big oose field commandments · “if you ask a lot of hunters, i bet most of them never change...

Fed up with honkers? Your tactics may be as stale as the late-season gander guard.

BY JOE GENZEL

Big Goose FieldCOMMANDMENTS

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FACT: The best-of-the-best waterfowlers in the world kill big Canada geese in fields. In the last decade, no bird species has become tougher to dial in if you’re a Mississippi or Atlantic flyway hunter. They are anti-social, flare off the best brushed blinds at 100 yards, and are content to sleep on frozen water all day. How the hell do you hunt a bird that would rather eat grass in the park than cut corn in a field? That’s a complex answer most mornings, but basically it boils down to this: There are certain days a honker will let you kill it, and there are days it won’t.

It’s true, big geese migrate differently than they used to, and have become a more urban bird, but that hasn’t diminished our passion for them. You just have to be willing to change tactics and pursue them when they are suscep-tible. Most will tell you targeting big geese over water is the key to consistently killing them, and that’s true in many places. They are less leery over water and even frozen ponds, but it can be damn tough to find (and get access to) a loaf every weekend.

They will frustrate the hell out of you at times, but don’t trade the decoy trailer for a new duck boat just yet. Some of the most core Canada goose hunt-

ers across the country are about to give you honker rules to live by.

IT TAKES TWONot many goose hunters in Roches-ter, Minnesota, kill birds by accident. They are smart, oftentimes pres-sured geese, that don’t make many mistakes.

“Sometimes we will have five guys in a pit with 125 goose-calling titles between them, blowing so hard we all get headaches to break off one goose from a flock,” said Molt Gear’s Scott Threinen, a three-time world-champion caller. “I’m a little biased, but the Upper Midwest is a tough place to kill birds. A lot of guys think birds are tougher to kill the further south you get, but that’s not entirely true. Birds are tougher when they stay in the same place longer and get more pressure.”

Threinen is obsessed with the habits of geese—why they do what they do—and their biology. For

They are anti-social, flare off the best-brushed blinds at 100 yards, and are con-tent to sleep on frozen water all day.

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big goose field commandments

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instance, there is a long-standing belief amongst even the most core goose hunters that when birds get close, you go quiet on the calls to finish them. WRONG! And did you know geese have almost 360-degree vision? So, when your greenhorn brother-in-law sticks his head out of the blind when the birds are on the corner...they see him.

The last 100 yards is when you should ca l l more aggressive,” Threinen said. “You don’t go quiet, that’s the opposite of what they do. When a big bird in the air makes a sound, big birds on the ground start clucking.”

Two rules Threinen lives by are the 25 and 1 to 10.

The 25 means if you’re hunting a feed, you need to put out at least 25 percent as many decoys as the num-ber of live birds you saw in the field.

The 1 to 10 rule is a sliding scale for concealment, a 1 being a very good hide and 10 being awful. For every number you move up on that scale, the blinds get moved another three yards away from the decoys (start at 25 yards and move back from there).

“If you ask a lot of hunters, I bet most of them never change their decoy spread much or call differ-ently,” Threinen said. “I would guess in the last four years we haven’t hunted geese the same way (twice). You have to add different kinds of

decoys to your spread—silhouettes, small shells, big shells, old wooden silos. Curiosity killed the cat, and it kills geese too.”

Remember, the bigger the goose the more anti-social it will be. The window when a 12-pound goose is going to want to be around others is small, maybe a week or two of the season. And when you’re hunt-ing smaller populations of birds, say

in places like southern Illinois or northern Missouri that were once hot beds, Threinen suggests ditching the big spread of 200 full-bodies for four-dozen Dave Smith Decoys.

“(This winter) I saw a flock of true giants, the 13- to 16-pound geese,

while I was snowmobiling here in Minnesota,” Threinen said. “I knew they were giants because they had big, white asses the size of a five-gallon bucket and were flying about 30 yards off the deck, never missing a wingbeat.

“I jumped in my truck and fol-lowed them. The temperature had been anywhere from 0 to 60 below, so everything was frozen up and I

“You have to add different kinds of decoys to your spread...

curiosity killed the cat, and it kills geese too.”


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saw them land in a creek that’s about a yard wide, a place you would trap a mink, not shoot a goose. That’s a damn tough bird to kill.”

BEST OF BIG SKYMontana was a well-kept big honker secret until Bozeman became the next western boom-town. It’s been good for Brady Davis’ roofing busi-ness but made chasing big honk-ers a challenge close to home. He and buddy Matt McCormick used to be able to knock on a door and get access, now there’s more com-petition.

“Most guys would tell us, ‘sure you can hunt geese, but why would you want to?’” Davis says. “Since then, Bozeman has gotten bigger and college kids are hunting hard, so when we knock on the same doors they will tell us they have guys com-ing to hunt Monday, Wednesday…but the great thing about Montana is it’s big and there are only 1 million people here.”

Davis started driving up to five hours away to chase geese that saw far less pressure. There are many riv-ers in the state that never freeze, and the birds come off that fast-moving water to feed in wheat, barley and sugar beet fields. Montana is also unique in that it holds birds most of the season unless a huge snow drives them out.

“I got into goose hunting on the Front Range of Colorado, where there is probably not a more pres-sured place to hunt geese,” Davis said. “Here they are easier to pattern.

The colder it gets the better they pattern. Late-season we use a lot of sleeper shells because birds land in a field and within 3 seconds go straight to their bellies.”

Davis and McCormick sometimes set up on birds a bit different than most. The hide takes precedence over anything else, and in some cases, they will position the decoy spread 40 to 100 yards away from the

blinds (typically layouts or A-frames) and shoot birds on the swing. That means the birds are circling to land and focused on the decoys, but before they touch down, the boys spring up and start shooting.

“We had this f ield that we hid in standing corn with the wind in our face and the decoys at least 40 yards out in front of us,” Davis said. “The geese were coming in over the ©

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corn and we were shooting at them straight up, which I think is the best shot you can take on a goose. I love hunting right in the decoys, but I’m not married to it. I’m married to kill-ing geese.”

GRAIN-BIN GANDERSMany of you have likely seen a viral video of mallards feeding in a parked train car filled with harvested corn. If you haven’t, go check YouTube and take a look. Travis Mueller of Banded/Avery said the big honkers in and around Cedar Rapids, Iowa, act similar.

“I think they are adapting well to the areas they are being hunted,” he said of big geese. “Here we have two ethanol plants and ADM (Archer Daniels Midland, a Midwestern food processing company) and there is this big pile of corn at ADM with 500 geese sleeping next to it. Some of the geese were just sitting on the corn pile eating. There are quarries full of water that never freezes and the birds just jump out of the water and walk to the corn pile.”

Like many big honker hunters, Mueller tries to hunt geese over water, but the options are limited. He mainly hunts field feeds, which can be tricky as honker habits have become less reliable day-to-day.

“We will hunt a smaller feed if

the birds are coming right into the field,” he says. “We have learned that big numbers of geese don’t always add up to a better hunt, particularly when we are scouting and the birds circle the field many times before landing. That means they are not comfortable.”

When Mueller is chasing geese in unfamiliar destinations, once the birds leave a field for the evening, he will walk in and mark exactly where the birds were, so they can set up

right on the X the next day.“Even when we hunt Canada, I put

a pop can where they were landing,” he says. “You have to be where they want to be. We tried hunting the fenceline and trafficking birds, and they don’t even think about doing it. Lessers are different, you can hunt them that way. But if you want to kill big geese, you need to be where they want to be.”

It’s still a numbers game when it comes to decoys for Iowa geese.

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East Coast sod farms are popular feeds for Atlantic Flyway honkers. When it snows, hunters use leaf blowers to clear a green patch in the sea of white—it’s a magnet for Canada geese.

Mueller always brings the trailer and puts out a minimum of eight-dozen full-bodies. He has also gone to Banded’s remote flagger, which allows you to place motion away from the blind, and when it comes to calling, he says mimic the geese. He has plenty of friends that can blow a short-reed like they are on the stage

in Easton, but that’s not what most honkers are looking for.

“I know the flag bit sounds like a product promotion, but it does work,” Mueller said. “Last year was so tough, it has me thinking about hunting the way Tim Grounds used to. He would throw everything at them, silhouettes, milk jugs painted

black, tires cut in half…maybe it’s time to go back to that.”

THE STAGE VS. THE FIELDCall champ John Walls—he’s won team goose three times and live goose in 2014 in Easton—looks the part of a honker killer, from his Brad Keselowski No. 2 NASCAR camo hat

down to old blue jeans. He’s a simple man, who keeps it simple in the field and on the call.

“A lot of people figure I just give it (the call) hell because of my titles and we kill a bunch a geese,” said Walls, who mainly hunts winter wheat in New Jersey. “But out here everyone is running big spreads and calling at birds as soon as they see them. So, I’m pretty subtle with calling, and we hardly ever run more than four-and-a-half-dozen decoys.”

Walls and his buddies are after mostly resident birds who hang out on golf courses and neighborhood ponds. They are big, wary, anti-social geese, so this last year they went to setting field decoys in small family groups of two to seven out in front of the blind.

“Some of these birds are 15- to 18-pound geese, and we have had success just by being different. We are also lucky that a lot of these birds are flying over us, so that gives us a better chance,” Walls said. “I don’t give them much, maybe a cluck-moan at 200 yards and if they come at us, I shut up.”

When migrators show up, Walls gets more aggressive, and will call them all the way to the kill hole. They don’t f lag a ton, but will hit geese when they are on the corners, which is typically deadly.

“I’ve just found that flagging birds that are a long way off doesn’t work here,” Walls said. “We have had geese get close and my buddies will drop their calls and start going for the guns and birds start to drift off and we have to get back on them. New birds, we’re going to call them to the ground.”

Walls hunts out of home-made A-frames and the Avian-X version. They brush them heavy and hunt from the middle of the field mostly, but will tuck into hedgerows and treelines, when it makes sense.

“It surprises some people, but about half the guys out here hunt that way,” Walls said. “We’ll put cut cedars on them or Christmas trees and it works pretty well if you hold still. Some guys get the farmer to leave a few rows of standing corn and hunt out of them.”

September 2019 | WILDFOWL Magazine 89wildfowlmag.com

“I’m pretty subtle with calling, and we hardly ever run more than four-and- a-half dozen decoys.”

SUMMER BLOCK PARTY

August and September are the two months big local

honkers are most susceptible (and fun to hunt),

because many states have more liberal limits dur-

ing the resident season and a number of these geese

are juvies, so they haven’t heard a call or landed in a

spread of fake “friends.”

You can count on local birds coming out to feed in

the early season. It’s not like when the weather turns

frigid in January and honkers would rather sit on any

open water they can find for a few days instead of

running the gauntlet of decoys, calls and shotguns

only to find frozen waste corn as hard as a steel BB.

What’s tough is finding cut ag fields to kill them in. In

the Upper Midwest wheat is being combined this time

of year, maybe some sweet corn, but feed corn and

soybeans are most likely still standing (they definitely

will be this year after the wet spring the Midwest had,

if there is a crop at all).

“Think of it like this: When you’re at home, you have

the same routine. You eat breakfast, you go to work,

you come home. That’s a resident honker,” says Jordan

Keil of Reaction Waterfowl in Hutchinson, Minnesota.

“When you go on vacation, you’re sleeping in late, eat-

ing at all different times...that’s a migrating goose.”

Keil doesn’t run many decoys for locals (mostly small

family groups), particularly if he is on the X. He will

increase numbers as more fields get cut and run traffic.

His rule all season long is the less geese in the field the

night before, the more decoys go out. More geese in

the field means less decoys because they want to be

there, so no reason to deploy the entire trailer.

For the hide, Keil likes to hunt the edges from

brushed-in panel blinds (cedars, willows etc. do the

trick for concealment). The best hide is standing corn

next to a cut field, but that’s a rare occurrence. If it’s a

buddy hunt with a few guys, they will go out to the center of

the field, because he knows they will all stay still in heavily-

brushed layout blinds. He likes to set up so the geese can

come straight off the roost and into the decoys, no banking

or hard turns.

“The thing you have to remember about early geese

is a lot of them are young and can’t fly that well, so you

want to make it as easy as you can for them to get in the

decoys,” Keil said. “I don’t run a lot of decoys and I don’t

call much because I don’t want to show them any of my

tricks until I have to.”


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big oose field commandments · “if you ask a lot of hunters, i bet most of them never change...

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