texas community pheasant and rooster hunt in the pandhandle with the hart lions club by t. edward nickens

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fieldandstream-editor — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:00:00 -0400

"My bead was covering up the back glass of that tractor," Hull says, pointing to a parked hulk of metal 50 yards away. "I'd have blowed the rear window right out of it. I kept thinking, move over, move over! Then, bam, he's gone. These birds know how to play this game."

And they have a decided home-field advantage around Nazareth. Unlike Hart's vast unbroken plains of row crops and pivot irrigators, Nazareth anchors a chunk of cattle range where there's as much pasture as corn and cotton. Sprawling playa bottoms are pocked with feedlots, mountains of hay bales, and farm machinery rusting in tangled shelterbelts. Curiously, Chinese fowl love the mix.

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fieldandstream-editor — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:00:00 -0400

I don't see such a fragile spirit in Nazareth or Hart. And I suspect you won't find it in Dimmitt, Easter, or Lazbuddie either. Not this weekend, anyway. Instead, I see a grinning Sarah Hart wipe the sweat from her brow as she pulls another platter of biscuits from the oven. I see Cyril Mitzie slap the backs of hunters he's known for 20-odd years, if only for a few glorious December days at a time. I see entire families throng the Nazareth volunteer fire department at the end of the day. They come to greet the hunters, locals and visitors alike, handing out sips of homemade schnapps as kids spray the cleaned pheasants with a garden hose.

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fieldandstream-editor — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:00:00 -0400

Last year, an ESPN.com story featured the Nazareth Swiftettes, the girls' high-school basketball team that, with 18 state championships, is the most decorated in the nation. The writer waxed poetic about the locals' devotion to the team, to the land, and to the community. But there was a darker side to the story. "That writer wrote that the town was in danger of drying up and blowing away," one Lions Club cook complained, as I scribbled notes for my own story. "Please don't do that to us again."

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One constant across the Panhandle hunts, however, is the hospitality. In the sprawling Hart Lions Club kitchen, 15 volunteers from the Golden Group, a local senior citizens' organization, have been on the job since 3 A.M. They've cooked 30 dozen eggs, 42 pounds of sausage, and 360 biscuits. "The FFA boys did it for a long time," says Sarah Hart, her forehead streaked with flour. "But they gave it up. Us young chicks had to take it over." The ladies range in age from 60 to 79.

Out in the dining hall, about 150 hunters mingle with locals. You want Texas icons, you got 'em: handlebar mustaches, rodeo vests, giant belt buckles, and pressed denim shirts at five in the morning. I wander over to a tall, bearded Fort Worth hunter named Mike Adams, who tells me that he first discovered Panhandle pheasant hunting back in 1972. "I've got loads of big-game rifles - 6mms, '06s, you name it," Adams says. "Haven't fired a one since I found this place. I just laid them all down to go pheasant hunting."

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fieldandstream-editor — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:00:00 -0400

It Takes a Village: Each year during the opening weekend for Texas pheasants, small ranching crossroads across the Panhandle hold sprawling, open-to-the-public "community hunts." For a donation of $150 to $250, hunters gain access to thousands of acres of prime private pheasant land. In some areas, the community hunts are limited to opening weekend, but in others, the passes are good all season. For example, pony up $150 per gun for the hunt in Hart - a town with 1,000-plus Texans - and it's good across more than 30,000 acres for the entire four-week pheasant season.

These hunts are the lifeblood for nonprofit and service organizations in the Panhandle's sparsely populated counties. They've poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into cash-strapped communities, helping to build volunteer firehouses, buy ambulances, support senior citizens' groups, and underwrite college scholarships for local ranch youth. The money goes to locals who've fallen on hard times. It goes to kids who can't afford to take their prize steers to the next round of Future Farmers of America (FFA) competitions. It buys band instruments for local high schools.

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At the end of another table, Taylor Martin, 11, nestles against her dad's shoulder. She has listened to her dad, Troy, talk about the community pheasant hunts for years. "She wanted to come so bad," Troy says. His son is at Disney World right now and "mad as all get-out that she got to come and not him."

Watching the scene is Richard Entrekin, tall and stately. His blue jeans are braced with clip suspenders, and his purple-and-gold Lions Club vest is festooned with service buttons. He's the local Lions Club "boss," and he grins when he sees the breakfast line snaking out the door. "All this money stays purt-near local," he tells me. "It's rewarding to be a part of this, even if I don't hunt."

Nearby, Cyril Mitzie nods. He's opened his farm to hunters for some 20 years. "It'd take a whole lot of hamburger flipping at ball games to do what we do with these hunts," he says.

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The Gathering Place: Our first hunt starts early at the Hart Lions Club, a low, windowless building nearly hidden by a hundred heavy-duty farm pickups and mud-splattered SUVs. Each town works the fund-raiser in a slightly different way. In Hart, where volunteer firefighters post the donated land, groups are assigned a field to hunt at the opening bell. After that, any posted section is open. Some firefighters serve as hosts, but many parties strike out on their own. In Nazareth, an area with a denser cattle population, hunters typically hit the fields with the landowner playing the role of host to keep them in the birds and away from the cows. In Spearman, a weekend of pheasant chasing involves two days of guided hunting and full meals from Friday dinner through Sunday lunch.

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But this rough country lends the Panhandle community hunts a certain brand of authenticity. We are working over land that is unapologetically utilitarian. Massive center-pivot irrigators scribe the skyline in all directions. Each acre is spoken for - this section in corn, that one in cotton, field corners in CRP. There might be prettier places where a regular guy can chase roosters, but there can't be many that feel so thoroughly real. Which is exactly what these hunters are seeking.

"We've been coming up here for 20 years," says Baumgardner. "We've gotten to know the land. That's one of the best things about these hunts. You can go to the Dakotas and hook up with a guide, hunt a different place every time. But with us, there's almost a sense of ownership. We can tell you stories about every one of these fields."

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The birds wait until the last possible moment to flush. It's hard to tell how many there are, and hard to imagine that we could miss them skulking in shin-high stubble, before they blast skyward in a rush of cackles and beating wings and frantic cries of Rooster! Rooster! Rooster! across the field. This time I can do more than watch. I swing and fire, and more pheasants flush. Suddenly there's one last bird in front and one last bird to fill a limit. I give it my best. Which seems to be the point of a Panhandle pheasant opener.

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fieldandstream-editor — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:00:00 -0400

We gather on the rim of a large playa bottom, and Roberts orchestrates the plan: As we push toward the turn in the field, the inside walkers will slow down as the outside pushers speed up, swinging the line of drivers like a gate on a hinge to keep the birds in cover for as long as possible.

During the drive, of course, there's no way to tell if such best-laid plans are working. We push through the bottom - drivers 20 yards apart, blockers little smudge marks of blaze orange 300 yards away. Rabbits squirt out of the field, but pheasants aren't in such a rush to show. They'd rather run a half mile, leaving me to wonder whether there are any birds in this field at all. I zigzag and pause, following orders, watching the line, but my eyes and mind start to wander.