corn and we were shooting at them
straight up, which I think is the best
shot you can take on a goose. I love
hunting right in the decoys, but I’m
not married to it. I’m married to kill-
ing geese.”
GRAIN-BIN GANDERS
Many of you have likely seen a viral
video of mallards feeding in a parked
train car filled with harvested corn.
If you haven’t, go check YouTube
and take a look. Travis Mueller of
Banded/Avery said the big honkers
in and around Cedar Rapids, Iowa,
act similar.
“I think they are adapting well to
the areas they are being hunted,”
he said of big geese. “Here we have
two ethanol plants and ADM (Archer
Daniels Midland, a Midwestern food
processing company) and there is
this big pile of corn at ADM with 500
geese sleeping next to it. Some of the
geese were just sitting on the corn
pile eating. There are quarries full
of water that never freezes and the
birds just jump out of the water and
walk to the corn pile.”
Like many big honker hunters,
Mueller tries to hunt geese over
water, but the options are limited.
He mainly hunts field feeds, which
can be tricky as honker habits have
become less reliable day-to-day.
“We will hunt a smaller feed if
the birds are coming right into the
field,” he says. “We have learned that
big numbers of geese don’t always
add up to a better hunt, particularly
when we are scouting and the birds
circle the field many times before
landing. That means they are not
com for table.”
When Mueller is chasing geese in
unfamiliar destinations, once the
birds leave a field for the evening, he
will walk in and mark exactly where
the birds were, so they can set upright on the X the next day.
“Even when we hunt Canada, I put
a pop can where they were landing,”
he says. “You have to be where they
want to be. We tried hunting the
fenceline and trafficking birds, and
they don’t even think about doing it.
Lessers are different, you can hunt
them that way. But if you want to kill
big geese, you need to be where they
want to be.”
It’s still a numbers game when
it comes to decoys for Iowa geese.© Travis Mueller© Travis Mueller