What does your typical winter hunt look like?
No doubt cover type, weather conditions, dog's hunting style, group size, etc. influence how you hunt.
Ace & I were out Saturday with a buddy & his springer from about an hour past the starting gun, nearly until the closing bell. We put in what I'd consider a long day. A typical long day for this time of the season.
Here's what it looked like:
Hit 4 public spots, all WPA's. Saw pretty good bird #'s & LOTS of tracks in each spot.
Saw very fresh human tracks at 2 of 4 spots; most likely made earlier Saturday; possibly Friday.
Hunted mostly cattail sloughs. Maybe 4" of snow on the ground. (hard to tell, since it's been blown around so severely)
23 degrees w/ 15-18 mph NW wind.
Total miles walked by me = 4.73
Miles walked actually in pursuit of roosters = 2.29
Miscellaneous miles walked (hiking around cover to preferred starting points, trudging back to the truck, etc.) = 1.92
Miles walked across ice to cattails & back to recover a cripple due to faulty shells = 0.52
Total time spent walking = 3.75 hrs. +/-
Average pace = 1.26 mph.
I'm guessing Ace put on at least 20 miles.
I've got out Saturday and Sunday last weekend for likely the last time this season. Generally I hunt on Saturdays and take care of regular adult life stuff on Sundays.
I try to leave to catch the first hour of sunrise because I like watching all the wildlife that is out and about at that hour. If I focus I can be out the door by 7:00 - 7:30. Any earlier and there just too much time to sit and wait for hunting hours to roll around. I've been driving north mostly this season, on and off the reservations. Like you I only hunt public areas.
Last weekend being the holiday, I had a 3 day weekend from work so I hunted both Saturday and Sunday. Saturday I took my old dog since he has only been out twice this season. I think he's happier at home in front of wood stove while my wife feeds him treats. We have a pretty sweet retirement program here for old hunting dogs. But he bounced up and was ready to go when I came out dressed in my hunting clothes. We headed east for a couple hours because I needed to see some new country and hunt somewhere I've never been before. Another poster in a different thread talked about driving an empty highway at 75 not seeing another soul. I thought of him when I snapped the picture of the empty road.
First stop was at a GPA that was bordered on 2 sides by picked corn. The cover looked great so I waded in. My dog, Gus, started with the most likely spots. We ran down the middle of a tree line but I wasn't seeing any tracks and Gus never got birdy. As we got to the end of the tree row I saw a hen and a rooster flush from some weeds. The hen peeled away out of the GPA, the rooster sailed off to the east, landing in some chest high grass, still inside the GPA. So I whistled Gus over and we hustled over to where I saw the rooster land. Found lots of tracks, and Gus got birdy but we never found the rooster and never flushed another pheasant out of that field. It just reinforced the fact that hunting a wide field field by myself with one dog is a losing proposition. It's produced a couple times, but it favors the pheasants. I just seem incapable of passing up a birdy looking field.
Back at the truck I reached down to pull back the charging handle on my shotgun to unload it, and there was nothing to grab. Yep, the charging handle fell out somewhere in that chest high grass. 2 hours from home I wasn't about to quit hunting and driving back to get another shotgun wasn't an option. I opened the chamber with my truck key and figured the gun would work long enough to finish out the day.
Next stop was a GPA that was off from the beaten track. It looked good, small, with a nice bunch of cattails that gave way to a frozen pond, and beyond that an unholy tangle of overgrown cedars, Russian Olives, and grass. At the boundary was a solid belt of old pine trees. I got Gus out of the truck and we walked along the grass, on the edge of the cattails, about a half mile to the back of the GPA. No tracks and Gus never got birdy so we turned around and headed back.
The pond was frozen and safe so I walked out on the ice and followed Gus into the thick of the cattails. Gus was off to my left when I heard the rooster flush. I looked over to my left and Gus had charged into a clump of cattails and flushed 2 roosters and a hen but they had a head start and were about out of range. I took a bead on the last rooster and pulled the trigger. I saw a leg drop at the shot so I knew the bird was hit, but both roosters sailed off into the pine trees at the back of the GPA. I hustled back there with Gus but there was no sign of the bird.
Trusting my dog, I basically turned him loose with the hunt dead command in a couple hundred acres of tangled Russian Olives and cedars and hoped he would be able to find the bird. I had no idea where the bird could be, so rather than try to handle Gus I just let him take off, and tehn started poking around looking under trees. 10 minutes later Gus come trotting out with a live rooster held firmly in his mouth. I'll never know how he found that bird or where, but I know he never looked more handsome. Just an absolutely amazing piece of dog work and shows what an experienced, well bred hunting dog is capable of. He's far from perfect and to be honest tiring to hunt with because he is always on the ragged edge of gun range but he can track and retrieve like a monster. I blame the trainer. : )
After the hero shot and some treats we drove to a GPA I found on the atlas I selected because it was small and surrounded by corn. We poked through some tree lines at the edge of the WPA where it met the cornfield, but no tracks and no birds. We walked out on the road to get the far side and Gus flushed a big rooster out of some cattails right on the edge of the pond. I was only 30 feet away and stoned the rooster with the first shot. Gus brought it to hand. It was a young of the year but had respectable tail feathers. We walked around the rest of the small lake but no other birds flushed. We got back to the truck just as the sun went below the horizon. Had a celebratory cigar on the drive home and felt pretty flush with a pair of roosters, since the past 3 weekends resulted in a total of one rooster.
My takeaways from this late season are to forget the WIA. The birds have left because of the pressure and as we know the dumb ones are mostly dead by the end of October. Cattails and picked corn are a deadly combination. I seemed to have the best luck late in the day catching roosters in the cattails. Midday they seem to be on the move. And the roosters really bunch up once the snow flies. I've seen two huge groups of pheasants this season. Both in January and both on private land but there was easily over a hundred birds in both groups. And I relearned the lesson that I have to relearn every year; trust your dog.
Really appreciate everyone's stories and pictures. They encouraged me to keep going out even when I wasn't finding birds and kept me entertained when I had to work instead of being outside where I belong. Learned somegood techniques from the posts too. Thanks!
