Thursday AM pheasants

With Dan not feeling well and wanting to change our luck on pheasants we decided to sleep in a little (compared to duck hunting) and hunt pheasants this morning. It worked on all counts. Dan woke up feeling better and we hunted Wolf Creek WMA from nine to noon and got three roosters and two Hungarian Partridge. The exact tally was 3 pheasants for Bill & 2 Partridge for Dan. We hunted Maggie and Winnie together again and they are proving to be an awesome team. The only thing they are not doing to near perfection is that neither dog has been very steady on birds we have shot. Our desire to quickly and cleanly retrieve the birds as well as not turn our hunting trip into a training session has given them enough leeway to start developing this habit. That will be something to correct another time...

We hunted a combination of grasslands and woody/brushy areas, with most of the birds coming from the brushy areas. In most of the cases, Winnie was finding in pointing the birds, then Maggie would pick up the trail to follow the running bird until she got it in the air. These trails would last anywhere from 50 to 500 yards. We also flushed three hens today, with one of them being an example of the point and flush teamwork above that did take about 500 yards of trailing before putting the bird in the air. What talent and persistence these dogs have! In addition to the 3 roosters we got, we also missed a very easy one. Win and Mag had been a little birdy and working up a field/grass edge when a rooster erupted 5 yards in front of us. I missed 2x and Dan missed once before his gun jammed - preventing a follow-up shot. Also of note, Winnie had a beautiful point on the covey (approx. 8 birds) of partridge. She was about 15 yards downwind and held it until Mag went in and flushed the birds.

Weather this morning was very pleasant. Mostly sunny with a morning temperature of around 50 and a noontime temperature of 60. We had a light breeze most of the morning.