Game Farm Pheasants

I took Bandit to Sand Pines Pheasants yesterday with Ted and Roman, where we had 8 birds set out. Yet again, my shooting left much to be desired. I don't think I hit anything on my first shot, but took down several on my 2nd or 3rd shots.

Bandit hunted hard and stayed close, except for once incident where he got on a runner in some standing corn and I didn't notice and two roosters got up out of range. No one to blame but myself for that one.

He also had a couple retrieves, but not to hand. He doesn't like feathers in his mouth, but he knows I want the bird, so he'll bring it to within about 5 feet of me and drop it. Good enough for me! He also is obsessed with biting the tail feathers of the birds after I pick them up. As you can see in the photo, only like 3 of birds have tail feathers left! Gotta work on that.

We had one bird that we wing-tipped and it sailed about 75 yards and hit the ground running. Bandit trailed it for close to 300 yards before finally rooting it out of a clump of grass and taking it down. Very nice work, and a lot of fun to watch!

Game farm birds aren't quite like wild pheasants, but since there aren't many wild birds in the immediate area, it's a fun way to spend the afternoon.

As we were nearing the end of the field, Roman flushed a bird that ended up flying into a tree after being hit. Here's the video of that. Only the first 30 seconds or so are interesting, but it was pretty funny!