Gary Greene's Memories from an Old Hunter #49
The 2017 Wisconsin duck season opened on Saturday, September 30th and it didn’t take long for me to find poachers violating hunting laws. On Sunday, October 1st the legal starting time for shooting in Walworth County was 6:23am. From our home, at 6:03am, we heard a volley of six shots over a local water hole, a full twenty minutes prior to legal shooting. Now that is not an accident, or a minor slipup, that’s just a major violation of hunting standards. That’s selfish people with guns caring about the number of birds in their hands and not concerned with how they acquired them. They are not hunters, they are poachers.
That 6:23am opening time is still thirty minutes prior to sunrise. It gives the hunters some daylight to see the target they are shooting at and where other hunters are located. That time also allows the waterfowl additional time to move around in the morning without immediately getting shot at. It’s just safer for all involved: hunters and prey.
October, 2017 Horicon Zone, father/son, goose hunt with Brian Jablonski, Gary and Nate Greene and the dogs Abby, Schmiddy and Nellie with photographer Brian Jablonski.
The following are accumulated examples of very questionable judgement by Wisconsin hunters that I have personally witnessed.
Around 1995, I was hunting Horicon geese from a local farmer’s rented goose blind. It was snowing lightly and the plowed field that I was hunting from became a wet mud quagmire. In the falling snow I was fortunate to hit a goose, but it sailed several hundred yards behind me and fell dead in the mud near the adjacent side road. As I was attempting to retrieve that bird, I was accumulating mounds of mud on my boots, but I wasn’t in a hurry as I knew exactly where that goose was located.
I was approaching the dead goose when a pickup truck stopped on the road and the driver side door opened and out jumped a black lab that retrieved my goose back into the cab of the truck. The truck door closed and it slowly drove off with my goose while I was only fifty yards away. Through the falling snow, I was unable to see the license plate number. To me, it appeared that dog had experience and it was not the first time it had made a similar retrieve.
It was the early 1980’s, and I was one of numerous opening day pheasant hunters that selected the Troy public hunting grounds. The road was lined with at least 75 hunter’s cars and trucks parked bumper to bumper. Back then, opening day was more of a family and state tradition. All the hunters were lined up for the noon start and it always resembled the 1893 Oklahoma land rush, a real free for all until the line spread out over the hundreds of acres.
Greene's six year old lab Elsie and her first Bong hunt pheasant of the season. (2017)
I was dogless at that time and singularly decided to push the edge of the river, hoping that some pheasants had run into a river road block. About fifteen minutes into the hunt, I flushed a rooster and I dropped it in one shot and it landed in the middle of the fifteen yard wide river that at this point appeared to be fairly deep. From the other side of the river and about 75 yards away, I heard a hunter yelling that was his pheasant and he shot it. He was awkwardly hurdling the brush and running to the best of his ability level, which as a trained coach, I observed was not a very coordinated effort. As he kept approaching, he kept yelling that it was his bird. I never replied, as I was wondering what he was going to do when he reached the river. Well, he never broke stride and ran directly into the river and as he recovered that water soaked bird, he found the water level was at his armpits. He waded back out of the river and looked at me and held the pheasant up above his head. While watching the entire episode, I never commented or made a move, but at this time I came out with: “That’s your bird!” There was no way I was going to get into an argument with this guy and if he wanted that pheasant that badly, he could have it.
Greene's Matriarch lab, the eleven year old, gray chocolate Hershey with her first Bong hunt pheasant of the season. (2017)
The year was maybe 2010, I was about to hunt pheasants at Kenosha’s Bong Recreational Area. The daily opening hunt time is 9:00am. There are over 2000 huntable acres and I was standing with my lab Hershey waiting for the opening time. I try to avoid other hunters as much as possible and if I see another hunter approaching, I will take an opposite direction. Just before 9:00am, a dogless hunter stood ten yards from me. I told him which direction I was headed so we could keep a safe distance between us. He didn’t reply. I started hunting and he remained that ten yard distance from me as I kept veering left attempting to create distance between him and me.
After about 200 yards, I stated: “Can you leave me alone and go hunt somewhere else, this isn’t safe!” He came back with: “I can hunt where I want and you can’t stop me.” Well, I got hot tempered and he did as well. He then threw his shotgun to the ground and challenged me to a fist fight. I was physically on top of my game then and I observed he was about 100 pounds overweight. While his gun was on the ground and he was threatening me, Hershey and I took off running and there was no way he was going to catch us.
There are just so many wrongs with his actions, but as I later analyzed that situation, I figured he thought he had a better chance of shooting a pheasant if he hunted over my dog. However, he had no social skills or hunter safety etiquette and generally had a totally wrong perspective on life as I like to think it should be!