October NoDak Hunt with Son

Just a couple pics from my son and I’s first trip out to serious pheasant country.
The last couple years we have done an MEA weekend trip down to the Mora area to give the roosters a try.

This year we teamed up with my father and mother-in-law for a trip to far NW North Dakota.
We stayed in their 5th wheeler in a county campground in Crosby, and hunted the 14th to the 19th.
It was a great time to say the least, and bird numbers were more than I ever would have imagined
My son and I had done a decent amount of clay shooting to prepare, and it seemed to pay off. My son, with the quick reflexes of a 14 year old, was just awesome day after day. And Ammo, our 4 year old yellow lab, who I had really low expectations for with so little experience on pheasants, did us proud during the week!

Weather was good most days, but did have a day and a half of high winds/rain/sleet and even a few snow showers.
The tall grass prairie is such a change from the woods of northern MN, but has a real beauty all its own. And listening to the sounds of sandhill cranes, untold numbers of geese, and the cackle of roosters each morning was a magical way to start each day.

After seeing some of these awesome pics that others have taken, I see I really gotta up my photo skills for our already planned
trip next year

Attachments:

1. 

   IMG_1424-1.jpg
   

2. 

   DSCN2766.jpg
   

3. 

   DSCN2777.jpg
   

4. 

   IMG_1424.jpg
   

Those will be some great memories for the two of you. Way to go, Dad!

Great hunt! I love the name “Ammo”.

Great trip!

I hunted Crosby a few years ago and had the same reaction you did, WOW there are a lot of birds!

The only thing that made the trip better was there is a power plant lake not far from there where during the afternoon we would go and catch silly numbers of walleyes and the occasional monster largemouth.

Cool place this time of year.

Thanks Guys!
My son was taking pics and sharing them with bud’s back home the whole time we were there, he’s lucky that he has several that also hunt regularly.
Ammo was named by my son (he was supposed to be “his” dog, but we all know how that goes LOL), and truth be told, he heisted it from another family acquaintance’s pup

Eric, that area is indeed fun just to do some driving around in. The oil industry has all but disappeared from there. There is soooo much area to hunt around there how did you find time to fish? Did you haul a boat out there?
I’m thinking about doing some duck hunting out there next year, but we’ll see how things work out for time.

We did take a boat with.
I met a guy who lives out there a few years back and he had us bring a boat and he brought his as well so we had 4 guys in 2 boats.
There was a lot of oil guys in town when we were there but my buddy had plenty of places to hunt.
I think between the 4 of us we caught about 50 walleyes in just a few hours and were back in time to do some hunting before dark.
It was the first time I had ever driven down a dirt road and had 20-30 birds jump up in front of us. (had not hunted out of Minnesota at that time. LOL)
Like I said, it would be a bird hunters dream destination for a couple weeks or so in the fall.
You pick your poison, pheasants, ducks, geese, (Black or white) you could do it all!
We did run into a blizzard of sorts on the way home so that kind of sucked!

To give you an idea of how empty it was, we stayed in the county fairground campground, total of 2 of us there. The big campground south on that road had maybe 12 rigs in it (looked to hold 100+, and the hotel/steakhouse next door has closed down) and the small one in town towards the highway had 1 person in it.

This was our first trip out of state also, so the numbers were crazy to us. Our fist day we hunted a small slough right on the corner of two gravel roads, only a half hour to ring the whole thing. We took two roosters on the way around and just a short ways from the truck we let out guard down and had 25-30 birds fly out of a small cattail thicket in all directions. All I could do was shake my head and laugh (my son did get one out of the group).

Wish we had time for another trip this year but Junior starts school and travel basketball next Monday so that puts a kabosh on travel the rest of the year for me.

I am thinking about bugging out Thanksgiving week for a couple days.
I still have 1 week on my ND license so can’t not use it! LOL

Just returned from ND myself and with the nice weather we were dealt, decided to pheasant hunt instead of usual duck/goose. I was amazed at the pheasant numbers. Hunted 2 days in Garrison, 2 in Newburg. Plenty of birds in both places.
I grew up in the Newburg area and we never had pheasants like that. I believe the new strains of corn that allow it grow in that northern climate have provided the food and cover for those birds to thrive up north.
I may have to rethink my annual trip which was always duck/goose to include more pheasant hunting.

ET