Eric Strand killed his first duck when he was fifteen, and from that moment on he was hooked. His obsession with waterfowl quickly brought him into the arena of contest calling and shortly after that guiding. During his time as a college student and early on in his guiding career Eric learned the fundamentals of how to run traffic hunts in the infamously competitive Columbia River Basin. After bouncing around a few different outfits, Eric finally started his own guide service in 2009 and has been running it ever since. In 2013, he started S2 Calls but after a few years sold it, and he is now back in the process of buying the company back. In this article, we’ve distilled some of Eric’s best tips and tactics for trafficking geese in dry fields from his years of calling and guiding experience, hunting some of the most pressured honkers in the west. Check out Born and Raised Call Co to stay current with what’s new from the guys!
LOCATION
“First and foremost you want to know where their X is and get under their flight line or as close to it as possible. What sort of food source are the birds in? Whether it be winter wheat, a cattle pasture- whatever it is, I’m gonna try and match that as closely as I can. Those birds are feeding in a food source because of the weather. When it gets really cold and starts freezing up at night, it makes it a lot harder for them to get to things like corn so you’ll see birds go into those bluegrass, fescue, and winter wheat fields. The same thing happens when it warms up, those birds will probably find some sort of grain to feed in, so you want to try and match that as best you can with what they are eating. On top of that if you can get into fields birds have fed in before that’s even better”.
CALLING
“I don’t call at every goose, we hunt a lot of high traffic refuge areas where it’s not uncommon to see ten to fifteen thousand geese and I can tell fairly quickly if they are birds that want to play or not. If they are birds that don’t want to play I really don’t want to waste my air or educate them on what we are doing. I call them travelers, they’ve got a place in mind they want to go, and a lot of times I’ll just let them go and hope to get them on the way back”. “Now specifically what I’m looking for when calling is the sound or the cadence that gets them to react, whether that be the birds turning or slowing down, what you’re looking for is some variation in their wing beat from the time that they started coming out. So in essence what I’m trying to do is grab those birds’ attention and build excitement about coming to check out the decoy spread.
Whether it’s a double cluck, a whole lot of loud clucking, a real barky cluck, or fast spits- whatever that sound is that gets that reaction, that’s the sound I’m gonna stick with until they are working the decoy spread. Once those birds start breaking down I typically like to back off and just let the birds work and maybe have one or two guys who are really proficient on the calls keep those birds interested if they need it”.
“Lastly, I like to blow the True Lesser because you can get some good honker sounds out of it but it’s a good high pitch call that can get those great demanding barky sounds, you can get really good spit notes out of it, it has a really good tonal range that helps me move up and down that high to low scale for whatever notes are working on a particular day/hunt”.
DECOY SPREAD
“If the decoys are doing the work I have no problem with putting the call away, I’m not too proud to put the call down and just let them work the decoys if that’s what they’re doing. A lot of the time if the decoys look good and they’re doing their job you can decoy birds without a whole lot of calling. It’s a lot different between little geese and honkers. Usually, if we’re set up for little geese there’s gonna be a lot more decoys and more aggressive calling. If you’re gonna run a smaller spread for honker traffic I just really like a big loose spread, a lot of the time I’ll put the brunt of the decoys where we want them to land or where we want them around us but I’ll even put decoys out 150-200 yards just so those geese will get down on the field because that’s a big thing if you can get those geese to start dropping elevation earlier, at that point, you’re winning”.
“Also with that if you’re in a competitive area, odds are a lot of people are gonna be running very similar decoy spreads, which is fine because you can still find success and kill birds, but if you’re looking to have success day in and day out I like to try and do things differently. Say most guys around me are running 60-100 decoys, I might throw out 300 plus if we are talking full bodies or even more if you’re talking silhouettes and socks, or maybe just the opposite I might go with a real small spread say three dozen or so”.
MOTION
“If I’m hunting an X you probably won’t ever see me pull a flag out. If I’ve done my homework I got a good spot in the field, decoys look good, I’ve got a good hide, all I can do is screw it up. Those birds want to be there so if they don’t then that means I’ve made a mistake somehow. A lot of times I hunt the edge or in the decoys but I don’t want to draw attention to my location, I don’t want those birds to know where I’m at, I want them to hunt for the sound and work the decoys. If I’m running traffic and those birds are a quarter-mile off and I’m just trying to get attention I’ll flag like crazy but as soon as they turn and start heading in my direction the flag goes away so they aren’t keyed in on where I’m at”.
PRESSURE
“You can usually gauge the pressure in an area from how your birds are acting when they get up off the roost. I can remember guiding hunts and in every direction I look there’s a spread set up in every pivot field, so there’s something definitely rewarding about finding success when it is that competitive out there. If I had clients that would do it sometimes I’d rather get out there around ten in the morning and get set up for the afternoon when it is that pressured because so many guys leave in the morning and those birds come back out super relaxed in the afternoon. So I think understanding the pressure in your area and keying in on how the birds react to it can help give you a lot more success”.
ENDNOTE
“Sometimes it does depend on where you are hunting in the country, I’ve had traffic hunts up north where it was four guys hammering the calls, and the harder we called the more the birds committed”.
Sometimes birds do things differently, what works on birds on one side of your state might not work on the other side, you might get an oddball weather day and sometimes birds just don’t give you the time of day. However, Eric’s years of experience running traffic hunts should help demystify some of the common questions around traffic hunts for honkers. It’s important to know what’s going on with the birds in your area but sometimes experimenting and doing things differently can pay off big time. Visit Born and Raised Call Co on IG to follow along with them.
