10-12 years ago I got a chance to go to Saskatchewan. An old friend of my Dad's invited me up to hunt with a small group of guys that had been going up there for 20 years. They actually bought a house up there, took all the decoys, boats, trailers, and hunting gear that they needed and left it up there. Each Fall they pack up some food and go hunt for a couple weeks. Pretty cool.
We hunted geese in the fields in the mornings and ducks in the marshes in the evening. We tried a couple other things, like pass shooting along a refuge boundary, pass shooting between two separate marshes where the birds trade back and forth a lot. But mostly we just stuck to the basic plan.
While I was there, I learned that geese prefer a pea field to any other grain. We didn't have any cornfields to hunt in, but we shot in barley and wheat stubble fields as well as the pea fields. It was the first time I ever had the opportunity to shoot Lesser Snows, Blues, Ross', Speckle Bellies and some very tiny sub-species of Canada Goose. I took good advantage of the opportunity. In the marshes I shot Mallards and Canvasbacks. There were a lot of Shovelers around, but I passed on them, except for a couple that took me by surprise. All in all we killed a decent assortment of ducks, but I stayed pretty much with the big birds. We killed a lot of Pintails and Mallards while goose hunting in the fields. A couple of days we shot nearly a limit of ducks before the geese even started to fly. Nothing wrong with that.
The farmers up there treated us great. My friends had made it a point to get close to the guy that ran the Tax Office. So we could go scout for geese, mark their location on a map, and he could tell us who owned the land. Every place we asked permission, we were allowed to hunt. Big difference from here in the States. We made it a point to clean some birds and offer them to the farmers, and most of them accepted a few. There were some old folks up there who could use the birds to make it through the Winter, so each bird ended up on a welcome dinner table.
I could have shot a Sand Hill Crain, but they just didn't look like a game bird so I passed on that. In retrospect, I wish I would have killed one. Just to add it to my Big List of creatures that have fallen in front of my 870. Maybe someday.
The year we were there they didn't allow non-residents to shoot Hungarian Partridge or Sharp Tail Grouse in the area where we were. My friend Paul drove me over into the zone so I could shoot a Sharp Tail because I never killed one before. But there were tons of the birds right around the house and it certainly would have been really nice to have been able to shoot them in the middle of the day when we weren't shooting ducks and geese.
Saskatchewan was a really neat place. The old homesteads were right out of history books. The fields were as big as the eye could see. The farm equipment was bigger than I'd ever imagined. I guess when you farm square miles vice acres, you need big stuff.
Paul is a great cook, so we ate well while we were there. Their house was warm and cozy. Even the little town where they stayed was neat. Big grain elevator on the side of the train tracks that ran through town. The setting was out of a Maynard Reese print.
This past October they invited me up there again but I couldn't get vacation time. Maybe someday I'll make it back. I hope so.
We hunted geese in the fields in the mornings and ducks in the marshes in the evening. We tried a couple other things, like pass shooting along a refuge boundary, pass shooting between two separate marshes where the birds trade back and forth a lot. But mostly we just stuck to the basic plan.
While I was there, I learned that geese prefer a pea field to any other grain. We didn't have any cornfields to hunt in, but we shot in barley and wheat stubble fields as well as the pea fields. It was the first time I ever had the opportunity to shoot Lesser Snows, Blues, Ross', Speckle Bellies and some very tiny sub-species of Canada Goose. I took good advantage of the opportunity. In the marshes I shot Mallards and Canvasbacks. There were a lot of Shovelers around, but I passed on them, except for a couple that took me by surprise. All in all we killed a decent assortment of ducks, but I stayed pretty much with the big birds. We killed a lot of Pintails and Mallards while goose hunting in the fields. A couple of days we shot nearly a limit of ducks before the geese even started to fly. Nothing wrong with that.
The farmers up there treated us great. My friends had made it a point to get close to the guy that ran the Tax Office. So we could go scout for geese, mark their location on a map, and he could tell us who owned the land. Every place we asked permission, we were allowed to hunt. Big difference from here in the States. We made it a point to clean some birds and offer them to the farmers, and most of them accepted a few. There were some old folks up there who could use the birds to make it through the Winter, so each bird ended up on a welcome dinner table.
I could have shot a Sand Hill Crain, but they just didn't look like a game bird so I passed on that. In retrospect, I wish I would have killed one. Just to add it to my Big List of creatures that have fallen in front of my 870. Maybe someday.
The year we were there they didn't allow non-residents to shoot Hungarian Partridge or Sharp Tail Grouse in the area where we were. My friend Paul drove me over into the zone so I could shoot a Sharp Tail because I never killed one before. But there were tons of the birds right around the house and it certainly would have been really nice to have been able to shoot them in the middle of the day when we weren't shooting ducks and geese.
Saskatchewan was a really neat place. The old homesteads were right out of history books. The fields were as big as the eye could see. The farm equipment was bigger than I'd ever imagined. I guess when you farm square miles vice acres, you need big stuff.
Paul is a great cook, so we ate well while we were there. Their house was warm and cozy. Even the little town where they stayed was neat. Big grain elevator on the side of the train tracks that ran through town. The setting was out of a Maynard Reese print.
This past October they invited me up there again but I couldn't get vacation time. Maybe someday I'll make it back. I hope so.
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