Have you ever heard of this?

[DRH1175]

A guy at work was just telling me about his pheasant trip to southern MN this weekend after the snow. He said it stayed soft so the pheasants would just bury themselves in the snow drifts untill the dogs kicked them out. He said the dogs ended up catching and killing several hens and said there was nothing they could do? Obviously these dogs had very hard mouths. But what would you do and has this happened to you before.

[gspman]

I've had my dog point with it's head half in the snow bank and a bird blows out of it with snow flying everywhere. I've also gotten on my hands & knees and dug through the snow while my brother had his gun ready. So it happens once in a while.

As far as dogs catching & killing birds. Not much you can do other than quit hunting for the day or hunt birds that aren't buried in snow. Or I guess you could hunt a pointing dog. If they're sitting that tight it'd be a riot with a pointer.

[Rooster Chaser]

What you have to think about with pheasants and the first snow of the year is that most of these birds have never seen snow before, and they are very confused about the whole situation.

I hunted Friday morning and have never had birds hold as tight as they were that morning. I was kicking a patch of meadow grass that my dog was locked on and I literally felt myself hit the rooster with my foot, and even then it did not want to fly. The bird tumbled out of the patch , ran about three feet into the field, and took one look at me and finally jumped, sad to say I missed it.

Despite that my partner and I got our limit. Each of the birds we got had the dogs locked up on them for a long stretch of time, and when they tried to flush them they had to literally bury themselves in the meadow grass with them. Without a doubt it was the hunt of a lifetime. The next day the birds seemed to have their wits about them and were much more sly.

As far as dogs catching birds goes there is not much you can do about it. The previous poster was right, unless you are going to quit hunting for that particular day you can't stop them, it is all instinct.