The Nation's Best Specklebelly Hunting

I killed my first specklebelly hunting alongside goose hunting legend Freddie Zink in northern North Dakota (if memory serves me right) around 1990. Like Zink, An Ohio boy, but from the opposite corner of The Buckeye State, I had no experience with white-fronts. I knew them by sight and sound, but our paths had never crossed until that morning. Zink was pleased and I was all kinds of giggly. Nowadays, I forget a lot, but I won’t ever forget that right-to-left shot over the dark goose spread and the sound that bird made when it hit the ground—or Zink’s handshake.

Today, I live in Washington state; not a hotbed of white-front activity west of the Cascades, but I run across them from time to time. Specifically, around Halloween, they make their way from Alaska to southern Oregon and down to the Sacramento Valley, which, if you’re wondering, is a hotbed of specklebelly action. But where else across this fine country of ours can you go one-on-one with plenty of white-fronts? Where is the best specklebelly hunting in the nation? Read on, oh future white-front wizard, because the folks at WILDFOWL are fixing to tell you.

California

While we’ve grazed the subject, let’s address California. Now 22, Brett Overshiner and his business partner, Cole Gessner, run Wild West Outfitters (wild-west-outfitters.com), a guide service based in California’s Sacramento Valley. In addition to his clients, Overshiner also works with Rich Peterson, the owner of Kwakman Calls (kwakmancalls.com). The two team up to create the “Wild West Speck Hunter,” a mouth call designed to not only sound perfect but also be incredibly user-friendly.

Overshiner began targeting specks specifically nine years ago. Since then, it’s become an obsession. With good reason, The Golden State attracts more white-fronts every season. “The area we hunt,” Overshiner started, “is the Sutter Basin. And this year, in September and into the start of duck season in October, we had more specklebellies than I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t have been surprised if our area held 50,000 specks on opening day, and ours is a small part of the Sacramento Valley. Throughout the entire area,” he went on, “I’d say there were hundreds of thousands of specklebellies—or so it seemed.”

Why so many specks? “We do have a lot of agricultural land,” he said, “and while rice production may have gone down in some areas, there’s been a lot more winter wheat (being planted). And the white-fronts have started associating with those winter wheat fields a lot more in the past few years. Other fields like harvested tomatoes where there’s a lot of ‘grow up’ (Author’s note: We call these weeds) and green grass. There’s a lot of food,” he continued, “and a lot of refuges and big closed zones. So, there’s no reason for the specks to leave once they arrive.”

Arkansas

From California we travel to Eastern Arkansas, specifically the area surrounding Delaplaine, the stomping grounds of Mister Chad Couch, owner of Snow Pros Hunting (snowprohunting.com). “I’ve been hunting specklebellies,” said the 44-year-old field veteran, “as long as they’ve been here. 15 or 20 years ago, you hardly ever saw a speck, but when you did, all you had to do was give them a little yodel, and they were going to come in.”

It’s no secret that Arkansas is on the bucket list for anyone (1) not residing in the state and (2) seeking an audience with thousands of white-fronts. But why? Couch’s answer was monosyllabic. “Rice,” he said. “It’s what we kill our specks in. All eastern Arkansas is high in rice production.”

Times have changed, Couch explained, since the advent of the 21st Century. Today, unlike even 20 years ago, The Natural State is home at the right time of year, of course, to an obscene number of specklebellies, and Couch, along with his clients, are reaping this white-front whirlwind throughout the Fall. “When I was in high school,” he recalled, “you rarely saw a speck, but around 2000, we started to hear them more often. All I had to do was mimic them with my voice, and they would come right into the duck decoys. Now, and not only with the difficulties in decoying white-fronts but with the population growing like it is, I think they’re going to catch snow geese. At times,” he continues by saying, “and in my area, there are more speckle bellies than snow geese.”

Texas

Traveling a short 700 miles west of Delaplaine, you arrive in Haskell County, Texas, home of Justin Hill and his Ranger Creek Goose (rangercreekgoose.com), whose website proclaims his county, along with neighboring Knox County, will winter roughly half a million specklebellies and lesser Canadas. That’s a bunch of white-fronts! “We started getting specks in the 1990s,” Hill told me. “Our [area of operations] is small, about 30 square miles, and we winter the vast majority of the specks coming down from Alaska. There will be times [during] the year when we’ll have 125,000 specks right here.”

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As Hill explained, his geese used to be all lesser Canadas back in the day, with more than a million dark birds wintering within an hour of his home in Haskell. But Mother Nature changed all that around 2011-12 when North Texas was hit with a four-year drought. “During that time,” Hill said, “our (lesser) Canadas shifted, but our specklebellies stayed.”

But why are the white-fronts there in force now? “These geese (specks) are feeding on peanuts, milo, and wheat, but it’s the peanuts that bring the birds here,” Hill said. “They’ll eat those peanuts whole. You’ve shaken a peanut, right? And heard the nuts inside the shell? These specks,” he continued, “will pick a peanut up and shake it. If it’s full, they’ll swallow it whole.”

Kansas

Tom Bidrowski currently serves as the migratory game bird program manager for the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, an agency he’s been part of for the past 14 years. It's a funny story, but when I first emailed Bidrowski, his note read as follows: “I’m currently in the field trapping white-fronts the next few days, but should be…” I’d not talked with Bidrowski before; but with that note, it seemed I was on the right path.

“White-fronted geese,” said the biologist, “have been over the past decade undergoing a migrational shift and moving a little more east and staying a little more in the mid-latitude states. And Kansas has been fitting that bill perfectly for them. We have plenty of agricultural land for them to use. And they’re able to use our reservoirs and wetlands. Not only are we (Kansas) seeing a pretty good Fall stage-over,” he continued, “but we’re also starting to see some wintering populations."

Bidrowski explained the reason for the uptick in terms of specklebellies in The Sunflower State is anything but singular. A strong upsurge in the overall white-front population is helping contribute, but there’s more to it, he said, than just numbers. “Research across the Mississippi and Central flyways have shown not only migration shift (among white-fronted geese), but movement once they’re on the wintering grounds. Birds that have traditionally gone to Texas now are making wintertime ‘loops’ to Louisiana and then back into Texas. (As far as Kansas is concerned), it may be some climate change, but it’s (new) migrational behavior as well.”

Oregon

“We have an abundance of white-fronts in what we call the Pacific Population,” said Brandon Reishus, the Migratory Game Bird Coordinator for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW). “And these are the birds that generally nest in southwest Alaska. For the most part, they don’t come through the interior of the continent on their migration, so they’re coming down a coastal route. They don’t have a lot of agricultural fields until they make landfall,” he continued, “and the Klamath Basin (in southwest Oregon and northwest California) with the big agricultural base has been a big use area for those birds. That’s their first big stopping point as they move to the Central (California) Valley in the Fall.”

Specks, as Reishus explained, are primarily what he calls a “passage bird” in western Oregon during the Fall; however, the Spring is a different story. “A lot of (white-fronts) used the Klamath Basin in the Fall when the agricultural base was potatoes and small grains,” said Reishus, “but the agricultural base has shifted over the last decades to alfalfa and hay, and that’s not a Fall food source because it’s dry.” In the Spring, though, these same grass crops are just starting to green up, providing an excellent food source for northwardly migrating specks. “The Klamath Basin has turned into a major Spring staging area for those white-fronts, but the farmers don’t necessarily want all those geese on their high-value fields."

Enter Oregon’s late white-front season. Scheduled during February and early March, which, as Reishus said, “brought an entirely new opportunity for white-fronts. Like (most waterfowl), you’re usually done hunting them by January, but now we’re able to hit those birds a little bit in February and March and help the farmers out by keeping the geese moving. And take advantage of an abundant resource.” How abundant? Biologists estimate the population of Pacific white-fronts at roughly 600,000. That’s quite a few.