Nov 2004 hunt

rascal

rascal

New member
snow and bitter cold today...been holed up in the house all day with the dogs messing around on the computer and looking through OLD photo albums of film pictures from hunts over the years. Found some real good stuff. I found a few from my very first time in Kansas...November of 2004. Had my Jag there when he was young and in his prime.. I had been in Maine grouse hunting a few weeks before this trip. All I remember from that first glimpse of Kansas was birds everywhere...we saw ALOT of pheasants on that trip. A L O T. I hope it gets back to that someday...we also stumbled into alot of quail but they were a bonus and we were really just focused on pheasants at the time....



Jag pointed a covey of quail at our very first stop and I got one

 
Cool pics. '04 was good for us. '05 was the best I've seen up there. We saw tons of pheasants in 2005. We easily limited on WIHA those two years.
 
cool.....yea was some of the best hunting I've ever seen. you don't seem to appreciate it fully until its NOT soo good though...:(
 
The good ol' days! :cheers:

To me it seemed like the bird numbers kept increasing each year, but the quality of the WIHA declined slightly each year, and the hunting pressure increased slightly each year. By the time the bird numbers peaked according to KDWP, the hunting pressure was nuts and a fair amount of the WIHA wasn't worth stopping to piss on.:eek:

Around '04, give or take a year, may have been the sweet spot for Kansas WIHA road trips. I can also remember having a legitimate chance of a pheasant limit, all on WIHA, within an hour of home on a 1/2 day hunt. If my shooting wasn't so terrible back then I probably would have done it pretty regularly. :laugh:
 
Yea, our impression was that the pressure greatly increased. We decided in 09 that it wasn't worth fighting the crowds and the drive between WIHAs increased (looking for good ones). We called it quits. Wish we had gone one more year now (2010). I was up there in 2002 and decided that year that I wouldn't make that drive during bad years.
 
sucks. yea at that time I lived in NJ so making frequent trips there was out of the question...although I was spending my future retirement anyway traveling to other parts of the country to hunt and dog train anyway :eek: I wish we had gone back a couple more times when it was at the "high" but I had some really good hunts the next few years in Montana, North Dakota and Maine. Now that I live in IL Kansas is not far and I find myself there more often. A training buddy of mine that lives in Maryland has been doing a Kansas hunt in November for over 30 years now. He has shared alot of good stories from the years with the peaks and valleys of the hunting there. I've had some great hunts with him also in NoDak. I know to the KS guys I'm just another outta stater chasing their birds but I really just dig the place...it feels like home more and more.
 
Ahh...the good ol' days (at least for us younger folks). I remember in 2007, we were hunting in SW Kansas. We had a dog point a group of yucca cactus. A buddy and I each took a rooster pheasant out of the initial flush of probably 6 birds. While we were picking up birds, my dog went to the same spot and pointed the yucca. We both thought he was just pointing scent from a few seconds ago. My buddy walks up to the yucca and yells...THERE'S MORE!! At that moment 4 hens and two more roosters got up and both roosters fell. Man, they were thick.

I haven't been to that spot in years and I am sure that it is a wasteland now with the drought. But I will never forget getting to the end of that WIHA and just watching hundreds of birds explode into the air. Hopefully, we'll get back to that again, but it will be a long while.
 
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