Beschreibung:

Bird decoy. Pink-footed goose, painted wooden bird decoy, label on base 'Made by Kenzie Thorpe for Sir Peter Scott used on the Wash c.1946', faded and weathered, 48.5cm high (including base), 87.5cm long Mackenzie or 'Kenzie' Thorpe (1908-1976), was born of a Romany father and a local south Lincolnshire girl. Always up to mischief, he started poaching whilst still at school. In effect this became his career, and he was certainly good at it. A natural side-effect was a growing expertise in wildfowl and their ways, which he used to earn money guiding wildfowlers across the marshes, and thus in 1928 he first met Peter Scott By the early 1930s Kenzie was assisting Scott in caring for his growing wildfowl collection, which Scott was developing at his home on the shores of the Wash, called the Lighthouse. Although the collection was broken up in 1939 when war broke out and Scott joined the Royal Navy, Kenzie remained in the area and became known as "the leading authority on the habits of ducks and geese along the Lincolnshire shores of the Wash". Sadly, when Peter Scott returned to Lincolnshire after the war, he discovered that the land around the Lighthouse had been drained to provide extra farmland. This meant that he could no longer keep a wildfowl collection there, and so in November 1946 he established a new collection at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire - the Severn Wildfowl Trust, later to become the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust. See Kenzie the Wild-Goose Man, by Colin Willock.