PHILLIPS COUNTY — The conviction in the dog’s eyes was undeniable. Man or beast, I had never seen anyone more certain of anything. It was a rare close-up of instinct in action. Thinking the dog was coming to heel or seeking a reassuring pat on the head, my eyes were opened along with hers, perhaps 3 feet from my own. Her nostrils flared and muscles flexed taut as she wheeled and froze just long enough to pinpoint her prey, then pounce.
All but invisible in the thick, rusty grass, the pheasant hen lurched for the sky, nearly soiling my boot as it squawked and flew. I raised the 12-gauge mostly out of surprise, already having granted pardon to the bird in my mind. The dog looked up in confusion as the shotgun’s muzzle lowered.
Hens, of course, are off limits to pheasant hunters in Colorado. On this final day of pheasant season, we had come looking for what I called a 24-hour rooster. We left with what I had come to consider a last-day limit.
The morning fog was thick on the Eastern Plains on Saturday, low clouds and occasional drizzle shrouding the landscape and muting the colors of the state’s most vibrant upland game birds. The pheasants were reluctant to fly and difficult to identify when they did. Even the hens appeared to have the long tail feathers telling of their male counterparts, creating an aura of uncertainty despite the looming sunset deadline.
On short notice, I had made the trip mostly for the dog, offering one last opportunity to do what she loves most before state law asked her instincts to hibernate for another nine months. Sure, there will be training opportunities, but the true test of hunting and retrieving wild birds in Colorado won’t be replicated until sometime next November. And there’s no telling what conditions next season may bring.
So my disappointment was understandable when the dog dug her nose deep into a tangled plum thicket some 30 feet in front of me and flushed another hen in perfect line of sight. Or at least what I thought was a hen, until another hunter — too late — shouted “Rooster!” as the bird flew over the trees.
Each of the three other hunters soon bagged a bird of his own before calling it a season. But there was still plenty of ground to cover between me and my truck, so the dog and I opted to see the hunt through.
It took another hour before we found another rooster. The dog was hunting her heart out, and less than an hour later, we had our second. Along the way, she put me onto no fewer than 13 hens, including the close encounter that held us both so captivated. Somewhere in between, I considered the one that got away.
The legal limit for pheasants in Colorado is three roosters. But on this final day of the season, I walked back to the truck confident that two was enough. A last-day limit, so to speak, giving that third bird a reprieve and the breeding population just a little bump going into spring.
All told, the Colorado pheasant season pretty much . It wasn’t a record setter by any measure but an improvement over the season before and a satisfying, if at best average, experience. The big winner, by many reports, was Yuma County.
But that’s if your only measure is the number of birds. If you kept your eyes open to the rest of the experience, you may not have seen anything quite like it.
Scott Willoughby: swilloughby@denverpost.com or twitter.com/swilloughby
