Hunting the big honkers   of Manitoba

While tucked comfortably into the natural cover surrounding the harvested barley field, each of us settled back in our Final Approach Pro-Guide layout blind to await the coming flights of huge Canada geese. Before the sun had peaked over the treetops, we had carefully placed our geese and duck decoys in the field in front of us then worked quickly to further camouflage our blinds by interlacing clumps of the natural grasses growing in the area. The honking we could now hear coming from behind us conveyed the message that the geese were becoming restless and soon would be moving from their watery night-time resting areas to feed in the adjacent agricultural fields, hopefully one of which would be the very grassland we were now watching.

Our Stoeger M3500 self-loading shotguns had been stoked full with Federal Precision’s new 3" Federal Black Cloud shotshells, which boasted an impressive charge of 1¼oz of No. 2 size steel shot sent on its way at the impressive muzzle velocity of 1450fps. These shells came with the unique blend of shot consisting of 40