| | What's new on Iowaz iowaz@swbell.net's "Photo Albums" pages Recently created and updated albums: | Copyright, for private/educational/personal use only. | - South Bohemia Maps
- 96 photo(s) (37 MB)
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| Copyright, for private/educational/personal use only. | - Kopet Cottage Spillville Iowa
- (May 22, 2008)
- Wenzel Kopet farm house, abt 2mi E of Spillville, Winneshiek Co, Iowa. Afeter Wenzel died, his daughter Mary ran the home 'dairy' farm. Eventually the home became a country school. Added July 2008, pics of the Kopet house that now sits at the back of Bily Clocks in Spillville. iowaz@hotmail.com
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| Copyright, for private/educational/personal use only. | - Sean Geese 2009 Nov 15
- (Nov 15, 2009)
- A good buddy and I decided to do a throwback hunt for ducks at a popular public area so we did the usual early wakeup to hopefully beat the competition to our favorite blind - just like the old days. We pull into the boat launch and "relief", we're the 1st ones there. Optimism is high with a cool day of wind and rain in the forecast. Drop the boat in the water and start cranking on the motor - huh, seems to be taking longer than normal to fire. Multiple cranks later still no rumble of the motor. You guessed it, motor wouldn't start on my buddies boat and the battery wore down. My buddy asks me, "what's today?", I said, "Friday" and he says, "Friday the 13th".
So we headed home under a cloud of "Friday the 13th voodoo" and not being much of a superstitious guy, I decided to retool and do a pheasant hunt locally. Darin opted out so I was on my own with the dogs which with the numbers this year is just about the best plan anyway.
We hit a spot that I hadn't hunted yet this year and we got off to a good start when a rooster that normally would have flown across the river on me for some reason decided to try to come back over the top - bad decision for him. See - no problem on the Fri the 13th deal. We then hunted for at least another hour without seeing a rooster in shooting range and just very few birds overall. We did get into a covey of quail and I took a couple on the flush. The next opportunity for a rooster was a wild flush very close to me flying straight away - bad decision again.... except I heard the ominous click of the firing pin not hitting the primer hard enough and the rooster flew away without me being able to shoot. I bet the rooster thought Friday the 13th was a lucky day, but I had a fleeting thought about mine not being so good.
Not much later Rose & Juniors collars are screaming and I traversed through the jungle to find them on point. Before I could get there, a pheasant gets up and flys away and I can't tell what sex it is so I hold fire. Bummer, but wait, Rose never broke point so I keep going. As I get near her, a rooster flushes and cackles loudly echoing off the cluster of trees he is rapidly putting between him and me. This time the gun goes off since I switched barrels, but I miss and pull the trigger again, but no iginition again. Well, maybe this Friday the 13th stuff is for real as 2 roosters got away that should have been in the bag.
Awhile later, the dogs and I hit some nice tall grass that always holds birds, but are tough to get close enough to for a shot. I notice a pretty large dusting area with fresh sign that alerted me to the potential for pheasants and sure enough the dogs get birdy and a rooster tries to escape to my right. Funny, how much more you concentrate when you think you are limited to only 1 shot and it worked as the bird came crashing down. When Rose brought it back, I noticed it hard some weird looking spurs - they curved down instead of up and were fairly long. It's been an interesting year for spurs from a higher proportion of long ones to the triple-spurred Montana rooster. Here's what the spurs looked like: (Pic attached)
As soon as the 2nd bird was in my vest, the dogs continued pressing the action and pointed a hen. We ran into a ditch that in the past has held birds, but this year had been fruitless. Rose and Junior both stayed birdy until Rose stacked up above the ditch while Junior went on point in it. Superstition flew out the window as a rooster flushed and cackled sharply as the feeling of can't afford to miss again came over me. It worked out and the rooster fell from the air to finish up the hunt in about 3 hours. I saw a total of 7 roosters in that time on some prime land.
So the initial Friday the 13th duck hunt gone bust turned into a blessing in disguise.
One of (if not the) best goose hunts I've ever been on came together in rushed planning Friday evening. Don Moody and I had a private field lined up for the next morning and I was fairly pleased with the numbers that were in it. Eric Jones did some scouting as well and when I touched base with him to let him know I thought we could do pretty well in our field, he wanted no part of it after the number of birds he saw while he was out. He wanted to hunt a public land spot and I momentarily questioned his sanity but gave him the benefit of the doubt since The Man Who Loves Goats (Moody) raved about his goose killing prowess. So he talked me into changing plans and the 3 of us were set to go.
I had left a message for my buddy Darin when I found out Eric's dad wasn't going and he called me the next morning to see what the plan was and decided to go after a lot of pondering. I met Moody and transferred my gear to his rig and realized I had forgot my blind (idiot) so back home I went and then hooked up with Darin. It was a zoo of a start to the day, but I was hoping it was going to get better.
We managed to get set up at just about shooting time and shortly after a single goose gave us a look before landing in the disced corn stubble behind our blinds. We decided to pull some of our decoys that were in winter wheat in front of us and put them behind us to give them 2 options since we were in a finger between the two. Then a non-stop flight of geese began that wouldn't end for the next 3 hours. We started by pulling a single in and dumping it and then a flock gave us several passes before we decided backwinging over the top of the decoys wasn't going to happen with this group and I knocked one out of it. It ended up being the smallest goose I've ever shot and it had some unique characteristics that I would be interested in hearing what species it might be and why the coloring.
Here's a closeup of the body: (Pic attached)
The head: (Pic attached)
And the breast: (Pic attached)
Here's the size comparison with the other lesser's we shot on this day: (Pic attached)
We worked another nice flock of about 30 geese, but this time we got a pretty good finish from them and dumped 6. The next group the same thing - nice and close and 6 more down. I was pretty pumped at this point since I don't get in on good goose hunting for the most part and to have everthing fall into place was really cool. The flight slowed a little after that point, but we got another nice flock to come in and took the final 2 birds out of it to finish our hunt.
Here's a shot of our setup with the blinds open and our geese. The hide was good, the geese that gave us a hard look but never picked us out. High marks go to Eric for picking the spot. You can see the part of the spread that we had behind us: (Pic attached)
Here's my hunt partners on the day (Eric, Moody, Darin): (Pic attached)
My ugly mug was captured as well: (Pic attached)
This was the kind of hunts I was hoping for when Darin and I went in on 6 dozen GHG FFD Elite goose decoys a couple of weeks ago. We mixed 3.5 dozen of our decoys with HH's 3 dozen to put out a decent spread. Even so, we were only able to work a minuscle amount of the geese we saw today. I took a couple shots of my decoys. I like them and hope they hold up over time: (Pic's attached)
It was a true pleasure and joy to hook up with Eric and Moody. I look forward to doing it again. Hope everybody else is taking advantage of the new wave of geese that have showed up. That was a heck of a good time today.
I tried a goose hunt on Sunday morning, but it was a bust so we headed home early to spend some family time. How was everybody else's hunts this weekend?
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| Copyright, for private/educational/personal use only. | - Paul Buffalo Hunt Nebraska 2009
- (Nov 8, 2009)
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| Copyright, for private/educational/personal use only. | - Hannibal MO 2009 November
- (Nov 1, 2009)
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| Copyright, for private/educational/personal use only. | - T58N R4n5W 1913 Atlas Marion Co MO
- (Nov 10, 2009)
- 47 photo(s) (35 MB)
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