They finally found them under little Bruce’s bed. He figured if they didn’t have decoys they couldn’t go without him.
His own boys, Curtis, Brad
and Tyler, joined their dad and grandfather when they were children. The boys, now in their early 30s, still go out with their dad every Thanksgiving. (Red, Bruce’s dad, went with them up until about five years ago.) They have dinner and then go hunting. Girlfriends of the younger generation had to learn, no doubt as the two generations of women before them, that it’s part of the package of being in love with a Munro man. When Bruce was a little boy, his
grandfather and father used to carve decoys in the back yard with a small broadhead axe and a wood-rasp file, and he never forgot it. It wasn’t until 1985 when he and his dad “got serious” about carving. They had always been close, but the carving brought them even closer and remains to this day a particular bond between them. Eventually Bruce started taking
classes, and that’s where he met some of the best of the best – people, he says, who still teach and challenge him. It was George MacMillan
of Black Duck Studio in Perth, Ont. who got Bruce started in the international Ward World Competitions in Ocean City, Maryland. This year alone Bruce won awards in Best-in-Species (Common Merganser, Brant, Shoveler) and Best-in-Category (Marsh Ducks, Upland Game Birds). Despite his extraordinary skill
and success, he doesn’t sell the birds. He does it only for the love of the craft and for the decoys he uses in hunting. He also donates them to Ducks Unlimited. Bruce uses basswood for his
ducks. It’s easily obtainable. He harvests the wood on his own property. The decoys are an exercise in physics as well as art. They have to be self-righting. They have to bob in the water just like real ducks do. When their shape emerges from a block of wood, it’s hollowed out, then temporarily sealed. The decoy
gets the water treatment (in rough water) to see how balanced it is and how it moves. Bruce makes adjustments with lead. Once it behaves correctly in the
water, he paints it. This is where the rest of the art comes in. Bruce uses Tremclad paint rather than artists’ tubes (although they come in handy now and again). He mixes the colours to come up with the right hue − Burnt Umber, for instance. His painting is so astonishingly
beautiful that you ask him if he paints on canvas. He laughs. Are you kidding? He wouldn’t know what to do with a one dimensional surface. And anyway he insists he can’t draw. “If you can draw a straight line,
you’re not a carver,” he says. There are all sorts of things to
know about ducks, Bruce explains. Diving ducks always ride low in the back. Puddle ducks always ride high in the rear, low in the front. And the ducks know. They always
know. Bruce says you can enter all the competitions in the world. “But the ducks,” he says, “are the
best judges of all.”
www.bounder.ca
BOUNDER MAGAZINE 55
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