Location Location Location

January 7, 2007

The words I heard a few years back in a Sean Mann goose hunting seminar was echoing in my head this morning as I watched the third group of geese landing about 75-80 yards away from us but well outside the effective killing range of out shotguns. If ever a place called for a layout blind it was this farmer’s field. A hunt here last year with layouts was one of the best goose hunts of the season and memories of that hunt haunted me this morning.

Sean Mann’s point years ago was that you want to set up exactly where the geese want to be not near where they want to be. Scouting is the key to correctly identifying the location you need to be when the sun starts to crack the horizon and the geese begin to fly. One of our party had scouted this field out all last week. Yesterday there was about 200 out in the middle of the field. Not everyone in our group had layouts so they got left in the trucks and we set up in the tree line along the field edge. The plan was with the help of decoys to pull the birds LZ over about 30-40 yards and well within the kill zone of our shotguns.

Moving those geese 40 yards was a near impossible plan and we’d of been better off trying to herd cats. We had 5 flocks come in and only 2 of them came close enough for us shoot at. Although the hunting was tough we managed to kill two geese.

The two fellows in the photo are two really great men. Although they don’t hunt much with us they do frequently join us on our hunts. It’s great to hear the stories Bill and Elmer tell and it was great to have them join us this morning. From their vantage point across the field in the truck they just knew we should have had our limit instead of just killing 2 geese.