A good friend and I got in a few days pheasant hunting this week to finish up my upland season. I did the driving and he provided locations for pheasants.
We took my two dogs Kassie (WPG) and Cash (GWP) and his dog Clancy (WPG). Kassie isn't quite 2 so still rather inexperienced and always excited. Cash is 7 and rock solid if Kassie doesn't get in his way. Clancy is 9 and also rock solid.
I'd have probably taken more field photos and staged dead pheasant photos with nice backgrounds instead of the tailgate variety had I been on my own. As it was, I didn't carry my camera in my vest. May not have mattered because I couldn't keep the battery charged in the cold weather (need new battery) and these wild late season roosters have a way of flushing at inopportune moments, so I didn't want to spend too much time trying to get photos of dogs pointing.
Our typical plan was to hunt from both ends of sections of cover to try and effectively block the birds and get some of them to hold. Even with that we had lots of birds flushing well ahead of us and in some instances as soon as we drove by. My shooting on this trip improved over some of my early season performances and the new/used 11-87 that I picked up back in the fall performed flawlessly.
By 1:30 on day one we had a limit of roosters for both of us. Note the new dog box/topper I built for the bed of my Tacoma. I finished it just in time for this trip. It is somewhat heavy, but not too heavy for two people to load. The additional weight actually helped on the snowy roads.
Rooster tails in the Big Sky
Leftover "Christmans ham" sandwiches are my favorite, especially made on the tailgate in the field.
It's hard to see and doesn't look like much, but the coulee in front of us snakes off to the left and right. The bushes in the distance are along it's edges and was a good place for multiple birds to hold up after beeing pushed from the cover in the previous photo.
On day two we hunted with a couple locals that my buddy met last year. We pushed birds from a stubble field into a big block of cover then hunted them in the cover. Three of us hunted from one end with one guy blocking. We ended up with three of us having a limit of birds and the fourth guy's bad luck kept him from anything other than shooting a bird that was already on it's way down.
I didn't get any photos of the 9 roosters because we were in a hurry to try and make it to a stubble field where they had been smoking the geese. I was going to settle for a shop photo of the roosters but by the time I got in behind the guys they were already taking them apart in a hurry to get to the geese.
We took my two dogs Kassie (WPG) and Cash (GWP) and his dog Clancy (WPG). Kassie isn't quite 2 so still rather inexperienced and always excited. Cash is 7 and rock solid if Kassie doesn't get in his way. Clancy is 9 and also rock solid.
I'd have probably taken more field photos and staged dead pheasant photos with nice backgrounds instead of the tailgate variety had I been on my own. As it was, I didn't carry my camera in my vest. May not have mattered because I couldn't keep the battery charged in the cold weather (need new battery) and these wild late season roosters have a way of flushing at inopportune moments, so I didn't want to spend too much time trying to get photos of dogs pointing.
Our typical plan was to hunt from both ends of sections of cover to try and effectively block the birds and get some of them to hold. Even with that we had lots of birds flushing well ahead of us and in some instances as soon as we drove by. My shooting on this trip improved over some of my early season performances and the new/used 11-87 that I picked up back in the fall performed flawlessly.
By 1:30 on day one we had a limit of roosters for both of us. Note the new dog box/topper I built for the bed of my Tacoma. I finished it just in time for this trip. It is somewhat heavy, but not too heavy for two people to load. The additional weight actually helped on the snowy roads.
Rooster tails in the Big Sky
Leftover "Christmans ham" sandwiches are my favorite, especially made on the tailgate in the field.
It's hard to see and doesn't look like much, but the coulee in front of us snakes off to the left and right. The bushes in the distance are along it's edges and was a good place for multiple birds to hold up after beeing pushed from the cover in the previous photo.
On day two we hunted with a couple locals that my buddy met last year. We pushed birds from a stubble field into a big block of cover then hunted them in the cover. Three of us hunted from one end with one guy blocking. We ended up with three of us having a limit of birds and the fourth guy's bad luck kept him from anything other than shooting a bird that was already on it's way down.
I didn't get any photos of the 9 roosters because we were in a hurry to try and make it to a stubble field where they had been smoking the geese. I was going to settle for a shop photo of the roosters but by the time I got in behind the guys they were already taking them apart in a hurry to get to the geese.