I watched with frustrated amazement as a team of older hunters parked right at the edge of the field I was stomping through. I had been working since just after sunrise, zig-zagging across the tall grass and kicking my boots through snarls of weeds. I had a gut feeling there had a to be a pheasant or two hunkering down somewhere in this patch of prairie. Sure enough, right after I zigged away from one side of the field, about halfway up, a rooster erupted from the end of the field.
“Roostah!” one of the old-timers shouted with a thick Boston accent, both raised their shotguns, and a pair of shots brought the pheasant to the ground. The men gave a little cheer, and turned to me to shout their thanks before trotting off to pick up the fallen bird. I just stood there, tired and incredulous as they marched further into the Wildlife Management Area (WMA).
Welcome to hunting in the incredibly hard-hit public lands of Massachusetts.
In the United States, Ring necked Pheasants are an introduced species originally hailing from the steppes in Asia. In agricultural areas such as Minnesota and, somewhat famously, South Dakota, pheasants naturalized quickly and became more or less self sustaining. Pheasants in Massachusetts, on the other hand, are almost all farm raised and released birds.
I enjoy hunting pheasants, especially naturalized, wild birds with my dad, brothers, and a well trained dog. Hunting the stocked pheasants, alone and without a dog, in Massachusetts is a totally different experience.
Hunting for those naturalized pheasants in Minnesota often mean trudging through thick brush, cattails, or long prairie grass. The dogs put in even more work crisscrossing the fields trying to pick up the scent of wily birds. For both human and canine, it can be difficult work, especially during a late-season hunt when you add snow, ice, and more skittish pheasants that survived the season so far.
If, while searching for a hunting spot in Minnesota, you pulled into a public land area and saw there were already one or two cars, you would simply drive a couple more minutes to the next public WMA to hunt. Minnesota’s WMAs are blessedly plentiful and productive for pheasant hunting.
Wildlife Management Areas in Massachusetts are nowhere near as plentiful, and are much more spaced out, and none of them are as productive for pheasants. So when you pull into a larger WMA and see multiple other vehicles in the parking lot, you shrug your shoulders and try to dodge other hunters while kicking through the grass in search of pheasants.
An observation that I made while observing the hunters chasing the farm-raised pheasants stocked in various WMAs across Massachusetts is that the hunters stick almost exclusively to the edges of brush and sloughs, preferring to walk along the mowed edges. Those with dogs send their dogs into the brush, but most of the dogs don’t go very far in search of the birds.
It was very frustrating because, as someone without a hunting dog, my pheasant hunting strategy was to comb through the edges of forests and other places pheasants like to flee to when spooked. With other hunters not working very hard, the pheasants don’t have much pressure to fly away.
After the two older hunters reaped the benefit of my labor, I walked to a grove of trees that ran next to a drainage ditch filled with water to wait. It was a little past 9:00 AM, and with most hunters starting their day at sunrise a couple hours before, many of them would be making their way back to their cars either with full bag limits in their upland vests, empty handed and frustrated, or somewhere in between.
I chose to stand next to a large oak tree near the ditch and just listen for the cackle of a pheasant rooster that had managed to escape the crowded field. I watched the orange clad hunters make their way back to the parking lot until their number dwindled enough for me to make my next move. Walking between the drainage and an open field filled with prairie grass, I walked slowly and stopped often to listen.
I walked for another hour, kicking brush, stopping, listening. A couple steps more and then repeat. I took a phone call from my parents and stood still in the middle of the brush, still watching for pheasants. Our phone call ended and I resumed walking through the brush, still stopping often.
Eventually, I heard a soft clucking in the brush in front of me. I stopped and peered through the brush, looking for the offending pheasant. At first, I could not see it, so I cautiously stepped forward, shotgun at the ready. The clucking grew louder and more frantic until I saw him, a young pheasant rooster hiding in the brush.
When I saw him, I pushed forward in an effort to make the pheasant flush, take off and try to fly away. Despite the hours of effort I put into just this one bird, I wanted to give him the opportunity to fly away, to dodge my shot. Call it sportsmanship I guess. As I kicked brush and shouted at the bird, “Fly ya bastahd!” When in Boston, as they say.
The rooster cackled, their customary call to announce they were taking off. I raised my shotgun and prepared to track the bird in the sky.
But he wasn’t there.
This little farm raised bird was running across the wide open field, cackling as he went. I shouted at him again, “Get up! Fly dummy!” But he wouldn’t fly.
I contemplated whether to shoot the daft bird or let him go, but had my decision made for me as I saw another group of hunters standing at the far edge of the field. I knew they would shoot this bird as soon as he ran close enough. So with more than a little frustration, I shot the running pheasant on the ground.
On the last day of pheasant season in Massachusetts, I stood next to another solo hunter in some pouring rain. He was an older gentleman, and I relayed the story of that pheasant to him, as well as my frustration that hunting in Massachusetts had brought. he told me about how things used to be, how he once had a wonderful hunting dog that had passed. We joked how we thought we would be the only ones out hunting, in the pouring rain that Saturday after Thanksgiving.
We listened to the sporadic gunfire as hunters chased pheasants, and we watched a large group of hunters walk along the mowed grass trail as their dogs ran a couple yards into the brush and back again. I remarked that I didn’t understand why the hunters wouldn’t just push the field together to chase the pheasants out like he and I had tried to do.
“Well,” he said as we walked back to the parking lot together, “they think the dog will do everything for them. You and me, we gotta be the dog.”
