From prehistoric times to the advent of modern wildlife management, decoys have been continually used for attracting game species into range for harvest and for photographic opportunities.  Until very recently, the decoys that had movement, giving them an appearance of life, were designed to move with nature's forces i.e., wind or water.  Electrically powered decoys have emerged in the last several years to propel duck decoys or move parts of deer decoys (tail and/or ears); however, in all of these cases, the electrical device to move the decoy was a permanent part of the decoy design.

It has been the goal of Advanced Decoy Research to find a power source that was independent of the decoy itself to give decoys realistic movements that simulated specific behavior of wildlife activities and could be used in the thousands of decoys already owned by hunters and photographers.  Early in 1995, we discovered the operation of a rotating counterweight within a plastic ball, powered by one AA battery.  The movement of the weight within the ball provides a random motion of the ball itself and when placed in strategic locations within different decoys has been successful in duplicating realistic movement of specific wildlife species.  Thousands of hours of field work using this power source within a wide variety of decoys have confirmed our early theories, namely that the movement of the decoy is critical to the believability of its "authenticity" in the minds of the instinctive wildlife species that may observe it.

We have named this mechanical ball the DECOY HEART™. It has proven to be amazingly successful in attracting targeted wildlife species when used in conjunction with lightweight decoys that have a means to accept the Heart within their anatomical design.  Depending upon the methodology used to place the Heart in the decoy, our research has proven that specific movement behavior can be duplicated, such as waterfowl in water and on dry land, panic movements of wounded deer or small animals  (rabbits, dogs, groundhog, etc.)  to attract predators such as foxes, coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, or bear.  These movements also include the feeding behavior of both sexes of wild turkey and the strutting movements of male turkeys which encompass both movements of quivering tail fans and the circular rotation of the bird as he struts.  No other method of decoy movement can remotely compare with the variability of movements we can produce in such a wide array of decoy species.  It is a truly unique system of decoy movement.

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