There’s a weird point every August when waterfowl season stops feeling like something that’s coming eventually and starts feeling like something that’s actually right around the corner.

We’re there.

The fishing boat is still getting used, there are bass and walleyes to catch, and technically we have plenty of summer left. But around our house, you can tell where our heads are at. The decoy trailer has been getting more attention. Calls are constantly sitting around. Layout blinds are getting brushed. Decoys have been sorted, cleaned, bagged, reorganized, and then reorganized again because apparently the system I came up with three days ago wasn’t good enough.

Ember knows something is happening too. Her training sessions are starting to look less like summer dog training and a lot more like hunting.

And every drive through the countryside has turned into scouting whether we intended it to or not.

Danielle has gotten pretty used to me slowing down whenever we pass geese in a field.

“What are you looking at?”

“Geese.”

“I know. I can see that.”

But at this point, I’m not really just looking at the geese anymore. I’m looking at where they’re sitting in the field. I’m looking at what they’re feeding on, where the nearest water is, what direction they probably came from, whether there’s enough cover to hide in and whether the terrain is doing anything interesting.

That’s what August does to us.

And with early teal right around the corner and the regular waterfowl season not far behind it, we’re officially at the point where the work we’re doing now is going to show up in the field very soon.

This isn’t really preseason anymore.

It’s final preparation.

It’s Time to Stop Buying Gear and Start Using It

I’m going to call myself out immediately here because I’m probably one of the worst offenders.

I love waterfowl gear.

This offseason has involved new decoys, blinds, motion ideas, calls, trailer organization and more than a few projects that started with me saying, “You know what would be cool…”

Danielle has heard that sentence enough times to know it’s probably going to cost money.

That’s part of the fun for me, and I don’t think that’s ever going away. I like tinkering with equipment. I like trying new ideas. I like looking at something we’ve used for years and figuring out how we can make it work better.

But there comes a point where buying and organizing equipment can trick us into feeling prepared without actually making us better hunters.

A brand-new goose call doesn’t matter if we haven’t practiced with it. An incredibly realistic decoy spread doesn’t matter if we don’t understand how the birds are using the field. A perfectly brushed blind doesn’t matter if we’ve never actually laid in it and realized the gun catches on the doors. A new motion system isn’t much help if we’re trying to figure out how it works while birds are circling.

So this is the time of year when we’re transitioning out of gear mode and into execution mode.

Anything we plan on hunting with needs to start getting used.

We’re brushing blinds instead of leaving them folded in the garage until the night before a hunt. Calls are getting thrown in the truck so we can practice regularly. Decoys are getting packed into the actual bags and sleds we’ll use. Ember is training around blinds and decoys instead of only retrieving bumpers across an empty yard.

Even the little things matter.

Where does my flag sit when I’m in the blind? Can I reach it without making a bunch of unnecessary movement? Where is Ember going to sit? Can Danielle comfortably shoulder her gun from the hide? If we’re walking into a pond, can we actually fit everything we’re planning to bring into one sled?

Those sound like insignificant details until you’re trying to solve them in the dark.

I Want to Think Less About Decoy Numbers and More About What the Spread Is Saying

This might be one of the biggest changes in the way I’ve started thinking about goose hunting.

For years, I thought primarily in numbers.

How many decoys do we need?

Two dozen? Four dozen? Six dozen? Ten dozen?

More decoys obviously have their place, especially when we’re trying to create visibility or compete with large concentrations of real birds. But the more time I spend actually watching geese, the less interested I become in simply creating a big spread.

I’m becoming much more interested in making the spread tell the right story.

A real flock isn’t fifty identical geese standing the exact same way. Some birds are feeding aggressively. Others are walking. Some have their heads up. Some are resting. There are birds sitting down. The geese on the outside of the flock often behave differently than the birds buried comfortably in the middle.

That behavior is something I want to replicate more intentionally this year.

Feeders can make up the working portion of the flock. Resting and sleeping postures can communicate security. Uprights can be used selectively instead of creating a spread where every single goose looks like it just heard a gunshot.

I’ve become especially interested in sleepers and resters.

We tend to associate sleeper decoys with snow, ice and late-season hunting, but watch geese loafing in a field for any length of time and you’ll see birds sitting down constantly. I’m not saying we’re going to fill an early-season grass field with sleepers, but adding a few relaxed birds can completely change the attitude of a spread.

Realism isn’t just about having the best paint job or the most anatomically correct decoy.

Realism is behavior.

That’s something we’re going to experiment with a lot this fall.

Practice the Stuff That Isn’t Exciting

Calling is another perfect example.

It’s easy to practice the fun stuff. Everybody likes getting loud on a goose call. It’s fun working on fast sequences and aggressive notes.

But some of the sounds I’m trying to spend the most time on right now are probably the least impressive ones.

Soft clucks. Moans. Murmurs. Little conversational sounds.

The kind of calling that doesn’t sound particularly exciting when you’re standing in the garage but becomes incredibly important when geese are hanging at forty yards trying to decide whether they’re comfortable.

Volume gets attention.

Control finishes birds.

I want to be able to get loud when we need to turn a flock and then immediately back down when the birds respond. More importantly, I want to be disciplined enough to recognize when the birds don’t need anything else from us.

Sometimes the best calling decision is to stop.

That’s hard when you’re excited and you have a call in your hand.

But the birds will tell us what they want if we’re willing to listen.

Ember’s Training Is Starting to Look More Like a Hunt

The same transition is happening with Ember.

Summer is great for building fundamentals. Marks, obedience, delivery, steadiness, water work and all of the little pieces that eventually create a finished retriever.

But hunting doesn’t happen in a controlled training environment.

Hunting is chaos.

There are decoys everywhere. People are moving. Calls are going off. Guns are being handled. Birds are circling. Somebody whispers that birds are coming from the left while somebody else is looking right. Then shots happen, multiple birds might fall, and suddenly we’re asking the dog to process all of it while remaining under control.

That’s why I want Ember’s training over these final weeks to start feeling increasingly like the real thing.

We’re running retrieves through mock spreads. We’re having her sit beside blinds. We’re calling while she waits. We’re making her watch some retrieves instead of automatically sending her every time something hits the ground.

That last part is especially important.

A hunting dog has to learn that not every bird belongs to them.

There will be times when another dog is sent. There will be birds we pick up ourselves. There will be cripples that require a different decision. Being able to sit there and wait until she’s actually released is going to matter.

The goal isn’t to perfectly recreate opening morning in the backyard. We can’t.

We’re just trying to make sure opening morning isn’t the first time she experiences everything at once.

And we’re still keeping it fun.

That’s where Danielle balances me out sometimes. I can get pretty focused on the tiny details of a training session. If Ember breaks early or takes a bad line, I’m immediately thinking about what needs to be corrected.

Danielle is usually a little better at looking at the bigger picture.

The dog is excited. She’s learning. We’re outside together. She’s getting better.

Progress matters more than perfection.

Scouting Needs to Become More Than Finding Birds

Everybody says scouting kills birds.

They’re right.

But I think we sometimes stop scouting too early.

We find 300 geese sitting in a field and immediately feel like we’ve accomplished the mission.

“Found them.”

But finding birds isn’t the same thing as understanding them.

This year, I’m trying to stay longer.

I want to know where they are in the field and why they’re there. Are they on the top of a hill? Are they tucked into a low spot? Are they concentrated along one edge? Are they feeding aggressively or mostly sitting around?

Then I want to know how they got there.

What direction did the first flock enter from? Did every group follow roughly the same line? Did birds circle before committing, or did they dump straight in? Where did they go when they left?

Those details can completely change how we set up the next morning.

The same goes for the field itself. Where can we park without disturbing birds? How are we getting equipment in? Is there a terrain feature that helps conceal us? Where will the wind naturally position the landing area?

The more questions we answer the night before, the fewer decisions we’re trying to make in the dark.

Finding birds tells you where to hunt.

Watching birds tells you how to hunt them.

There’s a big difference.

Fix the Dumb Problems Before They Become Hunt Problems

Every hunter has experienced one of those mornings where nothing major goes wrong, but fifteen little things make you want to lose your mind.

The flashlight batteries are dead. A blind strap breaks. The trailer light doesn’t work. Someone forgot stakes. The jerk rig looks like it spent the offseason being tied into knots by a toddler. The spinning-wing decoy isn’t charged. The dog collar is sitting on the kitchen counter.

None of those are hunting problems.

They’re preparation problems.

And August gives us plenty of time to eliminate most of them.

We’re trying to look at our equipment right now and ask one very simple question:

What could annoy us at 5:00 in the morning?

Then fix it.

If a cord is questionable, replace it. If a battery hasn’t been tested, test it. If the trailer tires need attention, do it now. Check the lights. Inspect waders. Clean the guns. Organize shells. Make sure the spare batteries are actually where we’ll need them.

And if there’s something that has annoyed you for the last three seasons, stop accepting it as part of hunting.

Solve the problem.

That’s been one of my biggest focuses with our equipment lately. I don’t necessarily want more stuff. I want the stuff we already own to work better.

A good hunting system should remove friction.

The easier it is to load, unload, set up, hunt and pack everything away, the more enjoyable the entire experience becomes.

I Don’t Want to Spend the Entire Month Waiting for September

There’s another side to all of this.

We’re excited.

Really excited.

And it’s easy to turn August into nothing more than a countdown.

But we’re still in summer.

There are still fish to catch. There are still warm evenings with the family. There are still boat rides and dog training sessions and plenty of reasons to enjoy exactly where we are instead of wishing the next month would hurry up and get here.

That’s actually one of the reasons I want to get organized early.

Preparation should buy us peace.

I don’t want the night before opener spent untangling decoy lines until midnight. I want them ready.

I don’t want to wonder whether Ember remembers how to sit quietly beside a blind. I want her to have done it twenty times.

I don’t want to pick up my goose call on opening morning and realize I haven’t blown it since January.

The more we handle now, the less frantic those final days become.

And honestly, this part of the season is fun in its own way.

There is something about standing in the yard on a warm August evening with decoys spread everywhere, practicing a call and realizing that in a few weeks we’re going to be doing the exact same thing in a field before sunrise.

That’s anticipation.

And anticipation is one of the best parts of hunting.

The Season Has Already Started

That’s probably the biggest realization I’ve had this year.

We tend to think hunting season begins when the regulations say we’re allowed to pull the trigger.

But for us, it doesn’t.

The season has already started.

It’s happening in the yard while we’re brushing blinds.

It’s happening when Ember runs through a little mock spread.

It’s happening on country roads when we slow down to watch geese.

It’s happening when calls start appearing in the truck again.

It’s happening in the garage when we take something that frustrated us last year and finally make it better.

Those aren’t chores standing between us and hunting season.

They’re part of hunting season.

Before long, there will be frost on the grass. The alarm will go off at an absolutely unreasonable hour. Coffee will get poured. The trailer will get hooked up. Ember will know exactly what’s happening before we even leave the driveway.

Danielle will probably ask if I remembered everything.

I’ll confidently say yes.

I’ll almost certainly have forgotten something.

And somewhere out there in the darkness, birds will start lifting off the water.

That’s when everything we’ve been doing this month finally gets tested.

Until then, we’re going to keep practicing. Keep scouting. Keep training. Keep tinkering.

And we’re going to enjoy every bit of the buildup.

Because waterfowl season isn’t something we’re waiting for anymore.

It already feels like it has begun.

– Max & Danielle
Burley Outdoors