Nov 14 2023 41 mins 1
There was one style of fowling that was practiced in America, named toling, which was as curious in performance as it was interesting. It probably came closer to the system of the duck decoy as practiced by the Dutch and English as any of the arts employed by the people of a foreign country for the capture of waterfowl. The American fashion of toling/tolling/toleing probably began about the Chesapeake Bay. Toling is an old 13th century word meaning to seduce or entice.
The Saturday Evening Post published in its March 1, 1913 issue that “We learned not only from our forebears but from the Indians, and the Indians learned from Nature. The fox is fond of ducks; and ducks, especially canvasbacks, have a fatal curiosity. So, to attract the ducks close enough for capture, the fox had a way of making a noise along the shoreline. The Indians copied this scheme. The white people went the Indians one better and trained their dogs to make the noise. So, if you should see a Chesapeake canine of red-dirt color, cutting up antics by rushing to and fro in the water and behaving like a lunatic generally, you would know that he was tolling the ducks.”
