Hunting the Storied Goose Fields of Easton, Maryland

To crouch in a blind in Easton, Maryland, as a flock of Canada geese descends into the stubbled mud of a spent winter field or splashes into ice-rimed water, all pounding wings and discordant honks, is to exist at the confluence of a fragile ecosystem and perhaps an even more tenuous way of life. But on the January day I join three generations of the Trask family in this epicenter of goose hunting on the state’s Eastern Shore, a storied strip of the peninsula on which Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia converge, the tradition seems more alive and essential than ever—to them and to this place.

What Thomasville, Georgia, is to quail or Stuttgart, Arkansas, is to ducks, so stands Easton to geese. And while I am not entirely new to the pursuit when I arrive in Easton at the invitation of my Wilmington, North Carolina, friend Raiford Trask III—I have hunted snow geese in Arkansas and, just a week earlier, killed one of a flock of Canadas that surprised me and my Labrador while hunting wood ducks in the bottomlands of a Tar Heel hog farm—I have never sought them with purpose, much less traveled to grounds as hallowed as Easton’s. So it is that I find myself in a brushed-in blind overlooking a broad creek to my north and a muddy cornfield to my south, accompanying fifteen Trask family members and friends in an annual pilgrimage dating back half a century.

Patriarch Raiford Trask, Jr., known as Big Raiford, first came to Easton in 1969. He was thirty-one years old then, and Easton’s guides came to call him Ten Gauge Buford. Ten Gauge because he shot the big gun he carried so well; Buford because it just sounded appropriately Southern for a man whose speech carries the rhythms of southeastern North Carolina. Fifty-five years later, Big Raiford tells me of eating lunch at Easton’s famed Tidewater Inn after a 1970 hunt over a field barren of even a goose track, guided by a “shyster I hired out of a sporting-goods catalogue.” A guide named Jay Tarmon overheard his exasperation and said, “Young man, I’ll take you hunting this afternoon. If you don’t kill a goose, you don’t have to pay me a dime.” After forty minutes, Big Raiford had his limit, and Tarmon had a client until his death, in 2005, when Rennie Gay—our guide for this trip—took over.

Two more generations of Trasks now join Big Raiford each year to hunt with Gay and his Tidewater Guide Service. “It makes my grandfather happy,” says Perry Trask Chappell, Big Raiford’s granddaughter, “but it’s also meaningful to me…the lighthearted family time interwoven with that feeling of respect for the outdoors and nature and the balance you have to keep.”

Of course, there are practical reasons Big Raiford gives for returning to Easton for five decades: For hunting geese, he says, “Easton was the best place on the East Coast.” And sentimental ones, too: “To me, it’s the prettiest part of the country—even the world.”

The story of waterfowling on the Eastern Shore, marked by booms and busts, stretches back well before the founding of the nation. In his book A Character of the Province of Maryland, published in 1666, George Alsop praised the “Swans, the Geese and Ducks” that “arrive in millionous multitudes in Mary-Land about the middle of September and take their winged farewell about the midst of March.” Echoing Alsop nearly 180 years later, John James Audubon called the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries “the greatest resort of waterfowl in the United States.” But as seemingly endless streams of birds piled into the region, so, too, did people less concerned about conservation than Audubon.

In the decades after the Civil War, hunters descended on the peninsula, killing birds as if still at war. Worse yet were the market hunters who massacred flocks at night using “punt guns”—huge shotguns, some extending a boat length, designed to tear through birds on the roost. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 aimed to stop the slaughter, but Eastern Shore waterfowl took decades to recover. Then, in the 1960s, as poultry farming and associated feed crops took hold on the peninsula, the migratory Canada geese that had previously overflown the area in favor of North Carolina’s Lake Mattamuskeet came with dropped feet and cupped wings to the region’s grainfields, establishing the area as the goose-hunting capital of the country.

By 1987, though, habitat destruction and overhunting drove the Washington Post editorial page to ask, “Will Canada Geese Vanish from the Eastern Shore?” In 1995, with weather changes in northern Quebec’s nesting grounds further affecting populations, Maryland imposed a moratorium on hunting migratory geese. Resident Canadas, generally larger and imbued with fat stores that allow them to withstand conditions less tolerable to their migratory cousins, were still huntable west of the Chesapeake Bay, but goose hunting as Easton and the Eastern Shore had known it came to a halt.

The moratorium remains controversial here, but after six years, breeding pairs of migratory Canadas had rebounded fivefold. Hunting resumed in 2001, with daily limits generally seesawing between one and two migratory geese since. As Sean Mann, an Easton native, hunter, guide, call maker, and world champion goose caller, puts it, while the moratorium was “terrible for businesses that could not adapt, I do think it gave people an appreciation for the resource and the reality that it is fragile.”

Rennie Gay, the Trasks’ longtime guide, stands as one of Easton’s most venerable, and a genuine Eastern Shore waterman who has lived by the wind and tide his entire life. Now sixty-four, Gay started when he was sixteen, helping his uncle Eddie Gay guide at Plimhimmon Farms—where its fourth-generation owner, the Eastern Shore goose legend Billy Myers, hosted hunters like Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and the prince and princess of Nepal—and then guiding on his own after leukemia took his uncle young.

As the Washington, D.C., metro area continues to expand, development is another threat to the place that defines Gay, and which he in no small part defines. He and Easton are built on a foundation of sporting traditions older than the country, a fact that seems to matter less and less to those who today look at an Eastern Shore grainfield and ponder how to squeeze in as many houses as possible, rather than how best to situate a goose blind.

“You’re driving more and more geese into smaller and smaller places,” Gay says of the growth. After a lifetime of hunting geese with his father here, Raiford Trask III concurs. Now, he says, in contrast to the huge expanses he hunted as a teenager, if “you want to go goose hunt, you’re hunting on a ten-acre field.”

We have a little more room for our hunt, though, our day unfurling at 8:00 a.m. at a 175-acre farm justoutside Easton on the banks of Goldsborough Creek. Gay and guides Danny Olds and Bobby Plato gather us for a safety briefing at the junction of two fields, welcoming us in voices shot through with the Tidewater accent that, like the peninsula itself, is a melting pot of North and South with some old England at a limited remove.

Afterward, Olds leads Raiford III and his wife, Ava; his brother, Richard; his sister-in-law Angie; and me across empty cornfields toward the creek and the brushed-in box blinds at its edge. We step through rich mud and small drifts of snow left by the previous week’s arctic madness. The air today, however, is heading toward the sixties, and I shed my jacket just moments after entering the blind. Climate issues, too, could pose a danger to Eastern Shore goose hunting. As Sean Mann told me, Canada geese do not migrate south to their traditional wintering grounds without the kind of weather that had finally scoured the nation the week prior: “The entire continent was starving for waterfowl until the January cold blast this year.”

By 8:52 a.m., Olds is frustrated. The decoys are here, and so are the geese. But they won’t commit, their honking a backbeat to the interplay of Tidewater and Carolina accents discussing birds, the weather, and good socks. Olds persists, his calls a rhythmic, repetitive murmur capped with a long huuuuurrr, about which he says, “There’s competition calling, what people think a goose sounds like, and there’s hunting. I do what the goose wants.”

A single Canada is sufficiently enticed to cruise close enough for me to stand, fire, and miss. It was a difficult trailing shot, but I feel the failure deeply as I sit back down, sipping coffee so as not to have to say anything about missing the only shot anyone has taken this morning.

Among the changes Eastern Shore has weathered, for Mann, “culture is the biggest threat” to Easton’s waterfowling traditions. “I think a lot of the character of our towns on the Shore stems from an enduring commitment to our heritage,” he says. “You say ‘hunt’ today and people look at you funny.”

Even so, Easton remains “the coolest goose-hunter’s town on earth,” he says. “I have guided all over this continent. Regardless of bag limit, Easton is a totally unique waterfowling world. Show me another place where you can sit in a colonial capital, hunt in the morning in a beautiful setting, then enjoy freshly caught seafood for lunch.”

Walking Easton’s streets—where I come upon a statue of two Canada geese, taller than a man—it’s impossible not to feel the importance of waterfowl hunting to the town’s character. While downtown’s Tidewater Inn, a waterfowler’s refuge since 1949, is no longer the place where, as historian Ralph Eshelman noted, successful hunters take “their geese to the kitchen for picking and cooking for dinner that night,” it is still a hotel “booked seasons in advance including repeat hunting guests from Europe and South America.” A block away, I duck into Albright’s Gun Shop, so named after Larry Albright bought the gathering point for local and visiting hunters from Mann’s father forty-two years ago.

Albright’s feels purpose-built as a haven for wing shooters. As I peruse the small sales room, with its neat displays of fine shotguns, the staff give me an impromptu history of Eastern Shore hunting and encourage me to come back in November for the annual Waterfowl Festival, a three-day celebration that has raised millions for conservation. Decoys figure heavily in the festival, and multiple people during my visit tell me I must stop by Guyette and Deeter, one of the largest auction houses in the United States focused on waterfowl decoys, guns, and sporting art, just ten miles from Easton in St. Michaels.

When I walk into the auction house’s reception area, I meet Cooper Rossner, an avid waterfowler, upland hunter, and decoy carver who left a high school teaching career in New Jersey to manage weekly auctions. It’s a testament to the unifying passion of waterfowlers that within five minutes he has me standing in the Guyette and Deeter warehouse holding an antique Elmer Crowell black duck decoy that will eventually sell for $480,000. An hour later, I find myself in the decoy-carving shop behind Rossner’s home.

Now thirty, Rossner moved to the Easton area around four years ago. He hunts over the decoys he and friends carve, and several years back traded his plastic and camo-painted shotgun for an over-and-under. “I’ll go [hunting] with my boss,” he says, “and we’ll have fun shooting wooden guns over wooden decoys.” I ask him about a black-and-white drawing hanging prominently on the shop’s wall. “That’s a pen-and-ink drawing of Jamie Hand, the guy who taught me,” he says. “I spent every second I could with this guy learning how to carve decoys. I was making my mom chaperone me to the sawmill to buy wood and buy tools and paints. I’ve been carving ever since.”

My time with Rossner, a transplant who’s bought in rather than simply bought up, makes me optimistic. Perhaps with more like him, this pocket of uniquely American culture can survive.

With our blinds still frustratingly inactive at 9:03 a.m., Olds pauses calling geese to hail what must be 150 canvasbacks passing at the farthest reaches of reasonability, a virtuoso performance featuring tones and subtones—hell, maybe even accents. Perhaps that’s to be expected of a fifty-eight-year-old who has been guiding since he was seventeen (he says, though, that when his sons are in the blind, he puts the calls away—a mark of pride at his children surpassing him, another tradition handed down). The canvasbacks are uninterested, and Olds resumes working the geese just as his phone rings. It’s Gay, telling him to get us ready to move.

Gay works like an orchestra conductor during a hunt, moving hunters in swirling parallel to the birds, while Olds and Plato handle the minute-by-minute satisfaction of hunting parties—part educators and part raconteurs. Almost before Olds can end the call, Gay arrives in an ATV to ferry us back to where we started, where Raiford III asks me if I want to hunt with Big Raiford’s gun.

I already know the lore of this gun, a 10-gauge New Ithaca Double chambered for three-and-a-half-inch magnums with a gold-inlaid receiver illuminating an engraved woodcock, eagle, and pheasant: how Big Raiford got it for $600 forty years ago because the barrel was bent; how he hammered an oak rod down it to straighten it out; how he has since brought it to Easton for decades, killing a goose with each barrel at a hundred yards multiple times before passing it along to his son. The Ithaca is an heirloom gun, not a particularly fine one, but like the hunt itself, it’s deeply important to the people who shoot it. In an ever-changing world, there is value in doing things with the people with whom you’ve always done them, the way you always have, before you can’t anymore.

It is 9:17 a.m. when Gay moves us to a blind on the edge of a more active field. Olds commences calling, and this time comes a storm of geese. The leaders of a half mile of whirling, shifting, calling birds descend into the decoys. Shouldering the heft of the 10-gauge, I feel the added weight of half a century of such moments: one young hunter coming north to hunting grounds full of promise; a father impressing his son with fine shooting; that son’s daughters taking up the gun themselves.

I am anxious, having already missed once with my own gun, but as I watch the birds come, those feelings fall away. The big gun thumps against my shoulder once, and then twice, downing my limit of geese. I hand it back to Raiford III, who soon takes his limit. Beside him, Ava Trask’s gun barks twice, testifying to her reputation as one of the family’s best shots. We are all of this place in this moment, outside of what has come and what still may, fixed squarely in the essence of Easton.