Throughout the pheasant's range, many hunters divide their season into two parts, Saturday and Sunday of opening weekend.
If you want to hunt pheasants all fall and do well, you'll separate the season into three parts and recognize that each requires a distinct approach. Early in the season, you'll fret if you're not hunting enough. In the middle weeks, you'll wonder if you're hunting in the right place. Late in the year, you'll worry that you're not in the field at the right time.
Early Season
My partner and I are hunting a strip of standing corn on Sunday morning of opening weekend. We can hear shooting in the distance all around us. As we reach the weedy fenceline at the end of the field, five roosters, what the English call a bouquet of pheasants, flush in all directions.
We each pick a bird and drop it. A few minutes later the dog plunges into the ditch and returns with a broken winged cripple lost by some other hunters the day before. It's only 8:30, and if we'd been shooting straight we'd both have a limit by now.
Harvest surveys show that between one half and one third of the total pheasant kill every year takes place in the first nine days of the season. My own records show that I usually shoot half my birds for the year in the first two weeks of hunting.
The early part of the season becomes, essentially, a race. The idea is not so much to kill birds before other hunters do, but to hunt the birds of the year before they become so well-educated they're virtually unapproachable. Later in the season I wouldn't think of hunting a cover that's just been walked. Early on, I'll do it happily, especially if the hunters just leaving didn't bring a dog.
Many late-hatch pheasants are not yet fully feathered early in the season, so you'll often see young roosters with short tailfeathers. Distinguishing hens from roosters by tail length is never a good idea, but early in the season it will definitely cost you some birds. Two roosters I shot last October had tailfeathers no more than six or seven inches long--the same as most hens--rather than the 18- to 24-inch tails most roosters sport. It's far better to look for, and to shoot at, the white ring at the other end of the pheasant.
Hayfields and other short grass fields where late broods hatch make a good place to start the season, since many of the young birds will still think of these fields as home. I hunt these fields all year long, as much because they're a nice place to watch my dog work as for any other reason; however, after the first few days of the season they mostly hold hens. Throughout the heart of pheasant country, standing corn is the classic early season pheasant cover.
Nowadays, fortunately, the harvest is usually over before the season begins, since standing cornfields aren't what they used to be. The "dirty" cornfields cherished by pheasant hunters are increasingly a thing of the past because modern chemical farming methods insure nothing grows in the field except what's supposed to. ("Go ahead and hunt," a neighbor of mine liked to say when granting permission, "you may as well kill'em before the herbicide does.") There just isn't enough cover at ground level in a modern cornfield to keep birds from sprinting down the rows.
When they do flush, you can't see them, since the corn grows eight feet high. The best you can hope for in standing corn is to push the pheasants out of the field and into cover where you can hunt them effectively.
Middle Season
I am standing in a tree-lined slough in a plowed cornfield, alternately blowing a whistle and bellowing curses. Sam, the object of my frustration, is little more than a liver-and-white blip careening across the vast blackness of the field. Opening day was a month ago, and now-wary pheasants have been sprinting flat out in front of the dog, drawing him farther and farther out of range. I can hardly remember the last time I flushed a rooster up close.
Sourly, I think back to the day my neighbor invited me to come road hunting in his pickup. No thanks, I'd said, I don't like to hunt pheasants if I can't take my dog. Adolph actually laughed in my face. "You'll never get 'em that way," he said. I'm beginning to think he may be right.
I hear beating wings in the distance. Somewhere near the county line, Sam has bumped another bird. I see him flush into the wind, then whip back in my direction like a paper cup tossed from a moving car. Ducking behind a tree, I peek around the trunk to see the pheasant right on course to come over me. When he's straight overhead, I shoot, and the bird comes crashing down through the branches. Puffing, Sam arrives to make the retrieve. "Never get'em with a dog," I tell him, "Ha!"
After the first two weeks of the season until the onset of cold weather, those pheasants who survived the intense hunting of the opener have very little to occupy their small brains but staying out of your way and mine. On the plus side, once the crops are in and the crowds of early season hunters gone, landowners are much more likely to let you onto their property. That's important, because where you hunt becomes crucial as the season progresses.
The best way to take pheasants in the middle part of the season is to hunt birds that haven't yet seen too many hunters and dogs. Go back to the farm you weren't allowed to hunt on opening day because the crops weren't out yet. If you're the first person on after harvest, as I was at one such place last fall, you'll have opening day all over again.
Realize, too, that birds move out of good cover in the face of hunting pressure. The farm house I rent sits on 160 acres of cover so sparse no one ever hunts here but me. The farms on all three sides get pounded most weekends through the season. Monday mornings, I can often find birds on this place that have been run off the surrounding farms over the weekend. Similarly, after the season begins you'll often find birds at the edges of public hunting areas.
The pheasants will be dividing their time between the good cover on the WMA and the lighter hunting pressure on the private ground.
My favorite tactic for hunting uncooperative mid-season roosters is to wear them out. The one season I kept track of my hits and misses, I found I shot almost half my birds on second or third flushes.
Forget what this says about my shooting and pay attention. Mark down any rooster you flush and go after him. Usually, he'll hit the ground running, but if he makes a little 180-degree turn just before touching down, odds are you'll find him glued to that spot. Keep after the bird, and you may flush him in range the second or third time you put him up.
I believe this tactic works for three reasons. First, pheasants aren't used to predators that keep on coming after them the way we can. Second, pheasants have home ranges, just like deer, and if you push a bird to the edge of familiar ground he'll be reluctant to leave. Lastly, I think a series of sprints away from danger eventually tires the birds out.
Late Season
My cousin and I are hunting a small cattail marsh on a zero-degree morning the day after a blizzard dumped a foot of snow on the ground. Hugo, Shaun's wirehair, has pointed five roosters for us in the last hour. Snuffling thorough the marsh grass, he points one final bird.
Like all the others, this one flushes so slowly, digging his way out of the snow, that at first I think he's a cripple. Shaun waits an interminable few seconds for the bird to travel 15 yards, then headshoots him. With a limit each, we're done hunting early for the day, so we decide to spend the afternoon chasing rabbits.
Four days later, with temperatures up in the teens, we hunt the same marsh again. The moment we set foot in the cattails, pheasants pour out the far side and disappear over a hill. We take a few more steps, see the cattails rustling as birds run ahead, and three more pheasants flush wild. Then, I slip on the ice, crack my head and my gunstock, and once again we're done pheasant hunting early.
Success in the late season is a matter of timing. If you can be in the field right after a severe storm, you'll find birds holed up for warmth under the snow, sitting tighter than they have since opening day.
If your timing isn't just right, the pheasants will be every bit as skittish as they were in mid-season. A blizzard may set the stage for a memorable hunt, but any amount of snow seems to slow pheasants down somewhat, perhaps because they sense they are more easily seen by airborne predators as they run against a white background.
Like many hunters, I love the idea of hunting in a fresh tracking snow. That said, I can't remember even one occasion when tracking a bird helped me put him on the table. On the other hand, when Sam went on point in a snowy field late last season I noticed a huge fresh footprint in the snow behind him. Realizing no pheasant had feet that big I was somewhat better prepared for the unnerving sight of a 20-pound wild turkey flushing in my face.
Even without snow, the beginning of colder weather means the birds have to take the temperature into some account every day. Early on subzero mornings, pheasants are unwilling to leave their roosts in cattails, tall, thick grasses, sedan grass, and phragmites. Throughout the day you should concentrate your efforts on south slopes, ditches, marshes, creek banks, windbreaks, and shelterbelts. In extreme cold I've even found pheasants perched in evergreens like ruffed grouse.
One of the nice things about late-season hunting is that much of the best winter cover will be found on public lands managed for hunting. Go back to the WMA where you got a bird on opening day and you'll see that the pheasants who've been sitting out the season on nearby private ground have no choice but to return to the food plots and shelter plantings on public ground.
Better yet, pheasants group up by sex late in the year. After the frustrations of the middle season, I've often enjoyed late-season hunts where I've seen nothing but roosters all day long, recalling the bounty of opening weekend. Those are the days when you don't mind so much that the golden autumn afternoons of the early season have long since faded to winter's dull gray.
Those are the days you remember all year.
Copyright (c) 1996 Philip Bourjaily. All rights reserved.
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