Iowa………last weekend - Upland Game Hunting – Pheasants, Quail & Grouse - Upland Game Hunting – Pheasants, Quail & Grouse

Well the 6 of us( Robert, Mark, Butch, John, Jeff and myself, and our better halves Oki, Bojie, Dodger, Tuck, Gus and Dalton) busted our butts and tails off Sat and Sun. Walking condition were very difficult, breaking through a crust on almost every step made for very tired legs at the end of the day. The birds were there but you had to work hard for them. NO shortage of hens out there, we saw lots and lots of hens so that’s a good thing to see at the end of the season. The warm weather this weekend will go along way for helping these birds through the winter. With a good section of the state having lots of freezing rain earlier this winter the birds were struggling a little getting through the ice to the feed. I think after this weekend that has helped the birds a lot. Fields started opening up a little and I think they will get to the left over grain in the fields if they weather doesn’t get really bad again.

We hunted switch grass and groves. Birds were very spooky with our blockers getting a lot of the shooting. The walkers had to deal with bird getting up early and rolling just a head of the dogs and shooters, and when we were lucky enough to get the birds past our blockers……they did a great job of bringing them down. You don’t know how hard it is to push the birds in these conditions and watch to blockers miss shots. SO hats off to our blocker this weekend they shot great.

The key to getting the birds in the switch grass was trying to figure out where they wanted to go when spooked out of the grass and having blockers in there path. If we picked correctly the blockers had some good shooting, if we didn’t we watch lots of bird fly out into the middle of sections making it impossible to get to.

Grove hunting if you’ve never had the chance to try, is a blast……..that is if you can pull it off correctly. Timing is everything, and you have to surround it all at the same time. If you can, and you can keep the bird from running out the back corner send in a dog and watch the explosion. You still have very difficult shots because most of the times the birds know you are there and they go straight up like a rockets before leveling off and hightailing it in to the middle of a section. The other hard part is, you can’t get you gun loaded fast enough. Usually the birds just erupt all at once, making it difficult to pick out one bird focus and shoot. It never fails you empty your gun and are trying to reload for that one straggler in the grove…..they the rooster have this uncanny knack for knowing when you are out of shells……they get up and fly past at about 15 yards while you struggle to get more shells in your gun…..usually dropping them in the snow…….well needless to say that straggler usually gets away.

We ended up with 24 birds for the two days…….trust me we earned them the hard way, it was some off the toughest hunting I’ve had in a long time.

I’m sad to say that the 2007 bird hunting is over for me. It was a great year for pheasant and duck. We struggled with our Kansas dove hunt but that’s why it’s called hunting.

I’ll post pictures later, I was to tired to download the pictures when I got home.

Whatsa