IVANHOE, Minn. _ Jeff Davis, who lives across the highway from the land we were about to hunt on, said he noticed the farmer pick the last corn standing around a cattail wetland just a few days earlier.
"With that corn just out it should be pretty good down there," said Davis, an avid pheasant hunter.
It turned out to be the understatement of the hunting season.
We let the dogs out of the kennels, loaded our guns, zipped our jackets up to our chins and pulled down our ear flaps. We were bracing against a 20 mph northwest wind that, with the temperature at 11 degrees, was nasty cold and right in our faces. And yet we were still almost as enthusiastic as the dogs.
As the morning played out, however, we were puzzled. Berta, a 9-month old German wirehaired pointer, and Blue, a two-year-old chocolate Lab, had rousted a few hens. And we bagged one rooster along a small drainage ditch that meandered through a picked corn field.
A fresh couple inches of snow that fell 48 hours earlier told us the pheasants were here recently. Lots of them. There were hundreds of tracks in the picked corn field on the edge of wetlands and tall grass. It looked like someone had released a flock of chickens.
"There are tracks everywhere in here, too," Davis said from inside a grassy slough where he was walking.
Still, we had only seen a few birds in the first hour of hunting. That finally changed as we started heading back toward the truck, by then a half-mile away, walking up a ravine with a tiny ribbon of cattails in the crook. The cattails were only 6-7 feet wide. But this was where all those birds that made the tracks were holding. Tight.
First the dogs rustled up a lone hen. Then another. And another. Then 10 more. Suddenly pheasants were flushing wildly in every direction out of a 50-yard stretch of cattails. It was a South Dakota-in-the-heyday kind of scene for a few moments. Roosters at the far end were flushing just out of range. And while it was an amazing site, rarely seen in Minnesota these days, it was frustrating not to see a rooster close by.
Until there was one. Then another.
