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Eric Davis

Sun Outdoor Columnist

During my senior year at SUNY Cobleskill, I live in a house off campus with four other Wildlife Management students. We all loved to hunt, but we particularly enjoyed waterfowl hunting. Nothing was better than September resident goose season to us.

This was before the current regulations were put into place but the daily limit was 8 geese per person. Each one of us had a layout blind and some sort of goose decoys whether it was shells, full bodies, or floaters. Collectively, we could hunt in just about any situation and have the right set up to harvest geese.

School started the last week in August so we all got to town a couple days early so that we could put in time scouting before other students came to town. We knew there were at least two other groups of students who goose hunted too so we wanted to be able to ask permission to hunt before they could. Also, we tried to scout areas a little farther away from campus in hopes of avoiding the competition. With only a couple days left before September 1st, we had permission for two fields with geese using them. One field was freshly mowed and the hay removed so there was not a lot of cover on the ground to try to hide our layout blinds in.

This would make a group of five hunters stick out like a sore thumb. The second field was a taller alfalfa field that was holding over 200 geese every day, but it was about 10 minutes from campus on a main road. When one of my housemates got permission to hunt there, they owner said that he was the second college student to ask permission. He added that whoever gets there first had the field for the day.

Being young and naïve, we hatched a great plan to split our group up with two hunters heading to the mowed field and three of us heading to the closer field at sunset on August 31st. This way we would be there first and could make sure we were the ones hunting those spots. The plan kind of worked. The two guys that headed to the farther field got there to see another truck parked in the tractor path with hunters who were planning to stay the night in the field.

I was in the group of three and we were first to our field so when the two others called we told them to head to our field. We left a truck down by the road in the tractor path proceeded to setting up. Some guys worked on thatching the layout blinds with alfalfa to make them blend in to the field while others worked on setting the decoys out in anticipation of the predicted wind direction. Before midnight we were all done and tried to get some sleep either in our blinds or in one of the trucks.

We woke up somewhere around 4 o’clock to find a heavy fog had settled in. Dense enough that our headlamps seemed like the didn’t project more than 10 feet in front of us. This made us worry that the hunt might not be that great as the fog would make it impossible for incoming geese to see our decoys and try to land within gun range of us. Adding to this fear, the wind that was predicted to be close to 10 miles an hour, was maybe a third of that speed.

Without a strong wing speed, the geese could approach from any direction instead of coming in into the wind. About an hour before legal shooting time, a single truck pulled into the tractor path by the road, saw our vehicles, and turned around. We never found out who it was.

As it got light out. The fog started to take it time getting out of there. Finally, we hear a distant honk from a goose in the air. Everyone dives into their blind and we go into our individual jobs. Two of us are calling, one if running the flag, and the other two are trying to spot the incoming bird or birds and whisper their location and direction. They sound like they are coming in from behind us and are getting louder and louder until we can hear their wings beating. They buzz over the blinds and someone calls the shot. We all sit up and start shooting. Only two or three birds fall to the ground out of the eight-bird flock. We all gripe about how they came in and how bad our shooting was. A couple minutes later, another group of birds follows the exact same path in and we again shoot two or three out of the flock. We quickly form a plan to move the blinds 180-degrees and make a landing pocket in front of us. The fog has finally gotten down to being barely there when a flock of 8 geese comes over the tree line.

They work in like a charm and we call the shot as they are putting their feet on the ground 15 yards in front of us. None of them fly away. We exchange high-fives and head out to pick up our bounty. When the first person picks up two geese, he yells that they are banded. Then the next guy who grabs a bird says that one is banded too. Turns out, every goose in that flock was banded. That made spending the night in the field a little more worth it.