Forget about buying that beautiful carving by Jim Robison of Hopedale, Ill., displayed at the Easton Waterfowl Festival last weekend. The life-size work features a Cooper’s hawk diving on a covey of quail, making a sharp (but legal for him) U-turn to snag a quail clearing the brush.

Well, it is not quite mid-air, as one lady discovered in figuring out the legerdemain that was holding the in-flight hawk over the rest of the sculpture. Each bird was supported by a separate small branch connected to a wing to make the birds appear as if alive — flying and defying gravity.

But forget about buying it. Even if you have a foyer as big as Tara in “Gone With The Wind,” or enough for the $100,000 price tag, you can’t get it. It‘s been sold.

Art, sculpture, paintings and a lot more were displayed at the 36th annual event (Next year: Nov. 9-11). It had everything from working-dog demos, goose-calling contests, ecology exhibits and fly-fishing lessons to the art, sculpture, carvers and decoys.

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During the three dozen years of its existence, the show has donated $4.6 million to waterfowl and wildlife conservation and habitat preservation.

Artwork was everywhere — sculptures in wood, clay and bronze filled one building. It was an explosion of creative beauty fostering appreciation for the skill of the artists and a love of the outdoors and field sports. The sheer volume of art almost overloaded the senses.

Many first-time visitors think that the sculptures are exquisite examples of taxidermy. Instead, they are a several-decades evolution of the working decoys of the past that went into a marshland puddle, instead of on a living room pedestal.

The average sculpture sold for the price of a Lexus or VW Jetta. The really reasonable works went for the price of a monthly mortgage or three.

“We’re getting a lot of tire-kicking,” Jett Brunet of Galliano, La., laconically said of interest in his work.

One of Brunet’s pieces featured a Cooper’s hawk on the ground, wings stretched defensively to protect its kill of a slumped, lifeless crow. You can have it for $11,000.

There were also paintings by the likes of Maass, Pleisner, Reneson, Kuhn, Swan and Abbott. Take home a Bob Kuhn original of a white-tailed buck for only $45,000. Yup, wildlife other than waterfowl is allowed.

Carved bird pins ($20) and cast wildlife belt buckles ($55) were available for those who wanted a souvenir but lacked a big bank account. And that Jim Robison sculpture of the hawk and quail? That was a good deal. For $100,000, you got the carved hawk and seven separate quail. Let’s see ... do the math, and that’s about $12,500 per bird. That’s about the price of other individual works shown. Not a bad deal at all.

C. Boyd Pfeiffer is an internationally known sportsman and award-winning writer on fishing, hunting, and the outdoors, and is currently working on his 25th book. He can be reached at cbpfeiffer@msn.com.