Yeah, buoy...!!! (Read that in a Flava Flav voice...)

 As you can tell from the title of this post, we are quite happy with today’s pheasant hunt. Our first afternoon of actual pheasant hunting was a short, but good one.  We hunted the English River Wildlife Area which is about 30 miles southwest of our hotel from 3:30 until 4:45 (sunset was 4:45).  We hunted 15 minutes longer than legal (shooting time ended at 4:30) because we had assumed that shooting time ended 30 min after sunset - like everywhere else in the US we've ever hunted. It turns out that Iowa pheasant hunting hours are 8-4:30 daily, regardless of sunrise/sunset times! Winnie hunted well, although by the end of the afternoon, her catheter site was inflamed & bleeding a little. Both Dan and I were developing heel blisters, which contributed to the decision to stop at at a time that we thought was 30 minutes before we had-to (but turned out to be 15 minutes after we should have!) We didn't get too bent out of shape about this because we had 3 pheasants already & were both pretty content.

We were hunting Winnie and Jackson together for that time & both dogs performed flawlessly. Dan shot and killed 2 birds on 4 shots and I got no birds on one shot (firing to back up Dan on one of his birds).  Jackson got one bird (Dan won’t let me take credit for the bird, even though it was my dog that found it) that was unable to flush. However, it had enough life in it to run for about 40 yards through the woods until he caught up & got a hold of it.  The 2 birds that Dan ended-up shooting had both been trailed by Winnie & Jax for quite a long way, with Winnie registering multiple points along the trail before continuing to pursue. Jackson was also participating in those trailing duties nicely. Jackson retrieved both birds (because I sent him for them) despite the fact that Winnie was also in the vicinity of both & could have handled that job. I sent him on the first one because it was in tall/thick grass and I didn’t think it was hit hard enough to be killed cleanly. The second bird fell into some heavy cover and Jackson had a perfect mark on it from an elevated position so I knew he would get it quickly and cleanly. Dan assures me he has no problem with those decisions, but I’m going to be more careful in the future & make sure that I don’t let the retrievers hog all of the retrieves for the remainder of the week.

With us wrapping up at 4:45, we had enough daylight to clean the birds on the tailgate at the hunting site, so that job is already complete!  Since we were fairly busy in the middle of the day, we didn’t have time to take a picture of my nautical find from this morning - so we used the little bit of extra light we had this evening to snap that picture & include it here.