Honkers hard to hoodwink

Decoys fail to draw gaggle after gaggle of Canada geese

By Buddy Gough (Contact)

GOSHEN — Six Canada geese approached low and slow from t he nort h on a southerly flight pattern that silhouetted their dark shapes against a sun rising over dewcovered fields on Labor Day morning.

Most likely a family group, the honkers had probably lifted off from the refuge of a park along the White River arm of Beaver Lake and were heading for a fescue pasture where they were accustomed to foraging freely and undisturbed.

It wasn’t difficult to feel a little sorry for the nearly tame and supposedly unwary geese. Sheltered in urban and suburban environments, they could have no inkling they were about to be hoodwinked into an ambush on the first morning of the Canada goose season in Northwest Arkansas.

Hea r ing t heir honk ing cries was also a reminder of there being much to admire about the big birds. Elegantly feathered. Gracefully formed. Power f u l f l ier s . Fa it h f u l mates. Dedicated parents.

They were most admired, of course, when they were migratory and a thrill to see coming south in the fall and going north in the spring instead of staying year-round.

The hunting season, however, said something about a welcome wearing thin for the resident honkers in the region. A daily bag limit of up to five geese per hunter said more.

The chances of the little flock of Canada geese becoming part of the bag seemed assured as their line of flight took them past a tree-linedpond where two dozen fullbodied Canada goose decoys were arrayed on the water and across the grass nearby.

The tricksters had been placed in full darkness by four local waterfowlers: Mike Kopek of Goshen; his 22-yearold son, John; Sam Martin of Hindsville; and Jim Singleton of Bentonville.

Kopek had scouted areas along the W hite R iver before the opening of the early goose season and had found a friendly farmer’s pasture where up to 100 geese had been gathering to feed within 200 yards of the pond selected for the hunt.

After the decoys were placed and hunting positions selected under the sheltering branches of trees along the pond’s dam, there came that familiar quiet time of watching the sun rise and for the game plan to unfold.

“What a beautiful morning to welcome hunting season 2008,” Kopek said.

Then the geese signaled their approach w ith their honking conversation.

Fly ing low, they pa ssed about 10 0 yards from t he pond and the hunkered hunters. Despite the pleadings of goose calls, they never gave our plastic phonies a second glance. Instead, they glided down on the pasture about 200 yards away, almost exactly where they had been feeding.

Well, the morning was still young.

“With geese, you have to be patient; it’s not like ducks at dawn’s early light,” Kopek said.

He had a special reason to be appreciative of the opportunity.

“Exactly one year ago today was when John f lew out to Iraq,” Kopek said.

Fortunately, John had returned unscathed from serving nearly a year in a war zone to resume his studies at the University of Arkansasat Fayetteville. During his sojourn in the volatile Ramadi area of Iraq, one of the things he had missed most was going hunting with his Labrador retriever, Iris.

Not quite, however.

Waterfowlers are known to be especially crazy about their sport, and John is apparently as avid as any. When he found himself stationed near a large, marshy lake in Iraq, he was surprised to notice a lot of small ducks and snipe on the flats around the lake.

Proving where there is a will, there’s a way, the young soldier scrounged around to somehow get his hands on a shotgun and a supply of birdshot. Then, he borrowed a bomb-sniffing Labrador and went snipe hunting.

The Labrador wasn’t particularly heralded for his bomb-sniffing skills and was not much better at retrieving, but the hunt was a success.

“John sent me a picture of him standing in front of a humvee with his shotgun, the dog and a pile of snipe,” Kopek chuckled.

GEESE COMING AND GOING

The reminiscing was soon interrupted with the approach of another f lock of Canada geese. There were eight this time, coming from the same direction as the first bunch.

Passing within 100 yards of the pond, the sharp-eyed geese couldn’t have missed the decoys, but they f lew on to land with the live geese.

Martin volunteered to make a wide circle behind the geese to get them up in hopes they would fly our way and within range. At the least, we wouldn’t have live geese to compete with our decoys.

The geese must have heard us because one group went wide left and the other wide right.

We weren’t done, though. (Actually, we were but didn’t know it yet.)

In bright sunshine, a third family group of Canada geese came in behind us from the northwest, skirted the pond by about 75 yards and casually landed about 150 yards to the east.

Our second-best opportunity came when a f lock of more than a dozen geese approached from the northwest and flew past in the front of the pond and flirted with us by f lying between the decoy spread and the flock of geese already on the ground.

For a moment, they seemed to be deciding between plastic or feathers. They chose feathers.

This time, John did the sneak-and-jump routine togive us our best chance of the morning.

A ll the birds got up and flew toward the pond, filling the air with their honking, climbing higher and higher, coming oh so close to gun range, but not quite close enough.

After the decoys were gathered and bagged, the hunt was salvaged by giving the retrievers a workout with dummies thrown into the pond for water retrieves and others hidden in the grass for blind retrieves. They had a lot of fun.

The hunters, meanwhile, were planning to take on the honkers again, during the first part of the season, which ended Sept. 15, or the second part, which ends Monday.

They would look for conditions of bad weather with poor visibility. They would also concentrate on a field where the farmer had planted winter wheat. Such fields would be magnets for the geese when the wheat started sprouting.

LESSONS LEARNED

Altogether, the hunt provided one example after another of why Canada geese are proliferating to the point of becoming a nuisance, if not a health hazard, in Northwest Arkansas.

The special hunting seasons were initiated with the aim of reducing the resident Canada population, but impact has been limited so far. Not many waterfowlers hunt the geese, and success isn’t easy in the limited areas where hunting is allowed.

Back in early August, Democrat- Gazette reporter Dave Hughes produced a lengthy article on the problems the geese are causing from Fort Smith to Bella Vista.

Hu nd red s of geese a re permanent residents in Fort Smith parks, where they find abundant forage on the grassy grounds and surrounding golf courses and are multiplying rapidly in the absence of natural enemies.

Hughes noted that each goose is capable of producing up to 2 pounds of feces per day, and the accumulation is obvious on sidewalks and around picnic areas andplaygrounds.

In Bella Vista, some 1,000 geese are thriving around the sprawling community’s lakes, golf courses, parks and green areas. Besides depositing their droppings every where from golf greens to hiking trails, the geese are contaminating the lakes with E. coli bacteria, according to Darrell Bowman, who manages the lakes for the Bella Vista Property Owners Association.

The geese, of course, also are numerous in parks around Beaver Lake, as well as those around Lake Dardanelle.

So far, “nonlethal” experiments to control them have not worked.

The situation is nothing new to David Krementz with the cooperative fish and wildlife research unit at the University of Arkansas.

When the geese were perceived as a growing problem several years ago, Krementz led a study to trap and band Canada geese throughout the region to help determine their distribution, populationtrends and movements.

Naturally, the study showed the birds to be widespread, increasing in number and not inclined to move much.

“We also found there to be two behavioral cohorts of the goose population,” Krementz said Monday. “There’s an urban population that are never hunted and another population living around our lakes and rivers.”

The latter group represents the geese exposed to hunting, but they don’t give hunters much of a chance.

“We put [radio] transmitters on some of these geese to track what they did when the hunting season opened,” Krementz said. “The main thing we learned was they changed their patterns the very first day.”

He noted that by the first afternoon of the day the shooting started, the geese left the lakes for small, isolated ponds on private properties.

Hunters should be feeling sorry for themselves instead of the honkers.

Tri-Lakes, Pages 127, 131 on 10/05/2008