[Bluebill]

I have a friend that lives in North Dakota, he is telling me that smaller spreads work better for snows than the larger spreads. It seems a little fishy to me, but I have heard it from several other people since then.
Someone straighten this out for me! I have 1200 decoys in a trailer that I would love to leave home this year.

 

[Doug Panchot]

It all depends on what types of decoys you have in the "smaller" spreads. I'm assuming your talking 2-3 hundred decoys. If they are all fullbodies, they would probablly be effective. But sheer numbers doesn't hurt either. I'd haul them up just to be on the safe side.

 

[Decoyer]

I think that it depends on how hard the birds have been pressured. If you are hunting flight birds that have just gotten into an area and haven't been shot out of a lot of 1,000 decoy spreads in that area yet, then by all means bring out the numbers, but if the geese have been in an area for a while then that is when it is time to start bringing out the off the wall tactics. After a goose has been shot at a few times over a big blob of rags, then it will probably avoid such spreads, in that case a small spread of ultra-realistic decoys could do the trick.

 

[nodakoutdoors.com]

I'd pretty much ditto everything Decoyer posted. I'd bring out the whole trailer and give it a whirl. If it proves ineffective, pull out the bag of tricks and do something completely different. For me personally, when the going gets rough I'll spread out the groups big time. It makes covering the spread difficult for shooting, but it causes the birds problems in spotting flaws as they have to cover more of the field. And for the record….my best shoot this last spring was over just 14 decoys….call it luck, or just something no one else tries. When are you coming up?

 

[GooseBuster3]

Im with Decoyer and Hustad on this one, they hit right on the head. :beer:

 

[hunt4life]

I also had a very good shoot recently over about 3 dozen shells and 3 dozen North Winds. Two of us shot 22 snows by 1:00 that day. If we were shooting better, we would have had our 40.

It was raining that day and we had to carry the decoys into the field.

We put out about 500 shells the day before in a different part of the same field and only shot 12 geese that day.

 

[Fetch]

We evolved from a thousand decoys (mostly Northwinds) to a couple dozen full bodies a couple doz shells both snows & blues. doz sillowetes & a few magnets - had one Deceptor (but I put the wing mechanism in a Enticer duck ) & I just bought one of these on Ebay http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... :B:BN:US:1

I want one of these
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 1859499456

Here is his other stuff see the deluxe version of this blind http://cgi6.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.d ... =3&rows=25

http://www.refugeforums.com/refuge/show ... adid=63253

& will buy one if I keep hunting SOB's (in Canada)