Stolen birds and the Two Man Ninga
The greatest weekend in Kansas is ending as I type. Well, great for me, anyways. I'm a little tired...ok, a lot tired. Lack of sleep and the Two-Man Full Court Ninga will do that.I managed three hours of sleep with dreams filled with anticipation. My alarm went off at 4:06, so I bolted out of bed to put some hot java on. Once the coffee was going, I managed to pull on clothes while slightly shaking. No it's not Parkinson's, it was Anticipationson's. I was jacked up because I really believed Danny was mistaken about the numbers of birds.
He wasn't.
Of the 100 roosters we had nearly a month ago, suddenly we were down to 53. They couldn't get out of the pen and even if they did, for some reason, those birds hang around the pen. Because we didn't have a lock on the pen door, it would have been easy for someone to actually catch the birds and remove them. How low is that for someone to take pheasants? I mean really. We're going to find out who did it though.
Depsite our now missing birds, we still released 48 of them. Our new plan is to keep all the hens and the four roosters for breeding stock. If this works, numbers for next year will be up a bit.
We had a blast and I managed to shoot 5 or 6. Afterwards, we had a feast and laughed quite a bit. By 3, I was pretty dang tired, then I called two basketball games.
Franzy called me and we decided to postpone our annual opening weekend trip to his ground until later. So I crawled into bed so tired that I wasn't hungry.
Waking up at six-thirty, I pulled on clothes and drug my ass up the stairs to go at it again. This time, our plan was to start a bit later while only hunting one or two patches. There were 3.5 of us. I know what you're thinking, how can there be .5 of a person? It was Gyles's 9 year old son Matthew who came, only to walk without a gun. We didn't mind because that's essentially an extra body.
Because KS opened pheasant season a week early, we couldn't shoot quail. Today, I bet we saw between 30-35 quail in the one patch we walked this morning. Our plan was to edge the field and let the dog work. We did exactly that and we saw and heard birds flushing in the distance. Things were setting up perfectly for us. That is, until my brain got in the way.
For some reason, these guys look to me to lead the hunt. Im not sure why, but they do. Anyways, I kept Jar, who was on the outside edge, in line to long before sending him out and around to hold birds in the corner. When he got out and was trucking around, at least a dozen came bailing out of the hedge row like their feathers were on fire. The problem was that they were so horribly out of range that we had no prayer.
We finished up rather disappointed in our lack of kills. Jar made a suggestion of taking a 15 minute break and running what we call the Ninga. (The Ninga is named after a guy we went to school with that tried to spell Ninja on a jeans jacket. Now we use the word to descibe a hair-brained half-cocked idea that only the two of us can cook up.) When the two of us run a Ninga, it's just our way of being helter-skelter and doing things completely and totally differently than the way we normally do things.
This time our Ninga was going to be a 2-man Ninga going right up the middle of the field which never seems to work. Our philosophy was that it would screw the birds up and we might be able to pin them up against the hedge. Gyles and the dog had taken off and we said that we could still manage the two-man Ninga. So up the gut of the field we went. The field itself was a fresh cut milo field with tons of grain left on the ground. We thought if we saw any birds, we'd pursue them across the field and just try to get them.
On our first trip down the middle of the field, we caught a hen trying to sneak away and flushed her. We turned around, moved to the south about 30 yards and headed back to the road. About halfway back to the road, I saw a rooster trying to sneak away but he darted back into the row ahead of me. Then Jar saw him but he ducked back in to the row. We were effectively walking the rows that weren't trashed by the combine tires. Those rows that are smashed make a natural edge which can help hold pheasants in. The two of us kept seeing fleeting glances of the bird. I even jumped over two rows to help keep an eye on him. Finally, we caught up to him and he flushed. Jar recorded the kill on that one.
Laughing because only the two of us could come up with a scheme like that and make it work. So naturally we did it again and we had the same result, only I recorded the kill. By now, we were tired as two miles of nearly jogging caught up with us.
We called it a day and I called it a weekend.
posted by Rusty @ 1:24 PM
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