EBSCO Industries, Inc. :: News :: Pretty Boy and Pretty Girl Take Realism to Next Level for Carry-Lite Decoys


	home

Pretty Boy and Pretty Girl Take Realism to Next Level
for Carry-Lite Decoys

The new pretty boy and pretty girl turkey decoys are true testaments to Carry-Lite’s commitment to realism. These decoys were developed by the legendary turkey hunters Harold Knight and David Hale.

Since Carry-Lite began manufacturing decoys for hunting in 1924, the company has focused on realism – at Carry-Lite customers know they are getting the most durable, natural-looking decoys on the market.

This commitment to realism fueled the recent launch of a new line of ultra-realistic turkey decoys – the Pretty Boy and Pretty Girl. No other decoy looks as real – as lifelike – as the Pretty Boy. Used in conjunction with the Pretty Girl submissive hen decoy, gobblers will literally come running, ready for a fight.

Legendary turkey hunters Harold Knight and David Hale developed the Pretty Boy and Pretty Girl in association with Carry-Lite Decoys. During the 2005 turkey hunting season, Knight and Hale were a part of 16 kills with the decoy combo. “Obviously we didn’t make all those kills,” Harold said. “We took a lot of people along while we were testing it. We hunted 50-plus days this spring, a lot of times morning and evening, and that decoy made this the most memorable season I’ve ever had.”

It all started when a designer for Carry-Lite sent Knight and Hale a gobbler decoy the company had been producing. Always looking for an edge in the turkey woods, Knight and Hale began making adjustments to the decoy.

With more than 90 years of combined experience in the turkey woods, Knight and Hale know what will work and what won’t. “We’d always been told that a mature gobbler decoy will scare gobblers off,” Knight said, “but that’s just not right.

"The first thing David did was cut off the tail and put in one of his dried tails,” Knight said. “Then I starting working on the colors, putting bars on the wings and changing the head color. It’s that head color that makes the difference.” Knight says that it’s the amount of white on the head that seems to enrage gobblers. Mature tom turkeys’ heads can quickly change colors to blue and white during mating season and their heads reflect the level of excitement a gobbler is feeling. “In all of my 50 years of turkey hunting, I’ve never seen anything that makes a turkey want to fight more than the Pretty Boy,” Knight said. “They just run to it. They run in and just as they get close they stop and start strutting and purring, and often that brings in even more gobblers.” Then, the fight is on. Knight made many trips from his blind to set the decoy back on its stake after a gobbler knocked it down. The mature toms seem to focus in on the decoy’s eyes. “The gobblers would go right for its head,” he said. “They’d peck at its eyes or crown. They’d circle around it and if they touched it with their wings and moved the decoy a little, man they’d jump on it and start fighting. You could hear the spurs hitting the plastic and they’d still try to fight it.” Looking at the footage Knight and Hale shot while hunting with the Pretty Boy and Pretty Girl decoys this spring, it’s obvious that mature tom turkeys simply don’t like the Pretty Boy. It makes them mad by threatening their macho instincts. If you’ve had the opportunity to see the television commercial for the product, you’ve seen it, too. Mature birds jump over the Pretty Girl to get to the Pretty Boy, even though the Pretty Girl is down in a submissive pose ready for breeding. It’s that combination of a ready hen and an excited gobbler, combined with the decoy’s realism, that’s the key to bringing turkeys into range. “Those decoys look so real,” Knight said. “Anytime you put a decoy out, the more real it looks, the better. Absolutely nothing works 100 percent of the time, but I’ve never seen anything that works like the Pretty Boy and Pretty Girl.”

Return to News Archive
Return to main News page