Ride along with me and 8 mo. old Bo, on her first pheasant hunt. Nebraska public land treated us well as always! I don't know what a guy can say about taking a combination limit of 3-pheasants and 3-prairie chickens over an 8 mo. old Lab pup on her first pheasant hunt. Of course, she benefited from my 25 years experience hunting public land in the Nebraska Sandhills, but still, this was her second dual limit in just three days of hunting!
Ride along with me and 8 mo. old Bo, on her first pheasant hunt. Nebraska public land treated us well as always! I don't know what a guy can say about taking a combination limit of 3-pheasants and 3-prairie chickens over an 8 mo. old Lab pup on her first pheasant hunt. Of course, she benefited from my 25 years experience hunting public land in the Nebraska Sandhills, but still, this was her second dual limit in just three days of hunting!
PHEASANT & GREATER PRAIRIE-CHICKEN
There are only a few combination limits that come immediately to mind to most upland bird hunters. Eastern and mid-western states would expect ruffed grouse and woodcock and pheasant & quail. More western states might consider pheasants and sharptails and further south, pheasants and bob-white quail. I have never heard or read of any hunter favoring pheasants & prairie chickens.
Over the years, hunting in the Dakotas and Nebraska, I shot many combination limits of sharptails and pheasants. I mistakenly believed that in all of those multi-species hunts, and some in Kansas, I would one day, incidentally take a combination limit of pheasants and prairie chickens. I had similar misconceptions about wealth, sex and happiness but pheasants and chickens was the most regrettable and just slightly easier to rectify.
Miss Bodett and I had just spent three hard days attempting a combination limit of prairie chickens and Wilson’s snipe in Nebraska. I should have said attempting to shoot a prairie chicken, because we didn’t kill a single one in those three days. The real purpose of the trip was to attempt a dual limit I’d dreamt of for many years. Three pheasants and three prairie chickens in the same day. I would have been just as happy with four pheasants and two prairie chickens in Kansas, but I hadn’t hunted Kansas much in recent years.
It was the Friday afternoon before Nebraska’s pheasant opener and I was parked on a two track at the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge. I was hustling to get Bo out of her crate as there were three rooster pheasants easing their way into tall weeds within shotgun range of the truck. If I could just get her attention in their direction before they flushed, this would be her first exposure to pheasants. Bo was only 7 months old and though we had taken a decent number of prairie grouse, snipe and a few woodcock and ruffed grouse, this could be her first taste of the intoxicating scent of pheasants.
I have no understanding of the properties of pheasant scent, except that I have never owned a bird dog that would not spit any other game bird out of it’s mouth, to trail cold pheasant scent. When considering flush and shot avoidance in a mid-western field, I’d rather be any species of bird other than a rooster pheasant.
Bo was kinda close, but did not flush those roosters, but she was dopey for a few minutes sorting through their scent. I knew just where we would start our hunt in 12 hours.
We passed several trucks scattered along the meadow marshes before we reached our two track. I was surprised to not see another hunter at our destination. There was a pair of hunters across the marsh that I would meet later in the day, but Bo and I had the opening few hours to ourselves. And anyone watching the progress of our day would have questioned my earlier enthusiasm. Between the two of us, a few pheasants flushed. I can’t say that they were anything more then early mourning shuffling, as none of them seemed to be the result of our hunting skills. After a couple hours, the other two hunters loaded up and left their side of the lake and soon after I watched two single roosters flush, cackle and re-land in distinguishable patches of cover. I loaded Bo and decided to hunt exactly where I saw birds. Bo flushed a few hens and one rooster that I failed to identify before it was out of range. Then as she was working a tight corner 30 yards away, I was distracted by running birds in front of me. I should have stayed and trusted Bo. She put up a hard cackling rooster that I could only watch fly to the wettest center of the marsh.
I really wasn’t too concerned with our lack of success. I had shot a lot of Sandhills roosters over the years and I knew they were toughest to hunt the first couple of hours of the mourning. They seemed to hold tight to the wettest areas until mid-mourning and then ventured further into the upland habitat to feed.
As we were working back towards the truck, a rooster flushed of it’s own accord and I should have held fire. He was flying over dense, tall, cattails but I shot anyway. It’s was an ugly scene trying to get Bo into that jungle and keeping my feet dry and eyes free of sticky cattail fuzz. After considerable disagreement about my role as a hunter expected to cleanly kill birds in delicate fields and her role as a relentless pursuer of wounded birds, we retired to the truck for a snack and reconciliation.
And wouldn’t you know, as I sat on the truck seat feeding morsels of my sandwich to Bo, I watched a rooster pheasant quickly skirt the edge of an opening and run into some dark weeds.
Bo sensed my heightened attitude and danced circles around me while scanning the skies for falling training dummies. I slowed when we approached the weeds and soon Bo dove headlong into cockleburs and yucca. The rooster boiled out, gained some speed and I tumbled him before he reached anything wet. There was a considerable exchange of expectation and surrender before I had the rooster and most of his plumage in hand. This exchange was greatly facilitated by the flushing of a couple of hens near by.
As Bo actually began hunting, I noticed a pickup easing towards us. I soon noticed that it was the Game Warden and headed in his direction. As we neared his parked truck I managed to slip a lead over Bo’s head and urged her to exhibit at least a moderate display of obedience for the next few minutes. I stood on Bo’s lead to shorten it as I pulled the rooster out of my coat. The warden said he noticed that she seemed to be hunting well as she had flushed a couple of hens as he approached. I couldn’t deny her that, but I did offer that her obedience was less than stellar. I told him that my wife referred to her as “Bo the Bully“. He stated, “Yeah, I can see some bully in her”.
In our conversation he noted that he had checked 26 hunters that mourning with a total of two roosters. I told him I’d been seeing a few but less than I’d hoped. I also told him that we’d lost a bird just a little earlier. He then told me of a fellow he used to hunt with who didn’t own a dog. He said when the guy knocked a bird down that he was certain wasn’t dead, he made no immediate effort to retrieve it. He said the guy marked where it fell and walked off to give it a chance to dig in. Then several minutes later he would walk to the spot and invariably find the bird very near to where it fell. Said he believed that the cripples only run because they hear or see your immediate approach. If the hunter or dog don’t race right over, the bird is much more likely to just dig in right where it fell. The observation sounded reasonable and I filed it away.
The Warden also stated that for some reason he had noticed the local pheasants had been venturing deeper into the hills then normal. He said he thought they were chasing grasshoppers and suggested I hunt higher than the meadow floor.
The Warden returned to his truck and Bo and I crossed the two track and began working a wide valley that lead down from a tall range. We hadn’t hunted up ten feet of elevation when Bo got birdy and soon flushed several hen pheasants followed by a lone rooster!
I hit him just as he crested a rise and Bo found him thrashing on the other side. I was able to recover him from Bo rather quickly because of all the commotion and scent in the area.
We hadn’t worked 50 yards in the opposite direction and Bo was birdy again. Hens flushed close and another rooster was cackling towards the marsh. He didn’t cackle long or far and Bo was half way to him when he hit the ground. He also had a lot of life left in him but the cover was thin so she didn’t have too tough a time catching him.
Not wanting to prove that she held an equal voice in our decision making, I pretended that I didn’t care that she kept this bird rather than releasing it to me, and I somehow got her in her kennel by feeding her every hot dog in the cooler. How she swallowed them without loosening her grip on the bird is still a mystery.
The Warden had never left our location as he completed bookwork and some lunch. He said he watched the whole show and thought I had a pretty darn good pup. He noted that all three roosters were juveniles and asked if I was going to hunt grouse for the rest of the day. I told him of my plans to drive back east and try for a limit of prairie chickens. He asked if had ever heard of the Nebraska Grand Slam? He and a couple of buddies used to try to shoot a limit of mallards, pheasants and grouse in one day. He said that in all the years they tried, only one of them had ever gotten all of them. Sheesh, I didn’t need to hear of another challenge.
As we rounded a corner towards the highway, the couple who had been hunting across the lake from me earlier, were lounging against a high bank along the track. They were a friendly husband and wife team from Colorado. They had a canvas topper on their truck that looked like something I would own. We talked for a few minutes and they shared that the husband had been hoping for a prairie chicken, but it looked like he wouldn’t get one this trip. I showed them on the CRP Map Atlas, two fields I had shot many chickens out of that season, about an hour east of where we were. I told them I was on my way there, if they wanted to follow. The husband said he thought they’d try on another trip. I told him not to do that. You have to do everything you can while you can. Tomorrows opportunities are consumed by other interests. His wife agreed and said she’d get him over that one way or another. I hope he got his chicken.
It was about an hour and a half to a new chicken field that I’d heard hadn’t made it onto the current Nebraska CRP Map. Biologist Bill said he sent another non-resident hunter there a few days earlier and he shot a limit of prairie chickens, and he would appreciate another scouting report.
This was a high-water year and many roads in the eastern Sandhills were flooded. I had to wade through boot top water to get into the field. The area was dog-leg shaped and about 1-½ miles deep with varied width. It was bordered on the west by a clean pasture and on the east by a picked soy bean pivot. Chickens love soybeans. A chicken flushed from the pivot corner near the road, but I didn’t shoot. Nebraska law doesn’t allow shooting within the right-of-way and even in this remote water locked area, you can’t fudge on dual limits. I couldn’t help but wonder if that wasn’t my limit chicken I was watching fly away.
There appeared to be a long line of ponds along the eastern edge, as there were a lot of cottonwoods. Most of the area had too many cedars as well. Bo and I made our way to the higher west side to work along the perimeter fence. I was pretty sure any chickens were going to avoid the trees even if they were near soybeans.
There’s been considerable research conducted, regarding lesser prairie-chicken habitat needs, that has revealed a strict avoidance of man-made structures and trees. Comparing those studies to my experience, I believe the same is true of greater chickens. To my recollection, the only time I have found chickens near man-made structures is in the winter when they may feed on waste grain near out buildings. Once they’ve fed, they fly back into the hills. You will occasionally notice prairie chickens perched in trees during the early morning in winter, although this trait is more common in sharptails, seeking the warmth of the mourning sun.
There were chickens along both sides of the fence. I dropped the first chicken that flushed and then there were more across the fence and a pair from behind me. I missed with my second shot and then hit the last of the pair. There were still a few chickens flushing in front of us, probably between fifteen and 20 in all, from our slight intrusion. A great weight had been lifted. I still had several shooting hours remaining and once we collected these two birds, I had plenty of time and birds to shoot my limit bird.
This was fairly open grass being about 20 feet above water line. There was what I was certain, a dead chicken about 25 yards in front of us and another dead chicken 30 yards behind us. Bo was still thrashing around bounding in the air hoping that even more birds would flush. I think she knew how this worked. For the first few days of our hunting, I’m certain she thought that the birds flushed from my pockets. After all, that’s where the training dummies she’d been retrieving all summer, came from.
I was hoping for a nice adult male chicken for a mount. Biologist Bill said they look their best in late October having completed their fall molt, so I searched for the larger bird that fell behind me. I couldn’t find the darn thing, so I went ahead to help Bo find the first bird we knocked down. It took a few minutes to find it which was ridiculous. It was laying out in the open, but Bo flushed a couple more chickens on the wild side of range but I already had enough trouble on the ground. I found the bird, noticing that it was a male chicken, but probably a juvenile, I just stood near it and waited for Bo to stumble onto it. She seemed very proud to have found the bird all on her own. She still thinks to this day that I wouldn’t have brought home a single bird in the three years we’ve hunted together if it were not for her superb abilities.
I found the other chicken as well and this time she didn’t get to touch it. It was a beautiful full plumaged, male with long pinnate. I had a nice male chicken and sharptail mounted and hoped to replace the 20 year old chicken mount with a new one, and this guy was perfect.
Now, where did all those other chickens go? Most of them appeared to follow the fence line deeper into the section so that’s where we went. Bo and I suffered through a couple of hours with a few chickens that flushed at full choke and hope range, but I didn’t shoot. I wasn’t carrying a full choke and I knew with three shooting hours left, I could find one chicken.
I had only once before been close to a limit of pheasants and chickens in the same day and that was in Kansas many years earlier. I was hunting with my friend Larry and I shot four roosters and two chickens. We lost one of my roosters and the first chicken I shot that day, in a field of standing milo. Most hunters wouldn’t believe the day we had as we each limited out on quail before 10:00 a.m. and with near limits of pheasants, we crossed the border to Nebraska and shot several more quail that afternoon. I think we counted 13 coveys of quail that day. If I had retrieved all my birds that day and taken a combination limit of four roosters and two chickens, I still wouldn’t have counted them as my dual limit. I was hunting as a guest in Larry’s area on land he had permission on. I only count dual limits on ground that I secured or located. I wanted to be able to show fellow hunters that you don’t need to know the right hunter or landowner to shoot a dual limit. You can do it all on your own.
I soon realized why the chickens were so close to the bordering pasture. Sandburs. Hillsides covered with nasty yellow sandburs. Bo learned bur avoidance in a hurry, but there were so many that it was impossible for either of us to take two steps without scores of them stuck to our legs and in her pads. There were no burs within 35 yards of the perimeter fence line. I’m sure that rancher had his pasture sprayed and the over spray killed burs on the CRP side of the fence.
I feel like I learned something new about chickens from this lesson. I’ve shot pheasants in sandbur patches before, but couldn’t recall any grouse or chickens. There’s a lot of time in a hunting day to ponder such things. Pheasants have long legs with no feathers below their knees. Grouse and chickens legs are fully feathered right down to their feet. There are a lot of sandburs in the Sandhills, as you might guess. But I could recall few times that I ever shot a prairie grouse with a sand bur in it’s plumage. With their relatively short, fully feathered legs, they would be expected to avoid low growing sandburs as much as possible.
I swung back towards the road but about 50 yards off the fence line and we were into nearly a dozen more chickens right away. One shot, one dead hen chicken and we were finished a couple hours before the end of the day.
Bo and I both splashed back to the truck, through the high water without a care. She played in simple unknowing pleasure, not understanding the tremendous relief and pride I felt, in finally shooting one of the top three dual limits I’ve ever wanted. In my mind, prairie chickens and pheasants go together like sharptails and sandhill cranes, ruffed grouse and woodcock and chukars and Hungarian partridge.
Sandhill cranes and sharptails had just moved to the top of my “I want” list.
I have to say, that when I returned to camp, there were three hunters from down south on their way to South Dakota to hunt pheasants. They had a nicer truck, more expensive dogs and a cool aluminum dog trailer. I’m sure they were anticipating their South Dakota pheasant hunt with as much enthusiasm as I have any of my dual limit hunts. But they were driving through opening weekend Nebraska, where I had just shot a limit of three pheasants and three prairie chickens, on public access land. When I answered about my day, they just asked if I had hunted or heard anything about the pheasant numbers in South Dakota. “Yeah, there are some there too,” I replied.
I can understand a group of friends heading to South Dakota for an annual pheasant hunt and even paying for access. I’m sure it’s as much fun as any hunt I’ve ever been on. But I can’t understand a guy not striking out on his own, just once, to test his abilities, down in the trenches, one on one, with public access birds.