The plan was to leave on sunday January 17th around 0230 hours. When I was planning the trip I had a possible in to some private land that fell through. I would hunt sun-tues and drive home after dark on tuesday. About six hours before we were to leave I found out that the trip would have to be cut shorter due to daycare issues. I had already bought my license and was so pumped to go I still went. I went to bed and woke up an hour later cus I was so pumped to go. So I loaded up the dog and just he and I went. We left at one AM.
I had done some research and spoke to a PF chapter in western Kansas and also a upland bird biologist to try n locate spots that would hold numbers of pheasants and quail. I settled on Hays Kansas as home base and mapped out several dozen walk in fields to scout/hunt.
so two and a half hours west of Kansas City on I80 I started scouting the fields I had marked. Kansas has a program called Walk In Hunting Areas. These are private lands the state leases. About half of the fields were not worth the time to hunt. I did try a few as a Kansas Pheasant website said to try some that don’t look very good sometimes hold decent numbers of birds. I hunted from 11 am to 4pm. I saw precisely zero pheasants and one covey of quail. I have trained with quail, but never hunted them. I was not ready for the speed in the wild. Didn’t get a shot off.
I spent the next hour scouting for the next day. I found some nice fields and although depression was setting in from not seeing any birds I was eager having found some fields that I would die to hunt in Minensota.
Day 2, you can hunt from a half hour before sun up to sundown so I was in position well before the legal shooting times. Even then it seemed to dark to be hunting so I road hunted. I saw a few birds and quickly found it hard to road hunt by yourself with a barking dog in back. The first field we hit was several hundred acres. I tried to walk along a tree lined creek to the back so we could work back upwind towards the road. I was seeing lots of sign of pheasants. However, we jumped about ten hawks all on the ground. My English Setter (Jet) is in his first season. He went on point once in this field and we never found the bird. Not sure, but all of the hawks appeared to have the birds running scared. Everywhere there were hawks. Driving down the roads you would see them one or two every mile.
The second field was similar to the first on day two. We had a few wild flushes but never got a shot off.
FIELD 3 (lesson learned)
Since it was only the dog and I a small field seemed to be worth a try. So as I am walking I hit a patch of ice and went 
over tea kettle. My gun hit the ground hard. I looked over and the barrel was pointing directly at my face. 
. I was alive and didn’t hear a gun blast 
. However when I collected myself I found that the only gun I brought was down for the count. I was able to make it safe. I still haven’t figured out what happened to the gun. Unfortunately that was the end of that.
It wasn’t worth the time to go since a short trip was already made even shorter due to unforeseen circumstances a few hours before I was supposed to leave, but I would do it again in a second. To try something new just the dog and i was a blast.
I will go back in the next year or two and redeem myself. If anyone goes down there on a regular basis I would love to tag along. Or any advise on the subject would be appreciated.
Even though you did not shoot a single rooster, you still wrote up a very detailed report that we can all learn from. 
