Walker Davidson for SPLIT REED
The World Championship Snow Goose Conservation Hunt. That’s a damn mouthful. For the second year in a row, Mack’s Prairie Wings has put on this snow goose hunting competition. The objective of the competition is for your ten-man team to kill as many snow geese as possible while following the rules of the competition, and whichever team does this wins an inordinate amount of prizes. It seems like a great deal right? Save the tundra by killing the hell out of whitey is the main goal of conservation season, so giving some guys incentives to kill even more is no problem…
Across the waterfowling world, like many things in this day and age, the Snow Goose competition has become a polarizing ordeal. Some folks love it, some more people hate it, or for others that don’t care about snow geese, it is irrelevant. I talked to one man who participated last year and he said he really enjoyed everything about it. The competition was run in a safe and legal manner with the assistance of Arkansas Fish and Game and that he thought the overall competition was a good thing. Mack’s did a great job getting together their prizes to make it worth it for the teams to enter. This competitor is under the impression that after hunting in the Stuttgart area for a long time and seeing the invasion of the light geese, it has hurt the duck hunting, specifically mallard hunting. Because of this, he believes that competition is a good thing. The hunters all stayed within the competition rules and the law while competing to take home the title, along with over $50,000 in gear. In my opinion, this competition is not very much different than any big buck contest, turkey rodeo, or bass tournament, and along those lines, I see no issue with it.
I also talked with a snow goose guide in Arkansas who strongly dislikes the competition because it has hurt his business. According to him, the competition has made it really hard to find ground to hunt on unless you have big enough money for a lease or know a big-time farmer in the area. He also said that in trying to win the competition sometimes these farmers will shoot a roost and blow all the geese out of the area. While it is at the farmer’s discretion who to allow to hunt their land, if anyone, and traditionally getting permission to hunt snow geese has been fairly easy. Once again it is at the farmer’s discretion if he wants to shoot a roost, but in doing so it does hurt other goose hunting in that area. Especially when it was a guy that traditionally never snow goose hunted and just did it for the sake of the competition. However, at the end of the day Mack’s is one of the big dogs in the waterfowl industry and anything they can do to try to gain more of the already niche market share, I believe they will, and the snow goose competition is just another tool to just that.
At the end of the day, if everyone’s goal is to actually save the tundra then I believe anything and everything we can to do kill more snow geese is a good thing. Obviously, some people make a living guiding these hunts and the competition ruining their business is not a good thing either. Another point to consider is that if the goal is to kill more geese, then should Mack’s allow them to be killed by any legal means instead of having to be over decoys? Or is the goal of the competition to see who can decoy the most geese? I am not sitting here proclaiming that one way is right or wrong, I am just posing questions as an outsider, trying to filter through the opinions of everyone affected by the competition and trying to figure out what the true goals of the conservation season are, as well as the goals of the competition and snow goose hunters in general. As with most things, I do not think there is a cut and dry answer, and that most people’s opinions will differ slightly. Hopefully, this article will incite some conversation on the topic of conservation of waterfowl and how killing more light geese plays into that. At the end of the day as true waterfowl hunters we should all care about preserving the birds we love to hunt for the future generations and whether or not this competition aids in that or not.
So, what are your opinions on the World Championship Snow Goose Conservation Hunt? Furthermore, what are your opinions on the ramifications of the hunt, economically, pressure on the birds, taking away business from the guides, etc..?
