GOOSE HUNTING. LEARNING DECOY PLACEMENTS. By DENNIS HUNT You are in an area with lots of geese, you have a good hunting team with you as well as a trailer full of decoys. Now, you are going to set your decoys up and go home with a limit of geese. WRONG! Trying to trick a goose by using decoys is getting harder each year. The geese are getting more wary and most cannot be tricked or fooled. They are living longer lives and live on super memory, eyesight and hearing. They might be able to see 10 to 20 times better than a goose hunter. They know what decoys are and most will not go close to a decoy spread. However, they look them over and could look at 5,000 spreads during a hunting season. The hunting season for snow geese in 2000 totals 274 days. It ended on May 31 and will start again on September 1. It will get only harder to get a goose for dinner as these old geese have seen every spread and heard every call. They encounter hunters who have used the same decoys, same decoy spreads, same style of concealment for 20 years and don’t understand that the geese know what is going on! The geese even know these guys by their first names. They have been using the same 240 shell decoys in a half-moon decoy spread while sitting on a 5 gallon bucket with white outfits on. They are not very creative and don’t have any imagination. They don’t bring home many geese. I use small spreads of decoys because I have learned thru experience that, LESS IS BETTER THAN MORE! Canada geese see 200 decoys in a field several times a day and snows see 500 decoys in a field as many as 20 times a day. They know what is going on. You have to use a different trick with these clever geese. It is like a card game! You have to have a lot of different ways to play the game if you are going to win the game. The goose hunter has a memory but, the geese can remember things 100 times better than a goose hunter. They have to! It is survival for them! I have had some great hunts using 4 dozen or less decoys. In 1999, I hunted over 6 full body decoys at least 18 times during the early nuisance Canada season. The field was a 7 acre oats field with geese flying into that field in family groups of 6 or two family groups of 12. The field would hold as many as 200 but, they were flying in families. If I would have put out a spread of 200 decoys, I might have scared them away because they had not seen 200 geese fly into that field together! I had 3 great days of hunting in Saskatchewan in 1999 without using any decoys. The snow geese knew what our big foots and North Winds were and would not decoy. We got skunked on Wednesday afternoon but hunted the same field on Thursday, Friday and Saturday mornings using low profile blinds covered with swathed barley. Two of harvested 110 snow geese and 32 mallards without using a decoy! I did the same thing in December, January and February while hunting snow geese South of Kansas City. They would not decoy so we didn’t use decoys and "killed them". I had another good hunt in Saskatchewan one windy morning using only 15 decoys. I killed my limit of 8 mallards and 20 old blues in 45 minutes while hiding in a tree line with my truck parked in the same tree line 50 yards away. The wind was blowing 47 mph and the geese wanted that field. I really gave it to them! You don’t have to use any set number of decoys. It depends on the mood of the geese. Some are very hard and some can be easy. It depends on how much hunting pressure they have received over the years. Some geese get pounded day after day and others flying different routes see very little hunting pressure. Let me show you a standard decoy spread. NOTE. The wind direction and position the hunters are hiding in their low profile blinds covered with straw from that same field. There is also straw spread around the blind to make it less conspicuous. The hunters are hiding with the teeth of the wind to their backs and the geese have to fly over their hiding spot. The large squares indicates family groups of 1 sentry and 6 feeder decoys. The decoys are 3 feet apart and the family groups are 10 to 15 yards away. There are North Wind hovering decoys in a foursome that look like they have just landed. The smaller squares are North Wind windsocks sprinkled on the edge of the spread. This is not a large spread of decoys but, it is effective with movement and a large landing zone for the geese. Concealment is the most important factor here.