Bottineau County, ND

by Culley Wilson
October 19, 2008

Day four of our ND trip started early, 3 am in fact, to make sure we got the field we scouted the afternoon before.  Tom Hughes, Chris Hawkins, and I all made the long trip from the Carolina's to ND this year.  We estimated around 2,000 honkers and 500-800 mallards in this particular field location.  We were very stoked being the wind direction was from the west which put sun at our backs allowing us to easily distinguish mallard drakes from the hens. There were no lessers or light geese in this area so we only used 4 dozen GHG FFD Canada Geese decoys and 6 dozen GHG Full Body decoys.

Once we arrived to the field we realized the wind direction had switched overnight.  We set up with the wind coming over our left shoulder towards our right foot hoping the birds would slide into the pocket of our set allowing us to distinguish drakes from hens.  This set up also made shooting easier and safer for us three right handed shooters.  As luck would have it, the mallards short landed us by a half mile with the switched wind direction just after the legal shooting time of 7:21 am and began feeding towards us. We decided to be patient having the watched the aggressive feeding behavior of the birds the three days previously.  We watched group after group of mallards pitch into the large congregation of feeding birds only 800 yards away and they were constantly jumping over each other to get to the front of the feeding frenzy.

Around 9 am we heard the first honkers.  We didn't get a visual on them until they were about 400 yards out being they were flying directly from the sun.  The group of 4 came right to us and dropped their feet in the pocket we anticipated them to land in.  Four birds came in, five shells were spent and zero birds left the spread.  We barley got back into the blinds when a large group of 40+ honkers was spotted.  We got into our Ground Force Blinds and covered up.  The series of soft moans and spit clucks from my SR-1 sealed the fate for five of the geese in this group.  They too swung directly into the pocket and we quickly dispatched the balance of our three man 9 bird limit.

We gave it until 11 am waiting for the mallards to return after we ran them up shooting the first group of geese but it just didn't work out.  We saw a beautiful sunrise, worked our plan, spent times with friends afield and harvested our daily limit.