RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO

RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO
RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO
RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO
RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO
RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO
RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO
RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO
RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO
RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO
RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO
RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO
RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO

RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO

EXTRAORDINARY ORIGINAL CONDITION & STRUCTURALLY AMAZING!! Exquisite Scratch Painting to the Feathers and Outstanding Individual Feather Detail Graduating in Size That Follow the Body Contour!! The Paint Detail is Second to None and Please Zoom into the Carving Detail!!

RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO. EXTRAORDINARY ORIGINAL CONDITION & STRUCTURALLY AMAZING! Exquisite Scratch Painting to the Feathers and Outstanding Individual Feather Detail Graduating in Size That Follow the Body Contour!

The Paint Detail is Second to None!! Please use the Zoom Feature to see the Carving & Paint Detail! Photos of other awesome Davey Decoys and other Decoys Made By his Uncles Before Him!

Great Example of this "Ontario, Canada" Master Carver's Pioneering Decoy Form & Style! DRAKE BLUE-WINGED TEAL, Cedar Wood Duck Decoy.

AWESOME ORIGINAL COMBED PAINT, FEATHER DETAIL & FINE, DETAIL CARVING! SUPERB PAINT JOB from The Man that is Considered "THE GOLD STANDARD" of ONTARIO DECOY PAINTING! EXAMPLE OF HIS AWESOME CHARACTER. In a 1957 interview Davey Nichol said that he whittled decoy heads at night on the kitchen table.

He quipped, I make an awful mess, but I don't charge Mrs. Nichol for the shavings if she sweeps them up for me. Made With a Tiny, Brass Clock Gears! Also His Finest & Typical Mid-Career Form with its Life-Sized, Fantastic Paint Job & Raised Wing Primaries & Wing Tip Feathers!! Awesome Fully Carved in Tail Individual Feathers!

PAINTED ON THE BOTTOM BY DAVEY. "MALE BLUE WING TEAL"; D. This is a Perfectly Symmetrically Carved & Painted Vintage Davey Nichol Pair of Decoys!! This DRAKE and the Awesome HEN Rig-Mate both Measure 12-1/4" long x 4-1/4" wide x 5 tall and Weighs 14-oz. (This is Just An Awesome pair of Decoys That Were Carved at the Same Time That Have the SAME Dimensions and EVEN the WEIGHT). THAT IS EXTREMELY RARE in and of ITSELF! (Truly a Great pair to Own). I Removed the Old Original Glued On Felt from the Bottom so You Can see all the Awesome Hand painting by Davey!!!

This beautifully-formed 65+ year old solid cedar Drake Blue. Winged Teal wood duck decoy was carved and painted by D. Smiths Falls is located in Eastern Ontario and is 40 miles SSW of Ottawa and 30 miles north of the St. The Rideau Canal waterway passes through Smiths Falls with four separate locks in three locations. It is also known as the Rideau Waterway and it connects the city of Ottawa on the Ottawa River, to the city of Kingston, Ontario on Lake Ontario.

DAVEY NICHOL in his LATER YEARS! The Nichols family of Smiths Falls, Ontario, is certainly one of the most important chapters in Canadian decoy carving history and began with brothers David K.

This eventually would grow into a family business and the passion and focus was passed onto their nephew David "Davey" W. NICHOL at their CAMP ON SAND ISLAND on RIDEAU LAKE with a LIMIT OF DUCKS. (They were lifelong bachelors and as close as two brothers could be). Davey's UNCLES, David K. And brother Addie were lifelong bachelors and lived, hunted and carved together. They carved with the most basic of tools including chisels and knives and their vise was simply their laps.

And Addie's decoys gave their birds texture with long feathered lines and used various tools to carve tiny detail to break up the smoothly sanded surface of the wings, tails and heads. The brother's carved their heads in a variety of positions with a great many having a lower, contented posture and they made mostly bluebills, some goldeneyes and roughly two dozen black ducks. Was a boat builder by trade which certainly transferred nicely to the decoys that he made as their quality and attention to detail is on par with the best of decoys ever produced in Ontario.

At the time that the two brothers were gunning the Rideau River system, it was a magnet for both local and migrating waterfowl and the inseparable brothers were constantly together hunting and fishing the rich Rideau sportsman's paradise. Addie worked his entire life at the Frost and Wood Implement shop, and unfortunately died at the age of 65, the day after he retired. He had saved up several thousand dollars and had an island and cottage on the river but was never able to enjoy it in retirement. Unfortunately, his brother and lifelong companion David K.

71 at the time, took his passing very badly and lost much of his desire to gun for ducks. After Addie's death he was known to have only hunted rabbits and on at least one occasion he hunted ducks with nephew Davey at the age of 84 and shot his limit of 12 ducks. NICHOL was an ACCOMPLISHED BOAT BUILDER, THIS WAS INTEGRAL IN HIS DECOY DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION. (He Was Very Close to His Brother Adam "Addie" & Basically Quit Duck Hunting When brother Adam Passed Away in 1928). The man that carved this awesome decoy, Davey W.

Nichol, experienced his first duck hunt with his two uncles at the age of 12. He was naturally drawn to the sport as he was very frequently a guest in their homes and under their "wings" he began to make his own decoys and develop his skills as an avid hunter and fisherman. This past time of carving decoys would be no passing fancy and the young Davey would go on to carve decoys in some capacity and frequency for seven decades. He often said that if he had known that there would be such a demand for his decoys that he would have retired much earlier. On the front of his Lombardy Road shop hung a sign that said "Duck Decor" and was known just as much for his wonderful carvings as it was for his advice and his anecdotes.

He would tell stories about his small cottage on the Rideau River and located on the Isle of Man that he bought when he was 18 and how it took an arduous 14 miles of rowing to get there. Another of his stories was how a kingfisher had turned a routine dive after a minnow into a fatal one, when it crashed bill-first into a submerged long and impaled itself. Before Nichol would converse with visitors and buyers about his decoys, he would first go off on a tangent and relay the thoughts of a sportsman and taxidermist as they pertain to working decoys.

It was his contention that the younger the bird, the easier it was to deceive them. He explained that he painted his goldeneyes in juvenile or immature plumage to mimic birds that are embarking on their first fall migration.

Davey's carving was also influenced by the woodland region where he lived (between Ottawa and Kingston) and carved species of decoys that were uncommon to most of the habitat in the region. It included vibrantly colored wood ducks and rigs of hooded mergansers.

Davey's work certainly included the original techniques that his uncles had pioneered years earlier along with the locally evolved wing form and produced some of Ontario's most prized decoys. His form never deviated to a decoy posed "in action" and his solid-bodied decoys almost all portray a resting bird with a straight facing head. He did not deviate the attitude of his decoys to include sleepers, feeders, preeners or swimmers and his paint was confusingly both ornate and simplistic at the same time. Nichol's influence on other carvers is of legendary proportions and locally directly affected the Smiths Falls decoys of Reg Bloom, William "Buck" Crawford and his cousin Bob May, among a plethora of others.

Others influenced, and from a younger generation, were his own son Lloyd as well as Smith Fall's own Bob Kerr and John Garton. As far as painting is concerned, he not only influenced others but he was actively sought after to complete the works of many other fine carvers and painted decoys for the great Stan Woodman of Wolfe's Island, Guy Blomeley and Bob Dixon among many others.

In addition to carving, Davey's son Lloyd was an expert taxidermist, and until 1957, he had worked in tandem with his father's carving business and then branched out and opened a sports store closer to home. As a matter of fact, Lloyd would be the one that picked up decoys that Stanley Woodman needed to have painted and it was his father Davey that would take over from there to complete the job. Davey Nichol in part, attributed the realism of his decoys to his lifelong passion in studying wildlife and often related that his family's hunting heritage can be traced back to their Scottish ancestors.

Davey Nichol also professed that in addition to his own knowledge of waterfowl, he often used reference books, taxidermed birds and wing specimens to ensure accuracy in his carvings. A mere three years after retirement, in 1957, Davey said that he was capable of carving 48 different models of 20 different species and he was beginning to give more emphasis to carving "non-working" decoys and that several had won competitive awards. He was proud of this fact because they were actual his working decoys and he now was wondering what type of status one of his "show" decoys might achieve. Davey was also uncompromising in the quality of his work and contended that the degree of detail is essential on a decoy for certain species.

Davey was certainly on par with most knowledgeable hunters as far as giving black ducks the credit that they deserve as being of the wariest of wild ducks. And for this reason he insisted upon giving his black ducks as much realism as possible as he believed that they would not decoy to anything other than his most realistic carving and painting effort.

It was also around this time in the early to mid-1950's that the wonderful detail in his decoys did not go unnoticed as he was seeing his decoys more frequently becoming instant collectors items or even converted into lamps or other converted decor items like flower pots. Davey Nichols also always believed that a well-seasoned piece of cedar stock was important for a long-lasting decoy and when possible he carved with cedar timber and logs that were "rescued" from long-standing farm outbuildings and barns. He logically concluded that although the outside wood was weathered and obviously not suitable for carving, the interior barn wood was sound, light and buoyant and made a wonderful carving stock. In a 1957 interview, Davey Nichol said that he carved the bodies of his decoys while standing up in his workshop and that he whittled the heads at night on the kitchen table. He also estimated at the time that he could make 2 decoys a day and that a matte finish was essential as to not spook decoying birds.

He added that the hardest decoy for him to carve and paint was the extinct Labrador duck. The interviewer noticed that Davey was never far away from nature and that the location of his workbench may have had an intentional distraction from overworking. Right outside of the window in front of his main workbench, were strips of suet nailed to nearby trees where he would watch the blue jays, nuthatches, brown creepers and other birds that came for a free meal. Davey Nichol was also very proud of the fact that his apples didn't "fall too far from the tree" as both of his sons, Lloyd and Harold would develop into crack shots and avid outdoorsmen.

In addition to his wife Anna Belle (nee Hewitt), Davey Nichol was father to two daughters Mary and Margaret. While Mary had left Canada to become a Presbyterian missionary in India in the late 1950's, his daughter Margaret stayed in Smith Falls to become Mrs. In his workshop with the "Duck Decor" sign hanging outside, Nichol told stories and gave advice as he carved. Rigs of Hooded and American mergansers, black ducks, scaup, redheads, whistlers, wood ducks and a few over-sized canvasbacks came out of his workshop. He set out to carve all the species of waterfowl in the world.

By the time he quit carving in 1975, Davey W. Nichol had carved at least three thousand decoys and these decoys represented all the North American species of ducks, geese and brant and more than two dozen foreign species including the New England shoveler, the Auckland's merganser and the Baikal teal. VINTAGE PAIR OF DAVEY NICHOL WOOD DUCKS!

One thing is for sure about David W. The tutelage of his 2 uncles, he became one of Ontario's most admired and copied decoy carvers in history. Combining what his uncles had taught him with local methods, Nichol produced lightweight decoys with small flat bodies and flat bottoms without keels or heavy weights.

He stamped, painted, combed, scratch-painted or carved feathers down the back and sometimes combined the methods for effect. The painting patterns Nichol created were simple, but he did experiment on occasion with blended colors or metallic powder to represent the feathers' iridescence, which this decoy has on the head and speculum. It combines all of the unique and painstaking detail that he was noted for including the gorgeous, multi-sized and graduating feather combing to the back feathers, wing feathers and daintily combed in and painted speculums. The raised wings were carved with perfect symmetry and the detail to the primaries, secondaries and covert feathers is flawless.

The beautiful and intricate body feathers start at the neck and change direction with the contour of the body and go all of the way back to a finely carved in fluted tail. The bill on this beautiful decoy may be its finest and most Nichol-like feature with its perfect form that is detailed with lightly carved in upper and lower mandibles that run the entire length of the bill and nail-definition that is uniquely carved in from the bottom. The small nostrils were done with absolute precision and flawlessly carved and detailed. And you certainly can't overlook one of Davey's trademarks as this decoy exhibits perfectly his serrated-like "coggling" on the lower mandibles and on the face where it meets the wonderfully carved in head/bill separation.

The head has very fine feather painting that starts at the bill and runs uninterrupted all of the way to the base of the neck and create a perfect feather "grain". Much like anything Davey did, the head was mounted to the carved neck seat with uncompromised precision.

The neck was carved perfectly so that it flows precisely into the body so that when it was attached, it "accepted" it so perfectly there is no interruption to the flow and hard to see. As he did with all of his excellent hunting blocks, the head on this decoy was attached to the body with a wood screw that was inserted into a recessed hole in the bottom and the hole was then covered with a pounded in dowel end to protect the joint from water seepage. The taxidermist grade medium brown glass eyes were also carved in and located with uncompromising precision and truly jump off the surface as if they are looking at you. Finally, the paint job on this old decoy is perfect in every respect and the combed in feathers on this decoy are amazing as they turn and twist with the contoured body just as a wild duck in nature looks.

This decoy was certainly made old school as his working birds from this era and beyond. Both Very Rare Decoys Measure. 12-1/4" long x 4-1/4" wide x 5 tall and Weighs 14-oz. THAT IS FANTASTIC & Makes for a PERFECT PAIR!! That Makes for an Awesome pair of Very Unique Gunning Decoys that are the Same Size and Weight and From the Same Company and Clearly Made at the Same Time!!

That Makes for a Superb pair that Were Carved Together and Have Been Together Since!! They Were Made and Clearly have been in the Protection of Climate and Light-Controlled Collections Ever Since! This bird is in extraordinary, absolutely Mint original condition and structurally it is also mint like the day it left his workbench. This bird is as solid as the day it was made and as you can see by the bottom photo, the two 1/8 in diameter screw holes that were used to hold the decoy when it was carved are still intact with the filler he used to plug them.

As you can also see by the bottom photo, Davey Nichol did not sand the underside of the tail or the bills on his vintage decoys and this decoy exhibits that trait perfectly. There are no chips, dents, marks, skuffs, etc.

On this decoy and it has no edge wear or rubbing anywhere, which really is a testament to the outstanding condition of this decoy. These must have been great rig birds to hunt over as ducks must have been fooled by its realism from a distance and then were comfortable "holding" right next to it as its realism is astounding. In the photo section are photos of the bottom from the day I bought them and after I removed the original felt to expose the full expertise of his hand painted signature. You could reglue the felt on the bottom but as a collector I surely wouldn't suggest it. At the Beginning of this Listing the Photos are as Follows.

FOLLOWED by 5 PHOTOS of this DRAKE and the HEN RIG MATE TOGETHER!! The Next 16 PHOTOS are of this DRAKE ALONE SO YOU CAN SEE THE AWESOME FORM THIS CARVER FOLLOWED.

Description of the Photos Below. EXQUISITE DAVEY NICHOL BLACK DUCK! 2 Photos of a DAVEY NICHOL CANVASBACK c1943 (Superb Close-up of Super Unique Toggled Bill). BOB DIXON DECOYS with DAVEY NICHOL PAINT.

Great Carvers from the Area Sought Davey to Paint Their Awesome Carvings!! Nichol and Addie Nichol Decoys!

Addie Nichol Bluebill Hen and a Close-up of His Combing! WHERE HE FALLS TIME-WISE VERSUS OTHER AMERICAN & CANADIAN CARVERS. CHRONOLOGICAL CHART FOR "ADDIE NICHOL". Show off your items with Auctiva's Listing Templates. The item "RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO" is in sale since Thursday, November 17, 2016.

This item is in the category "Sporting Goods\Hunting\Vintage Hunting\Duck Decoys". The seller is "gjoldan" and is located in Romeo, Michigan. This item can be shipped worldwide.


RARE MINT SIGN 1949 DAVEY NICHOL Drake Teal Wood Duck Decoy SMITHS FALLS ONTARIO


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