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Category: Waterfowl

Published: Saturday, 12 December 2015 15:11

Written by Greg

Bling...!

My work day was almost over when a text message came through on my phone late on a Thursday afternoon. It was my buddy from Wyoming, “the reservoir is full of ducks and geese, if only you lived closer”. A crazy thought flashed through my mind, no work for me tomorrow and no weekend plans, hmm. That’s all it took, I called my son…

Not two minutes later I was texting Jordan back, telling him that we planned to drive up to his house tonight. I glanced at the time, 5:34 p.m. And not surprisingly, my wild idea had appealed more to my son than it had to me, so the long day ahead was quickly dismissed.

                  A good start to the morning...                                                A little later with a couple more geese

By 8:00 p.m. we were on the road. The drive was long but we finally pulled into Jordan’s driveway at 3:30 a.m., just enough time to catch 45 minutes of sleep in the truck before heading down to the reservoir. Then with our decoys set, we patiently awaited shooting time as we watched several ducks swimming throughout our floater decoys, a good sign of things to come. Day one ended with 6 geese and 13 ducks to our credit, not bad considering we passed on ducks all morning long awaiting the honkers who didn’t cooperate quite as well as we had hoped.

Shot a nice mixed bag of ducks, one of the green-winged teals                            My first pintail duck

Day two worked out much better as the geese worked our decoy spread perfectly. Woodie, our yellow lab, was crucial in retrieving birds. The freezing cold water didn’t deter him at all. He made some impressively long 100+ yard retrieves out across the icy water, a spectacular sight to watch!

Woodie heading out on one of his long retrieves              Woodie can't figure out why everyone else was so tired

However, the most surprising event took place on day two as part of a double retrieve across dry ground. Woodie had just brought back the first of two large Canada geese and began his sprint for the second, when another flock of geese popped over the bluff a few hundred yards away. We jumped into our ground blinds and ducked for cover. Over the next minute we alternated between watching the approaching geese and Woodie’s retrieve, hoping the geese didn’t notice the latter. Unattended, Woodie dropped his goose next to the previous one and slipped into his ground blind. Everything worked out perfectly as we dumped a few more geese causing us to somewhat forget about the previous two. It wasn’t until a while later as we were milling around adjusting decoys, etc. that the words “this one has a band” disbelievingly reached our ears. We’ve joked around about shooting a banded bird way too many times before, but astonishingly this time it was true. Bling!

          Banded goose with a little "Bling", as they say                   Dallas and Woodie with their first banded goose

We couldn’t have been more excited, we had our limits of geese, had shot a number of ducks and had bagged our first banded Canada goose!