STANWOOD — John Engels’ favorite memory from last season’s snow goose hunt was the day he didn’t raise his shotgun.

Engels has hunted the geese for about 20 years and has permission from several farmers in the Stillaguamish Valley to set up his white decoys on their property. Two stuffed snow geese are mounted on a wall in his Silvana home, and he always eats the rest of the birds he gets.

Engles and a friend found themselves in a cloud of snow geese one morning last fall soon after they finished putting their decoys out.

“We had 2,000 geese land. Because we’re also bird watchers, we chose not to shoot,” he said. “It was as much of a hunt as if we both took our limits, kind of like catch-and-release fishing.”

Waterfowl hunting season is on through January, and so is the third year of a pilot project run by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The Snow Goose Quality Hunt Project along Port Susan near Stanwood and on Fir Island near Conway pays farmers to plant winter wheat or rye and allow hunters onto their property. In return, the project gives the hunters access to snow geese that they might not otherwise have, said project coordinator Doug Huddle of the state Fish and Wildlife office in La Conner.

People with regular permits to hunt snow geese put their names in a lottery for the project. Those chosen in the drawing are given a week of hunting at a specific location and always over a set of decoys, Huddle said.

Engels wasn’t chosen for the hunt project this year, but he said his experience last year in the program was a good one.

“I drew a good location. We had a good five days of hunting and we got a lot of geese,” Engels said.

The current quality hunt has been running for about a month, but until now activity has been slow, Huddle said. More snow geese migrated to the Skagit and Stillaguamish valleys last week, which could give people a better chance to hunt, he said.

The influx of birds may not make a big difference in odds for hunters, however. Many snow geese flocks are becoming decoy shy, Huddle said. Mature birds develop a wariness, and collectively the birds may sense the hazard posed by a decoy set-up. Juvenile snow geese often fall for the decoys, but there are fewer young birds this year, he said.

“Only about 10 percent of the snow geese this year are juveniles. Last winter we had about 35 percent young snow geese,” Huddle said. “Our Russian counterparts reported substantially fewer juveniles flying south for the winter. It could be a climatological thing or something that happened after the goslings hatched.”

The native snow geese breed during summer on Wrangel Island off the north coast of Siberia. Farmland in the Fraser River valley of British Columbia, as well as near the Skagit and Stillaguamish rivers, attracts the birds and provides a major winter food source.

Snow geese can damage that farmland, turning a green field into mud, Engles said. Many farmers he knows welcome experienced hunters to try for snow geese on their farms.

Others don’t want the hunters because of possible liability issues and the trash and shotgun shells left behind, he said.

“Hunting helps discourage the flocks from over-feeding a field, but you have to clean up,” Engels said. “I come out after the season with my kids and pick up all the trash. We deeply appreciate the farmers who allow us to hunt.”

What Engels and other local hunters don’t appreciate are inexperienced hunters. However, the quality hunt project aims to help educate those new hunters, Huddle said.

For example, hunters are told to know their quarry and not shoot at the thousands of the larger trumpeter swans that also winter in the region. The swans are off-limits to hunters. Hunters also cannot use lead shot when hunting waterfowl because the lead can be ingested by fowl, poisoning them.

“We yell at people who shoot at the swans and at the guys who shoot up into the sky,” Engels said. “We have no respect for sky blasting. It just ends up crippling birds and makes them even more wary. We need fewer shooters and more hunters who command respect because they are ethical and love the birds.”

These days Engels, who owns Bear Paw Construction, is out scouting snow geese every chance he gets. He admits that, much to the chagrin of his family, he lives for the hunting season.

“But not even nonhunting bird-watchers love these birds more than I do,” he said. “I watch them in the off season and I hear their chatter in my head.”

Reporter Gale Fiege: 425-339-3427 or gfiege@heraldnet.com.