New Jake Strutter!

As I ensconce myself here in the study, wearing my Brixton Brood Snap Cap, tweed hunting jacket and breeks, I’m cogitating over how our new Jake Strutter came to be. OK, actually I’m in what’s basically the cluttered attic of our house, wearing sweat pants, a Pittsburgh Penguins baseball cap, and a T-shirt that says “Vegetables Are Not Food. Vegetables Are What Food Eats” (A Jeff Foxworthy Original).

Well anyway, yes: we made a Jake Strutter! But while we’re being transparent and honest, I want to say it’s probably not so important that it’s a “Jake”. We mostly just wanted to make a smaller version of our strutter. My God, we have so much fun with our original Strutter, but to this day we still have people who are deathly afraid to even try it. Like it’s just so massive and birds will run in terror at the very sight of it (Our original Strutter is still smaller than a real Tom (and life-sized turkeys have been fighting and challenging each other for millions of years (and life-sized turkeys are all life sized) (oh, and no turkey has ever seen himself to know what size he is) (OK, I’ll drop it now)). 

Sure, with this new Jake Strutter;  I guess we sold out a little- we parted slightly from our usual routine of only making super accurate turkey decoys as far as size goes. But think of it as giving you options, and we want everyone, even the faint-of-heart, to experience hunting over a DSD Strutter because it’s FUN. I rationalized that if we can make a goose decoy that’s slightly larger than life-size, then we can make a turkey that’s slightly smaller. 

One of the other decoy makers has a Strutter that’s very small. I mean it’s not ridiculously small. It doesn’t look like a strutting Cornish Game Hen or anything. It’s not like you’d mistake it for a cat toy, or try to attach it to the top of your truck’s antenna. You wouldn’t look for it in a cereal box, but it’s still very small. This guy is my longtime friend, and I ribbed him about it a little bit. He looked me straight in the eye and told me they made several sizes and tested them all, and the small one worked the best in field tests. Being a decoy maker myself, I was able to decipher and unscramble his hidden message: “ we wanted to go kind of small, but it started getting out of control. We were too far into it to turn back”. Believe me I know what it’s like to get way into a decoy project and realize you’re going to have to change species or something to save this. I mean, I’ve had family members ask me halfway through a sculpture “what’s it supposed to be?” And I’m like: “It’s abstract art- way over your head; you thought it was a decoy? Ha Ha Ha Ha silly.” Anyway, now he gets to give me shit about this, and I deserve it! But too, our Jake Strutter is still larger than their Tom Strutter, so the market is full of options.  

There are only two Strutters, though, that have our legendary, colors, reflectivity, and finish that  matches real feathers as close as humanly possible, thanks to our own in-house, DSD-owned spectrometer. The other good reasons to make a Jake version, are the portability, pack-ability, and convenience. Speaking of convenience, we added wings to the sculpture, and we add a Jake-sized beard, so all you have to add is a tail fan. The irony will be how many people will add a huge Tom tail fan after all this lol, but that’s OK! If you can get your hands on a Jake fan, it looks so much better. A Tom fan will work in the meantime. 

If you’ve always wanted to use a strutter, but have been timid about using one that is, God forbid, nearly the size of a real bird, but also want one that’s big enough to be recognizable as a specie of North American wild turkey, then the new DSD Jake Strutter is for you! Good hunting to all- remember, there are no bad decoys; buy whatever you can afford and have fun! Take a kid! Take notes on the expenses of the hunt and charge him back later in life. Oops, didn’t mean to say that out loud lol DS