Of course, the first tip is to have your shotgun loaded before you start looking for birds.
A good place to find pheasants is the bottom of a dry lake with a significant amount of dead shrubs and weeds that reach knee to waist height or on the edges of cereal or corn fields.
The rooster pheasant (male) is the one you want to hunt. It is colorfully marked with long reddish-brown tail feathers and a red and green head. It has a white ring around its neck and has a red-orange and black body. The hen (female) pheasant is smaller than the rooster. It is mostly light brown all over the body and has short light brown tail feathers.
Pheasants follow a schedule as routine as morning coffee. Understanding your routine can increase the chances that you will get rid of a rooster.
Before sunrise, the pheasants start their day at the roosting sites. Usually these are the knee-to-waist grassy or weedy areas where they have spent the night. At first light, they head somewhere to find gravel or sand, such as roadsides, grain fields, or similar areas.
They usually start feeding around 8 a.m. In some places, the filming schedule begins at 9 a.m. and the birds are still feeding.
By midmorning, the pheasants have left the fields in search of a dense and thick cover, such as standing cornfields, bushes or native grasses. Here they will take refuge until the end of the afternoon. The nastier the weather, the deeper the pheasant will hide.
It is difficult to work large fields of standing corn, because pheasants run to avoid predators. If you’re hunting during midday, choose ditch banks, field edges, grassy fields, and salt marshes.
When you have a successful shot, be sure to mark where the bird landed so you don’t get lost on your way to pick it up because brush and weeds make it difficult to find anything.
Finally, the pheasant has to eat again. So in the late afternoon, the pheasants move from their roosting spots to the feeding grounds and are easier to spot.
In short, the best time to hunt pheasants is the first and last hour of shooting of the day.
I hope these pheasant hunting tips were helpful and that you have a successful hunting trip.