GOOSE HUNTING. LEARNING ABOUT DECOYS By DENNIS HUNT This subject is frustrating to most goose hunters. They want to be a good goose hunter and they want to use decoys to hunt geese. However, they don’t know much about decoys and can’t find the right answers. Only a goose hunter with lots of experience can attempt to give them advice on decoys and, he is only speculating. He will always speculate because you can’t get the answer from the geese because they can’t communicate with goose hunters. However, an experienced goose hunter watches geese for thousands of hours and has a good idea of what is taking place. I would like to go to "goose heaven" and find out the following questions from the geese: How far away could you see my decoy spreads? Were you ever close to getting shot going towards decoys and what kind fooled you that time? What was the worst spread of decoys you ever looked at? How many spreads do you see each hunting season? How much movement in a decoy spread convinced you that that field had live geese in? How many family members of yours were killed going towards decoy spreads? How bad sounding were some of those goose calls you heard? Would a small decoy spread fool you or a field full of decoys? What decoy/s almost fooled you the most? Did decoys "shine" a lot because they hadn’t been painted or was it because they were made from plastic? If we could have these answers before the goose hunting season started that we would all improve our harvests of geese and end some of our frustrations. We would "clean up our bad habits" and start doing it the right way. Before you set your decoys out onto a likely field, you should ask yourself, what is your objective? The answer should be, to trick a goose, a pair of geese or a small family of geese to break away from the oncoming flock and get closer to your hiding place and give you an opportunity to shoot your gun. Hunting is about OPPORTUNITIES! By setting out a good spread of decoys in a field that the geese like and by being concealed, you should get 3 to 5 opportunities each morning to harvest Canada geese and 3 to 7 opportunities to get some snow geese. The reason you would get more opportunities to get snow geese is, there are more of them! If your hunting party of 4 gets 3 opportunities to get some Canada’s and shoot well, you would end up with 6 to 8 geese each time out. That is a great hunt! How many decoys do I need? After hunting geese for 35 years, I am convinced that less is better than more. Geese have become very wary and are hard to fool. Canada geese see spreads of 200 in every field while snows see 500 in most fields. Every field looks the same and the geese are not fooled. In recent years, 50 of my most successful goose hunts have been using less than 48 goose decoys. I had some great hunts using 0 decoys because the snow geese knew we were using phony geese to try to kill them. We stayed in the same field with great concealment and "smoked the geese" without using a decoy! What are the best decoys? After years of experience, I use the big foot decoy with inter-changeable Canada and white heads. I use the white head on the Canada body and turn it into a blue goose while hunting snow geese. While hunting Canada geese, I use the Canada head on the Canada body. I compliment this with North Wind windsocks and hovering windsocks. I usually have 75% of movement decoys in my decoy spread. I have purchased every decoy ever made and this works the best for me. I owned 5,700 decoys in 1998 because I am an impulsive buyer! Some information for your benefit: Geese cannot determine size. They see only images. Geese are familiar with black and white and any other color makes them aware! You can mix and match your decoys in your spread. You will be the only one that knows the difference. Geese could be flying 55 mph as they go towards a decoy spread. They are looking for danger in the spread, not cosmetics! BEST ADVICE. Try different things and use what works best for you. GOOD LUCK!