Goose hunting can get tough. It gets difficult every season when the flow of new geese dries up and you’re stuck with the same birds that have been pounded by the same hunters day after day. The birds start to skirt your decoys. They flare from your flagging and calls. They fly to fields without making a sound. Suddenly everything that once brought them drifting into your spread seems to be working against you. The hunting season will be started in December and ended in the middle or end of December. In the goose season, the hunter may harvest 20 and more light geese per day or snow time.
Snow gooses are very tasty and edible, so most of the hunters are like the snow goose hunting. You’ll want to set up underneath a flight path and where a food source is visible, particularly in cold weather when birds want to conserve energy. But wherever you hunt, do not set up in the obvious places you and every other hunter have been using, like high spots in the middle of fields. Geese learn to be suspicious of spreads in the same places. Honkers eventually learn that dark humps layout blinds in the middle of spreads spell trouble. Instead, try hiding in fence rows using natural vegetation. Or set your layout blinds outside the decoys, preferably on the sunny side of the spread where approaching geese are blinded by direct sunlight or the reflection coming off the snow. If you bunch up the blinds and brush them heavily, they’ll look like clumps of weeds or windblown tumbleweeds.
Things About Goose Hunting
Decoy Change-Up is traditionally in the U or J-shaped decoy spreads mean trouble to hunter-weary honkers. Some substances will spread out his decoys in clusters of feeding circles with walkers between them. Absent a landing zone in front of the hunters, he’ll rely on calling and subtle flagging to center up the geese. In cold weather, they frequently plop down on their bellies the moment they touch the ground. Full-bodies without their stakes, along with shells, will imitate this natural behavior. If everyone has been using 60 to 100 decoys try four to 18. If they’ve all been using big feet or other full-bodied, mix it up with shells, silhouettes, or super high-end decoys.
The less the geese have seen a certain type of spread, the more effective it will be. In some areas late-season geese will be paired up, so represent that in your setup with a dominant lookout pose paired with a feeder decoy. And open up the decoys so they don’t look like a spread. When geese approach most spreads, they’re routinely met with lots of loud calling from hunters and plenty of enthusiastic flag-waving. They quickly learn to be on guard. That’s why it’s critical to learn how to read geese, even as far away as 500 yards. Body language is 20 percent of the calling equation; the rest is listening to them, something you can’t do if you immediately blow on your call the moment you see a flock.