I've been doing it for a few seasons now. I live in MN but usually get an Iowa license to avoid MN gun deer season. It can be good hunting, and it's nice to try new spots. I've never hunted any private land down there, just bounce around on public ground like a lot of other hunters. My first day down this year was really good. I'm just a blue collar guy and have only been hunting for 6 years. I'm not a master dog trainer, I just work on basic obedience, love the dogs, and let their DNA do the rest. This day it took me the 2nd barrel to get a hit on the birds. I'm always working on my shooting, and as you know every day is different. I made a video if you're interested, I do it for the good memories with the dogs. Have a good day.
Hunting Pheasants in Iowa on public land
Life of Riley
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Very nicely done.
About 15 minutes in... "Son-of-a" <-- I LAUGHED OUT LOUD.. I say the same thing ALL the time!
I also would have said it again when you tripped and hit the ground.
I was chasing my "Flatcoated Retriever" after grouse and fell so hard, that I broke the stock on my Beretta 686. I'm sure that I uttered the FULL phrase with that one.
Great video! Congrats on the Iowa limit! Keep after those goldens (notice my profile pic). That poor golden puppy worked 7 birds that day and I only brought down two!
About 15 minutes in... "Son-of-a" <-- I LAUGHED OUT LOUD.. I say the same thing ALL the time!
I also would have said it again when you tripped and hit the ground.
I was chasing my "Flatcoated Retriever" after grouse and fell so hard, that I broke the stock on my Beretta 686. I'm sure that I uttered the FULL phrase with that one.
Great video! Congrats on the Iowa limit! Keep after those goldens (notice my profile pic). That poor golden puppy worked 7 birds that day and I only brought down two!
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Often....the degree of isolated cover and food.....especially add in the ever increasing volume of humans, land ownership types and attitudes.....some will put it down to the mineral content of the soil but that ignores past high harvest days of wild pheasants in Ohio & Pennsylvania.
There are real reasons separating somewhat comparable in land size Iowa and Ohio, for example.
Yeah the presence of so many cattail sloughs isolated within cropland up here I know helps sustain pheasants up here...
Two weeks ago my son and I flushed ~35 wild birds on a Sunday. Of course that's counting the ~25 that got up wild in one massive flock 80 yards out as well as the 8 hens that got up at our feet. Shot 4 roosters. I guess I'm lucky to live in a state that still has this...
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Never hunted MN but the cattails in SD are a whole extra advantage to the birds, especially before freeze-up....thankfully, cattails are not in the section of Iowa I hunt.
I had forgotten and had to look...Iowa is a bit larger than Ohio with a quarter the population...such realities matter.
It's also why Ohio's pheasant program is embarrassing poor, comparable to many states.
Well done to the states with natural blessings or well-done programs.
Nothing wrong the fate of honest luck of location coupled with hard work.
I had forgotten and had to look...Iowa is a bit larger than Ohio with a quarter the population...such realities matter.
It's also why Ohio's pheasant program is embarrassing poor, comparable to many states.
Well done to the states with natural blessings or well-done programs.
Nothing wrong the fate of honest luck of location coupled with hard work.
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Here's another one I made
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Beautiful! It looked like you hit that one you labeled as a miss. It flew off, but it shuddered at the first shot. I'm wondering if it was the one you found later.
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Definitely a hit, probably due to weak pattern density as it didnt look too far off just not vitals.
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Good eye Coach. Yeah, I did get a few pellets on him, but as you saw he flew quite a ways off and looked pretty strong. We did go his way and looked around but never found him. And Kevin, I think the pattern density was a little weak because I didn't point the gun as good as I should have. I hate those fringe hits. It did make me feel better when Skye found a cripple at the end of the day at a different spot. In fact she's found two this year!
Up here in ND the pheasants definitely use the cattails to their advantage. I’ve only gone out a couple times for pheasants this year with my sons. Will have some more time off in the next couple weeks and might hunt them. All the snow here has melted off but we are supposed to get some tomorrow, which is disappointing. I was hoping it would hold off till I got out again lol. Speaking of pheasant numbers and environment. We have almost zero wild pheasants in NE ND but I can drive an hour or two and start running into them. We have tons of perfect cover and crop mixture, it’s just as good as out west. The difference as far as I can tell is temperature. We are the coldest part of ND and must be just a smidge over that threshold to sustain wild birds. They stock them here and in good years you will see some successfully nest but within 5 years something will kill the entire wild population. I have some that showed up on my property this year and would love to see some natural production but I know in the long run it will never happen. I think up here the biggest factor in the Dakotas is weather and number two is the predators. I worry with the fur price collapse that we will see a lot more predators and a lot less birds in the future.
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Anyone who loves the birds the way you and I do hates fringing them, but guess what? They are very, very easy to miss. We are not standing on a nice, flat surface knowing where or when the bird is going to come out. I have turned to shoot one, stepped into a rodent hole and fallen flat. In one of Tom Knapp's old shows he was big enough to leave in a clip of him missing what looked like a pretty easy bird with all three shots.
If I were teaching people to shoot pheasants I wd tell them to watch your videos and shoot them exactly the way you do. You put 100% of your focus on very quickly reading the bird and then put the gun where it needs to be and shoot without a millisecond of delay once the barrel gets there. Wild birds usually turn downwind and are accelerating from 20mph to 70 mph in about a second. There is no way to create such a practice shot with clays. I am thankful for my second barrel many times.
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I agree with you 100% coach. I've found on some of my misses when I think back to what happened, often my feet were tangled up or in a poor position. In light grass sometimes you can "step into the shot" but I had one last week in really thick canary grass I couldn't get squared up with the bird and I missed. In pheasant shooting it's been a learning process for me. All I can say at this point is that when everything goes right I simply maintain as strong a visual focus on the bird as I can. When I do that successfully good things happen. It is informative watching my own videos and learning from the hits and misses. When I've made a good shot the barrel looks to move smoothly. There's been a few misses I've watched and I'm whipping the barrel around way too much(I relate this to losing visual control). There's a miss I'll throw on the next one I make, and I was running after the dog so much that when the bird flushes I'm breathing so heavy the gun barrel is bouncing and he gets away clean. It's all part of hunting and why I love it. I work on gun mount exercises at home and when out in the field enjoy myself and do the best I can.
.Yes! there's a definite line in MN as well in the Ag areas where the numbers up in the NW part of the state start to plummet
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