EARLY GOOSE SEASON ONLY FOUR WEEKS AWAY!
by Mike Faulk

Thirty minutes before sunrise, September 1, 2006, is four weeks from tomorrow. Play your cards right on that day and you'll have time to harvest the liberal limit of five Canada geese, dress each for the refrigerator or freeze, and make it to a dove field for a high noon opening day dove hunt in Tennessee's first segment of dove season. Yes, you may read excitement into my voice!

Preparing for fall hunting seasons has been mostly toil up to this point. Food plots have taken the bulk of our attention over the summer months on Strum Island. Tree stands have been checked and maintained. Bow practice has started. It's time now to get the old bags out and check the decoys.

Thankfully, few decoys are needed for wood ducks. Rarely have I observed more than a dozen woodies together, so I never use more than that in my spread for early wood duck season. We try to segregate the goose decoys from the woodies.

Because of the difficulty for landing in such tight quarters, I pack the woody dekes in close and string the goose decoys out upstream hoping for a descent into the fringe of our firing range [were the geese can get down into my spread] and then a little drifting into the firing hole.

We usually limit on wood ducks. Geese are a bit scarce by the opening Saturday of early wood duck season. All the pass gunners have taken pot shots at the geese for a week or more at that point. But, occasionally we get lucky. The odds are good enough for me to devote the time necessary to deploy a dozen or more goose decoys.

There is definitely a cost-benefit analysis to do this time of year. It can still be pretty darn warm during these early seasons. Wasps are still very active. So are the snakes. So, I try to maximize my results from minimum effort on the likes of decoys. And, I'm reminded of a frequent poignant inquiry from my ex-wife: "Why don't you just stand there with a bag of Wonder bread? It works in the park. Wouldn't that be cheaper than all those decoys?"