Sitting in the house where I can only think about quail season. I still have snow on the ground and when it’s warm enough to work dogs it’s too wet and muddy. I waded through the mud to put some dog food in the shed. I just watched the weather forecast and they are predicting freezing rain tonight and snow with low single digit temperatures over the weekend. Well below average temperatures through the first half of March. Makes me want to shoot that dang ground hog.
Babe with a pigeon in front of her.
Mann on pigeons.
A couple of quail and a 16 gauge AYA.
The dogs and I were able to hunt 5 different states this year. We hunted Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Oklahoma. I’m still hoping to go farther west next year. It was my plan to hunt Nevada this year but it seemed every time we started planning, something came up. Maybe next year will be the time.
Hunting different types of cover was really good for the dogs and especially good for the young dogs. Mann came into his own and was able to find quite a few quail, hunting with dogs that had a lot more experience.
Mann and Babe both have been worked on the backing dog. All of the dogs honor but the first time Mann saw a German short haired pointer on point he didn’t honor. I waited on him thinking he would honor but when he didn’t I whoaed him. He stopped then turned his head and saw Sally honoring the short hair and he honored Sally.
Mann really has the backing down, most of the time. Once in Iowa the GPS showed him on point about a 150 yards from me. I had to go up a hill and around some brush piles to get close. When I saw him he was honoring a white log. He was steady enough that I was able to walk 20 yards ahead of him before figuring out he was backing the log.
Another time in Oklahoma he was lost from me. With the GPS I knew where he was but the wind was blowing pretty hard and he wasn’t hearing me call him. He got close a couple of times then went away from me. A little later he was on point according to the GPS. I started to him and saw a herd of cows close to where he was. They were standing still so I knew he was honoring the cows. When I got him away from the cows he was happy to stay with me.
I have hunted Kansas for years but there is still areas I haven’t hunted. This year, after seeing people begging for peoples favorite spots on Facebook, I drove 3 hours from my house, to a spot I had never hunted before, just to see if I could find quail. And I had some good hunts.
All of the walk-in properties aren’t good hunting for quail but if you hunt the ones that look good and you walk far enough you can find quail. The key may be walking far enough. If you drive by every place and think they look terrible and never turn the dogs loose, you won’t find quail. It has always taken lots of walking and now you have to go farther, in my opinion.
I like to hunt a property different than most people. If the place is really deep most people go to the back. I like to go around the edges on these. If there is food plot or grain field near where I park, I like to hunt an edge and come back through the food plot from the other direction. Sometimes this seems to confuse the birds. The birds have been used to running to the end of the food plot and then flying when the hunters get close. With me coming at a different direction they may hold instead of running.
Tur Bo on point.
In Iowa, we mainly hunted state owned land. Most of these and a lot of the walk-in areas we hunted had food plots with good cover around the edges. Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska were much the same. This taught the young dogs to run the edges and to check objectives.
Oklahoma was totally different. Both areas I hunted were just huge fields of cover. There is a lot of short shinnery oak and plum thickets that cover the whole place. Sandy Sanders WMA is 20 some thousand acres with, a highway on one side and a gravel road on the other, and a few cross fences. There were huge canyons that ran through the area.
To hunt this area dogs have to run. It wasn’t unusual, when I had 3 dogs hunting, to have one south of me, one east and one west. The plum thickets have thorns and the shinnery is really thick. Everything is hard on dogs and boots. The one day I hunted there this year the App on my phone showed 10.5 miles and 70 floors climbed. It’s also hard on old men.
The next day Jim Smith and I hunted Black Kettle National Grasslands. Black Kettle is flatter without the big canyons but it has more shinnery oak. One of the places we hunted was 320 acres and it was almost covered with shinnery oak.
We were almost to the back of this place and the east side was completely covered with shinnery oak from where we were to the north side a half mile away. Just about the time I was going to tell Jim that I had just read a study that said quail wouldn’t use a thicket over 5 acres in size the dogs went on point. When we got close a nice covey of quail flushed about 40 yards in front of the dogs. They flew straight ahead into more of the same shinnery oak patch. So much for that study. They must have hit the ground and ran. We never came up with any of the singles.
We saw quail on this trip, at both Sandy Sanders and Black Kettle, but they were really wild. They ran and flushed well out in front of the dogs. It got too warm for the dogs and Jim had a long drive home so we quit early but we still walked 9.5 miles. But on Black Kettle there was only 7 floors climbed. Much flatter country.
I had a good quail season but I’m worried about the quail surviving in northern Missouri, southern Iowa, southern Nebraska and northern Kansas. I still have snow on the ground and last night and this morning, we are getting freezing rain on top of that. The weather forecasters are predicting snow this weekend with single digit temperatures. The winter that doesn’t quit.
Sandy Sanders. Notice the difference in floors climbed.
Miles walked on Black Kettle.
Mann is really intense.