Of course, the first piece of advice is to have your shotgun loaded before you go hunting for some birds.
A good place to find pheasants is on the bottom of a dry lake with a significant amount of dead brush and weeds reaching knee-to-waist height or on the edges of grain or corn fields.
The rooster pheasant (male) is the one you want to hunt. It has colorful markings with long reddish-brown tail feathers and a red and green head. It has a white ring around its neck and has a red-orange and black body. The hen pheasant (female) is smaller than the rooster. She is primarily light brown throughout her body and has short light brown tail feathers.
Pheasants follow a schedule as routine as morning coffee. Understanding your routine can increase your chance of kicking out a rooster.
Before dawn, the pheasants start their day at the roost sites. These are usually knee-to-waist areas of grass or brush where they have spent the night. At first light they head somewhere to find gravel or sand, such as roadsides, grain fields, or similar areas.
They usually start feeding around 8 am. In some places the shooting hours start at 9 in the morning and the birds continue to feed.
By mid-morning, the pheasants have left the fields in search of thick, dense cover, such as standing cornfields, brush patches, or native grasses. Here they will crouch until late in the afternoon. The nastier the weather, the more the pheasant will hide.
It is difficult to work large fields of standing corn, because the pheasants will run to avoid predators. If you are going to hunt during the middle of the day, choose the banks of the ditches, the edges of the fields, the grassy fields and go into the swamps.
When you have a successful shot, be sure to mark where the bird landed so you don’t get lost on your way to pick it up because the brush and weeds make it hard to find anything.
Eventually the pheasant has to eat again. Therefore, in the late afternoon, the pheasants move from their resting places to the feeding areas and are easier to spot.
In summary, the best time to hunt pheasants is the first and last hunting hours of the day.
I hope these pheasant hunting tips have been helpful and that you have a successful hunting trip.
