Lessons Learned & Re-learned
Geese Landing - Not in Decoys!
How many of you have made a decision while hunting, then realized shortly after that your decision had cost you big time? How many times have you said, “I’ll never do that again, I’ll stick with my original plan from now on!” If you’re not nodding your head then you’re even a bigger liar than the rest of us hunters! Well, this happened to me and my fellow hunters just a couple days ago while goose hunting.
We set up early in the morning, everything was going smoothly. The decoys looked great, we were well camouflaged in our layout blinds, these geese were in the bag. Not so fast, we barely saw the first group because they were flying about tree top high when they crested the hill and never even gave us a look before they sat down about 200 yrds from us – not good. We spooked them off to hopefully keep other geese from doing the same, but to no avail – 2 to 3 more groups ended up doing the same thing.
We were frustrated, we had obviously set up in the wrong spot, but what to do now? The decision was unanimous, we needed to MOVE! Very logical decision, but one that probably cost us all our limit for the day. It was in the process of moving the decoys that a very large group of geese coming from a bit different direction, started locking up (then flaring off) our original location that now had half the decoys moved along with decoy bags and everything else out that it takes to move 4 dozen full body decoys! We were committed to the move so we finished moving only to watch another nice group sail over our original location and then that was it, they were done flying for the morning – talk about pull your hair out!
Lesson learned: Stick with your original plan while goose hunting – at least until the morning flight is over. Geese have a weird ability to fly all at roughly the same time. You’re better off being concealed in a nice spread, even if it is in the less than perfect location for that hunt. I realize I wouldn’t be writing this if our move had worked, and sometimes it does, which is what keep us making this mistake. My experience has shown that most of the time this doesn’t work while goose hunting, at least not during the big morning flight time.
Best solution in my opinion is to stick it out for that hunt where you are. At least you’re not educating the geese by being caught running around in your goose spread. There’s usually a next time – take notes for your next hunt.