Okay, well that's a detailed bird, yeah.
Colin McNair: And their paint, I don't have one here, but their paint is, that bird is probably going to be painted all white and then they would have taken a small brush or some small paint applicator and just tapped right along it and done one and done kind of dotted paint job on it. It could be a really nice abstracted form that's going to look great, but it's not something they were fussing over because they knew they were doing this to the birds. Great question. Then, to put a few of these things together, we've got a Mason merganser. It's made of wood. It's got lead paint, showing that nice lead paint halo. It has wire nails, so we know that it's made after 1880. There's a dowel in the neck that's going to be very faint. I don't know if you can quite make that out, but that's a typical Mason neck connector. We've got some lead shot in it. It's nice to see that the lead shot isn't filled in behind it, because that's a good indicator that it hasn't been repainted. And it's got hollow body construction, which we were talking about before. Katie, you know what you're looking at there. This hollow body is actually a little bit different. So you can see you've got these concentric circles making that hollow cavity, and that's because they were using a Forstner bit. And so this is what that bird would look like. And the other bird we were looking at earlier, it was all very nice, long swooping lines, and that's because they were going and finishing that with a chisel. So you can see here's an industrial-made bird. They had access- Yeah, a factory bird. A factory bird. Yeah, and they had access to all the tools, like a Forstner bit, that the average decoy maker is not going to have. And that's kind of a mason signature. And you can actually have a A better appreciation sometimes for a maker's craftsmanship when you see how delicately they hollowed and how carefully their craftsmanship is where no one was ever going to see it or they didn't think we were going to see it. So here's a nice example of a beautifully hand-scooped hollow body by Nathan Raleigh Horner. Yeah, these birds… And literally, you know what it feels like when you pick up a good hollow bird and it just kind of floats in your hand. And yeah, for me, I really respect those makers. And as a decoy maker myself, You know, I know how tempting it is to say, okay, you know, I hollowed it out with this Forstner bit, time to put it together. But someone like this is doing it because they can't do it any other way. It has to be resolved to a pretty elegant point. We had actually already talked about caulk and the white lead seams. Here's another view of that. So when you see it from the side, it's very thin. And then, of course, when you see it from the top, it's going to look entirely different. That was that same great Philadelphia bird. You can see some kind of funny things, like why are there these kind of random white lines in the hollow cavity? And if you think about how the bird was made, it would have been upside down when they put the bottom board on. And when they put that caulk in the seam, the caulk ran in. And so if you picture the bird upside down, then that explains it. And sometimes you'll get fun little cues about who made what. If you do a really deep dive into the Delaware River region, they had a tendency of making beautiful hollow birds, and their technique for keeping the block together while they were carving it, because you can't hollow a bird before you carve it, because you don't know where your lines are ultimately going to end up. They would use a single screw in the middle, and there's the base of the screw there, and then you can see there's actually this little protruded part inside the back, and that's where the screw would have been holding on for that last, even after he hollowed it, he wanted a little something to grip onto so it was staying lined up as he put those final nails in to finish it. Also, you can have an appreciation for planning out a decoy well, and the less holes you have in the bird, the better. When you make a hollow bird, you can put all those nails and fasteners on the inside of the neck, so you won't have them rusting out as much. And here we can see he's attaching the head from the inside, which is, again, just good craftsmanship, good planning, makes for a slightly better decoy. Then you get little quirky things like this. This guy put a dead nail through the bill of the bird into the back. Before he put the bird together, he hammered that nail over so that it was extra secure, going to hold that head on tight, and was going to survive from in the mid-1800s through to today. And these birds were actually hunted really late on. Here's another take on hollow birds and laminated birds. Again, this guy wanted a really big decoy, didn't have a really big piece of wood, so he's putting together one, two, three, four, five.
Katie Burke: I was wondering what we were looking at. I couldn't figure it out. It's a magnum, the original magnum decoy. Well, the way the head was tilted, I was so confused. Yeah, I know. I get it now.
Colin McNair: Yeah, this is not normal, but again, the more you look and, you know, this thing is still really tight. And from the outside, you might not see this at all, or you might have hints of it and say, what's going on here? And then again, you have a greater appreciation for the maker. So I've been talking about craftsmanship. You know, one of the guys that really exemplifies that is John Blair Sr. from the Delaware River. And when I see this bird, it's 140 years old, it was hunted pretty darn hard, and it still has absolutely perfect body seams. So you can tell that the bird's hollowed out because of that cavity, but you can't see the body seam from the outside, and you still can't even see the body seam from the inside, because he knew exactly what wood he was using, it was seasoned, he made a perfect joint, and the guy just knocked it out of the park. And again, it's another way of appreciating decoys from the inside and out.
Katie Burke: If I had all the money in the world, I would collect Blair decoys, by the way. Okay. Alright. That's who I would collect. I like that. He's my favorite.
Colin McNair: Nice. And then just to get into some kind of quirkier stuff you won't see a lot of, this is a mortise and tenon joint. Sometimes we'll get dovetail joints and mortise and tenons, and this is what they might look like from the inside. Also, we're getting two types of wood here. And every once in a while you get exotic hardwoods, usually along coastal communities where they were getting exotic woods that was coming off of ships as dunnage or parts of shipwrecks. But that base down there was made of a tropical hardwood, you got a copper wire in the middle, and then a couple different types of wood in the bodies of these little guys. And that's what a mortise and tenon joint looks like when you take it apart. That's a miniature bird that was actually carved by my father, Mark McNair. And there they are. And then, let's see, we'll do… All right, we'll do another application of how do we find value and add legitimacy to great decoys. This is a Captain Osgood goose. The one in orange is at the Shelburne Museum. It's part of one of the most famous rigs of decoys on the planet. there's only one of these birds outside of the Shelburne Museum. Fortunately, the Shelburne that x-rayed there, I got access to that. Then we got to see it inside and out. And when I compared it to the one in black and white that we shot, I said, okay, I've never handled one of these before, but I feel pretty darn confident that this is in fact what it's supposed to be. And the craftsmanship of how he's He's doing the cheek patches on the goose. He's putting these like fraction of an inch little pieces on holding him on with these little finish nails. Nobody else is doing that, and here you have the famous bird, and you have the bird that we sold, which is now more famous. We have that there, and then we have another particular construction technique of how he put these metal plates and actually hinges at the base of the neck, and he used the hinge pin. to attach the head to the body so he could take his heads off. And you only see that in really select, super high-grade decoys like the dovetailed geese, like the Osgood geese. And being able to confirm that against the museum examples is really important for us to be able to get behind the bird and promote it for the great piece it is. Just because you have an x-ray of a bird doesn't mean you know what's going on with it. In this case, we got an Ira Hudson shorebird, and it just has these white blobs in it, and you usually don't see that in shorebirds, so we need more information. Simple enough. We look at it from the other side and say, oh, it's a laminated bird. It's made with one core piece, and then he added two wide pieces on the outside so that it wasn't just a silhouette decoy. So, really simple, but you can get confused by just looking at one angle. Here's another example of a three-piece shorebird that's happening like that. But yeah, you can look at an entire auction catalog for an entire catalogs worth of birds and not see something that has that. And then original repairs. Does that sound a little like an oxymoron. The understanding that you have to have of individual makers over a large volume of birds to see something like this and say oh yeah that's great. It takes a lot of experience to get comfortable with this. There's a lot of information. This was made by George Boyd. He was carving cedar that was probably coming out of, if he lived in New Hampshire, it might have been coming down from Maine. A lot of that wood will have dry rots in it, so it's just wonderful wood, but it will have these imperfections. It can be a little flaky around those imperfections. And Boyd was absolutely fastidious about producing a decoy that looked perfect on the outside. And to have that perfection, if there's any lifted grain, if there's any little holiday in the wood, he'd fill it, he'd nail it down. So you can look at a Boyd in perfect original paint, maybe it was never even hunted, and you take a look at the X-ray and say, man, this thing's all all messed with, but it's 100% original. And we're able to confirm that because you look at the bird in the hand and say, oh, yep, that's all original paint. You can literally follow the brush stroke over this area that I thought might be problematic. So that's an instance of better knowing a maker through studying their work inside and out.
Katie Burke: Wait, hold on. Go back to that one because it's confusing. Can you explain the nail, what is happening?
Colin McNair: Yeah, so let's see if I've got a bird here. with me. In this bird here, I'm looking at the body of the bird from two different angles. We've got a nail coming in here. We've got a nail coming in here. This looks like it was probably maybe a knot or some sort of damage to the wood that was filled and had a little white caulk in it. This extra line here is going to be some filler caulk. What that line might look like if If you look at this bird in my hands here, this is a mason decoy. And the mason decoy factory, if I roll it through the light, you can make out this line right here. And that's just an original crack check age line in the wood. And the mason folks would have filled that with putty before painting it over. As the wood expands and contracts over time, that putty gets pushed to the surface. But wood has cracks in it. It's just part of what it is. Most makers would just keep rolling right over it. But Boyd would make his bird absolutely perfectly smooth before painting it. And so you're seeing these really minute things that most people would never pay attention to, and it's all hiding underneath the original paint. Boyd wasn't the only person to do that, but we were talking about personality types before, and Boyd certainly had one that comes through in his decoy construction. We looked at shot earlier, and we've looked at what paint looks like. If you see a bird that's in perfect original paint, and I got to be the messenger of bad news on this one, and it's not just this one, it's a whole group of birds. It's a Ferdinand Bach decoy, and it's got excellent Bach paint. And unfortunately, it has shot under that excellent Bach paint. So while the bird's in virtually perfect condition, We know that it wasn't the first coat of paint to go on it, and again, Baxter's taking really good care of his birds. He's maintaining his rig, and instead of just touching up the shathole, he went ahead and repainted the whole thing. That's a place where people thought these were an original paint, understandably so. For decades, they traded as such. And then when we started x-raying everything, I got to be the messenger, shot through holes. But these birds have really still held up their value because all the fundamentals are still there.
Katie Burke: Well, I mean, I would think if that's something he did, for that carver, that's typical, right? That's just how he treated his birds, if he shot them.
Colin McNair: It is. And because it's perfect back paint, it's really not a big mark against it, but you have to have an understanding of, okay, if you're spending tens of thousands of dollars like you are on this bird, You want to know exactly what you're getting, what you're selling. It wasn't so fun to bring that to the conversation, but you have to do it. And now I think everybody has a better understanding of Bach wasn't just a fastidious maker. He maintained his rig as well as anybody ever had, because these birds are in phenomenal condition otherwise. They don't look like they were worn out, so you wouldn't think they were candidates for repaint, and they only had a few pieces of the shot in them. But that was a tell that you have to acknowledge. Then, a lot of times we're looking for, you know, shorebirds have these teeny little bills in them. And, you know, here's this bird in my hand. This bill's about the size of a pencil. Sometimes they get smaller than that. You know, it's usually going to be a piece of oak or some other type of hardwood, so it's relatively durable. But you guys know what it's like when you're hunting and handling decoys and freezing and you have dogs, and a lot of shorebird bills were broken off. So, here's a great bird from Long Island by Charles Sumner Bunn, and he did something particular in that he painted his birds in white lead paint from tip to tail, and so he actually put white lead paint all the way down the bill. Most makers wouldn't do that because shorebird bills are all pretty much black, but that's something that's very maker-specific that's good to know about. Here's another shorebird that has an entirely different take on a bill. He's using an exotic hardwood, or maybe walnut, but he's out in Nantucket where you'd see some of those exotics show up, like ebony in the bills sometimes. So he doesn't have to paint his bill at all. If you look at the x-rays, you say, wow, that's a lot different. But we know that this is perfectly normal because we've seen enough of them, and it makes sense that you wouldn't need to paint that bill. Here's an instance where you take an Elmer Kroll shorebird and you've got that same kind of normal or regular flaking along the paint down the bill. But there's a fracture line through the bill. So you wouldn't be able to see it if you casually looked at the bird, but the bill did break off. It was glued back on. Somebody probably did a nice job of touching up the seam. Not a big deal, but again, something you want to know and x-ray helps you pick that out. Because I can tell you that one was not easy to see in person, but the x-ray makes it a no brainer. Then other variations of bill repairs, here's one that somebody did a really nice professional restoration on, and I think anybody can pick out that there's the line of where the original bill ends and the replacement starts. And then you get some more complex bill repairs. This one was mounted on a peg. So if you looked at it, you'd say, all right, well, it's probably replaced. And then you see that little peg in there and say, well, it's definitely replaced. Because no maker did original bills with little peg attachments like that. You just wouldn't do it. And more variations on shoreboard repairs. Here's one where you could look at this x-ray and you really wouldn't know if that bill's original or not. And this is a curlew, where the bill is a big part of the bird, so it can have a big factor on the value. When you look at the x-ray, you see this little white thing showing up here, and it doesn't show anywhere on the outside of the bird. So what happened here is the old bill was probably getting loose, so they popped a nail in there to sturdy it up. That bill finally gave up the ghost, it got entirely replaced, and this little nail was left hiding in there. And so this is one where it was really helpful to have an x-ray to confirm that, yep, that in fact is going to be a replaced bill, because you can't explain that stub of a nail otherwise. Then here's a bird where this is a Nathan Cobb Brant from Cobb Island, probably 1880s. A lot of cool things going on. You've got nails that have been filled with caulk over the nail holes in the neck. You're getting a little hint of the hollow body down there. They did mortise and tenon bills. If you look at this, it's going to be a blackhead, black bills, and not a lot of pink cues to work with. And what does the x-ray tell us here? Absolutely nothing. You had to look at this one in person and really know what you're looking at to see it. Or more importantly, that the fact that the bill was replaced was just part of the provenance of the bird as part of what's communicated when the bird is transacted. So x-rays don't always help. They're not a panacea for understanding birds' conditions. Here's where it can get really tricky. This is one where I got, I guess, a chuckle out of. this bird had a phenomenal replaced bill and when the bill actually slipped out and so you could look at the inside of the bill joint and it was all beautiful and dark and dusty and there is a little rusty spot on one side of the joint and there's a rusty of the face and a rusty spot on one side of the bill, and so that all matched up, great. But then you look at the x-ray and say, oh, well, that little rusty spot that I could see when I took the bill out was totally fabricated, because those two pieces of nail there don't work together. They don't match up in the x-ray. So somebody did an over-the-top restoration job, and x-ray was absolutely critical for identifying that, if it isn't handed down with the history of the bird again. And then you can pretty much x-ray anything. We x-ray miniatures. These minis are by Elmer Kroll. They'll sell for thousands of dollars. These are clean as a whistle, but one of the fun things about looking at Elmer Kroll's birds are his paint. He used layers and layers of paint. And in these, you can actually make out the plumage patterns in his paint. And so, yeah, fun way to look at them. And you can x-ray fish decoys. We're not going to go down that today. This was one I got from the museum, taxidermy decoys. And then you can start to get into specific makers, like the Ward brothers, who had corrugated fasteners in their birds, which are actually actually patented in the 1800s, but really only the Ward brothers used them, and they seemed to use them by the crate load. Without looking at it, I got a Ward brothers decoy right here, and I would bet you that there is a corrugated fastener in here somewhere. You almost always get corrugated fasteners in the Ward decoys. Then you get some other false positives, where you see something like this mason decoy. You say, man, everything looks great, but what happened to the end of the bill? Has it been chewed off or restored? And I've got a mason bird here. And when the Masons were making these decoys, and I can actually see it in the worn paint here, you've got gray on wood here, and you've got gray on white here. And I think what the Mason folks did is they held the bird by the bill pretty naturally, and they used that as a handle. But it's very, very normal to see Masons with either a hard or a faint line with a white paint ends here. And so you don't get anything at the end, but it'd be really easy to misinterpret as a replaced or repaired bill. So that's another place where it's nice to have a ton of x-rays and don't jump to any conclusions until you've looked at a much bigger picture. Here's a fun one. Most folks, including myself, would never guess that anyone would hollow the head of a decoy. This is a John Schweikert bird, and they've got these big bullnecks. It's a canvas back. Big bullnecks, giant heads, hollow bodies, really elaborate keels. So I think he was probably hunting in rough water, really sensitive to that center of gravity. So he went so far as to hollow out the back of the head. You don't see that very often. you Then you get other little quirks where you might learn more about a maker. This is a Stevens Brothers decoy, and he actually took a screw and he hammered out the head of the screw to make it a finished screw. And you'd never know that, you'd never have that appreciation for, you know, what length he was willing to go through. But here's a guy who's spending some extra time to do it the way he wants. And also you're seeing that he's putting that blind nail in through the base of the neck. to give some extra support to that neck so it won't crack. Or if it does crack, it stays together. So again, more appreciation for the craftsman there. And you might be able to say, oh, is this one of Stephen's, isn't it? It's got that really particular method of head construction. And then… Oh, here's your bad x-ray.
Katie Burke: Here's your bad x-ray, yeah.
Colin McNair: This is what it would look like if I tried to shoot one.
Katie Burke: Or mine.
Colin McNair: Yeah, consult with your technician, was my summary on this. And this is really easy to do. Back when people had to shoot with manual cameras, you'd have to mess around with your f-stop and exposure and work it out in the black room and now the dark room. And now we get to do all this digitally, so you see this and Hopefully, your technician says, you know, I think we can do better than that. Or maybe we have to shoot two x-rays of this bird, one for the head, one for the body, because this one was just loaded with lead paint, really wide body. So that's what it can look like if you do it right. So just because you have an x-ray doesn't mean it's going to be the best, or it's going to even help you. And then image processing. Everything we looked at today was a white object over a black image, but you can do it all sorts of different ways. I actually really like the dark over white. Sometimes if I really have questions, I'll switch to this view. So you can play around with it, play with the contrast. There's a lot of different ways of seeing these things. Efficiency, it costs money to do this. It takes time, it takes relationships. When we first started doing it, we'd pack in all the question marks that we had around. Actually, I'll show you what it looked like when we first started doing it. It looked like this. Here is a couple of shorebirds. This was not cheap and it was a big investment of time and money. This is a nice swan head. This makes a nice graphic. We shot them on this film and we'd pack in as many as we could. You can still do that, but you can see. how many questions you can answer in one shot. And you can x-ray everything. That's one of the most important things to remember. There's a lot of ways to approach it. And again, I talked about relationships, a good way to find where you're going to get your best x-rays done. And you can call up vets, and some of them say, yeah, that sounds really fun. Please bring them in. And others will say, we don't do that here. So sometimes you have to just keep trying until you find the right spot.
Mike Brasher: So Colin, do you, sort of on this point right here, do you, is it increasingly common for collectors to do this on their own? So that, yeah, I guess for them to learn more about it, just to complete that story, because they've already acquired it. I would understand like in some, when they take it to market, if they want to sell it or whatever, then Of course, it becomes important for that reason, but I would imagine certainly an auction house would probably do it independently. Maybe there's some certification that you would accept, I don't know. But do you see private collectors just sort of doing this on to complete the story of the decoys that they own?
Colin McNair: Yeah, so since we did that first fully x-rayed catalog back in 2018, we were promoting it before then, but we brought it to an entirely different level here at Copley in 2018, and we've maintained that. We've promoted it really heavily, and we've tried to just force the conversation. And it's had a huge effect. We see a lot more people feeling more comfortable with it. And I've given this talk at decoy collecting clubs to literally hundreds of people now. So yeah, this is happening on an individual collector level. It's happening. Dealers kind of have to do it more now. Auction houses have to do it. Otherwise, they're just behind the curve. Collectors are inherently inquisitive. They want to know more. They want to connect the dots. It's just a great tool for doing that. Personally, I love it. Not just because I've made decoys and have an understanding of how they're put together, but I think Our understanding of these objects, as I've tried to share today, is far richer because of what these things tell us. And I think a lot of people are understanding all that upside and enjoying sharing in that. So yeah, we're definitely moving in the right direction. I think it's only going to be more so in the future.
Katie Burke: I have a question about, as a carver, and you get to see the construction of some of these decoys. Let's use the Blair for an example. You get to see how good that construction is that he's got, and how does that affect you as a carver or other carvers on your own work, now that you can see what is on the inside of those birds?
Colin McNair: It's humbling. When I first made hollow decoys as a kid, legend has it I made my first bird at age six. But yeah, I remember making hollow birds and I hollow them out with a Forstner bit, and it felt better, it sounds cool when you knock on it, you get to say it's hollow, and I didn't really think, oh yeah, I should hand scoop this, or I need to hand scoop this, because that's a better way of doing it. Now, because of x-rays, I've been schooled by my predecessors. Next time I make a hollow decoy, I'm going to think about, all right, what's this going to look like in the future when somebody is looking inside? If I really want people to appreciate me at the highest level that I can maintain, I need to up my game. I think as clever as I ever got inside of a decoy was, we'd put some wood chips in or put a coin in so that someone like Mike would be able to wrap it and say, hey, what's going on? Is there treasure inside? When I look at that John Blair bird, it's absolutely humbling because you can make a hollow bird out of nice wood that you think you've done a great job of joining and you glue it together and then next week the weather changes and those seams open right up. To see something that 140 plus years later isn't even showing that there is a seam makes me realize that I can always do better with my craftsmanship.
Mike Brasher: I think it just occurred to me, so Katie asked me to be on this episode with y'all. Probably the only reason you wanted me on here so you could tell that story about that decoy that I have that rattles inside. We've referenced it now multiple times, it's been funny. I'm slow on the uptake.
Katie Burke: It was not why I asked you, but it did occur to me at some point that I got to tell that story.
Mike Brasher: You wouldn't mention that. That's pretty cool. To that point, what's the oddest thing that you've ever found inside a decoy, whether it be placed there kind of for whatever purpose or an object that, I don't know, has been used in repair or something else that got impaled in it for whatever other reason?
Colin McNair: I tried to put a few of those highlights in here. You'll see shot rolling around. You'll see putty that's flaked off from that joint rattling around sometimes. So usually it's not so much what's in the cavity, but, oh, that's how they put this together. So it's learning about the construction techniques. like that English decoy where there's the ghost hole in the bottom and then there's that little protrusion for the tip of the screw to catch for that last time that he put it together. So this really just goes back to those little quirks of the maker and I think that's probably the most interesting stuff that I've found. But you know I've got nine boxes of decoys out here that I've got to unpack next week, and the x-rays will start flowing after then. And let's see, I'd say the majority of those birds are all going to be hollow, so we'll see what shows up. I'll let you know.
Katie Burke: One day they'll be treasure, Mike.
Mike Brasher: There will be.
Katie Burke: All right, Colin, is there anything that you want to talk about before we kind of end the podcast that you haven't, that we haven't hit on yet?
Colin McNair: Gosh, I feel like in the world of x-rays, we covered it all pretty well. Thanks for the opportunity to do that and thanks for all your great questions. Yeah, I think just to Anytime I go down the x-ray rabbit hole, I like to back up and talk about x-rays are just, again, one thing, and decoy collecting we look at as the other duck season. It's something that obviously right now it's duck season, but you can do it year-round. So, we're doing this one way or another around the country all year. We've got a couple of shows coming up. We'll be at the Houston Waterfowl Festival. Hopefully, I'll see you there. We'll be down in Charleston, South Carolina for the Southeastern Wildlife Expo. Maybe I'll see you there as well. Did I say that right? We'll be in Charleston, South Carolina for the Southeastern Wildlife Expo. And we do a major preview down there where people can come see 100 plus birds coming up in our next auction. So yeah, I would encourage people to check us out online, come by our gallery here in Massachusetts or catch us at one of the shows.
Katie Burke: Thanks, Colin. Mike, do you have any questions for Colin before we go?
Mike Brasher: You know, you give me long enough and I'll come up with a question. I want to see if you can give me a quick answer to this. We talked about x-rays. Are there any other kind of scanning technologies that are used for any of this, whether it's ultrasound or anything else? Just kind of real quick.
Colin McNair: That's a really good question and one we've given some real thought to. Right now we use ultraviolet light for the most superficial view of things. You go in a dark room, turn on a UV light, and you'll be able to see differences in paint. that can be very, very telling and having a better understanding. We use a lot of magnification, a lot of white light. There are some other technologies that are being applied to art, but they're not very available. I've looked into them. I'm curious about them. Fortunately, right now, we're able to do a job of answering the questions about these objects that we're comfortable with, with the tools available. X-rays were really kind of the missing leg to this stool for a long time. To answer your question, there are other technologies, but we haven't really been able to find access to them. They're happening at extremely high levels in universities and some major museums, but haven't made its way down to us yet.
Mike Brasher: Well, I yield back any of my remaining time. Katie, this has been really cool. I've appreciated the opportunity to listen and view and learn and ask a few questions along the way. So thanks to you both.
Katie Burke: Yeah. Well, thanks for coming and joining me. Yeah. Anytime. And thanks, Colin, for coming on the show again, number the fifth time. So thank you again.
Colin McNair: My pleasure. Anytime. We've got lots of other subjects we can cover in the wide world of decoys.
Katie Burke: All right, thanks, Colin, for coming on. Thanks, Mike, for joining me. Thanks, Chris, our producer, and thank you, our listeners, for joining Wetlands and Waterfowl Conservation.