View the Photo Gallery Intro to Live Decoys First Live Decoys Raised to Deceive Call Birds For Sale Domesticating and Training Tethering Deployment Flying Decoys Rigging Geese Beginning of the End Play it Again, Sam? What to do with the Live Decoys?

[Three unidentified hunters, each holding a Canada call goose, with the morning kill. G. Calkins studio, Kenesaw. Courtesy Thomas G. Weynard.] Rigging Geese Text by Jon Farrar Published in NEBRASKAland Magazine, November 2010

Most of what has been written to this point applied to call ducks, but some was much the same using call geese as well. Still, there were differences. Call geese were significantly larger than call ducks and never became quite as domesticated and as easily handled. While white-fronted and snow geese call birds were not unheard of, most were Canada geese.

As with call ducks, most hunters wanted two traits in their call geese – small size and clamorous. Pound for pound, more call geese could be transported if they were small, and so a four- to six-pound bird was ideal. Larger geese were used, though, particularly on the Platte River. Many of the call goose flocks in places like North Platte were started with wing-tipped, wild geese before 1900, back when the large “giant” Canada geese were still pausing along the Platte River during migration and nesting in the Sandhills just to the north. Those birds could weigh up to 14 pounds, with nine- to 12-pounders common. For personal reasons, some breeders stuck with the larger geese right up until they were prohibited.

One of the best known North Platte wildfowlers to keep large Canada call birds was Sig Scott. Scott grew up shooting over live decoys and continued to do so until they became illegal, at which time he began making his own goose decoys. McNeel recalls all of Scoot’s call geese were big, from eight pounds to 11 pounds. McNeel said he had no idea why Scott preferred the larger geese, but other North Platte hunters did as well and that preference was not confined to just North Platte. Haworth, who lived in Sidney and hunted the North Platte River, used both duck and geese for live decoys, and like most hunters started his call flock with wounded birds. One of Haworth’s Canada geese, plumped up by easy living, weighed in at 16 pounds. While small geese have the better reputation for being vociferous, the large geese were no pikers.

“One time I was putting decoys out on the point of this towhead,” Haworth recalled. “We'd usually put the gander on one end and the hens down below so they'd call between them. And those old ganders would get so damn mad they would just bawl. I was out and a flock of geese showed up…and Ed  [Haworth’s brother-in-law] says, ‘Here comes a flock of geese.’ And I just laid down flat and held this goose by the leg. And you ought to have heard that old goose call – called 'em in. And that same day we called a bunch in and got 13 out of one bunch. In the days of call geese,” Haworth said, “we'd see one bunch of geese and you was mad if you didn't get into it.”

As a rule, wing-tipped geese were not used as call birds but as breeding stock.

“It took a long time to settle that goose down, I’ll tell you that,” McNeel said of using wild geese as call birds. “A lot of guys wouldn’t even attempt to take them to the river because they scared more stuff away than they was good.”

Hoffmeister kept his call geese in a cement-lined pond outside of Imperial; and pumped water into it to keep part of it open in winter. He kept his call geese even after their use for hunting was prohibited. “Geese are wonderful birds and I loved to care for them,” the Hoffmeisters wrote in their book.

Hoffmeister was probably typical of men who raised and used call birds in that each bird had its own personality and often individual birds had names. Hoffmeister had “Doc” and “Mrs. Doc,” and “Tunney” and “Mrs. Tunney.” Naming them by couples was an acknowledgement that Canada geese usually stay as pairs so long as both are alive. Tunney was named for heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney because, Hoffmeister wrote: “I called the male Tunney because every time I picked him up in the field he would nip me on the cheek drawing blood sometimes.” When Mrs. Doc died, Hoffmeister eventually got Mr. Doc to accept an “old maid in the flock who laid infertile eggs each season as his new mate. He courted her with “real goose gallantry and soon he was standing guard over the setting hen ready to defend her and her nest with all the wariness, shrewdness and strength nature had endowed him, defying the belief that Canada geese do not mate again [if their first mate is lost].”

Doc was Hoffmeister’s best call goose, “always a leader,” and so was harnessed and staked out “at a far outside corner [of the spread] and his mate on the opposite side and they kept a running conversation of goose talk going. When a flock was sighted in the air, Doc began to call and soon all the decoys were honking.”

Hoffmeister’s call geese began as wounded birds, usually birds with a broken wing. “We used to save all our winged geese when hunting,” he wrote. “The winged Canadas took up readily with the old flock, often eating [with them] the same day they were shot down. If the wing was badly broken, my brother, Dr. George Hoffmeister, would amputate it at the break.

“All the geese were highly intelligent,” according to Hoffmeister. “They knew the sound of my pickup truck and by the time I arrived at their pen to feed them, they were gathered at the gate to the delight and amusement of the people in the vicinity who watched their performance day after day.”

Kohler recalled hunting with his uncles on the Missouri River in the early-1930s and there would be three or four spreads of live goose decoys in a three-mile stretch. One hunter had more than 100 call geese, including white-fronted geese. Hunters deploying  large numbers of geese often built pens on sandbars to confine the call birds, as tethering each was too time consuming. Kohler said his uncles only used six or seven birds and they rigged them just like their call ducks, with leg bands and small chain. He recalled hunting close enough to the Tekamah Gun Club set-up that used 40 to 50 live call geese to see flocks go to their decoys.

“You would hear them shoot,” Kohler recalled. “In about two minutes you would hear them shoot again. Then they would shoot again. Pretty soon it was quiet, and you knew that they killed every one of them in that flock. [Those wild geese] would just keep going back to those live birds [in the pen]. They just kept calling them back. I remember walking down through that big timber and down to their camp, and they had a clothesline between two cottonwood trees, and they just had that solid with geese hanging on there. I can remember that, and that made me sick. [With] those call geese, if there were 20 in a bunch, they shot them all. I didn’t like that.” Kohler said it was “the best thing that ever happened” for geese when call birds were prohibited.

Unlike call ducks, geese were always penned, tethered or someway constrained.
“In using wild geese decoys one should be careful to have them securely tied and anchored, for if one gets loose he will do everything troublesome and annoying that a bad boy could think of and you will have trouble in catching him,” Bruette wrote.

“I don’t know anybody that had any geese that they would let loose,” McNeel recalled. “Most of the geese had this harness that came up over the wings. You put it over the wings, and then it crisscrossed in the back, and down right at the belly you had your ring. You hooked that ring into the chain, drove the stake into the sandbar. Some of the guys used a leg strap.”

Haworth described using a similar, home-made harness made of half-inch wide “wang leather” riveted as needed on his call geese. He said they tried using leg tethers but the geese “would try and fly to get away and they'd stretch their leg out and we'd cripple too many.” Haworth’s goose harnesses slipped over the birds’ heads and under their wings. The leather strap on the back had a ring so “you could just reach down in that cage and get a hold of them by that ring, just pick 'em up and set 'em up there and snap a snap on 'em.” Each bird had its own individual string about four feet long with a stake on it.

As with call ducks, call geese were deployed in a fashion to solicit as much “talk” among the birds as possible.

“In shooting over live goose decoys, from shore,” Bruette suggested, “a good caller should always be put in the rushes out of sight of the other decoys and near enough to the bind to make her answer the gunner’s signal to call. A good one responds to a little base mumbling sound of ‘Mum-ma.’ Geese are sometimes very tantalizing. What influences them is hard to understand, but at times, without any apparent reason, except obstinacy on their part, they will scream their heads off at every seagull that come around and refuse to talk to geese. When they start this, it makes the shooter feel like shooting the decoy.”

According to Bruette, another consideration when tethering call geese was where wild geese would fall when shot.

“Geese have a peculiarity when used as decoys,” he wrote, “that if a dead goose drifts between live geese, they are apt to refuse to call any more the entire day. When using them, the shooter should be careful to drop his birds to the leeward or down the stream of running water.”

Hunters on the East Coast put call geese to effective use, so effective that not many years passed before there were precious few geese left to shoot. Grinnell described it in his 1901 wildfowl hunting book: “On a good goosing day, long before it is light, the men go into the goose-pen and capture the live decoys, which are placed in coops, each one large enough to hold two or three birds. The coops are then transported to the boat, if the journey to the box [blind] is to be made by water, or are put in the wagon, if the box [blind] is close to the shore. The goose stools, on which the tethered birds are to stand, are put in the boat; then the gunners, with their arms and ammunition, enter it, and the start is made for the box [blind].

“If the weather is right for goosing, it is usually not long before a flock of the birds are seen coming,” he continued. “The decoys are likely to recognize them as soon as any one, and as soon as they see them they begin to call. If the decoys are properly set, the approaching geese will answer, and will usually lower their flight and prepare to alight with them. It is a common practice to allow them to do this, and then to fire one barrel at the birds on the water and another as they rise. If they swim up to the decoys in a long line, as they often do, the gunners, by aiming at their heads and necks, may often kill a large number on the water, and then, shooting with judgment, as the birds begin to rise, may get a number more. By this means, in favorable localities, more than a hundred geese are sometimes killed in a day.... There is little to be said in praise of the altogether common practice of allowing geese to alight and shooting them on the water. It, of course, largely increases the count, which, in fact, is what many men shoot for, but there is certainly little satisfaction to be derived from killing with the shot-gun on the water a bird as large as a goose, and the better sentiment of the best class of gunners will favor shooting at the geese as they are about to alight, and then giving them the other barrels as they go away.”

Perhaps the only example of using free-flying Canada geese to attract wild birds close enough to be shot was practiced by large hunting clubs on the East Coast, particularly in Massachusetts. William P. Bishop described how it was done in detail in an article, “The Judas Geese of Massachusetts,” that appeared in the January/February 1988 issue of Ducks Unlimited magazine.

“A typical gunning stand was a small, low-profile house, sometimes on the coast, but usually located on a freshwater pond just far enough inland to attract migrating geese,” Bishop wrote. “It had cooking facilities and sleeping quarters and could be quite elaborate. The camp, ideally located under a high bluff or knoll, had a vantage point or lookout on the roof where a ‘watchman’ could scan for geese. A sandy beach in front of the stand was necessary for a place to pin the callers, and was usually created by the gunners to suit their needs.”

The shooting stand, Bishop wrote, was connected to the beach by a fence similar to snow fence and called the “breastworks.” It was behind this more than 50 yards long fence where hunters hid to shoot. Adult geese were tethered on the beach or shore, and their goslings, the young-of-the-year, in pens on a hilltop or knoll above. It only took a few days of training, the calling of parents on the beach and the reward of corn for the young birds to learn where they should fly when released. When the watchman sighted flying wild geese, he would signal the hunters and release the goslings to take flight and draw down the wild birds to the shooters. Bishop wrote of one shooting club having between 300 and 400 birds and releasing as many as 50 to 60 goslings at one time. The tethered adults, upon seeing their young in flight, started yammering.

“The gosling would circle to gain altitude, and would actually attempt to join the wild flock and entice them to land on the pond,” Bishop continued. “Well trained birds would even pursue the wild birds a considerable distance if necessary.”

Bishop recounted Captain Jerry Smith, one of the old-time hunters, telling of a time when: “There was nothing flying that day, but we did decoy one flock. We sighted about six geese flying at a distance. A team of flyers was released but they were unsuccessful in attracting the wild geese. A second team was released, and flew out of sight, and were gone for several minutes. Finally they returned with the flock of wild geese tagging along with them.

“The swimming [wild] geese were allowed to get as close as practical, letting them bunch up for a ‘shot,’” Bishop wrote. “When the stand manager thought the time right, he gave the signal for the gunners to fire simultaneously. Big-bore guns such as four and eight gauges were preferred…. Only rarely were shots taken at flying birds.” Each trained gosling wore a 12-inch leather strap on one leg to identify them to the shooters.

The 1918 annual report of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Game stated: “The method of shooting wild geese as employed in Massachusetts has come in for a certain amount of adverse criticism on the grounds that it is not sportsmanlike, and claims are made that this method of hunting should be prohibited.” In 1930, 8,518 live goose decoys were being used in Massachusetts.