Pennsylvania Game News - September 2013 - 29

the pasture five times before dropping
and then setting down at the breast of
the pond. Perhaps half used the water
as their runway, the rest landed around
the breast and overflow. With a better
understanding of how the birds worked
the area, I slipped out of the barn and
headed home for breakfast.
My fellow waterfowl enthusiast,
Jimmy Smith, and I had collected
11 hard-earned geese in just the first
week of the season. Unfortunately, our
area does not have a lot of favorable
habitat for geese, and a lot of work
and miles had been put into getting
those 11 birds. With what I had just
witnessed in the past two days at the
current location, I could hardly wait
to call Jim with the good news. I felt
confident in telling Jimmy this hunt
held the potential of giving us a chance
at an early season limit. Although we
had accomplished the five-bird limit
in the November season on many occasions, the early season limit of eight
birds per person was something we had
never come close to filling. Because of
how the cattle pond and pasture were
situated, Jimmy and I decided to invite
only one greenhorn on the hunt.
While not completely new to waterfowling, Mike Holiday for the most
part was still a rookie, and had hunted
ducks and geese only a few times. Two
years prior, in January, I managed to
convince him to hunt Yellow Creek
Lake with me for ducks, and after that
icy adventure of wading out to an
exposed point in pitch black darkness,
he became addicted. Although he had
harvested mallards, wood ducks, a
green-winged teal and one goose while
accompanying us, he had never experienced a great shoot. When I called
him for the invite, he was reluctant to
SEPTEMBER 2013

make arrangements for missing work,
but my enthusiasm for the hunt was
hard to ignore.
Over the course of several seasons,
Jimmy and I had convinced ourselves
that the opportunity for a good goose
hunt ranked above most other commitments. That mindset was beginning to
rub off on Mike, and he also realized we
were not willing to wait until Saturday
for the new guy.
Although it would have been nice
to a have a few more shooters, the hunt
area was similar to many we deal with
in the early season. Resident geese
regularly feed and loaf in residential
settings with little fear of feeding in
manicured lawns, and they quickly
learn that most are safe havens. This
habit can make for some tight quarters,
so we always carry a laser rangefinder
when scouting potential hunting areas
to make sure we’re always well outside
of any safety zones.
With the geese spending the entire
day at the pasture, I was unable to walk
around the hunt area to get an exact
idea of how to set up the following
morning. However, from the cattle
barn I had pieced together a rough
idea of where we would attempt to
hide and how the decoys would be set.
Although shooting over water is typically avoided, as it quickly pushes the
birds out of the area, these birds were
not welcome nor were they roosting
on the pond. In addition to that, the
surrounding pasture was extremely
steep and would make decoying and
shooting anywhere other than over
the water difficult. With that in mind,
a combination of floaters and full body
decoys would be used to make the stock
pond the landing zone.
In the dark, the three of us made
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Pennsylvania Game News - September 2013

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