- Details
- Category: Waterfowl
- Published: Saturday, 14 March 2009 09:12
- Written by Greg
A few friends, lots of geese!
I had never had the opportunity to hunt snow geese until now. This year Utah opened up a spring goose hunt for the first time. I have a few buddies that are waterfowl hunting fools and when they heard about the upcoming spring "light goose" hunt, a plan to hunt Delta Utah was under way.
It just so happens that I know a couple of landowners in Delta Utah...a few phone calls later, we had permission to hunt their property.
We started by going down to Delta to do some scouting and were greeted by thousands of geese in the area. Not only did we see thousands of snow, blue and Ross' geese on the local reservoir, but we literally saw thousands of geese feeding in cultivated fields. If you've never seen several thousand geese take to the air at once, you're missing out on a spectacular sight! The sky literally turns white as the geese take flight and we were lucky enough to witness the event!
A couple of days before the opener, we headed down to Delta for some last minute scouting. We wanted to finalize on which field we'd hunt. The field that we settled on appeared to be in a heavily used flight path as we saw hundreds and hundreds of geese fly right over the top of us. Little did we know, but the allure of seeing so many geese fly overhead would cause us to choose the wrong field to hunt...how could we have known?
In the early morning darkness of March 2nd, we hurried to set out all 120 (oh how we wished we had triple the number) decoys and to conceal our layout blinds. By 6:15 a.m. we had finished, only 14 minutes until legal shooting time...
Minutes passed...then hours. Flock after flock flew over head. The air was filled with honking geese and distant gun fire, but not a sound from our guns! The geese were on a mission and the destination was not our field. We never had a goose fly closer than 100 yards overhead.
Around lunch time we finally accepted the fact that the geese weren't going to land in our field. We figured that we weren't close enough to the fields where the geese were feeding and not far enough away for the geese to come to rest. This wild goose chase wasn't going to be so easy after all...
We packed up everything and headed back to the field we knew we should have hunted in the first place. By early afternoon, we were again huddled inside our layout blinds. This time the location proved to be spot on. We killed 7 geese before the day ended and should have killed triple that amount. If it hadn't been for some bad timing of the Fish and Game, we definitely would have bagged more birds. With just over an hour of shooting time left, Mr. Game Warden came cruising up. He spent nearly 40 minutes of prime hunting time checking licenses, guns, permission slips and birds. During this time we had hundreds of birds flying right into our decoys and we could do nothing but watch them fly off. The timing of Mr. GW was horrible, guess that's how it goes...
The next morning we set up in the same location. We didn't see as many birds as the night before, but what can you expect with all the pressure these geese were getting. Within a couple of hours we had a mixed bag of snow and Ross' geese, not bad for a morning hunt!
Now that I had shot my first goose, I was addicted! On the way home, I was begging the guys to come back down and hunt before the season ended...we only had 1 more week. Luckily they obliged. I got a call Saturday night asking me if I was up for a Sunday hunt. Before my buddy Scott could finish asking the question, I had already answered with an excited "I'm in".
Sunday proved to be a great hunting day! Even though we didn't see 1/100th of the birds in the sky that day, a good portion of the birds we did see flew right into our decoys. Two new factors contributed to our success, the fact that we had 350 plus decoys afield and the fact that we had a sustained wind that ranged between 15 - 20 mph. The windy weather allowed us to set up down range of our decoys, which made for perfect shooting conditions as the geese eased (and at times almost stalled) into our decoys. By days end we had a whopping 30 geese! Yeah, yeah, even with the wind, we still missed our fair share of geese, but what a blast!
Oh, guess I should mention that I shot a banded snow goose! But being a newbie, the experienced waterfowlers took advantage of me by telling that whoever goes and retrieves the goose gets the band. I figured I didn’t care about a goose that had been caught before, probably a decision that I’ll someday regret.
Luckily for Utah hunters, the number of "light geese" in Canada has increased to the point where nesting grounds are being damaged due to over population. In addition, local agricultural is suffering because the geese stop in Utah during the spring to feed on grain and alfalfa crops that are just starting to grow. Our fingers are crossed that the Utah Division of Wildlife will schedule another spring goose hunt next year!