00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Foundations podcast. I’m your host, Tony Peterson, and today’s episode is sort of a love letter to what I consider to be the best game bird out there, but also how that relates to dogs and the truth about all upland hunting opportunities. Look, we all have our favorites. I don’t know yours might be chuckers because you live out west and your dog has a beard and that’s the most challenging bird you’re gonna run across. Or I don’t know, you might be from down south somewhere, and while you’d give anything to have more quail to hunt, the truth is that the annual dove hunts are your favorite time to get out. For me, it’s the pheasant, which I’m gonna talk about today, But I’m gonna go deeper than that into dog behavior and how we can use any real type of hunt to shape the way our dogs work for us and with us. So buckle up because it’s time to talk dogs and upland hunting. As a kid, there were two hunting uppportunities that took forever to come my way, and the wait for both just pure absolute torture. The first was in my home state of Minnesota, which is, you know, at the time, the only state I thought I’d ever hunt, because nobody ever traveled waiting on whitetail hunting bow hunting. When I was a young fella, you couldn’t hunt till you were twelve, So the time leading up to that was full of a lot of practice shooting with my first compound, and a lot of wishing and a lot of waiting.
00:01:28
Speaker 2: It sucked.
00:01:29
Speaker 1: But when I finally did turn twelve, I got to finally bowhunt deer, and then I quickly learned how bad I was at bow hunting deer, you know, which is fodder for a different podcast that isn’t dedicated to dogs. The other opportunity I could not wait for was pheasant hunting. My dad was an absolute pheasant hunting fiend, and so was my uncle Billy. My dad worked second shift his entire life, except for a couple years where he worked first shift when I was young, and those years happened to coincide with a time when Uncle Billy was a sheriff in a town in south central Minnesota. Now, Billy always had a really good black lab to hunt over, and my dad likes hunting over dogs more than he likes doing almost anything now. There was no age limit back then for small game, so technically I could have probably pheasant hunted when I was in kindergarten if I could have held and shot a legal shotgun, which I couldn’t have, nor would I have ever been able to see a rooster flush over the grass anyway. It wasn’t until I was eleven that my dad had enough confidence in my gun handling skills after hunting squirrels and rabbits to the point of being really really sick of eating squirrels and rabbits, that he took me on my first peasant hunt. It’s one of my best memories, and I remember the only rooster we flushed getting up in front of me in one of those dreamy, slow, straightaway flushes where they look like a colorful B fifty two lifting off out of the grass. And while I don’t remember aiming, you know, which is something I still deal with to this day, I do remember seeing a whole bunch of feathers fall off of that bird when I shot, and then I also remember sort of a stillness happening after that, like the world just slipped away and time stopped as I watched that rooster keep flying, and then the sound of my dad and Billy are shooting brought that rooster to the ground. It never occurred to me to shoot again. I just kind of vapor locked after that first one. Now, I do remember Billy taking that rooster from Rebel’s mouth and handing it to me and then shaking my hand. And let me tell you something, there wasn’t a person in the world at that time who stood taller than he did. In my eyes, It’s cliched and probably stupid to say, but I also kind of believe it to be true that that was the exact moment that I became a pheasant hunter, and it has stuck with me ever since.
00:03:47
Speaker 2: Now.
00:03:47
Speaker 1: Not everyone agrees with them being the best game bird out there, but luckily for me, I don’t care. I just think they are badass and their story of how they got here is pretty cool. But to understand their history you have to go back eighteen eighty one. That was the year that the first sea section was performed by a doctor in Germany. Was also the year that Louis Pasteur discovered a vaccine for anthrax and the Spigno mammometer or however you say it was introduced as a non invasive way to measure blood pressure. That same year, the first steel Transatlantic liner took to the seas. A little town in England called Godalming was the first to have its streets lit up by electric lights, and the International Congress of Electricians got together to figure out an international system of units so that the world could all be on the same page with the metric system. Well most of the world anyway. In March of eighteen eighty one, a ship called Otago also arrived at Port Towns in Oregon, and in its cargo were sixty ring necked pheasants that had made the long trip from Shanghai. A fellow named Owen Denny had had them shipped over in the hopes of establishing a population. Most of the pheasants didn’t survive to their destination, though, which was the Columbia River Basin, but a few did. History doesn’t say for sure whether any of those birds actually took hold.
00:05:09
Speaker 2: However, no one seems to know.
00:05:11
Speaker 1: Denny wasn’t one to quit though after one failed attempt, and eventually he had more pheasants shipped in where they started to find a foothold in both Oregon and Washington. Denny, who had arrived in Oregon via the Oregon Trail of all Things, wrote to a friend while he was working in China about pheasants and said this, these birds are delicious eating and very game and will furnish fine sport. Hard to argue with that, I guess now. The original birds were caught by net wielding Chinese farmers, who Denny bought them from by the dozen when he lived in Shanghai, where he quickly started daydreaming about having the birds around when he went back home to the States. Interestingly, he noted that the original shipment of pheasants survived the ocean journey just fine, where they stayed relatively relaxed and only a few of them died. But they didn’t handle train travel well, which stressed them out, and they often beat themselves to death against their cages. It seems that pheasants prefer the soothing motion of sailing over the jarring reality of railroad travel. I guess. It’s also interesting to note that the original shipment contained Mongolian sand grouse and some partridges as well as bamboo. Now the grouse and partridges couldn’t hack it, but the bamboo could. And if you see a stand of it in the Pacific Northwest, now you know where it most likely originated. Denny kept ordering up pheasants and had enough political connections to get hunting them banned until eighteen ninety two, when they opened.
00:06:38
Speaker 2: Their first pheasant season.
00:06:40
Speaker 1: Reports state that fifty thousand birds were killed the first day, which seems like a wild guess, but who knows. I’m sure they shot hens and roosters then, and maybe it was an absolute slaughterfest. Those original populations in the Northwest caught the attention of folks across the country and were used to encourage the birds to survive and thrive in many of the states we hunt them in today. I think we’re pretty lucky for that, even though some folks still shit on them because they are non native. But I like to point out to those fine folks who say that that they are also generally non natives themselves, a fact that it is easy to ignore, because if we were to decide what belongs and what doesn’t, we’d rather assume we belong just.
00:07:23
Speaker 2: Fine, thank you. Anyway. Pheasants are rat as hell.
00:07:28
Speaker 1: They can fly, but they prefer to run until it’s either not an option or when flying just makes more sense to evade predation or a load to sixes headed their way. They are pretty good sized, so hitting them isn’t a problem, which is a joke because sometimes it’s a big problem, which is likely due to the fact that they can fly up to speeds of like sixty miles an hour, which is fast enough to earn you a speeding ticket in a car, and an awful lot of roads across the country.
00:07:54
Speaker 2: That’s cruising and also a.
00:07:57
Speaker 1: Good explanation for why I sometimes go two barrels deep throughout the fall and don’t touch a feather on them. Pheasants are omnivores, although in the interest of hunting them, we tend to mostly think about them exclusively as vegetarians or herbivores throughout the fall. The bug munching happens through much of the year when the insects are active, but most pheasant hunters I know are mostly concerned with cornfields and soybean fields and milo and sorghum and whatever seeds that could be most interesting to roosters from about October through January. All of that’s pretty cool, but why I love pheasants is part nostalgia and part availability to me, but also because they just try really hard to not get killed, and that means the dogs have to figure them out. They don’t just have to find them and flush them like they do some bird species, but they often have to figure out in real time why the scent is here but the bird is not. That game is the best. And believe me, I get why people love grouse or quail or even woodcock, but the pheasant games different. Quail can be really tough to find, but once found, they aren’t likely to run their separate ways at speeds that would make Olympic sprinters question their life choices. Rough grouse well, hell, a lot of grouse species are you know, close to pheasant in some ways. But let’s be honest here, it’s pretty common to meet grouse that just don’t seem to be the mensa members of the upland world. I love grosse, but I’ve never once had a whole bunch of pheasants let me walk up on them and shoot them with a bow. And I’ve had grouse do that several times. One of my really good buddies has a grouse on his wall. That he killed with a rock, if that tells you anything. Woodcock are great too, but pretending that they are, you know, as game, You know, to give the dogs a real lesson in evasion as roosters is simply cognitive dissonance. Now, before people go not so, let me say this. If you can hunt it, and the dogs love it, and you love it, then that’s awesome. I spend some time I’m in October between deer hunts looking for grouse, woodcock and puddle ducks with a dark barker, and I don’t regret a second of it. It’s all fun and there’s nothing better than getting out with a good dog to hunt something. The work with roosters is different, though, And know not all pheasants are created equal. I know people like to talk about pheasants as if they are all the same, kind of like we do with people who we disagree with politically. But it doesn’t work that way. You can babysit pheasants on manicured ground and walk easy paths between rows of milo and shoot the crap out of roosters that sit tight and all that junk. That’s great if that’s your thing. Donuts for donuts, just like you can go to a preserve and buy some pheasants and have them put out in the field for you and your dog. That’s a thing too, and again you do, you boo. If you love it, go for it. But wild roosters that actually get hunted are the ones that will change you as a hunter and will change your dog for the better, at least in my opinion. They are the ones that know the tricks and they employ them very well. They are the ones that I ab freaking love because I can watch my dogs have to figure them out in real time, and there is often a tense reality after the gun barrels start smoking and the birds hit the dirt that they won’t be where they should be, which is kind of like the feeling of hooking a good sized musky or northern pike on a crappie rod and getting it all the way to the boat and watching as your fishing buddy gets ready to stab the net in the water where you know you’re about ninety five percent of the way to glory, but that last five percent can be a real heartbreaker. Healthy roosters doing their best to avoid you are one thing, but wounded roosters with some go left in them or another. I watched my old dog Luna chase down a bird I hit on one end of a forty acre piece of public one time, so I know how far she went, because it was four hundred yards from fence to fence. That bird did its best to avoid her and almost got away with it as it flew. But she was no slouch in her prime, and she caught that rooster as it tried to gain some elevation. Every One who owns a bird dog and hunts with them, at least enough, get some few moments like that out of their dog that just perfectly frame up why we love this stuff so damn much. And I think about that specific retrieve often. In fact, on that same parcel a few years later, I hit a rooster that caught a serious tail wind and sat down in a cattail slew across the road on a different chunk of public. I marked it, hunted my way over there, and then sent her in for a hunt dead command. When we finally got there, it took fifteen minutes, but she dug that bird up out of the sawgrass and cattails and it was dead as a doornail, and let me tell you what, she got some extra belly scretches that night. I know a lot of you listening to this don’t have close viable populations of pheasants to hunt, and that really sucks. If we only had maybe an extra two hundred million acres of CRP throughout much of the country, it’d be a different story. But that’s a dream that’s never going to become reality.
00:12:58
Speaker 2: That sucks.
00:12:58
Speaker 1: But there are birds to be had for the willing traveler who decides that the public land in some state or another should provide just enough opportunity. Or of course, you can go the pay to play route in a lot of places, or you can just find your own birds. But here’s where things get a little tricky. We often love the idea of the bird that works for us, you know, the one that holds the most nostalgia. I know a hell of a lot of Southern hunters who wouldn’t walk across the street to watch their dog point or rooster, but they’d cage fight the entire UFC heavyweight division to have even a remotely decent population of Bobwhites around. We don’t always get what we want, though, which is why I think that so many people are so miserable these days because with the NonStop doom machines we are addicted to, we realize that not only will we not get what we want, but a lot of people we feel are undeserving are getting what they want, and that kind of sucks. Anyway, that’s a side trail I don’t really need to take. There are birds out there to be hunted, and plenty of opportunities to find your new thing, or if that’s not in the cards, out of way to get to your old thing. I promise you that your dogs won’t even know that you can no longer really hunt bob whites in your state, but the drive to the next state over might yield a good hunt for something else. They’ll just be really happy to be hunting, and even if that means you don’t get the bird of your choice, you might get the bird of their choice, which is really for most dogs, all birds that you’re gonna let them hunt. The way that I look at this is that I do have my favorite bird, but I love all upland birds that have ever hunted, including the prairie chickens and sharp tails that usually do a good job of humbling me when I head out west to find them. But what I really love is just hunting with my dog for something. If that happens to be a late season pevesand hunt in the cat tails, which is the closest thing to dying and going to heaven, then that’s great. I’m not going to turn my nose up at a north Woods walk somewhere to see if we can flush up some rough grouse. It’s kind of like having multiple kids. You can have your favorite, but you better not make that so well known that it keeps you from doing what’s best for u all of them. So what’s your favorite bird? Is it available this season to hunt? Or are you in a situation where that seems like a distant memory and the best you can do is settle for something else that is actually out there on the landscape for you. Or could you make a hunt happen for your favorite bird? Maybe it’s quail, which for some reason everyone seems to think can’t be found or hunted, but they can’t well you know. Or maybe the travel thing isn’t in the cards for a hell of a lot of us for very understandable reasons. Then what Maybe it’s time to find a new favorite game. Bird to love, and even if you feel like that’s not in the cards, maybe should just pretend to love the woodcock migration or something else while your dogs do what they do, and in that process you just might find that it’s not actually the specific bird in a specific location that you need in order to fill your cup, but instead it’s any location with any bird, as long as you get to watch that tail go from back and forth to all over the place, or your whole dog go from a modeled white and liver blur in the field to a sudden, quivering statue that says, whatever it is, it’s right in front of my nose, and you had better get your ass over here, because this standoff isn’t going to last forever. Get out there and find some birds to love, my friends, and come back soon for more talk about dogs, which are the creatures that we all love the most.
00:16:24
Speaker 2: That’s it.
00:16:24
Speaker 1: I’m Tony Peterson and this has been The Houndation’s podcast. As always, I want to thank you so much for your support. You know, if you want some more dog content, bird hunting content, maybe you’re hunting some deer right now. Maybe you’re thinking about planning a trip somewhere or something. Maybe you just need a good recipe to cook up some wood ducks or something that you shot earlier this fall. Head on over to the mediator dot com and you will find that we drop new content literally every day. This goes for our vast podcast network, hunting films, how to videos, tons of article, tons of recipes, tons of news stories, just good stuff. Go check it out and thank you once again for your support
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