You're pretty close, KY Jon. There's the tolling dog, the Nova Scotia Toller registered by the American Kennel Club, a sprightly ginger-coloured dog still used to entice birds on bays and harbours to come close to shore. Toller is the word used for decoys all along the Eastern Shore.
A few years back my buddy and I tolled a flock of a hundred bluebills with a Nova Scotia Toller, also called a Litttle River Duck Dog from the area where it was bred in Yarmouth County along the South Shore. Just toss a stick for the dog to fetch and the birds stream in like iron filings to a magnet.
I've also tolled bluebills almost dry ashore with my Lab, and the trick is to keep him retrieving after he sees them so close to shore. The Toller breed is on hard times now because so many wanted them for pets but some of the fierce gunners around Cape Sable Island still use them to toll and retrieve.
If tolling works here it works anywhere. Next time you see a raft of ducks out in a lake , harbour or bay conceal yourself behind a rock or in cattails and toss a stick along the shore for your dog to retrieve. Bluebills are attracted most easily---sometimes from a quarter-mile---but blacks fall for it, too.
I don't know how much truth there's to the story that the reddish-brown Tolling Dog was bred to look like a fox by oldtimers who saw Renard catching ducks along the shore. I think the reddish-brown colour has something to do with it, though, because I have tolled blacks by waving a handful of dead ferns above the bushes.
The trick is to be well concealed in the bushes and to have patience. Wave the stalk of ferns for only three or four seconds and bring it down. Wait for five minutes and do it again. I've brought up to six blacks within range after a half-hour or so on those bluebird days when little is flying.
Last edited by King Brown; 11/27/06 01:32 AM.
