Oddball Hunting Tactics for Birds

Make a pond from a tarp. Drive and block pheasant with a transistor radio. I present three here, from most to least plausible, in hopes someone will tell me they work. I have, a time or two, called to turkeys and had hens lead the way, bringing the gobbler along, but there was no back and forth “fight.” The birds came more out of curiosity than to rumble. The times I have picked fights with hens, there’s been lots of squawking back and forth, but it’s all talk. The hen is happy to stay out of sight, trade insults, then take the gobbler somewhere else. I have even seen pictures of ducks people claim to have shot over such ponds, but that means nothing. Block With a Radio: One way to stop pheasants from running, according to this least likely of oddball tactics, is to put a radio at one end of the cover, turn on the football game, then slip back around to the other end of the cover and hunt toward it. Instead, you go to one end of the field, make a lot of noise, then loop around and hunt back toward where you were. I know one person who tried this—after reading about it in an outdoor magazine, of course—but it never got any shots doing it.