October 27, 2008

This last weekend, I went to Pocahontas County to hunt for pheasants with my dad, brother and two uncles. Each of my uncles have their own dogs so we figured that we were going to get our limit relatively easy. As we were driving to a specific area that the two usually hunt, we saw a rooster fly across the road. This added to our positive thoughts. 

Once we arrived at the area, we let the dogs loose. Right off the bat they flushed up 4 hens and we thought everything was going to be good. We drove around for the next 7 hours, walking through dozens of some of the best looking ditches I had ever seen and there were no roosters. We should have had our limit within a couple of hours, but we didn’t even see another bird until 5 minutes past shooting time. On top of that, they were on some farmer’s property so we couldn’t shoot them even if we wanted to.

With opening day a bust, my brother and I decided to try our luck the next day at a field outside of Indianola that was bought by the group Pheasants Forever. You would think that this would be a good area to hunt, right? Wrong. It was basically an entire field of thorns. You couldn’t take 5 steps without getting stuck by some plant. My pants received large cuts throughout them. The cuts were deep enough to give myself wounds. All over my kneecaps and upper thighs are bloody marks. My pants still have thorns on them that continue to cut me when I wear them. To top it all off, the winds reached around 50 m.p.h. This did not make for a good environment.

The Hawkeyes and Packers didn’t play this weekend so no new rant about them. The one thing I can comment on is, like I have been saying all year, Shonn Greene is starting to come up on some of the Heisman Trophy lists. He is the only running back in the country that has rushed for over 100 yards in every single game this year. Not only that, but Mitch King is in the running for the Bednarik award which is given to the best defensive player in the country. Finally, some of the players are getting the recognition that they deserve.