WINDSOR — In figures as round as, say, goose eggs, statistics compiled by one of the more popular guiding outfits in the region tell the story of Colorado’s hunt over the past three seasons.
By this date in 2006, clients of Woods and Water Outfitters had bagged roughly 1,800 geese from the prime hunting ground east of Fort Collins. In 2007, the number dropped to 800. Now, with the days dwindling down to a precious few, the tally stands at just over 300 birds in the bag.
As anyone who watched tens of thousands of geese fly overhead last Saturday can attest, the primary reason isn’t a total shortage of birds.
In keeping with what has become a mantra for Colorado waterfowl hunters, you can blame this season’s lag on the weather: dramatically deep and lingering snow last season, snow crusted as hard as boilerplate this time around.
In both cases, the result was pretty much the same. Large numbers of geese flocked to those widely scattered cornfields where wind or cattle created patches of bare ground where they could access the grain. A lucky few enjoyed shooting for a lifetime; everyone else suffered with silent guns.
“We hardly hunted at all in January,” John Young said of what traditionally stands as the most productive month of the season.
The snow crusting was worst in the area where hunting usually is best — that odd jumble of reservoirs, farms and tract housing east of Interstate 25 with Windsor roughly as its center. With the crust melted, Monday’s snowfall won’t make much of an impact.
“We’re going to have a heck of a two-week goose season,” Young said of a session that ends Feb. 17. “The birds finally are back flying around the way they’re supposed to.”
Mike Adams of Webbed Feet Down Outfitters echoed the late optimism. “The past week has really picked up. It’s getting better all the time,” Adams said of upswing in which two groups of hunters bagged a combined 21 birds over the weekend.
Mark Beam of Stillwater Out-fitters lamented the unpredictable nature of the geese, particularly the flighty lesser Canadas.
“You think you’ve got a bead on them and about every second day, they change,” Beam said. “Ten years ago, all the little geese had gone south by Christmas. Now they’ve made a home.”
Beam blames a dearth of large geese on the fact that weather to the north has remained generally warmer than along Colorado’s northern Front Range.
“The big geese just threw an anchor out in Montana,” he said.
Jim Gammonley, the Division of Wildlife’s waterfowl expert, confirmed this assessment.
“Reports from Montana indicated they still had 25,000 geese and the Dakotas are holding hundreds of thousands of birds,” said Gammonley, who noted that many birds also may have left Colorado in search of better feeding areas.
The biologist is working to complete DOW’s midwinter waterfowl counts, but he did make this prediction: The goose count and harvest will be down a bit.
Calculating the flight pattern of Colorado’s remaining geese is quite another matter. Geese that have been hunted since early October in three states and a Canadian province have become so wise to the hunting game that it takes a different act of weather to lure them in.
Four hunters from the Denver area and a single stray from Steamboat Springs on Saturday watched flight after flight soar overhead, raining sky music down into their pit. The men had arranged a particularly seductive spread: Bigfoots interspersed with Avery motion decoys.
They called and flagged and hoped, even cursed a little.
“Oh, my God, look at this string of birds coming,” Charlie Busch of Denver marveled, sneaking a peek through a slit in the pit cover.
“There’s geese everywhere,” chimed his father, John, the interloper from Steamboat.
The best they could manage was a close-in swing from a trio of geese that cleverly approached from the rear.
“I could have made the call, but everyone would have had their pit covers turned the wrong way,” said pit boss Tom Herman of Highlands Ranch. “Besides, we had so many other birds working.”
Dedicated hunters unwilling to surrender the season will continue to work through the next two weekends. Then it’s back to that old, hopeful refrain: Wait ’til next year.
