It’s nice to hunt the X, that magical spot where the geese have been going day in and day out—if, that is, you can find the spot, get permission to hunt it, and set up properly. It’s great when it works, but it can be a crapshoot, especially in September, when Canadas and routine patterns don’t often go together. More often, goose hunters find themselves running traffic, which means setting a spread somewhere along the birds’ flight path and attempting to intercept them along the way.
SCOUTING “We never hunt the X in September,” says eastern Iowa’s Travis Mueller, national sales manager for Avery Outdoors. “The birds here, and in a lot of places across the country, are getting bumped off the roost early now, so patterns are often tough,…