Standing Corn Honker Escape

After watching around 50 geese feeding in a small section of standing corn in a field off and on in February, I finally decided to load up some fullbodies, layout blind and camera and try to capture shots at the geese decoying in real close. I knew I could get the geese over the decoys but it was just a matter of how close I could get them without spooking them while I was following them with my camera.

Luckily, for the most part, the geese came in close and I had quite a few land right infront of my blind at 10-30 feet, offering great opportunites to take great looking photographs. I was also lucky to get out there in time because I had basically just settled into my blind when the first honk was heard. All together, I was out in the field for an hour and forty-five minutes. The remarkable situation happened when I reviewed the photographs at home and spotted the number of banded birds out of these geese, roughly 20% were banded! I wish they would of been around when I was hunting this year.

Using an Avery Power Hunter with a snow cover on, I was able to shoot out of the windows in the hood. For this outing, I used the Nikon D90 with the Nikon 70-300mm lense and shot in aperture priority mode to control the depth of field. Because I want to capture the most frames per second when taking BIF, I shoot in jpeg and then post process afterwards. The only thing done to these photographs were a small amount of "curves" to darken the blacks and whiten the whites.

#1. The first goose of the afternoon came straight at my blind.

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#6. Virtual Studio has a ton of neat filters and this is one of them, Shoebox B/W.

#7. Another filter from Virtual Studio, World War II B/W.

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#10. Looking like twins looking to the northeast.

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#12. First spotted band of the afternoon, left bird.

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#15. Flying directly over my blind, the band is easily visible.

#16. Shoebox filter from Virtual Studio.

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#18. The geese were eating the corn right off the ears.

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#21. A pair of bands on these birds.

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#23. Not a very happy goose.

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#26. Virtual Studio shoebox filter.

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#30. Virtual Studio World War II filter.

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#32. The two left birds are banded!

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#34. What the ear's of corn look like after the geese eat the kennels off of them.

#35. Virtual Studio shoebox filter.

#36. The spread and the Power Hunter.

#37. Tried out a new goose call today, a Lynch Mob Slipknot Hybrid in maple. The geese sure seemed to like the sound or maybe this guy didn't by him hissing as he hit the ground.