Dreaming of a white Christmas is all well and good for making the season bright. But if you want to put all that snow to a practical use, imagine spreading it out across Colorado’s pheasant fields.
When it comes to hunting spooky late-season pheasant, nothing helps quite so much as a solid snowfall. Toss in a generous helping of the attendant weather nasties – wind, low temperature, bad roads – and a true pheasant fanatic gathers all the ingredients he needs for a successful hunt.
Everyone knows the problems with birds a few weeks deep into the season. Nobody’s fools, pheasants become quickly educated to the ways of hunters, as difficult to pin down as a politician hedging on campaign promises. But bring on the snow and cold, and all sorts of good things begin to happen.
For hunters following the trail to walk-in properties in the prime pheasant zone of northeast Colorado, it all starts with tracks. But not necessarily the ones you think. These public-access lands, 150,000 acres in all, are right there on a map, easy to locate, which is where the trouble begins and the tracks start. On a given weekend, many of the spots you plan to visit also might be on someone else’s itinerary. Or several someone else’s.
With a fresh snowfall, this tale of visitation is recorded indelibly in the prints of tires and boots. You know immediately if someone already walked the field, how many in the party and whether they used a dog. The information won’t necessarily get you birds, but it’s a start.
Now for the tracks that count even more. Where walk-in cover borders grain fields, it’s easy to see where birds moved from one to the other. Or not. No footprints leading to the place you planned to hunt? Try someplace else.
The payoff comes in time spent in fields that haven’t already been pounded and might actually hold birds. Take, for example, the place south of Sedgwick on Sunday where the unmistakable tracks of pheasants crossed from cover to cut corn. Noses to the ground, hunters followed the trail to a clump of cover where two birds flew up practically beneath their feet. Neither was a rooster, but the point was made.
Apart from the functional aspect, there’s magic in a hunt involving snow. It started with the exhilaration of spotting four roosters in a field north of Crook scratching through 3 inches of fresh frosting for a meal of green wheat. The birds faded like ghosts into an adjacent plot of thick public access grass, then neatly gave hunters the slip by crossing a road to private land. An hour later, they were prancing again in the open, off limits and presumably having a good laugh.
This enchantment of snow drew hunters like a magnet to a plot where bluestem, the signature vegetation of the historic prairie, grew as high as a tall man’s cap. Tracks of deer, coyotes, rabbits and an occasional pheasant wandered through the towering grass. Large flocks of geese seeking relief from 7-degree cold drifted overhead, voices piercing the countryside.
Where ice crystals danced like diamonds in the still air, a cock bird leaped from cover the hunters had explored just minutes earlier, punctuating the thought that even jittery public birds hold tight in snow cover.
Although pheasant numbers are generally improved across eastern Colorado, shotgunners need every edge they can manage considering the generally nervous combination of enlightened birds and hunting pressure.
Ed Gorman, Division of Wildlife small game manager, reported a recent pre-snowfall outing on which he jumped more than 100 pheasants.
“They were really spooky and we didn’t get very close, but the birds were there,” said Gorman, who expressed satisfaction with populations in many parts of the northeast.
Cover varies with a crazy quilt of rain patterns, but Gorman suggests a formula that should guide anyone with a walk-in atlas.
“Look for tall wheat stubble, along with a little irrigation and quality CRP with tall native grasses. When you find those three in combination, that’s where you’ll get the highest density,” he said.
Even with heavy hunting pressure, pheasants won’t leave this golden triangle, Gorman said.
Gorman offered another helpful hint for public hunting, which is to forsake the well-worn path to popular areas such as Phillips and Yuma counties. These indeed have the most birds and the most walk-in access, but far and away the most hunting volume.
On their Sunday outing, two Denver-area hunters found activity in nearly every public spot around Holyoke, virtually none in the so- called fringe areas in Logan and Sedgwick counties to the north and west. The difference in pressure was easy to tell. All you needed were tracks in the snow.
Listen to Charlie Meyers at 9 a.m. each Saturday on “The Fan Outdoors” on KKFN 950 AM. He can be reached at 303-820-1609
