When it comes to early season hunts, you have a lot of advantages. The birds are usually spread out pretty evenly through the cover—cover that isn’t often overly thick. You also have uneducated birds, and young birds, with which to work. Making a little extra noise then, to keep your dog in line, isn’t going to cost you a limit in most cases. But when it comes to the last weeks of the season, the rules change.

The dumb birds are dead. The cover is always thick and unruly. And often, the conditions are pin-drop quiet. In other words, making too much noise during the last hunts of the year is a great way to give the birds all they need to get up well out of shotgun range. What’s worse is that most of the noise we might make involves controlling our dogs—and most of it is avoidable.

Stealth-E 

Modern e-collars are a lifesaver in many different ways, not the least of which is that they offer tone and vibrate. Both options are quiet, really quiet. Both also allow you to communicate directly with your dog without having to make a potentially game-spooking sound.

While it’s up to personal preference, I tend to use tone more than vibrate for my late-season hunts. This is because a dog that is really working heavy cover, like cattails, might not feel the collar vibrate, but they will hear the tone. To train this, I use a check cord along with the tone to enforce recall without having to issue a verbal command.

To further break this down, the way I really work with an e-collar to stay quiet is by holding down the tone button if I want my dog to come all the way back to me. If I just want my dog to check back, maybe because I want to change directions, slow down, or use a hand signal, I’ll hit the tone once.

This is easy, and eliminates the need to use a whistle or yell. I can’t stress how important this is, but it’s most evident if you wade into a December slough with someone who doesn’t have strong command of his retrievers. The moment the whistle goes off, or someone starts shouting, is usually the moment you’ll see birds bust from the far end of the cover. This doesn’t just apply to pheasants, either.

There are times in the grouse woods, especially if you have fresh snow to work with, where you’ll see that birds ran out 100 yards in front of you and took off. In that situation, you usually have no idea how many ruffs are getting out ahead of you because you often can’t see or hear them. But the tale of early flushers is often writ in a fresh layer of powder.

It’s also important to note, that if you’re using an e-collar on either quiet setting to control your dog, you might also have to use it to correct your dog. An attempt to be stealthy is not license to allow your dog to get away with whatever it wants.

Party of One, Please

The more people in your late-season party, the more likely you are to bust the birds early. This starts with the slamming of truck doors, and often ends with people shouting at their dogs who are often practically sprinting to stay in front of other dogs to get to the birds first.

While early season birds in the CRP might stick around for a gang-hunt to roll through, the survivors left in the last days of the season won’t. To make sure I can keep things stealthy, I keep my hunting party small, and make sure that not only can I communicate with my dogs without making a sound, but also my hunting partners.

This is something you want to work out ahead of time, but simple hand signals that indicate it’s time to slow down, or you see fresh tracks, or your dog is birdy, all help to keep the birds around. It’s also a really good idea to keep reminding yourself, and anyone you’re hunting with, to slow down.

This seems to really play off of the two kinds of bird personalities you’ll encounter in December. The first is the cagey, shot-at-one-too-many-times bird. This pheasant or grouse is one that just doesn’t tolerate people and dogs. He is dang near a lost cause.

The other is the sit-tight bird. This is the one you want your dogs to find, because it’s the bird that is going to give you a good shot. This is also the kind of bird that is no slouch at hiding, so going slow, quietly, while working into the wind is the best bet.

It’s important to acknowledge that this bird exists, because even if you can handle your dog without ever making a sound and you creep along at a glacial pace, you’ll probably have birds bust out ahead of you. This tends to make us think the cover might be empty, but it rarely is. You just have to worry about the dog and keep the faith that not every rooster in the slough has lit out for a safer section.

While working thick, late-season cover, it’s also important to train your dog to work close, and mark every bird you hit really well. I often pull a bird out of my vest and toss it when the dog isn’t looking. Then I recall them and make them hunt dead close to me. This conditions them to think that not every bird is 40 yards out, and that many of them might actually be found right by me.

Also, when the dogs put up a bird and I knock it down, I mark it, and walk right at it. But I don’t barge in without factoring in the wind direction, and I always assume that my mark might be a bit short. It’s really common to think a bird fell exactly in a specific spot, only to realize that it was actually 25 yards farther out.

Late-season hunts, with the bunched up birds, can produce some of the best action of the season. But they can also be truly frustrating. If you, or someone in your hunting party, makes too much noise, the whole thing is going to be rough. Instead, use the best tools at your disposal to train your dog to obey you, so that you can leave the whistles at home and only have to use your library voices in the field. If you do, your dog will be more relaxed, the hunting will be more enjoyable, and you’ll kill more birds.