Roy Belcher: Art of the Silo

From his day job at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, to his Mid-Atlantic accent straddling the Mason-Dixon line and stretching back to Shakespeare, Roy Belcher is pure Maryland. The Chestertown resident, owner of Mill Pond Outfitters, shares the passion of many in the region for the birds that flock to the Eastern Shore each winter, pushed south by an ice line retreating ever northward. However, it is ironically his dedication to preserving an historic method of attracting them that sets him apart from a crowded field. 

Standing in Belcher’s workshop, a two-car garage attached to a house like any other in his neighborhood, it would be easy to lose sight of the fact that it is the single point from which a legacy reaching back one-hundred years will move forward, if it does. For it is only there that a fragile throughline of Eastern Flyway history is kept uncut. Belcher is the last in a century-old line of artisans making and hunting over silhouette goose decoys. His flat, hand painted, representations of Branta Canadensis, the Canada goose, are a practical art form, the admiration of which is best expressed by using them to attract undulating, V-shaped waves of geese into their midst and thus the hunter’s guns.

Standing amongst examples of his predecessor’s collective legacy, gesturing at a rack of silhouettes, Belcher speaks of each in turn. “We have Captain Jesse Urie from Rock Hall. He made over 100,000 of these silhouettes. Every rig on the Eastern Shore had a Urie silhouette in it. I've made over 30,000, and I patterned some of my earlier ones from his, just because I love the colors and his feather detail. Then you have Charlie Bryan, a lot of the guys in the Middle River area used his silhouettes. Guys on the shore used them. It’s a really nice-looking silhouette. And then you have the Ward Brothers, Lem and Steve. I don't know how many they made, but the Ward Brothers are known as the ones to really start the tradition of silhouette decoy making here on the shore.”

Belcher says, “Silhouettes are going to kill your geese before the full bodies because of the black spot [they create] in the field. The geese are attracted to that black spot, which they can see from afar. The closer they get, the four colors, the black, brown, khaki, and white, will all come together and really draw their attention. This is a two-dimensional decoy and when you set silhouettes, as a bird flies around them, they appear to be moving, even though they're not, because the shadow and the profile of the decoy changes as the bird is flying around it.”

To make a silhouette, Roy first cuts the shape of the goose he intends to replicate, whether flocking, feeding, or standing sentry in defense of the flock. He relies on “a Masonite [board], and it's got an oil-injected resin in it to make it water resistant.” He paints base colors on a series of flats using a stencil, then bathed in sparks like Vulcan at his forge, turns to grinding points for the metal stakes with which hunters will plant his decoys in fields from North Carolina to Canada and as far out as North Dakota. As a final touch, he hand paints the details of each silhouette, using a brush to create the feathers and eyes that will sell the story to overflying flocks.

I fail on my first few attempts to stab a decoy’s stake into the ground. Looking at Roy in confusion, I ask for guidance on how to best do what he’s already done one hundred times this morning. He tells me that my best chances of finding soft earth lay under snow, the exact opposite of what I assumed. As the decoy spread expands, the wind scours my face, and my writerly instincts turn me inward to measure what it means to keep a dying art, designed for a dead season, alive. One cannot be a fatalist or pessimist, nor can one withhold the secrets of the craft from others. Belcher’s decoys are a reflection of his dedication to his art and his love for the waterfowling culture and traditions of the Eastern Shore. But more than that, like all hunting, they are an expression of the hope that if one persists there will be that one transcendent moment when time and space and preparation come together and allow us to find our place in the wild.

Belcher snaps me from my reverie, reviewing my installation of identical feeder silhouettes. “See this is not good. You can’t have all the same silhouettes in one place. Set them at forty-five and ninety degrees, offset to one another with one sentry to every two feeders or so.” His is a practical art, meant to produce tangible results. 

Belcher is proud to call Kent County, Maryland “The Goose Capital of the World” and he lives of the place as much as in the place. He’s a living repository of Eastern Shore “gunning” history who says of his place within it, ““When I was younger, I went over to a friend of mine's grandfather's house, and he was making decoys in his barn. I had the opportunity to hunt over a rig of his silhouettes when I was probably ten or eleven years old. That is when I fell in love with the silhouette. To see something that was handmade, gunned over, and the success that we had over them? It's just a passion I fell in love with. I harvested my first goose in 1979 and from that day on, it's all I've really thought about.”

Belcher must ask himself the same kind of questions faced by anyone hoping to pass on a consuming passion, not least, “Who will pick up the torch I accepted from Jessie Urie, Charlie Bryan, and the Ward Brothers?” He says the truth is, “I just...I don't know. Here on Maryland's Eastern Shore, as far as I know, I am the only one that still makes these silhouettes the way they have been for decades. And I'm doing everything I can to keep it going.” It’s not just the absence of other craftsmen. Even the availability of acceptable raw materials threatens the heritage Belcher is working to keep alive. The northern Michigan based supplier of the board from which he cuts silhouettes closed in February 2024. Belcher says, “There is another hard-tempered board out there, but it's not oil-injected resin. I had a company send me a sample piece. Within two hours, the edges swelled up after I submerged it in water. Now, can I apply more layers of paint to protect the edges? Maybe. I won't know until I actually make a dozen silhouettes and set them out in the yard and get some weather on them.” He may not yet have all the answers he seeks, but he is not merely admiring the problem, and listening to him offers confidence he will find a solution. It's an attitude that stretches beyond the confines of his garage workshop, one infusing the entirety of the waterfowl community.

Just as Belcher’s passion keeps the silhouette tradition alive despite challenges, he appreciates the efforts of conservation organization Ducks Unlimited to preserve and enhance waterfowl habitat on the Eastern Shore and beyond. “Without the conservation of wetlands, the generations behind me and the generations behind my grandchildren, their children, it's going to be gone. I mean, without DU having the impact that they do on wetlands, we're not going to have it. I want to see my children and grandchildren grow up to at least be able to enjoy what I did. And without DU, there's no hope at all.”

In the blind, amidst our guide Mike Kent’s 242 acres of harvest-stubbled corn fields streaked with week-old snow and stippled by countless webfoot prints, seven of us wait below ground, hidden from the sky by cedar boughs and brush grass laid across a wooden frame. Standing with my head just above the surface and squinting against the sun, Belcher’s silhouettes almost seem to feed and shift around us, so real is the impression given by their careful placement. Making the spread come further alive, Belcher calls passing geese with the skill one might expect of a man invited to serve as a judge for both the 2024 World Live Goose Championship and the 2024 World Live Two Man Goose Championship calling contests during Easton, Maryland’s iconic Waterfowl Festival. 

Mike Kent watches Belcher, who competed in the contests he now judges from 1990 – 1995, with growing appreciation as sinuous lines of geese, clearly intending for one of Kent’s nearby ponds, turn toward us and the silhouettes they believe to be issuing a siren song of honks, clucks, and moans. Something about the light of day revealing itself and the sight of geese piling into the spread, seemingly meaning to land upon our heads, makes for moments so special I wish I could stop time. I can’t, so mentally re-locating myself within it, thinking back to two centuries of goose hunts in the same fields, the legacy represented by Belcher’s combined mastery of decoys and calls which would yield a limit of geese within two hours, and the work of organizations like Ducks Unlimited to ensure the stability of the foundation upon which all of it stands, is the best I can do. For now, it’s more than enough.