This paper closely examines the marketing materials, instructional booklets, and ear-training records, as well as duck-calling horns themselves, of the modern U.S. duck-call industry. The combination of new materials (plastic) with new wetlands management practices fueled an expansion of duck-calling and duck-hunting practices in the Mississippi Flyway, a major waterfowl migration corridor that extends from the headwaters of the the upper Midwest then down the river to the Gulf of Mexico. Hunters obscured their visual presence by blending into the environment with special clothing and small structures called blinds. They disguised their auditory presence by mimicking the birds themselves, calling to them with small hand instruments (duck calls). The goal was something akin to communication, to gain the birds’ trust and draw them in close enough to shoot them. The contours of this world, from the technology of the calls, to the restoration ecology informing the wetlands management, to the animal ethology of calling techniques, bore the trappings of modern science. I am interested in the limits of modern science and technology for the hunter crouched in a duck blind. That is, I ask how the use of science’s products and practices to don the voice and grammar of one’s quarry informed their understanding of their environment as a multi-species sound commons as well as the ethics of blowing it out of the sky.

Numerous species of birds incorporate the songs and calls of other species into their songs. In North American, one of the best-known mimics is the Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottus). Alexander Wilson first noted the Mockingbird’s persistent mimetic song in 1828, and ornithologists ever since have worked to explain the varied songs. Various naturalists counted the number of songs that mockingbirds incorporate into their vocalizations from a low of 45 to a high of 203! Scientists developed two hypotheses to interpret songs in several ways. The first hypothesis is competition among males (intersexual function). A host of studies have produced evidence for and against this hypothesis. Another widely held view is interspecies competition provides another working hypothesis. However, this hypothesis has been repeatedly challenged. In considering the wide diversity of songs that Northern Mockingbirds incorporate into their breeding songs, scientists have worked to avoid the risks of telling “Just-so Stories,” while providing a richer understanding of this fascinating species.

In Mozart’s beloved singspiel The Magic Flute (1791), the bird-man character Papageno enters the stage boasting of his birding-catching prowess (“I know how to set traps/And I know how to whistle”) Indeed, in many productions, Papageno enters actively searches for his avian prey, catching or not catching birds with varying degrees of competence while he sings and plays his pipes. We might say that the pipes Papageno plays at various times throughout The Magic Flute function as his Lockpfeife: a bird call or lure. Despite the burgeoning scholarship in both music studies and animal studies on birds and bird song, devices used to lure birds have received little attention. These ephemeral objects ranged from informal tools improvised on the spot from bark and leaves to formally designed whistles. And, as I explore in this talk, it was precisely the late eighteenth century that witnessed a marked increase in the publication of guides to birding. These accounts of fowling practices first help us understand how Mozart’s singspiel reflects a broader, burgeoning interest in specifically local birding. But beyond their operatic resonances, these guides help us reconstruct a history of avian listening.