Every year I spend the fall up on the prairies of southern Saskatchewan, usually arriving in early September, then leaving (hopefully) before the temperatures plummet.
I’m up here guiding waterfowl and upland bird hunts, or at least that is my excuse to be non-stop outside. Our bird dogs have had plenty of contact with sharptail grouse and Hungarian partridge, with one of the highlights being ten-month-old Pancho pointing at his first wild birds.
The Big Show for us and many of our clients that travel to Cabri, Saskatchewan (pop. 300) is the waterfowl hunting which usually picks up in late September as things cool down up north, which is the Arctic and Boreal Regions of Canada and the United States, namely Alaska.
This region is the staging area for the central flyway. The birds here will eventually end up in Texas, but before that they take advantage of the food sources found here, which for the most part are “leftover” peas, lentils and a variety of grains that somehow missed the combine during the harvest.
First to come down are the lesser sandhill cranes, traveling from as far away as Siberia, then snow and specklebelly geese start showing up in vast numbers. Each cold front pushes birds out and new birds in. It’s sort of perpetual motion with a winged twist. Once mid-October rolls around, lesser Canada geese along with a multitude of ducks arrive. The lessers are a number of subspecies, including dusky geese that hail from Valdez, Alaska. For the most part, the ducks are very colorful, mature mallards, pintails and American wigeon.
We spot the fields that the birds are feeding in, then go in the next morning or that evening to set up our decoys and blinds. Eventually strings of geese fly out from the roost and (hopefully) check out our setup. They call and we call back, hoping that they will come in and land. Some buy our decoy spread and land.
Our clients shoot as they come in, and my Labradors BooBoo and Molly get busy retrieving downed birds, which, given the limits placed on each species, is a small amount of the million-plus birds that are heading out to feed.
We savor the moment, witnessing enormous rafts of geese, cranes and ducks that are flying around the vast prairie sky. The hunters agree that being part of witnessing this phenomenon is well worth the price of admission as they soak up the experience of the fall waterfowl migration.