HNI is a great resource. By and large its a very friendly, open, safe and informitive place. We get our fair share of loose cannons, but the mods tend to keep them eaten down to ground level. As for callingducks.com... I cannot say enough great things about it. You have to navigate around it a it to find everything it has to offer. I think that goose talk is probably the best resource available for goose hunters/callers period. I use it frequently to work on certain notes that have been giving me trouble, or to try and perfect my techniques.

Rebecca would give you a big AMEN there! She used to get madder than a wet hen at me about putting too much pressure on her. If you click on the link to my field journal in my signature line at the bottom... read the article I wrote up about 'trying to hard'. Thats exactly what the whole article was about... a boyfriend putting too much pressure on his lady, and making her flip out.... You can obviously relate! Rebecca and I have been together for about 16 months, and we had talked about it before, but we just recently got engaged. The wedding is going to be sometime in late 08 or early 09, which is a long time to be engaged, but work is getting ready to change for me, so I want to have a steady salary and have settled into the new place (90 miles away from where I am now) before we take that step. She agrees.



That sucks. My first car was an old beat up station wagon with fake wood panneling. Got like 30 miles to the gallon, plenty of cargo space, you could put four canoes on top of it and two dogs in the back of it. My Dad and I split the cost of the car, I think I paid him like $600. It ran well... and it got you there, comfortably and cheap... perhaps not in style, but thats in the eye of the beholder. You had to be cool to drive a Woodchuck

I got lucky to have a Dad that always made it a priority to take me hunting and fishing. I can't remember the first fish I ever caught, I was too young. I had just always caught fish, always followed Dad and our English Setter bird hunting, always been around guns and known how to handle them responsibly. Always been able to run boats, drive... I guess I almost take it for granted. My dad taught me how to be safe, and a bit about bird hunting and wingshooting, but other than that, he didn't actually teach me a whole lot. What he did was give me the opportunity to learn on my own, make my own mistakes. You asked how I knew so much... well thats how... I had a Dad to show me the start of the path and meet me at the end, but I had to find my own way there. In hindsight, I'm a lot better off for it than kids who just got told what to do, but never WHY to do it, or WHY it worked.

We got on a really hot field that the birds just wanted into bad. There were some bigger than others, but none exceedingly large. Rebecca would tell you that the smallest goose in that bunch was the one she was the most proud of. She was shooting a 20 gauge with hevi-shot, and brought down one at about 35 yards. That was her very first goose, and she had seen me shoot one a few minutes earlier, and it needed to be finished off so I rung its neck. Rebecca was screaming she was so excited! She went streaking out to her bird and tackled it (we got that on video) and then she tried to ring its neck and it looked like an old lady trying to stir laundry in an old washbin. She didn't do a good enough job! But it appeared the bird was dead. So, since we were in a green peanut field, we were just laying down between the rows, and pulled green pine branches over us, which worked extremely well. The first goose I had shot, had become my pillow... so my neck wouldn't get sore from leaning forward. I had another one behind me that I'd just shot and Rebecca came and put her goose next to mine. A few minutes later, I heard a flapping sound behind me. More geese were working in, and the small bird Rebecca had shot had come back to life and was standing up. When the other geese flew past, it started honking and squaking, and actually scared the other group off. Rebecca sat up to say something, and that goose went into kamikaze mode! It hissed and flared out its wings and charged her making a God awful noise! I have never laughed so hard in my entire life. I thought I'd wet myself I laughed so hard... everyone did! Except Rebecca of course.... who I then showed how her how to properly finish off a goose by stepping on the head, while holding the feet and lifting up until you hear that nice POP! Which kills it almost instantly. I'd have given $50 to have that on video. It was hilarious.

I've got her a Fred Zink PC-1 and a Sean Mann Eastern Shoreman goose call. Her duck call currently is a Buck Gardner, and she has a double nasty and a single reed... can't recall the model of it though.