I was pretty psyched when I looked up the weather for Greeley, Colo., near where I was headed for a goose-and-pheasant hunt, and saw the best prediction ever: Cold, wind, snow, and rain.
The forecast was on my favorite site, Weather Underground, which has been amazingly accurate this season. We hunters are obsessed with weather. And when it comes to chasing birds, the worse the better.
Birds, especially geese, do two things when the weather stinks. First, they are forced to fly under the clouds, even lower in rain and snow. And they freak out over finding their next meal.
We don’t get a messy weather combo often back home in Virginia, but when we do, the phone starts ringing with my shotgunning buddies begging to hunt. I’ll pull out the beat-up, 16-foot trailer, load it with a couple dozen Big Foot decoys and some coffin blinds and head to a field where we have permission to hunt.
One recent snowstorm looked to be so bad that I only had three blinds for the four excited pals who wanted to hunt, so we just threw a white sheet over the fourth and littered it with some corn husks and stalks. Lots of small flocks flew low. We hit the legal limit easily.
Colorado hunting can be that and more, since the flyway is filled with so many more birds, decks on top of decks of flocks looking for fields to dive bomb.
On the flight out of Washington Dulles International Airport, everybody was excited about the sucky weather we were expecting to fly into, skiers and hunters alike.
It was oddly nice when we landed, but that was OK since we were going to a pheasant hunt in the afternoon then head out to the fields in the morning for the snowy hunt.
All of us at the hunting ranch were primed. We had our cold-weather waterfowl camo suits, hand warmers, and brimmed caps to keep the weather out of our eyes. Bring it.
At 5:30 that Friday morning, I left early to help put out the decoys. It was cold, but no rain or snow yet. Instead of being in coffin blinds, the guides planned to put us six feet under in a comfy garbage dumpster, an unusual but ingenious set up. Over our heads, we’d pull a wooden frame covered in camouflage burlap.
At sunup, our group poured 12-gauge shells into our pockets and climbed into the dumpsters. Ready, set … nothing but sun. Awful sun.
All the predictions of bad weather were wrong. And according to our guides, that was the pattern all season. It has been so nice, in fact, that many of the estimated 180,000 geese that drop into Colorado were still up north feeding.
Jim Gammonley, the avian research chief for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, told me later, “Yes, this is one of those winters when a bunch of geese have stayed far north of Colorado. Wyoming and Montana waterfowl biologists are still reporting good numbers there. Also, because it’s been dry and not extremely cold in Colorado, the geese that are here are more scattered and have different flight patterns than we often see, especially along the Front Range and Eastern Plains. We probably have about average numbers of wintering geese, but hunting has been somewhat frustrating this winter.”
That’s a fact.
We got only one small flock to check us out, and they didn’t come close enough for the guides to bark, “Take ’em boys!”
Didn’t those birds know I had an $86 Colorado Parks and Wildlife license to kill? Come to think of it, they probably did!
Gammonley held out hope for those who came behind us, telling me, “We’re getting a series of cold fronts moving through, so maybe there will be some good late season hunting.”
Paul Bedard is a senior columnist and author of Washington Secrets.
