Black Friday Pheasant Hunt

Bandit and I hit up a WMA just West of New Ulm, MN yesterday to try to get flush some pheasants. I didn't have to wait long! Bandit flushed a rooster less than 50 yards from the car. Of course, I gave it the ol' two-shot salute as he flew away. I've really got to work on my shooting for next year. The dog is doing his part, now I've got to do mine.

I didn't have any real idea of how we were going to hunt this odd-shaped WMA, so I basically just followed Bandit to where he thought we should go. He led me to a cattail slough where we immediately flushed 3 hens. Bandit was really birdy in the cattails, but couldn't get any more birds to flush. He's small enough to get underneath the thick stuff into the lanes that the pheasants use, but they must have really been running on him.

After 90 minutes of pushing through cattails he was pretty beat, so we worked some edge cover without seeing any birds, then headed toward a feed plot that I had seen. Unfortunately, there were two other hunters there by the time we arrived, so we took a round-about route back to the car, flushing one hen out the way.

Bandit seems to excel when I don't try to control him too much and just let him do his thing. That's hard to do with more than one hunter, but it works well when it's just the two of us. He seems to be having a bit of trouble distinguishing between fresh scent and old scent, because we got on quite a few "hot" scent trails that never materialized into anything. Although I guess it could have been that the birds had run ahead and flushed without me noticing.

Overall, I was quite please with our success at a heavily-used public hunting area. Next time maybe I'll hold up my end of the bargain and put some birds in the bag!

Bandit spent the rest of the day taking a well-deserved nap.

Quartering

Since I want to get a new dog in the near future, I figured I should prove to myself that I've got what it takes to do the training. I've been a bit resistant to doing any "formal" hunting training with Bandit because, well, he's a terrier. I no longer care. It's fun for me. It's fun for him. Other people get a kick out of it. Why not?

I've decided it's time I put some real effort into training Bandit to quarter properly in the field. He has little to no natural quartering instinct, so I know I've got my work cut out for me. When he was a pup, I did some work with a check cord to teach him to turn on the whistle, but never really taught him to quarter on his own.

All the techniques I've seen in videos and books calls for assistants and birds, neither of which I have. I've improvised by using dummies in conjunction with pheasant wings and scent. I start out by planting them in the field, then I work Bandit into the wind until he finds them all. Then I continue casting him side to side with two whistle toots, every once in a while tooting the whistle twice and throwing a dummy in the opposite direction.

He's getting the idea, but I think it's going to take several more lessons for it to sink in. I may try to enlist the help of my wife and son over the weekend to really drill the lessons home. Currently he's going about 10 yards to the left and right, and I need to double that.

I haven't the slightest idea how to acquire pigeons or quail for training, so I guess the dummies are going to have to suffice.

I know I've got to get Bandit on more birds before the end of the season, so I'm hoping to get him quartering well, then parlay that over to some game farm work in which he has some good success while quartering.

The one thing that I have in my favor is that Bandit is very mentally tough, and very tolerant of my half-assed training methods. When there are birds (or rabbits or squirrels or deer or...) around, nothing can break his spirit.

Grousin'

My buddy Pete and I took the day off work today to chase some grouse around Meadowbrooke WMA just north of Motley, MN. I didn't know if Bandit knew what a grouse smelled like, but he seemed to do fine.

The cover was pretty marginal, but we still ended up flushing two birds within gun range in 2 hours. This is only the 3rd time I've ever been grouse hunting, and the first time I've actually witnessed a real flush, so it was pretty exciting.

I was shooting my 20 gauge pump, which I haven't shot for quite some time. That, combined with the fact that grouse are incredibly quick, resulted in zero birds in the game bag.

I read in a book recently that "real" grouse hunters value a flush almost as much as a shot bird. I guess I'll just call myself a "real" grouse hunter then!

3 Years Ago

My nephew shot his first pheasant EVER over my Jack Russell Terrier. It was a great day. One of those days where the dog does exactly what he's supposed to.

I was 15 (I think) when I shot my first pheasant over a point by my uncle's Shorthair/Lab cross, Cedar. She's my favorite dog of all time that wasn't mine.

Dog Games

I zip-tied pheasant wings to several dummies and hid them out in the field behind our house. Little bugger found 'em all!

The first one I dragged for about 50 yards, and he had no trouble tracking it.

A Bit More

I grew up on a farm in Southern Minnesota where the pheasants were plentiful, as were the dogs on our farm. I've had too many labs to count (they don't always have long lives on a farm) and one phenomenal Springer.

My step-dad and brother were killed in a hunting accident when I was 16, so I no longer hunt ducks.

I moved to St. Cloud to attend college, where I met and subsequently knocked up my wife. When my son Max was 8 moths old I was cleared to get a dog, which I'd been begging for. My wife wanted a Pomeranian and I wanted a Springer. There was a short stalemate during which we decided to go look at a Jack Russell Terrier puppy. I don't think it's possible to visit puppies without bringing one home, so that's how we came to own Bandit.


I was determined to make the best of the situation, so I began the arduous task of teaching him to hunt. To my surprise (and the surprise of EVERYONE around me), he excelled.

The defining moment of Bandit's young life was a day out at the game farm when he was less than 2 years old. We were hunting with a family member and his well-trained lab. 12 birds were released, 10 of which were flushed by my little white lightening bolt (much to the dismay of the lab's owner!).



He's got an excellent nose and is exceedingly intelligent, almost to a fault. However, he's not without his flaws. He doesn't like to retrieve a bird that's nearly his size, although he will on occasion, albiet begrudgingly. Also, due to his size (19 pounds and 14 inches tall) he has trouble in the "thick stuff" where pheasants invariably seem to be hiding out. He's a bit of a "sprinter" like his dad, and will run balls-out for about 15 minutes. If he's not hot on birds in that amount of time it's pretty tough to keep him motivated to hunt.

Bandit is currently nursing a rash on his belly, which he gets frequently due to skin allergies. For as much as he loves to hunt, his poor little body isn't always quite cut out for it.


We work through our issues and we have a lot of fun together. We've been out hunting wild pheasant 3 times this year on public land, but have only flushed hens. We've also been to the game farm a few times, where our success was obviously much better.

I've recently decided that there may be room in my heart and home for another hunting dog, and have been putting a lot of thought into which breed will suit me the best. More on that later...

Hola!

I'm Taylor, and I'm a blogger. It's good to be here.

I've spent the last several years blogging primarily about cycling on my other blog at tenacious-t.blogspot.com.

After competing at nationals the last two years, I'm a bit burned out on cycling and have decided to get back to my roots. Namely, upland bird hunting with excellent dogs.

Since most cyclists don't care about hunting (and vice versa...likely even more so!) I decided to start a second blog to chronical my upland adventures with my Jack Russell Terrier, Bandit.