SnowDak 10/04/12 Morning Hunt

The good news this morning was that we were finally going to be getting some colder weather that should help out with the hunting a bit. The bad news was that it was now coming at the tail end of the trip. Oh well, you can't plan for what Mother Nature is going to deal out, you can only play with the cards she gives you. We certainly worked hard to do the best we could with those cards. Thursday morning's hunt looked like we were going to be using those snow covers that we decided to pack, and what a good decision that turned out to be.

The field that we decided to hunt had been holding geese all week, and on occasion the surrounding fields did as well. This particular field however seemed to be the only one that was consistent, so we made the call to hunt here on Thursday morning. The other neat thing about this spot was that is was enlisted into North Dakota's PLOTS program, which stands for Private Land Open To Sportsmen. Essentially anybody could walk right in and hunt here, which leads me to the toughest part about this hunt. We couldn't drive the truck & trailer out into the field to set up. With that in mind, we packed in as light as possible, carrying only 2 dozen Hard Core full body geese and 3 dozen Big Al's goose silhouettes to help hide our layout blinds.

After working up a good sweat from the trek into the field, we hunkered down out of the howling wind behind some pines in the distant fence row. That break didn't last too long because as legal shooting light was drawing near we could hear wing beats over head. Mallards were already circling the spread. A quick dash was made to seek shelter in the snow covered blinds as we watched birds drop down and just about land on  top of us. Moments later our watches signaled we were legal, the mojos were flipped on, and whistling wings were once again circling above. Soon the white blanket covering the ground around us was turning red.

After the initial flurry of ducks came through we figured it would be a while before the geese decided to get up and eat. Typically that's the case. Wrong again. From the moment the shooting started it didn't really stop until our four man goose limit was filled, with the intermittent mallards also falling down around us, in short order the immediate area resembled a battle field. This time out, we won.

I recorded this short clip after we were wrapped up and ready to pack out for the morning. This was truly one of those hunts that you don't experience all that often. The amount of geese that showed up, and wanted to feed in this exact field was just simply awesome to watch. It was nearly an endless stream of geese just kept popping up on the horizon and filtering through to the field. The clip doesn't do it justice...

O - H.....   I - O!!!!!