When the power fails, go kill birds. Can't beat a plan like that.

I love hunting behind Labs. Especially if they point !

Pa. has state game lands all over and they put one heck of a lot of birds out. Some do make it to the spring time but weather they nest or not I don't know.

Good deal Lug, we made it out today.

A couple years ago, a buddy of mine and I were following his pack of beagles chasing rabbits. We we had just been lamenting the fact we weren't in pheasant country . No sooner as we said it, one exploded into flight right under our feet in SW Oklahoma.


Great pics , folks.

Nice! I'd love to hunt a big, wild population like you guys got. Haven't had that here in PA in decades. All our pheasants are stocked by the PA Game Commission on public hunting land. We haven't had a wild, breeding population for decades.

Looks like you's have a three-bird limit too. We have a two-bird limit, I really wish they'd raise it to three daily.

What kind of dogs are you hunting with? I think I remember labs and Brittanys from your other posts.

Me and the dogs are hunting tomorrow morning.

I had a beagle a long time ago that would trail and flush pheasants. The problem was that he was slow and the pheasants would just keep circling in cover. It would take forever for him to flush them.

The labs are a lot faster.

I’ve got a Brittany, one of my buddies has a lab. (Pointing Lab) It would be hard to describe the amount of birds we seen today other than insane..

There’s actually 7 birds on the tailgate (one hidden behind the guy on the left). The older gentleman doesn’t get around well, has a bad hip. He posted up and shot 1..

That's great. It used to be that way here in southeast PA back in the 60's and 70's when I first started out. You'd get into a big flock and they'd just start flushing and dozens and dozens of birds would go out in a couple of minutes.

My dad had Brittanys back then. I've always had a soft spot for them even though I'm a Labrador guy now (flushing labs).

My guess would be 200-300 hundred birds out of a 20 acre slough… insane.

Dang, I think that might drive my labs insane with excitement! LOL

I've never flushed anywhere near that many.

It makes if tough on the dog on downed birds in the cattails with all that scent around.

Is the reason there isn't a wild pheasant population in PA. because of the lack of habitat or are there other issues? Lack of habitat has hurt all upland game populations. The only way that we will have the numbers of birds as we did back 50 years ago would be providing more stable nesting, winter shelter and small grain food sources. As the quote from "Field of Dreams" movie implies - "Build it and they will come."

Wow!!!!!!!

The birds get really grouped up once the crops come down and snow shows up.

It was a combination of factors that slowly eliminated the wild pheasant population in PA over a 20-25 year period beginning in the 70's with the banning of DDT and passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1972. Prior to that birds of prey were killed on sight and DDT was making eggshells soft so that chicks never hatched. Raptor numbers began to increase significantly and in the 80's the Game Commission even stocked ospreys and then eagles to reestablish extirpated populations.

In the late 60's to early 70's there was an Avian Flu pandemic that wiped out hundreds of thousands of pheasants along with millions of other bird species.

In the early eighties clean-farming became a thing. The thick hedgerows that typically bordered small fields were buried to create large tracts of crop fields with no cover available for small game. During that same time period the fur market crashed and lots of folks quit trapping.

So now you had a major increase in avian predators, a major increase in terrestrial predators (coyotes started becoming a thing in PA in the 70's) and a huge loss of cover for pheasants to hide in.

Also in the 80's and hybrid grasses were developed that allowed earlier first mowings of hay fields. Hay fields were a favorite nesting location for hen pheasants. Early mowings meant hens were still sitting on nests when the fields were mowed. Hens would stay on their nests and be killed when the mower came through. That meant the loss of the entire nest.

Now ask me why they never recovered despite some very serious efforts by the Game Commission to rebuild the population and I'll tell you the same thing every honest person including biologists that study this stuff will, we don't know.

In 2009-2011 the Game Commission set aside tens of thousand of acres in various tracts across the state as Wild Pheasant Recovery Areas (WPRA). They released thousands of pheasants captured in western states and shut down hunting and even dog training in those areas for almost ten years with no success, no wild breeding populations were established. The program was shutdown in 2017.

To date, nobody has offered credible reasons for the failure.

We have a lot here and it’s been a good winter for them so far, the big snow came slow and pushed the brome grass down and they stayed on top also we haven’t had too much ice.

The game lands I hunt have some seriously good food and cover year round. But it's rare to have a pheasant survive more than a few weeks after the season closes, even rarer to have one survive until spring.