Goose Decoys Buyer Guide

Get those snow goose decoys ready! This year is going to be a big one.

It’s been widely reported that this goose hunting season is going to be a banner year for snow geese migrations.  Leading biologists are saying that this year’s bumper crop of snows and their blue morphs is nothing short of spectacular.

The nesting season has been a good time for the juvenile snow geese to grow up and this year could see numbers around 1.5 juveniles to every 1 adult. Juvenile snow geese are notorious for dropping in on goose decoy spreads.

As many of you know we’ve been battling for over a decade of over population of the snow goose. They’ve been over grazing so much of their feeding grounds up north while the adults are living longer.

The goslings have had a low survival rate over the past decade due to adults competing and over grazing these areas. The little ones just can’t compete with the big ones for the food. This goose hunting season is a really important one for the future of the snow geese.

If they continue to overpopulate and live longer then eventually they’re going to run out of good grazing grounds and we could see larger dangerous implications on the entire population.

It’s up to you find goose hunters out there to load up on your snow goose decoys, get those spreads ready and take as many as you legally can. I know we’ve seen special hunts for snows and other provisions to help reduce the problem.

We need more special snow hunts. We’ve got to help save this population by blasting as many of these as we can. Those juveniles are going to spend a lot of time this season in your decoy spread so get ready for it.

Goose hunters are always looking for more goose decoys. They’ve learned over the years that more decoys equals more success in attracting geese and ultimately taking them.

It’s Labor Day weekend and folks are starting to build their goose and duck blinds and to round up those dekes that have been in storage all spring and summer. Folks are beginning to clean them up and to start counting them.

An interesting trend has started to develop over the past couple of years. Goose hunters are turning to Craigslist to search for goose decoys for sale. They are looking for Canada goose decoys, Specklebelly goose decoys and many are looking for snow goose decoys.

Craigslist is a free online classifieds market that allows anyone to post items for sale or items they want to buy. It was once popular in only large cities but has finally stretched out and has become popular in rural areas of the United States.

Unfortunately, there are many folks who abuse Craigslist and try to take advantage of people who are just looking for a good bargain by searching for goose decoys for sale.

We always recommend that people look at buying goose decoys as a lifelong investment and to understand that what may seem like a steep upfront price for some of today’s best brands is not one at all. You’re buying the highest quality long lasting dekes that will keep working great for you over decades.

Most goose hunters will tell you that transporting and setting up your hunting decoys is one of the most important and sometimes challenging parts of hunting waterfowl.

Goose hunters already are committing themselves to wake up well before dawn in freezing cold temperatures and head out into the fields or on the frigid waters. You cannot afford to waste precious hunting time transporting and setting up your goose decoys. We do this all for the lure of the big honkers.

Regardless of whether you’re taking a dozen Flambeau decoy to a rice field or four dozen Carrylite decoy to a flooded timber you’re going to need a good strategy for transporting and setting them up. Long time goose hunters have their rigging and bagging strategy down to an art form.

There are several different tools and methods of transporting your hunting decoys. The following is a list of five essential tools you’ll need to save time and successfully set up your hunting decoy spread this goose hunting season.

There was a time in my life where the thought of silhouette goose decoys made me cringe. I couldn’t see how something that was a cutout of a goose could ever be useful. I’m happy to say that those day are over and I’m now a big fan of the silhouette decoys, or silos for short.

I grew up around my father who used to hand carve goose decoys out of blocks of wood. I would help him paint them and we put a lot of time into the details of each of the feathers and the beautiful black neck of a Canada goose.

Nowadays the amount of detail and craft put into silo decoys is unbelievable. The images are the highest quality photographic reprints you’ll ever find and the new anti-glare coating virtually eliminates the possibility of shine or flare from above.

The 3D effects that are being engineered nowadays can create some three dimensional spreads that look like full bodies from afar. It’s safe to say I’m now sold on the high quality silos. They’re one of the best types of hunting decoys around today.

I recently ran across a video online where a fellow goose hunter talks about the benefits of using silo goose decoys in the snow. He makes a great point about the benefits of silos over full bodies during a snow. The reason for their advantage is that you won’t have a snow covered decoy. Silos are thin and the snow just falls all around them and never covers them.

Click the link below to see this great video.

It’s that time of year again where my fellow goose hunters are searching online for goose decoy spreads and pattern layouts for this season. I’m also doing some searching to see if I can find some informative tutorials for you so you can get some good spread ideas.

I found this video from a few years back on YouTube and I thought I would share it with you. One of the best parts of this video is when he discusses a secret tactic used by goose callers to get the geese to hit the landing zone.

I think the video is worth watching just for that one bit of advice. It involves doing something that you duck hunters would never do. You start to aggressively call the geese the closer they get to your landing zone.

Why would you do that? Well, it’s pretty simple. Geese are competitive eaters and they often can be heard honking as they fight each other over food on the ground. Aggressively calling them into landing sends a signal to them that there’s good food on the ground and the other geese are all fighting each other for it.

I recommend watching it and giving some of these tactics some thought. It may or may not apply to you but it’s always good to see different goose hunters’ point of view.

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.

It’s no secret that it can take several dozen different types of decoys to get your decoy spread the way you want it this season. A top quality decoy can last you many years and give you a solid return on your investment.

However, as we all know, building up your spread isn’t cheap. You may hunt Canada, Specklebelly and Snow geese so you need to invest in those different species of decoys; or you may prefer to be creative and purchase numerous shells, full-bodies, silos and floaters of one species so you can build out one magnificent spread.

Building your spread, or the layout of your goose decoys in the field (or water), is an art form. It’s one of my favorite parts of goose hunting and it involves you thinking like a goose and really embodying the “hunter spirit”.

You absolutely need top quality decoys and many of them, but you also need to know that you can’t just throw money at the a lot of decoys and expect magic. You’ve got to work hard, get excited about it, put on your warrior face paint and build something beautiful out there.

If you’re new to goose hunting and this is one of your first few season then I urge you to take your time and slowly build up your decoy spreads. Buy your own and buy a few dozen each year. Ask any goose hunter and they’ll tell you that if you rely on someone else to contribute to your spread each year then you’re going to end up getting burned.

I’m always impressed by the quality of the goose hunting tutorials you can find on YouTube. I recently discovered a short yet very informative YouTube video about goose flagging. I wanted to share it with you because flagging and calling have become important accessories to a great goose decoy spread.

The most important components of a great goose hunting trip are the location of your landing zone, location of your blind, the number and types of goose decoys that you have spread out and finally your goose calls and flagging skills come into play.

There’s been an increase in flagging tutorials and use since the mid 80s and I hope the following video can help some of our new goose hunters learn something about this useful skill.

It happens every year. My fellow goose hunters stock up on plenty of sentry, feeder and silo goose decoys but wait till late in the winter to purchase the much needed resters, also known as sleepers.

If you’ve hunted long enough you’ve probably noticed that geese love to warm up a cold hard ground by lying down and resting on it. Once the ground is warm enough they will start to feeding beneath.

It’s good sign for geese flying late in the winter that there is food below when they can see plenty of resters and feeders below. I always recommend replacing some of your sentry decoys with resters as the season winds down and the winters get harsher.

As you might expect most of the resters start disappearing off the store shelves by the beginning of January. Don’t get caught without them and go ahead and make your investment now.

I get asked every fall about the best placement of goose decoys and I always respond the same way. I say, “Mimic the natural feeding spread of a family of wild Canada Geese”.

That answer never goes over very well. I get looks of bewilderment and lots of folks scratching their heads.

Today everyone is obsessed with the latest alphabetical shape variant. This has caused an unhealthy trend in goose hunting.

I’m going to tell you something that I hope you already know, but most folks seem to have not been taught; or have simply forgotten. The shape pattern whether it be U-shape, V-shape, etc doesn’t represent a natural grazing pattern.

These letter shapes are meant to be visual diagrams for you to determine where to place your landing zone. The layout pattern such as varying distances between geese, poses, family groups and direction are far more important than being obsessed with shape layout.

A general rule of thumb to help you better prioritize your spread is to focus exclusively on your blind setup and landing zone before you even begin to setup your spread.