Editor's note: I wrote this story two years ago, after my first hunt with Dee, my pointing lab.)
The Perfect Game Bird By Tony Dean
At precisely 12:16 on October 19, the opening day of South Dakota’s pheasant season, the first rooster of the year exploded from sorghum between Dar and I.. No matter how much you anticipate it, that first bird always surprises you. Joe was also to my right, along with our littermate pups of 8 months, Dee and Gunner. The bird gained altitude, and turned left toward the shelterbelt. I instinctively shouldered my gun, swung up behind and through the bird, and kept swinging though I don’t remember seeing the barrel or front sight, pulling the trigger or feeling the recoil. What I do recall was an explosion of feathers as the bird fell out of sight. I don’t know how to describe the experience other than to call it exhilerating. Gunner dropped it at my feet.
I held the bird and turned it slowly as the sun glistened off the feathers. I cannot identify a single specific color yet know there are dozens. Each bird that becomes the first of a new season rekindles my energies, stirring genes that lay dormant much of the year. I admire the bird, imagining I am looking at a kalaidoscope, stroking the feathers, recalling the raucous flush, the cackle that startles as much as it surprises. This is the perfect game bird; a bird that has it all; beauty, the ability to befuddle man and dog alike and provide a delightful repast at the dinner table. It’s the bird about which E.C. Janes wrote, “The only reason you shoot one is so you can wring its damned neck.”
I remember one during a South Dakota Governor’s Hunt, that flew left to right across a milo field lined with hunters. Each fired two or three shots. The bird ran the gauntlet, unscathed, untouched with the only injuries, those it inflicted on the pride of 18 men who wondered how they could miss such a large target. Do not feel bad if you find yourself among them in missing what appears to be such an easy shot?
This much is true. A long-tailed cock pheasant appears to be about three feet long. However, the vital organs that a pellet or two must hit to bring the bird down, take up mere inches and they are located shortly behind the head. The bird propels itself with a few rapid wingbeats, then glides for some distance before repeating it. You don’t realize how fast it is going until you have one pass overhead at about 45 yards, especially if it is riding a stiff tailwind. But it needs no tail wind to travel as fast as most any duck. I once served as a blocker at the end of a cornfield where the birds had up to a mile to build their speed, boosted along with a 40 mph wind. I remember missing a dozen consecutive shots until I finally folded one after establishing a lead far longer than I thought necessary. It eventually happens to all pheasant hunters. They miss and wonder why.
About 175,000 pheasant hunters, nearly half visitors representing every state and a few foreign countries, converge on South Dakota each opening day. Some of them are famous and past hunters include John Wayne, Robert Stack, Wally Hilgenberg, Bud Grant, Kent Hrbek, Tim Laudner and enough former big time ball players to form their own league. Most visitors have hunted quail, ruffed grouse, ducks, geese, deer and turkeys. But many are on their first wild pheasant hunt and before the end of the first day, most will be humbled. In a good year, these hunters will average 2.1 birds per day on opening weekend. Imagine, that’s over 750,000 birds falling in two days. By the end of the third day, you don’t even miss them because there are so many more. I am guessing that about 60 percent of the hunters will leave the field on the second day of the season and go back to wherever they came from. It’s a pity they’ll miss the real pheasant hunting because only the young and gullible birds die opening weekend. Those that haven’t figured out when to run and when to fly are always the first to die.
I grew up in North Dakota where there have always been fewer pheasants than in South Dakota and didn’t move to South Dakota until well after the soil bank program expired, but it’s hard for me to imagine more birds than I have seen during the 90s. Plainly put, I have experienced numerous days over the past decade where I’ve seen upwards of a thousand birds, sometimes, it seemed, two or three times that many. After the first thousand, it’s hard to keep track. Experiences like that year after year tend to jade you a bit. I can tell you this much. It happens only in South Dakota.
There have been slim years too; years when the weather didn’t cooperate. A winter blizzard, especially a March storm with heavy, wet snow, can wreak havoc on a pheasant population. But it is no more devastating than a drought year such as 2001. During July and August at Pierre, the temperature frequently measured over 105 degrees and by the end of summer, we’d barely totaled a half-dozen inches of precipitation for the entire year. During the spring, before the searing hot summer, I estimated the pheasant population in my semi-rural neighborhood, a cluster of homes along the Missouri River separated from town by a range of hills, at about 45. By opening day, just 4 birds remained, two hens and two cocks. Something like that happened over much of South Dakota. Biologists said the population was down about 18 percent, but that depended on where you hunted. In some places, most in fact, hunters I talked with figured it was more like 90 percent.
I saw a similar loss in my neighborhood in 2003, only this time it was hail. It occurred in early June and the storm was only about a half-mile wide. It started about a mile west of my home along the Missouri River, crossed our area and headed east before petering out. The hail wasn’t particularly large, maybe marble size, but five inches covered the ground. Only a few pheasants in an otherwise healthy crop of neighborhood birds, survived.
In such years, many landowners are tempted to stock birds. Some even think it works. There was a time I thought it wouldn’t hurt, but as the years pass, I have grown cynical. I have concluded that where there’s habitat, there are pheasants. I remember a landowner friend who decided to cash in on commercial hunting by stocking 900 birds a few weeks before the season. On opening day, his guests couldn’t find a single bird. What happened? It wasn’t hard to figure. He had no cover, just lots of milo that was identical to the fields of the neighbors on all sides. I suspect 900 birds can disperse over a wide area, that is those that survived the predators that exist in the real world.
There’s another thing I dislike about stocking birds. It’s not very hard to tell the difference between they and wild birds. Pen raised birds often have short or non-existent tails, they’re sometimes overweight, fly slowly and provide less than desirable wingshooting sport. The only plus is that they’re meatier on the table. But, so’s chicken. If you’re not sure whether you’re hunting wild or stocked pheasants, look at the toes. At least one toe is usually clipped on stockers. Hunting stocked birds is not like the real thing and I seriously doubt many of them that are not bagged by hunters, contribute much to next year’s breeding stock.
A few years ago, I was a guest on a preserve pheasant hunt. The birds flew slowly, many had to be virtually kick-started into the air and most had tails that were about as short as most of the hunters were on experience. One of them wondered why these birds had such short tails because the ones he saw in photos had long tails.
“It’s the predators,” said the preserve operator. “They pull’em out.”
He’d have made a good used car salesman.
There are many ways to hunt pheasants but most revolve around large groups or small groups. Having done both, I much prefer going it alone or hunting with a handful of others. That means tailoring the size of cover to the size of the group. Big parties can hunt mega CRP fields, but a single hunter with a good dog can too, if he has the smarts to let the dog find the birds.
November and December are my favorite months for pheasant hunting. That time of year, finding birds isn’t difficult. Just look for thick cover. That’s the easy part. The hard part is flushing birds within shotgun range. There are few places I’d rather be that time of year than in a big cattail marsh. If you’re in good pheasant country, you’ll see lots of birds, but only a few within the effective range of a shotgun.
I remember a day last fall when Steve Halvorson, my wife, Dar, and Joe Hutmacher surrounded a small patch of cattails and moved as quietly as we could to avoid spooking the birds. Within seconds, at least a hundred birds took to the air. We were about 150 yards apart and each bird that flew between us split the distance.
But every once in a while, one will make a mistake. Usually, it’s a bird that chooses to sit tight, and that’s where a good dog will make the difference, sniffing it out and a flush and a shot later, you’ll stuff that cock in your game bag.
A few nights later, after properly aging the bird in your refrigerator, filet the breast from the rib cage. Cut it into three inch strips and dust with seasoned flour. Save the legs for soup. Heat a saute’ pan until it is very hot. Add a bit of olive oil, then quickly saute’ the pheasant pieces on both sides. It shouldn’t take more than a minute or two. Remove them from the pan. Add a few shots of good brandy or cognac to the pan to deglaze it, melt a quarter-stick of cold butter and reduce it all by half, stirring over low heat. Serve the pheasant with fresh spinach or green beans and oven-browned potatoes. Pour the pan sauce over the pheasant pieces, then pour a glass of good red wine and enjoy the last reason I consider the pheasant a perfect game bird.
(Additional notes - Pheasants are a remarkable bird. And they're no slam dunk, opening weekend excepted. Since I wrote this story, Dee has matured into a fine hunting dog. Joe is now the Chief of Police in Chamberlain, SD, and his dog, Gunner, was killed after being run over.)
