BY PHIL BOURJAILY November 6, 2025
Sometimes the best way to avoid the eyes of waterfowl is to hide in plain sight. That’s the method behind the seeming madness of A-frame blinds stuck out in the middle of the Canadian prairies, as I was reminded again on a recent on a trip to Saskatchewan.
The idea is simple, if counterintuitive: build something so big that birds don’t recognize it as a threat. Two A-frames are better than one, and three might be better than two.
Second, you hide every square line. If it looks like a box, birds won’t play. Blur every edge so it doesn’t look man-made, and ducks and geese won’t see it as a threat.
Third, be sure there’s adequate overhead cover, so birds have difficulty picking out hunters as they pass above the blind.
Finally, set decoys to crosswind birds so they aren’t looking directly at you.
Before each hunt, the drill was the same: we’d drop the gate and pull the three giant decoy bags out, then we’d walk on the carpet of cedar boughs on the trailer floor to carry the assembled blind out, two of us grasping the frame inside so it came out looking like a huge rectangular bush with four feet. The other blind stood, rolled up, against the front of trailer, along with gold-leaved aspen branches and Saskatoon-berry saplings.
With the second blind assembled, we’d clip both together. They were already brushed, but that was just the starting point. We used some of the saplings and boughs to further camouflage the blind, and laid upside-down cedar boughs against the blind to hide the straight lines where it met the stubble.
With a drill and auger-bit, we bored holes around the blind, many of them several feet away from it, so we could build out a clump of trees using the remaining saplings, branches and boughs. When it was finished, and we stepped in around the cedars and saplings, it had the feel of entering some kind of fake Christmas forest.
If you stepped back, what you saw was a long clump, the trees around it further breaking up the outline and casting natural, brushy shadows on the ground. Inside the blinds, where we sat on comfortable deer-blind chairs, the brush stood tall enough to provide overhead cover.
The blinds were set to sharp crowwind angle, and our guide put fullbodies in an open V, with the point facing downwind. The whole setup worked beautifully. The first time our guide, Darren, called the shot, I popped up, and found myself face to face with geese at ten yards.
They were more surprised than I was, and every one of them fell before I ever thought to touch the trigger.
The best moment of the trip didn’t involve shooting. One afternoon we finished the dark-goose limit we’d started on in the morning, so we could only watch as flock after flock of cacklers worked the decoys and landed in the spread by the hundreds. They had no idea we were there, awed and arising mere yards away, hidden inside our A-frame clump of bushes.
Phil Bourjaily is shotgun editor for Field & Stream, shotgun columnist for Ducks Unlimited, and a frequent contributor to Shooting Sportsman, California Waterfowl, Clay Target Nation and others. He lives in eastern Iowa with his wife and a German shorthaired pointer. He has two grown sons and a new grandson.
