Labrador Retrievers Of Montana Article

Poor pheasant hunting depends on one's perspective.

Perched six-wide on tree limbs, tailfeather to tail-feather atop round bales and running amok in tangled ditches, this could have easily passed as the Chinese Year of the Pheasant. As my hunting partner, Mike, and I idled along the gravel road the day before the-South Dakota pheasant season opener, I remembered one of Bill Murray's famous lines from the classic 1980 comedy Cadctyshack.

"This should be gravy," I believe Murray said, as he plotted his unconventional, somewhat demented golf course gopher-hunting strategy.

Cackling roosters had caused such a commotion at sunrise that October day that they drowned our calls to mallard flocks. We knew we were in for fabulous pheasant hunting when the Saturday opener rolled around because the farmer who owned the land near Aberdeen where we were hunting said he'd never seen so many pheasants in his 30 years of working the land.

Off the Beaten Path

Don't get me wrong. The memories from that trip are certainly fond and quite a spectacle of sound and color Seeing firsthand the South Dakota pheasant factory running at peak capacity is a sight to behold. And the temptation to witness it and turn my dogs loose in it again is substantial.

But then I turn to photo albums and memories of muddied, bloodied dogs; old, late-season cockbirds held high in snowy landscapes and a mile-long hike ending in a flush imagined for an hour. The shot echoes, but there is no one else to hear except for you and the dog. And the single bird in the pouch weighs every bit as much as a brace.

Far be it for me to pass judgment, but for my own sake (and my dogs would certainly beg to differ here), I like my pheasants fewer and farther between; and hold the hunting pressure, please.

Certainly, it's fair to ask why any pheasant hunter in his right mind would or should purposely hunt places holding fewer pheasants. Why, if staring at a Department of Natural Resources state map showing poor, fair, good, and excellent pheasant range, would a hunter steer clear of the good and excellent areas? To me, the answer can be neatly summarized thusly: economics, access, competition, and quality. I'll try to explain.

Why Less is More

Let's start with the economics. Most of us who wish to hunt wild pheasants fair and square will have to travel out of state to do so. Iowa and South Dakota are the primary destinations, with Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Montana also attracting nonresident pheasant hunters in respectable numbers.

As a result, right from the get-go, your pheasant hunt tab stands somewhere around $ 1OO for the necessary licenses. In South Dakota, in fact, your license is only good for two five-day periods of your choosing. Should you wish to come back with the season still open, South Dakota rolls out the welcome mat, so long as you're willing to pony up the funds for another pheasant license, of course. But that's a rant for another article. The point is, the licenses aren't as cheap as they used to be. These states know that good hunting for wild pheasants is severely limited. And they're charging as much as the market will bear.

Whether you pull a camper, get a motel room, bring your own meals or eat out, you'll incur a few hundred dollars of expense in room and board for a long weekend of pheasant hunting. Tack on gas, shotgun shells, etc. But if you want to hunt in any of the prime private real estate in South Dakota or Iowa and even some of the other states mentioned, you'll face a "trespass" or "access" fee that's typically something around $100 per hunter per day. Granted^H you don't have to hunt private land to find good pheasant hunting. There are many quality tracts of public ground, but in areas that hold a lot of pheasants, this "free" ground gets a lot of action.

So a four-day pheasant hunting weekend on good private ground is likely to run you somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 for licenses and access. Add in food, gas, and lodging, and it's pretty easy to spend a cool $1,000. It's no wonder that pheasant hunting preserves attract so much business despite charging around $20 per bird.

Pay to Play

Access fees, to me, are the deal breaker when it comes to hunting wild pheasants, especially if you'd like to take junior along to share the experience. Fewer farms now dot the pheasant hunting landscape. And those that remain are much larger. This further complicates the access issue. Some hunters are happy to pay to lease a chunk of prime private South Dakota pheasant turf for $5,000 or more for a hunting season. Others don't blink at $100 per day trespass fees. I'm not and I do.

No one likes burning daylight knocking on farmers' doors asking permission to hunt and being turned away more than half the time. I'll allow that it's a good way to waste a weekend and that it might make the lease or trespass fee alternative seem reasonable. But unless you're flat lazy, loathe to walk more than a couple hundred yards to shoot your limit, or simply can't find any other way to spend all your money, I can't see any good reason to pay for pheasant hunting access. After all, if people would stop paying, no one would have to pay. But that's another rant.

A few years ago (before the nonresident deer license fee became ridiculous), I traveled to southeastern Iowa to bowhunt for whitetails. During the course of my six-day stay, I heard a few crowing roosters and saw some promising pheasant habitat. This certainly wasn't prime pheasant real estate like in the northern half of the state, but if three birds fill a bag, why does one need a field of 300?

Querying the locals, I learned that the pheasants were lightly hunted. While most of the landowners closely guarded their property for whitetails, they'd willingly allow bird hunting. So back I came six weeks later in January with my hunting partner, three Labrador retrievers, a plat book for the county where we planned to hunt, a DeLorme Iowa Atlas & Gazetteer, and a map of properties where my deer hunting host had cleared permission for us to hunt.

As is often the case, I've learned, when hunting "poor" pheasant areas the hunting is either boom or bust. Day one we flushed a dozen or so hens, but sighted not a single rooster. Day two we trudged through snow and a biting wind along a wide, brushy fencerow. It had "fat chance" written all over it. But on we marched, soon intersecting a conglomeration of pheasant tracks, and just in time, seeing our now electrified dogs lining out down the fencerow. We jogged as best we could and managed to get just close enough as half a dozen birds barreled skyward, one cock busting to the side crossing insanely in front of Mike. Mike rarely misses, and he never misses after a day of being shutout, cold and tired. The cock crashed to earth, we celebrated for a second, urged the dogs to keep closer, and continued along the fencerow finishing with two more long-spurred roosters for our efforts.

The next clay at breakfast at the local diner, we heard that a farmer was going to complete the harvesting of his still-standing cornfield and that we were welcome to hunt the property. Circling the field in the truck to survey the property and likely pheasant hides, we chose our parking spot and plotted our route from beginning to end before we ever stepped out of the truck. Late-season birds, even in lightly hunted areas, do not allow for bumbling.

Just across the ditch and into the field, five roosters peeled out of a fenceline tangle and rocketed over the corn stubble. Two fell, and Mike and I kicked ourselves for shoddy shooting. But by the time we completed the circuit of the freshly cut cornfield and adjacent grassy ditches, we had five roosters and three mudcaked Labs to show for it.

During the three-day weekend, we never saw another pheasant hunter. The eight birds were well below our possession limit, but it was a fantastic, gratifying hunt.

Competition

This brings me to my first priority in pheasant hunting. I want solitude. I want a field with a rooster or two hiding somewhere, not having been run wild on a regular schedule. After all, as I wrote earlier, if three roosters make the daily limit in most places, what pleasure would one gain from watching 300 bail out the far end of the field, a quarter-mile outside of shotgun range? To a pheasant hunter, there is no greater agony. Get a flock of pressure-cooked pheasants nervous, and they can clear a half-section in no time. Then what?

A bird or two will be more inclined to hold or run a short distance and hold tight. And that's better for man and beast. A hunter can play the wind, take his time, and really work a piece of cover methodically rather than am hell-bent for the other end to tiy to get there in time for one too-far Hail Mary. If the hunter has a son or daughter along, he can instruct and explain, while the young hunter can more easily and more safely focus his or her attention. The hunter's dogs can clo the same, less distracted by the inundation of pheasant scent everywhere.

The canines are different here in poor pheasant country. They better remember the quartering drills taught during the summer. They take the time to keep track of the distance between them and their human partner, eventually scenting a bird and tracking it, backtracking, and then finally pinning it in a place where it is forced to flush, marking the fall and delivering the bird to hand. And that one bird for that dog, I say, is worth more than the 300 he puts out beyond gun range. It's also worth more than the one flushed by a line of walkers, shot at by three of them and pounced upon by four retrievers; even if your dog is the one who "wins" the retrieve.

In North Dakota one recent and early October weekend, Mike and I walked a grassy pasture along a public Waterfowl Production Area scouting for clucks. The dogs ran along as we headed for the water's edge.

Suddenly a pheasant cackled from deep among the cattails and flushed skyward, followed by another. Then a hen shot from the fencerow near us. The clogs were wild and looking at us in wonderment over the fact that we carried no guns. Pheasant season had not yet opened.

This happened in central North Dakota in part of the state where the Department of Natural Resources' own pheasant map designates thehunting as "poor." The same area is famous for ducks and geese. I made a mental note, and after a weekend of poor waterfowl hunting, I returned two weeks later sans the duck decoys, waders, and gobs of other gear required by the waterfowler. Light boots, an orange ball cap, and a 9 . start were refreshing.

Worry crept in, though, as I idled down the gravel road that turned to a dirt trail and eventually dead-ended against cattails at the WPA. Would there be other pheasant hunters? Being that this was public ground and that so many hunters had probably been here in search of ducks, I fretted that the few local pheasants might have already been cropped.

Just after setting out, only 100 yards from the truck, amid the cattails on dry ground, a rooster flushed in the mid-morning sun, too close, too easy. I fumbled when surprised by the sight of that gaudy, slow-flying bird, and missed him clean with three shots. The dogs and I tried to roust him again to no avail. Into a patch of tall grass we retreated, and 30 minutes later I made amends on a single rooster that flushed hard and crossed low. Ice found him wing broken after a long hunt. Back into the cattails, we flushed a group of maybe a dozen birds from a good looking point of cover, and there I capped my tliree-bird limit.

I'd wager the birds hadn't yet been hunted in the week since the season opened. Hack at the motel in the bird-cleaning shed, a bunch of muddy, foul duck hunters gathered about barrels plucking shovelers, teal, gadwalls, and the odd mallard.

"How's the grouse hunting?" one of them asked, assuming I'd been chasing sharptails.

"I don't know, but the pheasant hunting's not bad," I said as I emptied my bag.

None of them had ever even considered coming to this part of North Dakota for pheasants. They'd never even seen a pheasant hunter about. During the next three days, and five more roosters later, neither had I.

"Poor" pheasant hunting, you see, is in the eye of the beholder.