When it rains....

Mid February and March of 2015 saw a very strange period of weather, that all in all, wasn't great for anybody, including hunters.

Where farmers wanted days of sunshine to help get the crops off the fields, they got rain. Where farmers wanted rain to get clover and grass going, they got draught. As such, some birds were late arriving, and others were early.

And you guessed it, they all turned up at once...everywhere.

The next four days were to see us shoot an incredible amount of birds, spread over more than 100 kilometres, on three different farms, with 7 different Hunters.

But it had to begin somewhere, and it was the same fields that we shot our first lot of geese on for the year!

The sun rise of the first morning of our 4 day hunting trip really set the scene. Amazing!

By the time the magnificent sun rise was up, the 6 of us all ready had a decent bag of birds on the ground. They came in for most of the morning, flying off their roost on a nearby estuary as the tide pushed them off, and their belly's told them it was feeding time.

We had some much larger mobs come in on this day, and prior scouting had shown that we could expect birds wanting to feed in different areas of the property. For this reason, we ran two spreads of decoys. Running two teams of hunters is always a risk, but in our experience, once the birds in this area have been hunted once, its nice to give them two options to pick from. We have been doing it long enough that we don't compete with one an other too much...

This day showed again the value of two spreads, with smaller groups committing well to one spread, while the larger mobs preferred another.

Our crew of 6 and our great morning flight bag from both spreads

Experience and prior scouting had shown that the birds coming in for the evening flight preferred one particular field, so Decoys from one of the morning spots were picked up, and a photo of the mornings bag taken.

After packing away the mornings work, the 6 of us slid into our blinds, wondering what we might pick up in the evening. At the end of a solid day in the field, both spreads, with three hunters each had bagged over 100 geese that morning, and with the a good evening flight, the days total pushed 300. |It was a quick cleaning session, because tomorrow, we are heading somewhere totally different!

The end of a great evening flight and an amazing day on the geese.