If it looks like a duck...

The hunter pulls a wooden decoy out of his sack -- a loon, black with white spots -- and he places it in the lake, shoving it gently toward deeper waters. He gives a few blows on the duck call and hides in the bushes with his rifle to wait for the flock of loons to arrive.

The decoys made in Taiwan's Sanyi Duck Treasure Shop (三義一ㄚ箱寶) these days will probably never lure ducks, but that's how they got started.

Hunting ducks commercially was banned in the US in 1918, but loyal followers of the sport and those enchanted by its rustic charm have kept up the demand for hand-crafted duck decoys. Native Americans used floating duck decoys made of straw before the arrival of white Europeans, sometimes covering them with duck skins. The mid-1800s saw an explosion of hand-carved wood decoys, and the combination of pragmatism and beautiful craftsmanship have made the items a favorite among folk-art collectors. In the 1970s, North American entrepreneurs introduced the lucrative art of wooden-decoy making to Sanyi (三義).

The predominantly Hakka Sanyi Township in Miaoli (苗栗) is surrounded by dense trees abundant in camphor. Once the world's top supplier of camphor oil, Sanyi turned to the woodcarving industry when demand for the pungent ointment took a nosedive. In 1963, three brothers surnamed Tang (湯) built the Shuang Feng (雙峰) woodcarving factory (now known as Sany Duck Treasure Shop) where they mainly produced wooden Buddha statues for export to Japan.

In 1973 the factory received an order from Dallas, in the US, for 30 wooden duck decoys. The ducks were to be carved and painted to look like common loons. Soon, orders for the ducks began to pour in from the US and Canada. However, the biggest business was yet to come. In the early 1980s cosmetics and collectibles company Avon caught on to the duck-decoy craze and ordered 80,000 green-winged teals, wood ducks, mallards and canvasbacks for sale as collectibles. Shuang Feng began to net about NT$60 million per year.

"It took us a full year just to produce the first models for the order," said Lee Mao (李屘), who runs the place today with her husband, one of the younger Tang brothers. "Avon kept rejecting the samples, saying they weren't good enough," she said.

The solid wooden figures had to resemble real ducks, but they also had to resemble real decoys -- the simple, rustic kind that antique-lovers were dying to get their hands on.

A Shuang Feng duck could easily be identified on Antiques Roadshow as a "cheap Taiwanese imitation" while a duck decoy carved by master craftsmen A. Elmer Crowell (1862-1951) or Gus Wilson (1864-1950) could sell for hundreds of thousands of US dollars at auction. However, looking at some examples on display in the Duck Treasure Shop it's easy to see how an interior designer with a rustic bent would have been happy to find such good, cheap imitations. The form is convincing, while the lack of intense detail and the relative dullness of color evoke the pragmatism of hunting. Nowadays the Avon ducks sell on ebay for US$10 to US$15.

Following the Avon orders, Shuang Feng began producing all sorts of wooden, duck-shaped items: telephone cases, match holders and more. The number of crafts-people working in the factory hovered around 80.

But, with the arrival of the year 2000, the orders started going to cheaper factories in Southeast Asia and China. With the high cost of labor and importing wood from North America, Shuang Feng could no longer compete and was moving towards bankruptcy.