How I spend my Feburarys in the gumbo.

[M R Dux]

The local guys have been hammering crappie on KY Lake and I've been reading and hearing all about it. Problem is I spend the entire month of Feb each year in SE MO chasing snow geese with clients. I watched the weather reports closely last week and saw we were going to be dealing with thunderstorms Friday night and Sat. If any of you have ever experienced gumbo mud, you know how hard it is to deal with and it is terrible on equipment. To say I was concerned was a gross understatement! I had a full group booked but 3 backed out at the last minute, leaving me with a great but small group. We typically set out our 700+ decoys each morning and pick them up after the hunt each day and hunt different locations each day.

As we drove thru a bad thunderstorm Sat morning, I was feeling it was going to be bad if the rain kept up. Seems divine intervention took place and the rain stopped just as we drove up to our field. We dodged the showers for the rest of the weekend. Still had some mud to deal with but things firmed up by Sat afternoon.

The field I had gotten permission to hunt held probably 2-3000 snows Friday but it was raining hard when I scouted it so I had no idea if they would return. Luckily they did both Sat and Sunday. The guys shot really well and were pretty happy customers to say the least. We took 57 Sat and 81 Sunday from the same field.

[joejv4]

AWESOME!!!! Can't wait for them to start migrating back north. We only have dekes for canadas, so we usually road-hunt and jump-shoot snows on the fields we have permission for. Tempted to buy a set or two of texas rags for the conservaton order season.

We generally get a dozen or so snows, and they taste better than the canadas IMHO.

We get 3 seasons on Canadas, early season in September (thins out local bird flocks) then we have first regular season from mid October to mid November, then we have our second regular season from the day after Christmas for 3 weeks.

Was still fishing during the early season. We couldn't pattern them during the first regular season - they were on different fields miles apart every day and wouldn't decoy. Second season, we got out twice (my neighbor and me) and we managed to get our limit both days.

We witnessed the strangest behavior on one small flock. there were probably 10-12 birds, they came right at our spread, set their wings and started to circle. All but one landed about 150 yards away, just over a knoll so all we could see was their heads, while one came right in and landed right in the middle of our spread.

The one in our spread stood stock-still for a good half a minute, then walked around a bit and looked around a bit. Finally, he made a low grunt and the rest of the flock took off an headed in to our spread for us to shoot at them. I bet the ones that were left were pretty mad at their "scout" for bad intel!!!!

[olduckhunter]

mr, there are absolutely millions of them here in northeast ark along the cache river from west of jonesboro, ark up north to the lake ashbaugh area and i'm sure from north and south of that part i travel are many more. i don't know if they migrate towards your area or move to south dakota a different direction. kill'em all.

[rocket rich]

Poor dog had to retreive all those geese, you should have had the old duckhunter with you he's a real dog.
Nice shooting guys

[Frank C]

Very Nice, snow goose hunting is alot of work but also alot of fun. We try to set up and hunt a field 3-5 days at a time. so we don't have to pick up every day. we had days last year that we got 100 plus 3 days in a row witch is great up here.

[huntinslabs]

Simply awesome!