In this follow-up to "Three Season Pheasants" are some additional thoughts on pheasant hunting tactics that work, and on the best guns and loads for pheasants.
Stopping Frequently
Hunters without dogs have an especially difficult time getting birds into the air when they'd rather not fly. If you pause for a minute or two from time to time, you'll unnerve pheasants nearby who suddenly can no longer tell where you are. Nervous pheasants usually try to fly away from danger.
One-Man Drives
To make pheasants flush when they want to run you have to push them into a corner so they can't run any farther. That's a hard job for one hunter in a big block of cover. I always try to hunt into the middle of a field and then push out towards the edges, hoping to pin a bird between myself and a field edge. Remember to stop frequently, too.
Pheasant Drives
The classic midwestern hunting tactic, the drive requires 12-15 hunters.
One third of the party sets up as blockers at the far end of the field, the rest walk down the rows in a long, U-shaped line. Pheasants should collect in the center of the line and flush when they run into the blockers. Although many drives take place in standing corn, any large block of cover can be driven.
Blocking the Exits
When you hunt pheasants in strips of cover, they will want to run as far as they can go and remain unseen, then flush. A blocker at the far end of the ditch, waterway, or slough may get a shot as his partner hunts towards him. If the strip is oddly shaped, you'll need a blocker to cover each projecting point.
Pass Shooting
If you can't get into range of a flying pheasant, sometimes you can wait for a pheasant to fly to you. Pass shooting opportunities usually occur around 4:00 or 4:30 p.m., near the end of legal shooting hours in most states. At that time pheasants often fly back to their roosting cover from the fields where they've been feeding.
Most of the situations I've noticed where pass shooting opportunities exist involve birds flying from a field on one side of a road to roost on the other.
Hunting with a Dog
Putting a good dog into the best looking cover you can find is by far the best way to bag pheasants, but you won't find it to be particularly restful.
Often, the dog and the hunter must work together, forming two arms of a pincer to cut a bird off and make him flush. Sometimes you'll see grass rippling ahead of the dog and you can dash ahead of him to flush the bird. Similarly, when my dog goes on point I don't stand around admiring him or repacking a pipe. I break into a run. That point may well be the first of many as Sam tries to corner a rooster who may flush at any time. If you don't stay right behind a flushing or pointing dog when he makes game you'll miss a lot of chances.
Pheasant Guns
Everyone agrees that most early season roosters are shot at close range. Few people, I'm convinced, realize how close "close" really is: inside 20 yards, usually nearer to 10. Any open-choked 12-, 20-, or 16-gauge loaded with high velocity 6 or 7-1/2 shot makes a fine pheasant gun early in the season. The extra length of a pump or autoloader is no hindrance in the wide open spaces of pheasant country, while the third shot a magazine gun offers comes in very handy for anchoring lightly hit roosters the moment they touch the ground.
Double guns enjoy the advantage of two chokes. Almost all pheasants are shot going away, so if you miss with the open barrel you can take your time with the second shot, secure in the knowledge that the tight pattern will still have enough punch to stop the bird at long range.
Conventional wisdom holds that the open-choked gun will no longer do the job after opening day, and the middle and late seasons are the time to unrack a tightly choked 12-gauge. I follow this advice every year so I can tell you what's wrong with it.
The wild-flushing birds I plan to pick off at long range with the full choke actually appear just at the edge of 7mm magnum range, while the birds I outsmart still flush underfoot. I end up taking the same shots I did early in the season, but fewer of them. After I fringe hit one too many birds with the tight choke up close, I go back to the gun I started the season with. If you must switch guns or chokes, save the tight shooters for windy days when pheasants are skittish and even the birds that flush nearby reach long range in a hurry.
Late in the season, pheasants become difficult to kill for two reasons. First, they have added another layer of feathers that serve as a sort of armor. Moreover, these feathers clump around shot, retarding penetration.
Second is the fact that cold air is enough denser than warm air to slow pellets in flight. Bob Brister reports in Shotgunning: The Art and Science, that early tests of steel loads confounded engineers because they showed no difference in killing power between one-ounce loads and presumably deadlier 1-1/8 loads. The reason? The heavier loads had been tested on a day 30 degrees colder than the one-ounce loads. The difference in temperature slowed the heavier loads enough to nullify the ballistic advantage of the extra shot.
In cold weather, choose the highest velocity loads available for your gun and consider moving up one shot size. The 3-3/4 dram, 1-1/4 ounce 12-gauge load of 5's is my favorite late-season load.
Consider patterning a pheasant gun at 20 yards rather than the usual 40. At that distance, the full choke favored by so many hunters groups almost all its pellets into a 15 inch circle, while an improved cylinder's pattern is almost 30 inches across. Put another way, the full choke covers only 177 square inches at the range most pheasants are shot, but the IC's pattern covers 706!
Copyright (c) 1995 Philip Bourjaily. All rights reserved.
Home | Library | Hunting | Wingshooting