Saturday, December 31, 2005
In three days, nine birds didn't come easy.
Knight Ridder Newspapers
ELLENDALE, N.D. -- The rooster thundered out of cattails in front of Eric Larson. We had been hunting -- what -- 15 seconds?
We knew there were birds here. Larson, of Duluth, Minn., had done his homework, building relationships with landowners over the past few years in this birdy part of North Dakota. Now we had broken away for three days of late-season pheasant hunting in mid-December.
But an unusual thing happened when that first rooster flushed and a few minutes later when another half-dozen burst from some tall weeds.
Larson, 34, elected not to shoot.
His two Munsterlander pointers -- Riley and Macy -- hadn't pointed any of these spooky birds. And, like a lot of pointing-dog owners, Larson doesn't like shooting birds that his dogs don't point.
Three of the half-dozen birds that flushed from the weeds were roosters. The scene was like something from a Pheasants Forever print -- birds flying every direction, dusky cover in the foreground, snowy fields in the distance.
Challenging
Late-season pheasant hunting can be plenty challenging, even where bird populations are good. I wasn't sure we were going to have a lot of chances like this.
Not much farther along, back in cattails on a frozen wetland, Macy tightened into a perfect point. Larson moved in, and the bird jetted skyward. A hen. Only roosters are legal targets in pheasant hunting.
As we walked the slough, more pheasants flushed far ahead of us. Singles, pairs, groups of four and eight. They weren't waiting around for the party.
Finally, a tight-sitting rooster flushed from the edge of the slough and tried to clear a small rise. Neither Macy nor Riley had pointed the bird, but Larson is not a slow learner. He had seen enough. He dropped the bird with one clean shot, and Macy hustled it back to him.
Larson looked over at me, feeling a little guilty about breaking his self-imposed rule.
"Had to do it," he said.
He didn't have to justify his shot to me. When I started hunting alongside him later, I'd have my yellow Lab, a flushing dog, in front of me. I'd be shooting at any rooster she could put up in range.
Our three days in North Dakota would throw all kinds of challenges at us. The weather would go from zero to above freezing, and the wind blew hard -- North Dakota hard -- almost all of every day. Seed-corn signs had been pushed to 45-degree angles. When you tried to pour water for your dog in the field, a lot of it blew away and missed the bowl.
Birds all over
Birds? Oh, there were plenty of birds. We saw hundreds. We saw the tracks of thousands. And, like a lot of late-season birds, they were bunched up. These weren't the naive pheasants of October. They weren't even the semi-wary birds of November. These were the graduate-school roosters of December that had learned how to stay alive.
Skittish? Some of them flushed from heavy cover when we merely drove by at low speed. Waves of them lifted off as we started rattling through the brittle cover.
One afternoon, it was 10 minutes before the end of shooting hours before we pulled a trigger. A single rooster chose to sit tight in front of my Lab's nose, and soon the bird was a warm lump in my hunting vest.
Larson had had one opportunity the same evening. His dogs had pointed a rooster, but it flushed in my direction. Although I was some distance off, Larson passed on the shot for safety's sake. He finished the day blanked.
"I've never come back from a whole day without any birds at all," Larson said.
A late-season hunt can do that.
Heavy snow
Our second morning, snow was falling heavily. Jerry Barton, the farmer with whom we were staying, had told us of a cattail slough on his brother's land where he saw pheasants every morning. Barton took a break from cattle feeding to show us where to go. Larson and I both knew that pheasants sometimes hold well for dogs in snow.
"I think this is going to be it," Larson said, anticipating a good hunt. "I have a good feeling about this morning."
That feeling evaporated as our dogs picked up virtually no pheasant scent in those cattails, which we hunted shortly after sunrise. In the distance, we could see pheasants flipping from a bean field into heavier cover. We never got close to them.
"What I've learned is that your expectations should be reduced," Larson said later. "If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't bring my 180-quart cooler."
It was probably the most challenging pheasant hunting either of us had encountered. We finished with nine birds in three days and earned every one of them.