Please practice before you go to the field

A great story of how not to blow a goose call. Last year I was out hunting a wheat field for honkers and we had a nice fully flocked spread set up for early season goose hunting here in Minnesota. Early in the morning had no luck , just lots of high flyers that did not seem interested in landing in our field. So we rearranged the decoy spread and moved to an area more out in the open that had more down wheat. The geese in the afternoon were flying much lower and many of them close enough for me to blow my short reed goose call.

I by no means am a expert call, but I can make about 4 calls pretty good. I started to blow a nice feeding call and the geese started their final decent. One of the guys that was with was a friend of a friend type of thing. He started wailing on his $10 garbage call and all the geese veered off and left before we had any shooting. It was so bad it sounded like someone was stepping on a dying cat. He was breaking his reed open right away and it sounded just awful. We banned him from blowing any more during the day. Bottom line is that we filled out on geese because so many were around. I kept telling the guy - you need to go over to field across the road we are going to get a lot more shooting over here when you blow your call over there.

A great hunting story, but the bottom line is if you cant blow your goose call - PRACTICE away from the field. If you cant blow it at all, choose a better location and leave the call at home.