Black (Pacific) Brant
At age ten, totally obsessed with ducks and geese, I read several articles in Outdoor Life magazine about brant hunting in coastal Oregon written by Wes Batterson, a pioneering biologist who worked for the Oregon F&W department. His descriptions of these dimunitive, unique sea geese captivated me. When I actually MOVED to Oregon I had forgotten all about brant until I read a brant hunting article in Gray's Sporting Journal written by Worth Mathewson, who was listed as living in Salem. He was in the Salem phone book so I called him. That was the start of a friendship and he introduced me to Netarts Bay and brant hunting, Worth had even known Wes Batterson before his death and had some of Batterson's silhouette decoys. Worth pointed out several of Wes's favorite hunting sandbars and points. Life can be like that sometimes.
Without a doubt, brant are my favorite goose. I bought decoy molds and cast and hand painted a set of 50 decoys, which I still have. I am now surrounded in my house in The Dalles with 4 brant decoys decorating the corners of the living room. My goal in life is to take the best pictures of brant, ideally in flight over an Oregon coastal bay, ever taken.
This wild but very lost bird showed up in a cemetery fountain pond in Eugene were he stayed for a month. He was blind in his left eye, possibly explaining both his being lost and staying so long. Setting up to take pictures of flying brant on the coast may take even more work than hunting them.
Waterfowl in flight==>
More Brant Thumbnails ==>
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