Waterfowl Hunting: It's a Family Story

By Harold Doré
February 3, 2010

As most of us work full-time and don't have the chance to hunt for a living, we certainly share the same common passion for waterfowl hunting! We spend the whole year to look for new products on the market, to repair and maintain our existing equipment and also to practice our calling techniques. We wish could do it 24/7. This is why when the hunting season comes close, we get so excited and can't wait to get in the field and unload our guns on these big honkers.

Every year, my cousins and I take a week off work just to hunt ducks and geese. We also hunt as often as we can during the week-ends. This year was no exception. That week was at the beginning of October for us. We hunt in the Mont-Laurier area which is about 250 km north of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. We are lucky because we have a lot of permissions on different kind of fields where ducks and geese love to stop feeding during their migration.

A good hunt always starts with a good scouting. We have heard in a movie before and we always refer to it: Be where the geese want to be! The day before, Joel and I spotted a freshly cut oat field with about 350-400 geese feeding. They were all at the end of the field, close to a ditch where a grass field begins. We usually hunt on the X with our lay-down blinds and we put our spread of decoys where the geese are. We thought that this time, we should take advantage of that ditch.

We called our buddies to let them know where we were going and that they had to be ready by 4:30 AM. We would meet at my cousin's place. After seeing every hour on the clock because of the excitement, it was finally the time to go. We always want to be there early enough so we don't have to rush before sunrise. We unloaded my brand new "waterfowl" trailer and loaded the ATV trailer because it was too muddy to get in the field with the trucks. We had brought 8 dozens of full body Green head goose decoys and 2 dozens of full body Green head duck decoys, including the Mojo Mallard just in case some ducks decide to join the club.

As expected, we stuck to the plan and decided to put our lay-down blinds in the ditch, where they were really easy to conceal, and set our spread of decoys in front of us in a W shape to make sure there is enough space for the honkers to land. Concealment is for us the key element for a successful hunt. We pay attention to the details and we don't overlook any technical aspects like the decoy setup, calling techniques, use of a flag, etc. We love to fool the birds and have them on the X. We have better clean shots that way too.

The geese spent the night on a river close to where we were and when the sun started to raise, a few flocks of geese showed up. The first few flocks never stopped and were going to a different field. We were a bit concerned but we quickly realized that there was a lot more geese than we thought in our area. After maybe 15 minutes, our geese started to drop in our spread and finally we unloaded our guns. We killed 9 out of 12 on the first shot and 6 on the second shot. Flocks were coming one after the other and they were very confident. Our strategy worked well and we had a blast. It took about 30 minutes to kill our limit of 30 geese. We have not seen any ducks on that morning but time will come where ducks will be falling from the sky.

That day was only the first day of our week off. We had a lot of successful hunts throughout that week and it is very satisfying when you get results after waiting for so long to finally reload the freezer for the coming winter months.