Sugar Finds a Tough One

We were hunting an area that has lots of tall grass but few trees.  I think trees offer pheasants protection from hawks. Sometimes they even roost in trees. It seems like I have better luck if there is at least some brush around, but today it was going to be pretty open.

So far this season my dogs have never had birds flush without them giving me at least some warning. If not a point, them slowing down, tail wagging, some sign that they were on strong scent. However today two pheasants flushed 40 ft. behind me, and the dogs didn't seem to know that they were there. In both cases the sound of their wings snapped me around. When I drew a bead on them ,although they were within range, I couldn't tell if they were a hen, or a rooster because they were flying at heads height, level, and straight away. I just couldn't see any color. That white ring neck is the first thing one looks for, then maybe the long colorful tail feathers. Looking under their tail didn't give me enough information, so I had to pass. We made a big oval drive ending up back at the pickup.

 I drove on a short distance. Then we started  hunting an old RR cut. Just as we were starting out, I heard a rooster crow behind us,and across the road some distance away. I pressed on with "plan A"hoping to get a chance to look for him when we got back to the pickup. And that's what happened about an hour later.

  We crossed the gravel road, climbed through the ditch,. and headed to the thickest cover in the area.  Both dogs went on point. I edged into tall grass ahead of them, but the rooster flushed way to my right, almost behind me. My second shot hit him as he cleared the raised RR grade. He wasn't hit hard. He tumbled over a couple times them righted himself and in a few more wing beats disappeared over the mound. My Short hair disappeared right behind him. I scrambled up the bank hoping that she would meet me at the top with the bird in her mouth. It wasn't to be. Instead she was frantically trying to pick up a scent trail. The best cover, and the most likely place to look was in a strip of heavy grass between the gravel road, and the top of the RR grade. By now both dogs were hunting hard, but I could see this was not going to be an easy bird to find if we could find it at all.

We had worked about 40 yd. of the cover getting farther, and farther away from the line of flight, and I was about to give up. I was thinking that about another five minutes of this, and then we will have to go back to where we had started and try a different escape route.

I had been walking along a fairly steep bank with the county road below me, and the old RR grade above me, when the Brittney, five feet below me at the base of the slope locked up on a solid point. I wasn't sure if this was our winged bird, or a different one. I waited a few seconds for a flush, when nothing happened I gave the dog permission to flush it with a strong "OK!", but she still wouldn't move. As I slide down the bank she lunged.  Her head and most of her shoulder disappeared  straight into the bank. My next thought was that she must have found an old drain pipe with a porcupine in it. Just when I was about to yell at her and grab her to pull her out, she backed out with the rooster in her mouth. What a great job!

With only a few minutes of day light left I let the dogs go back to the location of the original point, look around, get their noses full of some good pheasant smell, them we head for the pickup.

I should have killed that bird with the first shot, It is a good thing I had a dog that could make up for my failure.

                            Those first two pheasants were very near that distant tree on the right.

The bird flew from right to left. We found him over the bank from the X.