Dog Days of Goose Hunting
By Russell Tinsley
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By gentlemen's agreement, commercial hunting operations cease at noon each day. This gives the geese time to calm and dine in peace and keeps them hanging around the neighborhood. Meanwhile, each afternoon a guide scouts for geese concentrations and plans where he will hunt the following morning.

If the geese are feeding in a field his hunting club has leased, the decision is a no-brainer. He'll have his spread out and will be waiting for the geese to return the next a.m. And if his hunters can shoot straight he'll probably bring in a bunch of geese. Other hunters will wonder why their party hadn't done as well.

Location can make this much difference. If the guide doesn't have access to the field in which the geese are feeding, he will have to make the best of circumstances, putting out a spread on land where he can hunt and trying to get the geese to decoy as they head out in early morning to get breakfast. Some days the birds are more willing to decoy than they are on others.

Geese flying by sometimes change course slightly and act as if they are inclined to approach the decoy spread, but at the last moment they will flare away, just teasing. Some hunters can't resist the temptation and will throw desperation shots their way, wasting ammunition and risking crippled birds.

This is where a guide earns his fee. He lets the geese come into range and he calls the shots. But even so, typically it will sound as if an anti-aircraft battery has opened up and few if any geese will fall. Geese are deceptively fast for their size, and the general tendency is not to lead them enough.

Geese usually decoy in small groups of five or six birds. Large flocks tend to hold together as they fly high, jabbering among themselves. They have a destination in mind and they are not much interested in the spread. The best hunters can hope for is that a goose will see the spread, get curious, break away from the large gathering and pull two or three others in with it.

Surprisingly, the birds might be more inclined to decoy toward the end of the season than they were earlier. Clifton Tyler says there are several reasons for this.

The birds are not as skittish, for one thing. The season has been under way for almost three months and most hunting pressure eased a few weeks back. There are fewer hunters in the new year. Also, the geese become more social in the winter and won't spook at the slightest hint of danger.

"I like to hunt late in the season rather than at the first because the geese have had a chance to complete their migration and there are more birds to hunt," Clifton says. "Plus, they're not as wild, since hunting pressure is not as widespread or intense."

In either case, late or early, location-again-plays the leading role. Ask the typical hunter to name the most important factor in hunting success, though, and he probably will say weather.

You've probably heard it: Fog or a stiff wind will cause the birds to fly close to the ground; with a high sky, clear and blue, the birds will fly way high, just moving specks on a blue horizon.

Geese are not that predictable, however. Take fog, as an example. Clifton says geese really don't like to fly in fog. After leaving their roost they often will find a plowed field, land in it and wait for the fog to lift.

And as I found on one hunt in late January a few years back, the white decoy spread in a fog will actually spook geese rather than attract them. When our group of hunters got settled, the ground fog wasn't that significant. But as first light came to the prairie, it got soupy. We could hear geese flying overhead, and occasionally we would get a brief glimpse of birds changing directions as they neared the decoys.

It didn't take Clifton Tyler long to understand what was happening. He said the birds were flaring off before they got within range. He suggested that Lonnie Gescheidle and I take off our white smocks, walk about a hundred yards in the direction the geese had been coming from, get down and be prepared to shoot as the unsuspecting birds came in low to give the spread the look-see, before they sensed something suspicious and flared off.

This was weird. We usually could hear a bird, two or three sometimes, before they briefly broke out of the fog-shadowy shapes right there in front of us, easy shots.

That, incidentally, was the last limit of geese I shot. Since the daily limit of light geese was raised to 10, I haven't come close. But I can blame older snow geese as much as my shooting ability. These old veterans that have survived a season or two don't make many mistakes.

But if they do make mistakes, it is just as likely they will make them late in the season, when they're not being hassled almost every day. And if the hunter can take advantage of location, a late-season shoot can be one to remember.