Together to hunt
digg it!
Facebook
del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit
BY JOE DUGGAN / Lincoln Journal Star
Sometimes crafty old rooster pheasant will sit tight and let the hunters walk on by.
When the hunters get good and out of range, crafty old rooster will break for the sky. Nothing for the hunters to do but cuss as the bird slides over a distant hill.
But not this time.
Mike Shumaker of Lincoln doesn’t shoot competitive trap.
He doesn’t run his dogs in field trials.
But he’s spent close to four decades hunting pheasants and quail in Southeast Nebraska.
Here are a few pointers from the skilled, experienced hunter:
Sleep in
When birds have been hunted a time or two on the roost, they’ll quickly figure it out and flush as soon as they hear you coming.
Over the years, Shumaker has had the most success hunting from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., after the birds have fed in the morning and are loafing before feeding again late in the day.
Work slow
As leg problems have slowed Shumaker over the years, he said it’s made him a better hunter. Many hunters simply rush through a field and leave the smart birds behind.
Follow your dogs
A lot of hunters attack a field like they’re waging war. Point A to Point B. That’s fine if your hunting without dogs.
But if you’ve got a dog, why not let it dictate the path? You can still work in a general direction, but let the dog and its superior nose show you how to get there.
The rooster waited for Edward Klein to walk past its prairie grass hiding place in southern Gage County.
Then it burst from the grass like it was shot from a catapult.
Klein swung a Winchester Model 21 and fired.
He dirtied just one barrel.
No cussing required.
A few moments later, he ran his thumb over the nub of a spur. No wonder — a young rooster and it flushed too soon.
Mike Shumaker watched from afar, smiling as his buddy put the ringneck in his game bag.
Hunters tend to choose their companions based on a good bit of personal history. In other words, they know each other pretty well before they go for armed walks on uneven terrain.
But that’s not how it worked for Shumaker and Klein.
The two met in 1983 through a mutual acquaintance. Shumaker, a commercial painter from Lincoln, invited Klein, an officer stationed at Offutt Air Force Base in Bellevue, to go hunting.
Neither can remember how many birds they shot in the fall of 1983. But the men learned what mattered most — each was confident, safe and capable with a shotgun, and passionate about pheasants, quail and bird dogs.
It was more than enough to start a friendship.
They hunted again the next year.
By the the third autumn, a pattern had developed.
The Air Force sent Klein from Nebraska to California to Virginia to New York to Belgium. But no matter where, he always made it back to Nebraska to hunt with Shumaker.
This marked the 25th fall they’ve hunted together.
Technically, it’s more like 24, thanks to Saddam Hussein. The 1990 Iraq invasion of Kuwait marked the only year Klein couldn’t make it back.
“You can’t ask for vacation in the middle of a war,” he said with a shrug.
Klein left the Air Force in 1994, went to medical school and became a family-practice doctor in Middletown, N.Y., in 1998.
It’s what he does between bird seasons.
Klein has always been the guest of Mike and his wife, Leesa. He watched their son, Jeff, grow from a child into a regular hunting companion.
He usually makes it back twice a year and stays for about four days each visit. He leaves a lot of his hunting clothes and a spare shotgun in Lincoln, to reduce his travel load.
Most of his doctor buddies couldn’t find Nebraska on a map. And they can’t begin to understand why he’d burn vacation time in what they consider a fly-over state.
“This is my favorite thing in the world,” Klein said. “I’d rather be here than in the Caribbean.”
Standing around a pickup after walking through a patch of cover, the friends talk about past hunts.
There was the trip when they hunted four straight days and the temperature never got above 7 degrees.
There was the time they must have flushed 20 roosters from a corner of grass and after a barrage of gunfire, only one bird fell.
They could laugh about it, because they also remembered trips — November 2000 came to mind — when they got limits of pheasants all four days.
“There’s days I can take you out and you might shoot nine pheasants in two hours,” Mike Shumaker said. “Other days, you don’t get a bird.”
Klein nodded and smiled.
Once they’re out in the field, they hardly ever stop for food. The doctor tries to bring healthy snacks along, but lunch often consists of candy bars and cans of soda.
They’re also dog partners. Klein helps with expenses while Shumaker boards and trains the dogs. Their shared enthusiasm for dogs means they never run out of things to talk about.
But it’s not the birds or the dogs that keep Klein booking flights to Nebraska.
“I’ve always loved the people,” he said. “Wonderful people. You know what they say, and it’s true, it is God’s country.”
After giving the dogs a chance to rehydrate on an unseasonably warm afternoon, they resumed the hunt.
On Day Four of his trip, Klein said 2008 was stacking up favorably. They’ve seen good numbers of pheasants and quail, and have shot reasonably well.
Shumaker lagged back behind his friend and his son. He carried no shotgun. In recent years, he shoots one pheasant and one quail in honor of his late father, Vernon, then leaves the gun at home.
“I just like to watch the dogs work,” he said.
He walked with limp, more like a hobble. He’s got a lot of pain in his legs, he said. He’s only 53, but he’s not sure how many more years of bird hunting his legs will give him.
As for the future, all they can do is hope for the best.
Klein already knows what he’ll say to Shumaker before getting on the plane later this fall.
“See you next year.”
Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or jduggan@journalstar.com.
Post Your Comment
Standards and RulesYour posted comment will appear after it has been approved.
Frequently asked questions about story commenting.