What distance should I leave between my Canadian goose decoys?
Have you ever had geese come close to your spread, but move away and never land?
Have geese made it to the sides of your quilt but not in your pocket?
In the event that any of these circumstances happened to you, you may have set your lures close to each other.
3 tips: for the proper distance between lures
1) Geese are large birds and need adequate landing space
2) Wider spacing between lures makes your cast look bigger
3) It is not difficult to set the proper distance
Tip 1: Geese need room to land
If you watch king geese land, you will notice that they leave a lot of space between themselves and the goose that follows them. Geese are big and need a landing area like an airplane. If you think of an airplane as a good example, you’ll notice that bigger planes need bigger runways. This is similar with birds. Small birds can easily land without much space. However, as birds get larger, so does the amount of space they will need.
The moment the geese approach their decoys, they are constantly looking for a landing place. If your lures are too close to each other, they won’t feel like they have enough room to land, so they will hit the outside of your spread or not at all. You’ll want to make sure that as they check your lures from above, they have a comfortable feeling so they can land.
Tip 2: Lure Spacing Makes Spreads Look Bigger
Many goose hunters want more decoys to increase their ranges. However, they often place their lures too close to each other, which lessens the purpose of getting more lures. It often seems to be a race between hunters over how fast they can buy more and more lures. People want to add several dozen lures to their spins because they believe that the more lures they have, the more automatically their success will increase. Although adding decoys can be an effective way to attract more geese in your direction, if they are not set up properly, the geese will still not want to land near you.
Before adding to your spread, try to spread your lures further apart first. This will probably add to your hunting achievement and save you some money as you may find that the decoys you have are enough to attract the geese. Lures aren’t cheap, so before you invest hundreds if not thousands more dollars on your lures, try increasing the distance between them first.
Tip 3: How to set lures at the correct distance
Any time you set up your goose decoys, place them no closer than 6-9 feet apart. To do this, set one up and take 2-3 big steps before setting the next lure. With each big step you will advance about 3 feet, so 2-3 steps will give you decent separation between your lures.
When you think about it, the simplicity of separating the lures further is laughable. However, it is often something that many goose hunters overlook. They like to think of other reasons why they are not successful, such as the number of lures or their vocation. Actually, a quick and common way to get more geese in shooting range is to simply increase the distance between the decoys.