Timber!

"Thank God we don't get all the government we pay for." ~ Will Rogers

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

I honestly don't know what to think about what I am about to write.  This is either yet another way that our tax dollars are used wisely by benevolent city management or wasteful expenditure that people would spend more wisely privately.  I just don't know enough to say. 

The city came today - in freezing weather - and cut down the Ash tree in front of our house.  It was in the right of way so this was something that us citizens do together.  

Here's Eagan's web page about the Emerald Ash Borer, the evil that lurked in my aging tree.   

Evidently the hoped for Ash Borer winter apocalypse where huge numbers of the evil insect died in the long and cold winter of 2019 did not come to pass.  

https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/disturbance/invasive_species/eab/control_management/cold_hardiness/

So, here is the dignified and glorious fall of our stately tree that has been our driveway sentinel for a score of years.

 

On that sad note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff 

Quail

“I knew the blur of wings, the rocketing form, and the Great Moment that only hunters know when all existence draws down to two points and a single line. And the universe holds its breath. And what may be and what will be meet and become one – before the echo returns to its source.” ~ Peter Dunne

Gentle Readers and Love Ones,

Unlike the pheasant hunting, Rowdy and I enjoyed some success with Culbertson’s Quail population. Which puzzles me because Quail are much more difficult to shoot than pheasants are.  Fate is perverse that way.

We flushed a nice covey of quail the very first morning.  But before I describe that, I need to cover two different topics.  As we entered Pheasant Alley – which I will describe in a moment – I discovered that I had to do some Rowdy training I had not counted on.  First there was an evil oil well head and then the sand spurs attacked.

Nebraska is moderately productive oil country.   

“Nodding Donkeys” freckle the landscape.  One of them dominates the entry to Pheasant Alley.  As we approached that first morning, Rowdy was all excited to be on the hunt, when suddenly the huge pumping well entered his awareness and he dropped to his belly and began growling and barking at it.  He wasn’t going to settle down until we got him used to it, so I heeled him up, told him he was a good dog and we went over and got acquainted with the pump. 

The entrance to Pheasant Alley guarded by the Nodding Donkey

After that we found the sandspurs that are ubiquitous in the sandy margins between the cover and the fields.  It took me longer than it should to learn that I either needed to ensure Rowdy remained deep in the cover or well out in the corn stubble to avoid the patches of sand spurs that were always in between.

Cenchrus Spinifex haunted my barefoot childhood in Central Florida and this trip did nothing to change my hatred of the evil weed.

It was cold that morning and I had totally forgotten to bring the metal comb I keep in my vest for just such deburring issues.  So, I got bogged down in pulling sand spurs out of Rowdy’s coat bare handed.  This was when Don gave me the first of many great pointers.  “Geoff, if you stop every time to pull his burs, you are just teaching him to use you.  Make sure his feet are OK and let him decide if he wants to hunt or stop.”  Great advice and I strove to use it all the rest of the week.  Rowdy got the idea quickly enough.

Pheasant Alley is a narrow, cover choked valley that runs between two cornfields.  It runs north-south, about three-four hundred yards and is around 50 yards wide at the north end and widens considerable out to 150 yards at the south.  To work it well would require at least 4 hunters and a dog but since we only had us, I took the west rim and Don and Jake beat the cover as we worked south. 

More than a few wily pheasants did the bug-out-boogie thing and we caught glimpses of them in the distance.  As we neared the southern end of the alley, Jake flushed up roughly 5-8 quail and I missed twice.

Quail add yet another issue to the wingshooting problem. A flushing covey demands your attention and you must have the mental discipline to control your startle reaction and focus on one bird.

The next day, we are just to the east of Pheasant Alley.  I’m in the corn stubble on the far side of the barb wire.  Don and Jake are in the margin of the cover.  There is a moderately sized scrub tree poking up out of the cover.  Rowdy is doing a pretty good job of quartering, when he stops, runs about ten yards from the scrub tree and points.  I’m stuck on the wrong side of the fence and yelling, “Look at Rowdy!”  Don doesn’t hear me but notices Rowdy anyway and walks over to flush.

 A huge covey of quail erupts from the tree.  At least 15 of them.  The go everywhere at once in a confusing cloud and the dogs go mad trying to chase all of them.   I manage to focus on one, still 30 yards away or so and moving fast from left to right.  I empty the gun and totally miss the bird even though it helpfully bent its flight in a circle around me trying to work back into the cover.

The next day, Don let me out to walk a huge expanse of public land out to the west of Culbertson. This is one of the few times I remembered that I could take pictures.

 Towards the end of this hike, Rowdy and I had wandered to the south up a slight rise of agricultural terracing.  In between the berms of the terrace there was a small area of cover and three or four widely separated scrub cedar trees.  The wind was blowing around 15 miles and hour or so.  Rowdy suddenly turned, semi-pointed and then pounced into the cover at the base of one of the cedars, flushing around 5 or so quail.

I focused on one of the laggards and I’m pretty sure I hit it.  It disappeared downwind into the cover and Rowdy and I began searching for it.  We failed. Later Don, patiently explained to me that many times they can dive into a hole in the cover.   A strong wind like that wind-washes their scent away and dogs really can’t find them with their nose.  We looked for that bird for at least 20 minutes never finding it even though we worked our way downwind of where I saw it disappear.  

 Which brings me to a new discussion to further muddy up this narration.

"Dogs don’t generalize.”

I’ve tried to find the youtube where I first saw this but failed.  A well-known trainer teaches that every time a dog experiences a new species of bird with a new scent and taste you are back to square one with “fetch, hold and give” training.  The process may happen quicker each time – this is my experience with Rowdy – but you have to let the dog know that you expect them to fetch to hand this new bird.

At this point Rowdy had never experienced quail and I’m pretty convinced this impacted our inability to sense that bird.

We finally bagged birds on the last two days.  I’m fairly pleased with how it occurred.  To the west of Pheasant Alley is nice little wooded area near another oil well.  There is a convenient parking area, right in the middle of the sandspur strip, just to the east. 

I got out, geared up, got Rowdy out in the corn stubble away from the evil spurs.  As I was clearing a couple of the crippling burs from between his toe pads, Jake flushes a nice covey out of the narrow strand of cover leading us to the wooded area.  Most of the quail fly west over into the wooded area and disappear.

We continued on into the wooded cover walking roughly 30 yards apart, Don to the south and on my left.  Suddenly, one of the previous quail jumps up whirring and begins to fly directly away from Don and directly at me.  This all happened in a blur, but I distinctly remember the bird superimposed over Don’s face as it flew at me. It sees me and breaks hard to its left.  I track, shoot and make what might be the best “low house seven” shot of my life.  The bird falls about 20 yards away from me and Rowdy is there in a second - and he runs right over it and ignores it.  New bird smell syndrome, I think.

Jake on the other hand, being an old, experienced Quail hunter is on it in a second and retrieves the bird to Don.  I ask Don: “Here in a second, would you throw that bird over someplace and let Rowdy go retrieve it?  We need to get him used to quail.”

So, we did that.

Another 100 yards later, Rowdy flushes another and I make a high going away shot and kill my second quail.  Jake beat Rowdy to that one too and we did the training thing again with Rowdy. On the way back to the truck, we walk right by the oil well, which Rowdy totally ignores. One counts one's successes where one finds them.

Finally, it came to the last hunt of the last day for me.  We saved it for Pheasant Alley.  I was up on the western berm edge, Don down in the cover.  Within seconds of entering they flushed the covey of quail again and one flies out into the corn stubble.  Rowdy sees it and chases it.  It flushes again and flies almost directly back at me.  I track, miss, track better and hit it as it passes me maybe 15 yards away. This picture are from that last hunt.  It was a beautiful sunset.

So, in four days of hunting, I bagged three quail. You gotta love when you have room to improve!

 

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad/Geoff

Pheasants

Fast is fine but accuracy is final.  You must learn to be slow in a hurry.  ~ Wyatt Earp


Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

I’m about to write about hunting wild pheasants and wingshooting.  It’s longer than I normally write. If that doesn’t interest you or, worse, you are going to take this as an opportunity to be offended, would you please just go read something else?

As, I’ve related before, Rowdy and I have been training with farm raised pheasants that we buy at Coyland Creek.  Even with those docile birds, we have never achieved 100% success with harvesting all we buy.  Even the humble farm bird is wilier than your foolish correspondent.  

I offer this really interesting article now that does a much better job than I could hope to do in describing how challenging an actual wild pheasant is, honed as they are by actual survival in harsh reality.

Don said almost exactly the same things about the cunning Phasianinae before our first hunt.  I thought I knew what he meant, but as is common in human experience, the difference between intellectual and intuitional knowledge often sneaks up on you and hits you with a sledge.

What I’m working my way toward saying is that Rowdy and I did not manage to bag a single pheasant in four days of fairly intensive hunts.  (For an old guy with a heart condition and a bad knee, they counted as intensive.  Young fellows would snort at my actual effort.

So, I am reduced to attempting an analysis of why we failed and what to do about that next time.

 First to discuss wingshooting again.  Serendipity struck this morning as a friend I’ve never met in person posted this comic on line.  

As I attempted to discuss earlier, the flush of a game bird happens much too quickly for it to be an exercise in thought and reason.  You have to rely on muscle memory.  Hunting farm birds has given me a bad habit pattern in one important way.

It is only legal to harvest the rooster.  Hens are verboten.  So, this adds rooster identification as another step in the “Is it safe to shoot?” process.  Now, I know you are thinking.  “Geoff,  It ain’t real hard to tell the difference between and cock and a hen.”  

There is, however, an important perceptional issue to discuss here.  The Upland Journal article talks about how the tail of the Rooster offers protection against shot.  I would add to that.  The rooster’s, big, voluminous, glorious tail is an easy way to identify the rooster and it draws the eye like a magnet.  So, if like me, you are trying to mount the gun and shoot, knowing the shot string will go where you are looking….and you are looking at the tail, you will probably ‘hit’ the bird but totally miss anything vital. You will stand there in the field, watching the bird fly away, laughing at you, flirting its ruffled feathers.

This has been my long-winded way of saying that as I practice in the future with farm pheasants, I am going to strive to identify and look at the rooster’s head and ring-neck as that is a much better visual target.

Moving on, wild pheasants pretty much behave as the article says they do.  They sense you coming and run like the wind until they run out of cover.  Then they take off and fly fast and low much too far away for a shotgun to be effective.  I saw this happen far too often.

On Tuesday, Don took me out to an abandoned farm.  It is surrounded by a vast field of corn stubble. Inside the roughly 400 by 200 yard farmstead proper there is extremely thick cover, much of it hemp.  We parked nearby, and my attempt to quietly exit the truck, uncase my gun, load it and get Rowdy all heeled up was, as usual, comedic.  Before we had walked 3 steps, a rooster flushed up out of the cover and I shot and missed.  Don yelled, “Stop, this is the only cover in a mile or so.  It’ll settle back down nearby.”  Sure enough, the rooster appeared to fly about a hundred yards or so over to the center of the farmstead’s thick cover and disappeared.

The plan is to walk the perimeter of the farmstead and let the dogs work the cover.  Another rooster jumps up and this one is flying across the road away from the cover so I mount, shoot and I hit the tail and maybe get a few pellets in the actual bird.  It drops a bit in flight and appears to go to ground across the road in a pasture area with little cover.  Rowdy takes off in hard pursuit.  He beats around the probable area of the fall but never finds the bird, nor apparently even picks up the scent.  Don reminds me that the tough old bird hit the ground running and was long gone.

About the time I get Rowdy back to me and heeled up, another rooster jumps up, flies roughly ten feet up in a right to left straight flight.  It was about 30 yards away and the most makeable shot I got at a rooster all week.   I emptied the gun and never touched the bird.  Review the suggestion to look at the head and ring-neck, Geoff.

We walked roughly a mile around the perimeter of the farmstead and the circuit brought us back near where we saw the original rooster settle. Rowdy stopped and froze in the deep cover. This was the first time I really used Rowdy’s new pointing skills correctly.  More precisely Don did.  I was on the wrong side of the perimeter fence but Don calmly walked toward Rowdy and flushed the rooster.  Rowdy broke and chased.  (Note, find a way to emphasize sit-stay training from a point with Rowdy.)  Because he was right behind the bird, I didn’t have a safe shot for the first few seconds and by the time I did shoot, the bird was too far and I missed.  Don did not shoot either.  So, we missed that bird.  But it sure was exciting and made my day seeing Rowdy actually find and point a wild pheasant.

We hunted the couloirs around Culbertson faily extensively. 

As a side note, "couloir" is a mountaineering term.  The plains around Culbertson are not mountainous, yet the canyons that erosion carves out between the fields are called couloirs.  I like the term and will continue to use it.

We hunted one that required a group effort due to its vastness.  Young guys could easily walk the full circuit but I just flat couldn’t.  It’s a big, wide couloir that runs diagonally across the NE corner of a huge cornfield.  We drove my car down to the eastern boundary and parked it on the roadside in the wash.  Then we returned up to the top of the hill in Don’s truck.  Don walked the western edge to cap off any birds that would run out into the cornfield and Rowdy and I elected to beat down through the thick cover in the canyon itself.  We’d seen a lot of birds there a day or so earlier.

I got one shot early in the walk.  Don’s dog, Jake, flushed one up behind and to my right.  It flew by me and I had a going away shot from right to left that I missed by looking at the tail again.  Don says about that same time a few hens and another rooster ran out into the cornfield and escaped to the west.

About half way down the couloir, I saw another bird off in the distance going away.

The walk itself was interesting.  It was roughly 2.5 miles down to the car.  The water flow in the canyon had bent the cover downhill and downstream. Anybody walking up that couloir would be trudging uphill and beating the cover against the grain.  I doubt I could make the walk.   It was very pretty in a brown, autumnal way.

We loaded up in my car and returned to Don's truck.  As we got there, to the north the north we saw a huge flock of Canada Geese floating down to feast on the bounty of a corn stubble field.  We stood and watched that show for a bit.

Finally, I’ll tell the story of the bird I actually thought we’d bagged.  I got a really lousy picture of the terrain involved.  

Two days earlier, we’d walked this little cover filled hollow and we’d seen a lot of birds run out the sides and escape.  So, the plan was that I’d park about 500 yards away and walk quietly over see what came out.  Don had other plans for his pointer and went to a nearby field.  We’d meet up in an hour or so.

I walked the perimeter of the hollow and saw nothing.  Rowdy acted interested once, could have been a rabbit or a bird, but nothing flushed.  I started trudging back towards the truck.  At the top of the rise, I stopped a moment to rest and took this picture.  Don had not made it back to his truck yet, I had some time and it occurred to me that this was a chance to work with Rowdy a little.  I heeled him up and sent him back down toward the choke-berry with a “Back!”  Rowdy took off down the hill, ran about 25 yards and suddenly did a 270 degree turn and pointed at a spot we had just walked within 10 yards of, moments earlier.

Beep, "Sit!" and I started towards Rowdy with the gun semi-mounted.  A rooster erupted, flying to the right.  I tracked and shot as the bird passed over the barbed-wire fence.  Feathers flew, the birds flight faltered and it hit the pasture on the far side in a running flurry of feathers, wings and feet.  It never took off again and Rowdy burst through the fence on the run, mere feet behind the bird.

They disappeared down the draw, Rowdy hard on the bird’s heels and I was elated we’d bagged our first pheasant.  I fully expected Rowdy to come trotting proudly back up, wounded bird in his mouth for me to dispatch.  There was a rustle and commotion down in the choke-berry cover and then silence.  I waited about 5 minutes and then called Rowdy in.  He came back bird-less and I have no idea what happened.  I just shake my head when I think how tough that bird was. I am saddened that I caused it to suffer.

There was never a day south of Culbertson that I didn’t see many pheasants.  Never a day that I didn't take a shot at one.  I think I learned some and I think Rowdy learned some.  I’d do it again in a heartbeat.  But, I’m also disappointed that my shooting skills were not equal to the challenge that nature presented me.

On that happy note, I remain,
Dad/Geoff