NEBRASKAland Magazine is dedicated to outstanding photography and informative writing with an engaging mix of articles and photos highlighting Nebraska’s outdoor activities, parklands, wildlife, history and people.
Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/873551
40 NEBRASKAland • OCTOBER 2017 is constantly changing, and not simply due to the shift from crops to conservation and back. Land changes hands, and permission comes and goes. The landscape has changed, too. Many shelterbelts have disappeared and weedy draws were leveled to make room for center pivots. But through connections and friendships made over decades, the group has more land to hunt than they can cover in a weekend. They reestablish those connections on fix-up weekend every year. And on the day before the season opens, they head out into the countryside to do some scouting, checking to see what grass looks the best, and where the harvest is done. Opening weekend is rarely good to this bunch, as standing corn holds a lot of birds and hunting pressure keeps them stirred. Their permission is rarely exclusive. When they talk about where to hunt next, it is in their own sort of verbal shorthand. They know the countryside like the back of their hand. They have been down practically every road in the county and have their own special names for many of them, names like "no pheasant road" and "three pheasant road," which were the end result of many hunts or a specific one. There's goldfish road, named for a guy who lives there named Goldfish; piano road, where an old schoolhouse fell apart and an old piano sat for years; and evergreen road, named for the trees that lined it. There are places with names, too, such as the railroad grass, what's left of a Burlington & Missouri River Railroad line, built in 1887 and abandoned in 1940, that is now grass, weeds and trees. While this hunting tradition began because of good hunting, it hasn't been about the hunting for years. "Everybody wants to get a shot but nobody cares about limits," Jake said. "We're pretty laid back. We're not up at the crack of dawn, and we don't kill ourselves and hunt all day long. "There were years when we didn't even see any, let alone get any. A lot of skunk days." Turkeys are doing well in the area, and the group has taken advantage, each buying at least one fall tag. A few years ago, they got permission from a farmer fed up with the turkeys eating his guinea and peacock food. "We had way more turkeys than we had pheasants that weekend," Schmidt said. "The December trip is the best," Jim said. "If you get a little bit of snow and it stays cold and the corn is out, there's nothing left but pockets of grass. And there's birds. There's birds everywhere." Last year's opener was a skunk day. They flushed plenty of pheasants, but other than a rooster that used trees as escape cover, only hens got up within shotgun range. Later hunts produced a limit of turkeys for the three with permits and some pheasants, but they were far from limits. "Some hunts are better than others," Jim said. "But they're all good," Schmidt said. The Stories These days, the trips to Scotia are more about friends getting together, continuing the tradition, and adding chapters to a story that now has volumes. There are plenty of stories. "A lot of them we hear over and over again," Schmidt said with a laugh. Many stories involve the weather. In the early days, no one had four-wheel drive pickups, and getting around on snow-covered or muddy roads was a challenge in cars. After a blizzard one year, they followed the maintainer out of town to reach their hunting spots. More recently, the wind blew someone's truck off the road in the snow. Jake fell through the ice crossing the creek below the shack in a blizzard John "Jake" Jacobsen of Omaha went on his first pheasant hunt with his father and uncles in Scotia on opening day in 1956 and hasn't missed an opener there since.