“A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward, his ear cocked for geese.” Aldo Leopold, “A Sand County Almanac.”
Pre-dawn, 31 degrees, and a southeast wind weaves corn shucks into the broom straw covering seven hunting blinds.
The sky canopy stops where the corn field stubble begins and the decoys stand just so. Beyond the blinds is the lake, dug shallow enough to keep the dogs from paddling, deep enough to entice the snows and blues. More decoys trail out onto a spit, their heads nodding, beckoning to the skeins flying overhead.
This is Ralph Kohler’s world.
At 88, he stands in one of the blinds at the water’s edge and faces the east horizon, very barely tinted the palest rose.
“Ahh,” he says, “it’s going to be a beautiful sunrise, isn’t it?”
Ralph that’s what everyone calls him opened his first commercial waterfowl hunting spread 50 years ago in the gumbo soil of this Missouri River bottom land.
In 1956, his was the only place on the eastern edge of Burt County.
Now there are 21 other spreads along that same 16-mile stretch. Other men have bought or rented ground, dug ponds, pumped water, set decoys and hunkered down to reap their rewards.
But, after all that, everyone knows there is still only one Ralph Kohler.
Each year in the fall and now also in the spring, hunters flock from across the nation to spend time in the blinds with the man who has seen day break thousands of times and millions of birds navigate the sky.
Today, Ralph is hosting a dozen men from Illinois, Florida, Colorado, Iowa and Nebraska. Some come solely to hunt, others are here as guides to spot and call in geese or retrieve downed birds. Along with Magic, a female black Lab, and Taylor, a male yellow Lab who’s almost 3, the men wait in blinds heated by propane burners and connected by an intercom system.
It’s still fairly dark and there’s time to talk.
Ralph says the spring goose hunting season, which runs from Feb. 1 to April 16, attracts many out-of-state hunters.
“Twice, we had 11 states (represented) here one day, out of 30 people,” he says.
He can name those days and also what happened on any other hunting day in the past 50 years.
To say Ralph keeps records is an understatement.
Every morning, he notes the wind’s speed and direction, air temperature and other weather conditions, arrival time of the first flock of waterfowl, its breed and number, whether or not the birds are lured into the spread and the number shot by the hunters. Similar data is taken on every subsequent flock that comes in.
Once tabulated in notebooks, Ralph’s decades of information are now filed on a computer. But he keeps print-outs in a big blue notebook which he’s brought to the blind today.
“All those years, it’s all there in that book,” he says, gesturing toward the inches-thick tome. “If a guy wants to know what happened on a day in 1974, I can tell him.”
Right now, he tells his eager companions to hold off on a pair of snow geese settling into the decoys.
“It’s not time to shoot yet,” Ralph cautions into a microphone perched on the blind shelf. His warning carries into each of the six other blinds.
“I can talk to them, but they can’t talk to me,” he says with a grin. “I like that.”
What Ralph likes even better is watching the flocks come in.
At first, they may hover high above the spread to check it out. Sometimes, they wheel, spooked by something amiss. Sometimes, they circle, setting their wings and dropping lower and lower, intrigued by Ralph’s precise placement of 400 decoys and an electronic cackle coming from the blinds.
This recorded sound of actual geese feeding blares now as it will periodically throughout the day. Ralph, who once mouth-called flocks into shooting range, says he’s amazed at how well the electronic device works to decoy these springtime flocks heading north.
No one really knows for sure, he says, but the North American snow goose count has been estimated at 6 million in recent years. Consequently, the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission now allows a “conservation action” season each spring to relieve the numbers of white and blue-phase geese and Ross’ geese. Those species, summering in the Canadian tundra, are stripping that area of its vegetation at too fast a rate, Ralph says.
“There isn’t enough feed for them to exist, so this (season) was put into effect to thin them down,” Ralph says. “I don’t know if it’s going to be enough.”
Just because the geese answer the electric call doesn’t mean the hunters enjoy a one-sided heyday.
“You’d think, with 30 people and they all shoot, they’d kill all of them, but they don’t,” Ralph says. “These geese have gotten so smart, they’ve been shot at a thousand times, all the way to Texas.”
With the magic moment 30 minutes before sunrise at hand, this guy vs. goose saga is about to continue.
“Ralph, we’ve got four snows on the bank in front of the milo,” one guide says quietly.
Ralph gets out his field glasses and peers across the lake.
“One blue and four snows,” he says.
The birds wing slowly toward the blinds.
“Is it shootin’ time?” someone asks.
“It’s shootin’ time,” Ralph answers.
The men release their guns from the blind brackets and wait for the go-ahead.
Ralph waits, too, for the wary bunch to circle into shooting range.
“They’re real low, get ready here,” he murmurs into the microphone. “They’re too high. They’ve got to be lower than that ... come on, turn back.”
Magically, a baker’s dozen does and Ralph says, “Take ’em.”
Spent shells fly, geese plummet into the lake, and Magic and Taylor bound into the water amid whoops from the men.
Within minutes, the hunters are into another bunch. The phone behind Ralph’s chair rings, as it will many times throughout the day.
“We had 15 by 7:30,” he reports to the caller. “That isn’t too bad, if we can just continue.”
Ralph can continue through just about anything, it seems. He’s weathered numerous visits by camera crews filming his story for television. He’s dealt with a congressman who had to be reminded the day was for hunting, not schmoozing with other guests.
“He had everybody out in front of the blind, shaking hands, and we were trying to shoot geese,” Ralph says, ruefully shaking his head.
On rare occasions, hunters have fired their guns before Ralph gave the order a definite breach of etiquette that can also be lethal.
In 68 years, no one has been injured while hunting with Ralph and he’d just as soon keep it that way.
He laughs about “claimers,” hunters who regularly identify downed birds as the product of their own marksmanship.
“You’d be surprised how many think that, and that’s good, I guess,” Ralph says. “We get some real prime claimers out here.”
Overall, today’s hunters don’t seem quite as enthused about the sport, he says.
“We used to have 20-25 guys and they’d get 50 or 60 geese and we’d lay them all out and the guys would draw from a deck of cards for the birds,” Ralph says, noting after that process, the remainder of the geese would be up for grabs which is exactly what the hunters did.
“Now you have to put up a gate so they don’t leave before they’re divided,” he says. “Ladies work now and they don’t cook like they used to.”
He pauses and adds, “I don’t know, if I took a goose home and Dorothy said I had to cook it, if I would, either.”
Dorothy is Ralph’s wife of nearly 71 years and an integral part of his hunting life. She fields customers’ calls at home and forwards those messages to her husband in the blind. Sometimes, when the geese are pouring into the area, he calls her instead.
“Dorothy loves to watch them,” Ralph says. “I always call her when they’re flying.”
They’re flying today.
By 2:45 p.m., the group has bagged 39 birds, enough to help Ralph win a steak-dinner bet with a hunter at another set-up, enough to have two customers reconsidering their plans to go home the next day, enough to make Magic and Taylor, who have ranged far and wide without fail, wiggle with satisfaction.
Ralph, who has hosted an estimated 54,000 hunters over the decades, is satisfied, too. He wants his customers, no matter who they are, to have a good day in the blinds.
“They’re all important to me,” he says, “when they love to hunt.”
For more information about hunting with Ralph Kohler, call (402) 374-2747.
Beverly J. Lydick covers the region for the Tribune. She can be reached at (402) 721-5000, Ext. 1435, or via e-mail at beverly.lydick@lee.net .
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