So I got some pintail decoys for Christmas. I'm very grateful, excited to use them, and looking forward to filling out my decoy spread a bit. But, I don't think I've seen a pintail while hunting, and my current small set of decoys includes teal and a few mallards.

My question - will adding pintails to teal and mallards look unnatural to real ducks? Would it be better to exchange the pintails for mallards, or something else to create a good general decoy set?

Thanks for the help!

no

Your overthinking it. Use the pintail decoys. We have several species in our spread. We do sometimes keep them segregated. though i am not sure it makes a difference.

This time of the year, try 2 pockets of 12 decoys each, real thight, with a pulsator in the middle of them. Works great

I like to use just a few pintail just because of the white on the decoys. I usually use mine to look like swimmers coming into the group.

I always use a 1/2 dozen or so pintails on the outskirts of my mallards. Has worked for me.

^^ What the last two guys said. For a duck that is primarily black and white they sure are racists. Unless I'm hunting the coast or somewhere else where I know they are stacked I put a few by themselves on the edge of the spread. Almost like a confidence decoy.

Ducks look like ducks to ducks

Confidence decoy. I think it’s good to mix a few in or throw a few on the outskirts of another group of dekes.

Do pintail swim with mallards?

Shot a widgeon, mallard and sprig out of the same group two weeks ago. All came in as one group.

Listen to the Beaver, It's what I've done for years works great.

Mallards will fly with anything it can mount up on at some point in time, got a Pintail/Mallard mix on the wall. The guy that mounted it said he had done several mixes of mallard and other ducks.

I never put out a spread of one type of duck.

I do the same

Thanks for the info guys. Hopefully I'll get out next week to try these new dekes out.

Now that we are on a thread like this, let’s say that you throw out a dozen mallard dekes but you only know how to use the pintail/teal whistle. Will the ducks see that there are only mallards and flare on the whistle?

Some of y’all give ducks way too much credit. There are no guest lists at the duck hole

Mixing is fine

Mixing is good