Pheasant Opener This Saturday

Who’s going out?

My son has a party I need to take him, but planning to get out a couple hours Saturday morning.

I am either going to take my boys pheasant hunting or to the grouse woods to check out our deer hunting locations.
Doesn’t look like the weather will be real great, but at least it isn’t supposed to be 70 degrees like it has in the recent openers.

Thought about it, but with the rain in the forecast, I will be taking the duck boat out instead. My GSP will not be happy with me.

I’m going to play it by ear with the weather. I’d like to, but opener is usually a big cluster, anyways (on public land, at least).

I am passing on opener. I hunted opener 2 or 3 years ago, and it was a mess of people on public land that it really wasn’t too enjoyable. I’ll hunt the rest of the season after the first week and hardly see another person out!

I’ve got niece and nephew birthday parties this weekend, and when we were planning out the dates for all of us to get together, I actually voted to have it this weekend so I could miss the cluster of hunters and get a free weekend in 2 weeks (when the birthday parties were originally planned) when there’s more crops out and less hunters out.

The weather looks pretty good in SW Minnesota. 40/50s with only 20% chance of rain. Like Captain Musky said, much better than 70s.

Agree about the crowds though. I am lucky enough to have a small piece of CRP at my in-laws farm. It’s not much, but hoping I can find a bird or two. Plus I have a 9 mos old pup that is itching for her first (wild) pheasant experience

Going to SW MN area.

Heading out to far NW North Dakota on Saturday for 5 days of chasing roosters with my son and father-in-law. Numbers out there have really dropped this year due to a severe drought this summer. Young birds will be hard to come by, most of the birds will be holdovers from last year which will most likely make for some tough shooting.
My biggest concern is that alot of the available cover may have been hayed/cut this year, so just finding decent spots could be a challenge. No way to know until we get out there, and any day in the field with family and the dogs is better than here at work

Good luck to those who go but a heads up to everyone heading to western/SW MN – they’ve had lots of water out there in the last 30 days, to the point where corn and bean fields are super muddy and pretty much anything that’s been burned and/or tiled in the last 10 years is underwater. My farmer friends in Traverse, Big Stone, LQP can’t get equipment into lots of fields right now and they have a real concern about getting it all out on time.

May not be an issue in the grass but be careful cause there’s lots of water where there usually isn’t any.

Good luck. I’ll be chasing Grouse at the other end of the state starting Thursday. My Pheasant opener will be Iowa two weeks later.

Good luck to all!

I’m going to duck hunt in the morning and it sounds pretty wet for tomorrow afternoon. If it’s dry around here Sunday the hounds and I will be out after the roosters.

SW MN is gonna be tough as 95% of the crops are still in and it’s been wet for a number of months

Discovered a gorgeous tract of Voluntary Public Access land (thank you landowner for making this habitat available). Unfortunately it didn’t hold any birds for us, only a couple whitetails. Adjacent standing corn and beans probably didn’t help our cause. Nonetheless Piper worked hard and we both enjoyed our time afield. I just GOTTA get her on some live birds though – soon.
I was disappointed in the WI DNR FFIGHT map system on my mobile device, not a substitute for a paper map.

Attachments:

1. 

   IMG_2593.jpg
   

My son Zach and I had a great day. Got our Limit on our farm in Wisconsin before the rain hit.

Ben

Attachments:

1. 

   IMG_3683.jpg
   

2. 

   IMG_3673.jpg
   

3. 

   IMG_3682.jpg
   

Nice, Ben! Looks like a great day.

Sometimes plans come together. Zeb got the duck duties this morning and Gus had the honor of the first pheasant of the season.

Between the rain on Saturday and being out of shape and sore on Sunday there wasn’t as much hunting as a usual opening weekend. Still saw about 8 on Saturday and 4 on Sunday. There were 4 roosters we shot at and got 2 of them.

This time my girlfriend came with for her first pheasant hunting trip and got the first bird Saturday morning.

Reef W wrote:

This time my girlfriend came with for her first pheasant hunting trip and got the first bird Saturday morning.

Nice! My wife did the same at a game farm last week. Hopefully, she can get a wild bird, soon, too.

Reef W wrote:

…being out of shape and sore…

Ha ha ha. I know how you feel.