I grew up captivated by images in Field and Stream, Outdoor Life, Cabela's catalogs and a hundred other publications that are made specifically for the outdoors-lover like me.
Paintings and pictures like these blended together into one mental image of an ideal: Cold loaded steel in hand, well-trained dogs working fields full of pheasants flushing out of the early morning frost-covered grass. Followed, of course, by an afternoon gathering of family and friends with food, football, sore legs and stories of the morning's hunt. I imagined myself like these lucky hunters:
As a young hunting teenager growing up in a non-hunting family, I had somehow been lucky enough to shoot a pheasant or two here or there after school, whether at nearby railroad tracks or a local irrigation canal. Those times were much enjoyed, but I had yet to go on a real pheasant hunt, and I knew that as soon as I had that chance I would take it. The images I had collected in my head had already made me nostalgic for hunts yet to be had, dogs yet to be trained, trips yet to be taken, and future memories yet to be made.
Sadly, as I grew, I discovered that endless fields of flushing birds existed only in my mind. For a guy like me in the state where I lived, the best pheasant hunting I was going to get was at one of the places we called pheasant farms...
...places where pheasants were raised like chickens, but rather than slaughtered, packaged, and sent to the grocery store, you could pay to have the owner release a few into his fields the morning before your hunt. Whatever birds you couldn't shoot or couldn't find eventually fell prey to foxes, coyotes, cars, or the cold of winter.
Pheasant hunting clubs and ranches exist because without them pheasants wouldn't, at least not where I grew up. The truth of it is there just wasn't enough habitat to support a healthy, huntable, publicly accessible population of birds. Reality set in, and somehow the thought of paying for pen-raised birds to be planted in front of me destroyed the idealistic images from my youth.
However, this Fall I found something worth daydreaming about, and now I can't stop doing just that. Nebraska has no shortage of wild pheasants, and two months ago I was invited by some friends to come experience Nebraska's best, first-hand.
I used to think that publicly accessible fields like this didn't exist...
...but they do in Nebraska, and inside them live hundreds of pheasants as wild as can be.
We hunted for four days, and only saw the sun once. The rest of the time we were hunting in the remains of ice storms and frozen fog
On the last morning I stopped to fill up with gas and realized how cold it actually was:
All the dogs' noses were bloody from the ice and cold, as demonstrated by Rudy:
Without the dogs there would have been no birds. They hunted their hearts out, even little Rudy who really is more of a pet than a hunting dog. A time or two he flushed a hen all by himself, but mostly he couldn't even keep up with me in the thick grass, yet alone the other dogs. He's just too small. A bird would flush, guns would go off, and by the time he'd get to where the bird fell one of the other dogs already had it back to its owner. He struggles to fit birds that big in his mouth anyway, even if he could get to them first, but he never quit trying. As much as I love him I'm excited to get a bigger dog like my buddy's Springer Spaniel Lily:
Or another friend's four-year-old female Brittany, complete with safety vest:
That little gal put up three roosters for me one morning a few weeks ago and I missed all three. It was in the middle of a 25 mph blizzard, but I admit, I sucked it up.
I'm not saying that hunting clubs and ranches don't have their place. They do, and I plan on hunting them in the future, especially when I have kids or can't make it to places like these. I'm just saying that I'll always prefer wild birds in wild places with dogs that wont quit till you force them to. It's an ideal that lives in my head pieced together by a thousand images.
Here's one of those images that I'm glad to have stuck in my mind:
Sweet onion catalina pheasant breast glazed with cranberry honey sauce, wild rice, steamed vegetables, toasted focaccia parmesan bread, and sparkling pink catawba grape juice to wash it down.
