Delmar Waterfowl Club - Delaware Snow Goose Hunting

Delaware Snow Goose Hunts

DelMar hosts the Avery crew for a late season hunt in Sussex County

Snow geese are without a doubt the toughest waterfowl to hunt. There is a good reason that the number of white geese has risen so dramatically....they are smart. We have one of the best opportunities to hunt snow geese on the east coast. Between our top quality decoys, blinds and properties proximate to the refugees we have many excellent opportunities to hunt snows. We take pride in being able to successfully decoy these wary geese at the DelMar Waterfowl Club. While we have many amazing days in the field, it still takes the right combination of shooters, weather, migrating flocks, and little luck to have those 50 plus bird days. The spring of 2004 and fall 2005 was exceptionally good. A combination of good weather and the right spread resulted in some great days in a field. We hunt snows often in the club and an opportunity that few groups can match.

End of the season snow goose hunt on the Cartanza Farm (January 2004)

The best snow goose hunts require quality fields, an experienced crew, and top-notch equipment. At Delmar, we shoot for all of the above...

Early season hunt at the Prime Hook Road Farm (October 2004)

We will follow the snow geese between our private leased fields. We have a collection of contiguous farms, over 2,800 acres located on the East Side of Route 1 in Kent County Delaware, running roughly 4 miles long in a north/south direction from the city Dover to the town of Little Creek. Therefore, we will often be under most of the inland flights of snow geese leaving the impoundments in the Little Creek Wildlife Area and the southern portion of Bombay Hook. We also lease five large fields on the northwest side of the federal and state areas of Prime Hook in Sussex County Delaware.

Snows coming out of Little Creek WMA to our farms

Several our leased farms are the open, flat fields that have been consistent producers of snow geese for many years. We can fill a large field with thousands of decoys for a top-notch hunt. Due to the large number of fields we lease, the membership always has a choice of corn, beans or wheat/barley/rye for a variety of conditions for the five month long season.

Rick and Teddy at the Bilboro farm in March 2006 with the shell rig

These properties are in one of the largest snow goose migration routes in North America. Tens of thousands of geese travel through and stay in Kent and Sussex County Delaware (our main hunting area) every fall with very little hunting pressure. Many snow geese do not proceed any further south and will often winter in Bombay Hook, Little Creek and the Prime Hook Refuges. Therefore, we expect a significant concentration of snow geese to remain from October 15th to March 15th. In the 2005 season over 60,000 geese stayed on a 200 acre private roast pond that was surrounded by our leased fields.

Our Snow Goose Snow goose hunts can take place in a 20 ft. pits, stand-up or layout blinds with 1,500-2,000 decoys. These blinds provide excellent concealment, comfort, and mobility. Members can choose from open fields, standing corn, impoundments in flooded corn or the freshwater ponds.

The hunts take place over both land and water on our private leases with a large spreads of custom painted Northwind windsock decoys, shells or Bigfoot/Green Head Gear full bodies. Each one of our windsock decoys are individually painted adding feather detail for realism. A large spread of realistic decoys with movement is the key to successfully decoying snow geese. The mobile blinds we use are of the lay down type variety. We will not pass shoot snow geese.

We will plan our snow goose hunts in large groups. We typically need at eight hunters to put out a large spread. That’s the best part of the club, there will always be a willing bunch of hunters to help drag the big spreads out. Follow the website for planned hunts or get one organized yourself. Based upon our experience last year, Sussex County will be the best early, while Kent County does well later in the season. Early in the season, we refrain from shooting into any flock of over one-thousand birds and we never sneak a field and gun them off one of our leases. For several of our members, one of these club hunts were the very first opportunity to hunt snows and we had many converts to snow goose hunting. There is nothing like the thrill of a thousand snow geese floating down at your feet. For the upcoming season, we will likely set up a large snow goose spread for the peak of the season for smaller groups of members to enjoy these hunts.