"Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do." ~ John Wooden
Gentle Readers and Loved Ones. I'm about to tell you about the most successful 30 minutes I've spent with Rory.
Michael has a special relationship with a land owner we call Gary. Gary has a nice little farm with a creek bottom splitting it. The cover in the bottom has just been crazy with hens and roosters these last two years. Gary evidently only lets Michael and another friend hunt his land and the birds are unpressured, dumb and plentiful, just the way you like 'em.
It's a big plot of land with lots of room for the birds to run away from you down the creek cover. Therefore, it really needs a blocker at the far end to have a chance to harvest the leakers. We decided that Michael and I would would walk the cover and Brandon would drive up to the far end to block. We waited for him to make his way up there and then we started out. I took the right side of the cover. Rory started doing a really nice job quartering back and forth between us, crossing the cover and the hidden creek bottom, frequently.
On the right side, I could see birds up a couple hundred yards away, running toward the far end and Brandon.
The attentive reader will note that I have not yet mastered wearing the GoPro on the hat band mount I have.
 |
| The GoPro Hat |
I have the camera tilted much too low and totally missed a good part of the action. Still, I'm running with the video I have. Please make sure you have your sound turned on and recall that you can click these video links, expand out the size to see them better and control the quality of the video with the gear icon.
We had walked about 3 or 4 hundred yards when this bird pops out. It looks like I bagged him, but I did not. The wounded bird fell on my side of the cover after both Michael and I shot. I missed.
Rory comes charging across the cover and sees the wounded bird running for the cover. I love the way he grabs it before it can enter the cover. Once they are in cover, wild pheasants have a much higher chance of hunkering down and getting lost to die in peace.
Now, we have an interesting situation - it's why I chose the quotation to lead off this post. Rory is not yet as well trained as Rowdy was, but
"You go to war with the Army you have." ~ Rumsfeld.
Rory normally would retrieve the Rooster to me. But at the same time, he thinks gunshots mean another bird is down. As he comes back to me, Brandon - way out in the blocking position - starts shooting at the bird di di mauing away from us. Rory's confused. Does he bring the bird to me? ...Or go fetch the new one? Does he drop the bird he has? ..or try to get both in his mouth? I'm going to have to work on that a little because he ignored my "heel" command for a while.
Finally, he delivers the bird to hand. I sound miffed but I'm really pretty proud. This is Rory's first time with multiple hunters and real live birds. He did great.
Not soon after that, Michael jumps a second bird.
Again, I'm sorry I did such a poor job mounting the camera to my head. But if you look along the top of the video, you can see bird flying away.
Now we have the same story, Rory has a bird in his mouth and there is more shooting. Brandon down the way and suddenly Michael gets his third bird. If you listen close, you can hear, "Got my limit!" But this bird is wounded, running and Rory still has the second bird...
The video at this point gets too long and muddled to edit and tell a good story. The camera is still terribly mounted. So...to make a long story short, Rory runs around excitedly, bird in mouth, and finally crosses over and gives the second bird to Michael. Brandon continues down the wash and joins up with us. He saw where the third bird ran into the cover and hid.
We spend about 15 minutes crashing around in the cover, trying to get Rory's nose on the third bird and failing miserably. There were so many birds in that cover that morning - soaking everything with scent - that finding a wounded bird is almost impossible... although we did find a blood trail and Rory really showed interest in that. I'm really sad we did not recover that third bird.
So, in about 30 minutes, we flushed a lot of birds - probably close to 20 between the three of us and shot three of them. Rory retrieved two. That's not bad for Rory's very first wild pheasant hunt.
We did note where many of the birds that escaped went to up in the terraces and adjoining draws but their dots were pretty agitated by then and we never got close to them again.
For the next story, I'll tell you about "busting my bucket", getting up and making the best shot of my life.
On that happy note, I remain,
Dad/Geoff
No comments:
Post a Comment