The Goose Gospel The 2016-17 Season
This season for me and several other guides and serious goose killers all over Kansas was an absolute frustration. As goes for anything, some people have good days and great weeks here and there. Expectations and standards have a lot to do with what I consider to be a good to great season. This report is going to be based on the expectation and standard of goose hunting 3-5 times a week and averaging 4.5 to 5 birds per man. The weekend warrior that field hunts 8 times a year and shoots limits with 2-3 guys half the time they go is always going to think goose hunting is cake. They simply aren’t out there enough to get smoked. But the more I do it the more I think that they might be the smartest guys out there?
For a brief history lesson and backstory check out my other blog talking about the Central flyway goose hunting and how it’s evolved so much in the last 5 years.
November
Hunting was very subpar for most of the state. The northern half of the state enjoyed a bit of decent honker hunting over water while the central and southern parts were below average to non existent. The bottoms area and Quivera enjoyed a few good days of staging specks and snow geese, but numbers were brief while the weather fluctuated so much. Cold fronts were few and far between and the calendar birds that moved in moved out just as fast.
December
With the arrival of the lesser Canadas and a better push of big honkers, the hunting got a bit better. Birds now were transitioning to dry feed patterns and field hunting for most of the state was now an option. Honker numbers seemed to be higher for some areas, while the lessers seemed to be down. The urban honker wintering population in Wichita has absolutely exploded and is incredible to see. Hunting during December was incredibly frustrating as the weather seemed to fluctuate so much nearly every 3 days. I saw birds feeding after shooting time of an evening depending on the wind direction, and birds willing to go water to water of a morning without feeding while temps were in the mid to low 40′s. Typically this time of year the big geese are targeting fresh winter wheat sprouts that are easy to feed on and abundant. This year the birds seemed to have no concern with feeding in winter wheat and were happy eating vegetation on ponds or loaf areas if temperatures were warmer. I have a hunch the nutritional content in the winter wheat was very minimal as the crop has been dehydrated for much of the winter. They also seemed to jump from grasses in the morning to grain in the evening, leaving us as hunters operating with a whole lot of risk involving setups on water or fields. Their unpredictability was at an all time high this year and it started early. The speck population and migration has remained incredible as they grow and push farther east every year. We really need to establish two different speck hunting zones in the state to allow hunters in parts east of Wichita a chance to hunt them in January when they are the thickest. Check out my blog “Speck Surplus” for more content on that topic.
January
This is usually the peak migration time for central and southern Kansas as the bird numbers typically explode as geese become extremely concentrated. I’d estimate that during the first week of January this year and like many years past, in a 30 mile circle of Wichita there was roughly 250k-300k wintering geese of all species. Field hunting at this time gets to be as good as it gets. Although birds are under intense hunting pressure, big rigs and big feeds often yield big results. This is the point where the guys that know what they are doing keep getting em’ and the weekend warriors often enjoy sloppy seconds. This year January was a bit warmer and mild than that of years past, and the birds seemed to be spread out a bit more. The freeze line hovered near Emporia to Hutch and birds north of that were feeding once a day to keep water open on their roost areas.
February
I’ll argue this is the best time to goose hunt all year. By now most of your weekenders’ are done hunting and the pressure seems to back off. The birds are beginning to push back up the flyway and staging and feeding hard to prepare for their migration back north. I can’t figure what days they migrate back the best yet, because i’ve seen big numbers of birds push on calmer NW wind days and i’ve seen huge pushes on big south wind days. I do know the birds seem to stage a little bit longer when the wind is consistently out of the north. This year was no different, we targeted staging birds in some huge feeds and had the best field hunting we’ve encountered all year.
All in all, this was an average to below average year for most of the goose hunters i know. The early freeze up seemed to push a lot of birds out and move birds to big water patterns that can sometimes be tough to hunt. With more and more land being leased to deer hunters the access to hunt fields is becoming tougher and tougher. The birds quickly find a safe field and know where they can and can’t get shot.