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Originally Posted by tatonka2
A pointing breed is great when hunting Sharptails, Huns, etc.....birds that are in the wide open and you need to cover a lot of ground, but it's the rare pheasant that will hold when a dog is on point 600 yards away. I've never seen one. Huns and Sharptail will hold quite well for a Pointer (in the earlier part of the season). Rooster pheasants are like a race horse (talking wild pheasants, not preserve birds). I have a Setter and he'll range out there 500 or 600 yards at times, but he's usually within 200 yards. He's fantastic on Huns and Sharptails, but I can't even rate him as mediocre on pheasants. I've seen him pick up the scent on go on point on a Sharptail from 100 yards away and he won't move a muscle until I get there....He's a lot of fun to hunt with, but when pheasant season opens I take my Springers.....
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Contrary to popular belief, we kill about 75% of our release site pheasants in the brush, rather than in open fields. When the truck first arrives, there is usually a slaughter in the vicinity of the release, but within hours, most birds are driven into the brush. Within a day or two, a rooster in the open grass, is by far the minority. In order to get those remaining birds, the dogs must go into the brush to either point them or flush them. That isn't the case with some of the Southern sites, but that is the case for us. That isn't saying that we don't kill any birds in the open grass, we do kill some , and we do encounter birds that run a couple of hundred yards as well. I haqven't killed a lot of wild pheasants, but I have killed some, and the cover that they were in was no tighter than the cover that we kill most release birds in.