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

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

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

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.

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

For the rest of the day we pound CRP plots, playa bottoms, and maize fields still pocked with hail craters from a recent storm. With daylight fading, we surround an old farmstead - a low, defiant patch of brambles and leaning walls cordoned off by a square of cedars. Worming through the thicket, the drivers curse in frustration and pain. But the birds are there. They pop from the overgrown quarter acre, bursting from the cedars, wings rattling in the boughs. The blockers shoot and howl. It's a perfect end to the day. "We see those TV shows where birds are blasting out of all that waist-high grass and we say, 'I want to hunt something like that!'" says Jeff Novak. "It's not all tough country here, but few of these birds come easy." Nothing worthwhile does.

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

Roughing It in Hart: Philanthropy aside, we came here to put pheasants up - and hopefully down. On opening day in Hart, Davis and I hook up with a set of largely Dallas-area hunters, a crowd of 15, from teenagers to geezers. Their unofficial leader is Les Baumgardner - a 54-year-old teddy bear who's big, happy, and serious about roosters. At dawn our group lines up in a snaggletoothed arrangement along a red-clay road. Winds are already roaring at 40 mph, sending tumbleweeds across the playas. Found only in a southern swath of the Great Plains, the playas are funky, sunken wetlands. Dry most years, they fill with rainwater often enough to host ducks, geese and, for those willing to work hard enough to find them, ringneck pheasants. With a signal from Baumgardner, we start across the field in a formation straight out of the British redcoats' playbook. But within 50 yards, opening-day adrenaline has some hunters pushing too far ahead. I watch a pair of pheasants sneak out the sides of the corn stubble. Three more birds flush out of range of a driver too far in advance of the line. Baumgardner bogs down in a hellish tangle of 10-foot-tall shelterbelt. "This ain't GQ hunting," he grunts.

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

Deep in the Heart of Roosterland by T. Edward Nickens It became my mantra, a chant inside my head. I said it when my ankles twisted in the prairie-dog burrows. I said it each time I bogged down in some kind of unidentifiable high-plains brush, or whenever I shouldered my way through head-high shelterbelts. And just now, I said it again to the rusted piece of old plow that nearly broke my shinbone as I jerked free from yet another Texas tangle.

Deep in the Heart of Roosterland

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

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