On The Road For Snows

March 29, 2009

Our Crew I’m in the back then L to R NCState, Pickle, Billy, & Hawkeye

Travel half way across the country with 4 other guys and you know there has to be some stories. I’ve had a few ask me about my trip and I’ll admit I’ve been slack.
We left North Carolina headed for Mound City Missouri the center of the snow goose spring migration. We traveled together in a van towing a trailer of dogs for the hunt. The ride was really not bad given that we all don’t see each other much but we love to hunt.

I had never been to St. Louis so it was exciting to catch a glimpse of the arch as we rolled through.

Cabela’s in Kansas City was great, some had to get supplies for this trip while others don’t need much of an excuse to shop at Cabela’s . One of the guys who had been to this Cabela’s before insisted we had to eat lunch there because they made wild game sandwiches. Had many of us thought about the rest of the week and all the sandwiches we would consume we may have opted for something else.

The weather had to be the big story of this trip; days before we got there the temperatures were in the 70’s but a front arrived about the same time we did. The first day of the hunt the high for the day was 56’ with one important note that it happened at midnight. A few of our group missed that part so as the temperature continued to drop throughout the day the lack of cold weather gear really began to take a toll. The 40’s and rain in the morning was replaced by the mid 20’s spitting snow and a steady 30 gusting to 40 mph wind. The wind chill had to be the hardest thing to deal with especially after getting wet earlier in the day. I was one who had watched the weather closely and I was pretty prepared for what we faced that day.

The hunting the first day was not the best but we had a lot of opportunities that we didn’t capitalize on. Unlike Canada geese that seem to come in a bit lower the snows come in high and just drop. When the day ended we had a number of birds but we knew we should have had a lot more.
The second day was a lot colder the corn field went from being a muddy mess to frozen tundra. The weather in Missouri was cold but just to the north in the Dakota’s the rain we got was snow up there. They had blizzard conditions which was now forcing the migrating geese that had already traveled through Missouri and north into the Dakotas to reverse the migration and fly back south to find food. We saw a lot of birds many headed south and a pretty good day of hunting. The wind was not as bad but it blew steady all day. The day ended and we had a better pile of birds then the first day but we still knew our shooting had not been the best letting many of the decoying birds to escape.
The final day of our hunt was a spectacular one. The sky was filled with flock after flock of bird all morning and that was only a small taste of what the afternoon held for us. The final afternoon was one of those hunts I think all of us will remember forever. We killed some birds but even more spectacular was the migration flight we witnessed that day. The weather had really piled the birds up in the area many of the locals told us that they thought there was record number of birds resting in the area. That afternoon the birds began flying about 3:30 and from then on there was almost never a time that you couldn’t see birds in the air.

There were a number of times that afternoon when we had the white tornado over our heads as 5 or 6 hundred birds circled our decoys. That was a sight to see and one I’ll not soon forget. Late in the afternoon we just laid our guns down and soaked the whole scene in as we laid there in the blind and the flocks flew by.
While we didn’t kill as many birds we had thought we would we did all right and brought back a cooler of birds. There are a number of other stories and laughs we shared that week that maybe I’ll share in the future. We had a great trip and one we’ll not soon forget.