By Nick Simonson

Pursuing upland game in the late season creates some unique challenges.  Those challenges come on faster when winter decides to arrive early.  With snow events sweeping across the Dakotas this week, the feeling of a late season hunt has taken hold well before even the earliest of the holidays has happened, and October suddenly feels a bit more like December.  To turn this near-Halloween trick of eight inches of snow into more of a treat, consider these tips on the changed landscape to get the most out of your pheasant hunts in the new environs. 

Deep Undercover

It doesn’t take much of a drift to render stretches of grass unusable to pheasants, and those wide open fields of brome and even hip-high grasses lose some of their early season allure to pheasants.  As a result of the recent snow, consider targeting heavier cover if you’re hunting in those regions where more than half a foot has fallen this past week.  This means targeting deeper cover like cattail sloughs and dense brushlines and shelterbelts where pheasants can find protection from predators and additional buffers from the suddenly much colder temperatures that have come in behind the latest system.  Particularly in the hour or two after dawn, exploring the edges or even the depths of these spaces of thermal cover will produce plenty of flushes, as birds congregate to find the shelter they need in the changed seasonal setting.

A Quiet Place

Normally a couple weeks into the hunting season, pheasants that haven’t been weeded out by hunters in the early stretch become a bit more wary.  This means they’re more susceptible to early flushes when they hear something out of the ordinary, such as the banging of a tailgate, the slamming of a truck door, or notes of conversation as hunters set into the field. To keep birds from busting cover, it’s time to employ those late-season field communications now, whether that’s working a dog with just a slight whistle and hand signals or whispering to your hunting buddies what the plan for the next walk will be.  Keep the radio off when pulling into the parking lot of a hunting area, and quietly lock the doors, avoiding the horn confirmation that things are secure.  Silence is golden in the late season, and it can pay off even more now as those cold, snowy conditions have settled in early.

Tighten Up

Some folks prefer to tighten their patterns when birds get a little more prone to flushing early, and now may be a good time to consider moving up from an Improved Cylinder choke to a Modified version, or from Modified to Improved Modified.  Additionally, bumping the shot size from six to five, or five to four might also be in order, as payloads with a bit more punch will help bring down those birds that flush farther away in colder weather or that simply seem to be more resilient in these early-arriving late season conditions. 

Just because the first blast of winter has arrived in the region doesn’t mean that hunting has to come to an end, in fact it may make for some of the best walks of the year as pressure from fair-weather hunters decreases.  Get out there and look in those deeper, nastier stretches of cover to find pheasants, practice quiet hunting, and adjust your salvos and your shotgun chokes accordingly to make the most of each opportunity.  It’s likely you’ll still find some success in the snow, whether or not it all melts in a week or two, or sticks around until spring.

Simonson is the lead writer and editor of Dakota Edge Outdoors.

Featured Photo: Think Deep Thoughts.  Roosters will utilize heavier cover once snow settles on the landscape.  Target sloughs, brushy stretches and places that provide them a buffer from the winterlike chill the region has experienced, and you’re likely to get more shots. Simonson Photo.