Cody runs through some tips on how we set our spread when birds start to migrate!
We're just wrapping up a pretty successful goose hunt in upstate New York. I want to talk to you guys a little bit about our decoy spread.
During these early seasons of time geese, when you're hunting local you wouldn't run as big of a spread as we're doing today. We run probably three or four dozen full bodies, or we'll run six or seven dozen or so.
But today we had a lot of migrators push in, had a strong north wind. We've been seeing a constant flow of birds all day. So we're running a lot bigger spread.
Typically, those early-season locals don't really want to come into a decoy spread. They want to land just outside the decoys. They will run that spread pretty tight to us. If we're shooting across one, we'll put it heavily on one side versus the other but with these migraineurs, you get geese that actually want to work.
We'll run a long tail like we have just a normal J hook here. We run a long tail that way and a mass on the upwind side, and we're trying to draw in front of the blinds as much as we can.
We're shooting across wind today and with these fires over the geese, you can actually work them in a spread. Every flock we had today did it perfectly in front of the blind, which you can see.
We have the blind over here and then the string of decoys into this mass, and we left it open in the middle and those geese were kind of coming down, following that line of decoys and coming right to the mass and landing just outside it, which is directly in front of the blinds, making a perfect kill.
Not all September, we'll run a spread this big, but because we're seeing more and more geese show up and we're getting flocks really high, we want to look big. We want to draw as much attention as possible, draw those really high migratory flocks of geese. And it worked like a charm today.