You don’t hunt deer in January the way you hunt them in October. The same should hold true for your pheasant hunting.
By Jennifer L.S. Pearsall
The pheasant, while part of the family that has evolved into fast-food nuggets, is no dumb cluck. I don’t think there’s a game bird out there that educates faster when it comes to hunting pressure. What starts out as a bird to fill limits with on the season opener will inevitably become to you what the Roadrunner was to Wile E. Coyote. That means that if you want to hunt them from beginning to end, you’re going to need a full bag of tricks.
Opening Assaults
For a lot of pheasant hunters, the season begins and ends with the opening day or week. Take, for instance, Mitchell, South Dakota, where the Cabela’s there is, literally, an explosion of blaze orange and waxed cotton in the weeks leading up to the season opener. With huge banners that read “Welcome Pheasant Hunters!” adorning the store, it’s clear the season’s a big deal.
South Dakota may be a pheasant Mecca, but it’s not the only one. All across the Midwest, this is one celebrated bird. For instance, in the small Kansas town I lived in for a few years, there are two big placards, put up at the town’s entrances weeks in advance of the opener, advertising the Rotary Club’s pancake feed for all hungry pheasant hunters—and boy, do they get a draw. And in Pennsylvania, where the state does a remarkable job of raising very savvy pheasants for release on its excellent public lands, folks line the fields in droves, waiting for legal light on opening day.
Opening days are something to live for, something to gather friends round for and assault the fields en masse. Why? It’s easy to work the No. 1 tactic for this time of year, a kind of hunter’s dance I like to call the “pinch-and-squeeze.”
It goes something like this. You and twenty of your closest friends—who’ve duped your wives into yet another year of soup-kitchen and bird-plucking duty—head for the nearest recently harvested grain field or CRP swath (and you should never discount public lands for the opener, as pheasants on these lands haven’t seen any more pressure at this point in the season than they would in any other habitat). You’re going to “do the drop,” depositing half of you at one end of the property, while the rest of you head for the far end. You can put down all your dogs at one time, a couple if the weather’s warm and you’ll need to rotate dogs throughout the day, or you can go dogless. It matters not, other than that, with a dog, you’ll better realize the benefit of having birds retrieved by something other than yourself.
When someone can get a visual that there are two lines of hunters facing each other across the opposite ends of the chosen field, it’s time for everyone to move forward.
This is the pinch part, and if the field’s good, everyone should get some shooting in, whether in the middle of the line or the end. In fact, that’s the real benefit of this “assault” approach, because birds rising from the middle of the field and missed by center-line shooters will undoubtedly fall to others across the line as they try to make an escape. Finally, when the two lines have come nearly together at the squeeze point, the shooting should be nearly non-stop, with those on the outside of the line getting their best chances yet.
It is not unusual, during an opening day and with a good field or two, to have limits filled within a couple hours. Indeed, you may get this kind of good shooting through the entire first week, but you’ll have probably noticed that after the first day’s salute, it’s harder to get birds to rise throughout the pinch. You’ll also have seen more and more birds leaking out the sides. Like I said, pheasants learn fast.
Author’s Bio
Jennifer L.S. Pearsall is an outdoor writer, photographer, and editor, who has been a professional in the hunting and shooting industries for nearly 20 years. She began her career by selling guns in a retail establishment in Northern Virginia in the early 1990s, before being recruited by the NRA to join its editorial staff. She has long been a dedicated sporting clays competitor, and has also dabbled in IPSC and metallic blackpowder cartridge competitions. Ms. Pearsall is a practiced and dedicated hunter, with her fair share of big-game trophies decorating her home, but her deepest passions are bird dogs and upland bird and waterfowl hunting.
Since her tenure with the NRA, Ms. Pearsall’s freelance writings and editing work have appeared in dozens of outdoors print and online publications, including Gun Dog, Wildfowl, Whitetail Journal, Petersen’s Hunting, Waterfowl & Retriever, and various publications of the National Rifle Association and Safari Club International, among others. She has also written under the pen name C. Fergus Covey as a gun test and evaluation expert for Gun Tests magazine. Currently she is authoring the blog www.HuntingTheTruth.com.
Ms. Pearsall currently resides in San Antonio, Texas, with her two dogs, an aging Lab named Noah, and a squirrel-obsessed English pointer called Highway.
