Finding pheasants to hunt close to home

HINCKLEY, Minn. _ We were roughly 60 seconds into this early season pheasant hunt when Jaxon locked up in a statuesque point.

Jared Wiklund's 4-year-old English pointer left no doubt that a pheasant was somewhere just beyond his nose.

"When Jaxon locks up like that, it's pretty much 100 percent," Wiklund would say later.

Wiklund walked in on Jaxon's point. A gaudy rooster first ran, then took flight. Wiklund's 12-gauge double-barrel sent the rooster tumbling across a sky where low clouds were beginning to break up. Jaxon raced out to pick up the bird and delivered it to Wiklund.

We were hunting a state wildlife management area near Hinckley just six days into Minnesota's pheasant season. Wiklund, who grew up in Duluth and now lives in Forest Lake, Minn., is public relations manager with Pheasants Forever, the upland conservation group based in St. Paul, Minn. He had wanted to hunt this sprawling parcel of grassland, wetlands and aspen forest to make a point.

While Minnesota's highest pheasant counts typically are in the west-central and southwestern portions of the state, the east-central region has plenty of public land that holds decent numbers of pheasants. In roadside counts conducted by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in August, the pheasant index was up 27 percent over last year in east-central Minnesota and up 72 percent in the central region.

Wiklund slipped the handsome bird into his vest, and we let Jaxon lead us to more birds. Some, however, weren't waiting around. As we walked north through thigh-high vegetation, a flurry of pheasants boiled out of willow shrubs beyond gun range. It was a spectacular sight, as the birds exploded simultaneously, fleeing in several directions. It was the kind of scene usually reserved for Terry Redlin wildlife print, minus the sunset and the old pickup.

"There had to be eight roosters in there," said Wiklund, 30.

We took our best guess at where some of the bids might have settled and moved in that direction. The soft clank of Jaxon's bell let us know where he was much of the time, and if he was out of sight and sound for long, Wiklund just checked the GPS receiver he wore around his neck. Jaxon was wearing the transmitter.