Hunting a White-out and Bird Dog Ramblings

Now I've been told there is nothing better than spending a fall day in the field behind some fine pointing dogs shooting a limit of roosters. I see it on the covers of the hunting magazines or on Pheasants Forever Television so I know what they are talking about. Usually the sun is at everyone's back, there is a nice breeze coming in, a brushy hill rises up in the distance, a German Short Hair Pointer is locked up straight as an arrow while an English Pointer waits patiently honoring the point, steady and frozen, but ready for the call to flush. A custom side-by-side fires and a plump bird windmills to the ground, eventually brought to the hand that pulled the trigger.

When you hunt with a Mack-Truck-of-A-Dog like I do you don't see much of that finery. Most times I just hope the blind doesn't come down around me with each new dog-sized exit hole that is created, sometimes even before the shot goes off. I also never see those guys running with their guns, which seems totally foreign to me. Her (yes it is a girl-dog-truck) name is Gunner Girl but everyone calls her Gunner. She is 100% Chesapeake Bay Retriever.

Back in 2005 I went to the breeder looking for a Chessie with a hunting background and had some concern about all the show ribbons on the wall. There were no pictures of ducks piled up like cordwood or dogs leaping off docks after geese like I hoped. She assured me she had some hunters in the linage and showed me something that looked like a sentence diagram from high school English that showed her grandfather had passed a hunt test. I…d been looking for awhile and had a short window so my options were few. I took the one nick named curly for her curly hair and she had a deliberate demeanor about her that looked good for hunting. However my show dog concern increased after I picked her up when I found out her father won best of breed at Westminster. Thankfully her price didn…t increase because the check was cashed. I later found out that winning at Westminster was kind of a big deal but to me it was another flag I was going to have the best looking non-hunting dog in the duck blind.

Thankfully my concerns about her prey drive dissipated at 6 months when she broke her tether (I just wanted her to watch the hunt) to chase a goose I winged. The goose sailed 300 yards over an inlet before landing on the far side of the bank. I couldn't swim it and had a long trek (again running with the gun) and was terrified that this giant Canda twice her size would wing-whip her into submission and a cushy life on the couch. She had completed the swim about five minutes before I got there and I was out of breath. As I approach the first thing I see is a twitching goose with its spine jutting out in a few places. She is standing there looking at me like …where is the next opponent?-and has no fear of geese. On field hunts she seems to enjoy ramming them with her chest at a full sprint knocking them down like a fullback or pins at a bowling alley. She also …plays-with other dogs in the dog park like this, and as you might guess we no longer visit dog parks. In the water she will break ice with her chest and it is an amazing thing to watch.

The only thing she loves more than geese are pheasants. When she was about 10 weeks old I bought some pheasant scent and a pheasant wing. I would play keep away with it and hide it in the house for her to find. I continued the game outside in the tall grass. When she was a little older I would leave her in the house and make a scent trail with drops every few feet in a zig-zag pattern leading to the wing hidden under a bush. This all happened out of her sight and she would go absolutely berzerk headbutting the sliding glass door in anticipation of finding this wing.

When we get to do the real thing, chasing pheasants, it is usually in the state parks that release birds at different points in the season. My favorite time to go is later in December or January after the birds and hunters have scattered. Even better is if there is a good snowfall on the ground to help find tracks. A month in the field dodging hunters, yotes, and marsh hawks and you would never know they were pen raised. And boy they seem to know when to run vs fly!

Back in 2007 I had a day off work because a near blizzard that hit Northeast Ohio. They shut down the campus where I work. I say near blizzard because all the elements where there for accumulation and timing but I think the wind wasn…t enough to qualify. It was a white out with visibility under 100 feet or so. I drive a lifted jeep on 33inch mud tires and this was probably the only day that made this vehicle a …practical-purchase. So while the rest of the world holed up to weather the storm, or made a mad dash for non-perishablesat the grocery store, I grabbed Gunner and the 12 gauge and off we went to hunt.

After an hour drive with just me and some wreckers on the road I remember thinking how strange it was to be out in the middle of a snowstorm. I…d been hunting these woods for a couple of years but the complete blanket of silence and snow coming down made it feel much different. It is interesting just how different the woods can be, hunting in the rain, in a drought, in the snow, after an ice storm...I recommend them all for different reasons. I feel bad for anyone that hasn…t experienced a sunrise from a tree stand or red hawk landing on a branch 10 feet away at eye level, the sound of a deer crunching leaves, or ducks materializing in the mist above the water... but I…ll save that for another journal entry.

On this hunt there was about a foot of snow on the ground and the flakes where so fat and fast that another half inch was on your shoulders in the time it took to cross a field. At this rate I knew our chances of finding a pheasant would be best in the heaviest cover near or in a food source. Shelter from this snow, not loafing, would be the goal of any early afternoon pheasant today. I knew of a couple corn strips that were left standing and figured that would be the place to go. In the corn strips, which are planted extra wide and from a strain that grows shorter, was a heavy undergrowth of wheat from the previous planting. ODNR plants and rotates these fields for wildlife so they aren…t harvested but knocked down or left for tilling each spring. Seeds are plowed under and you…ll always see corn growing in the wheat and vice-versa. Near this corn was a wet area frozen over but still with tall reads that get bent over from the weight of the snow. These areas make great snow shelter caves and tunneling for rabbits and pheasants.

Gunner and I headed out on about a 30 minute hike in deep snow with more coming down hard. Visibility was just enough to see the tree line to keep a heading and stay on course. By the time we got there Gunner had an inch of snow piled up on her back and only from the sides could I see the orange safety vest. The orange dog vest was so another hunter wouldn…t mistake her for something else but no hunter was crazy enough to be out there on a Monday hunting pheasants in a blizzard. At this point roads were closings by the hour so they might not get there if they wanted to anyway. I was still tromping away in the snow but gunner had changed over from the …excited to be hunting with leaps and bounds-to a deliberate kind of chest deep plowing through snow like the elk coming down from the Colorado mountains caught in an early season blizzard. It was light and powdery and made a sort of wake around her, she made it look effortless. I guess Chessies were bread to take on the elements and any terrain. In the Chesapeake Bay area they have to climb steep banks and for that reason their hips and shoulders are different heights to give better leverage for climbing. I…ve seen her crawl up under-cut creek washouts taller than me and I…ve seen her run on her forearms using them like snow shoes in mud flats to keep from sinking in the mucky quagmire. It is strange how they can adapt and camo to any surrounding.

We arrived at the corn strips ready to look for pheasants just after 12:00. There were no tracks because of the fresh snow fall and I knew the success of this hunt was going to rely on pushing through heavy cover in combination with Gunner…s nose rooting in the snow caves. I was glad to have the brush busting Mack-Truck-Dog on this hunt. It wasn…t long in the corn and I saw the rhythmic tail swing she only gets when on a bird. She will get on other animals but this tail swing is reserved for pheasants. It reminds me of a metronome, a perfect long sweeping side to side and a nose to the ground kind of intensity. Occasionally she will lift her head to make sure a bird isn…t running ahead of her. On this blizzard hunt however she has to submarine into the snow caves beneath the sturdier but laid over reeds. Gunner literally disappears under the brush and I can tell from the moving snow on top where she is. I follow along like tracking a mole that disturbs the dirt slightly on the surface. She is in there for a bit, travels about 5 yards or so and about 10 yards in front of her out pops a pheasant at the end of the brush line. The pheasant doesn…t see me and is just sort of walking around there looking around and looking back. It sees the rumbling snow gaining ground on it and then Gunner makes a snort-wheeze like a deer and I see a nose and a tail break through the surface of the snow. This activity causes the pheasant to flush. I didn…t have a safe shot until the flush and was so mesmerized by this thing unfolding before me that I it took me a while to get the gun mounted. I came to realizing why we were here and I get two shots off. Both misses. It isn…t until the pause and I slow things down for a proper lead that the third shot folds the rooster. It was a good long poke and a lucky one too. Gunner runs out in the deep snow to bring me the prize. Good dog I say! We go back to the corn and the second bird is found in an easy flush in a small patch of brush in the corn. This rooster came down with a more respectable single shot just as it leveled off from its rise to catch the wind.
The white-out pheasant hunt might be one of my favorite days in the field. We went out just the two of us, not expecting to see birds and more to have a reason to play in the deep snow. Taking a limit of pheasants with my hunting dog in the biggest snowstorm since the blizzard of 76 will stick with me for a lifetime!