Field Day #1- First Pheasant

November 22, 2010 Afield and Afloat No Comments

For those following my Bow Journal entries on this blog, you might be concerned that I was not spending as much time in the woods the last few weeks due to the lack of entries posted. Well, there’s a good reason for that. While early November is such a great time to sit in the woods yourself, it’s probably an even better time for photograph others having fun in the Nebraska outdoors. So that’s what I’ve been doing.

Over the next few days, I will be posting brief journal entries on the who, where, and what surrounding my days afield. Looking back, it’s been a very busy time lately. Yet even more fun than busy.

Enjoy.

First Pheasant

My wife called me from work a few weeks back and asked if I could try to wrangle a pheasant hunting trip for a colleague of hers, Chad West, and his father-in-law Elwood. Neither Chad or Elwood had ever shot a pheasant, both being from Mississippi, and I was told by my lovely wife to see if I could help. I made a couple of phone calls and end up hunting with a friend of mine from Gretna, Bob Schweikert.

Schweikert and his dog Chevy with a quail

Bob is an avid bird hunter who loves to watch his Brittanys run. So he had no problem meeting another country boy or two for a hunt. We went west of Lincoln, with me shooting photos the entire time, and the two Southern boys were thrilled with what they saw. On the day, the group shot five pheasants and two quail, but you would have thought from Chad that they had been taken to Oz.

Chad shoots at the wrong quail

But in a way, they had. They had never seen dogs pointing pheasants before, never seen a rooster flush, and never walked through prairie grass – all scenes that many of us have witnessed before and probably take it for granted much more than we should.