Okay, so it wasn't merely a duck. It was a red-breasted merganser. And it wasn't exactly alive. It was a decoy carved more than 120 years ago by a fellow named Lothrop Holmes, a cemetery superintendent and waterfowl hunter from Massachusetts.

But that very decoy sold for $856,000 at Christie's not too long ago, and that made us sit up and take notice. That's nearing a million bucks for a carved wooden decoy, after all, prompting the question: Who buys such things for such money?

Well, as Gary Guyette of the Maryland auction house Guyette & Schmidt recently put it, "What we've got is a dozen or 15 new collectors who make hundreds of millions of dollars a year. If you have a $30,000 decoy and they like it, they might pay $130,000 for it."

Excuse us for a moment. There are a few thousand barns and sheds in New England and down in the Tidewater that we'd like to rummage through for a little while.

--BEN COSGROVE