For those of you who live in the United States and haven't tried out spring snow goose hunts, you need to know that most of the hunting expeditions occur in Northeast South Dakota and Northwest Missouri. Both of these locations are excellent staging sites for snow geese and with these staged birds, along with the endless numbers of traveling flocks, there is plenty of decoying action. The perfect time of year for these hunts is usually from the middle of February until the first days of April, for the period of the Conservation Order. This season benefits from liberal laws which will allow you to use an electronic call as well as an unplugged gun.

As far as Missouri is concerned, this state usually is the most successful when it comes to snow geese hunting. The vast majority of the operations are organized in Mound City, an area in the northwest part of the state, located about one hour away from Kansas City (on the Interstate 29). Outside the town you will find the Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge, which usually accounts for almost 500,000 geese. Regarding the hunts conducted in South Dakota, most of them happen in the Aberdeen area. The main hunting area here is the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge, where there are populations of up to 700,000 snow geese.

Just about all of the snow goose hunting occurs in water or grain fields, as well as private rents with lots of efficient decoys. Speaking of goose decoys, they are should be a ultra-realistic windsock type of lure that consists of an internal hold-up system that provides them with full-body look, printing of very high detail, and unmatched realistic movement. The electronic calls mentioned in the first paragraph are very good at emitting quality sounds of the highest clearness without having to worry about the background noise or the annoying distortions that affect many callers and recordings. A significant selection of life-like decoys, sounds and motion are very important for decoying and obtaining efficient results while spring snow goose hunting with your buddies.

On the best spring goose hunts, you should be able to bag from 40 to up 60 birds per day if you are experienced enough and you also have just a little bit of luck. In most of the years, a couple of fields get a zero while a couple ones near or even above that century mark. Over the last several years the goose hunting season averages have ranged from 22 to 26 birds per field, per day.

You need to understand that for this type of hunting, the weather is a crucial factor and for this reason many of the hunts are conducted during the most efficient intervals of the spring conservation season. Despite all of this, you can never know for sure what Mother Nature has in its plan and you have to rely upon your experience when trying to figure out or at least predict the conditions of the weather which will certainly have a great influence upon the geese populations in a specific area.

Spring goose hunting in both Northwest Missouri and Northeast South Dakota is such a popular practice that there are plenty of high quality locations and lodges which have emerged almost overnight. They offer good lodging conditions and hunting services. Another good thing is that the prices have dropped significantly in direct proportion with the new competitors and this can only be a good thing for us, the geese hunters.