From my experience when hunting pheasants with the corn standing, it would seem that this crop provides some pretty good cover. I fare poorly on pheasants when the corn is in. But Penning said that corn cover is not a significant factor in pheasant production. It's all about reproduction.

"Corn is not nesting habitat," Penning stressed. "The limiting factor for pheasants is not food. It's nesting habitat. Corn is not that great a winter cover either. Even when you leave it standing, it's pretty open. You think about wind-driven snow and those corn stalks are planted 12 inches apart. That's not good winter cover. So, when you think of corn as cover, it's not good for overwinter survival. They need more than that to survive bad winter weather."

It was our annual whitetail scouting trip. This was the year we were going to hunt public land around Brandon and Evansville. Jason reminded me that there were plenty of small, grassy WMAs in this region, so we should take our shotguns along and try to flush a few pheasants. I argued that hunting roosters would cut into our scouting time. Jason won the argument, just like his mother usually does.

We always take a couple of days to scout for potential deer-hunting spots. After checking out a few spots south of Brandon, we moved up into the Evansville area and quickly settled on a lowland swamp rimmed by some timber belts. It looked like a great place for whitetails to move through when the hunters started to push them. It was the Alvstad WMA, and as we were preparing to leave, we were giving it one more look from the parking spot at the top of the hill when the pheasants started cackling. Jason and I just looked at each other like, "where did they come from?" We had just finished stomping all over that area and never heard or saw a pheasant. Now they were taunting us. Jason pinpointed the source of the rooster cackle from a thick stand of cattails on the edge of the pond. I told him we might get wet. He loaded his shotgun. I followed his lead.

We figured those birds would know we were there, so we moved slowly and quietly toward them. They flushed in range, a rooster and hen. We never shot because they went over the water and we didn't have a dog to retrieve that rooster if we did connect.

Now that we had our deer-hunting spot pinned down, we figured we could scout some secondary locations and see if we could flush up a few more birds.

Jason hates to hunt without a dog. I don't mind the challenge. You have to modify your approach. Instead of walking quickly straight through the cover, you move slowly in a circle while tightening it up to create a spiral to the center of the field. You actually pinch those birds into the center and flush them when they can't figure out where you are.

The best bird hunting came from a WPA, not a WMA. It was a beautiful grassy spot right off County Road 20 next to Rosby Lake. We only killed two roosters, but we saw over 30 birds and at least 10 of them were males.

You didn't see this kind of pheasant numbers 10 years ago in this region. The wicked winters we had in the early and mid-1990s knocked down the pheasant populations, and hunting up toward the northern fringe of the ringneck range or out in western Minnesota where they really were hit hard was a lesson in frustration. You could walk all day with a world-class dog and not flush a single bird. Now we're getting plenty of opportunities to shoot on public land, and we're seeing plenty of hens, which is a good thing.

There was a push in the last legislative session to raise the limit of pheasants from two to three per hunter in Minnesota. It didn't pass this year, but it could pass in years to come. I don't know what the biological argument is for this, but I don't think that pheasant hunters in this state are too worried about where the limit goes. We were elated when the season was extended to the end of the calendar year because that's what it's all about for us: getting to hunt, the brisk breeze of fall tipping your cap, the smell of gunpowder wafting by, and the rooster crumpling before falling to the ground. Even the birds that make it through the shower of lead or steel and fly over two roads and three fields to safe cover puts smiles on our faces.

It's going to be another great year for pheasant hunters in Minnesota, so enjoy it while you can.