12/17/11Arkansas Snow Geese, Specklebellies and Layout Blinds

Layout blinds are a bit like a coffins. You close 'em up and bring death to the ducks and geese. If things go right.

I just spent this past week in one, then another, finding the right fit for this long frame. We had 350 full-bodied snow and white-fronted goose decoys staked around us in a dry Arkansas soybean field, along with some flapping wing options. We hauled in slotted bags of speck fakes daily with the help of our four Yamaha wheels. That was a good start. Here are some other tricks we kept in mind. We . . .

* Lined the blinds up so that they faced the direction birds might likely come. Adjustments are expected.

* Staked decoys around the blinds for more realism from above as birds looked down.

* Added motion fakes to put even more sizzle in our spread.

* Adjusted some more. As with the blind positioning, fine tuning might be expected as decoys go too. This might simply be based on the way live birds work in during the hunt.

How did we do? What did we learn?

* We heard then saw thousands of snow geese (no lie) work out of the fog, many skirting our spread just out of range, with others winging in closer for a look. Those got shot (or shot at), and eaten as bacon-wrapped grilled poppers.

* In addition to the big visual of $6K worth of fakes on the ground, the flapping wing snows seemed to draw birds closer and into that seam where they checked out the motion.

* The specklebellies didn't seem to like the spread one morning, as the white-fronted geese fakes were spread out and maybe mixing to close to the snows (my bad). My buddy Checkett, a Ducks Unlimited waterfowl superhero, remedied that by grouping the specks with some empty space between them and the monster snow set. Three of us killed our limits that day.

(Steve Hickoff post/photo)