01/01/10

Just after Christmas I had the opportunity to go to Colorado with my landlord to hunt geese. Since I have a wonderful wife who "gave" me this present for Christmas I got to go. We left on Sunday and drove all day. We stayed in Loveland. It is just south of Fort Collins. I thought we would be going to some small farm community; I was dead wrong. This place was like hunting in Sandy. There were tons of malls, outlets, and people. The places where we hunted were only a few minutes from all the hubub of the city. We hunted with Fowl Basin Outfitters. The first day we hunted a picked corn field. I hunted for the first time out of a pit. It was a little tricky to shoot out of at first, but I caught on pretty quick. We ended up killing 20 birds. It took all day, but it was tons of fun. The birds were pretty tough to bring in. There were about 3,000 birds feeding and loafing between a couple fields only about a 1/2 mile away from us. We watched the birds move all day, but if birds saw the birds in the field they were gone. It was really tough competing with that many real birds. The guides did a good job calling and our 30 dozen decoys helped a little bit too.

Day two was our water hunt. My landlord has hunted with this guide service for a few years now and asked for us to be able to hunt water one of the days. They were nice enough to do what we wanted. They set us up on the golf course that they work at during the summer. They have pits and ice eaters set up all over the course and they control where the geese will go. The geese had been roosting on the other side of the lake that we hunted. We set up after most of the geese had already left to feed for the day. We were hoping to pick off geese as they traded water or came back for a drink. The hunting was a lot tougher than you might expect for a golf course. The geese really didn't move much all day. We ended up staying almost all day but did get 20 birds again. The birds that we did see worked much better. These birds were all basically "in the hole." I ended on a really good double; that absolutely made my day. The last pictures are an action shot on the last 3 killed. They are a little blurry but turned out ok for my first attempt at a kill shot. We also got to shoot a few bonus ducks. We ended up with goldeneyes, mergansers, spoonies, and a gadwall.