Saturday opener in Nova Scotia - busy fields and skittish birds!
Well, it was a big day on Saturday. I had two (dogless) buddies with me and Ruby. Opening day fell on a Saturday for us (and for many of you I'm guessing) for the first time since I started pheasant hunting. We got out "our" fields, which border a narrow river (a spot where I, and others, have permission to hunt). It was an hour before first legal shooting light and there were two trucks there already. A bit disappointed, but we shrugged it off and drove around to hunt the opposite side of the river, where there is a small patch of public uncultivated land (where most of the birds that are flushed from the farm fields on the other side will go to escape! :thumbsup: ).
We started down into the field and put up a hen 5 yards from the car - good start. We worked our way down along a patch of thick alders, sending the dog in on 'loops' while we worked the edge and waited for a rooster to pop out the top. The sun was just starting to glow to the east and we saw 7 deer bounding the top of the ridge against the orange sky - like a postcard! I spotted a small patch of beautiful soft grass and thought that "If I were a pheasant on this cold morning..." Called the dog over and sent her in - a big rooster exploded out and I had to wait a heartbeat or two before taking the shot to avoid making mincemeat of him. As soon as I shot 3 sets of 3 shots echoed from very close, startling the heck out of me. There were no other trucks on that field so I could not figure who was shooting, especially so close. We quartered out away a from the shots to give the guys some space and soon put up another 5 pheasants - 3 of them roosters, along the edge of a pond. My buddy was hanging onto the alders to avoid falling in, so he had no shot, and I had no safe shot over him so we let them go. All of a sudden another 6 shots rang out. We figure we're pushing a bunch of birds to someone, but that's the way it goes. We keep on, still moving away from them. We keep working, a few more hens later Ruby gets birdy and I gesture to my buddy to circle around a thick patch of rose and other rough cover. Up comes a rooster and he drops it - his first over a dog. We keep working and Ruby is still pretty hot. We move forward more and more, coming to the edge of a big pond near where we started. I know we're pushing at least one so I step it up to be near the edge when the bust. Up goes a rooster and I hit him with my second barrel. Into the pond he goes, jumps up and hits the other shore running - takes off into the thick alders. I send Ruby across. She pauses in the water at the feathers from the shot, looking for the bird. I cast her "back" onto the far shore and she gets on his scent, takes off into the alders up the hill. When her bell starts to get faint I worry because of the other hunters, and whislte her in. I leave my buddies to mark the spot and cross the pond to help Ruby with the bird. Ripping my face and eyes to tatters in the alders we search and search. Ruby puts up two more hens and a big rooster in the process, and then gets so turned around on all the scent that I lose hope of finding the cripple. We try for another while but no luck. Dissapointed I head out to tell the boys that I lost the bird. As I get back down to the pond I see two guys leaving in camo wiht a decoy bag - the shooters that morning had been duck hunters and I must have shot that last rooster right over their heads! Feeling a bit bad about that I wonder why they didn't speak up and where the hell they were parked!!! We head back to the car and I put away my gun for the day to concentrate on handling Ruby for the other two hunters, one of whom doesn't have a bird yet. We cross back over to the far side to see if the boys have finsihed over there yet. What do we see but the duck hunters wading back across the river to their trucks. They put on blaze over camo and start hunting pheasants! I must admit that I was a bit confused (and perhaps a bit annoyed) that they had parked on the field to "stake their claim" then waded across to duck hunt. Not only did this seem a little unfair but also a bit dangerous because we had no idea that they were in there. Whether or not they shot any of the roosters that we put up near the pond from the duck blind I will not speculate about... Anyhow, we did our best to work around them and pushed each other some birds throughout those fields, getting my second buddy a rooster in the process and putting up another bunch of birds. Two more parties hunted the far side (where we had just been) while we were at it, and we pushed them some birds. They didn't have dogs and I never heard and shooting, so at the end of the day we finished by going BACK over to where we started for a try, where we put up some more hens. We also found a deer stand in there that had been used that morning, which made me even MORE nervous because we had been in there with the dog. In this province, dogs and deer hunters don't mix very well, especially on teh second day of deer season, so Ruby always has a vest and a bell on and I keep her close. As we left another guy was coming in to go duck hunting! MAN - our little "secret honeyhole" is not much of a secret anymore I guess...
I was very pleased withi Ruby's work for the most part. In particular she never once chased a flushed pheasant after the whistle, which was a serious problem last year which we worked on a lot in the off-season. The only thing that she did that concerned me is when she stumbled on a runner who was either crippled of VERY smart because he REFUSED to fly. He was dashing back and forth in the cover while she want BALLISTIC trying to get him - deaf to the whislte when he made a break for the alders and she chased him out of range. In the end we all went home with a bird after a long, sunny day afield. My buddies were thrilled, so that was good. I was perfectly happy with the harvest (we don't have crazy numbers of birds here in Nova Scotia, compared to some spots where you fellas hunt), but a bit dissapointed about losing the wounded bird and at finishing an otherwise very good "dog-day" with Ruby disobeying me on the running bird. I suppose that I was a bit frustrated also about some of the jostling and waltzing around with other hunters, but that's the name of the game when hunting public land I suppose... I don't know if it was all the hunters around the area, but after the first 5 minutes the birds were VERY skittish - behaving more like wily late-season gun/dog/whislte-shy birds than naive opening-day chickens! In particular, they seem to have figured out the "you fly you die" rule pretty quick, and were doing their best to run out of range before flushing!
When I got home I immediately checked the '09 calendar - Nov. 1 is a Sunday, so pheasant opener is a Monday next year - yay! I'll also have to spend some time scouting and knocking on doors to find a new honeyhole! I didn't have my camera with me, but my buddy took a few snaps.
-Croc
