Manitoba Trip report and photo's

[Todd Caswell]

Returned Yesterday from Central Manitoba, I would say less than 50% of the crops are off, too wet to get into field or crop is still green, duck numbers in our area were non existant, we go up there to target Big dark geese but most years there are enough ducks to keep you busy in the morning befor the big geese come out, not this year, very warm weather and no wind, the big geese would come out really late in the morning after 10 most days and come out very late in the afternoon we had a hour and a half window to find a good feed for morning, most years if the field has less than 500 birds you drive by it this year I don't think we ever found a feed that had more than 200 birds.. we still shot plenty of birds and shot more snow geese than we have in the past.. All in all a good trip, I'm sure this coming week would have been better.. Both dogs picked up lots of birds and I had the oportunity to run some 300 yard blinds with both dogs on birds that sailed.. Hope you enjoy the photo's..

[Todd Caswell]

[Todd Caswell]

[Todd Caswell]

[Todd Caswell]

In this last one you can see the shot string above the bird on the far left

[fishuhalik]

Awesome pics, thanks for sharing em!!!

[BoxMN]

Great pics! You have any of your layouts in the field? I always think we are not covered good enough, and would love to see what others who have good luck look like.

[westguy]

Todd, nice pics did you guys have a lot of snow goose decoys in the spread or mixed bag.

[Todd Caswell]

I normally don't put snow goose decoys in the dark spread, like i said we primarily target the big geese, and thats why we go where we go, I try not to set up in fields with little dark geese there to much like snows very unpredictable on what there going to do from day to day, but on this trip we had no choice, we only had one day where it was big geese only in the field, all the other days we were hunting little geese and snows so then we did put out some white silisocks, we didn't bring very many around 100 but I think it saved the trip, for the most part we had pretty good cover in the fields we hunted, I won't hunt a black field or a really short one, and we spend alot of time stubling them up in the morning.. One of the land owners had a plane and took one of the guys up for a ride around the area one afternoon and he took a few photo's of the spread pretty cool.. There are also 10 dozen Canada decoys in there as well hard to see from the air.

[Pherris]

Very nice photos Todd!

[dan z]

Sixth photo is bomb!

[123fish]

What Dan said. Awesome!

[ChuckN]

Incredible pictures Todd!

I just returned from Manitoba after 5 days and bagged a huge mixed bag of ducks in the field and over water. There were plenty of ducks (and geese) to keep us happy. Later season migrant birds were almost non-existant; Scaup and Canvasbacks were very, very low numbers. We bagged a majority younger birds and not too many mature ducks. I guess bird numbers are impressive in far northern Canada, so we need some cold weather to make them move. It was too darn warm and dry on this trip!

Fields were almost all harvested at the end of our trip and a few fields had grain cut and laying in the field; the birds loved these fields full of food! Accessing them was not an option.