116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
When at first you don’t succeed ...
Wild Side column: First day of pheasant hunting was not so good, but second outing was good enough
The Gazette offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
You always dream about a bouquet of young-of-the-year roosters erupting from cover within gun range of all members of your party — hanging there like the glowing sparks of a fireworks burst — while shotguns report and dogs race deliriously to recover all the downed birds.
Limited out by noon on opening day —that’s always a worthy goal and certainly a possibility in a year in which pheasant numbers are reportedly up by 40 percent over the preceding season.
Cognitive dissonance sets in when you and three hunting buddies and a pair of good dogs bag just four birds in six hours on opening day.
Given that the state’s August roadside counts have accurately predicted pheasant populations for more than 60 years, and that our opening day crew — Tyler Franck, his aptly named son Hunter, their black Lab Bella, Arthur Clark, his German shorthaired pointer Willow and I — was at least competent, we had to conclude that we were hunting in the wrong places.
With the modest size of our party, we focused on manageable blocs of cover — creek buffers, brushy terraces, smaller plots of Conservation Reserve Program grasslands and roadside ditches. We combed them thoroughly and, with the exception of three roosters which fled a CRP plot well out of range, we bagged every rooster we saw. We just didn’t see as many as we’d hoped.
One week later the same crew (with the exception of Cooper Franck filling in for his brother Hunter) plunged into 160 acres of CRP in Bremer County, 80 acres on each side of a gravel road.
Predominantly thick, towering switch grass with patches of shorter vegetation, it was way more than we could handle, but it held plenty of pheasants, many of which, on the eighth day of the 2025 season, acted as if they had yet to be hunted.
It took us two and a half hours to circle the irregular perimeter of the west half of the CRP. A morning drizzle dampened the ground, providing optimal scenting conditions for Bella and Willow, who tirelessly followed their noses through cloying cover and signaled the impending flushes.
Though we never saw more than one pheasant at a time, those we saw generally flushed within range of one or more members of our group. If I don’t count the one that flushed near me in 7-foot-tall switch grass and gave me a half second to identify it as a rooster, mount my shotgun and fire before it disappeared unscathed, none of them got away.
The dogs found all of our downed birds, including one that appeared to have gotten away before dying in mid flight a quarter mile away.
With six roosters in our vests at 11 a.m., we decided, partially in deference to the waning stamina of Art and me, not to hunt the east half of the CRP, which likely would have yielded the other half of our daily bag limit.
It was just half a limit, but we called it a good hunt.
Though some might call it sour grapes — disparaging the unattainable, in this case a limit — I prefer to think with age comes the wisdom to recognize when enough is enough.
Daily Newsletters