DAKOTA REPORT-ND It was August 2011, early goose season along the upper Missouri river. Forty degrees was a welcomed chill while setting up decoys in the darkness that Saturday morning. There were only two of us willing to wake up for the hunt that day. Our destination was a harvested pea field that had shown good numbers of geese frequenting the area. With our anticipation of good luck on high, Taylor aka Moostafa and I set up the decoys with haste and worked hard to blend in the blinds. With what should have been a traditional morning of shooting at decoying birds turned into a chaotic morning that tested our loyalty to the waterfowl hunting nation. Anyone that has hunted a pea field knows the challenge that it is to hide the blinds in it. Unlike late season corn fields that have plenty of cover to hide in, these early season conditions have limited options, and peas are in some cases the only harvested crops at this point in the year. Geese love to eat peas but since we didn’t have permission from the landowner to dig pits, we spent the majority of the morning stuffing the exterior of our layout blinds with whatever trash the combine had left behind-- which wasn’t much. After some morning coffee, the geese were in the air about 9:00, headed our way. They were roosted about a mile and half away on the river so as soon as they were in the air, they were visible and on our radar. As the bluebird skies looked down on us, so did the first group of geese, dropping their landing gear and heading right for our modest decoy set up. With the fever of early goose season rushing through our veins, seconds away from blowing open the doors on these seemingly unsuspecting geese, they flared hard. Obviously they saw our blinds and wanted no part in our set. After the third group showed the same reaction and no shots fired, we knew changes needed to be made fast. With geese in the air we frantically scoured the earth for more camouflage to put on our blinds, made adjustments to the decoys--all in desperation to hopefully fool the next group that we could already see on deck. In the flurry of adjustments, it became clear instead of real that our hopes of decoying the geese all the way into the kill zone might
TAYLOR MICHELS
not happen with our blinds so exposed. We told each other if this continues soon our only real hope of stacking up a few birds was possibly calling for some loooong shots to be made. With that, we decided to call shots on any flaring geese within any sort of range of our gun barrels. We spent the rest of the morning calling shots on flaring geese at long ranges knocking down a few at a time. Cycling through more ammo than any early goose hunt should require, we were exhausted of ideas to make these geese cooperate with our program. We were sweating in a more familiar August heat as the clock struck noon and the thermometer was showing 70+ degrees; a far cry from the comfortable temperatures earlier in the morning. We continued to battle these birds with aggressive shooting and perseverance as they approached our decoys over and over only to flare or land in other parts of the field. We truly felt as if we kept getting knocked down in a boxing ring and foolishly kept getting up; clearly we were on the losing end of this battle. This was not the first “tough” hunt either of us had been on but surely at this point in our hunting careers we would know better than to put ourselves through another unsuccessful goose hunting situation such as this. At this point we had been long ranging the birds for the last three hours and to our surprise, we had nine birds in the bag. After all the hunting anguish we had been through watching hundreds of birds come and go from our decoys, nine birds seemed to be a great consolation as we were trying to make a decision on whether it was time to go home
Photo by Bret Amundson
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