5 Tips for Pheasant Hunting Beginners
Pheasant hunting is one of the few forms of hunting that allows you to pay less attention to the finer skills required for a successful deer hunting trip, or a quiet sit in the turkey woods. You will spend your day walking instead of sitting, you can talk louder than a whisper with your hunting buddies, you can bring a gun dog along with you, and your chances of encountering game are significantly higher than many other forms of hunting. Are you researching nonresident hunting license fees for South Dakota yet?
As thrilling as pheasant hunting is, new pheasant hunters need to be prepared for several realities that will contribute to a successful experience.
1. Scent = No Big Deal. Noise = Big Deal.
Many make the mistake of getting too relaxed with how they approach pheasant hunting. Wait, isn’t hunting supposed to be more relaxed? Yes, absolutely! But, your game plan should still be taken seriously and that begins with your approach to the hunt. Pheasants aren’t going to be alarmed by your coffee breath like a cagey old buck would, but they will take immediate notice of your noise. Some pheasants will elect to stay put while others will literally run (pheasants would give Usain Bolt a challenge) far ahead of you through the CRP strip you are planning to walk, or they will flush much earlier than you want them to, creating distance that your pellets will never make up. To avoid triggering these flight responses from the birds, be as quiet as possible when you are closing the doors to your truck, letting your dogs out, and loading your gun. Certainly you don’t need to be totally silent, you can still talk with your hunting buddies and give verbal commands to your gun dog, but your game pouch will be heavier at the end of the day if you learn to keep the noise down as much as possible.
2. Too much of a good thing?
Sometimes locating good pheasant ground can be a challenge. Once you find a honey hole you will be tempted to keep going back to the same area. The problem is pheasants become progressively more jumpy as the season wears on and they’ve been reminded of the the autumnal threat of overzealous pooches, and hunters decorated in blaze orange yelling ROOSTER! To prevent this reality from scaring the birds right off of your favorite property, try to find some alternative hunting ground to work in between hunts on your preferred property to allow the birds to settle.
Gear Tip: Gun dog care is extremely important. Without a good dog, pheasant /recovery retrieval is often impossible and injuries that turn into bigger problems will sideline your dog. A great thing to have on hand or in your vehicle is a Pet First Aid Kit like this one from My Medic.
3. ROOSTER!
Every state that houses a huntable population of wild pheasants, that I know of, only allows hunters to target rooster (male) pheasants. Obviously the knowledge needed to distinguish between the male and female (hen) birds is imperative. The most distinguishable features I look for are the long streamer-like tail feathers, the distinct burnt orange and brown color (kind of a cola, or copper color) of the body and the red coloring on the head of a rooster. Hens will appear more uniformly grayish-brown colored with much shorter tail feathers. The difficulty distinguishing between the two can come when you flush a young rooster. This is because the tail feathers are usually serve as the most obvious way to tell the difference, and young roosters can have short tail feathers, much like a hen’s. If you ever flush a bird you aren’t sure about, hold off on firing your gun. It’s better to let a rooster live another day than to kill a hen by mistake. When you are hunting with others it is helpful to give out a “rooster!” call when you see a rooster flush. This helps provide confirmation to all other hunters that the flushing bird is a legal target.
4. Retrieving Your Quarry- easier said than done.
One of the most surprising factors of pheasant hunting that I didn’t know about until I had a bird on the ground was their ability to disappear into the CRP grass. I mean they turn absolutely invisible. This is where I will get a little preachy to new pheasant hunters. If you do not have a gun dog to hunt with, you should probably wait until you find one you can either borrow or someone you can join for a hunt with their dog. Of all my pheasant recoveries only one of them was able to happen without the assistance of my dogs. That bird dropped in a cut soybean field. If you are planning to hunt thick grassy habitat you will need to have a dog with you if you are going to consistently retrieve your downed rooster. Don’t be caught off guard with this and end up with the heartbreak of having to leave your game for the coyotes and foxes.
5. From Wild Game to Wild Cuisine
Getting your hands on your first pheasant is an unforgettable experience. Common symptoms include huge smiles, shouts of triumph, overpraising your gun dog and a whole lot of grip and grin photos get added to your phone’s camera roll. After the celebration and the day’s hunting is over, you may find yourself turning the bird over in your hands while your inner voice asks, “now what?” Just like all fish and game outdoorsmen pursue, getting the meat from the critter can seem daunting, but I have found the best approach is to slow down and logically assess the situation. Meat is muscle tissue. Skin covers the muscle, organs are found in the body cavities under the rib cage and sternum. The way I start field dressing a pheasant is by locating a spot, either on the back or chest of the bird, where I can pinch the skin together between my thumb and index finger. I insert my knife at that point. I then make an incision all the way across that portion of the bird (tail to neck). Once I have this incision made I can begin peeling the skin back (with all of the feathers still attached to the skin). Once you have the skin peeled back you can begin making some shallow cuts to gain access to the body cavities (abdominal and thoracic) and start removing organs. Next you will need to remove the legs, wings and head. Although bird bones are nowhere near as dense as our fellow flightless mammals, they still can be a challenge to cut through and the jagged shards of bone can be quite sharp. I suggest using a heavy blade or even a hatchet to remove these appendages. Cut as close to the body as possible, but keep in mind that your state may require you to leave a leg or the head attached to the body in order to identify the sex and species of your bird if you will be transporting the bird to your home from your hunting area. Be sure to save the wings for scent training with your gun dog, keep the tail feathers (keep the tail feathers grouped together and make a cut at the base of the group of feathers where they attach to the body) for a trophy, and pluck the feathers from the skin to use for tying flies for fly fishing. Wash out the carcass and begin making plans for a pheasant featured meal.
Of course this list does not include all useful pheasant hunting knowledge, but it’s enough to get you out in the field with a good chance of tasting the savory success of bagging a pheasant.