My first trip hunting in Massachusetts was an attempt at taking my eager backyard squirrel chaser, Calvin, out to try our hand at squirrel hunting. It was the first small game season to open in Massachusetts, and I was interested to see if chasing squirrels around the yard translated into helping me harvest tree rodents.
It does not.
Calvin and I walked through the woods for a couple hours, listening for the chittering of squirrels up in the trees. While it was easy to hear the squirrels, we struggled to locate any. Walking around those woods, however, gave me the opportunity to take in my surroundings. One of the things that alarmed me about this public hunting, Wildlife Management Area (WMA), was that I could see the rooftops of houses close by.
It felt like I could only walk a couple hundred yards in any direction before I found another house. I would have to switch direction because although the .22LR rifle I was toting is not the most powerful, I still didn’t want to put an errant slug through a kitchen window.
I proceeded through the WMA walking until I saw a roof through the trees, then angling away until I found yet another. I covered the whole WMA after a couple hours of slowly picking my way through the forest. Calvin and I heard plenty squirrels, but I hadn’t been able to get one in view to shoot at it. I felt bad, because I wanted to involve Calvin in the hunt more. Although, he seemed to just enjoy running around the woods.
There was a farm on one end of the WMA, and as we walked back to the truck, I noticed a whole bunch of gophers and ground squirrels milling about the woods just inside the WMA boundary. Setting my sights on one of the gophers, I shot as it poked its head around a tree. The gopher dropped, and I called Calvin over to take a look.
He hated it. As soon as I showed him the dead gopher, he looked at me with incredulity on his little doggy face, as if he was horrified that I would actually shoot the gopher. He would rather have chased it all over the woods. Another gopher popped up, and I shot again, and again Calvin regarded it with dismay as the dead gopher flipped out of its hole. A squirrel dog he is not.
After that not-so-productive trip chasing squirrels, I tried my hand at archery hunting for deer and turkeys, and was met with similarly unproductive results. One thing I was not prepared for was to be picking ticks off of me by the hundreds, and if there were any deer in the woods, they surely were scared off by me cursing the little parasites I kept picking off my clothes.
Unproductive hunts behind me, I got ready for the upcoming pheasant season in Massachusetts. I figured that, surely, in a state with restrictive gun laws and small parcels of public land, there couldn’t be much pressure for Pheasants. I scouted WMAs for weeks in advance, chose my starting point, and set out super early the morning of Pheasant opener.
In Minnesota, Pheasant hunting starts at 9 AM, so in the interest of tradition, I showed up shortly before 9 AM, even though Massachusetts allows pheasant hunting at sunrise. I figured, why not? Nobody is going to be out hunting anyway, at least not at the carefully selected spot that I had chosen. To top it off, it was pouring rain, and the Massachusetts hunter could not be as dedicated and hardcore as those in Minnesota.
As I pulled into the parking lot I was greeted with over forty vehicles, many of them sunk in the mud from hours of being parked in the rain. There was a Massachusetts wildlife policeman parked next to the WMA entrance, checking hunters for licenses and their harvests as they came back to the cars. There were multiple parking lots for this WMA, so I figured there had to be even more hunters crawling all over the place.
No matter, I decided to switch to Plan B, and drove another thirty minutes to the next WMA on my list. By the time I pulled in, it was raining even harder, but there were significantly fewer cars in the parking lot of the WMA. With my trusted shotgun, I trudged out into the rainy fields.
Hunting pheasants without a dog or a partner is an interesting proposition. You rely on other hunters to actively chase pheasants. You rely on those pheasants getting away from said hunters, and you try to position yourself where the pheasants are going to flee in the hopes of getting a shot.
I didn’t see any pheasants, despite kicking around prairie grass and cornfields for hours. The handful of hunters I ran into hadn’t seen any pheasants either, many of whom were baffled and surmised that MassWildlife had neglected to stock pheasants on schedule. A booming symphony of shotgun blasts coming from the nearby duck ponds indicated that I had picked the wrong species to hunt on that rainy first Saturday of Massachusetts pheasant season. After a couple more hours of stomping through brush and getting soaked, I tried one last ditch idea I had.
Pheasant hunting in Massachusetts is a different experience than it is in places where pheasants are abundant and pseudo-native. Pheasants are stocked periodically in certain WMAs by MassWildlife, and they advertise which WMAs, how often those WMAs are stocked, and how many pheasants they put out. The WMAs that are stocked most often are, obviously, hunted the hardest, so they are stocked with more and more pheasants and draw more and more hunters, so they are stocked with more and more pheasants and draw more and more hunters, so they are stocked with more and more pheasants…
You get the idea. Certain WMAs get hit super hard and produce a self fulfilling prophecy. My last effort for pheasant opener was to go to one of the WMAs that was not stocked with pheasants, but was connected via stream to one that was. The idea was that the hunters would chase the pheasants to the stream, and the pheasants would use that stream to fly or run along the banks to this other WMA.
It was a good idea, in theory, and I was highly optimistic as I pulled into the empty parking lot of this last WMA. By this late in the day, the rain had lifted, and the sun had come out in earnest. I walked into the WMA to find the creek, and followed it upstream past a beaver pond that took up most of the WMA’s acreage.
Walking slowly and stopping often to listen for the tell tale sounds of pheasants hiding in the brush, it took me over an hour to reach the edge of the WMA, tired and unburdened with pheasants. Walking off the creek bank, I stood in a clearing in the woods and leaned my shotgun against one of the tall pines that surrounded me. I checked my wrist mounted GPS and pondered what to do next.
A familiar noise sounded high above me, and looking up, I saw a gander of Canadian Geese checking out the beaver pond behind me. They were too high to take a shot at, even with the high-powered goose loads I keep in elastic loops on the stock of my shotgun for this exact situation. The geese passed over the pond, and circled back around, lower this time.
I quickly shucked the three pheasant loads out of my shotgun and replaced them with my emergency goose loads to lay in wait for the flock to pass overhead again. Wishing that one of the geese would be low enough for a shot, I half crouched in the forest clearing and hoping that the geese ignored my blaze orange vest.
Loud honking announced the arrival of the geese. Picking one of the stragglers flying the lowest at the tail end of the V-shaped pattern, I fired.
The shotgun blast erupted out of the forest, momentarily drowning out the honking before the geese sounded the alarm in disjointed harmony. The gander aborted their landing pattern and rose back into the sky to find a more peaceful landing zone. My goose flapped its wings a couple more times before folding and spiraling over like a stricken airplane in a war movie, striking a tall pine tree before landing on the ground with a heavy thud.
I rushed over to pick up the goose, the first goose I had shot in a very long time, to suddenly re-learn how heavy a Canadian Goose is. I stuffed the goose into my upland vest and started the long walk back to the truck.
After I got home and skinned the goose, we roasted the goose in the oven and served with excellent red wine and roasted asparagus. We invited some friends over, and for Jenny and our friends it was their first time trying wild goose. Although there was some apprehension at first, the goose turned out really well and everyone enjoyed it through warnings to look out for shotgun pellets.
All in all, a successful hunt, although not the quarry I set out to find. At any rate, any day in the field beats the best day inside, every time.
