Pay attention to the way the birds react to your calling, most times we would leave the Halloween horns at home and use softer grunt type calls like the duck commander later in the season. After being hammered hard all season, they can become extremely call shy.
Last weekend the only birds that came in was when we did not call at all. I was wondering if people changed there spreads up or used different technigues later in the season.
We usually used less duck decoys but would throw in more Canada floaters, we also removed all the snow geese from the spread. It seems that the ducks didn't like to fly over the snows but would trail right down the Canadas.
Do you set the Canadians to one side or mix them in. We have been using Mallard, Pintail, and Teal, and somewhat putting them into their own little subgroups. The teal we put distinctly to one side of the main body of the spread.
It is hard to explain in words but here goes, we would usually set the Canadas in a line (not exactly one behind the other but kind of scattered) angling out on the downwind side of the blind. We stopped the geese approximately 10 yds. from the point we wanted them to land in front of the blind. To keep the ducks from landing short with other duck decoys or over shooting the spread, we would put the majority if not all of the duck decoys on the upwind side of the spread and sprinkle a few up toward the bank on that end, this would usually shortstop them on the upwind side. Since we had a permanent blind, we would have to play with the positioning because we could not move the blind to suit the wind.
