Christopher Cefalu
01-02-2024, 08:13 PM
In late October, my best bird sniffer (Pearl) and I found ourselves in the beautiful state of Wyoming. We made the trip along with my brother to our annual deer and antelope hunting grounds except this year we didn't draw big game tags, instead we were going to chase wild Chukar and Huns. Pearl is a 5 year old experienced waterfowl and upland dog. Pearl has been exposed to ducks, geese, doves, valley quail, and chukar in our home state of Nevada. The first few days went very well with multiple flushes each day of both chukar and Huns. My brother and I chose to use 20ga guns, his was a red label O/U and I was using a light weight semi auto of Italian decent (yes I know a dredged auto). However, I did slip a Parker VHE 12ga with 30" tubes choked IM/Full into the truck before departing from Nevada just in case. On day three we got very lucky and were granted full access to a beautiful ranch with extensive river bottom that was lined by farm fields and held a healthy population of wild roosters. Pearl had never seen or smelled a pheasant in her 5 years and I had never taken game with my new VHE. A few minutes into the pheasant hunt I could tell Peral was birdy and with every step I was anticipating a rooster flush. This went on for what seemed like forever and I could almost feel the frustration coming from Pearl, that wildly ditch chicken was moving ahead of us and alluding the black monster that was hunting it down. Pearl picked up her pace which lead me to darn near trot when all of a sudden pearl dove into a thicket and disappeared. I planted my feet square knowing that this was our moment and a second later that rooster exploded from the brush, flattened out and was headed out of Dodge in a hurry. I leveled the old VHE on that widely rooster and let that Parker sing. The rest is history, Pearl made a great mark, and the retrieve was flawless. So Pearl got her fist ever rooster and I got my first rooster with a Parker ( I've taken many pheasants with a verity of scatter guns just not a Parker). We went on to pick up a few more over the next 3 days but that first one with Pearl will always be special.