3-Picking Your Spots for Late season by the Late Tim Peterson

Picking Your Spots
Where to go when the temperature bottoms out? Open water, if you can find it, or grainfields. Point is, you have to adjust.

"If you are going to tough it out to the end of the season, you are going to have to keep track of the birds," says Tim Peterson, creator of the Goose Magnet decoy and a Minnesota waterfowler with 40 years of experience. "This is when scouting becomes critical."

Cold weather will freeze shallow marshes and ponds, and when that happens, ducks and geese often will move to large lakes, reservoirs, and estuaries where there is open water. Rivers, spring creeks, and man-made flowages offer additional options if the current is strong enough to prevent freezing.

"If you know your territory, you will also know which lakes have a tendency to freeze later," Peterson says. "You will know what will be open, and what won't."

Ducks and geese require extra carbohydrates in order to stay warm when the weather turns bitter cold. They find what they are looking for in harvested agricultural fields where waste grain provides the birds the energy they need.

"I much prefer to take them in grainfields late in the season," Peterson says, "just because there gets to be so little open water. I really don't want to disturb birds on their roost.

In this situation, all you are going to do when hunting open water is to chase the birds someplace else, and then you are going to have to find them again."

Courtesy of Ducks Unlimited