By JIM KEVLIN BURLINGTON FLATS

Early one fall morning – “cold, nasty, lousy weather,” just the way Jonathan Dowdall likes it – he is in a duck blind with Rigby, his yellow lab.
Suddenly, a goshawk swoops over his head from behind, hits one of the hunter’s decoys and swoops back into the air.
“Most of their game is picked out of the air,” and Dowdall can sense the goshawk’s puzzlement as it hangs above, waiting for the mallards below to scatter.
Those are moments that the master decoy maker – the last of a shrinking breed – savors most during those chilly dawns, sitting, waiting, along along a string beaver ponds across Route 51 from his multi-hued home three miles north of Burlington Flats.
“When you get older, shooting game doesn’t mean anything,” said Dowdall, who latest exhibit opens Saturday, Nov. 21, at the Cherry Branch Gallery, Cherry Valley.
But luring a smart, canny bird to his decoys – he only shoots male mallards, the most commmon duck: That attraction doesn’t fade.
“...and working with my dog,” he adds, stroking Rigby, who’s yapping so as not to be forgotten.
“He’s never missed a retrieve,” Dowdall says with evident satisfaction. “He’s never lost a bird.”
Raised in White Plains, young Jonathan fell in love with the outdoors when his mom, Harriet – an avid gardener and birder – took him the Natural History Museum in New York City.
Soon, he was fishing every chance he could with his buddies – Joe Giulino and Al DePaul; they’re still buddies 50 years later – in Westchester County’s many reservoirs, catching trout, bass, perch, sunfish, from a rowboat the boys built themselves.
By the time he was 14, Jonathan and his friends had joined the Southern New York Fish & Game Association and spent their weekends hunting for small game – rabbit, grouse – on property the club owned near Elizaville, Columbia County.
By the time he was 16, he was hunting big game in Delaware County, on a Hobart farm owned by a friend of his father Bill. In 1966 his parents bought a farm in northern Otsego County, where the towns of Burlington, Exeter and Plainfield connect.
He graduated from high school, worked in a gun factory – Maletown, Inc., in White Plains – for a year, then enlisted in the Army. It was 1967, and Jonathan soon found himself in Vietnam as helicopter door gunner.
He volunteered for two more tours of duty – “I wasn’t too pleased with spit and polish, and over there we had a lot of leeway.”
But also, it gave him a chance to shave six months off his three year obligation. He was wounded just before he returned stateside, after two years, nine months and 11 days in the military.
He entered Pace University, but with no particular plan. Among peace protesters and an anti-war public – a woman berated him when he disembarked at LAX – he didn’t feel at home.
“Up here, it was different,” he said. “People welcomed me, had me to their house for dinner, made me feel better.”
Soon he was out West, in Idaho, across a mountain from Yellowstone. But he missed all that the Northeast has to offer, and after three years was back at Maletown, doing retail sales and some custom work. In the mid-’70s, he joined a company in Hartsdale, learning locksmithing and installing “any type of door you can imagine,” from kitchen doors to those on aircrafts.
He and a partner broke out on their own, and the success of their venture eventually burned him out. His dad had died in 1978. His mother inherited an aunt’s home in Oneonta.
“I decided to see what I can do up here to make a living.”
His mother sold the farm, but he held on to acreage across the road. He built a serendipitous house and opened a gun shop and taxidermy. By the late 1990s, he had joined Toad Hall, the interior decorating and furniture making concern in Fly Creek.
When Toad Hall moved 4-5 years ago, necessity turned him to decoy making, and the first decoy he ever made – a mallard – was on the round oak table in Dowdall’s busy front room.
And so it began.
Since then, he has crafted hundreds of decoys, all of them working models: “I like to have my birds baptized,” he said. “Everyone of them is balanced.”
Some are tried out in the ponds across the way, all are at least tested in a bathtub.
“Nice paint” – and he does apply paint nicely – “isn’t to attract the ducks. It’s to make the owner happy.”