Fun in the Sun: Saturday Afternoon

September 13, 2011 Shawn West Leave a comment

I arrived back from grocery pick up after the morning hunt just in time to find everyone back at the farm and ready to go; they told me to hurry up and get my gear together for the afternoon trip.

While I double-checked to make sure that I had not forgotten anything, Tack laid down the plan. There were three cut grain fields bordering the highway just outside of town and while no geese had been feeding in them yet, they were primed for a hunt. We had a skeleton crew for the afternoon, with just six of us heading out. I’ve never had a lot of success in afternoon hunts during the early season, but as the proverb goes “make hay while the sun shines”. I was up there to hunt, and hunt I would. It was very hot out with little in the way of a breeze though, so rather than load up with camo, I opted instead for the oh-so-fashionable t-shirt and shorts with rubber boots look. We packed up the trucks and Lucas, Hastings, Dane, Jason, myself, Tack and Tack’s dog Levi headed for the fields. Rory was going to show, but later decided not to.

Levi looking keen to get going

This was Levi’s first hunt, so Tack set his blind up towards the back and facing near perpendicular to our line of blinds, opting only to shoot at birds that were outside the pocket we had created with our decoys. Levi, wearing a coat of the golden yellow that blended seamlessly with the grain stubble, crouched down in the grass next to Tack’s blind even hopping in with Tack once or twice (Levi’s not too big just yet, and Tack is rail-thin so it wasn’t as cramped as you’d think). This pup had been in training for just under a year, but we all had high hopes for him. He’d turn out to be the highlight of the day.

As we put the finishing touches on our setup and settled into our blinds, I became aware of two potential challenges for this hunt. First, even though we had gone a couple of hundred yards out into the middle of the north grain field, the east edge of the field was still close enough to the highway that the noise of cars driving on it made hearing geese at a distance difficult. The second was a challenge and a mixed blessing. A slight breeze had picked up and was blowing out of the east, which allowed us to set up facing away from the highway and thus negating any risk that we’d have to shoot our shotguns towards the roadway (even at a couple of hundred yards it is never a good idea to be popping off towards traffic…I’ve still seen some hunters do it though). As some of you have likely inferred though, facing west on an afternoon hunt on a sunny day poses its own issues. We brushed the blinds up extra heavily and settled in with the mid-afternoon sun beating down directly on our faces. It was just about 3pm. For over two hours we lounged in the sun, making jokes, telling stories, and generally having fun at one another’s expense. No geese flew.

Yours truly getting too much sun before the action started

Lucas and Jason relaxing in the sun

I was sitting back listening to some nonsense story being shared by a couple of the guys when Jason, who was laying in the stubble at the far left of the set-up, shouted something along the lines of “[expletive]! There’s geese right there!”

Sure enough a group of about a dozen geese was gliding in from behind us. Between the highway noise, our overly-relaxed demeanours, and the fact that no one had really thought to look behind us, we were caught with our blinds open, some of us had our guns unloaded, and Lucas literally had his pants down (it was hot and he was stripping off a layer inside his blind when the geese showed up). The geese were obviously aware that something was not right as we covered up, loaded guns, and tried to turn the geese back. With some comeback calls we were able to swing the birds and they began to filter into the decoys. But about 10 yards outside of the sweet spot the geese changed their mind and flared off to the south, settling into another field that was being cut to the southwest. Now we had to compete with the real thing just a few hundred yards from us, which is always frustrating. Not that it mattered for the next hour or so, as nothing was really flying. Just near to 6pm, and after I had gotten a very nasty sunburn on my cheeks and ears, we had another group work or decoys, and this time we were ready for them. Unfortunately a mix up on who was calling the shot led to some of us opening up on them just a bit outside of where we should have, and we only scratched down one, and this bird glided down into some tall grass towards the field’s northwest corner. The rest joined the live birds in the southwest field.

Cue Levi. He was live to the action and with very little prompting began chasing down the escapee. With no hesitation at all he tackled the goose and began to bring it back to hand from a distance of well over a hundred yards. We all whooped and clapped as the dog (one that is really just barely past being a puppy) bounded back towards us with the goose gripped by the breast. A dog has never received so much praise for a retrieve, and it was a first retrieve to remember. Tack was obviously proud, as any owner would be, and we remarked that if we didn’t pop another cap all afternoon that retrieve made the day a winner; it will be a treasured memory for certain. Turns out, though, there was more action to come, and it was made clear who was calling the shot in the future.

But at first it looked like the live decoys a field over were going to skunk our hunt on us. We saw a lot of geese, hundreds really, but all of them had their vectors set on the field full of live geese. Almost every group didn’t even bother to give our fakes a glance. I’ll tell you this though, I learned more in two hours of just listening to how wild geese on the ground call to flying birds than I ever have listening to instructional CDs or videos. It was unreal how good the real sounded and I will freely admit to the crushing inadequacy I felt while I listened to the gaggle of geese summon basically every bird we laid eyes on their field. Eventually though, the farmer who was working the field kicked them up with his combine and with birds in the air we were able to use some flagging and pleading calls to get them to swing our way. Between about 6:45pm and 7:30 when we decided to pack it in, we had four flights of about five or six birds per group come our way and we got nine more birds out of them in total.

I was especially happy to hammer down on one flight that tried to set down about 90 yards outside our setup. They circled and didn’t want to commit but we put some nasty ground calling on them and they picked up and tried to land right on the bullseye. Geese skirting the edges of spreads had been a problem for a while for me, but about two-years ago I found that by aggressively auto-clucking (basically doing a rapid fire duck feeding chatter on my goose call) I could get most groups to stop their descent and slide on over to where I needed them to be. It’s a pretty mean sounding noise and I don’t fully understand how it works, since I’ve not heard much that resembles it coming from live geese but I’ve called in and killed a lot more geese than I would normally have since I started doing it, although other hunters prefer to use a train note or aggressive push-moans to achieve the same effect. To each their own I always say.

But the real story wasn’t our calling, or how we shot, or how well the geese worked. The highlights all went to Levi. He made a couple more good retrieves, and it was obvious that he was both getting tired and also obviously having a blast being out hunting. His tail thumped the back of my legs more than once as he bounded excitedly back and forth while we packed up; he was just a happy dog out having a good time, which is always nice to see.

Levi and the ten geese from the evening of Saturday, September 10th, 2011

The shadows were getting long as we took some photos and packed up the gear. My thanks go out to Lucas Hunter for the photos accompanying this post; he’s a pretty talented photographer and photo editor with just enough modesty to make the images he generates all the more impressive. After a quick tour around the area to scout out a field for the morning, we cleaned the geese and enjoyed a beer in the hollow behind the farm in a looming, still dusk that gave way to a brilliant full moon and sky full of late-summer (or should I say early fall?) stars. As we stood around sipping brews, chuckling and telling stories, I took a few steps away from the group to enjoy a moment or two of semi-peaceful reflection in the open field under the moon and stars. Distantly a coyote yipped and somewhere far out of sight more big Canada geese loafed on the calm waters of Georgian Bay and Lake Huron. We’d be after them again in the morning, hoping to add to the count that we had in the bag from the day that was just then coming to a close. My absence was noted and someone shouted to me to come back and join in the camaraderie once more.

Who am I to say no to that?

goose hunting, hunting

The Right Way to Open a Goose Season-Saturday Morning’s Hunt

September 12, 2011 Shawn West Leave a comment

I’d been going stir crazy for nearly a week, doing everything from trying to pretend that the impending goose season was “no big deal” to furiously writing some pretty awful haiku poetry. Then suddenly it was upon me; the open road, the sun shining on my left arm as I cruised with it draped out the driver’s side window, and the knowledge that in a few short hours I would be laughing with friends as we prepared for what for many of us is the unofficial kick-off to the fall season.

I drove through some very pretty country as I made my way from Mississauga up through Hockley into the Georgian Highlands, before eventually picking up Highway 6 in Chatsworth and continuing on to the farm. As I passed through Wiarton my friend Lucas flipped me a text and I read it while stopped at one of the three traffic lights in town. He had arrived just ahead of me and was assembling his layout blind. He also told me that he had an ice-cold beverage waiting for me when I arrived. Some friends just know. The trip had been good with little traffic, nice weather and it afforded me the opportunity to think and to listen to some music, including a new addition to my list of favourite hunting tunes, the album “Flood” from They Might Be Giants. I’ve had this CD since the mid 1990’s and it is just plain old eclectic awesomeness. I won’t make another hunting trip without it.

Anyways, we convened in the laneway, checked all our gear, laid out the blinds, calls, decoys and other necessary impediments that every goose hunter treks out into the fields and marshes with before loading it into Lucas’s Jeep. My sister and some of her friends showed up for a wedding that was taking place that weekend, and then a group of even more hunting buddies arrived for some planning, some good-natured arguing, some laughs and a bit of storytelling before we turned in. I still have that giddy, anticipatory sleep that goes with not really being able to wait for something. Some people get it at Christmas, or the first day at school, or something like that, but for me, I just can’t get to sleep the night before the first goose hunt of the year. My mind is filled with thoughts of what the day will hold and how the geese will behave, with a dash of worry that my alarm won’t go off and I’ll somehow sleep through the whole thing. This latter irrational fear usually results in me waking up twenty minutes before my alarm goes off, and Saturday, September 10^th was no exception.

We met at the local gas station and laid out the final agenda. I and the three others with layout blinds would set up in a cut grain field with little perimeter cover, while the other six or eight guys would man another cut grain field just across the county road; their field had a good ditch and standing corn surrounding it. In the grainy breaking dawn we put out a couple of dozen shells and full body decoys and then ‘brushed up’ our blinds with some grain stubble, a task coincidentally that I’ll get better at with practice. I endured some heavy teasing from the other three, but the geese didn’t seem to mind once the flight started. In a line, Tack, myself, Lucas, and Rory faced west-south-west with both the flaming orange glow of a morning sun and a light September breeze coming over our left shoulders. The first thin skeins of geese appeared out of the north, flying high and showing no interest in our flagging our calling. Fully 200 birds traded past a height that advertised to every hunter around that those geese had no interest in detouring from their planned destination. Once, with heavy flagging and excited calling, we were able to peel a group of four off the tail end of one such high-flying flock; they rocked and glided into our setup and after Tack, lounging to my left, and I had finished two of those four stayed behind with us. It wasn’t great shooting for the first group of the season, but it was a start and my adrenaline was pumping. A group of about twenty birds barreled in from the west, and while we made an attempt to work them, it became immediately apparent that they were on a beeline down the pipe into the cut grain field that housed the rest of our group. Our compatriots scratched down eight birds after a frenzy of shots and my cousin Dane would later say that those birds finished just perfectly into the decoys. I love it when that happens, although unfortunately, it was the only group to drop in on the field being patrolled by the balance of our hunting party.

We saw more groups of geese, but never worked in a group that held more than six birds. Either through dumb luck or perfect planning (or perhaps a 70-30 combination of both) the geese that we were able to work were decoying perfectly and we called it a hunt more out of a desire to eat a giant Farmer’s Breakfast at Mom’s Restaurant in Ferndale than out of a lull in the action. In all we had eight birds on the ground just as the other party did, but we had the more frequent of the shooting. Some rusty shotgunning on my part, and a jammed shell that occurred as I only half-pumped my gun before trying to continue onto a pair of birds that were literally hanging in the air ten yards from my barrel kept my personal tally to two birds, but it was still a good kick off as I learned the nuances of layout blind hunting and worked to overcome some of the habits I’ve developed over the last 17 years of pass shooting geese from the sidelines of grain and corn fields. Lesson #1: unlike when you are pass shooting and you need to call geese all the way down, once a group cups their wings and floats into your layout blind spread, the call can go down and the guns can come up. If anything I rushed a couple of shots because I was still calling to birds that were committed when I really should have been putting both hands on my 870 and getting ready to come up firing. Oh well, as I’ve said before, it’s not always about quantity. Lesson #2: you can generally call more quietly to geese when you’re lying out in the decoys. While ear-splitting volume is good for hail work, tone, inflection, and cadence count when the gunning is close.

We scarfed down (or at least I scarfed down) a big breakfast and drove back up to the farm to dress out the sixteen geese and engage in the epic historical rite of retelling stories from a hunt that had concluded no less than 90 minutes before. My hands and my knife got filthy, but as strange as it sounds, it was nice getting a little mud and blood under my nails. It adds a tactile reality to going out and getting your own meat, some of which is destined for the meat grinder, while some of it has a date with my stock pot where it will become the backbone of my classic Stewed Canada Goose. In the end, it will all go where it ought to which is into our bellies.

We resolved to take a brief siesta and while one or two from the group would take a quick scout around the area for a spot to set up for the afternoon hunt, I made a quick jaunt into town to get the necessary requirements for dinner. Just as I came out of the grocery store, laden with potato chips, baloney for frying, bread for toasting, and Walla Walla sweet onions for caramelizing (more on that in tomorrow’s post) I heard the excited chatter of a gaggle of geese as they literally fell out of the sky and into Lion’s Head Harbour. As I watched the birds careen out of the azure blue sky and clumsily skid down into the equally blue water I couldn’t help reflecting back on the morning that had just passed. We could have shot better and we could have shot more, but really we couldn’t have asked for a better start to the 2011 waterfowl campaign. Little did we know how much better things were going to get on the afternoon hunt.

haikus?, hunting

Everybody Loves a Haiku, Right?

September 8, 2011 Shawn West Leave a comment

So for some inexplicable reason I turned to haiku poetry as a way to calm my overly taut nerves in advance of the goose hunting opener here in Southern Ontario. For those unfamiliar with the concept, haiku is a traditional style of Japanese poetry that for North Americans roughly translates into three lines totaling 17 syllables in a 5/7/5 syllable style. While there is some debate over traditional haiku versus Westernized haiku, and so on (check the Wikipedia page for haiku if you want more on that) it is generally accepted that a 17 syllable poem in 5/7/5 style is a haiku. They don’t have to rhyme.

It was actually a pretty good idea, as reading the meditative, naturalistic stanzas of Issa and Basho put me in a serene state of mind. That was until I decided that while there are many classic hunting stories, and maybe even a couple of poems (or dirty limericks) about hunting, there was a real shortage of haiku poetry that paid tribute to the pursuit of hunting. So despite what my better judgment told me to do, I wrote a few haikus of my own. Some are beautiful if you ask me, but others are downright dumb.

A Preliminary Haiku of Apology

Now you shall have to

Suffer through these, that is if

You be brave enough.

Goose Season Opens

Goose season opens,

I sit alone at my desk.

Anticipating.

The First Flight

The first flight of birds

Sneaks up on me in the blind.

My nap is cut short.

Deer Hunting is Hard

Deer hunting is hard,

If you fail to grasp that a

Deer can outsmart you.

How Many Miles

For how many miles

Will the wingbeats be heard? I

Missed that grouse badly.

Cold Water

An old leaky boot

Makes the walk back to the truck

Unbearably long.

Floating on Air

A goose on approach

Floats in the air serenely

Before the guns bark.

A Haiku on False Hope

It is strange how the

Shooting continues after

The ducks have flown off.

I could go on like this for hours (because when you write terrible haikus, it really isn’t that hard to be ultra-productive) but I’m sure you’ve all had enough for now. I may concoct a few more of these crimes against poetry this weekend while I’m chasing Canada geese all over the Bruce Peninsula, and although you may not want to see them…I’ll commit them to the blogosphere upon my return.

goose hunting, waterfowl hunting

All Goose Hunters are Liars

September 6, 2011 Shawn West Leave a comment

I’m writing this in response to the aggregate of some not-so-flattering feedback I received from some individuals who are obviously a more sophisticated and accomplished group of waterfowlers than I am. The one, most articulate, of them sent me an email deriding me as a ‘fraudulent, amateurish, lying hack”. Yes, that is a direct quote. Fair enough…I’ve always said that if you write enough you’re bound to piss someone off eventually. With a provocative title like the one above, I’m already anticipating even more backlash from the waterfowl powers-that-be. But here goes anyways.

Yes, it is the truth: all goose hunters are liars. I’m well-positioned to make this statement because I am an experienced goose hunter and an even more experienced and adept liar. One does not inevitably breed the other (i.e. while all goose hunters are liars, not all are adept liars…likewise not all adept liars are goose hunters, although by virtue of their skill they already meet more than half the criteria to be labeled a goose hunter) but generally if you meet a person one day at the gas station and they have mud on their waders, corn stubble stuck through their belt loops, and they have a lanyard of short reed goose calls and aluminum leg bands around their neck, odds are good that he (or she, I don’t discriminate when it comes to fibbers) has been goose hunting. Odds are even better that they are about to lie to you about something as they fill their pick-up truck (a truck that will no doubt be towing the ubiquitous trailer of morbidly expensive gear, of course).

Most of the lies that spew from the mouth of a goose hunter are benign, loving lies designed to either make the listener feel better about themselves or to make the liar in question seem like less of a lunatic/outcast/failure/success/etc. But this much is for sure, if a goose hunter tells you something, don’t trust it any further than you could throw said goose hunter. A goose hunter will lie about any number of hunting-related topics, the first category of which is the type of harmless lies told by someone who is either exceedingly proud or exceedingly ashamed of their pursuit. While the material of the lies may differ, the fact that they are deceptions is constant. A goose hunter will lie about the cost of their goose call; a proud one will inflate the price, an ashamed one will decrease the price. A goose hunter will lie about the store where they buy their equipment, lest you begin to frequent the establishment and deplete the stock. A goose hunter will lie about the size and velocity of the shotgun shells they shoot, and they will most assuredly lie about the shell’s pattern density and efficacy downrange, for various, poorly understood reasons. A goose hunter will also lie rampantly about their own shooting ability; if a goose hunter states that they are a crack shot, they are likely terrible. If a goose hunter tells you they miss a lot of geese and that they need to hit the sporting clays range, rest-assured that they will shoot most of the birds that day, thus affording the lying scoundrel all of your undivided adulation.

The second category of lies that a goose hunter will tell you are what I like to call ‘tactical lies’. This type of fabrication is specifically employed to ensure that a goose hunter denies you vital information while simultaneously attempting to extract facts from you. **Note: this is not a type of lie exclusively practiced by goose hunters. In fact, I have met many turkey hunters, duck hunters, deer hunters, and even anglers that employ their own subtle variations of the ‘tactical lie’. In my experience though, no one does it quite as well as the goose hunting segment of the population. Ask a goose hunter what time the first flight is at, and then automatically subtract 90 minutes from it. This lie is designed to misinform other hunters of when the liar will actually be afield, in the hopes that the hunter in question can get first crack those early morning geese. Ask a goose hunter what the best part of a field or marsh to be set up in is and they will tell you a location that may be good, but one that is more likely just a spot that is far enough away from their intended blind so as to assure that there will be no worry over competition for birds. Ask them what call works best for them, and I can guarantee you they will demonstrate for you a sound that will most definitely not help you kill more geese; it may even drive geese away from you and inevitably towards the liar’s own mellow, magical brand of goose-music. Tactical lies stem from a selfish, ill-spirited streak that innately exists in all goose hunters. This streak precludes a goose hunter from ever actually forming a truly trustworthy relationship; befriend a goose hunter at your own risk, and woe unto the poor deluded individual who actually gets married to a goose hunter, for they will be subjected to the most heinous of goose-hunting’s lies: the lies of convenience.

Lies of convenience are reserved exclusively for spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends, various and sundry conjugal partners (because let’s face it, there is no person alive that is sexier than a goose hunter), and live-in roommates. Lies of convenience are also sometimes used (sparingly) on teachers, parents, non-hunting friends, and employers. These are the most basic, but also the most effective of the goose hunter’s entire arsenal of lies. If the hunting is bad, a goose hunter will tell you it was great; this will ensure that no one ever says that goose hunting is boring and pointless and therefore not worthy of continued pursuit. If the hunting was great, they will understate the brilliance of the day in order to ensure that they can say that they will be ‘making up for a bad day’ when they go on their next goose hunting trip. If they shot poorly, they will say they shot well, so as to save their ego from the ridicule of being considered unskilled. If they shot brilliantly they’ll use false modesty as their guide so that they can have more time in the marsh for ‘practicing’. And so forth.

It is a truly confusing world in which the goose hunter dwells; a world in which black is white, up is down, success if failure, and the only constant is that the geese will fly whenever they feel like it. But these are the facts, I promise you.

Which ultimately brings us to the following, cyclically logical conclusion. I, Shawn West, am a goose hunter. Therefore, I am by definition a liar. I am asserting to you that everything I have written above is the truth, but then again, as a goose hunter, I’m inclined (and some would say compelled) to lie to you. So what do you make of all this? How do you reconcile the above paragraphs and their seemingly authoritative statement of the facts? Maybe I’m using a tactical lie to dissuade others from joining in on my little slice of waterfowling paradise and crowding me. Perhaps I truly am a fraudulent hack with no business writing about the subject matter. Or is it possible that I’m just using this forum to have some fun with a topic (i.e. hunting) that was always meant to be fun in the first place, before some self-appointed authorities started determining what information about goose hunting was worthy of discussion in the public forum?

Who knows? After all, would I lie?