Pennsylvania Geese Took Off Less Often on Hunting Days

IHunting Mornings

Take-offs Fell on Hunt Days but Rose Near Blinds

A 2025 paper in Movement Ecology funded by the Pennsylvania Game Commission describes this pattern as two nested anti-predator behaviors that pair a drop in movement during hunting with a take-off when a threat is close. The team fitted collars on 134 adult female geese in the June molt of 2021 and 2022 at Pymatuning in northwestern Pennsylvania and Middle Creek in the southeast. Tracks from 81 of the 134 geese made it into the final models, while geese left out had usually left the study area or been shot early in the season. The models covered only each area's legal hunting hours in the 2021 to 22 and 2022 to 23 seasons. Those hours were 5:00 to 12:30 at Pymatuning and 5:00 to 13:30 at Middle Creek.

Our rule is to scout on a rest day at a managed area with fixed blinds and set hunt days and treat what you see as the best case for the following hunt morning. Expect fewer geese in the air on the hunt morning. Expect feeding birds to be farther from blinds than on the rest day, as they were at Middle Creek. Expect the geese that do take off to be those close to a blind.

IIMorning Moves

Models Separated Rest, Ground Movement and Flight

The study says both areas allow a limited number of hunters at fixed blinds on set mornings, while the surrounding statewide season allows hunting most days without assigned blinds. Each area's season had a break without hunting, and hunting days alternated with non-hunting days inside a hunting period.

Hidden Markov models used step length and turning angle to sort each 10-minute step into 3 states. The authors treated the slowest state of low ambulation as resting or standing alert. They treated the middle state of high ambulation as feeding or walking between places and the fastest state as flight. Here a take-off is a change from low or high ambulation to flight.

A season-scale model compared hunting periods with non-hunting periods for geese on an area and geese off the areas but within 7 miles. Two hunt-day models compared hunting days with non-hunting days inside area boundaries, with one covering both areas and one covering Middle Creek alone. Effects show logit-scale changes in the chance of a switch with 98% confidence intervals, and a negative number means a lower chance.

IIIHunting Periods

Take-offs Fell on the Areas and Stayed Unchanged Off Them

Season-scale results use a goose off the areas outside a hunting period as the comparison in each case. A goose on an area in a hunting period had a lower chance of taking off from high ambulation (-0.23, interval -0.45 to -0.01). The same goose also had a higher chance of changing from high to low ambulation (0.5). Its take-off chance from low ambulation leaned the same way, though that interval crossed zero.

Beyond the areas but within the same 7 miles, hunting periods left take-offs from both low and high ambulation unchanged with an estimate of 0.00 in each case. Geese on the areas rested more than geese off them even outside hunting periods, which the authors say may mean the areas offer a refuge in a wider countryside with fewer hunting restrictions.

IVClose Threats

Hunting-day Take-offs Rose Near Blinds and With More Hunters

The hunt-day model covering both areas showed the same pattern. On hunting days a goose in high ambulation had a lower chance of taking off than on non-hunting days (-0.41) and a higher chance of moving into low ambulation (0.24).

The second behavior appeared close to the guns. At Middle Creek the authors found geese less likely to take flight near a blind on a non-hunting day and more likely on a hunting day. As distance from a blind increased on a hunting day the estimate for taking off from high ambulation was -0.91 (interval -1.3 to -0.52), meaning the geese farthest from a blind were least likely to take off. Having more hunters on an area increased the chance that a goose in high ambulation would take off (0.16, interval 0.08 to 0.23).

The authors took the Middle Creek tracks to mean geese fed nearer blinds on non-hunting days and farther away on hunting days.

On both kinds of day geese in low ambulation in crops and grass had a higher chance of taking off than geese on open water, and the crop effect appeared in corn and wheat in the Middle Creek data. The authors suggest geese may have stayed in crops overnight or in the hours before hunting and flown off when hunting hours started. When hunters remain in one place, the authors argue that "when the predator is immobile the best strategy is to also not move."

VChanging Blinds

Authors Suggest Fixed Blinds May Hold Geese and Rotation May Move Them

The authors suggest fixed blinds may help keep geese on an area and changing which blinds are active may keep enough geese moving to satisfy hunters. The authors also hypothesize that hunted animals may move more if risk is spread unpredictably from place to place. The authors did not test either idea. Our read is that a hunter on private ground who shoots the same field from the same spot on the same days creates the sort of predictable pattern these geese learned, so rotating fields is worth a try. The study did not test private fields.

FDR's rest-days guide describes ducks that moved to closed water after shooting, and FDR's Missouri weekday duck paper found greater harvest per hunter on weekdays at Missouri duck areas.

VIResident Goose Limits

The Findings Cover Resident Females on Two Areas With Fixed Blinds

The study tracked only adult female resident geese on two areas with fixed blinds and set hunt days, and it did not test a system where hunters move from day to day. The authors say migrant Canada geese may act differently because they are less familiar with the ground and may be less used to people. The models ended at the close of each area's legal hunting hours, so they tell us nothing about geese later in the day. Several effects in the results had intervals that crossed zero including the Middle Creek blind effect on a non-hunting day, and the models included no random effect for individual geese. The authors could not tell resting from standing alert or whether geese reacted to the schedule or gunshots. The authors did not compare behavior early and late in the season, so geese may have become used to hunting as the season went on. This was an observational study.