Decoy spread on the bay

Just wondering what decoys you guys throw in your spread while hunting coastal waters.
I mainly use pintail, bluebills, BWT, ringnecks in my spreads.

pintails, redheads, ringers, wigeons, BWT, sometimes mallards just to add to the spread

Late season I throw redheads in with some hen mallards.

I use a lot of pintails to add a lot more white, and cause that is what I mostly see. I've also got redhead and shoveler decoys out. Teal are easy to carry a lot of so I always have a couple dozen of those. Also mallard hens.

When I walk in by myself on the bay, I use about a dozen pintail, ~4 redheads, ~4 shovelers, ~4 mallard hens, and about 20 teal. With more people I add more.

When I am hunting open water and want a BIG spread, I have old mallard decoys that I painted to look like bluebill, which work great as fillers and puts out a lot of diver colors out there.

Redheads are pretty easy to decoy, but they really tend to focus on the half dozen GHG redheads I've got out there.

Doesn't really matter in my opinion, but don't think I would use mallard drakes. I also like to seperate out in species groups, cause that's what I have noticed they tend to do naturally.

thats alot of decoys

When I used to hunt the bay system open marsh, we (dad & I) would put out 10-12 dozen sprig decoys and around 2-4 dozen teal. Now that was back in the early 60's-80's when duck numbers and sprig numbers were still high and were only 10 points on the 100 point bag limit. Those flights of sprigs coming out of the rice fields headed to West Galveston Bay and Bolivar Pennisula were as high as 50-200 birds that would circle and circle and again, until they committed to drop in on the spread. Amazing to watch and not jump up and shoot. Remember those days well and fond memories with my father.

Now, I don't focus on sprigs anymore since I have shot my share when I was younger and have seen the overall numbers decline over the past decades and with new species of decoys, especially balpates, it gives the spread a more realistic appearance. They didn't have those back then, mallards, sprigs and green & blue-winged teal decoys only.

Oh yeah, I would also use wigeon, but I don't have any of those.

I understand what you mean about the 200-500 birds working the dekes. I have been lucky enough to see that, it truly makes one appreciate the art of waterfowling. Those are the memories that are etched in you forever!