Late Season Goose Hunt

Well as you all know, my previous post was about goose hunting in the late season. Well the season proved to be challenging once again. I've been scouting a very large corn field that has been holding upwards of 500 ducks and several hundred geese. My two friends decided they were going to try to hunt that field on Tuesday, but unfortunately I had class all day so I was unable to hunt. The report they gave was a little slow on the geese since the geese that checked out the field had trouble committing to the spread. But for the entire afternoon the 500 ducks were landing all around the layout blinds and decoys.

 So after that report I was pretty excited to if nothing else get some great photos on our trip back to the field in the morning. The only thing is, the temperature was supposed to drop. When we hit the field in the morning the temperature was less then 10 degrees outside. We hit the field around 6:30 AM to get our 100 fully flocked body goose lesser decoys set up in plenty of time before the ducks and geese started working into the field. The sun began to rise, the snow picked up along with the wind. That temperature fell even more with that ice cold wind cutting across the open field.

Because of the instant drop in temperature from the day before the birds decided to stay on the river instead of coming to feed, doing so would take too much energy. We decided to pack it up around 1:00 PM because be this point we were cold and the only three ducks we had seen were a half a mile away and never even looked in our direction. We never even saw a goose and froze our butts off. We decided to drive twenty miles up river and check out another one of our spots. Here the river froze completely across, so this spot will be useless until next fall. After checking out the river here we decided it was time for lunch and while we ate our lunch I looked out the window only to see the first flock of geese of the day! The temperature must have risen enough to make then get up and feed since at this point it was 2:00 o'clock in the afternoon. So we spent another day afield and did not have any luck this time either...

The Outdoors is My Life.

When I am not in school or doing homework, I am an avid outdoors enthusiast. Currently the hunting seasons are starting to slow down for me which keeps me on the ice, locating fish from lake to lake. Also in my spare time I enjoy walking through the woods, enjoying the scenery while checking my traps.

Over the past weekend, a couple of my friends located some geese that were roosting on a lake that happened to have some open water on still, this was excellent since waterfowl season here is all but over when the lakes and ponds are Clio, Mi are frozen. Now for the tricky part, we had to somehow get at 14ft jon boat and a canoe across a section of the lake which was roughly four hundred yards, to get to where the ice broke and water would take us out into the rest of the lake fed by a local river. This was a strenuous task and posed a big threat to us. As it was my friend, fell through the ice up to his waste.  (We had ropes attached to all of us and to the boats just incase anything did happen.) Once we got near the waters edge, I took a sledge hammer to break through 3 inches of ice or less to make it close enough to push the boat across to the open water. 

As soon as I hit the open water, we located birds, now it was time to get the two boats two miles from where we were to get to our hunting spots. On our journey up river we saw hundreds of ducks mallards, mergansers, and black ducks. Not to mention the other ducks that were too far away from our boats to actually identify which type of duck they were. Unfortunately the duck season closed on January 2^nd and we were too late. By this point in our hunt we were still empty handed because we had not seen any geese. 

When we got to the blind, we set up the decoys and had ducks landing in our spread almost immediately. Once we had a little break in the action, I set up my cook stove and had hotdogs and venison for lunch, (which to anyone outside on a cold day, a nice cup of coffee and a hot lunch makes the day a lot better.)  And soon after the geese started coming by the hundreds and we had a group come in… and they all left we were too busy eating our lunch! After an awesome day of seeing thousands of waterfowl that late in the season, I can honestly say for once I was truly happy coming home empty handed. It was a beautiful day and enjoyed being in the outdoors. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more updates.