Late Goose Season

Goose hunting in March? You bet, and it’s legal if you hunt on private property for the special depredation hunt for White Front geese in Klamath County. The old refrain, “You should have been here last week,” was answered with a “We were, and we got skunked!” Two hunters and a fumbling cameraman and none of us fired a shot on our first hunt. But how sweet it was on this last day of a short, special hunt, and it was, indeed a special hunt. The Duck Commander would stroke his scraggly beard and nod his head in approval.

I joined Steve Barrow and his brother Cliff southeast of Klamath Falls on a piece of private property wedged between a couple of irrigation ditches and a nearly dry creek. The small rivulet opened up to form numerous shallow mud depressions, which drew in returning mallards. The previous weekend we placed our goose decoys around the shallow depression of the creek bottom, and huddled in a small washout. It was a bluebird day, and the only two birds that came in range chuckled as they looked down on us eating lunch and swapping old stories. Today was different, however. It had the foggy promise of a good shoot. Packing our gear across the field, we could hear the high pitched honks and cackles of birds directly overhead, invisible in the fog.

Steve suggested we place the decoys out in the field within shooting range of the shallow drop-off above the creek. We huddled beneath a lone and very large cedar. One of the trunks had broken off so we had some cover. As I had decided not to pay for an out of state license, I brought my camera. The barrow brothers had no sooner taken their position when multiple flights of geese dropped down below the fog and spotted our decoys. Three groups of twenty to thirty birds merged in one flight circling our sixty foot cedar. They split around the tree on both sides and dropped into the decoys. The Barrow men know how to shoot. In seconds both men had their two goose limit. And I stood under the tree gazing through the branches as geese dropped out of the sky. My camera was out of reach. It was classic, and the best part was that for the next three hours Steve and his brother called in small flights, one after another, hoping I could get some decent camera shots.

I had nothing but problems with my digital camera, but I had one of the best “hunting” experiences of my life. The Duck Commander would have had to film for days to capture the action we had in four hours.

Dave Archer