First snow goose hunt. Iowa spring 2000.
Our 2017 spring snow goose season was a shortened version this year. We only guided Arkansas opting to not hunt Nebraska. Because of this, instead of the typical 40-45 days in the field we hunted only 26 days.
The weather got off to a warmer start. During the timeframe that we hunted there wasn’t any major artic cold blasts and there was a good number of young birds in the flocks. These are typically the two biggest factors in our success. It was a good solid snow goose year. Total harvest was 3277 snow geese. The high field for the year was 91 and low field was 0. Overall thought there wasn't too many of the extreme high-high’s or low-low’s but rather there was a lot of consistent average hunts which we will take any year it's offered up by the goose god. Seven of the birds were banded. About half of them were juvy’s. The oldest was a Ross banded as an adult in 2005.
For the 2018 spring snow goose season we will be hunting Arkansas and adding Iowa. Iowa is my home state. It’s the state I shot my first snow goose in, where I spent many of my high school/college years chasing snow geese, and the state I first hunted the spring snow goose season.
The western portion of the state is a big migration corridor that it is not hunted by too many people other than Iowan’s. I think mostly because the non-resident license fees are significantly higher than Missouri and South Dakota that hold birds at the same time. We are discounting our Iowa hunt prices by $75 this year to help offset these higher fees keeping your overall cost similar Missouri and South Dakota. There is a ton of birds that migrate through the state and we look forward to showing them to our Iowa hunters.
