Opening Day

Yesterday was the opening day for pheasants out here in Wisconsin, a sport very few participate in simply because there aren't many good game farms here. Well me and my father went out there to the annual opener, a beautiful day by the way, where they grill up some brats and make up some sweet corn on the cob from the local farms and you get to mingle with some of your fellow hunters. It's pretty nice, especially being amongst like minded individuals who share your sport of hunting and love of nature. You eat, talk, let the dog run around, shoot some traps and poke around the property for some birds, all around a fine afternoon.

Now my game farm is one of the best there it, in my opinion. It has heavy cover, the birds are hidden well and often get out of the cover and move around before you can flush them from where they were put out, and people often miss much of what they had put out for them. Needless to say, it isn't a game farm where the hunting is more like shooting fish in a barrel, it's genuine finde'em and flush'em. My father and I, however, take it one step further, making it even more difficult for ourselves, and even closer to the real thing. We scratch hunt, that is, hunt for the birds everybody else miss. We are the cleanup crew, and every bird we harvest is one someone else put out.

It was a pretty good day, my sister and brother in law came out that day and she took my niece shopping with my mother, so Neil, my brother in law, came out to join us. He's a good guy but not as much of a hunter as us. He doesn't do much more than Whitetails in winter. But, he did surprisingly well when we shot clays, almost better than me. Then I got a chance to shoot this little 22. I won at the DU banquet a while back, now I know why they call them plinkers. It's a sweet little gun, though, and pretty fun to shoot. But before any of that, we got the dog out and walked around looking for birds, not hunting hard though, just mainly checking out the property and giving Hannah a chance to run around. She's getting on in years, but still is an excellent bird dog, and she loves hunting. It's very lucky to find a natural hunter in a dog, and I'm glad Hannah worked out so well.

That was opening day, and we didn't see anything but a good time.