Another opener has come and gone. This year was good with the temperatures down in the mid 40’s and partly cloudy. I went down to my parents farm in Chippewa Falls, WI to hunt with my 2 brothers, my Dad, and 1 of my brothers friends.
Waiting until noon on Saturday is always hard anticipating the hunt. The minutes seem to go so slow, until noon arrives and it’s time to go out. We started off in one of our fields that we have set aside in native prairie grasses for wildlife habitat. We thought with the wind direction and cover that this would be a good place to start. We got about 3/4 of the way down the field and no birds yet. I thought for sure that we would have seen at least 1, but nothing. We got done with that field and decided to hit a crick bottom with woods and thick cover on each side.
That was the ticket. About 30 yds in, Molly(our friends dog) gets birdy and the rooster gets up and 
I got my bird! Molly pics up the bird and on we go. Not even 20 yds more, rooster and Mike our friend puts the down.
By this time we are getting excited because we found where they were hiding 
. We could hear more roosters crowing up further from us. My Dad was posting at the end of the drive because he cannot walk with us. He has a bum ankle. We started into the drive again and I heard my Dad shoot and he had his bird. Now we are 3 out of 5. We start again and keep going until we almost reach my dad and right in front of me another rooster gets up and brother Al get his bird.
We get to my Dad and decide what to do next. We are 4 for 5 with 1 bird left to get. We decide to keep going and finish the push out of the crick bottom. At this point we are about 1/2 way down the crick bottom which in total is about 600-700 yds long. We started again and made it about 50 yds and a rooster pops up and my brother Chris gets his.
I asked my brother Chris what time it is and he said 1pm. I said are you kidding? I could not believe that it was over so soon. Al in all it was one of the best openers we had. I think we had a total of 8-10 flushes and got our 5 birds. That was only covering a small portion of what we could have hunted, so the other areas will be for up coming weeknds .
Now for the bonus part.
Afer the pheasant hunt we were walking back to the house and noticed that there were a lot of doves flying around as we passed a 20 acre field of sun flowers that the farmer who leases our land had planted. I wasn’t sure if the season was still open or not so I went back to the house to check the regulations. It is open until November 9th, so we decided to give dove hunting a try.
We started out by walking slow through the sun flowers and seeing if we could kick some up. There were several waves of 3 to 4 birds that got up and we started to shoot. We ended up with 1 on the fisrt flurry. They are not that easy to hit. After most of them got up and left we decided to sit and wait for them to come back as we had time to kill anyway. After about 20 or 30 minutes a flock of 4 came back and we got 2 more. After doing this for another hour or so we ended up with a total of 6.
Not too bad for a few hours of hunting. I cannot wait until the next time.
Pretty cool that everyone got to shoot their own rooster pheasant! 
