There are only a few things that really can get your hopes up for a hunting or fishing trip. One of those things is to hear how successful others are in the days leading up to your outing.

Whether it is hearing that bass are on their beds so catching them can be easy or that deer are moving all day long during the rut, these things make you envision a great outcome when it is finally your time to go. However, once you get there, it turns out that you pumped yourself up for nothing.

Sometimes you even get that great bit of advice from someone, “Man, you should have been here yesterday.” I had this exact scenario play out for me last week.

Some of my hunting friends bought a snow goose decoy rig last year by all pitching in a portion of the cost. Then as the timing of the snow goose migration back through New York got closer, some of them took the week off from their jobs to spend it in a cornfield with over 800 decoys. Monday and Tuesday they saw some snow geese but nothing that close. However, on Wednesday after the fog had disappeared, flocks of snow geese started to give the decoy spread a look. After a couple of flocks didn’t get quite close enough, they changed the decoy spread a little and must have gotten it right. The next flock that came over worked in and presented them with some shots.

On my lunch break, I got a text message with a picture of one of them with a snow goose sporting a neck collar. This would be like shooting a 180” buck deer hunting. I called him and talked briefly about the hunting and the weather forecast. It was supposed to be a south wind that night and all of the next day with little cloud cover. This seemed like the perfect recipe for a big migration push of snow geese out of Pennsylvania to the Finger Lakes of New York. So, I decided to take Thursday off from work to snow goose hunt.

I got up at 4:15 and jumped in the shower. I got dressed and loaded my blind bag, stool, and shotgun into my truck. Three of us met in Greene to carpool out to the field we were hunting above Ithaca. As we made the drive, we got ourselves pretty amped up over how they had figured out the decoy spread look that worked for the later flocks on Wednesday so birds that day were sure to be fooled as well. We stopped at a convenience store a few miles from our field and bought breakfast not knowing that would be one of the highlights of the day!

Once we got to the farm we hurried to get our gear out to the field to be ready in case snow geese were flying first thing. Then we sat in the blind looking int he sky all around us, hoping to spot high-flying flocks of migrating snow geese for the next five hours. That entire time, an electronic caller was playing a recording of a flock of feeding snow geese. Around 11:30 we decided to cook lunch. Luckily, we didn’t have to worry about geese coming in while my friend was cooking sausages on his camp stove. We made it another couple hours before calling it a day around 2:00. In the seven hours we were there, we didn’t see a single snow goose.

While the hunt was not successful in terms of harvesting snow geese, it was still a good time to hang out with friends in the blind. And hey, a bad day hunting is better than being at work!