The Outdoors

By Scott Rall, Outdoors Columnist

So, how is your pheasant hunting season going? Mine has been pretty bleak, but this is not the result of all hunters who chase ring necks on the pheasant range of Minnesota. The weather has been so nice I can find no way to complain. The higher-than-normal temperatures in November certainly make the winter shorter and I am all for that.

What it also does is make getting a rooster into gun range a lot harder. As the fall ages and winter starts to set in, it has the effect of concentrating birds. Some of the more marginal habitat becomes filled with snow, the birds move to better cover and there is always less of that.

Pheasants can withstand a normal Minnesota winter if they have the quality habitat they need to survive. Pheasants feed twice a day, once in the morning and again in the late afternoon. When the temperatures are warmer, they have no need to return to suitable cover between feedings. They can just lounge around a fence line or near a farmhouse grove. They are not forced to return to heavy cover to get out of the wind and conserve energy resources.

When things start to get more intense these same birds will fly out early, fill their crops with waste grain and immediately return to suitable cover to protect themselves from bitter wind chills. They tend to hold tighter, meaning a gun and a dog can get closer because they don’t want to use up their energy with an escape flight and then make the same trek back to cover when the hunter and dog have passed on.

Snow and ice also make it harder for a bird to just stay on the ground and run the marathon. Birds that fly get shot and those who run normally live another day. With the conditions we are having as of late the running game is winning. I was helping a group of gals chase pheasants a few weeks back and as they were approaching the end of a field, they were about 300 yards from coming up to a gravel road, I watched as 25 pheasants ran across the road, ran down in the ditch on the other side of the road and then proceeded to run across a bean field about 150 yards where they all took wing and make their escape.

When the hunters arrived at the pinch (a pinch is a spot where the birds can no longer run without getting exposed), only two hens held and flushed within range. We all know you can’t shoot hens, so after a 1 mile walk the end result was no roosters to shoot at. This is the norm of the past month or more. Young, dumb roosters, those born a few months earlier, are not the brightest bulbs in the box and those get cropped off pretty early in the season.

Take that same bird that is now survived 5 months and they are no longer the naïve quarry they used to be. If you think about it, just about everything wants to eat a pheasant. Coyotes get some, hawks and owls each get some, and don’t forget hunters doing their best to put them in their game bags. And after spending most of their lives dodging everything that wants to make a meal out of them, they get super smart.

Last weekend I watched a group as they hunted for two days. They had three great dogs and three gunners. Every time they made a walk I watched as rooster after rooster outsmarted them. Over the two days they saw 15 roosters and had shot at only four of them. The shots they took were by no means gimme’s. They ended the weekend with one bird.

My efforts have been much the same.  I hunted for two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday. It was super windy Saturday and I finished without taking any shots. On Sunday the winds had laid down, but the roosters were the same smart alecks as they have been. I could tell my dogs were tracking a bird and, after training a running bird for up to a 1/4 mile, they would finally jump out in front of the dog more than 100 yards away. I pinched birds into corners, up against creeks and almost every other pinch you can think of, and still ended up empty-handed. It is raining today and the snow that was in the forecast a few days from now has melted away into just rain.

I will just keep on chasing the wily ringnecks and see if the weather ends up changing at all. There are some good reports from hunters hunting on private lands that gets very little hunting pressure and they are bagging some birds. Bird numbers are down from last year due to the fact we had 15.2 inches of rain during the primary nesting season. Most of the bird’s hunters are bagging are leftovers from the nesting season of ‘23.

My very good friend John Ziehlke, tells me all the time that they call pheasant hunting, pheasant hunting and not going to get pheasants. This is so true. My dogs have a great time doing what they love and 7,000-10,000 steps a day is good for the heart. When I don’t bag a bird, I call those outings a wildlife nature walk. Both successful and not successful outings are all part of a life outdoors.

We will see if the weather changes between now and the season’s end on January 1. Between now and then I will continue to watch the dance play out between the nose on my dog trying to find and flush that elusive rooster and the rooster’s intense desire to outsmart the persistent nose that is tracking them. I am turning 64 in a few months and hope to participate in that dance for many more years to come.

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If you have any questions, reach out to me at scottarall@gmail.com.