For those of you watching the thread because you're interested in my bird outings, but aren't necessarily interested in criticizing the decisions me or my kid make, here's the story from today;
The boys were tired so they slept in today. I met a friend from work and we headed toward the NE border. The thermometer in my truck said 8 degrees, but with no wind, it didn't feel that cold.
We arrived at a nice quarter of CRP. We let the dogs out and the GWP found 2 hens 15 yards in. We made a pass around the outside of the field and saw another 7 hens and one rooster. A late ID on the rooster allowed him to escape with his life. Another 10 birds flushed out of range and we couldn't ID their gender. We kicked up a 6-bird covey of quail. We didn't shoot them or even look for a single.
The next field was a 10-acre patch of thick grass. 3 solid hen points and some very birdy dogs, but no shots taken.
The next patch was about 40 acres of grass. I could see pheasant tracks all through the plum thickets. We kicked up 2 hens and 2 roosters. Both roosters died.
We took a sweeping pass through another hilly CRP field and had 2 roosters flush. One of them was killed, but we never found him, despite taking a 30-minute break for the dogs to look (maybe mustistuff can tell me what we did wrong
). As I was crossing the fence by the truck we flushed another hen.
We then dropped off some cookies for a generous farmer and wished him happy holidays.
We finished by hunting some CRP behind my friend's parents' house. We saw another covey of quail (12). We had several good points and took one bird. We then kicked up about 6 hens and called it a day.
In 3 days of hunting I've found that there are a few birds out there. If everything goes right during the nesting season, I know of 2 areas that could be pretty dang good. It's nice to see a few quail, everywhere we go it seems.
Now it's family time; time to rest, time to eat, :cheers:, and be merry:thumbsup:
