It seems the cold set in here shortly after Thanksgiving, and since the second weekend in December, we have been pretty much frozen out. I am pretty much a one marsh man anymore (it's a big marsh!) so I don;t travel much. Most years we get frozen out for a few days here and there but usually you're back in business pretty quickly and the marsh fills back up with ducks. Not this year. The snow geese even went back south a couple of weeks ago. The Delaware River in Philly is getting pretty icy too. What we do have around is hordes of Canada geese. But I am not that interested in field hunting. I like to hunt snows out on the meadows of Delaware Bay after duck season closes. If you can get near them you can set up with relatively few decoys and get a little shooting at birds that you can call in for a look. Hunting snows on the salt meadows is a lot different than hunting them in fields. Like everything tidal, the water level dictates where the birds like to sit. But if the water is open, they are always there, unlike a field where they are there today and gone tomorrow. Some of our mud flats have hard bottoms that you can walk on, so if you hunt around low tide you can get out on them and set up some shells. While every once in a while you can get a tornado started, I have never been able to put them on the mud, but it's a lot of fun anyway to watch. Best shooting is when you get small flocks trading between large rafting groups, those are the birds that you can get to decoy and call in. I usually hunt with a dozen Herters floaters if I'm by myself, and while you probably won't shoot 15, i usually get a couple. If I'm hunting with others, we'll take some shells too. But it's actually pretty easy hunting as far as the amount of gear that you need. I think this is one of the only places that you can get at them like this. We also are fortunate to have the guy who is probably the master snow goose hunter of region, as far as marsh hunting goes, as a friend. He figured out years ago how to call them with regular flute style call. But not just any flute call, you need a Big River Long Honker, and you need to blow just a high note. There is way he cups his hands around it also, so it sends out a little different sound than if you blow a Canada high note. I've watched Bob call geese over my head standing in the parking lot at the ramp, I watched him call them off some decoys to where we were standing a couple hundred yards away(he called them away from the other guy that was with us), you just have to see it to believe it. He knows where they go when different weather events happen, where they will come from the next day, and how long it takes them to come back once they are frozen out. So right now we need a week of daytime temps above 32 before they show back up. And it's still cold.
Boated the 5th & 6th Cans (all bulls) of the season this AM Came in right as the snow moved in on the bay about 1030