Pheasants & Other Waterfowl

She lay in the shade beside the truck, blood running from her nose. As she panted, I could see that her tongue was cut, too. When I knelt down to examine her paws, something she normally allows with no fuss, she tried to pull them away. I noticed that even her nipples were rubbed raw, and her eyes were almost swollen shut from irritation by dust and grass seed. I also noticed that she was wearing a huge doggie grin. In short, she was as happy as a little brown Labrador possibly could be. And why shouldn’t she be? Heidi had just spent the past several days doing what she was born to do and what she loves more than anything else: sloshing and halfswimming through bulrushes, air-scenting while bounding through five-foot-high reed canary grass, and snuffling and scraping her nose through knife-edged cattails and marsh grasses trying to put pheasants in the air for me. And she had succeeded.
    That morning we’d walked about a half-mile down the lakeshore—first admiring a flotilla of swans out on the water, and then stopping to watch a small flock of dowitchers “stitching” a muddy flat—before Heidi started getting birdy. As her tail wagged faster and faster and she cast back and forth, I cocked the hammers of my 130-year-old game gun in anticipation. But she crisscrossed a small area for so long that I began thinking it was a false alarm and let down the hammers again. About then Heidi began rooting around in a little patch of bulrushes at the water’s edge. Nothing moved. A few moments later she stood back briefl y, then jabbed her nose into the rushes, looking for all the world like those dowitchers poking their beaks into the mud. Still nothing moved. Heidi stepped back again, cocked her head, moved over two feet and jabbed in again. A copper-colored pheasant burst out of the water almost at my feet, gleaming in the morning sun as he strained to put distance between us. As the gun rose to my shoulder, my thumb reached for the right hammer in a motion becoming ever more familiar. The rooster was no more than 25 yards away when he tumbled into the weeds.
    Heidi had just brought him to hand when we heard the staccato cries of birds overhead. I looked up to see small flocks of snow geese passing, their brilliant white blazed against the achingly blue prairie sky. I crouched in the grass, hissed Heidi down and began fumbling through my vest pockets for the Tungsten Matrix shells I always carry for just such occasions. I found them and reloaded in seconds before turning back to the passing snows.
    Most flocks were a bit high, as they always seem to be when you are pass-shooting; it is an endless marvel how these birds seem to quickly learn the range of a shotgun. Then I saw one that was going to be in range, which, with this gun and load, I take to be anything less than 45 yards.
    In confirmation of my assessment, a goose folded cleanly with my first shot. I had a fleeting impression of a second bird flinching, but I picked out a trailing bird and completed the double. The fat grain-filled geese hit the ground with satisfying thuds. Heidi had departed for the first retrieve before I’d fired the second shot; she always breaks at the shot, the untrainable little monster. Soon she returned to deliver the second goose as well. As we crouched in the grass, watching to see if any more of the passing flocks would come within range, Heidi kept whining, moaning and fi dgeting, looking in the direction the geese had fallen. Of course I kept growling at her to shut up and sit still, assuring her that she was a good girl and she’d already gotten the two dead birds. At last the flocks passed, affording no more opportunities.
    “OK, Heidi,” I said as I stood up. “Let’s go fi nd Chris and the boys and show them what we’ve got.” With that, the little Labrador raced away uphill about 50 yards and trotted back to proudly present me with a third beautiful snow goose—obviously the second casualty of my first shot. She may be unruly, but her alertness and intelligence more than make up for her bad habits.
    Heidi proved herself again on the way back to the truck by suddenly dashing into the cattails and, after a flurry of splashing, returning with a blue-winged teal that obviously had been wounded. When I met my son, Chris, accompanied by a couple of my young grandsons, I saw that he had a pheasant, too, as well as a pair of blue-wings he had jumped out of a little stock pond across the road from the lake.
    These sorts of mixed bags explain why we so often hunt pheasants in duck marshes rather than in dry prairie coulees. And why I have a waterproof and pain-resistant Labrador rather than a pointer, setter or Brittany.
    Here on the arid prairies of Alberta, water is a scarce commodity. The enormous fields of dry-land grain—wheat, oats and barley—provide abundant food for pheasants and waterfowl, but the only water around is concentrated in a few rivers and the system of mostly manmade reservoirs, ponds and irrigation canals that catches and channels the spring runoff from the distant Rockies. The lakes serve as holding water for millions of migrating waterfowl, and dense margins of cattails, bulrushes and marsh grasses around these oases provide refuge for pheasants from the myriad predators of the prairie: coyotes, foxes, feral cats, raccoons, prairie falcons and horned owls. Like ducks and geese, pheasants range far out into the grainfields to feed in the daytime and then return to the marshes to roost in the evening. Cattails and rushes are especially important during the harsh winters here, near the pheasant’s northern limit, because they are strong enough to support loads of snow and windblown drifts that would crush down less-robust species. The pheasants thus have dry caves and tunnels under these plants.
    So adapted have pheasants become to living in a semi-aquatic environment that I sometimes hunt them wearing chest waders. Heidi and I have flushed roosters out of cattails in as much as two feet of water—the same habitat from which a mallard is equally likely to spring. Which raises a mystery: Where do those pheasants sit? Often not one speck of dry land or even a mat of floating vegetation is detectable where the birds come up. How do they keep dry? Their feathers certainly aren’t waterproof like those of ducks and geese, as I can attest, having dropped them in the water. One almost can imagine these pheasants clinging sideways on cattail stalks like giant marsh wrens, confident that no (sane) upland bird hunter will ever disturb them.
    This was by no means the first time we had picked up bonus waterfowl while hunting pheasants. Conversely, on other occasions the surprise has been pheasants when we were concentrating on waterfowl.
    One morning, for example, Chris, his 8-year-old son, Wesley, and I had hiked along this same lakeshore to take up a stand to pass-shoot Canada geese that had been dropping into some small islands to loaf after feeding in the grainfields. I walked into the tall grass to take my stand while Chris and Wesley moved farther along the shore. I had just dropped a pair of three-inch shells containing 1-1/4 ounces of steel BBs into my heavy waterfowl gun when I heard squeals from Wesley along with another familiar squawk. Heading my way was a rooster they had stumbled across. While I was hardly properly attired—or armed, for that matter—for a driven pheasant shoot, one must rise to the occasion. The pheasant was low and close, and he came down in a huge cloud of feathers. When Heidi presented him, I feared the worst. Sure enough, he had no tailfeathers, and the body where the tail normally attaches and the insides, too, had been completely amputated by the high-speed load of heavy goose shot. However, the rest of the beautiful plumage and delicious breast meat were perfectly intact—luckily I had led him about a foot too little, perhaps a subconscious calculation to avoid pheasant burger. Subsequently, I have enjoyed planned poor-man’s versions of driven pheasant shooting by stationing myself in the cattails at sunset when pheasants come flying back to roost.
    A few seasons ago I found an irrigation canal that inevitably held a flock of gadwalls. Something irresistible brought them to that particular spot day after day, no matter how often they had been ambushed there. One afternoon Heidi and I were sneaking across the dike to jump those gadwalls when a pheasant clattered out of the grass. Like any predator, I had a search image, in this case for ducks. When the gaudy cockbird burst out, even though the gun mounted automatically, my brain went through a little dialogue—something profound like: What the . . . . That’s not a duck! If you shoot that pheasant, those gadwallswill spook . . . and aren’t we huntingducks? Uh, do you want one pheasant or two ducks? This dialectic produced a moment’s hesitation before my synapses decided that, yes, I did prefer a pheasant, and that indecision was enough to throw off my lead on the first shot. The pheasant, experiencing no such philosophical vacillation, was a small target in the distance by the time I found the second trigger. His long tail waved a flag of insult at my hopeless second shot. The gadwalls, of course, sprang off the water unscathed, leaving me with an open mouth and an open gun while Heidi bounded around looking for something to retrieve.
    So why hunt just pheasants when you can hunt pheasants and geese? Why miss just ducks when you can miss ducks and pheasants, too?
    After resting the dog in the heat of the day, we tried another push for pheasants in the afternoon. We planned to walk the edge of a dugout next to an enormous stubblefield, pushing the strip of weeds in between. I had given Chris a light Spanish side-by-side for Christmas the year before— nothing fancy or expensive, but a 6-1/2-pound gun with 28-inch Modified and Full barrels. I thought it was about as good a pheasant gun as one could carry. Chris had tried it once or twice and claimed he couldn’t hit anything with it, seeing as he was used to shooting his Winchester 101 over/under, which he was lugging now, even though it weighed probably two pounds more than the little Spanish side-by-side. Just for fun, I decided to tote the Spanish gun.
    Chris had just reached the edge of the stubble to parallel Heidi and me when Heidi disappeared into a tiny patch of cattails at the edge. I yelled to Chris to get ready a second before the familiar thrashing wings and harsh cackle signaled that Heidi had hit paydirt.
    The next few seconds are etched in my memory forever. The rooster headed straight for Chris, who started to mount his gun from the port-of-arms position. But as the pheasant beelined for his face, Chris’s gun mount became a defensive maneuver, the over/under held out stiffly at arms length and waving back and forth like a parody of a soldier with bayonet at the ready. I already had shouldered my gun and was tracking the bird, and then pulled up the muzzle when I sensed the pheasant heading for Chris. The rooster towered suddenly when he saw Chris, who tried to turn, stumbled, and got squared away just in time to see the pheasant fall to a shot from the scorned little Spanish double. I was shaking with delighted laughter as Heidi trotted past my scowling son with the big rooster. How often does a father get a chance to make a point to his son so dramatically without the slightest room for argument?
    To finish the day, that evening we staked out a point on the upwind side of the marsh in hopes that the rising Chinook wind would force the snow geese returning from the grainfields to fly low enough for pass-shooting. As Chris, my three grandsons and I huddled behind a little ridge trying to stay warm and watching tens of thousands of snows fly overhead out of range, Chris nodded at yet another of the diving ducks that had been regularly cutting across our point to join a large raft bobbing in the open water.
    “What are those?” he asked.
    “Scaup,” I said.
    “How can you tell?” he asked, squinting doubtfully at the tiny gray-and-black silhouette against the light. Chris, an engineer, is endlessly impressed with my ability as a field biologist to identify distant specks of birds by their flight patterns or shapes.
    “Why aren’t we shooting those?” he wondered.
    “If we were on a lake full of wild rice in northern Ontario, we would,” I said. “But out west here they might not taste particularly good.”
    “Well, I’m going take a crack at the next one that comes by anyway,” he said. And he did, dropping the bird into the frigid water off the point. Heidi plunged into the surf, breasted 50 or 60 yards of two-foot whitecaps, and came back to present me with the most beautiful drake redhead I’d ever seen.
    “Gee, it sure looked like a scaup,” I mumbled. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell in this kind of light.” A couple of minutes later Chris folded another speeding bird that I’d also identified as a scaup. Heidi braved the breakers again, and this time she delivered a fine canvasback. My son looked at me sideways.
    Finally I couldn’t stand watching Chris have all the fun, and I connected on a third hurtling “scaup” that was passing within range. This time Heidi’s battle in the cold, dark waves produced a second drake redhead. So much for my credibility.
Back at the truck, Chris lit the barbeque. I fed Heidi an extra-big supper and tucked her into bed in the camper while Chris’s wife was doing the same thing with their three sons. None of them would stir until morning. As we sipped glasses of amber liquid, Chris battled flaring yellow flames caused by fat dripping onto the coals from the three incredibly plump blue-winged teal. Somewhere out in the marsh a pheasant crowed. We watched the last gold fade on the horizon. Stars brightened in the gathering darkness. Tomorrow looked like another good day for pheasants and other waterfowl.

George Calef is a wildlife biologist and photographer living in the Yukon Territory. He shares his log cabin with two beautiful brown-haired girls—one of the human persuasion and the other of the Labrador retriever variety. Each fall they brave the Alaska Highway to Alberta to visit his son and three grandsons and to hunt pheasants and other waterfowl. Calef’s book, Caribou and the Barren-lands, won Canada’s Governor General’s Award.