Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2025 i Wildfowl

WHAT A WILD WATERFOWL year it’s been, and it’s not over. Now, we are entering the truly mad season, when countless white geese wing their way back to the far north. This is our first issue dedicated solely to the fantastic, boundless snow goose hunting North America offers from the Gulf Coast to northern Canada. We wanted to target the thrill of the conservation order season and moved our normal April issue up to February. I’m hoping to make it back to Alberta for the late, late show, the May migration, where the birds stage and linger to fatten up before they have to “jump the trees” and fly over the boreal forest with no food for thousands of miles. It’s wildly good hunting, with the birds only lightly pressured…

❚ DAKOTA DECOY X-TREME SNOWS Dakota’s X-treme Snows aim to simplify your life by reducing moving parts and includes a motion system that is easy to attach and detach in one simple step. Sold in six-packs of either juvie, blue, or adult snow goose that include motion bases, eliminating the pain-in-the-butt need to drill holes in frozen ground. Each decoy includes Dakota’s Wind-Walker motion system that creates realistic movement birds can’t resist. Whether you are just starting to build your snow rig or looking to add a few new decoys this spring, these decoys will certainly help you save the Tundra. $140 per 6 | dakotadecoy.com ❚ LUCKY DUCK SUPER FLAPPER HDI 2.0 – SNOW GOOSE We all know that motion is vital to convincing white geese into the decoys,…

Killing a snow goose was on my bucket list when I was in my 20s. That was 40 years ago or more. I realized my dream on a trip to Texas when snow goose numbers were near their peak in the Lone Star State. Not only did I harvest my first snow goose, but I also shot an exquisite eagle-head blue goose. I didn’t know how rare the bonus trophy goose was at the time. “For hundreds of years, blue and snow geese were considered separate species,” said Josh Dooley, waterfowl biologist for the USFWS Division of Migratory Bird Management. “Through the early 1900s, the two had rather separate breeding and wintering ranges, which promoted the perception that they were separate species. Researchers ultimately proved that they are not different…

THE LIGHT GOOSE CONSERVATION SEASON has special rules that give us the chance to really amp up the fire power. Make sure you have a shotgun that spits hulls far and can sport a magazine extension tube so you can pull the trigger as much as possible when those storm clouds of snows descend. I was in high school in the late 90s when the Light Goose Conservation Order began. A young, budding goose addict living where thousands of flocks pushed through. I couldn’t get enough. Wanting to take full advantage of the unique regulations, my brothers and I loaded up in a single-cab Ford Ranger and drove five hours to the nearest Cabela’s. We had enough for a new electronic caller with speakers rivaling the most impressive 1980s boombox…

THE FINAL DAY OF duck season is bittersweet. We’re glad the grind is over, and we can catch up on sleep. But if there was another day, week or month of the season, we’d gladly embrace it. Just because the season is over doesn’t mean you have to stop looking for ducks. Now all we do is hunt without a gun. Last January our area was hit by a devastating ice storm and flooding. It damaged a canal system forcing it to be drained indefinitely. I’d hunted sloughs off that canal since the 1970s. With no water, I had to find where the wood ducks and mallards went. Through scouting and running trail cameras in February, March and into April, I found two new areas the ducks were using. As…

I watched him leave. He didn’t prolong it, and didn’t, like so many others, predict that “they’ll be back.” When Mike Ladnier saw snow geese disappearing from the rice fields of coastal Texas in the early 2000s, he transitioned his Bay Prairie Outfitters guide service to Canada. He closed the Texas piece of his business for good in 2014. For years, as I drove by those shuttered doors, I was reminded of our hunts for snows, specsk, and little Canadas. I was slow to admit those birds were gone, probably for good. But Mike knew. Last fall, I decided it was time to join him in Saskatchewan. The southern Saskatchewan terrain that Bay Prairie calls home varies from flat to rolling, its landforms resulting from the advance and retreat of…

BEFORE THE 1900S, snow geese made a non-stop journey from their northern breeding grounds to wintering areas along the Texas and Louisiana coast. It was common for people to collect weak or even dead birds from the prairie that fell, exhausted, from their passage. Snow, blue, Ross’s, and white-fronted geese began moving inland from the coast after the introduction of rice and man-made reservoirs. One early Texas rice farmer remembers: “We didn’t know what a white goose was. We called ‘em white or blue brant. Everybody decided to go out and kill one, to see how they tasted.” By the 1940s, prairie hunters began developing ways to decoy the growing numbers of white geese in their rice fields. The Texas rag spread—loosely defined as hundreds of pieces of anything white…

The first year I started hunting was also the first year that my home state of Utah opened a spring snow goose hunt. I was already in love with chasing waterfowl, but snow geese…from the stories I’d heard and the videos I had seen, this was going to change my life—for better or worse. I only faced one dilemma; I didn’t own any snow goose decoys. With all my youthful ingenuity, I decided to take white grocery bags and draw on them with black sharpie to create the black wing tips. Then I whittled sticks long enough to serve as stakes and taped the bags to them. After a few hours of working, I had a spread of 14 grocery bags. I couldn’t have been more excited. The hunt arrived,…