Modern Pheasant Hunting

By Steve Grooms

Completely revised and updated reference for pheasant hunters. Guidance on making the best use of pointing dogs and advice on guns, gear, and ammo. Includes a variety of pheasant recipes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stackpole Books
• Release date: Aug 10, 2005
• ISBN: 9780811753036

Book preview

Preface

I was raised hunting pheasants, have hunted them all my life, and hope to hunt them for a few more years until I can no longer totter through the weeds with a shotgun. I think I understand them pretty well. The experienced ones sure act as if they understand me. When hunting pheasants, I fancy that I try to become like them, emulating that unlikely mixture of Apache warrior and Russian chess master.

If a fairy godmother ever appeared to offer me three wishes, I have one in mind: just once, for one exhilarating day, I’d love to be a springer spaniel smashing through a marsh filled with tricky roosters. Just imagine: running flat out through shifting screens of cattail stalks with only inches of visibility; sucking in the maddening scent of nearby cock birds; coming at last face-to-face with the cacophonous eruption of a rooster whose streaming tail would just elude my snapping jaws. And would I hunt obediently, always under my master’s control? Hell, no!

Welcome to the second edition of Modern Pheasant Hunting. The first edition appeared in 1982, more than two decades ago. The book was forward looking then, but many dramatic changes have altered the sport of pheasant hunting. In fact, the first edition of this book was responsible for some of those changes.

The origins of this book date back to 1976 until 1982, when I edited a magazine about hunting and fishing in the upper Midwest. It was a fascinating time to be an outdoor editor.

For about a century, outdoor journalism was dominated by three magazines emanating from Madison Avenue. Since there were no competing media discussing hunting and fishing, by default what the Big Three magazines printed was the accepted view of outdoor recreation.

The editors of the Big Three lived in the Northeast and reflected its regional biases. Of course, they ventured outside New England. They went west for trout fishing and big-game hunting. Sometimes they traveled south for bass fishing. They took trips to Canada and Alaska. But they remained northeasterners wherever they went. And there was one region where they never went: the Midwest.

The Midwest has long been dismissed as Flyover Land—an empty and inconsequential place where people are nice and nothing happens. The editors of the Big Three were ignorant of midwestern hunting and fishing traditions. Since they looked down their noses at any form of fishing requiring boats, they failed to understand the structure-fishing movement when it revolutionized fishing on inland lakes. Preoccupied with stream trout, the Big Three’s editors didn’t appreciate the midwestern angler’s obsession with walleyes, northern pike, and smallmouth bass inlakes.

My magazine was invented rather accidentally at a time when fishing techniques were being revolutionized. Although the magazine was pain -fully amateurish, midwestern sportsmen forgave our many errors because they were thrilled that someone was finally talking to them about their kind of fishing.

Those were heady times. A few innovative men were reinventing fishing. I believed that the new style of fishing owed less to technology than to a vigorously analytical approach to fishing. The best of the new breed of angler understood fish behavior better than did fisheries scientists of the time. It was fun to be an editor then because each issue of the magazine offered tips that were more original and authentic than anything ever printed.

But I was struck by a bizarre contrast between my magazine’s hunting and fishing articles. Our fishing stories were so original they couldn’t have been written a year earlier. The hunting stories didn’t even try to say anything new and could have been written any time in the past half century. Something had happened intellectually in angling that had not happened in hunting.

It became a challenge for me to bring to upland hunting the analytical thinking that was transforming fishing. I naturally began with the pheasant, the bird I loved. And I started with the primary conundrum of pheasant hunting: Why do pheasants behave so differently at different times? When I set out to answer that question, I didn’t have any idea what the answer might be.

Above all, I burned to undo the damage done by decades of poor advice from the Big Three. The outdoor experts on Madison Avenue had created a body of conventional wisdom about pheasant hunting that was condescending, outdated, and wrong in every detail.

According to the Big Three, pheasants were stupid and slow birds that were easy to hunt. Their writers made snide comparisons between the fat, dumb, and vulgar pheasant and the noble ruffed grouse of New England. While the grouse was the king of upland birds, the pheasant was the common man’s bird, a quarry suitable for boys and old men. Shooting a lumbering pheasant, said the Big Three, was so easy it was hardly sport at all. Pheasant hunting was invariably depicted as a group activity, and the only hunting technique described was the mass drive. All hunts took place in cornfields.

No dogs appeared in pheasant stories. The Big Three claimed that the rooster pheasant was too rude to be hunted by pointing dogs and blamed pheasants for ruining countless pointers. Somehow, we were supposed to respect the noble grouse because it would squat passively in front of a quivering setter, whereas those wicked roosters would boogie off and thus avoid ending up in the oven.

One bit of idiocy repeated endlessly was the observation that a flushing rooster shifts from vertical to horizontal flight at some point in the flush. (They don’t!) According to the Big Three, a flushing rooster would stop and hang motionlessly in the air as it shifted gears. (Not true!) Readers of the Big Three learned that this was the magic moment for our shot, when that poor rooster was hanging in the air like a shirt on a clothesline. (If a rooster could suddenly stop, that actually would be the worst time to shoot.) This bunk was recycled endlessly by writers who did their hunting in bars, cranking out pheasant articles by stealing from each other’s copy.

As a pheasant hunter who was passionate about my sport, it disgusted me to see pheasant hunting misrepresented. I didn’t enjoy the insults heaped upon pheasant hunters, although as a midwesterner, I’m accustomed to a lack of respect from the self-appointed spokesmen for American culture. What did sting, however, was their boundless contempt for the pheasant. Writers referred to Chinese ring-necked pheasants as Chinks, as if they were illegal aliens. Writers grudgingly acknowledged that pheasants were attractive, but in a garish and vulgar way, like a hooker in a miniskirt, Day-Glo halter top, rank perfume, and too much makeup.

I’m getting angry again just remembering all this!

With Modern Pheasant Hunting, I was determined to give the American hunter a new sort of book. It would rehabilitate the reputation of the pheasant and describe the startling ways the sport had evolved. It would bring to pheasants the rigorous analysis that structure fishing had brought to fishing. It would be original. And it would be a fervent affirmation of a sport that had been lied about by hack writers who weren’t really writers and sure as hell weren’t pheasant hunters.

I sweated when the book appeared, waiting to hear critics howl, You can’t say that! But it never happened. Although the book broke new ground in every chapter and made many new claims, veteran hunters wrote me to say, Thank God somebody finally got it right. And I had the amusing experience of seeing my radical thinking become the new orthodoxy. Notions that were heretical when Modern Pheasant Hunting appeared are conventional wisdom today. Phrases and concepts I introduced in the book now regularly show up in pheasant-hunting articles.

But I had one odd regret. Several years after this book was published, I wrote another book on pheasant hunting, and at that time it occurred to me that I had been stupid to call my first book Modern Pheasant Hunting. If that’s the name of your first book, what do you call the second? Ultra- Modern Pheasant Hunting?

Let’s sum up the changes in pheasant hunting documented in Modern Pheasant Hunting. The old pheasant hunting was about cornfields, mass drives, and hunting in large groups. Dogs had no part in it. The right shotgun was a full-choke pump or autoloader stuffed with five shells, probably short magnum 4s. The sport involved no strategy, just a little military marching and a bunch of shooting. One pheasant hunt was a lot like any other.

Modern pheasant hunting is about chasing pheasants in small groups, or even solo, and always with a dog. It takes place almost anywhere except cornfields, but mostly in dense cover. The modern pheasant shotgun is an open-choked side-by-side or over-and-under. Modern pheasant hunting has evolved from a no-brainer one-strategy cornfield hunt to a swashbuckling sport that emphasizes fast thinking and strategic maneuvering.

I used to think the good old days of pheasant hunting were behind us. When I was a kid during the Soil Bank days, the sky would go dark when flocks of pheasants went up. Hunters would kill so many pheasants on opening weekend that they’d bring boxes of them to VFW halls. It wasn’t much of a gift, really. Pheasants were too common to be seen as valuable.

It’s too easy to bemoan the passing of the golden age of pheasant hunting. But I’ve listened to old-timers tell stories about their hunts without hearing anything to suggest that they got more pleasure from their easy hunting than today’s hunter gets from his challenging hunting. The old-style pheasant hunting did nothing to rejuvenate the soul of the pheasant hunter, nor did it exalt this noble game bird.

Modern pheasant hunting has become more challenging, yet I count that a gain. Modern pheasant hunting is all about the excitement of chasing one of the most beautiful, elusive, and unpredictable game birds in the world. The sport has matured. It has acquired complexity, beauty, and respect . . . even, by God, a bit of glamour! Sportsmen now spend thousands of dollars to hunt a bird once dismissed as too easy to merit respect, and some dream of having at least one great pheasant hunt in their life, one moment of transcendent passion with this fabulous bird.

You can decide for yourself whether pheasants are beautiful or garish. Judge for yourself whether shooting them is as easy as other writers have said. But don’t tell me—don’t begin to tell me—this is a stupid or easy bird to hunt. Don’t tell me this is a sport for boys and old men. Don’t tell me you can hunt pheasants without using every bit of your brain, your legs, and your lungs. Don’t tell me this is a bird that dogs, even pointing dogs, cannot hunt. Indeed, the rooster pheasant is the ultimate challenge for a pointing dog, a great quarry that brings out greatness in the best dogs.

I wrote the original version of Modern Pheasant Hunting in an effort to redefine a sport that had been stupidly misrepresented. Although I wasn’t consciously trying to do it, the book also helped establish a new ethic for the sport. What pleases me now above all is the way so many people hunt pheasants with zeal, respect, and skill. The sport has evolved in many positive ways, and I would like to think my book played some sort of role in that.

If you are an accomplished pheasant hunter, you already know you have mastered the many skills required by an incredibly demanding and beautiful sport. Hold your head high. And never forget that it is the pheasant that makes pheasant hunting such a fascinating, maddening, and glorious sport. Treasure each bird as a gift from God.

1

The Challenge

Let’s follow a pheasant hunt. Imagine that you, like Superman, have X-ray vision. You can see through the weeds, which will allow you to understand everything that happens on this hunt.

Early in the morning, a sport utility vehicle (SUV) rolls along a gravel road and crunches to a stop near a marshy wildlife management area. The hunters check their watches, noting that it’s a few minutes before shooting hours begin. Somewhere out in the marsh, a rooster pheasant crows defiantly, a raspy two-note cry that pierces the silence. The center of the area is a shallow lake, with a fat fringe of cattails and bulrushes where the walking is pretty good. That’s where the hunt will take place.

Four hunters clamber out of the vehicle. It is the fifth day of the season, so the pheasants have not yet experienced their second weekend of gunning pressure. The hunters have no dogs. They don’t know what you know: that there are five roosters in the weeds they will be walking. The hunters stretch, load their shotguns, and check their watches. Time to go!

The slowest man to get ready bangs the tailgate of the SUV shut. With your special vision, you can see a cock pheasant about a hundred yards from the vehicle. This is an old rooster, a veteran of last year’s season. He hears that tailgate and recognizes it for what it is. While the hunters are joking and getting lined up, this rooster breaks into a run. The hunters have barely gotten under way when the rooster sprints out of the management area into some standing corn on a privately owned farm adjacent to the public hunting area. He learned last year that hunters don’t bother him on this side of the fence. These hunters will never see him or even have any idea he was close by when they started their hunt.

The party has covered less than a hundred yards when they approach the second rooster. Hearing them approach, this cock sneaks nervously ahead and to the right of the oncoming line. He pauses from time to time, listening carefully, then darts through the weeds again, always drifting ahead and to the right of the drive. Finally he senses he has successfully outflanked the fellow on the far-right side of the driving line. He hunkers down in some sedge. The hunters plow ahead, not guessing that two roost ers have already slipped away to safety.

The third cock is a young-of-the-year bird that was lucky enough to be somewhere else when hunters stomped through the management area on opening day. The approaching danger alarms him. He ducks into a clump of cattails to hide. When he decides the hunters are too close for comfort, he panics and takes to his wings. There is a shout and two guns boom. The young rooster falls. Someone yells, Looks like the opening-day crowds didn’t get ’em all!

They move again, rounding the far end of the field and coming back. Now and then they kick up a hen or two. Soon the fourth rooster perceives the danger. This bird has learned to associate safety with the wet part of the marsh. That is where he heads now, scooting through the weeds, heading always toward the wettest part. The man on the left side of the drive is determined to let no pheasant outflank him, so he sloshes along in ankle-deep water. The cock is surprised to hear a predator coming at him so noisily, but he swims across a patch of open water and scrambles up on a little island of bulrushes. The hunters pass him by.

The fifth rooster decides to play it cool. He slinks into a tiny pocket of marsh grass that wouldn’t seem capable of hiding a grasshopper. Although the nearest hunter almost steps on this rooster’s tail, the skulking bird doesn’t move. Then the line stops, for this hunter has spent the morning guzzling coffee, and now his bladder is sending distress signals. He lays his gun across a patch of weeds, unzips, and seeks relief. The rooster decides it has been spotted. It takes two quick steps, hops into the air, and erupts raucously from the cattails. The nearest hunter isn’t holding his shotgun at the moment, so this pheasant reaches the safety of a weedy fence line in an adjoining field. Everyone in the party laughs. The hunter, now zipping up, says, Shoot, I’ll bet we’ve been walking by roosters all morning.

They haven’t, although it’s easy to understand how they got that impression. Thanks to your magical X-ray vision, you know that roosters have at least five different ways of avoiding hunters: by flushing at close range, running wildly, sitting tight, sneaking, or even swimming away from trouble. Five ways . . . and from the point of view of a hunter, only one of them—flushing at close range—is desirable.

So how can anyone hunt such a contrary bird? Basically, you have to keep in mind all the escape tactics available to roosters, and then conduct a hunt in such a way that you eliminate all the birds’ options except flushing at close range. This is easier said than done. If you hunt alone with no canine assistance, the odds are stacked heavily against you. If you hunt with a gang, you will succeed more often, because formations of hunters can trap cocks in places they have to flush from. If you hunt with dogs, you’ll do better still. The party of hunters you just watched had about as much luck as they could expect, seeing two of the five cocks that were present and bagging just one. With the aid of one or two good dogs, they might have bagged four of the five roosters in that cover.

Don’t underestimate the pheasant. This is a smart, tough, enterprising game bird.

Well, that’s pheasant hunting, and it still beats me why anyone ever thought this sport was easy. One of the sport’s conundrums arises from the way cocks can elude you in two entirely different ways: by sitting tight or running whenever you try to get near them. The more you try to cut off one of those options, the more you leave yourself open to being beaten by the second. It’s like the dilemma of a batter facing a great pitcher. Most Hall of Fame pitchers have at least two completely dissimilar pitches, usually a fastball that can be heard but not seen and a slow curve that drops off the table when it breaks. No wonder hunters strike out so often.

THE BIRD WE HUNT

Talk to a biologist about the pheasant and one of the first things he is apt to mention is that the ringneck is an exotic. I agree, except I fear biologists mean something different than I have in mind. Some managers can’t hide their sense of disapproval, as if the pheasant had stowed away from its Asian fatherland and slipped past customs into the New World with a phony passport.

The pheasant is as American as you or I. Like us, it is a transplant from another continent that has had to scratch hard to make a go of it in its adopted country. Like us, it represents the culmination of many decades of genetic melting-pot mixing. We could even argue that the pheasant has a superior claim to American citizenhood, since it has been on this soil for well over a hundred generations (though those generations admittedly are short ones). Although the ringneck cannot claim to have come over on the Mayflower, the second pheasant stocker in American history was no less a figure than George Washington, who released several birds at Mount Vernon during his first presidency. Ben Franklin’s son-in-law also tried to start a local pheasant population. Friend, those are mighty impressive credentials! If the pheasant has not earned the right to be called American, I don’t know who has.

Outdoor writers in the 1950s liked to ascribe qualities of the American personality to the pheasant. The bird has an undeniable cheekiness, a sort of cocksure American common man’s bearing.