Opening Day is more than just a single Saturday hunt in pheasant country; it's the beginning of a combination harvest festival and family reunion that draws crowds throughout the first three weekends of the season.

Yet after the once-a-year hunters have claimed their bumper crop of naive young roosters, they put their shotguns back in the closet. There the guns will sit unused for another year, stored like the farmer's combines in their sheds waiting to reap next fall's bounty. A friend who runs a small-town supermarket tells me those first 16 days of the season bring him an extra $10,000 in sales of dog food, foot powder, potato chips, and pop to hordes of resident and visiting pheasant hunters.

When Joe's profits fall back to normal, that's when my fortunes rise: two months of pheasant hunting remain, and once the early crowds fade away, there's little competition in the field as the golden weather of late October shifts to a mid-November gray. The balance of the season belongs only to the small group of hunters who chase the now-gunwise pheasants beneath the low iron skies of late fall on into the first snows of winter.

The hardcore pheasant hunter is probably fitter, craftier, and straighter-shooting character than the Opening Day man, if merely by virtue of more time spent in the field.

IT'S DOUBLY TRUE that the cock who survives the initial onslaught is a much warier bird than the short-tailed roosters of the early season. The pheasant of the middle and late season has aged noticeably in a few weeks (you and I might, too, with that many people shooting at us). With his feathers now fully grown out, his plumage is brighter than the early bird's, and tougher, too. The pin feathers of the early season have fluffed into a warm insulating under-layer, able to protect against arctic winds and stinging copper-plated pellets both. The late-season rooster is bigger, as well, and often shows a layer of fat just under the skin, laid on against the coming of cold weather. That fat adds a little extra armor to an already tough bird, while having the fortuitous side effect of keeping him a little moister in the oven. Primarily out of respect for late-season pheasants I traded in my old skeet-choked 20 gauge long ago for a 12 and high velocity 5s.

All in all, the mature cock of the late season is a bigger, stronger, brighter, spookier, tastier pheasant than the gangly five-month-old roosters of late October--a real upland trophy. We call the birds that evade us "smart" to soothe our injured vanity, but the truth is, most pheasants learn only one or two responses to danger and stick with them no matter what. Think of them like Pavlov's dog, conditioned by the boom of a shotgun and the whistling of pellets instead of a ringing bell. If my theory is true, it doesn't make them any easier to approach--pheasants have exceptionally keen hearing and know their home territory intimately. Late in the season, they operate with a hair trigger sensibility, ready to put their escape plan into effect at the slightest hint of danger. If Plan A is foolproof, what does it matter that there's no Plan B?

Very few hunters have the opportunity to spend enough time with a single bird to learn his ways. When I lived in the country, though, there was a rooster that flummoxed me every day I hunted my home place one year. He loafed along a fencerow by an old barn where I always began my hunt. On hearing my approach, he'd run a short distance along the fence to the top of a small rise, then flush and fly over a hill to safety. Since I was the only one who ever hunted him and danger always came from the same direction, he needed only one escape plan. If it were possible to leave ruts in the air, he'd have done it, so often did he fly the exact same route to elude me and my dog. Clearly, I could have put that bird in my oven by posting a friend on the other side of the hill to shoot him as he flew away from me. I never did; I liked chasing him too much and the fenceline would have seemed empty without him.

AS THE SEASON WEARS ON, pheasants get spookier and run more often than fly. Although I prefer hunting alone, I've found that teaming up with one or two hunters to push birds and block their escape routes pays off on running birds. Two seasons ago, for instance, I hunted a farm where there was a strip of unmown weeds shaped like an elongated diamond in the midst of a close-cropped grass field. Hunting by myself, I walked in one end of the diamond and all the birds ran to the far end and flushed wild.

When I returned the next week, I brought a friend. After a whispered consultation, we split up, looped around to come in to the cover from either side, and started at the far ends of the diamond, each of us heeling our dogs and being as quiet as possible before entering the grass simultaneously. The sound of dogs thrashing through the grass from both sides told the birds they were caught, and they sat tight. Within a minute my partner's dog locked onto a rooster who flushed and tried to fly back over the gunner's head, falling just a few steps into the tall weeds. Seconds later, Sam went on point. Ready, I kicked up the bird, relaxed when I identified it as a hen, and was completely surprised by the rooster that burst noisily out of the grass a step behind me. There's no reason to miss a target that big up close when your shooting eye is in mid-season form, but we all do, sometimes.

Another way to put the brakes on running birds is to push them from light cover--a few rows of standing corn, say--into heavier weeds where they'll feel secure and sit tight. Conversely, if you push birds from heavy cover towards lighter stuff, they'll frequently sit or fly when they reach the end of the thick grasses. Later in the year, though, they grow too nervous to tarry long when they run out of security cover. As you near the end of the cover sometimes you'll need to pick up your pace in order to be in gun range of the edge when the birds come up. Last fall I pushed a small field of heavy weeds with two friends and a dog. Eighty yards from the field edge, pheasants began to flush at the fenceline ahead of us. I broke ranks and ran towards them, and was rewarded for my wind sprint with a 40-yard shot at the last bird in the bunch, a rooster who waited just a second too long before breaking for safety. He turned out to be the only pheasant we saw in range that day.

Finally, the weather can be your ally late in the season if you time your hunts right. The day after a heavy snow, especially the first storm of the year, finds birds hunkered down under the snow waiting for the weather to clear. I'm always amazed to watch my dog puzzle out the faint scent of sitting birds seeping up through a thick carpet of new snow. He'll crane his neck, holding his nose out like a divining rod, his tail flagging with uncertainty then slowly stiffening, and I know then without a doubt the bird is right there.

YET SNOW WORKS AGAINST the hunter, too. Not long after a snowfall, the birds dig themselves out and are up on top of the crust and running. Snow flattens light cover, concentrating pheasants in smaller, heavier thickets. Such flocks, protected by so many sharp ears and eyes and painfully aware of their vulnerability as they crouch, visible under a brush pile become difficult, even impossible to approach.

Obviously, you hunt birds when you can and adapt to the wind, snow, and rain as you have to. If I could order weather for late-season pheasant hunting, though, I'd ask for a 40 degree day (good for the dog's nose and keeps me from overheating), a gray sky (no glare for the birds to fly into), a light wind (again, for the dog's nose), and no snow, just acres of CRP grasses. I'd hunt by myself, just me and the dog, late in the season, and I wouldn't mind if the birds had been hunted hard. I'd hunt alone for the same reason you take a stand for deer instead of joining in a gang drive: the feeling of accomplishment that comes from bringing home a special trophy all by yourself.

Four or five years ago there was a bunch of birds that lived in a CRP field hunted by nearly everyone, and by the end of the season their numbers had been whittled down, leaving a skittish, high-strung band of survivors that lurked near the fenceline along the gravel road, the only possible parking place. Opening your car door, no matter how quietly, inevitably brought the sight of a dozen rooster pheasants streaking past your windshield, headed for the safety of a heavily posted cornfield across the way.

DETERMINED TO BAG ONE of these birds, I left the car far down the road one day, walking as quietly as possible up the road ditch, doubled over and clutching the dog's collar firmly in hand. I lifted Sam over the fence, hissed at him to sit, then climbed over myself, keeping my feet close to the fence post so the barbwire wouldn't bend and squeak.

Now came the one part of the scheme I hadn't ironed out yet: lacking a gunbearer to hand the gun to me over the fence ready to fire, I'd unloaded the gun for safety before climbing over. I had to get the shells in it quietly. While Sam sat trembling with excitement at my side, I slid a green-hulled shell into the chamber, held the handle, and eased the auto's bolt down, perhaps just a mite too quickly. To my ears, the lockup made a virtually inaudible "snick." To pheasants who've learned the hard way (and who probably knew I was there all along), it might as well have been a fire alarm. Birds boiled up inside the fenceline at extreme range, too far for me to shoot. Sam ran towards them, excited, and snuffled around where they'd flushed.

"Sam, they're gone," I called to the busy shorthair, "That's where they were."

"Always believe your dog," my father used to tell me, so I followed anyway, halfheartedly thumbing two more shells into the magazine. Then I spotted a slinking black shadow in front of Sam's nose, heading for the boundary fence. Taking several quick strides towards the fence, like a cornerback with an angle on a breakaway runner, I cut the distance between us. The pheasant flushed at the fence, but I was just near enough to take a long shot, and he arched down to fall on the other side of the gravel road. All of a sudden I was the smartest pheasant hunter in Iowa County again, and the thought buoyed me through the rest of a tiring, birdless afternoon. I did catch a fleeting glimpse of one last rooster who ran in front of the dog to the cover of a treeline, then flushed on other side of the creek. He coasted away over the grassy fields, too cautious by far for this hunter and his dog to approach, ever. I could do nothing but wish him well, and hope he survived the winter to pass those wild genes on to a new generation of birds.

The ones who get away keep me coming back until the day the season ends, yet late-season pheasant hunting in those empty fields is not all bitter winds and wild-flushing birds. The pendulum swings from one day to the next throughout the season, from long-range birds to flushes in your face, goose down to shirt sleeves, scarcity to abundance, frustration to triumph and back.

HUNT ALL SEASON and you'll see a slightly different side of the bird every day. Honestly, for instance, I don't know why pheasants flush 100 yards away one day and sit tight the next, it's just the way they are. Face it, these birds have brains the size of marbles and sometimes the act like it, no matter how smart we say they are, or how often they've fooled us before. The biggest lesson of late-season hunting is to take the hard hunts in stride and accept the easy days with gratitude.

My final hunt of the season last year began inauspiciously enough when my cousin's truck bottomed out in a drift, all four wheels spinning in the snow, and we resigned ourselves to a walk back to the nearest farmhouse for shovels or a tow. Looking out the window, I spotted a flock of 30 pheasants in the distance, small dots against the white, feeding in the field. "Perhaps," said Cousin Shaun judiciously, his gaze following my pointing finger, "we should hunt first and dig the truck out later."

"That," I said, trying to speak calmly while clawing to undo my seatbelt, "is a very good idea."

As soon as they saw us fussing around the truck, shrugging into hunting vests, loading guns, and belling the dog, the birds flushed together. They left the bare field and scaled like a flock of prairie chickens into a patch of heavy, waist-high grasses about 10 acres in size. Once scattered in the safety of the thick cover, they were reluctant to leave. The birds we shot held for the dog as if it were Opening Day, not January 10, and an hour and a half later we carried an embarrassment of riches--a limit each of long-tailed, bright-plumed roosters--back to the stranded pickup. In the afterglow of the vanished sun, the snowy fields took on a purple tint, with pinpricks of light twinkling on as farmhouses lit up in the dusk. We dug the truck out of the drift with a couple of borrowed grain scoops and drove home in the dark.

Sidebar: The Pheasant in Winter

The hard winters of pheasant country are far deadlier than we with our 12-gauges and half-trained dogs can ever be. As daylight shortens, you'll see birds out at first light gleaning waste grain from rock-hard fields, gobbling up high energy corn to see them through the cold weather.

Pheasants never starve to death in farm country; they're surrounded by food even when the fields are fall-plowed and the stalks turned under.

Exposure, not starvation, kills birds. If snow flattens all the grassy cover in an area for an extended period, even a comparatively mild winter can kill birds. Heavy cover--warm-season grasses like switchgrass or bluestem, for instance, or thick stands of cattails--provide shelter from the wind that can stand up to heavy snows.

Some argue that the scarcity of good winter cover should mean late-season hunting is a potentially damaging practice, since hunters key on good habitat and would drive birds out into marginal cover where they'll be at risk of exposure. If everyone hunted all season long, according to Pheasants Forever, late-season hunting could be potentially damaging to populations. However, so few hunters are actually out late in the year that the impact on winter survival is minimal.

Rather than hang up your shotgun and feed pheasants late in the year as so many do, better to work towards increasing and improving the winter cover in your hunting area. Joining Pheasants Forever makes an excellent start.

All money raised in PF banquets stays in the member's home county. Pheasants Forever works with private landowners to establish good pheasant cover and also helps states acquire areas like wetlands that help see pheasants through the winter in good shape. To learn more, contact them at Pheasants Forever, P.O. Box 75473, St. Paul, MN 55175. Phone: (612)-481-7142.