Pheasant hunters know the real new year begins on Opening Day not on January 1. On Opening Saturday, the young season stretches before us like a carpet of fresh-fallen snow, as yet unsullied by our footprints, frustrations, and empty hulls.
As New Year's Eve on the pheasant hunter's calendar approaches, it is time to draw up a list of last-minute resolutions for a successful season. Here's my own for this year based on what went right and wrong last year:
1. I will not miss easy shots over points.
No matter how many clay targets I break during the summer, I still begin every season by missing billboard-sized roosters at fly swatting distances.
Actually, clay target practice pays very little dividend, because hitting pheasants over points has virtually nothing to do with shooting skill, per se. Three feet of cackling pheasant blasting out of the grass beneath your feet provokes a startled, fight-or-flight response in most of us. Early in the year, my synapses choose "flight," and the gun is emptied as if the trigger were pulling itself before the bird has completed five wing beats.
Some people are totally immune to this problem; recently I took an air-traffic controller on his first bird hunt ever, and the stress of having a pheasant flush underfoot seemed to him quite mild compared to the tension of landing airliners. He drew an easy, unflustered bead on his first pheasant, a bird that flushed raucously underfoot. Me, I hunt pheasants for excitement but Roger thought he might take it up as a way to relax.
Having failed to come up with an ironclad cure for rooster fever, I guess my real resolution is to accept it as part of the fun and be thankful pheasants go away from us instead of charging.
2. I will block the exits.
If you own a pointing dog you spend less time planning complex tactical maneuvers and more time simply following the dog around. After all, you reason, that's why you own a dog in the first place--to let him find the birds. It's beginning to dawn on me that some tactical planning will produce more of the solid points that keeps us buying pointing dogs instead of springers.
Posting a blocker at the end of the cover, or coordinating a pincers movement from two sides, pins birds down and prevents them from running away. Driving and blocking works because pheasants can almost always hear us coming, and if they know they're surrounded they'll hold that much tighter.
One hunter I know goes to the trouble of approaching a field noisily from one side, then sneaking around to the other and driving birds with his Brittany towards himself, or at least, towards the spot where he'd been standing. The pheasants, he believes, think they're caught between two hunters and hold better.
Two hunts last fall convinced me of the value of blocking the exits. One day I hunted a small patch of long grasses--perhaps 150 yards long by 30 yards wide--in a mowed field. When Sam and I went in one end, the birds ran out the far end and flushed wild.
The next week I enlisted the help of a friend and his drathaar and we trapped the birds in that grassy strip between us by executing a pincers movement, starting at opposite ends of the strip behind our dogs. This time the pheasants held beautifully. My friend shot a rooster over a point right away. I had my chance, too, a minute later, and missed, causing me (once again) to vehemently reaffirm Resolution 1.
3. I will find new places to hunt.
The biggest secret to successful pheasant hunting is having good places to go. Now, if you don't have a place lined up for Opening Day already, you may not find one. However, it's often possible to find new places to hunt right through to the end of the season, after the crowds have thinned for the year and the field work is finished. In fact, some people who might not let you on early will let you on late.
And, it never hurts to ask. Toward the end of last season I finally stopped at a farm planted to perfect bird cover that I'd driven past many times, deducting from the "Posted" signs and lack of hunters that the landowner didn't let anyone on.
He came to the door and said without preamble the finest words in the English language (finest from a pheasant hunting standpoint, anyway): "Go anytime you want. Don't even stop and ask." Needless to say, I did, and had a couple of great late-season hunts there.
4. I will use enough gun.
We all know pheasants are big, rugged birds. Nevertheless, many hunters kill them cleanly with small-bore guns over pointing dogs. I used to favor a 20-gauge skeet gun loaded with an ounce of 6s, and that combination proved more than adequate for most birds most of the time.
Every once in a while, though, you'll run into a rooster who is flat-out bulletproof. Last fall, for some reason, I encountered many more than the usual number of extra-tough birds. Pheasants I hit hard kept on flying, and it seemed to me an entirely plausible explanation that someone had dumped the shot out of my shells and refilled them with Grape-Nuts.
At one point, after hammering a rooster with high velocity 4s only to watch keep flying for some 300 yards before expiring,
I seriously considered buying some 3-inch magnum 2s. Bigger, harder hitting shot, however, is not the whole answer. What you need is sufficient energy plus enough pellets to give you a high probability of hitting vitals and breaking wings.
From my own observations this past fall, the 12-gauge, 1-1/4 ounce, 3-3/4 dram equivalent high-brass 5 offers the best compromise between sufficient pellet count--212 per shell--and high energy. For hunting over pointing dogs I like the 5s in a modified choke repeater (on windy days), or an IC/M double most of the time.
5. I will believe my dog's nose at all times.
We bring our dogs into the field not for companionship or comic relief, but because their noses are proven to be one million times more powerful than ours. One million times. Remember that next time you want to call your dog off a trail when you suspect he's tracking old scent or hunting mice instead of birds.
Last season I shot a rooster over Sam that he pointed in grass too short to even reach my shoelaces. As I was arranging the pheasant in my game bag, Sam kept hunting around where the bird had flushed, nosing the ground where the pheasant had crouched, hidden. I looked at the cover, deemed it too sparse to hold another bird, and stood yelling at Sam with my gun dangling in one hand, instead of getting ready to shoot. When the second rooster jumped up at the edge of range, I, of course, missed him.
So: believe the dog. He knows better than you do.
6. I will hunt public areas more often.
Many of us believe public lands are overhunted, overtrampled, and generally shot out about three days into the season. Frankly, though, at some times of the year, managed public areas offer great hunting. Heavy cover of the type you'll find in WMAs (especially wetland areas) hold birds late in the year when the weather turns bad. Moreover, you'll rarely find many hunters after the early weeks of the season.
A heavy snow will flatten the lighter cover found on most private ground and drive birds back into the thick stuff planted on managed areas. Find a cattail marsh after a blizzard, and you'll get hard points on tight-sitting birds. Usually, by late in the season, you'll have the place to yourself, too, especially if you hunt during the week.
7. I will lose fewer cripples.
Last year the law of averages caught up with me. After losing exactly two birds in the previous two seasons, I lost four in one year due to a combination of bad luck and bad shooting.
Pheasants are active cripples, but they can be found with persistence. In my experience, crippled birds will run for the nearest dense cover and then hide, rather than sprinting for the county line, as so many hunters believe they do. When a bird is down, let the dog search the area methodically; chances are, it's nearby. Drop an orange hat where you think the bird went down so you can look yourself if the dog can't scent anything.
Sometimes it's the "air-washed" birds that drop stone dead that are the hardest for the dogs to find. Last year I found a dead rooster after the dogs had run right past it--killed by someone else earlier in the day--in plain sight (and perfectly edible, it turned out) but too cool for the dogs to smell.
8. I will take turns.
If you hunt over a pointing dog, there's no reason not to divide up the shooting with your partner. I'm getting better at this, but old habits die hard; I began my hunting life as a waterfowler where there were few ducks so the plan was to blaze away at any bird in range and worry about who hit it after it was safely in the blind.
My goal now is to make it through an entire season without once saying "Did you shoot?" Beating the other guy to the draw is disrespectful of the game, causes bad, rushed shooting, and results in too many shot-up birds on the table. Competition belongs at the gun club, not in the field.
9. I will rejoin Pheasants Forever.
Last year I let a number of memberships lapse. Pheasants Forever was the first one I renewed. While PF is in name a single-species group, their work benefits all kinds of upland wildlife, making farm country a more interesting, diverse place to be.
In pheasant country, you rarely face the choice of managing for one species at the expense of another, a charge sometimes leveled against single species conservation groups. Instead, you either have wildlife or no wildlife, acres of sterile cornfields or a diversified mix that supports everything from butterflies to whitetails. Pheasants Forever improves farm country habitat better than any other conservation group. And, yes, that does result in quite a few more pheasants.
10. I will not take pheasants too much for granted.
This last resolution is the most important, and sometimes the hardest to keep. It's easy to accept pheasants as commonplace; after all, they live close to people, at the margins of small tidy farms, in road ditches, fencelines, and cornfields--mundane surroundings compared to a southern quail plantation or the autumn woods of New England.
All in all, we can forget, sometimes, what a lucky accident of fate brought pheasants to us, that they made a journey halfway around the world, adapted to a strange climate and thrived here.
It's easy too, to get caught up in the petty frustrations of the hunt--the missed shots, the runaway dogs, the barbwire that tears your pant legs. Every once in a while, though, if you're at all like me, you'll top a rise, your thoughts focused on the distant, misbehaving fleck on the horizon, sweating, gun weighing down your arms, game bag flapping empty. Suddenly you'll see the landscape of pheasant country, rolling off into the distance under the vast midwestern sky, looking very much like a Grant Wood painting of itself, and you'll stop in your tracks to take it all in, realizing that it's a privilege just to be there at all.
My real resolution for this year is to let no part of the season go by unsavored.
Copyright (c) 1996 Philip Bourjaily. All rights reserved.
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