If I had to choose one hour of the day to hunt pheasants with a dog, I’d take the last hour. Birds are active then—filling their crops, picking grit, and moving toward roosting areas where they’ll settle in for the night. As the air cools, scenting conditions are often the best they’ve been all day. The air takes on a heavier, almost palpable feel. Sometimes it almost seems like I can smell the birds myself.
Besides, it’s a beautiful time to be afield. The light softens and the autumn sky ignites in shades of orange, pink, or lavender as the sun drops toward the horizon. Best of all, I don’t have much competition. Many hunters have already filled their limits. Others have retired to camp or motel for a cold beer and a hot dinner. And some are just plain tuckered out and have packed it in for the day. So it’s just me and my dog out there, locked in a sundown chess match with a wily rooster.
Does that mean I’ll pass up a morning limit of pheasants if given the chance? Nope. I’m not crazy. Pheasant hunting can be fickle, and wise hunters take the opportunities as they come. But early in the season if the weather is warm I’d rather hunt for a few hours in the morning, rest during the middle of the day, and venture out again in the cool of the evening. Later in the season, I often don’t have a choice. Days are shorter and pheasants harder to come by. Late afternoon often finds me lacking a bird or two of a three-bird limit.
Such was the case one November when Buck MacLaurin, Joe Elliott, and I pondered our chances of finding a late-day rooster in a northern Montana Conservation Reserve field. We had hunted most of the day with precious little to show for it. We hadn’t hunted this field before so we took off with our dogs in different directions to scout it out. I hadn’t gone far when I started seeing pheasant roosts in the heavy grass and alfalfa undergrowth. But after combing the field for an hour with my Brittany, Ollie, it became clear the birds simply weren’t there. The weather had been unseasonably mild, there was no snow, and plenty of hunters had worked the area. Footsore and discouraged, I returned to the truck, swapped my hunting boots for sneakers, and sat on the tailgate with Ollie while I waited for Buck and Joe.
As the sun moved closer to the horizon, a rooster crowed several hundred yards away on the far side of a hill. Ollie perked up his ears. Then another rooster answered. Trouble is, these birds weren’t in the Conservation Reserve tract—they were in the middle of a big wheat stubble field that extended east for a half-mile. That solved the mystery of why I hadn’t found birds in the Conservation Reserve— the warm weather had allowed them to hang out in the stubble where they could see and hear hunters approaching from any direction. They were daring me to put my boots on and come after them. So I reluctantly obliged, figuring the thin cover would make it a futile effort.
I walked into the stubble and released Ollie, who raced to the top of the hill a hundred yards ahead, looking for Loudmouth No. 1. By the time I trudged up there, Ollie had been on point several minutes. But the rooster wasn’t about to let me get within shooting range; he cackled his way out of the stubble, taking three hens with him. Undaunted, Ollie raced over the next hill in search of Loudmouth No. 2.
When I topped the crest there stood Ollie, patiently pointing again. This bird flushed at about fifty yards but made a fatal mistake. He came ten yards closer as he angled back toward the Conservation Reserve field, offering me a crossing shot. I don’t like taking forty- yard shots at late-season ringnecks, but this time the odds were in my favor. His profile was exposed and when I knocked him down he had nowhere to hide. Ollie scooped him up and delivered him to me.
That’s not the first time I’ve been alerted to a rooster’s presence by its crowing, although I hear it more often in the morning than in the afternoon. The sound has a ventriloquial quality that makes it hard to pin down, but if I get a fix on the location I always check it out. My stubble field experience notwithstanding, the noise usually comes from heavier cover where birds are less inclined to flush wild or take off running late in the day.
While using your ears can give you a heads up on a rooster’s presence, more often your eyes will tip you off to a spot worth hunting. Birds are typically moving from feeding or loafing areas to heavier roosting cover in late afternoon and sometimes they fly from grain fields to shelterbelts, brushy draws, cattails, or dense Conservation Reserve fields. Marking them down will at least give you a place to start.
With my usual bad timing I twisted my knee a few years back and had to play couch potato for a week right in the heart of the pheasant season. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and decided to try an afternoon hunt in a Conservation Reserve field that has yielded a rooster or two for me in recent years. As luck would have it, Ollie pinned a rooster not far from the truck and I bagged the bird. I tried hunting a while longer but the uneven ground and thick grass had my knee joint clicking like a castanet, so I decided to call it a day. As I drove home past Freezeout Lake Wildlife Management Area west of Great Falls about 4 p.m., I saw a rooster fly across the road and disappear over a hill. My knee instantly felt better. I quickly found a place to park, uncrated my black Lab, Jenny, and crossed the fence into the public hunting area.
Once I cleared the rise I could see a patch of cattails surrounded by knee-high grass and weeds that hadn’t been visible from the road; it was just the right size for a gimpy hunter and an old Lab to cover in a half-hour. But I hadn’t been in the cover ten minutes when Jenny’s tail began gyrating wildly—always a sign that good things are about to happen—and a minute later she boosted a rooster from the cattails twenty yards in front of me. The shot should have been an easy one, but just as I pulled the trigger a gust of wind gave the bird a rocket-fuel boost. The rooster came down wing-tipped but Jenny had it in her jaws before it could get up and running.
Another twinge in my knee told me I was done hunting but I still had a half-hour to enjoy the “crepuscular bonus” of a late afternoon outing. Many wildlife species are most active during the twilight hours of dusk and dawn—biologists refer to them as crepuscular. Even if pheasant finding is slow, there is often a white-tailed deer in an alfalfa field, a red fox trotting down a distant fenceline, or a flock of ducks or geese overhead to admire. Freezeout Lake plays host to a fantastic migration of tundra swans, snow geese, and other waterfowl each spring and fall. The snow-white, long-necked swans were flying low that afternoon, bucking a strong west wind. I love watching waterfowl and I spent the remaining daylight with a pair of binoculars as restless flocks of swans, geese, and ducks traded from fields to marsh until a blood-red sun slid behind the Rocky Mountain Front.
Does going the extra mile before dark always pay off? No. There have been plenty of times when all I got from my last hour of hunting was tired legs. But there is something satisfying about giving the day full measure. As Izaak Walton said of fishing, “You must indure worst luck sometime, or you will never make a good angler.” He could just as well have been talking about pheasant hunting. Even if I don’t get my sundown rooster, dinner tastes better when I straggle in at dark knowing I gave it my best shot.
My old Brittany, Groucho, who went on to the great Conservation Reserve field in the sky a few years back, knew something about never- say-die pheasant hunting. Several friends and I were on a four-day hunting expedition in southwestern North Dakota. Our host had promised us great pheasant hunting in his corn and sunflower fields, and he wasn’t kidding. We saw literally hundreds of pheasants and easily bagged our possession limits. But hunting them involved walking the fields with a line of hunters and driving the birds over blockers. Our retrievers had a field day gathering up birds, while our pointing dogs languished in their crates. Our farmer friend didn’t have much land in Conservation Reserve, and the grassy fields adjoining his corn and sunflowers belonged to other landowners. One of these fields, in particular, made our mouths water, since we knew it held hundreds of birds.
Apparently fourteen-year-old Groucho knew it too. Late in the afternoon on the last day of our hunt I made the mistake of letting him out of the truck at the edge of this field for a quick leg-lifting while we loaded our gear prior to heading back to the farmhouse. I took my eyes off him for a minute and when I turned around he was already fifty yards out in the Conservation Reserve field. The field was posted “no trespassing” so now I had a moral dilemma. Groucho was quite deaf, so yelling and whistling had no effect. He had no intention of coming back anyway.
Soon he was eighty yards away, pointing a pheasant. While I deliberated, the bird flew, and Groucho was on to another one … and another one … and another one. I couldn’t see him anymore, but I could trace his progress by the birds boiling out of the field. Besides being deaf, Groucho was on his last legs physically. His breathing had gradually gotten so labored that any exertion caused him distress— my vet had pointed out several suspicious masses on X-rays taken earlier in the year—cancerous tumors, likely. Sundown wasn’t far off and he was still headed directly away from me, so I grabbed a leash and took off after him. I figured any landowner with an ounce of compassion would cut me some slack if I explained I was trying to retrieve an old warrior who had temporarily lost his mind.
The field was a hunter’s dream, thickly vegetated with gnarly clumps of alfalfa and rank weeds, but a nightmare for a tired soul trying to jog after a pheasant-crazed Brittany. Soon I was having breathing problems of my own. About the time I was ready to give up I caught sight of him—on point, eighty yards ahead in a thin spot in the cover. I prayed for the bird to hold while I thrashed and stumbled my way to him and got him on the leash. Once he realized the game was over he flopped down on the ground, sides heaving, gasping for air like a marathon runner at the finish line.
By the time I got back to the truck with Groucho, my “friends” were having a tailgate party, complete with cold beverages and snacks. There was great hooting, applauding, and snickering at “Dave and Groucho’s excellent adventure.” You get the picture. Enough time has passed that I can now see the humor in that sundown pheasant hunt, but it took awhile.
Old Groucho, bless his hunter’s heart, survived the outing, and lived to point a covey of Huns later in the fall—his last covey, as it turned out. That November he died in his sleep in northeastern Montana during a pheasant-hunting trip, and I buried him on a hill overlooking a lovely lake. I know that over the course of the year a pheasant or two will wander near the big rock that marks his grave, and the thought of it makes me smile. I sit there at least once each autumn watching the ducks fly back and forth across the lake, and if I wait until sunset invariably I hear a rooster crow.
While I’m there I reflect on a pursuit that teaches us all a little something about work and fun, success and failure, and, at least where old dogs are concerned, tears and laughter. You can’t help but respect this bird that sometimes frustrates and bedevils us, and admire his beauty, his wariness, and his toughness. One thing is certain: bagging a sundown rooster is a perfect way to end the day.