February 18, 2009 by Gildas Paradis

Hello All, Ran Across this article, thought I would share this with all of my followers:

By Dry Creek
The Pratt Tribune
Posted Feb 13, 2009 @ 12:04 PM
Pratt, Kan.

I’m not going to tell you that last weekend’s goose hunt was great because it wasn‘t. It was almost unbelievable!

We had geese in the air over our decoys 30 minutes before shooting time, 30 minutes before sun up, at sun up and for the next hour and a half. that’s around 21⁄2 hours of constant geese in the air over our decoys.

When there are a few birds to a flock and a few flocks, it’s easy to get an accurate count of the number. When the flocks turn into a stream, counting birds is like weighing a fish after it got off. Having time that morning, I put together the following formula.

Flying from south to north in a two-minute frame there were four flocks of geese. Each flock had around 25 birds giving us 100 geese every two minutes. Two times five gives you 10 minutes and 500 geese. Six times ten gives you 3,000 geese per hour, about 7,500 for the time we were hunting and that’s only the geese flying in a line directly in front of me and at telephone pole height. Not counted were the flocks that came into our decoys nor the geese behind us or above us or the ones we could not see in the dark or hear in the clouds. In other numbers “one heck of a bunch of geese.”

Five of us limited out on Canada geese and harvested four different varieties of Canada geese from two of the largest — one was banded — down to several of the small mallard duck size. The smaller Canadas winter in Oklahoma, and as all the geese we saw were coming up from the south we wondered if they were riding  warm air up from the Salt Plains or the watershed ponds of Barber County?

Recently there have been stories in the Wichita and Hutchinson newspaper about how birds are spending the winter farther north than usual, which might account for the large numbers of geese we’ve seen this winter in Pratt County. From our hunts we’ve found that the white geese are using the north half of Pratt County, along with whitefront geese, while the Canada geese seem to be concentrated in the south half of the county.

Also during November, December and January the geese were seen feeding in the middle of the fields and as far way from the roads as possible. Last weekend driving back to Pratt we spotted large numbers of geese feeding at the edge of the corn and milo fields with some as close as 20 yards to a road, giving proof to the notion that large numbers of geese have cleaned up all the waste grain and are now moving into the green wheat fields.

Two places overlooked to hunt geese are the Isabel Wetlands and Texas Lake. When duck and pheasant season closes, both of those areas turn into locked doors as far as hunters are concerned, but geese use both as primary  spots to rest during the middle of the day, or at night, protected from predators by the water. For bird watchers again both spots are prime for the spring waterfowl migration where you can get close pictures of many different species.

Crappie are still slow but the recent warm weather has turned on the “bite” if you’ll try a number of different spots and depth. Remember to fish slow, and you can by using a jig and cork and not reeling, letting the wind provide the action to your jig.

February, with a bit of snow, is also a prime month for rabbit hunting. You can hunt rabbits with a .22 but to improve your shotgun skills never shoot a sitting rabbit.  To hunt rabbits, I’d take along as many shells as you’ll need for a limit of quail, pheasants, doves, geese and ducks. They are quick, come up under your feet and to bag a limit of cottontails, 10, is something I’ve only done once in 60 years of hunting.

I know it’s Valentine’s Day weekend and to take your wife or girlfriend on a romantic walk really does not include camp clothing, a gun or getting up early, but it’s a really good way to set up next year’s hunting trips. Think about it!