Another Limit of Late Roosters

As the holidays were just beginning, I took a Sunday afternoon to drop off Christmas cookies to one of the landowners that let me hunt his property this season. I was going to hop around public property until I found a bird, but the landowner said I was more than welcome to try my luck at again out at the property I limited earlier.
Once I was done catching up, I hauled over to spot again, as I knew I would at least see birds at this place.
It was colder and windy, and it took both the dog and I a little bit to get our legs under us. I could tell we were pushing birds ahead again this time, but they were sticking tight with the snow cover in the cattails. Mocha flushed one hen right in front of me and I caught some birds flushing far out ahead of us. Fortunately for us, they would get up, and drop right back down again. When we got to the end I just let the pup work the area.
Birds were flushing all around me and it was only a matter of time before one of them was a rooster.
The first one flushed to right and I dropped him on the edge of the slough in the deep snow. Before I could even bring my gun down  another flushed far to my left. This was a poke but I again dropped him in the open winter wheat field.
After those two, I just stood in my spot and let the pup work around for awhile. I wanted to make sure there were no more roosters in that spot to complete a quick limit.
I picked up my buried rooster, and worked over to the one in the open field. Mocha flushed two more hens in the span of a few yards. We took a quick pic with my first double.

The next bird we had to earn...
There were birds flushing everywhere.
What I figured out was, every time we came to a corner the birds would hold until I was in range. The first corner got me two birds, the next corner I biffed on two birds.
We continued through the deep weeds just like last time but the birds were not cooperating. There was pheasant and deer sign everywhere so we knew they were there. We made our way back out into the cattails and there again were birds flushing wild. We pushed through to the next corner, halfway through, unloading on yet another without a scratch.
When we got the the end this time there were no birds.
We turned to work our way back and Mocha found one close.
I unload my gun again. I drop a leg the first shot, scrape the back on the second, and clip a wing on my final shot, bringing him back down to the prairie. I knew this was going to be a fun one to find...
Mocha and I began our grid and we were coming up with little. There was enough snow that we could find a fresh track if we ran into it, we were just struggling to find that.
Finally I found a blood trail. We trailed a pheasant like blood trailing a deer: one step at a time.
I caught sight of the bird a split second before Mocha did and she barrel rolled it once she was on it.

This is likely the last hunt of the 2015 season for me and it was a fantastic finish to an unbelievable hunting season. I would change nothing, and despite my frustrations with deer in this country, it really made me appreciate years past as well as what South Dakota has to offer as an alternative. Now we have cold, we have: ICE.



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