I believe that geese here are driven as much by pressure as by food availability. Lots of outfitters work to the northeast of the refuge, and quite a few along the southeastern corridor. With much of the refuge closed to hunting, they have a little sanctuary, and these geese can be easily decoyed if you're able to set up near their flyway and focus on getting stragglers from the group. Flocks of a dozen to two dozen geese are as good as dead if you have a well-placed decoy spread and call minimally.

Many of the outfitters here use huge spreads and call a lot, so the geese trying to dodge the pressure will gladly go to small to medium-sized spreads with minimal calling activity.

"I would recommend hunters use a couple of dozen life-sized decoys and then have a few magnums it there to grab their attention," said veteran Lake Charles waterfowler Chris Phelps. "I always like to have a dozen and a half snows, and then throw in a few specklebellies. I put the snows in a cluster, mix a couple of specks in with them, and then put the rest of my specks in a group out to the side.

"I have always seen the small clusters of geese like this where you will have the specks feeding around them down here, so I try to set it up as natural as I can."

According to Phelps, you should call sparingly the snows, but if you see specklebellies coming in alone, turn up the volume. "You almost can't overcall the specks down here, especially if you have a young bird coming in alone," he noted. "If you just give it that steady action, be ready to shoot, because I have found them very easy to bring in."

Hunters in the rest of the parish should look for some geese moving from the northeast that are pressured from along the Cameron-Calcasieu parish line and an east-west and west-east line of travel. Geese along the coast are very mobile, and those not roosting on a refuge can be hanging out in one spot one afternoon and be at another location the next morning. In the early part of the month, they'll be feeding in available rice and some coastal grassfields, but at some point they should turn to rye grass. Any available rye grass is like a magnet for geese -- they're addicted to it -- so hunters with access to rye grass should have no problem scoring on big numbers of geese.

Large spreads in the fields tend to work better than do small ones, and hunters who set up realistic spreads that show geese doing a variety of things (feeding, preening, etc.) will do much better than will those with just a bunch of rags out in a field. The old adage in these parts used to be that you could take a white bucket and put it in the field and shoot snows. That's simply not true anymore, as the species has developed a level of awareness second to none in the waterfowl world. You have to know the behavior of the birds in your area. If you're hunting marsh refuges think light and mobile, and if you have access to private fields, go big and super-realistic.

Mix it up with life-size photorealistic decoys, shells, rags and kites. During the last few years I've seen kites popping up on more and more goose hunts, and I believe that they're one of the major keys to success -- depending on wind, of course.