9/1/04

Member Details:

Area Hunted

The west end and 4 of the islands within the Payette Wildlife Management Area.

Directions

There are numerous access points to the WMA. Contact the regional Fish and Game office for complete details about access. For this hunt we drove to the New Plymouth exit on I-84, followed the highway to the north side of town. On the north end of town there is a big road bend to the left. Get off the highway here and turn right. At the first stop turn left. Follow this north to a t-intersection and turn right. This will take you to the WMA parking area.

Hiking Rating

Easy

Birds

Pheasant during release period, Quail – best first couple weeks of season, woodcock, ducks, and geese

Tips

Even though this WMA gets a fair amount of pressure, from my few visits it seems only a small portion of the hunters attempt to cross to the islands. Instead they watch missed birds escape out of reach to the islands. While hunting WMA’s in general I have also noticed that it just takes the first day of hunting to make the birds skittish and start to provide some decent wing shooting. Personally I have found very few birds on WMA’s with much in their crops, this may have a lot to do with the heavy harvest rate immediately after release. I believe few birds have the chance to start to adjust to life in the wild. Although I have flushed a few singles my advice would be to be ready for a second flush and conduct a good search of the area for additional birds when one bird is flushed. These birds are raised with lots of other birds and my experience suggests that for the days right after release they tend to at least partner up as much as possible.

Payette Wildlife Management Area

So, you guys are island hopping chicken hunters? With a chuckle I looked up from pulling on a hip wader and simply replied, “Yep”. The truck had just pulled up and the hunter in it had moved around to his passenger door and was pulling out his own set of hip waders as he asked the question. Although cordial in his tone, the thoughts in his head were written plainly in his expression, “Dang it, I’m not the only/first one today!”

It was a Saturday morning, quickly approaching 10 a.m. (beginning of pheasant shooting hours) and Carl, his Puddle Pointer Zo’e, Z, and I were at the Payette Wildlife Management Area to chase pheasant…or ditch chickens as referred to by many people that do not live and breath hunting them. Today we were chasing the remaining birds of this week’s release of stock pheasants. Throughout the season and divided twice a week about 80 pheasants are stocked on the Payette WMA. Carl had been here a couple Saturdays before and had some luck. This was a new hunting area for me, and a new way of hunting pheasants, which was wading across channels to hunt the islands. I had hunted stocked birds with Justin, Chewy, and Z last year on C.J. Strike WMA and had a great time working the young dogs on these stocked birds.

Once the hip waders were on we struck out towards the West end of the refuge. We started the hunt by cruising the fields all the way to the western boundary line. And then we jumped over to the big island. While working the north edge of the big island Carl and Zo’e got into a couple quail but Carl’s shot was through too much bramble to be effective. In the first week of quail season there could be some decent shooting on this WMA. The WMA gets a fair number of hunters and the quail are quickly pushed off the refuge and the ones that stay are harvested to a few stragglers.

The highlight of my hunts on this WMA had to be the time I saw a pheasant run to hide in a large bush and Carl tried to set his young pup on an easy point. Carl worked toward the bush and was less than 10 feet from it when Zo’e burst on to the scene. Zo’e didn’t have the opportunity to scent the bird before the bird busted brush. The memorable part, seemingly in slow motion to me, was watching Carl lift his gun muzzle in the air in an attempt to touch the bird as it flew over his head. I won’t say what happened after that but the day ended good, I at least had 2 birds in my game vest.