Opening Weekend

Every year my brother and I go home to hunt opening weekend with our dad and a couple of his clients from his vet clinic. Pheasant hunting has been one of my favorite activities since I was big enough to walk fields and carry a shotgun. With my dad being a veterinarian in west central Kansas he has lots of cattle clients with farmland. Most of his clients with land don’t regularly bird hunt so they are happy to let us hunt their cut milo fields and CRP fields. The only stipulation is that on opening weekend most farmers have family come to town to partake in the opening weekend festivities, which means our access to our usual hunting locations is being hunted by the clients and their family. Luckily, one of my dad’s clients invites us to hunt with him and his family. We’ve been fortunate enough to get this invited extended the last three years and have graciously accepted. This year the group was about 20 guys from 17-75 years old. Personally, I don’t enjoy hunting in groups that big. I think it’s hard for dogs to work that large of a group and with 20 people walking a field it can be hard on the bird population as well as the field you’re walking. Anyway, I’ll get off my high horse, I get more enjoyment from bird hunting outside of opening weekend, but as I haven’t gotten very many opportunities to hunt yet this year being here in college, I’ll talk about my experience this year opening weekend. With the group we went with not being super hardcore about the hunting and more just there for the experience and camaraderie we met up around 8 am. The first field we walked was a quarter section of CRP. We had about 15 of the group walk the field and the rest block on the far side. With that many people and a couple of the older guys not wanting to walk a whole lot they offered to block while the younger group walked. We own two German Shorthair pointers a 2-year-old male and a 9-month-old female. This is the females first season, so we left her home and took our male. He was a little rusty having not been worked since that summer at training and didn’t run his best for the first pass of the field. We were blessed in the fact that the farmer we were with takes pride in providing habitat for the birds. He typically puts food plots in his CRP fields and lets it come back volunteer most years until he has to replant it. With the effort he puts into his land for upland birds his land is a great habitat for birds and his fields are habitually populated with birds. We walked the first field and got five birds, then walked a milo field next, that we had no luck in. After that, we decided to call it a day went home to relax with family.

Written by B Nichols