The Secret to Calling Late-Season Geese

EDITOR'S NOTE: Mitch Sanchotena of Middleton, Idaho, a longtime goose hunter and a pro staffer for Knight and Hale Game Calls, enjoys hunting geese in the Snake River valley in southern Idaho.

Question: Mitch, what's the secret to calling late-season geese?
Answer: I think the secret to calling anything is authenticity. If you don't sound somewhat like the critter, it isn't going to respond very well. The northern birds have left, and we're back working on the same small population of 4,000 or 5,000 geese that we started the season with. So the late-season geese are extremely wary. You might say the fools have already been weeded out of the gene pool.

To be successful, you've got to read the bird. If it's an old single goose and he's coming in honking and screaming, you better let him know this is where he wants to be. If it's a single coming in silently and he's already pretty much committed himself, there's no reason to alarm him by sounding out with something that may or may not be authentic. We just have to read the birds and hopefully learn from our mistakes. If we're overcalling, as soon as we get aggressive and the birds start leaving, we better be smart enough to change our tactics. What worked yesterday may not work today.

Question: In late season, do you like to have a lot of people calling on the geese?
Answer: I like to let them know this is a pretty good place to be. Geese are very gregarious and group-oriented. I want them to think they're coming to a New Year's party. We're using 18 mounted decoys. Eight or 10 of those birds ought to be responding in some way to the birds in the air.

Question: You shrink your decoy size the later the season gets, right?
Answer: Right. A field has to start some place. The field we see that has 400 birds didn't start with 400 birds. It probably started with eight, 10 or 12 birds. Late in the season, like much earlier, hunters have gone to the bigger-is-better concept. Three hundred-decoy spreads that worked well 30 days earlier in the season won't work as well today. We had a 200-decoy spread in this field 10 days ago, and we had a lot of birds out. We were very successful and killed seven or eight out of the couple of hundred birds that came to the field.

I just think those birds have seen too many spreads of 300 plastic imitations out there. Towards the end of the season, we'll work off the concept that fewer is better and try to convince these geese they are the second group into the field. I want every goose that comes in to think, "There's food here because there are geese here, and I want to get in on the groceries." If the stuffed decoys can't get the geese in, I don't know what can.

Tomorrow: Using Scarecrows to Scare Up Geese