8-18 SS Oregon Geese

  What could be absolutely great news for goose hunters in Oregon. Don’t get your shotguns, decoys or blinds out right yet, but great hunting may be coming down the road. There is a nifty program in Oregon, nifty that is if you are a hunter,  and it is called the Open Fields program.  It’s part of a federal grant that goes to Oregon Fish and Wildlife administrators. Open Fields funding will be used to pay landowners on a per-acre basis to allow public hunting on private land in the Willamette Valley. Properties that experience goose damage will be given priority. Landowners may choose to enroll on a “Welcome to Hunt” or a “By-Permission” basis. All By-Permission hunting reservations will be coordinated through ODFW Staff. Here is Oregon Fish and Wildlife  Access and Habitat Program Coordinator Matthew Keenan:  “A lot of the grass seed farmers in the Valley are really starting to get hammered, particularly over the past couple of decades, the numbers of Canada geese that visit these properties have really increased and they hang around longer and they eat and tear their crop apart. The landowner community has been really looking for an answer to this for a long time so they took it to the legislature and they actually established a goose task force in the Oregon Legislature specifically to address this problem. How can we alleviate the damage that these landowners are suffering in lost crops? One of the recommendations was to increase hunting access on these properties