Early Season Waterfowl Recap

Our September resident goose season was a bust for us. We struggled to find geese in our normal haunts and with all the rain we had the corn fields were too wet to cut. We jumped around between 4 or 5 spots and never fired a shot. The highlight or should i say low light, of the September goose season was a trip to a local pond where my daughter and I got into a yellow jacket next when setting up for an evening hunt. It wasn't pretty as my daughter got stung 17 times as we tried to beat feet out of there. She has refused to go goose hunting until the snow flies. The only good thing about the lack of geese was we were loaded up with ducks. Lots of wood ducks, teal and plenty of Mallards and hopefully they would stick around for the duck opener.

Thanks to all the rain we had more water then we needed

We have a split waterfowl season here in CT and in the northern zone our 10 day season started on October 12th and Bubba, Busch Pilot and Myself were welcoming in the season in our favorite local swamp. We had lots of wood ducks early, a small group of geese and even a couple flocks of mallards. It would have been a spectacular day if we had remembered how to shoot. We really stunk the joint up and only manage 2 Mallards and plenty of ducks left untouched and smarter. We continued to hunt the local watering holes and while seeing plenty of ducks, some serious shooting for some of our crew but little to show for it.

Busch Pilot, Myself, Damon and Bubba with our limit

When we got the call that the farm we hunt started cutting the corn with just days left in the early goose season it was like receiving that special gift on Christmas morning, you know the one that you just had to have and Santa delivered. We headed out to the farm made a make shoft blind for the 5 of us and settled in for what we hoped would be a good shoot.  The geese were flying early and there were lots of them except they were headed off to another field.   After about an hour of watching about 400 to 500 geese fly by us with barely a look, we got a flock interested and when they made there final decent inot the spread we let out our frustration and dropped 3 geese right off the bat.  We picked away at some smaller groups of geese over the next hour to come one short of a 5 man limit and we were packed up and on our way to breakfast at 9:30am.  The boys decided to hunt the following Tuesday which was the last day of the first season and they had a 4 man limit by 7:30am and then sat at the barn and watched flock after flock land in the field.  Hope they stick around for the second opener.

We have a couple of youth deer hunt days mixed in over the next two weekends and duck opens back up soon as does our rifle/shotgun deer season.

Bubba Day dreaming about Green Heads

Busch Pilot doing his best to hide

Bubba the pack mule

View from the goose blind

Busch Pilot retrieving decoys

Team Empty Hull goose pile.

The X

Hannah napping in the blind

No ducks to retrieve this hunt, so she was retrieving the decoys

Sunny Rise over the swamp