2019-2020 A New Year

Let me start with a review of the 2018-19 season. Simply put, it was as tough as it gets. The snow goose hatch was the absolute worst I have ever seen in my 50 years goose hunting.

I surveyed a group of 2,500 birds and saw not one single juvenile bird. That is almost unbelievable. Without young snow geese, the adults become impossible to hunt. They move en masse, they don't return to the same fields and they feed at night. It is uncanny how smart they are.

That being said, we still have some decent hunts - mainly on speckle bellies - but we did kill a few snows, but nothing constant.

I will file that away as a bad memory. The 2019 -20 hatch appears to be on tract for success. Snow geese nest in the marshes in the far reaches of the sub-arctic. The predominant factor for nesting success is the date when the ice melts. There is a three-week window that the ice needs to be gone so that they can nest. This window closes by the 15th of June.

In the last nesting season, the ice didn't melt until the 20th of June. The geese didn't even try to nest. This year the ice line is almost a thousand miles farther north than last year. That is good news.

2018 (left) vs. 2019 (right)

Source: http://www.climate4you.com/SnowCover.htm

This is really good news when you look at where Third Coast is located in the Arkansas Delta. Most of the geese fly unmolested until they reach their feeding grounds in Arkansas. The young birds may have not showed up last year, but the number of geese was still phenomenal.

With a good hatch this summer, we know we will have a very good hunting season this year. We are excited for the new season, and look forward to taking you on a great hunting excursion.