Goose Hunting

	Canada Geese Photo by: USFWS

Goose hunting is generally a cold temperature proposition, requiring an inordinate amount of decoys and gear. The work begins long before dawn, with numb fingers and clouds of frost frozen into your face mask, but there isn’t much in the world of hunting that compares to the sight and sound of a sky full of geese falling on top of you.

While geese can be hunted successfully on both land and water, most geese are killed over land. Goose hunting generally means field shooting. Hunters conceal themselves in the middle of feed fields, dry stubble fields of corn or sorghum or green winter wheat. Concealment can take the form of an elaborate pit blind, or be as simple as laying out flat on the ground wearing camouflage clothing or tan Carhartts. In the case of snow geese, hunters lie out in white jumpsuits among the white decoys. Hunters often will cover up with burlap cloth or light chicken wire screens woven with corn stalks. When using the largest-sized goose shells, a decoy can cover half a shooter’s body and make a very effective hide.

Picking the right field to hunt is important, and here scouting is vital. Often geese are spotted feeding in a field by watching where morning feed flights land. If trespass permission can be obtained, the hunt is on. Arrive the next morning, several hours before light, and budget enough time to be completely set up a half-hour before sunrise. Sometimes the birds start arriving very early, and if everything is not perfect the opportunity will be lost. Remember that geese remember, once they get stung coming into a field, it will be very hard to fool them there again. As you are working a field that birds are actively feeding in, they should not be particularly wary as they approach. Try to set up in the same spot where the birds were feeding previously. If everything checks out visually on their approach, they should lock up and drop into an opening in the decoy spread. Layout the spread, so that the birds will land in the most advantageous position for a shot.

For refuge hunters or those prospecting on unscouted ground, sometimes all you can do is set up in a likely looking field and hope for the best. If birds are trading above, there is always the chance to pull birds down to your spread. Calling can be very important in convincing reluctant birds. The new goose flutes on the market are a little pricey, but they sound good and fool birds. The most effective style of calling is double clucking, where instead of sounding like a single goose, the call is blown to sound like an entire flock.

Sometimes juvenile birds will mess up and pull other birds down to a decoy spread with them. Flagging can be very effective in pulling birds from great distances. My experience with both geese and cranes is that flagging will get them to close the gap to 150 yards. Then they start looking for a sign. Stop flagging when they are a couple hundred yards out and lay low. Try some low feeding clucks and don’t do anything flamboyant. Less calling is better than more and on some mornings, no calling is best of all. If the flock swings and flares, and it looks like you have nothing left to lose, then get on the call and make some noise. Maybe you can change their minds.

With decoys, the rule is the more decoys the better. For Canada geese a minimum would be 2 or 3 dozen, with 8 or 12 dozen being better. With snow geese, the sky is the limit. Three or four hunters, working together, can only put out so many birds, so gauge what you can afford in both time and money. Most of the time, the bigger the size of the decoy the better. The exception would be with a population of birds that have been hunted hard. Decoy-shy geese tend to avoid oversized decoys or large decoy spreads. A small spread of life-sized decoys, possibly interspersed with mallard field shells and good calling, will sometimes dupe them. The best thing for wary birds is a taxidermy mount.

Make sure that you are wearing a face mask or face make-up, so a shining face doesn’t flare incomers. Let the birds work; they may circle a time or two just to check things out before they commit. The risk is that the flock will take one swing and leave. If the spread isn’t right, that is precisely what they will do. If birds are flaring on you, stand up and try to figure out why. Are the decoys not facing into the wind?

Is there some moisture on the decoys that is making them shine unnaturally? Is one of the laying-out gunners showing a shadow or moving? Always pick up your empty shell casings and keep everything as natural as possible.

Double Banded Canada Goose Photo by: USFWS

A choice of shotgun for waterfowling is a matter of personal choice. There are a few factors, though, that I think a goose hunter should keep in mind while picking a weapon. Personally, I love pretty guns. They complement a day in the field after upland birds. Sadly, for waterfowl, and especially geese, they are a pain in the rear and if a serious goose hunter uses one for any length of time, they won’t stay pretty.

A goose gun, which is going to spend most of the hunting day laying in the dirt and mud, should have a synthetic stock and forearm and be parkerized or camouflaged. It should be equipped with a sling so that the weapon can be slung over a hunter’s shoulder on the trip out to the blind, leaving hands free for decoy bags. At the end of the hunt, on the trip back from the blind, those same hands are also going to need extra room to carry a few dead geese. Lastly, the gun should be the most powerful gauge and shoot the most powerful loads a shooter can handle accurately. A 12-gauge will suffice, a l0-gauge is better. Take your shots no further than you are capable of killing cleanly.

Like shotguns, the type of retriever a waterfowler uses depends on several factors, with personal preference being the most influential. For the dog to hold up when a hunter concentrates on goose hunting, he is going to have to be stout. Springers and setters can pick up the occasional small goose, but it takes a waterfowl dog to do it day in and day out at 5 degrees Fahrenheit, with a wet coat. The big three- Labs, Chessies, and Goldens-should be on the short list. Just for shear cussedness, I personally would pick the Chessie, although a Lab or a field-bred Golden will also be up to the job.

A word about killing geese on water. The one place that a goose figures he’s safe is in the middle of an unbroken piece of water. This is why geese roost at night on large reservoirs and loaf there during midday. The old time waterfowlers knew how to kill birds, their livelihood depended on it. To kill open water birds, you must go back to the knowledge they had, which we have sadly mostly lost in these modern times.

The same methods that apply for open water diving ducks will work just as well on geese. Even more so, in some instances, because they just don’t expect it. The two tools of choice are layout boats and scull boats.

The exciting development in Kansas’ goose hunting is the liberalization of snow goose hunting regulations. The continental snow goose population has been estimated at 6 million birds, which is double the number their nesting areas can sustain.

The central flyway snow goose numbers are censused at 3 million. The current central flyway population objective is 1.5 million, which is half of where the numbers stand now. The central flyway produces an estimated average annual harvest of 220,000 snows and blues; 5,000 of those birds are taken in Kansas. Canadian and U.S. gunners produce a continent-wide annual kill of 500,000, but the experts feel that the bird take would have to double or even triple in order to reduce the population substantially. Meanwhile, the fragile far northern nesting areas are being stripped and destroyed at an alarming rate, and the damage is beginning to impact other nesting bird species.

To aid in reducing total snow goose numbers, snow goose bag limits were increased a few years ago to allow a take of 10 birds a day and 40 birds in possession.

In addition, along with the liberalization of hunting methods, the season was extended to run from late January to early March and allows hunters to take birds on their return trip north. None of this has reduced the overall numbers, and a whole host of additional liberalizations are being proposed. The list of possibilities the Central Flyway Council recommended to the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service for consideration under the provisions of the special conservation hunt includes:

• No bag and possession limit.
  
• Legalized electronic callers.
  
• Legalized partial baiting (along the lines of what is currently legal for mourning dove; by way of explanation, this means that you can do whatever you want with the crop as long as the crop never leaves the field)
  
• Legalize live decoys.
  
• Eliminate tagging requirements.
  
• Extend shooting hours until one half-hour after sunset.
  

In addition, there has been a proposal to issue a flyway-wide license to hunt snows and blues, and another to eliminate magazine plug requirements. Any of this got you goose hunters out there daydreaming? It could sure be fun to turn the calendar back a hundred years. The difficulty is that snows travel in such large flocks that they are just plain hard to kill. Their movements are random and hard to pattern.

Certainly, mitigating factors occasionally kick in, and birds lose their advantage and end up hitting the ground. Weather plays an important part in giving hunters the occasional edge. In a recently completed study where electronic call success was being monitored, the hunter success ratio was 6 to 1: 6 birds killed with electronics as opposed to 1 killed with conventional calling. Successful hunters claim it takes 700 or 800 decoys to pull the big flocks. I wonder what effect live decoys would have in fooling these wary birds?