The Great White Hunter

So Saturday morning I got to go pheasant hunting.  It is so much fun.  Maybe not for the pheasant but that's a moral discussion we can have later if need be.

Elias Sater (one of my cooks) and I headed to Pleasant Hill Farm in Shoreham around 8:00 AM.  The farm is a pheasant farm that raises birds for sale to restaurants and stores but also has hunts.  You order a number of birds (we ordered 8) that are released into the fields early in the morning.  After a quick lesson in safety and how the hunt was to work we headed out.  Boy do I look good in blaze orange!  You go out with a handler who leads the hunt,directing you and handling a dog.  We were working with a yellow lab named Charlie who was on his first solo hunt.  It was incredible watching Charlie work.  Glenn (our handler and owner of the farm) would station Elias on one side of a swath of cover and me on the other.  Cover could be a row of corn or grass or hay.  He and Charlie would walk down the middle and Charlie would be released to run and boy did he like to run.  Up the middle, turn and back, across and back up until he got the scent of a bird that was hunkered down in the cover.  Once he got on scent we would close in and wait for him to flush the bird.  Once the bird took off and got high enough (so we wouldn't shoot each other) we could aim and fire.  My big problem was the aiming part.  I did manage to get one bird, Elias got 7.

After about 2 hours Charlie started to get a little tired so Glenn radioed to the house and told his wife to release Stu.  Stu is an English setter that came out of the house, looked around and once he heard Glenn's whistle shot our way.  Charlie the retriever works as a flushing dog, meaning he works until he finds a bird and goes right in and flushes the bird to flight.  Stu the setter works by pointing.  Setters also work a much wider area so we would let Stu run until he found a bird, at which point he would freeze and point.  We would move in, Glenn would release Charlie from his sit to flush the bird and kaboom!

We got back to the Inn around 1:00 PM, did a little work and then prepared a great staff meal featuring Breast of Pheasant with a Pomegranate Barbeque Sauce!  Oh so good.

Speaking of tacky sweaters, we hosted a tour group of women from Albany for dinner and caroling last night.  I'm sorry but sweaters with pictures are just wrong.  And snowflakes count as pictures.  Anyway they had fun.  Maybe not the sweaters, but that's a moral discussion we can have later...

Love you all.  Peace.  Peter