Dismiss it as ersatz- or mono-prairie if you want, but this field was as close as I would get to the real thing in Iowa in 1992: several hundred acres enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program and planted to brome. Not quite a sea of grass, perhaps, but a good-sized lake of it, anyway.
From my vantage point at the top of the wide, shallow draw I could see nothing but waving stems to the east. With my back to the cornfields, and red-tailed hawks wheeling in the sky high above my head, I could almost imagine what this land was like before John Deere invented the moldboard plow and chased the elk and bison from the Midwest. Maybe Sam will point me a prairie chicken, I thought fancifully.
Sam has a pretty good nose, but not even he can pick up a trail one hundred years old. He tore through the grass, catalogued its contents with one peremptory sniff, then veered back behind me and disappeared. Shortly thereafter, his bell fell silent. I knew I would find him near the edge of the cornfield behind me; I could follow my imagination, but Sam follows pheasants, and pheasants always lead us back to corn.
So yes, it was a ringneck pheasant and not a prairie chicken that flushed when I kicked at the grass, and it was a 209 primer, not a percussion cap, that flashed when I pulled the trigger. There was no cloud of black powder smoke, either, to obscure my view of the rooster falling and the dog running to fetch him.
Sam brought me the bird, and as I took it from him I could feel the flat-sided kernels of corn in its crop through the black-edged, iridescent neck feathers. Years ago I shot a rooster who flushed from a narrow grass strip dividing a cornfield from an equally large soybean field and discovered in this perfectly controlled taste-test that he chose soybeans to the complete exclusion of corn. That bird, however, was as much of an anomaly (if better tasting) as the wood duck with a belly full of shad I once killed and tried very, very hard to eat.
For every pheasant with a fondness for soybeans, there will be a hundred who prefer corn. Open a bird's crop and you might find a grasshopper or two, a little clover and perhaps some foxtail seeds for variety, but chances are it will be stuffed with yellow kernels, gleaned from black dirt. Corn is the perfect bird seed--an abundant, high-energy food that can keep a pheasant's inner furnace stoked through the coldest midwestern winter. Finding pheasants means hunting near corn.
Corn actually preceded pheasants to what is now the United States by fifteen hundred years, following trade routes up from Mexico, bartered from tribe to tribe for bones and shells and pipestone arriving and flourishing in the rich prairie soils. Pheasants reached the Corn Belt around the turn of the century.
In Iowa, the story goes, a winter storm blew down the fence of a private game farm and the birds scattered and ran, never looking back until they'd populated the entire state. Pheasants took so readily to corn that Iowa held an emergency spring season in 1944 to keep the birds from devouring a corn crop needed to feed soldiers overseas. Even in these days of vast fields of CRP cover, nearly all the roosters I shoot come from a cornfield or within one hundred yards of one.
A pheasant hunter will see cornfields in four stages as the season progresses: standing, stripped, picked, and plowed. Early in the season, you may find much of the corn still unharvested. If the corn is up, the pheasants will be in the cornfields and nowhere else. If you want birds, you have no choice but to wade into the corn after them.
Once upon a time standing cornfields were small, weedy, and a manageable size to drive and block with a dozen or so hunters. Nowadays most cornfields are too big and clean to work effectively, no matter how much help you have. Last time I took part in a group hunt I served as a driver, walking down long, dark rows with the cornstalks touching over my head, trying to push birds to blockers waiting at the end of the field.
There are neither weeds nor grass in a properly herbicided modern field, just tall stalks and hard-packed dirt, a veritable runway for pheasants. In the shadows, I could make out hunched forms scurrying in all directions, dodging back and forth from row to row, the dog in hot, uncontrolled pursuit. Not long after we heard a single, speculative shot fired by one of the blockers and nothing more, certainly not the frantic, gun-clearing volley that signaled the climax of a drive in the old days.
Some hunters continue to seek out standing corn and hunt it with good results, but I am not one of them. An unpicked field is the only place I know of where a dog is more hindrance than help since there's no place for the birds to hold. For that reason alone my approach to standing corn is to hunt ducks until someone picks the field.
Often, as the corn is harvested, the farmer will leave strips of corn standing to dry for a few days. If you are charming and strike the landowner as a responsible sort who won't trample the stalks, he may let you walk the strips.
The ideal strip is about eight rows wide, and you can work it with two people, one on either side, with the dogs in the middle. As you move down the strip, birds will run ahead, sometimes even flushing and flying a short distance before settling back into the corn, letting you push them the length of the cover. As you near the end of the strip, pick up your pace a little; you want to be in gun range as the birds reach the end of the corn. If no pheasants fly out, work the nearby cover thoroughly. Chances are good the birds have run out of the corn and may be hiding in thicker cover where they'll sit tight.
Strips may make for excellent hunting, but they are an ephemeral feature of the pheasant hunter's landscape, here today and gone tomorrow. One farmer I know picks and plows all his corn early each year, leaving a few strips standing until Opening Day. That morning, he and his friends hunt the strips. At lunch time he puts his shotgun away for another year, eats, then starts up his combine and has all the strips harvested by dinner time.
Immediately after a field is picked, you'll see normally wary pheasants walking around in a sort of daze, like hurricane victims who've had the roofs blown off their homes. And, of course, they have--the shelter they've taken for granted since July, which must be many months longer than a pheasant can remember, is suddenly gone. And while they won't wander aimlessly as you try to approach them, they are nevertheless relatively easy birds, more the naive early season variety than the savvy, late fall kind.
A few years ago, I watched my neighbor to the south as he made slow progress through his crops. He's a thrifty farmer who gets by with a three-row picker instead of the huge combines favored by his over-capitalized neighbors. He worked steadily throughout November as I marked his progress every morning from my kitchen window. The day he finished-- a month after the season began--I called up and asked if I could hunt.
It was Opening Day all over again. I shot my first rooster out of a flock that flushed from a waterway in a picked field, the second over a solid point at the corn's edge. Then Sam cut out into the stubble after a scent. I followed him into the corn, stopping to watch him run down one row and back up the next, like a shopper searching for bargains in the aisles in a supermarket. Sam came to an abrupt stop at my feet. Looking down, I saw a long tailfeather protruding from a tuft of grass a yard or so ahead of me. I shot that bird, too, which made a limit in less than an hour.
A well-connected hunter I know of made a single-minded practice of such hunts one season when rains delayed the harvest. He would wait by the phone for his friends to tell him when they'd finished picking, then pack up his dogs and head over. He shot 101 roosters that fall. You may or may not have freezer space for that many birds, but it pays to monitor the progress of the harvest as closely as you can.
After the corn is out, pheasants will adopt the pattern that how-to stories such as this one invariably outline, leaving grassy cover in the mornings to feed, loafing near corn in grass at midday, feeding again in the afternoon and returning to the roosting areas around dusk. Regardless of time of day, I concentrate my efforts on the grass fields bordering corn, since they often serve as roosting, feeding, and loafing areas all in one. Cornfield waterways, creeks, and fencelines hold birds throughout the day as well. As always when hunting pheasants in the grass, try to push them up against an edge so they'll have to stop running and either sit or fly.
Plowed fields are no fun to hunt at all; they are ugly, and the dirt clings to your boots in 10-pound globs after a rain. They're even worse after a cold snap, then, negotiating the slick, hardened clumps of frozen topsoil becomes almost as tricky as wading a rocky stream.
I've hunted more plowed fields than I care to recall over the past few years, trudging across acres of turned earth to check a distant drainage ditch, fenceline, or terrace. As I walk along Sam runs back and forth among the furrows, unsure of what to do when there is no scent to find and nothing that looks remotely like cover to find it in.
Granted, once I reach those islands of grass or brush in the big fields I've do fairly well, at least in terms of birds in the bag. There is, however, an essential aesthetic quality lacking in the sight of a rooster falling with a thump among the dirt clods, one that makes me wonder how much pheasant hunting I'll want to do once the last of the old-fashioned farmers retires.
More pragmatically, I wonder how much pheasant hunting any of us will do; plowed fields are a disturbing sign, and not just because they're wasteful of topsoil or unpleasant to look at and walk across. The kind of agriculture that necessitates fall tillage also requires creeks to be straightened, sloughs to be tiled, and shelterbelts to be bulldozed so that bigger, more efficient machines have room to operate. Pheasants never starve in corn country, biologists tell me, even after the stubble is plowed under, but a shortage of winter cover will devastate a population when the weather turns hard. Then, pheasants die of exposure, surrounded by food.
It may be difficult to imagine pheasants without corn, but it's depressingly easy to visualize corn without pheasants. You have only to visit parts of the Midwest flat enough to permit the most intensive kind of farming to see an endless expanse of black earth, a barren monotony unrelieved by fencelines, trees, and grass. Or pheasants.
To which some people may comment--as the editor of a conservation magazine once did in response to a story idea of mine--pheasants aren't native birds, what does it matter if we lose them? I would reply that ever since we plowed up the prairies and planted them to corn, pheasants are all we have, and, quite possibly, even more than we deserve. When a bright, copper-colored rooster flushes against the backdrop of a vast blue prairie sky, his short wings beating hard to carry him cackling over the dried tan cornstalks, I need make no argument at all. Anyone can see then that corn and pheasants were made for one another.
If there's a Cornfield Classic it's the 30-inch barreled, full choked, 12-gauge Model 12 Winchester, the serious hunter's gun during the pheasant's glory days in the 1950s and '60s. My cousin still shoots one to lethal effect. However, the three most fanatical pheasant hunters I know today shoot shorter-barreled guns, one 12, one 16, and one 20, two of them autoloaders, one a side-by-side. All three favor Improved Cylinder chokes. I might hesitate to include myself in their company, but I will tell you I shoot a 12-gauge O/U with 28" barrels and IC/M chokes, weighing in at a little over seven pounds.
Pheasants are renowned for carrying lead, but honestly, trap load 7 1/2s work fine for most shots. Sixes, I think, are the ideal all-around shot size, and 5s make the best choice for cold, windy days when birds flush wild. Most hunters shoot high-velocity ammo in deference to the bird's toughness and I always have, too. Last year I switched from the hard kicking 3 3/4 dram, 1 1/4 load to 3 1/4 dram, 1 1/8 field loads. My theory was that I'd hit more second chances if the first shot didn't kick my face off the gunstock. It didn't work, but recoil was noticeably less, I saved a little money, and the pheasants seemed to fall just as hard.
Home | Library | Hunting | Wingshooting