Skins Game.  A pair of nice upland birds for the author last week will provide plenty of fly tying material in the coming months.  Each bird is a trophy and in turn can produce more. Simonson Photo.

By Nick Simonson

I’ve often said that each bird is a trophy, especially in those seasons where winter weather, dry summers, or other situations have impacted populations making it tougher to come by those favorite upland quarries.  Even in this autumn of relative plenty, where every walk has produced a pheasant, partridge or some other winged target for my dog and I, each bird in the bag feels like a big success, especially last week while hunting the rolling hills of some public acres west of town.

There, my dog held on point at the end of a tree row, after a couple hundred yards of weaving in and out of the gray trunks of the elm trees and the golden field grasses along the wheat stubble, the trail of a running bird evident by his behavior.  On my go command, he lunged in and sent a rooster rising right to left, providing an easy shot and a bird to end the walk, with my truck just fifty yards away.  Looking it over, the mature pheasant sported a well-developed coat of feathers and a tail tinged with lavender on its edges.  With the hit to the bird’s wing and little other damage, the pelt would make a fine one for fly tying and jig making this upcoming winter.

The following day, on the state lands a bit further west, I explored the hillsides of an area that had been previously grazed for a number of seasons, but this year it was allowed to remain untouched.  Patches of bluestem began to grow with the revitalized brome and other ground cover. The space provided an amazing walk which wrapped with a chattering covey of partridge taking flight just moments after my dog picked up their stationary scent pocket and ran into the unseen aura they had been emitting from their hillside position amidst the grasses.  I missed on my first shot as I focused on a low bird in the group of 15 or more, but my second salvo sent the Hun tumbling into the berry patch of the sloping draw and my lab was quickly on it.

Bringing it to hand, the mix of barred grey feathers and those tipped with a bit of rusty orange shifted my thoughts to the fly tying season ahead, and like the rooster the day before, when I returned home I meticulously pelted the small bird out and salted the skin.  I set it in the freezer in a bag atop the rooster’s feathers to let it cure and to kill any mites it might have and went downstairs to my fly tying desk to take stock of my supplies and put my shotgun away.

With plenty of feathers to craft my favorite patterns and lures, I needed only a few hooks to get ready for those colder months ahead where tying takes up my evenings and inhospitable stretches on weekends keep me inside instead of on the ice angling.  With a hand-scrawled order put together, I stuck the Post-It Note on the wall above my vise and went back to my day, placing the trigger lock on my gun and stashing it in the gun safe with a clank of the lock and a turn of the key.

At the end of every successful hunt, each bird is a trophy, and in turn, they can lead to others.  Be it a well-tied fly that comes together perfectly at the vise, or the large trout or smallmouth bass that comes on the patterns put together with the feathers from the fall before. Thus, each autumn outing and what can come from it and its benefits own the road are memories that are all wall worthy…in our outdoors.