48 Nebraskaland • April 2022
where hunters who spend the most
time talking about the glory days
would walk on by.
"Look at that fence line!" a hunter
once told me on opening day. "I've been
doing this since I was 10 years old, and
now I'm 60, and if there was a bird in
this whole country, it would have been
sitting right there! I've been walking
all morning, and I haven't seen a thing.
There's just no birds here!"
I didn't have the heart to tell that
hunter that a mile away, the last
group of hunters I had interviewed all
had birds in hand; they had seen at
least 40 roosters, and that fi eld didn't
look anything like his fence line. This
hunter isn't the only person who has a
hard time believing there are birds to
be found.
And yet, with intentional habitat
placement, good design and active
management, we see glimmers of
hope.
Last Hunt of the Season
On the last Sunday of the 2021-
2022 pheasant season, I joined a few
family and friends for a year-end hunt
in an area where signifi cant eff ort had
been put into habitat development and
management during the fi rst round of
the Berggren Pheasant Plan. It was
hot, almost 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and
there was defi nitely no snow. When
I showed up at 12:30 p.m., the four
people who had walked the fi rst fi eld
already had fi ve birds between them.
The landowner, a friend of his, and I
made seven of us for this next walk.
We walked the high-diversity CRP
and saw lots of roosts, but only bumped
a few birds — all too far out ahead of us
to take a shot. Next, we walked some
newly seeded CRP, a long narrow piece
along a draw, and again, lots of sign, but
no birds. Our fi nal option was about 10
acres of CRP, so new that the perennial
grasses had not yet begun to establish.
The 10-foot-tall annual weeds were
so thick that in some places, you
had to get a running start to make it
through. As we rounded the south end,
it thinned out a bit, and the dogs' tails
started doing helicopter whirls.
One rooster got up — "bang, bang!"
The landowner made a great shot and
30 more pheasants rose into the sky.
They fl ew to the north, too far for most
of us to take a poke, but a few coasted
toward our blockers at the top of the
hill. I heard gunshots and another bird
fell from the sky.
"Who shot grandpa?" my husband,
Scott, joked when we all got back to
the truck and lined up the birds on the
Rooster ring-necked pheasant in a tree in Scotts Bluff County. JUSTIN HAAG, NEBRASKALAND
