Decoy spreads: The role of the sentry goose

The layout of your decoy spreads is key to your success while goose hunting. It’s simply not enough to purchase the best decoys and place them randomly in the field. You’ve got to put some serious thought into your decoy spreads and constantly be experimenting and working with them.

A feeder and a sentry goose.

This is part of the sport that makes it very exciting. You get to apply your own strategy and thinking to the layouts and try to optimize every decoy and pose. You’re the hunter so you’ve got to study your prey and get wise to their behavior.

Most goose hunters understand that our mission here is to recreate a natural feeding spread with our goose decoys. Migratory geese are landing to stock up on food and catch some rest since they sometimes can travel up to 1000km in one day.

You’re trying to place your decoys in smaller family groups of three to seven. You can experiment with the distance between families. I think most folks get this right. They get the correct species, place them in groups of families and tinker with the distance between groups.

The next part is where I think some folks don’t do enough. It’s in choosing the appropriate number of geese poses and styles for your decoy spread.

Since the mission for migratory geese is to land to eat and rest you want to make sure that you have a large number of feeder and resters in your spreads. This is a signal to geese, whether flying very high up or coming in for a landing, that there is food on the ground and that it looks safe to land.

Geese have lookouts, or sentry geese, whose job is to keep their heads up and look out for trouble. They are going to sound the alarm if something looks dangerous and warn the others to get their heads up and get ready to fly away.

You want to make sure that you do have sentry geese in your spread. Once again these are decoys that have their head up. You may see them referred to as “standards”.

Don’t use too many “standards” or sentry goose decoys. Why? Because if you’re about to land and you see there are too many geese with their heads up then that spells trouble for you. It means something has startled them and they are getting ready to fly away.

I hope this post can give you a bit of a different perspective and more to think about when you’re setting up your decoys this hunting season.

The layout of your decoy spreads is key to your success while goose hunting. It’s simply not enough to purchase the best decoys and place them randomly in the field. You’ve got to put some serious thought into your decoy spreads and constantly be experimenting and working with them.

This is part of the sport that makes it very exciting. You get to apply your own strategy and thinking to the layouts and try to optimize every decoy and pose. You’re the hunter so you’ve got to study your prey and get wise to their behavior.

Most goose hunters understand that our mission here is to recreate a natural feeding spread with our goose decoys. Migratory geese are landing to stock up on food and catch some rest since they sometimes can travel up to 1000km in one day.

You’re trying to place your decoys in smaller family groups of three to seven. You can experiment with the distance between families. I think most folks get this right. They get the correct species, place them in groups of families and tinker with the distance between groups.

The next part is where I think some folks don’t do enough. It’s in choosing the appropriate number of geese poses and styles for your decoy spread.

Since the mission for migratory geese is to land to eat and rest you want to make sure that you have a large number of feeder and resters in your spreads. This is a signal to geese, whether flying very high up or coming in for a landing, that there is food on the ground and that it looks safe to land.

Geese have lookouts, or sentry geese, whose job is to keep their heads up and look out for trouble. They are going to sound the alarm if something looks dangerous and warn the others to get their heads up and get ready to fly away.

You want to make sure that you do have sentry geese in your spread. Once again these are decoys that have their head up. You may see them referred to as “standards”.

Don’t use too many “standards” or sentry goose decoys. Why? Because if you’re about to land and you see there are too many geese with their heads up then that spells trouble for you. It means something has startled them and they are getting ready to fly away.

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