Fabulous Pheasants

From our September/October 2025 Issue

From a distance, I saw Rick’s springer push the bird into the air. The pheasant staggered at the shot, dropped a leg and kept flying. Less than a month later, on the same farm, at the same spot, I shot the same rooster. When he’d flushed, he’d seemed completely healthy, even though later I found a pellet embedded in a thigh bone that had broken all the way through, knit and healed. Pheasants are tough birds.

Whatever else you pack for a trip to pheasant country, be sure to bring a healthy measure of respect. Wild ringnecks can take a punch. Mortally hit roosters can still bury themselves into heavy cover and disappear. Broken-winged birds hit the ground sprinting. Your gun, choke, load and, most importantly, shot selection should all be geared toward killing birds dead in the air.

GAUGE

If I were traveling a long way to hunt pheasants, I’d take a 12-gauge. I shoot 20s most of the time and 12s sometimes, but I live within 15 minutes of the nearest pheasant and have no problem passing up shots I don’t like. A bird I don’t shoot at today is one I can hunt again next week. Traveling hunters don’t enjoy that luxury.

The ballistic gap between 12-gauges and smaller bores is greatest when you shoot nontoxic shot, especially steel. You need the large capacity of a 12-gauge hull to hold an adequate load of steel No. 2 or 3 shot, and some of the best public pheasant hunting takes place where lead is prohibited. Put lead back into the equation, and 16s, 20s and even 28s—all of which are capable of shooting an ounce of shot—are enough to take pheasants at reasonable ranges.

ACTION TYPE

There is no right answer to what makes the best action type for pheasant hunting. I like break-actions, but most of the birds I shoot are pointed or flush close by, and there’s rarely more than one in the air at a time. If I can’t kill a bird with two shots, I’m not going to kill it with three or five.

Break-actions also have the advantage of being easy to pop open for safely crossing creeks and fences, and you can check the barrels for obstructions by looking down them from the breech ends. While none of my guns have two triggers for instant barrel/choke selection, your gun might; and double triggers can be a handy feature when a bird flushes wild.

As for over/under versus side-by-side, I shoot O/Us most of the time. Pheasant hunting takes place in wide-open spaces where the narrow top plane of an O/U gives you a tiny advantage on crossers. Honestly, though, when I do shoot a side-by-side, I don’t notice much differences in my hits and misses.

If you hunt in a big group where there are lots of birds, a repeater makes sense. I’ve even seen semi-autos with mag extensions in the field. Pumps and semi-autos are both easy to top up while still keeping them ready for action. O/Us and side-by-sides are quite often broken open at the wrong time.

While pumps were once the most popular pheasant repeaters, it’s no news that autoloaders have passed them by. Semi-autos have become almost 100 percent reliable, they get lighter every year, and there’s no need to pull on the forearm between shots. If I hunted pheasants for money, I’d shoot my 12-gauge Benelli Montefeltro autoloader, period.

WEIGHT & BALANCE

What’s heavy for one person is light for someone else, so take my weight recommendation with a grain of salt. Any pheasant gun more than 7 pounds is too much to carry. Anything less than 6 1⁄4 is too light—for me, anyway—to shoot well. I like some weight-forward balance in my pheasant guns too. Fast, muzzle-light guns have their place in the brush, not in wide-open pheasant country, where deliberation is your friend.

CHOKES & LOADS

Most pheasants are shot between 20 and 30 yards. Therefore, my usual choke combination is Improved Cylinder & Improved Modified, and I leave those in all season. I used to believe in tighter chokes and heavier loads for cold, gusty, late-season hunts. What I have since decided is that on those days most birds flush far out of range. The shots I do get are on those few roosters that decide to hunker down and take their chances.

In general, I’d recommend steel No. 2s or 3s, bismuth No. 4s or 5s, or lead No. 5s, 6s and even 7 1⁄2s if there’s a possibility of quail. Lead remains the best pellet material where you can use it. A season or two ago my wife bit down on a lead pellet—one of many pellets of various kinds she has encountered in our marriage—and announced that it was the last one and that from that time forward I would shoot bismuth shot, which would break before her teeth would. So I do.

While I have shot a lot of pheasants, most of them have fallen to me, hunting by myself, in three counties in Iowa. Other styles of hunting in other places demand heavier loads. The owner of a South Dakota pheasant lodge once told me that his lost-bird rate dropped when hunters started carrying 12-gauge, 1,300-fps, 1 3⁄8-oz loads of No. 4 lead from his pro shop. It makes sense, because shots can be longer on group hunts; and you’ll often have several birds down at once, so it’s best if they’re fully anchored, to make it easier for the retrievers to find them.

SHOTS AT PHEASANTS

Straightaway and quartering angles make up the majority of chances at pheasants over dogs. Rushed shots make up the majority of misses at those birds. You have time to shoot a pheasant that gets up right in front of you. In fact, you don’t want to shoot at 10 yards or even 15. Make yourself focus on the bird first, let it get out to where the pattern can open, mount smoothly and shoot. Hurrying just risks a bad gun mount, a miss or a shot-up bird. On crossing and hard-quartering birds, look for the ring around the rooster’s neck. Pheasants aren’t so tough if you shoot them in the front end.

While I will stretch out sometimes to shoot at crossers, I pass on going-away shots exceeding 30 yards, especially in heavy cover. There’s not a lot to shoot at on a straight-away bird, and long going-away shots often result in running cripples.

In a South Dakota hammer-and-anvil-style hunt, you’ll see all the standard pheasant angles plus get chances at incomers and overhead birds when you block the end of a field. Swing through overhead pheasants from behind, shooting as the barrels blot out the birds. On the rare occasions I see a bird coming directly over me, I’ll let it pass, and then turn and shoot it going away, like an extra-high High House 1 on the skeet field. My though is that fewer pellets wind up in the breast that way, and I like eating pheasants just as much I like hunting them.