After checking into the hotel and laying around for a couple of hours, we piled into the vehicle and drove around to find some of the hunting areas that we had never laid eyes on. I thought we'd get in another short hunt, but it turned into a scouting trip. The scouting trip proved productive when we located several pheasants along a road. One side was open for hunting the other side not, but it appeared the birds would be roosting on the open side. We also found several whitetails entering the back of a hayfield from a thicket along the river. We now had a plan for Friday.......hunt pheasants early morning until mid-day, nap for a couple of hours, then my youngest son and I would sit with our backs to a bale of hay with the .308 on a bipod for the last couple hours of daylight.
The pheasants were still there in the morning, but I suppose acted normal for birds hunted by the masses and started flushing before we were in range. I nocked one rooster down that flushed on the outer limits of "in range" but it was clear that he'd be running. We searched for quite a while but could not locate the bird. We did get one good point from Cash on a rooster that had held during the search but the bird flushed straight at a ranch house. When he finally flew clear I found my chamber empty (???) and my son missed a shot through the tree branches. I was kicking myself for taking the long shot on the first rooster and for missing out on the second opportunity. I could blame it all on rookie mistakes, but I've swung a shotgun on enough waterfowl and quail in my younger days to know better.
We still had a lot of cover to hunt and the birds appeared to have spread out along a wash that meandered across the field. There was also another wash that we could swing around to from the end of the property and likely find more birds. However, just before calling off our search for the rooster I knocked down; two trucks pulled up and asked if we planned to hunt the whole field. Seemed like a dumb question, but at least they were polite enough to ask. They were actually very polite. I told them we could just hunt the side we were on if they wanted to hunt the other side. They kept their hunt short but definitely killed more birds than we did, which wasn't difficult considering we only put up three hens.
I believe our biggest problem was when the cattle (calves) that were scattered across the back of the field decided to herd up and come investigate the dogs. Kassie interested them the most because they frightened her and she started to run from them until she barked at them over her shoulder and that frightened them. I saw the lightbulb go off in her head when they retreated from her bark, but couldn't get her turned around before she chased the whole herd while barking back through all the cover the birds had landed in. I doubt that would have went over well with the rancher and vowed to not let her near the cattle again. I'll have to admit it wasn't one of my proud bird dog owner moments.
We made one more attempt to find the wounded bird once the dogs had settled down, but they never found the bird. I was pretty disgusted with our first real morning hunting roosters on our own. I suspect it looked like a circus to the guys across the field. Regardless, we were hunting and that is a whole lot better than working.
With only one evening worth of scouting, I decided to drive around scouting several more areas with one more mid-day hunt in mind before heading back to the hotel. I flushed a covey of huns around noon when I got out of the truck at the parking area of the location I decided to try. My boys didn't even see them but the covey landed at the edge of a disked field just over a rise not 50 yards away. I hurried the boys out of the car once I had everything ready. We left the dogs in the car with my wife and daughter and basically walked over the hill and flushed the covey. My oldest son and I knocked three birds down on the rise. To my surprise, all three of them bounced in the disked field and ran like the wind.
Kicking myself for not letting the dogs out to start with, we grabbed Cash immediately and he started trailing wounded birds. It took about 30 minutes total over about 100 yards, but Cash did a great job and pointed all three of them. He then proceeded to retrieve each of them when they bounced across the ground fleeing from us. While not the roosters we should have had, we were happy to avoid being skunked.
After lunch, a shower, and an "almost" nap, my youngest and I headed back to the hay field to see if he couldn't fill a deer tag on the last evening of the youth deer hunt. The outcome turned into more work than I really needed on a "bird hunt", but he was happy to kill a whitetail doe (his second in as many years) about an hour before dark.
Immediately after dropping his doe like a rock at 98 yards.
Montana whitetail doe
"I want to drag it by myself"
That didn't last, so we both started dragging. "Do you think you could carry it over your shoulders if I carried the gun?" Well.........I've never done it that way, but why not......dragging a doe without a strap stinks.