Digging In for Early Geese

[Mike Bard]

Date: September 2, 2008

Location: Upstate NY

Sunrise: 6:29 am

Weather: Sunny and warm

Temperature: Upper 50’s rising into the mid 70s

Wind: Calm

Equipment Used: Avery® Field Caps, Avery® Mud Case, Avery® Floating Gun Case, Avery® 6 Slot Decoy Bags, Avery® Finisher Blind Bags, GHG® Ground Force Dog Blind, Avery® Power Hunter Blinds, Avery® Power Flag, GHG® Lesser Canada Goose Decoys, and GHG® Hunter Series Honker Decoys

Hunters: Mike Hasman, Frank Clifton, Chris Davanzo and Avery® Pro-Staffer Mike Bard

The resident goose season kicked off Monday, September 1st across New York State and after an opening day I’d rather forget about, I got a call from Chris Davanzo; he had a field for day two lined up. I jumped at the opportunity to go out and hunt with Chris, as he and I have been trying to get together for a hunt for the past couple seasons, but he does some guiding in the regular duck and goose seasons and our schedules have never allowed us to make it work out.

Tuesday morning, my friend, Frank and I, drove out to Chris’ place where we met up with Chris and his buddy, Mike. The field had been plowed under, so there was little cover to hide in. Chris had a few shovels in his trailer, so we decided to dig a few shallow pits to lay our Power Hunters and Ground Force Dog Blind in, and then we used some clumps of straw left in the field to finish off our blinds. With the lack of cover, clear skies and sun, we knew that we needed a good hide to get the geese in close.





Shooting time arrived and not long after, we had the first group of the day approach and work the spread. They came in on our left side and looked as if they were going to over shoot us and land on the upwind side of the spread, so Chris called the shot, as they glided low over our hole and we had the first birds of the day. Some time passed before we saw any more geese in the air, but when we did, they weren’t headed for our field. Seemed like today the geese had decided to start looking for new food sources and we watched sporadic, small groups of geese land in near by fields.

We started to have our doubts about the future success of the hunt, but Chris reassured everyone that there were a lot more geese to fly on the morning, so we waited them out. He was right, the next group we saw come over the distant line of trees was headed straight for us, and we flagged and called them right into the pocket and added a few more geese to the day’s bag. Not long after a large group of geese headed towards us from a different direction, although these didn’t appear they knew where they wanted to go. We got pretty aggressive with the calling and flagging on this group and they responded, hooking around and following our line of decoys right into the hole. Just as their webbed feet were about to hit the dirt, the shot was called and eight geese lay on the field. It was a great set, the geese responded like we wanted them to the decoys, the flagging and the calling and everyone even shot well.

The morning went on and the temperatures climbed rapidly. No geese were in the air and everyone was getting baked in the sun, so we decided to call it a day and pack up and head home.



Thanks for having me out Chris!

[Brian Rhodes]

Nice JE Mike!

Congrats on a good hunt!

[Angelo Casbarro]

Way to go Mike! Great JE!

[Rusty Hallock]

Great job guys.

[ksayers]

Nice hunt guys!

[Darren Bondar]

Nice job Mike. I dont know about that side of the state but our leaves are starting to change and it's still in the 90's!!! Decoys, calls, blinds and Coppertone!

[hardcore dekem]

Looks like you had a great hunt!

[John Walls]

Thats cool guys, nice job!

[Honkershooter36]

Great job

[Ron Zega]

Way to go guys!! Looks like a great day!