November 21-24, 2021: Moved the whole family to the east side of Washington for the week so that the old man and I could chase birds and wrestle with the kiddos in the same day. The first few days were the usual wandering on public land trying to jump pheasants and ducks + the old man was interested in trying for quail. Then I was also dragging him kicking and screaming to a guided goose hunt as I have had a multi-year, irrational craving for wild goose. The routine hunts were entertaining in the usual, random ways that wandering many miles outside will always provide but I didn't do a great job of getting us on birds. On the other hand, the goose hunt had two minutes of absolute insanity that I'll probably never get to experience again, so it all balanced out. Rather than dragging you through all the details, I'll just share some of the highlights/pictures before dwelling on the goose hunt.
Day 1: We hiked three miles before getting into any pheasants or ducks and those were the painful, long range flushes from a "pointer". At least she is pretty cute... Along that walk we also flushed some snipe who promptly had a hawk following in hot pursuit. Finally, right near the end of our loop, and right by the road, Oak and the old man combined for a rooster and then winged a second one that we couldn't find.
The afternoon was supposed to be a duck hunt but the ponds were dry and had been converted to porcupine farms. Hopping between the mud puddles was a pile of teal and there was a wily rooster and quail hiding in the margins. As we made it to the one pond with real water we could hear a crazy amount of mallard chatter and we snuck all the way on top of them (with two dogs keeping quiet the whole way, Oak would have vibrated himself into a puddle of mush). But for all that stealthy work we ended up with a single duck... I think if we hadn't been aiming, more ducks would have fallen but the griffon got a make a long retrieve and was giddy with pride. My GPS fell out while crawling through a brushy tunnel and so we would be back to try again the following day and maybe even solving the mystery of the shot hat (below).
Day 2: The morning was 5 hours of futility, not even a shot fired but we did find 5 pheasant hens while hunting with Sage (the griffon) and Josie (the german wirehair). With 4 dogs available, Oak and Ginger (the brittany) were off duty but Oak managed to cut up his foot/sprain his ankle jumping from the truck back at the house and wouldn't get to hunt again on the trip.
In the afternoon we returned to the dry ponds to retrieve the GPS and try sneaking back in on the ducks. Unfortunately, they were sticking just across the boundary in a protected area. The most epic part of the day was walking back out as uncountable numbers of ducks were flying overhead, leaving the Potholes area and heading for their roosting waters. It probably started an hour before dark and the waves of birds never stopped.
Day 3: Time for the kiddos to do some walking with grandpa and while they haven't really been exposed to the concept of hunting, they were helping us scout a new wildlife area. It was a good thing too because this area turned out to be one solid swamp with just the road serving as a causeway.
For the afternoon we headed even further afield to try for a miracle location. The miracle would have to wait for another year but despite very low bird density it was pretty country and we did see Eurasian doves, pheasants and quail. The dogs did get a solid point on a hen pheasant but ran too hard on the roosters. Of the three pointers, Ginger was the only dog with a nose for the quail and she was working really hard to find a couple birds in square miles of sage brush.
Day 4: Our last hunting day started almost before Day 3 ended as we had to get pretty far south to meet our guides and get the decoy spread set up before shooting light. I already suspected doing my own decoy goose hunting was out of reach and this trip only served to confirm that suspicion. We had nine people working for over an hour to get things in place and looking realistic. That is not even considering the expense of all those decoys and the trailer to haul them around... The guides set up the posts for the decoys while we grabbed brush to hide the sit up blinds and then we all helped put out the decoys. You couldn't add decoys too early because they would frost over and that is an easy give away to wily geese.
It wasn't windy enough to support snow goose socks with us sitting amid the socks so we primarily had Canada geese groupings with one token set of snows and we were sitting back in the brush along the edge of the field. To make things look more realistic we all went back through the spread, scuffing up the frost to make it look like the geese had been feeding.
We climbed into our coffins at 7am and the first geese to arrive were "cacklers", the smallest Canada geese we would see and barely bigger than mallards. All six went down and were retrieved by a our guide's little black lab.
There were a few more speculative calling attempts but it wasn't until an hour later that our blue sky was replaced by a white tornado of sound. Somehow, our two guides had convinced a snow goose flock of many thousands to land right on top of us and when we popped up to shoot, all you could see above and in front of us was whiteness (it was probably that same view in any direction but I was just looking down the barrel). I can't imagine I'll ever get to be part of something like that again, even our guides were in a bit of shock. Between the 7 hunters and two guides we fired 25 shots (two of us had the last shell jam) and we recovered 54 snow geese. After a big team retrieving effort and stuffing geese into all of our coffins, we settled back into the blinds to see if lightening would strike twice. 
We were a little handicapped in that the dog and a guide were still hunting for injured birds in the orchard so the calling wasn't as enticing without the stereo effect and after an hour of watching shy birds skirt the decoys we realized there were probably way too many white feathers out on the ground so we scurried back out to scour the grass of evidence. The last birds to come in that morning were four big honkers but somehow we only managed to get one of them, I think I helped bring down the first bird but I know I missed two of my shots and it was painful to see those big xmas sized birds making their escape... Still an epic adventure that far exceeded my expectations and I think even the old man grudgingly admitted that it wasn't a complete waste of time.
The grand finale of the trip was getting dropped off by a guide on a leased piece of property nearby for chasing more pheasants and quail. The drive over alone was worth the trip because we got to see a couple of the lakes where the snow geese were staging and to confirm that despite our efforts there were still many thousands lounging happily in between their morning and evening feeds.
Back home I got to work processing a giant pile of geese (couldn't get the old man to take his share). In a first for me I kept the livers, hearts, and gizzards to try in some dirty rice recipes and some of the gizzards were slow cooked in fat for a day. All of it was pretty good and definitely will be including those bits in my future harvesting but the tastiest attempt so far was the snow goose pastrami from the breasts.
PS - All of my goose recipes came from Hank Shaw of Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook fame and I highly recommend his website if you are looking to up your wild game, fish, or foraged offerings or to utilize more of any given animal.