Reminiscing about the hunt before heading home

Saturday morning dawned cold and snowy here in Idaho. A perfect day for hunting pheasants. I thought about ruffed grouse, but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to track wily roosters in the snow. As it turned out, the day warmed up and by early afternoon there wasn’t any snow to be found. The wind however, kept the birds flighty and made it challenging.

I have been working with a young Brittany and thought it was the perfect time to get him on wild birds. At times he ranged out farther than I wanted, and blew through several pheasants and a whole flock of huns, but by the end of the day he came through for me, producing a plump young rooster that held fairly well in a thick covert along a stream.  We put a lot of miles on for that bird, but he was worth every bit of it.

American brittany and ring-neck pheasant

A limit of ring-necks, prairie chickens, sharp-tail and a bobwhite. What a day.

While pheasant hunting in Nebraska this year I was thrilled with my lab’s performance. Because of the condition she is in from daily roading, and early season grouse and chukar hunting, Allie was a powerhouse. She hit the tall grass CRP fields with leaps and bounds and quartered over every inch of the fields. Best of all, she listened to and followed my quiet commands.  She stayed within gun range and put up roosters for me.  I was proud of her.

I did, however miss my Drahthaar Aika. This new dog helped me recognized some of the strengths of that old dog; mainly her tracking ability. There was one rooster in particular that drove this point home. We were working a tall grassy edge that ended in a plumb thicket adjacent to a plowed field. All at once about six roosters erupted from the back side of the covert. Five of them flew left and away out of range, but one came up a little closer and crossed to my right over the plowed field. When he cackled from the cover his tail feathers seemed to just keep coming. He was one of the longest tailed birds I have ever seen.  I rocked him at about 50 yards with the first barrel and dropped him with the second barrel. He went down hard, but immediately jumped up and sprinted 150 yards across the bare field to a nasty thick field of standing cane. We raced over to where he crossed under the fence and entered the cover and Allie started down his track, but after a short search came back empty. I wanted that bird and worked and worked to find him to with no success.

With Aika, I can honestly say that I didn’t lose many birds. If you put a bird down, that dog would track it down and find it.  Looking back now I can see she was an amazing tracker. I remember one pheasant I knocked down in a thick weedy patch of tall corn stubble. I sent her for the bird, certain I had killed it and that it would be a quick retrieve. She hit the area, worked around then headed off down our back trail. I called her back several times and each time she would head off. Soon she was gone. I yelled and whistled for her and she was just gone. I waited probably ten minutes before she reappeared, rooster in her mouth. I couldn’t have been more pleased. To this day I wonder how far she tracked that running Ringneck.

One of the things that I really saw on this pheasant hunt is how individual dogs have different strengths. I appreciated how much energy Allie had and how easy she was to handle and follow my commands. But I also recognized my Drahthaar’s hard headedness and her amazing tracking ability.

I had a funny thing happen the other day. I was talking to a local guy about our mutual love of hunting, especially pheasant hunting. He began railing against the State Division of Wildlife about the fact that they aren’t more active about promoting pheasant populations in the state. “They should do more,” he said.

The funny thing about it was that two days later I saw him and his dad out burning off their fencerows and ditch banks on their property. He saw no connection between his land management and pheasant populations. It was simply something the Division of Wildlife should fix.

Almost without exception, every landowner in our county and the surrounding four counties burns off their fields, ditch banks and fencerows every spring. This has gone on for generations; my dad and grandpa always did it. In fact, burning off the ditch banks was an event that would warrant a visit home from college. I believe that it’s primarily recreational. Let’s face it, it’s fun to play with fire. We can say that we are doing it to maximize water flow, keeping the weeds down, or cleaning the place up, but the fact of the matter is, around us most of the ditches are concrete lined or in pipes now, so surrounding vegetation doesn’t take up water.

The problem is that this type of clean farming, where all the ditch banks and fencerows are slicked off, strips the land of cover for wildlife, namely pheasants. I found it ironic that the farmer that was complaining about the low pheasant numbers was the very person that could make a difference in the county. The Division of Wildlife can shorten seasons and constrain possession limits, but where pheasants are concerned, they require habitat, and that habitat is on private land. Here in the arid west (Utah), the limiting factor for pheasant populations is over winter and early spring cover. Without that, you can’t grow pheasant populations. If you were to calculate the acres of all the ditch banks and fence rows cumulatively that are burned clean just in this county it would add up to a significant amount of pheasant cover. So, this fall, or next spring, when you get ready to burn your ditch banks and fencerows, think about the little piece of pheasant cover you could leave for a few more pheasants.

You couldn’t have asked for a better day Saturday at the shooting preserve. The weather was mild with a slight breeze, just right for working flushing dogs. We were working working three different retrievers, Blade, Allie and Sophie. The heavy cover along the Sevier River at Rooster Valley Pheasants made for excellent training on pheasants in natural situations. The birds held pretty well and flushed strong for the retrievers. Since it is the end of the season on the shooting preserve, each dog got lots of work on birds. Lots of birds make for a good bird dog.

 

I was driving home from Sarah’s piano lesson and we saw this guy out sunning himself in the afternoon sun. He took to the cover pretty quickly, but I managed to get a couple of good photos.

I didn’t make it out for the closing of the waterfowl season. I did, however, have a great day at the pheasant shooting preserve training dogs. It was a chilly day, but beautiful and mostly sunny. We set the birds in thick cover along the river and gave them plenty of time to move around and leave good scent trails. I happend to have had all retrievers (flushers) we were training, so the thick cover was excellent for them. The dogs worked the birds well and the birds flushed with gusto and flew strong. It was a great training day for the dogs. We were able to work on a lot of different aspects: hunting close, not chasing running birds (coming back into gun range when called), flushing, pulling off missed birds, tracking wounded birds, and retrieving. It also tuned us up on our bird shooting. Mike, George’s son-in-law was a newcomer to upland game hunting; he did great and had a ball! Hopefully he’ll be hooked on upland game gunning for good.

Today was the last day of the Utah grouse season and the extended pheasant season, so I had to get out. There was a storm predicted for the afternoon, so we went up on the mountain first after ruffed grouse. It was somewhat slim pickin’s, but we had a great time. There seemed to be a lull before the storm; the weather was overcast, but calm and warm. We had one ruffed grouse flush wild out of range, but then had the dogs work up a blue grouse (dusky grouse) and had a picture-perfect flush through an open aspen stand and finished with a nice retrieve. In the early afternoon the weather turned noticeably colder, so I took the hint and left for lower country.

The extended pheasant hunt (on public lands, including the State Wildlife Management Areas) also closed today, so I thought I would see if I could get one last wild pheasant this season. By the time I got down to the WMA it was raining, which I took as a good sign. Often pheasants will be hunkered down in the rain and don’t run on you (a real problem late season on public land), and you can quietly get within range and have the dog work them up. It wasn’t to be, though. I walked for two hours in the rain and got so wet I had to wring my shotgun out. I didn’t see a bird, but still had a good time because I had the place completely to myself.

 

Pheasant hunting in Utah is difficult, because bird populations are low. I remember my Grandpa Colt talking about going to Delta, Richfield, Price and the Uintah Basin hunting pheasants. Back then there were a lot fewer people and more farm ground, plus the Fish and Game was raising and stocking pheasants, and ground was easier to get permission to hunt. I think the main difference, however between then and now is the habitat. The key to pheasant numbers is overwinter cover. We farm differently now that we did 50 years ago. We have put the water into pipes (good for water conservation) and lost the cover along our ditches, farm clean from edge to edge, then what’s left we turn the cows on all winter. Take a drive out through some of Utah’s best farm country this time of year and look to see where you can hide a pheasant. The fencerows are way too skinny. The only places left are the marshes. This is really sub-optimal habitat, but that’s where most of our over winter survival of pheasants comes from.

I grew up pheasant hunting in western Kansas. I thought it odd when I invited a Utah friend from college to go pheasant hunting with us in Kansas and he asked if he needed his waders. “Waders for pheasant hunting, what?” I now better understand that in the marshes is where he found wild birds to hunt in Utah.

What can we do about it? I’m not sure. If a landowner can get 15 more bales of hay or winter a few more cows it is probably worth more that having 5 more pheasants around. It takes a lot of water to grow good winter pheasant cover and water is money in Utah. The one thing I am sure of is that the Farm Bill being debated right now is absolutely critical to upland game populations throughout the country. After recently having lived in Nebraska for five years, I fully understand that the CRP program is what has made the pheasant populations what they are today.