John & Karen + Josh page 2
Karen and I wanted to let you know that we had a wonderful time on our trips this year. We made our first trip to Missouri to bird hunt and took our 7-year-old son Josh along. We didn't have great weather, but enjoyed introducing Josh to wild bird hunting. Josh "claimed" more birds with his BB-gun than both of us combined.
Our latest addition to the hunts, our 17-month old pointer Mike, with his first covey find. He acted a little lost at times, but wasn't too bad for his first time on wild birds. |
Karen getting close, but not quite, to her first limit of Kansas pheasants. |
Meg and Mike pointing a couple singles for Karen on our last day in the field. |
Our older and steady hunter, our 6-year old Meg, showing Mike how it is done. Meg has went with us every year and has proven to be an absolutely wonderful and consistent bird dog. |
We met a fellow club member our last day in Missouri and then ended up running into Bill again when we returned for our Kansas trip after taking Josh back home. We had already found 2 coveys and teamed up with Bill to find 3 more coveys and take a few roosters to be off to a good start for the Kansas trip. We enjoyed our first venture out to a completely new area of the state.
After we got to our usual destination and started hunting, we found some coveys in the same fields as previous years. We also added a large number of new coveys to our notes for future reference. For really the first time since we started in 1999, we were consistently finding multiple coveys on individual properties. We found multiple coveys on 8 different sections and we only count them as a separate covey if we felt sure there was no way the second covey could have been related to the first covey. We joined up with couple fellow club members from WV on a few of the days. We were able to split up on a single piece of property and both groups find coveys.
Overall, we set personal records of 30 coveys in our 6-day hunt and matched our single day covey count of 7 twice. By far, we saw more birds this year than any year since joining the club. That said, we are already planning for next year!
(We will have to wait and send a picture from the Missouri hunt with Josh because our scanner is broken and the Missouri pictures weren't taken with the digital camera.)
Thanks again for allowing us this unique hunting opportunity!
John and Karen
Another
Over our time with the club so far, this was probably our most disappointing year. It wasn't any fault of the club. We had heard several reports saying that the bird population was going to be way up and let our expectations get pretty high. We ended up having a decent year, but definitely not our best.
We usually go primarily looking for quail. This year, the quail seemed harder to find and the pheasants were way up. After a couple days, we went ahead and started looking for pheasant first and finding quail second. Overall, we got into many more pheasants than we have in any of the years since we started hunting in [location deleted]. Even though I still didn’t manage to get a limit (John did as usual), it wasn't for lack of opportunity. I just need to shoot a little better!
This year, we just averaged about 3 coveys per day, but were finding pheasants in waves. There were several fields that we flushed 20-30 pheasants. In addition, it seemed the majority were roosters.
Again this year, we discovered some new good spots that we added to our notes. Many of our favorite spots from past years were in winter wheat this year and forced us to look at some areas that we hadn't explored yet. In fact, our new favorite spot was one that we had never hunted before but that had been available in past years. In that field, we flushed 30-40 pheasants, got up two good sized coveys and tracked down some singles too. We were in birds from the time we stepped out of the truck until we had worked the entire field. It made up for venturing out on a rainy day.
We had planned to make a second trip out, but some unfortunate events prevented it. As always, we are already looking forward to next year.
Karen and John West Virginia Hunting Partners
