Ducks and Geese

Situated close to the Willamette, located just out of Brownsville, Rogers’ refuge feeds a lot of birds.

Guided duck hunt on the Crooked River with Predawn Adventures.

This hunt on the last day of duck season was testament to Mitchell’s first year dream of a sanctuary for wildlife along the Crooked River. Here, where the river carves a twisted course through ranch land, we staged Duck Creek Outfitters’ first annual father/son hunt.

When I opened the door it hit me, not the scent of the dairy, in the marsh east of Klamath Falls, but the decay, the yellowed orchard grass and the mud. Darren Roe opened the trailer and we shrugged into huge packs of decoys and deposited them on the ground fifty yards away. There was…

If you’re one of those marsh junkies that, by the end of January, didn’t get enough waterfowl hunting in – good news! Klamath County’s Late Goose season gives you two more weeks in the field. In the basin, they’re calling this the spring goose season. Technically, it’s still a late-winter hunt, from February 24 through…

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Oregon’s goose harvest in 2006 was approximately 78,800 birds. 14,400 goose hunters averaged 5.6 days afield. That’s a lot of hunters educating a lot of geese. The ones that don’t graduate to the freezer and dinner table go on to get advanced degrees in hunter avoidance. Get…

We joined the hunt in progress a few miles outside of Klamath Falls. Brad Douglas parked the Expedition a quarter mile away. A field of white decoys shimmered in the afternoon sun. Then on the horizon, white snow goose wings winked against the sky, and a mass of birds seemed to lift out of the…

Ducks and geese drifted in and out of my dreams. It’s always hard to sleep the night before a hunt. When the alarm rang, I rolled out of bed and found my camo and my boots. An hour later, we tromped through icy marsh. A biting wind howled out of the west, driving a sullen…

A whispered prayer to bring geese out of the west? It seemed presumptuous somehow, but not entirely out of place on a hunt two days before Christmas. That day the mercury registered minus-1 degrees Fahrenheit and there was 18 inches of snow on the ground in Sisters, Oregon. First I stuck my Toyota in Sykes’s…

Through a loosely woven burlap blanket I watched the eastern sky pale. I lay in the middle of a group of Canada Goose decoys in a cut-over barley field, the barrel of my double barreled shotgun just protruding from the corner of the straw-covered blanket. My friend, Darren, lay in the middle of another flock…