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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment