Wily birds put damper on rooster-thinning career

Looks like my second career as a pheasant gender balance adjuster won't be happening.

After Sunday my vision of a pickup truck with “Rooster Thinners” painted in fancy script on the door has faded away.

In the first place, in this age of the disappearing pheasant, there is just not that much call for the service. And in the second place, turns out I am not all that good at it.

The idea held a glimmer of promise two weeks ago when a friend called to say he had a little patch of weeds, grass and willows inhabited this winter by seven roosters and seven hens.

Looking to increase the winter survival odds of the hens - the limiting factor in pheasant reproduction - he wondered if I and my hunting buddies could stop by and thin out the larger and more aggressive roosters, which tend to out-compete the smaller and more demure females of the species for scarce food and cover.

Glad to oblige, I told him, and on a calm and sunny afternoon last Sunday, the four of us - Art Clark, Terry Franck, Tyler Franck and I, all of Quasqueton - showed up for work.

We sized up the 4-acre thicket, bordered on two sides by gravel roads and on the other two sides by snow-covered picked cornfields, and formulated our plan: Arthur and his dog would cover the north side, Terry and his dog, the south side, and I, the west side, while Tyler and the landowner, who doesn't like to see his name in the newspaper, pushed through the thicket from east to west with two more dogs.

Where I stood at the midpoint of the west end, arrow-like pheasant tracks had left exhilarating imprints in the trampled snow, causing my heart to beat loudly in my ears as our dragnet tightened on the thickest part of the cover.

This is really going to work, I thought; in another minute, we shooters would be close enough together that no rooster could escape without presenting an in-range shot.

Then the first cackling rooster burst from cover, followed by a succession of similar eruptions until at least 10 roosters, white-ringed necks outstretched, tail feathers streaming, were in the air at once.

Wings whirred and 12-gauge blasts resounded as the birds clawed for altitude then leveled out on courses calculated with computer-like precision to carry them safely through the gaps in our coverage.

Tyler, who was closest to the roosters, killed three of them. Terry, Art and I fired a few vain rounds at the distant departers but had to content ourselves with witnessing the spectacle, which was more pheasant-hunting entertainment than we'd had in years.