Kerrybrook's Wisdom of the Ancients (Pearl)

Well, the holidays were more about snowshoeing an skiing for me than about hunting, but I did get out for a bit of late-season duck and grouse hunting. I tagged some grouse hunting on along with retrieving treestands and visiting with some hosting landowners to deliver pheasant pies and christmas cards. I fired one shot the entire time - at a grouse that came ROCKETING straight at me through the fog one damp day just before Christmas. I'd conservatively guess that my shot arrived something on the order of about 5-10 feet behind him! He passed about a yard over my head and I spun to follow him with the second barrel, but he zigged then zagged and I didn't get onto him. Pearl had winded him from about a hundred yards away and did an amazing job of finding him in the thick stuff and putting him up for me. So as usual - she did her part! I finally got around to properly exploring some beautiful new grouse cover though, where I heard another two in the thick stuff but had no shot. In the process I found a very interesting bottleneck of deer tracks that might be worth further exploration this fall.



I did take Pearl out for her intro the the mud flats, but it was a calm day and we didn't have any serious takers. My spot out there is changing though - much more slumped mud and thinner grass up on top. It was pretty sloppy! If this continues, and I think it will, my years of hunting out there are numbered. I passed on some shots that would have felled the ducks (assuming I hit them!) into very soft mud on the far bank. Missed another that came straight at me and passed right overhead. I should have shot earlier, but I wanted him to fall on the near bank to make Pearl's first experience out there a good one. But I was too slow, so by the time he came right over me I'd have had to hide him with the muzzle to get enough lead. By the way he flew off after I shot - I clearly failed to do that! After several hours of washing gear and Pearl, I was reminded what a chore that hunt is, and was at the same time reminded not to undertake it unless the weather is snotty enough to ensure more action! But nonetheless, it was perhaps for the best that Pearl's introduction to the big mud flats was on a relatively benign day without much "work" to do. By the time the aforementioned snotty weather arrived, I was away on my ski vacation! Next year... next year...






Take'em and I did get out for (another bluebird day) duck hunt. Once again, the ducks were content to sit where they were on the glass-calm water, and there were no other late-season duck hunters around to keep them moving, so we had plenty of time to shoot the breeze about this year, plan for next year, and luckily for me, to take a few pics! Want to know how to get some great shots of your dog? Take a good photographer out hunting with you on a day when there are no ducks to shoot! Eventually, he'll get bored and start taking pictures! :)



Watching an imaginary double-curl mallard cupped over the decoys...



Casting Pearl to retrieve said imaginary double-curl mallard after having made a spectacular imaginary shot! :)



Still over a week left. Might get out again for a last kick at the can... Still only a handful of ducks in the freezer - it'd be good to have a few more feeds before next fall!


Happy New Year.

-Dave
 
Dang....does that mean we'll have to wait till next year for more reports! :)

Some of those photos are worthy of framing. :cheers:
 
FLDBRED said:
Dang....does that mean we'll have to wait till next year for more reports! :)
Click to expand...

Oh goodness no! I fully intend to continue this narcissistic thread throughout the off-season! LOL

Pearl may be one helluva pheasant dog, but her retrieving leaves something to be desired, so I'll post updates on our training progress in that department, as well as stories about our non-hunting adventures afield. I'm also in the market for a new digital SLR camera, so I hope to be able to up the ante on some photos as well.

Cheers,
Dave
 
Well, I guess that's it - the fat lady has sung, at least as far as birds go.
I got Pearl out for a number of duck hunts in the Atlantic zone these first few weeks of January. We were skunked at every turn - just never quite hitting the conditions and spots right. There were some birds around, but they were pretty decoy-wise it seemed. I passed on some shots that would only qualify as sky-busting at best, and even let some crows flap on by despite my temptation to crack 'em out of frustration with the ducks.
I also drifted a stretch of river, hoping to jump a few ducks. The only two ducks I encountered were in a straight-stretch, and they saw me coming and flushed before I was in range. But it was a nice afternoon regardless. The slog back up the road in the dark to get the car with waders on was not so nice though!

We got out in last week's rain/windstorm, but the wind died out just as we were getting settled, and the birds stopped moving. I hoped that the dropping tide might get them moving, but if it did, they didn't move my way!


We got out on the last day of the season, but the high tide was at noon and it was a bluebird day.

The local ducks were particularly well educated - hanging out tucked in safely around a nearby residential property. Pearl - ever the sassy jackass - expressed her displeasure about this by repeatedly trying to pull my hat off.

I'd have stayed longer, but when I went out to reset the decoys on a dropping tide, I quickly discovered a significant leak in my boot. This turned out to be a piece of glass, which is a pain for my waders, but better my boot than Pearl's pads - vets are a LOT more expensive than Aquaseal!

So that's about it for 2015-16 hunting! Quite a year for Pearl. She and I did very well together on pheasants. We scratched down a few ducks in the process, but really have very poor success on our directed duck hunts. For the most part, that's my own fault. I was so obsessed with pheasant hunting, and not all that enthusiastic about getting up at "0-dark-30" to slog out into the marsh, that I really didn't give waterfowling my best shot. Next year..... next year........
-Dave
 
Thanks for all the pictures and stories throughout the season, felt like we were there with you. :cheers:
 
You're more welcome FLDBRED - glad you enjoyed the posts. We had a modest blizzard here last night. Pearl and I headed out this morning with a camera and a bumper to enjoy the aftermath.
Snow + Pearl + bumper + camera = fun morning!

Heading out


Returning


LIFTOFF!


Mid-flight


LANDING!
 
Dave,

That is an outstanding Posts!!! I love the work at the 2:03 mark, you're expecting a Rooster to explode at any moment, the whole video is very well done!:thumbsup::thumbsup: Now let me watch it again!
I know all two well about not being whole.

Dan
 
So how is the 2016 pheasant season going? Miss your Posts!
 
Hey FLDBRED - sorry for the radio silence! I started a new (and much more interesting) job, so I've been flat out getting up to speed on things and just that much more "engaged" in my work. Thankfully, this has not meant less hunting, just less time to write/post about it is all!

We've been having a good season, but it's been a very warm fall so far, which I don't like for hunting. Pearl is doing great on pheasants - she's got a very good nose for them and her intensity when she gets on hot scent is actually slightly frightening! She has shed quite a bit of blood here and there as a result - nothing catastrophic, but I've had to call off more than one hunt out of concern for how long it will take her nose/eyes/ears to heal! She's still not retrieving cripples as well as I would like. While I love that she has a very soft mouth, I'd like her to be a little more confident at holding the lively ones to get them back to me. We lost one a few weeks ago as a result, and had a few close calls otherwise. She's over two years old now and appears to be in perfect health. Vet says we're past the age of genetic joint issues, so that's great. While I love her intensity, I'd also like to see her just take it back a notch or two in the hopes of lessening the chance of injury! It's also hard to keep up sometimes! She's got a solid whistle-sit though, and great recall, so she's a joy to hunt with. the only issue is that sometimes I have to be a bit louder with the whistle than I would like. She's good with the "tone/buzzer" function on her collar though - I have added that to her "sit whistle" training, so she'll now sit when she feels the buzzer without the sound of a whistle as long as she's not on hot scent. So that's helping a lot.
Anyhow, I've been out pretty much every chance that I get. Today is Remembrance Day in Canada, so I personally don't hunt on that day (not that I judge those who do - I just prefer to attend a memorial and have a "family day"). I'll get out after 'em tomorrow. Here are a few pics.








So that's what's been going on up in Nova Scotia!

-Dave
 
And because my hunting buddy shot this monster moose, I've got a quarter of it in my freezer so I'm not "wasting" bird hunting days on deer hunting this year! That has helped to offset the busier job a bit too.


I also didn't have time to deer hunting pre-bird-season as I usually do because I went on a dream fishing trip - tangled with way more than my share of very large brook trout on a mouse fly pattern in the wilds of central Quebec. I'll never forget it.




It's a tough life, but I get by... :)
-Dave
 
Well if you get tired of all the excitement maybe we can swap lives for a while.:thumbsup: Thx. for the nice photos and commentary!
 
Thanks for the update Dave! Sure looks like a Sportsman paradise up there, and the fact that it still has a wild pheasant population is awesome! :thumbsup:
 
Pearl and I just wrapped up the Nova Scotian season yesterday. We hunted a lot and flushed many birds, but we didn't connect with as many roosters as we did last year. But we made up for it a bit in the last week. It was warm and dry most of the fall, but I think I hit every one of our first four snowstorms as I got out four times to close off 2016!
First hunt was last Thursday. Pearl had to sit this one out due to a cut on her paw that needed just another few days to heal, so I was hunting over my buddy's 7 year old Golden, Ginger. We hunted hard all day and had only one bird in the bag - picked him up on the edge of an orchard in the morning.

The snow started that afternoon and we worked every cover we had access too. Ginger ran off on Tom and he came staggering back from recovering her exhausted and pretty much fed up. I convinced him to go to one more spot, and we didn't regret it! We picked up a double (one each) right off the bat. That renewed his energy a bit, enough that I could convince him to go to the back corner of the cover where we got one more to finish our two-man limit for Tom and Ginger's last hunt of the year.


Pearl was all better by Saturday, just in time for a modest snowstorm. We hunted hard for four hours solo, dodging a few other hunters here and there. We flushed only one hen until the very end, when Pearl went red hot along a thickly treed fenceline. I tried to find a shooting lane as bird after bird popped out of the sheltered brush along the backside of the fence. Each time I saw a hen it was wide open. Not so for the roosters - screened out every time! I also screwed myself up by running up the line to where the birds were, only to hear and see them flushing from where I had just come from! I could have used a buddy at that spot! I could have hammered some shots through the brush I guess, but it's a never ending swamp back behind there and impassable for humans, so a great place to lose cripples. So not worth it. It was the last day of bow season for deer, so I packed up my pheasant gear after that and went to sit in my stand for the last few hours of the deer season. You know, just to be able to say that I got skunked on that too! I nearly froze to death because I had generated a bit of a sweat while pheasant hunting and didn't have a complete change of clothes!
Monday we had, you guessed it, another good snowstorm! I took the morning off and drove through to a heavily hunted cover that is within reach for short hunts. I took off her bell and I put the whistle away. We worked the wind as quietly as possible and Pearl seemed to understand the need to be stealthy in my urgent whispers and hand signals. We snuck up on some bulrushes where I figured the birds might be hiding out from this first storm. Pearl first chased a hen and from up high I could see the bird scuttling along infront of her until it flushed. Wasn't much further along when a young rooster came up out of the bulrushes and I got him. There were some curious cows that came over to the fence line so I took a loop farther away and then came back down to the bulrushes when I was well clear of them. In the last 50 yards before I had to head back to the car another rooster went up and I got him too for my limit. A quick pic and then back in the car and slipped into the office by lunchtime feeling pretty damned pleased with myself!

Thursday, the last day of our season, it was the biggest storm yet. Morning was a southerly wind and not too cold, but strong wind and lots of snow. Lots of emergency vehicles out on the highway and cars in the ditch. Nothing serious that I could see, but lots of people having a very bad day. We hunted hard in that nastiness at three different covers. Pearl and her buddy Tori (black lab) flushed two roosters into a tearing wind in the morning, but we had no shot at them. Then shortly after another pair, but over the river that was not safe for retrieves (thin ice). Tori came up lame so we went to my buddy's house to drop him and her off because he had to go to work. It turned out to be a thorn in her paw, thank goodness.
Pearl and I got on the highway for home and it was at a crawl. We stopped at one more spot for the last hour of hunting and there they were! All kind of birds all over the place. Just one of those strokes of good luck that come around once in a while! Got our two roosters just as the sun set on the 2016 season. Perfect.


Cheers,
Dave
 
As usual great report and pictures! :10sign: The wild pheasants of Nova Scotia have always intrigued me. Thanks for sharing!
 
Merry Christmas to you all and wishing you all the best for 2018. Pearl and I had a great season. She’s three now and dynamite on pheasants. Her ability to deal with crippled birds and to take casts on retrieves that she doesn’t mark the fall really came together this year. It was a real pleasure to watch her work out the scent trails of stubborn late season roosters that’s refused the flush. If she told me that there’s was a bird here somewhere I trusted her, shut up, keep up, and try not to miss! LOL Her greatest gift to me this year was an injury free season, so I was able to hunt 3-4 times per week. A newly acquired cover close enough to home to hunt before work made this possible without burning through every last vacation day.
d68DoZV.jpg
 
That's a photo worth of framing...seriously! Boy I hear ya about an injury free season, Chipper's been off and on all season! Love your Posts Dave, what do we have to do to get more of them? lol.
Have a healthy New Year!
Dan
 
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