lassig:
Those woodies sure are pretty, aren't they? Do you have to register the geese? I was wondering about the neck tags.
The woodies sure are, the picture doesn't do those two justice. I hope the wood duck boxes I just put out on the pond get used in the spring. They should we saw plenty of woodies looking for nesting places during turkey season last spring.
The neck tags on the geese is Wisconsin's DNR harvest control method. We hunt the Horicon Zone and to hunt geese in the Horicon zone you must apply for tags before 8/1. Then based on the harvest quota for the state on geese and how many folks apply for tags they issue x tags per person. Of course not all geese are shot in the Horicon zone, there is also other areas of the state that are permit only, and what is referred to as the exterior zone (the rest of the state). The harvest quota is split between all of these areas so Horicon doesn't get all of the quota. This year we got 6 tags per person, which is average for what we have been getting the last 5 or so years.
I been hunting the Horicon area since 1976 with my dad, both in the marsh itself and farm lands around fox lake. So this is a tradition that I do with my dad and want to keep it going as long as possible. He is 72 and not sure how much longer he will be able to do this.
The majority of my goose hunting takes place around my residence in the far western Chicagoland area which opens 10/17. One of the fields we hunt was in beans and was harvested last week. One of my hunting buddies scouted it Sunday morning and saw a couple of hundred mallards drop into the pond and a couple thousand geese land in the bean field. If we keep half of these birds the openner is going to be great. Last year we shot 5 man limits of mallards and geese out of this field both Saturday and Sunday of openning weekend.
