Sandhills....

Sharptails hold a lot better during warm afternoons if your hunting areas with brush, like chokecherry, Buffalo Berry etc. Because their lounging around, cover is thick they feel safer. If your not hunting stuff like this you should be. :thumbsup:
Groups of Sharptails while feeding, say a hillside with grasshoppers or a stubble area. At these times there are lots of eyes looking for danger. You may get close on the young ones (just one time) they learn fast about danger. Then you will see the flocks take off 200 yards away and fly and glide away for miles, over the top of the far hills.
 
mnmthunting said:
Sharptails hold a lot better during warm afternoons if your hunting areas with brush, like chokecherry, Buffalo Berry etc. Because their lounging around, cover is thick they feel safer. If your not hunting stuff like this you should be. :thumbsup:
Groups of Sharptails while feeding, say a hillside with grasshoppers or a stubble area. At these times there are lots of eyes looking for danger. You may get close on the young ones (just one time) they learn fast about danger. Then you will see the flocks take off 200 yards away and fly and glide away for miles, over the top of the far hills.
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Amen! The only thing I will say, that in the sandhills of Nebraska, very few service berries, and in hundreds of flushes, I have only gotten 3 from a bushes,pine rows, or cedar trees. Almost every flush was in the pasture eating grasshoppers, small legumes, rose hips, and rose leaves. Yes they fly many miles, might even be counties! Circle into the wind a long way out, chuckle all the way, get high, then turn with the wind..... zoom, faster than ducks and a way up! Following up mature birds is futile! if you see where they went, and have the gumption to lug across the hills to get there. I have shot sharptails in the bushes, Manitoba, Montana, Washington, a lot more berry bushes there. Sandhills it has to be cold and snowy, even then they are out playing in the snow! and eating rose hips, and freezer burned grasshoppers, or sitting in a big cottonwood in a creek bottom.
 
I went to a friends farm near Alliance yesterday to help him with some work and scout for the upcoming season. Cover is looking great in western Nebraska and most of the corn was looking really good. Only saw a few young pheasants driving up from the Colorado border and were all hit by cars. The time of day I was driving wasn't the best for spotting birds but they had to have had a good hatch in a lot of the country we drove through. When we were driving around the farm we did see a hen sharptail and a brood of six chicks that could fly 20-30 yards and found lots and lots of pheasant tracks in the ditches and on the road.:cheers:
 
andyperry07 said:
Any one hunted the Ogalala National Grasslands? It is one of the closer options I have in Wyoming. I am debating between trying NE or MT for a couple weekends this fall. Montana is about 2-3 hours farther each way and the drive can be a bit trickier as fall becomes winter.
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I wouldn't bother with the Ogalala NG. It's worth the extra driving time to make it to MT. I went to the ONG last year. Great if you want to pop prairie dogs and coyotes but lousy for birds. I saw 1 sharptail the whole time and that was in the front yard of someone's bed and breakfast.

It was my one and only time there so I might have just been in the wrong spot but it just didn't feel "birdy" if you know what I mean. My dog wasn't impressed either and he's the one with the nose.

Better to go further east or further north. Pretty place for camping though. Bird hunting is never a total loss... :cheers:
 
Thanks hobbie.. that is kind of what I have been gathering there are probably some sts in there, but nothing to write home about.
 
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