Sartain and his friends burn plenty of gas riding through the Mississippi counties in which they hunt, looking for large flocks of geese, especially, specklebellies. Once they find concentrations of birds, they start patterning the movements of the flock.
“We know that geese usually roost at the same place at night, leave the roost (during the day) and go feed, leave the feed and go to water, return from water to feed two or three times a day, and at the end of the day, go back to the roost,” Sartain said. “So, the keys to being successful are pinpointing where the geese roost, where they feed and where they go to water.”
Once you’ve established the route taken each day, you have to make sure you set up your decoy spread and your blinds far enough away from the roost so you dont spook the geese and cause them to move away from the roost. If you set up too close to the roost, the geese will leave that roost site.
Generally, the geese will come off the roost in waves. Setting up this way means you’ll have several flocks to hunt each morning.
“Scouting is the most-important part of goose hunting,” Sartain emphasized. “We’ve found that our best tactic is to identify the field that the geese are feeding in late in the afternoon, before they go to the roost. The next morning we’ll have our decoys standing in that field, exactly where the specklebellies have been on the previous afternoon.
“We’ve learned that geese like to start feeding in the same places where they’ve been feeding the afternoon before and then march down the field like an army — eating everything that they can find.”
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