Way back during tag hunting season in February my friend Tom asked me if I’d be interested in going on an elk hunting trip with he and his two teenage daughters in the fall, it was to be their first elk hunt too. After my Idaho mule deer hunting trip last year I was up for an elk. We both looked for outfitters and he finally found Hellander Outfitting in Craig, CO that had openings during the 3rd Rifle Season hunting out of Yellowjacket Ranch between Craig and Meeker. I had to quickly go through Hunter’s Ed and take the Colorado opt-out test so I could put in for tags in time for the hunt and decided that for my first elk trip I would just target a cow figuring a cow elk would be plenty to feed Catherine and I for a year since it would have as much or more meat than the quarter cow we usually buy in the fall. In July we found that we all drew tags, the girls and I for cows and Tom for a bull and it just became a matter of getting geared up fully and waiting until the end of October to roll around.
Category Archives: Hunting
Lira’s second season
Acting nonchalant
Last year Lira did pretty well as a pup hunting in the fall, she found birds, she mostly pointed and rarely bumped them and she retrieved most of the time. She also liked to chase other dogs around the field quite a bit and locally found ‘easy’ birds that were not in too thick of cover for the most part. This year she really changed a lot. No more chasing other dogs around or even wanting to outside of the usual parking lot sniffing and the who let the dogs out initial walk into the fields. Once she gets to the grass she is all business, nose to the ground looking for birds. She’s also become fearless of heavy cover. She will go into anything that she can possibly get into to go after a pheasant and has flushed birds out of brambles so thick that i couldn’t get the bird to move by kicking the crap out of the outer layers of the stuff. She’s grabbed cripples and even a few unscathed birds that got trapped in thick stuff and couldn’t get out before she got to them. Just a few days ago she ran down a wing shot rooster who took off up a corn row and brought the bird out still kicking and flapping but Lira’s tail was up. She also finally lets me take a photo without constantly trying to grab the bird on the ground, that was a huge accomplishment. We’ve gotten twice as many birds in the first three weeks of the season than all of last season and I’ve missed or not had shots at quite a few that she found in really thick stuff where shooting can be a challenge to say the least. The season is about half over since I’ll be gone most of next week but I can’t wait to see what November brings.
Pheasant Creole
While I’m busy prepping for the upcoming hunting season I’m also busy trying to clear out the freezers in hopes of re-filling them soon. I had a few pheasants left from last winter and decided to try something new with them after doing some variation on smoked pheasant for the last several. We had some Shrimp Creole a few weeks ago and are inundated with tomatoes from the garden at the moment so that inspired me to make Pheasant Creole last night and it was awesome plus I did it in the slow cooker so it didn’t heat the house up too much on a hot day.
Hunting season prep
The pheasant station at Red’s Sporting Clays course
A little over a month to go before the season opens and I’ve been busy as heck between work, fishing and trying to get myself and Lira ready for the season. I’m going at this on three fronts:
- Shotgun – I wanted to go through at least 1000 rounds in my shotguns before bird season opens up.
- Rifle – I wanted to get at least 500 rounds through my rifle before deer season.
- Physical Conditioning – Need to get myself and Lira ready for heaving walking.
Looking forward to next season
Hunting season pretty much ended at the end of last month when turkey season closed here in Washington. Of course, tag hunting season was still ongoing and I just finally received word of all those efforts and am getting ready for next season. Last year was really my first true hunting season. The year before when I decided take up hunting again it was limited to a few pheasant hunting trips but in 2016-17 it got much more serious. I ended up the season with 30 days of hunting in total, 23 days of pheasant hunting, 5 days of deer hunting and 2 days of turkey hunting. Overall, I was pretty successful, I must have taken about three dozen birds, one Mule Deer buck and two Merriam’s turkeys. I managed to gather enough food that we have been eating wild game a few days a week since last fall. Add in fish that I catch and we are just under half our food supply now from hunting and fishing.
Turkey Time!
First turkeys!
Since taking back up hunting a few years ago I’ve been trying to expand my skills and the critters I’ll go hunting for and turkeys were at the top of my list. I had planned on going on a guided turkey hunt last spring but after getting Lira a few days before the season opened realized it just wasn’t in the cards so I put it off until this season. I decided to use the trip as a lesson in turkey hunting but wanted to be pretty prepared so bought some calls and learned how to use them, read as much as I could on turkey hunting and got out and patterned my shotgun at the range with turkey loads.
2016, year of the dog
2016 turned out to be a much better your than even 2015 was for me and really was shaped by our new family member – an Australian Labradoodle puppy we named Lira (river in Aboriginal Australian). Catherine and I had been talking about getting a dog again and I wanted one that could hunt since I got back into hunting as well as be a good family dog. We also wanted a non-shedding dog if possible. This narrowed our options down to basically two breeds – a Pudelpointer or a Labradoodle. We were on waiting lists for Pudelpointers when I found a breeder that had hunting doodles as well as Pudelpointers and after talking to her decided that the doodle would be a better dog for us.
First snow for Lira
Playing before the hunting starts
It had been a week since the Western Washington pheasant season closed and a friend came to town with his dog so we decided to head over the pass with a small group, brave the cold and do a hunt at Cooke Canyon with the dogs this week. I was a bit worried about Lira in the cold and snow so got her a neoprene vest to wear and decided to see what would happen. When we got the dogs out of the truck they both basically went crazy running around in the snow chasing each other. Lira had Reagan by the tail much of the time. Snow seemed to be no problem.
Why I’m sticking with my 20 for the rest of the year
I currently own two shotguns – a 20-gauge that I bought last year and a 12-gauge that I bought this year. Both are Benellis. The 20 a Montefeltro and the 12 an Ethos. I’d been alternating guns a bit this season but recently noticed a trend. When I carry the 12 gauge I don’t see any birds. I mean none. I haven’t even fired a shot out of that thing in the field. When I carry the 20-gauge I see birds and have shot all my birds this year with it. Now I’m superstitious and am sticking to the 20 the rest of the season.
Lots of bird hunting this past month
In the last month since I got home from my Idaho deer hunt I’ve been spending a lot of time out bird hunting with Lira. So much time, in fact, that I haven’t been fishing for a month now. We’ve been spending time at Cooke Canyon in Ellensburg and several of the Snoqualmie Wildlife Areas on the west side. Lira has gotten better and better at finding birds, holding point and retrieving over this month, it has been really fun just watching her progress. She’s also graduated from needing to be leashed up to being able to be free and, for the most part she listens. She definitely would just as soon go out and play with other dogs as hunt though, it takes some prodding and a few zaps to get her out of play mode into hunt mode first thing in the morning.