There are two times pheasants are easy. The first is opening weekend, and the other is immediately following the first snowfall.
It takes a weekend of heavy gunning pressure for roosters to wise up, and by the third day of the season, they are so spooked that they’ll take flight at the sound of a door slam. As the season progresses, they get wilder and take to heavy cover, where they remain just as wild.
But that first snow. Oh my. That’s when I want to be in a cattail marsh. The birds bore into the clumps of snow at the base of the cattails. They don’t run but they do hide. However, they can’t hide from the nose of a good bird dog, and I’m fortunate in having one. My 4-year-old pointing Lab lives for such days.
Give her six inches of fluffy snow and a cattail marsh and it must be the closest thing to doggy heaven. The smell of a pheasant must be, to a bird dog, an intoxicating aroma, for they seek it out. And the flush out of snowy cover is something to behold.
It is as if the bird explodes from the cover, sending a shower of flurries as it rockets skyward. Unfortunately, such conditions rarely last more than a day or two, for even a couple sunny days reduce the snow cover to a point where the birds don’t feel as secure and they go back to being wild as usual.
