How to get scammed by a Waterfowl Guide | Outdoors

Select a snow goose guide with caution; here’s a cautionary tale

By Dylan Cooper, Outdoor columnist

Imagine lying flat on your back in a frozen February winter wheat field. The temps are in the single digits, the wind is whipping at the minimal skin you have showing from your white camo suit. You’re surrounded by wobbling wind socks, flapping decoys, and obnoxiously loud electronic calls. Hands are clasped around a shotgun containing a dozen shotshells. You are having a hard time staying perfectly still and keeping your eyes open while the poop rains down on you from the 20,000 snow geese circling in a cyclone above, at heights varying from a half mile to just out of gun range, like the wildest mirage you’ve ever seen. This moment is what you paid your hard-earned money for.

It’s that time of year for waterfowl hunters when they start thinking about hunting the white plague of snow geese currently plundering the fields of cover crops in the Atlantic, Mississippi, Central, and Pacific flyways. Snows fly in flocks of dozens to thousands to even hundreds of thousands, often called a “mob” that will move from field to field like a flock of starlings ripping as much out of the ground as they can before moving on in a hurry. The Conservation Snow Goose Season starting in February makes them an appetizing target for waterfowlers because daily limits are often waived, shotguns can be unplugged and extended, and e-callers and other tricks can be used to bring in the huge flocks. This leads to an awe-inspiring and adrenaline filled hunt that I recommend any waterfowler try, but select a snow goose guide with caution.

I had been on a couple of these conservation hunts in the Atlantic flyway, and they were mildly successful, but I desperately wanted to see the bigger flocks out west and harvest my first blue phase Snow Goose. Arkansas seemed like the place to go, a 13-hour drive from Virginia, to be smack dab in the middle of the Mississippi flyway and snow goose wintering grounds with lots of rural farmland to hunt off a $0 license. I knew I would have to find a decent guide to take me and that it would be best to get several buddies together so that we could book our own private hunt and maximize the number of birds we could bring back home. Typical prices started around $250/day per hunter for a full day hunt and $50/night for lodging. The old saying “you get what you pay for” generally applies to waterfowling, but a little less when it comes to snow goose conservation hunts, as you can pay a lot for a guide that doesn’t have the birds due to migration/weather/leases/etc, or pay a little for a guide that got lucky one day on the one piece of property he hunts all season long. Generally, finding a guide who chases fresh feeds is the best bet over one that hunts permanent spreads.

So I had scoured the waterfowl Facebook groups and pages for guides with availability in the date range I wanted. I looked at pictures and comments and reviews. After contacting a few different ones, I started a Facebook messenger conversation with one we’ll call Sky High Snows (“SHS”). The pictures they posted always had perfect piles of snows and just one guy in them. All of them had only good comments or likes. Fancy produced promo videos. New looking side-by-sides and trailers. “Standing on business” was a common saying on their posts. Seemed pretty professional to me.

The first message replies to me were pushing urgency (“250 messages in 24 hrs”, “dates going fast”) and to maximize our group size and number of days booked. He had a policy of 50 percent due at booking, the other 50 percent paid upon “arrival to the lodge.” I felt this was a little pushy and out of the ordinary compared to the other guides I’ve gone with, who you would usually pay a deposit to at booking and then the rest after the hunt concludes. But I thought maybe this was standard business in the wild, wild west.

SHS was quick to keep checking in with me until I booked and paid that 50 percent deposit, which I eventually did through Paypal for a three-day hunt for our group of five. They had promised us one of two lodges, guides that would take care of our birds, either layouts or A-frame blinds, an all-day hunt if they were flying good, etc. All the good things you wanna hear.

In the lead up to our booking dates, they would randomly send a pic or video of thousands of birds in the field or air. Told me they had stale adults right now, but for our week they were expecting a fresh push of juvies. Really buttered me up. Then came the day we were to travel to Arkansas.

We started out on the road at 7 a.m. hoping to be to our destination around bedtime. The exact destination, though, still escaped us. SHS went oddly silent about where they were sending us in the days leading up, and on arrival day they would only tell us a general area of a town that seemed to change every time I reached back out every couple hours into the trip, which also kept getting even further away meaning a longer drive into the night. This was even after paying the remaining 50 percent hunt and lodging fee that morning! Yikes. I started to get a bad feeling in my gut. Should I just go ahead and book our own place to stay? I started looking at hotels and AirBnbs in that general area.

Finally, when I asked what was going on, he fessed up and said another group just got into the lodge and he was scrambling to find us another place to stay. Well that’s a shocker… I thought our group had “blocked off those dates” as he told me over messenger weeks prior.

So he finally sent me the address of our “lodge” around 9 p.m. on arrival day. It was for a “tiny home” that I had seen on AirBnB so I knew the actual price and location. He was sending us an hour away from where we were hunting and booking a place for half the price of our lodging fee so he could skim half of it off the top. And it truly was tiny. Three single beds in a loft, a double bed in the only room, and a loveseat by the door that didn’t recline… all of which had to fit the five of us. I texted him back questioning the number of beds and if he was seriously sending us to a tiny home for three nights and he said, “Look man y’all came here to hunt. If the accommodations don’t suit, I’ll refund your lodging fee. We’ll talk tomorrow if it’s not working” and sent me the door code.

Well that’s all I heard on that issue. No apologies for getting bumped, the location changeups, the late/non-existent notices and certainly no refunds or a better place to stay the next day. Also I still hadn’t heard about a location on where to meet the next morning. I texted again for that info and he finally got back to me at 10:10 p.m. with a Google Maps pin and “545.” That was it.

The next morning the real show started. We were slightly early and showed up exactly at the pin where we found two other vehicles full of hunters who came up to me thinking maybe I was their guide showing up late. Finally at 5:52 a.m. the guide texted us a screenshot map and “follow this rd in to drop gear.” Well all three vehicles ended up getting turned around in the farmer’s driveway, farm-wife peering out through the curtain on the door, and a vicious dog barking in between us. We finally get back to where the guide is and he’s still setting up the spread. Shooting light had already started at 6:15 a.m. He got all 16(!) of us shuttled out to the spread around sunrise (6:45 a.m.), all the while thousands of birds were pouring into the other side of the field.

It was cold that morning, and the back end of a cold front had brought a rare couple inches of snow to these nearly barren, ditched Arkansas winter wheat fields. We were asked to lay on layout wedges with just half our body in camo, the other half in whites. No safety talk or any other instructions. Around us were a total of about 200 full-body snow goose decoys. No socks or silos. And a pair of clones (battery powered flying decoys, one of which had a broken wing) and one e-caller (that sounded broken up, more like a dog barking with occasional gun shots). No other guides, just this one dude and his 16 clients.

This was a spread that would only fool a rookie snow goose client. In past hunts with other guides in the East, I had been a part of 1,000 to 1,500 decoy spreads to hide just eight to 12 guys. We were trying to hide 17 people propped up above the height of these small goose decoys. It was a joke.

At 7:30 a.m., after just 45 minutes of constant geese swinging wide around our spread, the guide walked to the front of us. He put his hands on his hips while looking at the 100,000 snow geese just a few hundred yards away. He said “Alright I’m gonna get yall out of here and reset. Be back at noon and I’ll try to get you in A-frames or something.”

One of the other client groups walked out with us and we chatted a bit. One of them could hear the guide cussing about cold feet and his electric socks not working that morning. Another said the guide had also screwed up their lodging and got them a last-minute AirBnb only 45 minutes away. Yet another said he thinks where they were put up was the guide’s personal residence or long-term rental because of the belongings left there and how dirty it was.

We left and had breakfast and came back to the field early, ready to assist the guide and put out hopefully 1,000 more decoys and some A-frame blinds. Instead he told us to stay back, so we watched through binoculars. He was driving his UTV around erratically. He was loading dead geese into a truck that another guy was driving. He was kicking and throwing his decoys and yelling and screaming at his assistant. The assistant left in that truck in a hurry. SHS got out some camo burlap pieces and zip-tied a handful of grass pieces to them. Then he finally got us back in the spread at 1:30 p.m. and hardly anything had changed. We now had maybe 225 full-body decoys around us, still in the same spot, and with the same layout blind bags but now with little burlap blankies to cover our legs that didn’t match the field at all. We questioned him immediately, asking why he didn’t put us in A-frames over in the ditch on the edge of the field. He quipped back that “it didn’t matter because these stale birds wanna be in here so bad that I was able to drive the UTV into them unloading my shotgun and they still came right back.”

The afternoon hunt went just the same, all birds were way too wary of our spread to even come close to gun range. We watched hundreds of thousands bump around the fields around us, cleaning out the wheat to where it looked like we were in a brown bubble of stubble that was the only corner they didn’t touch. SHS finally grew restless and told us he was going for a walk. No one left in charge, no instructions. For the next hour, we watched him walk off of his lease and on to another while shouting and waving his arms in the air, trying to chase up geese. Did it work? No, they just kept going elsewhere. But at one point an unsuspecting pair of snow geese came crossing directly over us about 50 yards up so I called the shot. Half our group shot up in the air and one goose fell down. We did it, our first Arkansas snow goose! And without the help of this “guide.”

SHS got back a half hour before sunset and immediately told us “the evening flight is pretty much over, time to get out of here,” which we could look around and see that wasn’t true. He walked away on his cell phone screaming and throwing a fit. We got back out to the road and he said his phone had died so he didn’t know the plan for tomorrow. I gave him our phone charger hoping it would help get us in the right direction. That was the last I heard from him until 11 p.m. that night while back at our tiny home, at which point I got a Google Maps pin for a location a few miles down the road from the first site and “6.” We couldn’t believe that he wanted us there even later than the first day’s screwup. I texted with the other group that would be hunting with us again to make sure they heard the plan and they said that when they got back to the residence, the fridge was full of dead snow geese.

The next morning, we were all dressed, about to head out the door when I got the text at 4:20 a.m. telling me the morning hunt was being moved to noon. No other explanations or anything. I sent back the same message he sent me the first evening that “we were there to hunt, not stay in a tiny home, hope you’re right on that call.” He finally texted back at 9:12 a.m. saying “yessir.”

We went out there early, once again hoping to help set up a larger spread or something. The only thing we found was a 500-sock spread in a small chopped cornfield. Half the socks were blown over and covered by snow. Hundreds of bootprints and tire tracks around in the frozen mud.There were no blinds and only enough tall sock decoys to hide maybe six people. This is what’s called a stale sock spread, something that any adult goose that has been around for a minute ain’t gonna fall for. I was absolutely furious seeing this. So I went back to the old spot thinking this guy probably did do a hunt that morning but with some other groups. I found a different guide service camped out on that farm doing a snow goose hunt and just so happened to meet the owner of that guide service in the road who knew who we were looking for when he said, “Oh the scam artist?”

This new guide filled me in on the SHS guy, who he had hired on when he first came to town and fired him on the second day. He was then known for stealing spots, equipment, decoys, and even a trailer. He was known to treat all his assistants like crap till they quit and wouldn’t pay them. And he was well known for scamming his clients. Also that walk SHS took the evening prior that was scaring geese off another hunter’s lease had got him banned for life from that farm, hence why we weren’t hunting it on our second day. This new guide offered to take us in for half a day’s hunt and I said we’d go back and check with the others.

Back at the second day’s hunt location, we still didn’t find a SHS guide but did find two other trucks full of hunters furious about the situation they were in. Now there were 18 angry hunters standing in the road. An Arkansas Game Warden stopped to make sure we were alright and when he heard the name of our outfit he said, “Huh. Never heard of him. Good luck,” and drove off. Calls to the SHS guide weren’t returned. But we did receive some texts where he lied and said he told us to meet at 1 p.m., scolds us for being there at noon, and then attached a picture of wrecked a truck and trailer as some sort of an unexplained excuse. The mysterious photo looked like it was even from a different time of year.

At 1:30 p.m, the SHS guide got dropped off by his girlfriend about 100 yards down the road from us so that she could safely monitor the situation. He swaggers up the road to us with a big ol’ Texas grin and says “Ready to go boys?” We all started questioning him and his made-up story about wrecking the trailer, that this hunt was gonna be a “migration spread” even though he’d been telling us these birds were all stale, and eventually that anyone that didn’t want to hunt this afternoon could get a refund. My hand immediately shot up and he came over quietly asking me, “What’s wrong?” I said I was tired of being jerked around since the beginning with lodging and now these crappy hunts so my group and I wanted out. He said, “OK I’ll look at my books when I get back tonight and figure you up a refund. Let me get these other guys going.” He shook my hand and I said, “Alright, but if I don’t hear from you by tonight I’m going to do a Paypal dispute.”

We went and hunted with the new guide service and they did a great job actually getting us to kill geese. The other client group that stayed back with SHS told us they didn’t fire any shots that day or the next, but couldn’t back out since he had all their money. They did tell me he admitted to them he lost the lease and was cancelling the rest of his hunts that season. But SHS posted to social media that evening a picture of a huge pile of snow geese with just the guide behind them, acting as if that was killed by that weekend’s clients, when they were actually the ones he jumpshot from his UTV, snuck out of there, and hid in the fridge till we were all gone.

And of course when I finally heard back from SHS, they had a completely different story about how they don’t do refunds, never have, and would offer me a discount on booking next year’s hunt instead. I started the Paypal dispute. At one point he texted me that if I didn’t drop the dispute, he would get the local sheriff to issue an arrest warrant from my wife and I (because she was on the account too) for charges of fraud and theft of services. I never replied nor heard from him again. And then somehow I lost the dispute due to him having paperwork and all I had was this story to tell.

Dylan Cooper is a Page County native and graduate of Luray High School and Virginia Tech. He is a stream restoration specialist and a registered professional engineer in the State of Virginia. An avid outdoorsman and ardent environmentalist, he currently resides in Luray with his family.

Email: currentsolutionsva@gmail.com

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