It was late October, 1972, as I pushed through a ridge of thick cover just outside of West Chester. I was in quest of wild ring-necked pheasants that day. I carried a double-barreled side-by-side 16-gauge shotgun borrowed from seasoned pheasant hunter Tim Skiles. Trailing behind me was hunting buddy Ralph Haney toting the single-shot 12-gauge he had borrowed from me that afternoon.

To say we were pheasant-hunting neophytes would be putting it mildly. In fact, neither one of us had ever bagged one of the long-tailed birds. This outing was our first of the young season and we had high hopes, even though hunting without a dog, because in the early ’70s pheasants were so plentiful here in southeastern Pennsylvania you didn’t really need a dog. In a few hours of pushing through cover you could expect to flush as many as half a dozen cockbirds even when dogless.

Our trek across this ridge would prove fruitful when a cackling cockbird exploded from the cover right in front of my face. I shouldered the borrowed shotgun and immediately pulled the trigger without letting the bird put some distance between us. A rookie mistake and a clean miss. Haney followed up with another errant shot and the bird sailed away unharmed, disappearing into a nearby cornfield.

But a moment later a second cackling rooster erupted from another patch of cover 20 yards away. I realized I still had one shell left in the double barrel and now I took my time, swung on the bird, and squeezed the trigger. The big bird dropped at the shot and from that moment on I was hooked on pheasant hunting. I had that bird mounted by taxidermist Harmon Rodgers and the mount still graces the wall of my log cabin’s entranceway above the door.

The next year I invested in a new shotgun, a lightweight Remington 20-gauge pump that would score on numerous pheasants in the years that followed. The year after that I went on a first date with my future wife Patti on a mission to purchase my first hunting dog, an English springer spaniel we named Raina. She had a great nose and flushed scores of pheasants over the years. Just don’t ask her to retrieve anything.

I remember hunting with Raina late one afternoon on the last day of the season in 1976.  She managed to flush a beautiful cockbird that fell to my lightweight 20-gauge at the last legal minute of the season. That hunt was the inspiration for my first published article, “A Case (or Two) for Persistence” which appeared in the October 1984 edition of Pennsylvania Sportsman.

But by the time I got married in 1979, the wild pheasant population in Pennsylvania was in serious decline for reasons that ranged from clean farming practices to bird flu, habitat loss, and predation. No one seemed to be able to put their finger on the exact cause. Back in the day I would keep and collect one of the long tailfeathers from each of the wild birds I harvested. Soon the wild pheasant population disappeared and the only pheasants you could hunt were stocked birds by the Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC). At the same time, I stopped collecting the tail feathers from the put-and-take cockbirds the PGC provided.

Opening day also became a bit of risky business thanks to the crowds of hunters that descended upon freshly stocked pheasants concentrated on designated properties. I remember one pheasant opener when Haney and I reported to the well-stocked Marsh Creek State Park with my two springers. As Haney and I followed the dogs through fields of cover, lines of dogless hunters surrounded the field hoping to get shots at any pheasants our springers might flush. That made things very iffy since any shots we might try would likely find a few of the hunters encircling us in the line of fire. When my dogs flushed a bird far out in front of us three or four other hunters opened fire on it. All misses. After that, concerns for our own safety and the safety of my dogs brought an end to our day and any visits to stocked properties on future opening days.

Not long after that I joined the Brandywine Gun Club where members stocked our Regulated Shooting Grounds with a variety of pheasants, quail, chuckars, and Hungarian partridges. It was a great way to get our respective bird dogs practice on flushing, pointing, and retrieving these game birds. It also provided incentive for me to purchase another shotgun, this time a 20-gauge Browning Citori over and under. That’s about the same time our club changed its name from the Brandywine Gun Club to the Brandywine Sporting Dog Association. But a few years later the property was sold, we lost our Regulated Shooting Grounds lease, and the club soon disbanded. The open field where I bagged my first pheasant is now an extensive housing development.

More recently my pheasant hunting has been limited to a few visits to game preserves hunting with old timer Tim Skiles and his pair of Labrador retrievers. Unfortunately, Brooke, my current springer spaniel, is extremely gun shy so I’m not inclined to take her afield in quest of cackling cockbirds.

Pennsylvania’s 2026-2027 pheasant season opened this past Saturday and plenty of stocked birds are still out there. This year the PGC plans to stock around 232,000 pheasants from the pre-season and then weekly from late October through November and more through January.

On Saturday’s opening day I didn’t do any hunting myself but I visited the stocked pheasant fields at Struble Lake. There I met with Wallingford’s Nick Coppock who had just completed his morning’s hunt. He reported that the stocked fields and meadows were packed with crowds of hunters when the season opened at 6:51 that morning. Despite the stiff competition Coppock, hunting without a dog, managed to score on a nice cockbird. “I had two shots on two birds,” he said. “Missed one and got one. But there were a lot of hunters out there.”

For more information on the state’s pheasant allocations and stocking locations, visit the PGC’s website at https://www.pa.gov/agencies/pgc/huntingandtrapping/get-started-hunting/pheasant-hunting/pheasant-allocation.

Tom Tatum is the outdoors columnist for the MediaNews Group. You can reach him at tatumt2@yahoo.com or check out his website at tomtatumoutdoors.com