116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Skunked by pheasants
Wild Side column: 5 hunters and 4 dogs went home empty-handed on last day of season
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This column was initially (and over-optimistically) conceived to describe a successful season-ending pheasant hunt, replete with photos of proud dogs posed beneath a tailgate covered with beautifully plumed roosters.
Reality intervened on the last day of the season, yielding instead a paean to the survival skills of the state’s most popular game bird.
Jan. 10 dawned favorably: low-30s warmth suitable for fumble-free shotgun handling, just enough breeze to waft bird scent to the dogs without chilling exposed skin, solid, snow-free earth to facilitate easy walking and an overcast sky to preclude fleeing roosters from escaping by flying into a blinding sun.
Even in retrospect I don’t blame myself for being confident. We were five veteran pheasant hunters, with four talented dogs, combing 160 acres of Conservation Reserve Program grassland in Bremer County on a nice day.
Our crew consisted of two crack shots in the prime of their lives, Tyler Franck of Quasqueton and Kent Chesmore of Cedar Falls, and their bird-finding and -retrieving black Labs, Bella and Harper, respectively.
Completing our 75-yard-wide phalanx were Terry Franck and his yellow Lab Rocky, Arthur Clark and his German short-haired pointer Willow and your correspondent, on the outside trying to keep up.
For Rocky, Arthur and me, advancing age and associated infirmities have begun to outstrip the advantages of our extensive experience. But like Hank Aaron, who hit 10 homers in his last season at age 42, we all can still give it a ride if we get the pitch we’re looking for (like a pointed rooster, for Arthur and me, like a downed rooster anywhere for Rocky, still a stone-cold retriever).
Pheasants get hunted every day of their lives. Raccoons, opossums and skunks eat them when they’re still in their shells. Foxes, coyotes and raptors kill them after they hatch. Humans with dogs ratchet up the pressure during the annual hunting season, greatly thinning the ranks of roosters, including most of the slow learners, leaving only the fittest.
Pheasants elude hunters by hiding, running or flying. If they try to hide, the dogs will find them. If they run, they’d better keep running or the dogs will catch up. If they fly, they’d better do so out of shotgun range.
That’s how they foiled us on Jan. 10. Unlike early season pheasants, which have yet to earn the “wily” appellation, the late season veterans we encountered had perfected hunter avoidance tactics.
We should have targeted smaller parcels of cover that would have allowed us either to surround any birds caught in the dragnet or to block their escape routes. Those key late season tactics, however, were not feasible in a quarter-section sea of grass.
On two occasions at least 30 pheasants flew en masse before we were even close enough to distinguish roosters from hens, and they didn’t just relocate to another part of the grass we had permission to hunt. They kept going until we lost sight of them.
Our one chance to avert the skunk occurred when a rooster took flight within the range of Arthur’s double barrel 12 gauge. It barked. A string of 5 shot jolted the long-tailed rooster so hard that it moved sideways. Expecting it to collapse, I hollered “Nice shot, Arthur.” Then we all watched open-mouthed as the bird righted itself and flew through a line of trees bordering the grass and disappeared.
While I might have slightly overestimated our crew’s hunting prowess, I greatly underestimated the worthiness of our quarry.
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