The farmlands of north-central North Dakota close to Minot are well-known for his or her abundance of pheasants. The terrain is good upland fowl habitat, with ample wheat and soybean fields and loads of coulees with cowl that ringnecks relish.
Native hunter Eric Henke and 6 buddies had been chasing birds on his farm there on Dec. 7. It was a frigid morning — “chilly even for right here,” Henke says.
“There was 6 inches of snow on the bottom, the temperature was 5 levels and there was a 15 miles per hour wind,” he tells Out of doors Life. “It was so chilly that we needed to start out our hunt at mid-day so pheasants would have time to heat up and transfer round, so our 4 canine might scent and discover them.”
They break up into two teams and labored collectively close to one another. They adopted behind a pair of German shorthair pointers, a German wire-haired pointer, and a Labrador retriever. They received into loads of birds and had been quickly closing in on their three-bird limits.
“My good friend Miles Zietz walked out on a finger of canopy and flushed a white pheasant that received up 150 yards forward of him,” says Henke, a 37-year-old farmer. “We went that means the place the fowl flew and flushed it once more far out of gun vary.”
Henke and his buddies knew concerning the uncommon rooster. He says they’d seen it over the previous two years, normally in the summertime, when its white feathers confirmed up starkly in opposition to the inexperienced grass. Nevertheless it all the time appeared to vanish in the course of the fall and winter.
“We surrounded the comb the place the white fowl had flown into and the canine labored additional time looking for it,” he says. “We knew there’d be different roosters that may flush out, however we waited to get an opportunity on the white fowl.”
The canine labored the realm for about quarter-hour. Lastly, one in every of them went on level, and the intense white rooster flushed simply 10 yards from Henke. He dropped the fowl at 30 yards with a load of #4’s from his 12-gauge, however then it hit the bottom and took off operating. It took some time for the canine to seek out it within the snow, however one lastly did and introduced it proper again to Henke.
The rooster is nearly all white, with some bright-colored breast feathers which are typical of untamed ringnecks. It’s not an albino, because it doesn’t have pink eyes. It’s extra doubtless a leucistic or piebald fowl — genetic mutations that have an effect on coloration. These sorts of birds are typically bred in captivity, however Henke says there are not any business pheasant operations anyplace close to his Ward County farm.
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Henke could have the fowl mounted by a taxidermist as a flying wall mount.
“It had a protracted 22.5-inch tail, and it’s actually stunning,” says Henke, who introduced the fowl to a taxidermist to be mounted. “Nobody I do know has ever seen a fowl prefer it. And I most likely gained’t ever see one other one.”
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