Late Season Pheasants By Gary Howey
Late season pheasant hunting is a great sport; sometimes, one requiring a real love for the sport.
During the late season, the weather can be down right nasty as I found out last week on a hunt we filmed near Watertown, S.D.
Over the last several years, a group of us back home in Watertown, S.D. try to get together to do a pheasant hunt and this year; we just happened to pick a day where the weatherman predicted a temperature of -12 with a wind chill, a brisk –21 degrees.
Well needless to say, because of the many things going on during this time of the year and the colder weather, we ended up with just 3 hunters on the first day of the hunt and four on the second.
Chuck Stone & John Wilson joined us on the first day with Chuck Stone, my cousin Joe Jipp and Larry Munger joining us on the second day.
With the cold temperatures, we didn’t get too excited about going out, hoping that it would warm up a bit, waiting until one o’clock before hunting our first field.
With the smaller group we were hunting with, we’d have to change our hunting tactics, hunting smaller patches then we had the year before when we hunted with a larger group.
We’d be hunting smaller grass strips, sloughs along with a few rows of unpicked corn.
On the first drive, since Chuck and I had dogs, we’d push through a slough towards a stock dam where John would be strategically waiting for those birds that ran ahead of us or flushed out the end.
As it often happens this time of the year, several birds blew out of the cover well out of range as we worked our way through the slough.
Fortunately for us, they only flew a short distance, dropping back into the four rows of snow packed unpicked corn we’d be hunting next.
The unpicked corn was a perfect place for the birds as they could burrow under the snow getting out of the weather and not far from their food source.
Shortly after we started our walk, one shot from John’s shotgun rang out, which is a good sign because when you hear one shot you can bet that the bird was down, as John doesn’t let many birds get by.
The birds that flew up in front of Chuck and I either flushed well out of range or were buried deep under the snow, until our dogs dug them out.
We ended up with four birds on our first walk and another out of a smaller slough on the east end of the field. Not bad for three hunters out during the late season!
With the sun quickly disappearing in the west we hit a larger slough, hoping to pick up the last few birds of the day.
We followed the dogs as they worked through the slough, flushing several birds before the dog could get near them.
When my dog finally managed to corral a rooster, I was looking off to the north where I’d heard several shots in the direction that Chuck and John were hunting.
I franticly swung around, trying to catch up with the bird that was now airborne, as he desperately tried to put as much distance between himself and the dog.
My Escort 12 gauge barked twice as the bird careened through the trees and off into the next field.
The laughter from my cameraman and the goofy look from my dog told the whole story as I hadn’t touch a feather on the bird, but I did do an excellent job on a small tree and a bunch of reeds the rooster had came from.
The shooting I’d heard earlier was Chuck and John as the dog had flushed the first of four roosters as they approached the end of the slough.
The birds flushed in pairs with each hunter bagging two birds apiece, ending the first day of our hunt.
Our hunt on day two was very similar to our previous day as we hunted some several of the same areas, all of which were still holding birds.
If you’re still looking to do some pheasant hunting, there’s still some of the late season left, as the South Dakota pheasant season will run through January 3rd with the Nebraska season closing January 31st.
Late season hunting can be very productive, as you won’t have all the competition for hunting spots that you’d have during the early season.
The birds will be more concentrated, giving both the hunters and their dogs opportunities to hunt before the end of the season.
In the few hours that we hunted our group bagged seventeen birds, a bonus when hunting late season, as I feel the real benefit is the opportunity I had to spend time back home with friends and family.