Bird Camp Diaries: July 2007

The Bird Camp Diaries are nothing more than whimsical monthly musings. I hope you find them entertaining, and sometimes thought provoking.

Anthony Hauck
Public Relations Specialist
Pheasants Forever & Quail Forever

SoDaks Are Americans, Too
The Heartwarming Tale of Captain Obvious, Rusty and the $110 Bird

Bird Camp Diaries: July 2007 At the end of last November, I joined my dad and a pair of his longtime hunting buddies for a weekend of pheasant hunting near Hoven in the north-central part of South Dakota. But while the calendar said autumn, the temperature and wind chill said Antarctica.

I wondered how I'd keep myself from becoming cryogenically frozen, much less display enough dexterity to actually drop a rooster. The brutal weather conditions, combined with scores of spooky, late-season birds, made for a tough hunt on day one. I didn't shoot a bird, but I had bigger concerns, like how to raise my core body temperature back to at least 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

Normally, a day of pheasant hunting in SoDak is followed by team photos and a jolly good time at the local establishment recounting and making up hunting tales. To tell you how down and out we were, our evening was spent thawing out under blankets while watching Ed Asner star in the Hallmark Channel's original holiday movie "The Christmas Card." I guess we were all too frozen to get up and change the channel.

Bird Camp Diaries: July 2007 Day two wasn't any better. Still trying to stave off hypothermia, I was also becoming keenly aware that I was on the brink of the impossible - going an entire weekend hunting pheasants in SoDak without bagging a bird (which is on par with jumping into a lake and not getting wet). I'd had a few good opportunities, but none better than right at the end of the day when a rooster flushed out of some cattails directly in front of me. Four shots were fired, four shots missed, and I knew the rooster's cackle as he flew away was not a reaction to fear, but laughter at my ineptitude.

I hung my head to let the remaining minutes of daylight beat down on me and waited for my dad and pals to come give me a healthy dose of grief. All of a sudden, a rooster exploded from a small patch of grass right behind me. If he'd been tailgating any closer, we'd have had a fender bender. Startled, I turned around and put the bead on old tail feathers and fired. A hit in the rear, but not clean. I fired again. Click. Damn it. I hadn't reloaded.

The bird fluttered down into a creek bed. We hadn't brought any dogs on the trip, so we approached the area in what I thought was sure to be a futile effort in retrieving. We kicked around the bed for a few minutes, finding only a few feathers - painful reminders of "the one that got away." Cold, tired and with an empty game-vest, I wanted nothing more than for the trip to become a distant memory.

A pickup truck happened to be driving down the nearby gravel road as were exiting the creek bed. The truck pulled into the approach and the driver's side window slowly rolled down. "What the hell are you guys doing? Don't you know how cold it is?" said the driver, a man in his mid-twenties whom I've since referred to as Captain Obvious (What gave it away, the orange vests, or the shotguns?...Cold? Really, I hadn't noticed my frostbitten fingers turning black!). And seated next to him was a mutt of a dog if I've ever seen one.

We small talked a bit and, much to my chagrin, the conversation turned to the tale, or should I say tail, of my most recent failure.

"Oh, Rusty will find him," Captain Obvious said of the downed bird. Allow me to clarify. I can't recall if "Rusty" was actually the dog's name, and I highly doubt it was. But by the looks of it, his genealogy included upwards of 20 breeds. And I've always liked the name for dogs. So for the sake of this story, "Rusty" will do just fine.

Even though I was raised Minnesota-Nice, I've long been wary of our neighbors to the west. With their legal fireworks, gambling and higher speed limit, SoDak has always seemed to me a rogue state still worthy of territorial status. Rusty did nothing to change my thinking. Based on his appearance, I would've considered it a success if he was able to walk correctly on all fours, much less find a downed bird.

Bird Camp Diaries: July 2007 Out of the cab Rusty jumped. Success.

"Get him!" Captain Obvious commanded.

Rusty disappeared into the creek bed. I blinked. And no sooner than I had, there sat Rusty with the rooster clenched between his jaws. With the confident gait of a seasoned vet, Rusty trotted over to his master and handed him the bird like he'd done it a million times before. "Good job, Rusty," Captain Obvious said.

And that's the story of how Captain Obvious and a mutt named "Rusty" gave me newfound respect for of the entire state of South Dakota. And more importantly, they kept my $110 non-resident small game license from going to waste.

If you have story ideas, dog photos, pre-1980 hunting photos and requests for future On The Wing consideration, please send correspondence to ahauck@pheasantsforever.org.

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