And the countdown begins
Six days away. I must repeat that to myself all week. Of course I will lessen the number by one per day, but good gosh, I'm starting to twitch.Saturday is taken care in the regards to the ground we're going to hunt. Yesterday, my brotherfromanothermother and I went to look at ground up by Inman about 20 miles away. We think we've got some lines on a couple of places to add to our "collection" of ground we can hunt. The two of us explored the Kansas countryside from about 8 a.m. until 1:30. It would have been a bit longer, but I spent 15 minutes searching for my coffee cup which I still can't find. Anyways, it was very nice to have a navigator who was looking at the rural directories and telling me where we were going and who owned what.
We did make a move that one can only be considered as a mistake as we went to look at the birds. A little background again, my father and I belong to a pheasant club that raises pheasants, then hunts the raised pheasants on opening day. The reason that the club was formed was that numbers were down so much a few years ago, this group got tired of not shooting 60 on opening day.
So now they buy 250 pheasants, hoping that they get about a 50/50 split of roosters to hens. This year however, we lost some of the birds to a power outage, and some laziness by one of the founding members of the club. I think we'll still have good numbers however. You'd think with planted birds we would just shoot and shoot and shoot.
That's not the case. Last year, on opening day, we released 74 birds. As we caught them we put a plastic cable tie on one of the legs so we knew if it was one of our birds. The cover we placed the birds in was ridiculously thick, tall thick grass varying between chest and over the head height in spots. We ended up shooting 46 between the 17 of us. However, those numbers are deceiving as of the46 birds, only 31 had the bands. Fifteen were actuall wild pheasants but that means 43 somehow got away. It wasn't that hard to believe as the cover was so thick. Once during the walk, I realized that Rick and I were the only two people trying to cover about 75 yards. We yelled and yelled and yelled for help but no help came. Two guys covering that much space? The birds were probably walking past us.
Just realizing that I get to take part in my favorite activity has me nearly twitching.
posted by Rusty @ 7:24 AM
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