Category Archives: hunting

The Right Way to Open a Goose Season-Saturday Morning’s Hunt

I’d been going stir crazy for nearly a week, doing everything from trying to pretend that the impending goose season was “no big deal” to furiously writing some pretty awful haiku poetry.  Then suddenly it was upon me; the open road, the sun shining on my left arm as I cruised with it draped out the driver’s side window, and the knowledge that in a few short hours I would be laughing with friends as we prepared for what for many of us is the unofficial kick-off to the fall season.


I drove through some very pretty country as I made my way from Mississauga up through Hockley into the Georgian Highlands, before eventually picking up Highway 6 in Chatsworth and continuing on to the farm.  As I passed through Wiarton my friend Lucas flipped me a text and I read it while stopped at one of the three traffic lights in town.  He had arrived just ahead of me and was assembling his layout blind.  He also told me that he had an ice-cold beverage waiting for me when I arrived.  Some friends just know.  The trip had been good with little traffic, nice weather and it afforded me the opportunity to think and to listen to some music, including a new addition to my list of favourite hunting tunes, the album “Flood” from They Might Be Giants.  I’ve had this CD since the mid 1990’s and it is just plain old eclectic awesomeness.  I won’t make another hunting trip without it.

Anyways, we convened in the laneway, checked all our gear, laid out the blinds, calls, decoys and other necessary impediments that every goose hunter treks out into the fields and marshes with before loading it into Lucas’s Jeep.  My sister and some of her friends showed up for a wedding that was taking place that weekend, and then a group of even more hunting buddies arrived for some planning, some good-natured arguing, some laughs and a bit of storytelling before we turned in.  I still have that giddy, anticipatory sleep that goes with not really being able to wait for something.  Some people get it at Christmas, or the first day at school, or something like that, but for me, I just can’t get to sleep the night before the first goose hunt of the year.  My mind is filled with thoughts of what the day will hold and how the geese will behave, with a dash of worry that my alarm won’t go off and I’ll somehow sleep through the whole thing.  This latter irrational fear usually results in me waking up twenty minutes before my alarm goes off, and Saturday, September 10th was no exception.

We met at the local gas station and laid out the final agenda.  I and the three others with layout blinds would set up in a cut grain field with little perimeter cover, while the other six or eight guys would man another cut grain field just across the county road; their field had a good ditch and standing corn surrounding it.  In the grainy breaking dawn we put out a couple of dozen shells and full body decoys and then ‘brushed up’ our blinds with some grain stubble, a task coincidentally that I’ll get better at with practice.  I endured some heavy teasing from the other three, but the geese didn’t seem to mind once the flight started.  In a line, Tack, myself, Lucas, and Rory faced west-south-west with both the flaming orange glow of a morning sun and a light September breeze coming over our left shoulders.  The first thin skeins of geese appeared out of the north, flying high and showing no interest in our flagging our calling.  Fully 200 birds traded past a height that advertised to every hunter around that those geese had no interest in detouring from their planned destination.  Once, with heavy flagging and excited calling, we were able to peel a group of four off the tail end of one such high-flying flock; they rocked and glided into our setup and after Tack, lounging to my left, and I had finished two of those four stayed behind with us.  It wasn’t great shooting for the first group of the season, but it was a start and my adrenaline was pumping.  A group of about twenty birds barreled in from the west, and while we made an attempt to work them, it became immediately apparent that they were on a beeline down the pipe into the cut grain field that housed the rest of our group.  Our compatriots scratched down eight birds after a frenzy of shots and my cousin Dane would later say that those birds finished just perfectly into the decoys.  I love it when that happens, although unfortunately, it was the only group to drop in on the field being patrolled by the balance of our hunting party.

We saw more groups of geese, but never worked in a group that held more than six birds.  Either through dumb luck or perfect planning (or perhaps a 70-30 combination of both) the geese that we were able to work were decoying perfectly and we called it a hunt more out of a desire to eat a giant Farmer’s Breakfast at Mom’s Restaurant in Ferndale than out of a lull in the action.  In all we had eight birds on the ground just as the other party did, but we had the more frequent of the shooting.  Some rusty shotgunning on my part, and a jammed shell that occurred as I only half-pumped my gun before trying to continue onto a pair of birds that were literally hanging in the air ten yards from my barrel kept my personal tally to two birds, but it was still a good kick off as I learned the nuances of layout blind hunting and worked to overcome some of the habits I’ve developed over the last 17 years of pass shooting geese from the sidelines of grain and corn fields.  Lesson #1: unlike when you are pass shooting and you need to call geese all the way down, once a group cups their wings and floats into your layout blind spread, the call can go down and the guns can come up.  If anything I rushed a couple of shots because I was still calling to birds that were committed when I really should have been putting both hands on my 870 and getting ready to come up firing.  Oh well, as I’ve said before, it’s not always about quantity.  Lesson #2: you can generally call more quietly to geese when you’re lying out in the decoys.  While ear-splitting volume is good for hail work, tone, inflection, and cadence count when the gunning is close.

We scarfed down (or at least I scarfed down) a big breakfast and drove back up to the farm to dress out the sixteen geese and engage in the epic historical rite of retelling stories from a hunt that had concluded no less than 90 minutes before.  My hands and my knife got filthy, but as strange as it sounds, it was nice getting a little mud and blood under my nails.  It adds a tactile reality to going out and getting your own meat, some of which is destined for the meat grinder, while some of it has a date with my stock pot where it will become the backbone of my classic Stewed Canada Goose.  In the end, it will all go where it ought to which is into our bellies.

We resolved to take a brief siesta and while one or two from the group would take a quick scout around the area for a spot to set up for the afternoon hunt, I made a quick jaunt into town to get the necessary requirements for dinner.  Just as I came out of the grocery store, laden with potato chips, baloney for frying, bread for toasting, and Walla Walla sweet onions for caramelizing (more on that in tomorrow’s post) I heard the excited chatter of a gaggle of geese as they literally fell out of the sky and into Lion’s Head Harbour.  As I watched the birds careen out of the azure blue sky and clumsily skid down into the equally blue water I couldn’t help reflecting back on the morning that had just passed.  We could have shot better and we could have shot more, but really we couldn’t have asked for a better start to the 2011 waterfowl campaign.  Little did we know how much better things were going to get on the afternoon hunt.

Everybody Loves a Haiku, Right?

So for some inexplicable reason I turned to haiku poetry as a way to calm my overly taut nerves in advance of the goose hunting opener here in Southern Ontario.  For those unfamiliar with the concept, haiku is a traditional style of Japanese poetry that for North Americans roughly translates into three lines totaling 17 syllables in a 5/7/5 syllable style.  While there is some debate over traditional haiku versus Westernized haiku, and so on (check the Wikipedia page for haiku if you want more on that) it is generally accepted that a 17 syllable poem in 5/7/5 style is a haiku.  They don’t have to rhyme.

It was actually a pretty good idea, as reading the meditative, naturalistic stanzas of Issa and Basho put me in a serene state of mind.  That was until I decided that while there are many classic hunting stories, and maybe even a couple of poems (or dirty limericks) about hunting, there was a real shortage of haiku poetry that paid tribute to the pursuit of hunting.  So despite what my better judgment told me to do, I wrote a few haikus of my own.  Some are beautiful if you ask me, but others are downright dumb.

A Preliminary Haiku of Apology
Now you shall have to
Suffer through these, that is if
You be brave enough.

Goose Season Opens
Goose season opens,
I sit alone at my desk.
Anticipating.

The First Flight
The first flight of birds
Sneaks up on me in the blind.
My nap is cut short.

Deer Hunting is Hard
Deer hunting is hard,
If you fail to grasp that a
Deer can outsmart you.

How Many Miles
For how many miles
Will the wingbeats be heard? I
Missed that grouse badly.

Cold Water
An old leaky boot
Makes the walk back to the truck
Unbearably long.

Floating on Air
A goose on approach
Floats in the air serenely
Before the guns bark.

A Haiku on False Hope
It is strange how the
Shooting continues after
The ducks have flown off.

I could go on like this for hours (because when you write terrible haikus, it really isn’t that hard to be ultra-productive) but I’m sure you’ve all had enough for now.  I may concoct a few more of these crimes against poetry this weekend while I’m chasing Canada geese all over the Bruce Peninsula, and although you may not want to see them…I’ll commit them to the blogosphere upon my return.

Funny Things You Hear Sometimes

My thanks to those of you who have emailed me to wonder if I’m doing okay.  Yes I am, but the drop in blog productivity is with good cause.  A couple of good causes actually.
First and foremost, it is July.  There’s not much to hunt in July (other than hunting for a cool place in the shade…not surprisingly, I am not a warm-weather creature).  Since it is the high summer, there just aren’t the stories that I had in the run-up to, and duration of, the spring turkey season.  Secondly, and the inspiration for this post, is that I’ve started a new job in the bustling metropolis of Toronto.  Some of the time I had previously spent writing is now spent driving home, but please do look forward to increased output from me as I slowly descend into the madness associated with chasing ducks and geese.
Now onto today’s ramblings.  As mentioned, I’m now in a new office…an experience not altogether different from one’s first few days of school.  There are new faces, names, and social cliques to navigate.  There are meetings and training sessions to attend.  And there is my personal ‘brand’ to establish.  Of course my brand is good-natured consultant who happens to love hunting and the outdoors.
This love of the outdoors did not take long to shine through (maybe the framed photo of my wife and I on her only hunting trip piqued the curiosity of my new coworkers, who knows?) and immediately I was attacked with questions from a number of people who, through no fault of their own, have never experienced the outdoors outside of a televised beer commercial.
Here’s a list (in no particular order) of the most ridiculous, charming, and downright wacky questions and statements I’ve heard since my arrival in the urban business world.  My responses (or what I had hoped they could have been) are italicized.
It’s illegal to shoot Canada Geese isn’t it?  I mean they’re on the $5 bill!
Nope, completely legal and downright delicious.  In fact bag limits are liberal so in a way it is encouraged.  Polar bears and loons though…strictly off-limits.  Thus your monetary-based system of valuing animal life is somewhat accurate.
That mean you own weapons right?
Yes, but only because I’ve grown too old to continue to chase down and tackle things.
Can you talk to animals?
Yes, but they rarely listen.
Can I go hunting with you?
You can come and watch if you want, but you’ll mostly just see me sitting still and being quiet.  You can do that in the office if you’re so inclined, and if you stay inside there is less likelihood of you being bitten by a tick…so that’s win.
What did that duck/goose/deer/turkey/rabbit ever do to you that you can just kill it?
Nothing.  That’s why I’m not trying to kill it out of spite.  It is just a challenging thing to do, which happens to have very tasty results if I’m successful…which is not very often.
When you eat an animal, do you gain its strength?
No, but if I don’t brush my teeth afterwards I do get breath that would terrify a grizzly bear.
Does this mean I shouldn’t make you mad?
I think that you are asking if you enrage me will I hunt you like a wild animal?.  Really, you shouldn’t make me mad but only because that would just be a mean thing for you to do to me; that I go hunting shouldn’t enter into it.  If you do make me mad, rest assured, I enjoy hunting and the outdoors far too much to jeopardize that privilege by doing something thoughtless and violent.  I likely will go hunting, but in a nice calm forest far away from such silly questions and where whatever you did to make me angry will be washed away by the relaxing sounds of the wilderness surrounding me.
It is too bad that stereotyping of this sort still goes on, but it does and I’m sure this is just the start of some of the hilariously absurd things that people are going to say to me.  I’ve already gotten some funny looks when I told my coworkers that I usually reserve a week or more of vacation for the dead of November.  Maybe they think I’m a skier.  This list will probably grow, and this is nice outlet for it, since I usually have to just politely answer in a neighbourly sort of way that won’t make my interrogator feel ridiculous.  After all, if they took the time to ask, the least I can do is give them an answer.
Well, actually, the least I could do would be to walk away silently shaking my head…but that would really make it hard for me to make friends in the office.

True Love, Commitment, and Hunting

So my cousin Lukas got married last Saturday, and as predicted it was a rip-roaring good time.

Aside from being there to witness the marriage of Lukas and his new wife Heather, there was also an opportunity to reconnect with all my hunting buddies, and basically all of them were there.  Turkey hunters, goose hunters, coyote hunters, and deer hunters, all were there to likewise see there friends and usher one of our own into holy matrimony.

Many of them were there with their significant others; the  older generation with their wives, and my friends with their girlfriends (no others aside from Lukas and myself have been committed, or foolhardy, enough to propose marriage….although I sense it is coming for some).

Anyhow, the point of this, besides being my return to the blogosphere after a nearly two week absence, is that we had some drinks and told the obligatory lies about our hunting prowess.

And this is where I knew that for the most part, we’d all found the right women for us.  Not because they love hunting, or because the wives and girlfriends of my hunting pals are particularly loving or spectacular (although they generally are), but because all of the women sat together and lovingly degraded us for telling the same hunting stories, jokes, and lies that we always tell to each other.  With happy smiles they watched us talk about our common bonds, needled us when the tales got too tall, and generally were good sports about us having some beers and ignoring them.  At least I dedicated a song to my wife…what did the rest of you do?  HA-HA!

I’ve long since given up on my wife becoming a hunter.  My cousin Lukas has likewise done the same, I believe.  For Rory, Tack, Andy, and the others there may be hope, but I’m not ultra-familiar with the outdoorsiness of their respective spouses and girlfriends.  I have a brother who, while handsome, is still a bachelor…primarily I believe because he has not been able to find a woman who will lovingly tolerate, or potentially share, the addiction he shares with all of us hunting men.

But that is okay…while I hope women everywhere will show an interest in taking up hunting (it really is great, and not at all about some macho, chest-thumping dominance of nature) if they don’t, we still have the opportunity to have them see the greatness in the pastime, and our commitment to its promotion through our eyes, and then they can at least appreciate all the positive things that hunting ethically and responsibly can be.

Which, might not be an out-and-out win for the hunting community, but it is certainly a fair compromise.