First Full Day of Pheasant

Wednesday, Nov 8 - Today's weather topped out around 30 and winds were 5-15mph. Overall, a really nice day to be pheasant hunting. We first went to a GPA about 35 min SSW of Chamberlain & hunted it from 10am-12:15pm. It had great cover, food plots, wetlands with cattails, and lots of hen pheasants. Overall, we flushed 30+ hens & 3 roosters. Dan shot 1 of them & Winnie trailed the very alive cripple until catching & retrieving it. The other rooster flushed wild just out of range in front of me & the 3rd one was in front of Dan, but he was obstructed by a tree & couldn't shoot.

We grabbed lunch to go at McDonalds in Chamberlain & met our friend (& Winnie's breeder) Lance Fargo at the hotel to make a plan for the afternoon hunt. In the afternoon, we checked-out 2 of the other spots the WCO noted for us - 1 of them was worthless (a drought here this summer caused many of the grasslands to be hayed for emergency animal feed), 1 looked 'ok'. We also stopped and hunted a 1/4 mile swath of roadside right-of-way along a sunflower field. Winnie had a beautiful point on a rooster that held perfectly until Dan flushed it. He them missed what he described as a "break-away layup". We proceeded on & hunted the 'ok' spot noted by the WCO (a WIA just NE of Presho) for the last hour of the day & put up around a half dozen hens & 1 rooster that was just out of gun range. We hunted Lance's 3 dogs, Winnie, & Jax all together. While all of the dogs are good, the combo of 4 pointers and a flusher made things a bit tough (keeping Jax in range). We also realized that Jax's whistle command for "Stop/Sit" is the same as Lance's dogs' command for "go"... We're figuring it out...