Pass shooting pheasants at the Game Farm

Last Saturday I headed out to a game farm SE of the metro with a guy I used to work with. He runs Springers and somehow got a pretty high opinion of my dog which he proceeded to pass along to several of his hunting partners - who were also along. I'm not sure how this happened since he had never even seen my dog, much less hunted over her, but nonetheless she had something to prove. And, coming off her illness I wasn't sure what to expect. Sure she had done well at the test the week before, but that is a pretty short workout compared to an afternoon hunt with 7 guys and a few dozen birds. As it turned out she did well, I think she is still a little out of shape, but all in all I was pleased. We combed the field a few times and put up all of our birds, only letting one get away. The dogs (2 springers, a pointer, and my lab) all worked well and we had some pretty good shooting all around.

So afterward we are standing there at the corner of our field discussing what to do next and watching the two other groups next to us. Now, for perspective, we were standing basically at the corner of our field almost in between the other two and down in sort of a valley as the fields all were up on some sort of a hill. So 7 of us standing there with 4 dogs running around and the guys hunting these other fields start putting up birds. The first one comes from the field south of us and flies directly at us and presents us with a 15 yard crossing shot as it tries to land in the field right by us. Well, he gets pounded a few times - and before we can decide what to do another one comes at us, this time from the field east of us. It might have been a bit smarter, but not much. This one gets to about 35 yards and banks across in front of us and 4 or 5 of the guys in our group empty their guns as it flies away and lands by the south field. And whether they missed, or their dogs were too far out or whatever birds continued to want to fly past this spot. After one such bird flew a little out of range but then landed in the middle of our field, a couple of us went and got him and then we decided to call it a day. Good times all around, decent prices on birds, and next time I'm bringing a lawn chair to pass shoot the bonus birds.