By Jennifer L.S Pearsall

After the first seven days of any pheasant season have gone by, forget everything you know bout “pinch-and-squeeze,” because the pheasants have instantly gone from grade school to PHD status in hunter education. This is a far different bird than he was a week ago, but a couple different approaches on your part can still see you taking your limits.

If you live in pheasant country, skip the weekends. Go to work early and skip your lunch so you can leave early, because the hunting will be more productive in the weekday afternoons, as locals will continue to exert pressure over the weekends. Too, hunters on vacation and traveling from out of state will be more likely to get their hunting done in the morning; there’s always that urgency not to waste time when you’ve covered some miles in the truck, so you’ll find most visiting hunters out of their motel rooms early and in the fields first thing.

On the other hand, if you’re the one who doesn’t live in good pheasant territory and are traveling, schedule your trip so that of the weekend days, at least Saturdays are your travel days to and from. Why just Saturday? If you have to choose between hunting Saturdays and Sundays—and this goes for both travelers and locals—Sundays can provide more opportunity for better shooting, as pheasant country has two religions with hard-core followings: the kind that involves church, and the kind that involves a pigskin. If you don’t have a driving need to cheer for the one or a guilt complex that makes you put on a coat and tie for the other, you can often have the fields to yourself on the traditional day of rests.

A couple more pieces of advice for the traveling kind of hunter, because you know there’s nothing worse than packing up the dogs and the gear, only to get to your destination and find it bird-less. Do yourself a favor, even if you’ve reliably hunted the same area for years, and do a little pre-hunt scouting with your computer.

The first things to check out are the websites for the states you intend to hunt. Go to www.huntinfo.org and click on the states that interest you. You’ll be taken to the individual game department websites, where, more often than not, you’ll find some sort of bird report or forecast, just as you would if you were searching for info on big game. Remember, states like Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota take their pheasants every bit as seriously as Colorado does its elk and Texas its whitetails.

If you’re not certain after your initial search, Google weather histories for the regions you wish to go, five years back, if you can, but at least two. Two’s a good place to start, because in regions that experience harsh winters and periodic drought, it may take a couple years or more for bird numbers to recover from particularly brutal weather years. Really important to look at is a history of ice storms. Birds can take a lot of snow, but ice is a killer. It’s hard on them physically, and they can’t feed. If your favorite area got hit by nature’s popsicle production (e.g., western Kansas and Nebraska in late 2006 and early 2007), you can bet numbers will be off for a few seasons. Hunt elsewhere.

Now, homework taken care of, I’ll say this. If you hunt pheasant hard and often enough, you’re going to run into crappy weather. It’ll be cold, raining, or snowing, and you’re probably thinking that pheasant hunting’s gonna suck, right? Well, it probably won’t be comfortable for you, that’s a given, but it can be terrifically successful if you focus on the places all the birds are going to be: shelter belts and cover.

Even just a day or two of yuck will have pheasants hunkering down, waiting for it all to blow over before they return to regular roost-to-food-and-back movements. Seriously, they don’t like getting their feet wet or having water running down the backs of their necks any more than you do. And they sure as heck don’t want wind blowing their scent to every passing coyote, fox, and bobcat looking for an easy meal.

During inclement weather, search out heavy cover, those places that offer the most protection from the elements, and, if it’s raining, especially work those sheltering spots on higher ground. Be prepared to push some really thick stuff to get a flush (small flushing dogs like cockers and springers, and smaller pointing breeds like Brittanies, can be an excellent choice for this kind of work). Too, this is the place to enlist a couple buddies, if you can drag them away from the fireplace. With one of you in the thick of it, use a triangle formation of friends working on either side and a little to the front of you. The one wading through the tangles will push birds in front of him, but the presence on either side of additional hunters can act as pincers to put birds to air. Trade off the job of bustin’ the brush, and everybody should get a chance to shoot.

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.