Kaska Goose Lodge ~ 2009 News
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Well, our opening crew has been in camp for about 10 days now, having driven from Winnipeg up to Thompson with most of the supplies on August 27th and flying into Kaska the next morning. Kaska survived the long winter in good shape. A bear had ripped one of our plywood shutters off the dining room picture window and torn out the screen. A number of minor repairs are required, but we have to wait for our first charter to arrive from Winnipeg with the parts we need to make the repairs.
I arrived at Kaska on September 3rd, bringing in a new 30 KW generator for the camp as one of our old Detroit diesels finally died on us last fall. The crew did a great job in getting the generator off the plane and into the generator shed. Things couldn't have gone smoother and we had the generator in place in less than an hour. Gary, who worked at Kaska last season, and is an electrical contractor in Southern Ontario in his "real" life, came into camp to do the installation. The generator is now fully installed, but we are waiting for some fuel line connectors and an exhaust system before we can bring it on-line.
We flew along the Hudson Bay coast from York Factory right into camp, checking on the number of birds (and white bears) in the area. I didn't spot any geese until we almost reached the Anabusco River delta, which is only about 18 miles west of Kaska. There were about 12 - 15 flocks of snow geese in the area ranging in size from smaller family groups of a dozen or so birds to larger groups of a couple of hundred. I saw about an equal number of Canadas.
The coast is quite dry with low water levels and a sparse berry crop. This is quite different than last year which had an abundance of berries and also wild celery, which are two of the main staples of the geese along the Hudson Bay coast. The Kaskattama River is very low, but that makes for some excellent brook trout fishing as the brookies are concentrated in the deeper pools.
The past few days we have started to see more geese flying near the camp. The flocks have mainly been dark geese, but we did see a few flocks of snows. The flocks are smaller - all less than 100 birds. The weather had been very hot and extremely "buggy" for the first week in camp, but the weather has changed with today being cool and windy. With the change in weather the birds have started to move.
Our first guests arrive on Wednesday, September 9th and we're eagerly anticipating their arrival.
Saturday, September 12th
Our first two groups of hunters arrived on Sept 9th and 10, so we now have 15 guns in camp. The weather is continuing to be unseasonably warm - much to the delight of the flies and mosquitoes. Aftet the first two days of hunting our guests had no trouble limiting out on dark geese, but the snows were more elusive. So far the flocks of snows have been mainly adult birds with very few juveniles, so they are smart birds that are making our hunters work for them. The opposite is true for the Canada and Ross geese as there are quite a few juveniles in these flocks. We are seeing more Ross geese this year vs. last year when the Ross geese were few and far between.
The snow geese started to move into our area over the past couple of days and we have thousands of geese both to the west and east of camp. Hunting on our island was good yesterday with large numbers of both dark and white geese flying along the coast. With the dry weather there are fewer ducks than last year - although last fall offered ideal conditions for ducks, so we had large numbers of ducks in the area all season.
The Long Ranger helicopter has been getting quite a bit of use as the hunters are travelling both east and west of camp to where the larger flocks of snows are staging. The helicopter greatly increases the hunters' success rate as they can travel to the prime hunting areas that would be difficult to access on the ground.
We'll keep you posted as our season moves forward.
See you on the "Bay" this fall!
Randy Duvell
