Faking Out Snow Geese

It’s the time of year for snow goose hunting. The North Dakota season has been open for a little while, but now is a good time to be north by the Canadian border, setting up decoys and shooting some birds. The main flyway has already came through North Dakota, but a lot of those big flocks don’t even stop in North Dakota; they just fly right through.

That past few weeks were a good time to pass shoot geese. This is when you find a couple bigger groups of geese on the ground that are flying back and forth from one location to the other. Then you just try to sneak your way out into the middle of these two groups and shoot the geese as they fly over. This is a lot of fun and can be very rewarding if you put yourself in the right place at the right time.

The way to hunt these geese now is to decoy them. This is where you set out a spread of fake geese on the ground and conceal your position. This is a good time because most of the mature geese fly straight to Canada right away, but the younger geese or the juveniles come a little bit later. The younger geese are much easier to decoy. Snow geese can get as old as forty human years. So some of them have seen every decoy spread known to man and are too smart to fly low enough over the hunters.

The younger geese will still decoy, so you need to find a field that you have permission to hunt and set up as many decoys as you can get your hands on. Back in the day, it was much easier to decoy these birds or to get them to land where you have a shot. Hunters used to use white plastic bags and white disposable forks as decoys, and it worked. Now you need actual goose decoys, which are mostly made of plastic and mimic the look of snow geese pretty well. Some of the newer decoys even have felt heads on them, which looks very realistic.

With quality comes higher price, and these decoys can get pretty spendy. Snow geese are very overpopulated, and the farmers are more than happy for hunters to shoot them as long as they give you permission to hunt their land. There is no limit on snow geese because they are so overpopulated, and you don’t need to have a choke in your shotgun, which means that your gun can fit five or more shells in it as apposed to the normal three shell limit imposed by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) when hunters go for ducks and other species of geese. This makes it easier to shoot more geese when you do get the chance.

This is a lot of fun, and this is also one of the only seasons open for hunting right now in North Dakota. So, if you’re itching to get out and hunt, I would recommend getting out as soon as possible before all of the geese leave North Dakota and head for Canada.