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Michael Ezban (MLA ’13) considers “Decoys, Dikes, and Lures” in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes

Michael Ezban’s (MLA ’13) article titled “Decoys, Dikes, and Lures: Polyfunctional Landscapes of Waterfowl Hunting” has been published in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, the peer-reviewed journal edited by John Dixon Hunt. The article recasts historic and contemporary waterfowl hunting grounds—decoys, wooded ponds for the harvest of waterfowl in Baroque England, and diked marshes, the constructed hunting wetlands of the Great Lakes—as multivalent landscapes with varied economies, constituencies, and ecologies. These waterfowl hunting grounds are more than sites of predation; they are spaces of violence and science, economy and leisure, community and solitude, and they can inform the design of novel public landscapes in the littoral zone.