Today was a nice day, if your not a waterfowler that is. The sky was bright and clear with a few clouds here and there. The wind was blowing about 10-15 mph and the temp on my Garmin Rhino was 14 degrees.

That was the key to today’s hunt.

Looking out the window I would have said the geese would never fly today.

My buddy Steve says "The birds gotta eat today." With which I agreed to. But I would have thought the birds would have flown while we were at work after the sun got up.

Knowing that our hunting here in this part of Pennsylvania can be hit or miss I decided to give it a whirl. So, home I went to hook up the trailer, change clothes and head out into the field for an afternoon hunt.

Steve and I arrived and proceeded to put out the 81 deeks we had. Since it was so cold we changed 95% of our deeks to feeders with only a few sentries. The ground was frozen too hard to get the silhouettes in the ground so they stayed on the trailer. Will have to work on a silo base for frozen ground hunting this summer.

We finally got all the heads on our various makes of shell decoys and got them into position. We then worked on our layout blinds and took the vehicles back up to the farmers barn.

The 250 yard walk back without a coat and gloves was a little chilly. Remember, its only 14 degrees with a stout wind.

Coats on and everything in place we huddled down into our layout blinds to await the evening flight.

Had I been a gambling man I would have said that the birds would not fly the rest of the day, having thought everything flew in the morning hours while we were at work. Isn't that how it usually works?

Laying there with the wind blowing from at an angle from our left to right at approximately 330pm, we patiently waited for the birds we knew would not fly.

"Steve, over your left shoulder is a flock flying back to the quarry,"

"That’s not a good sign buddy" I said.

Still waiting in hopes of a good evening flight, 20 mins later, I look behind us and there was the first flock sneaking out the side door from the quarry.

Then they started coming out over our preferred route. Coming around the trees and houses several hundred yards ahead of us, and just barely treetop high, I hit them with some honks to get there attention as Steve flips the flag a little.

The birds see us and start to turn in our direction. I hit them with some more honks and go into a cluck moan combination.

Once they heard that the wings locked and the first flock of Greater Canada’s sailed right up the pipe. Unfortunately they started landing at the far edge of our long leg of decoys. Still within range we come out of the blinds and score on 3.

Excitedly we jump out and retrieve our birds, bringing them back and placing them around us in a sleeping position with bloody heads hidden beneath a wing.

Back in the blinds, the birds are starting to move good now. We see several hundred birds in flocks from four to 200 come off the quarry. We work several more flocks, some commit and some don’t. On two flocks we have one bird come in and land but the rest do not. Steve gets out for the first one and makes a clean kill as it rises off the ground. The second one I do the same and discover I took my first true Cackling Canada.

Not much larger than a big mallard, the Cackler has a bill that’s about 1/3 that of a Greater Canada. That one will go to the taxidermist this week. Too bad it wasn’t banded.

Five birds on the ground on a bright, sunny, bluebird day. I would say that was a good day.

In extreme cold the birds have to eat to maintain warmth and fat reserves. This is what made our day a success.

The biggest thing with bright sunny days is blending in very well with your surroundings. If you do not go the extra mile to blend in you are going to have a long cold day. And it doesn’t help that most of the flocks will be large and have hundreds of eyes looking at you.

So when it’s cold and sunny and you don’t think you have a chance. Try it out anyway. Things may just go your way like they did for us.