Adam Johnson Outdoors • Reading Outdoors

Flush - Cackle - Bang

By Adam Johnson

The smell of the air in the fall is crisp and cool with a tinge of burning leaves. The explosion of fall colors is a welcome sight as you wander down the crooked backroads of rural Minnesota. In the distance you can here a rooster pheasant cackle and you smile, because now they are fair game and that is what makes fall the best season of them all.

Minnesota is on the northern range of the pheasant, but conditions were good this winter and spring and there should be an outstanding population of birds to hunt. While most pheasant hunters tend to migrate towards the bigger farms in southern Minnesota with a group of friends to push big swaths of cover, I prefer to take a dog and one buddy out to the little patches of cover in south central Minnesota and dig the birds out one at a time.

What I'm talking about here is the small Wildlife Management Areas and Waterfowl Management Areas that are spread out all over the state. These areas can be a pheasant paradise once the corn and beans are picked and the cover for the pheasant is condensed to locations like that.

When hunting small spits of cover you have to have the stealth attitude. If you pull up to a spot, get out of the car and slam the doors and make a lot of noise, those roosters will hightail it out over open country to hunker down in a plow divot. You never see these birds because they are long gone before you get there.

I often park the truck some distance from the spot I'm going to hunt and hoof it a hundred yards to the edge. This way if I drop a shell on the tailgate or hit the lock button twice by accident and beep the horn the birds won't be so apt to spook.

Another good tip for small-patch pheasant hunting is to move slow until the dog gets onto a bird, then let that dog chase him down with you hot on its heels.

The cover is thick and the escape routes are everywhere in these spits of grass and wetlands. You need to dig those roosters out of those thick hiding places, but once they go on the run you can't let them get too far ahead of you or they will be long gone by the time they flush.

I predict a great season for chasing pheasants this year. There's nothing like the sound of a pheasant cackling as they flush, just prior to the bark of my 12-gauge shotgun, which creates another smell in the fall air I truly enjoy.