somethingbenign
Member
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2017
- Messages
- 944
Went out to a farm that lets me hunt to zero in my deer rifle today. After shooting the breeze with the farmer a bit myself and a couple buddies drove to the back field where he wanted us to shoot. As we were driving in one of the guys points out a rabbit sitting next to a grain bin and I immediately tell the drive to stop. I hopped out and grabbed my shotgun quickly putting in a couple pheasant shells from yesterday. I chased the rabbit a bit trying to push him to a better backstop but he ended up taking advantage of the buildings and ran off towards the house. As I was about to unload the driver tells me excitedly that a second rabbit ran behind me. I turned around and chased him down the road a bit and as soon as he stopped I took a quick shot and bagged my first cottontail of the year. Tossed him in the truck and continued off to where we sighted in. Parked in the field and one of the guys mentions that we are really close to the duck blind and pond that we hunt, thinks we should see if anything is on it. We load up the shotguns this time with some steel loads and head out towards the pond. Halfway through we catch a glimpse of the water and sure enough there are three teal hanging out. While picking our way through the marsh that surrounds the pond we made enough noise to scarce off one but the other two were plenty happy to keep feeding. We didn't bring any waders so we're trying to plan our jump so the birds would flush over the nearby sandy shore for easy recovery but the ducks kept feeding in the most inopportune spots. At last they got in a decent spot and flushed them but in our excitement both birds dropped short of the shore and had to be fished out with sticks. Proceeded to sight in the rifles but not without a couple of squirrels that kept hollering at us but stayed out of sight and a few flocks of geese that stayed about 10 yards out of range for a fly over shot. Lessons learned today are that the shotgun is the most versatile hunting implement and and day in the field can turn into a hunt.
