2016 early season

[Novice123]

Goose hunting is slow for me to date (Aug. 17) in southeastern ND. I have scouted two times for 2 hours each time. I am only seeing very small groups. Most of these are loafing in small puddles. I few small groups are feeding in wheat stubble, but not in places that I can hunt. I know there is a lot of water in north east ND, it has been raining buckets up there all summer. I have yet to go on a hunt. I have not seen enough geese in a wheat field to justify a hunt. I saw a good number of geese in a flooded pasture but it was to close to a lady's house to even ask her for permission. Some sloughs in southeastern ND dried up this summer for the first time in over 25 years.

[tornadochaser]

How many birds do you consider enough in a field? Just curious if you go by overall number or how many flocks they fly out in. When we hunted August in ND we found it was better to pay attention to how many flocks hit the field, otherwise we'd get burned setting up on 50-100 birds thinking they were better feeds, only to have them all come out at once.

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[Novice123]

I think 8-10 birds is too few as they might be in a different field the next day if I were to hunt them. I would like to see more than one (small) group using a field to justify going through all the trouble of driving 1.5 hours and setting up. The good news is that a farmer's son (16 years) wants to hunt with us and the surrounding wheat fields are farmed by neighbors that he and his Dad know or by his relatives, which promises to give us access to a lot of land to hunt. It has been my experience that hunting usually improves quite a bit as we get toward the end of the early season, which is Sept. 15. It will be fun to get a young person started on field hunting geese. I sent him the 'Bad Grammer' this winter as a Christmas present and another one of Scott's goose DVD's.