The Banshee Bobwhites of the Swamp

Coltin Gresser

The 2025 Upland Season was one for the memory books. Not only did I harvest my first wild rooster ever. I harvested birds in my home state and in the great state of North Dakota. Now, when it comes to that pretty-looking ditch chicken. They are a ball to chase, but there was one feathery foe that kept eluding me all season.

His first name was Bob, and his last name was White (yes, I know that was a rough dad joke…at least give me a damn giggle). I felt good with my shooting after folding a few roosters. When my buddy Will told me that quail are a little tricky to shoot. I said, “Oh, I bet they are”, while in my head I told myself, “pshhhhh I got this shit”. Flash forward a few hunts in the season, and I have now gone 0/5 on my shooting of quail. I overestimated my capabilities of shooting on the wing, and those 6 oz ball of feathers humbled me.

Now I am the worst sore loser. It doesn’t matter if it’s a game of tic-tac-toe, cornhole, or even beer pong. I do not like to lose. So, when all I kept doing was missing those bobwhites, it drove me up a wall. Now I didn’t care if I would have killed one or two and miss 3 or 4. At least I have killed some. However, when it comes to straight missing, and I haven’t killed my first quail yet, it was far from being okay.

You should’ve seen me in my apartment. I was constantly shouldering the imaginary shotgun and making sure that after I shot, I followed through the bird. The last weekend of the pheasant and quail season. Will, his father, whiskey, which is their stud poodle pointer, and I went out to the property we call the swamp. If y’all keep up to date with our degenerate shenanigans. The swamp has made an appearance in our pictures, videos, and other deer hunting stories. When I was growing up, my grandpa, dad, and uncles would hunt it for quail and pheasant. It has had the ebb and flow of bird populations in this 40-acre plot.

I was able to bag my first Indiana wild rooster here when it was 5 degrees Fahrenheit and a foot of snow. We saw around 30 pheasants that day and flushed the covey of quail that was around 25 birds strong. We arrived at the property, and the conditions were different from the last outing. It was still cold, around 5-10 degrees Fahrenheit. There was just a dusting of snow on the ground, and it was hard enough that the birds could walk on it and not have to trudge through it. With these conditions, we all agreed that the birds would run more, rather than hunker down and flush more easily.

We headed towards the famous phragmites patch (super tall invasive reed). Pheasants love to hunker down in this European reed. It is thick, gnarly, and has good thermal cover. I DO NOT recommend keeping it around for a habitat management standpoint. I would try to kill as much of it as possible. That is another story for another time. We crunched our way down there on the frozen thin sheet of snow. We flushed two hens and heard another bird take off, but no cackle, so we assumed it was just another hen pheasant.

We devised a plan to grid out the property and try to work up the birds. We could tell, due to the tracks in the snow, that the birds were running on us. With the birds giving us a fit and running to the standing corn to the north. We decided to spread out into the standing corn and see if we can get some chances to unload the shotguns.

I was the farthest on in the corn, Will was in the middle, and Will's dad was on the edge. He pushed from east to west, going with the rows of corn. As we walked, I was able to see semi recent pheasant tracks, and kept hearing Will and his dad say: rooster track here, and deer track here. As we approached 70-80 yards away from the end of the standing corn. I hear Will’s dad scream QUAIL! By that time, Whiskey must have picked up some scent, because he got real birdie. That little tail was moving like a rocket, and now he was weaving in and out of the corn rows.

We start to move in a few rows. Now it was a constant screaming match of saying “I got them in front of me”, “quail in my row”, “they’re running”, and finally “oh…they are heading your way”. We picked up the pace from a speed walk to a run. This was in hopes of getting the birds to flush. However, they must have been gold Olympic runners, because those little bastards ran all over and would not sit and hold.

So, after the 3-minute chase of the bobwhites through the rows of standing corn. If I had a third-person perspective on the chase, it would have looked like the scene in the Scooby Doo show. Where the gang gets chased by the monsters through the doors, and then the monster gets chased by them. Finally, there was a slope in the topography of the field we were traversing. This little change finally made those little buggers sit and hold. They finally did what quail are supposed to do and flushed!

The moment I had been waiting for was now right in front of me. After all the prep talk Will and his father gave me and all the internal dialogue I had in my head, I was ready. I picked one bird out of the 4-5 birds that flushed near me. I let him get out a little farther, because if I hadn’t, it would just have been a few feathers left. He hit the range where I thought it was good to shoot, and I didn’t overthink. I just went naturally with the flow. In the first shot I sent off, I saw the quail drop 3 rows to my left!

I screamed, I finally did it! Shocked in pure joy, I watched the bird go down, and I marked the location on where I think he dropped. I was so eager to recover that bird that I did not move and kept a mark on that location. Wills’ dad shot another one on the far-left end. So, after he recovered his bird, we got whiskey out near the mark I had called. It did not take long; whiskey had that bird in a minute. I would be lying to say that I wasn’t ear-to-ear smiling and even shaking a little bit. Everyone high fived and, cheered and reminisced over what had just unfolded.

As we are slowly making our way back to the truck, we hear a quail calling out to locate the others to join back up. Will’s dad plays the back and forth of whistling to each other. I was shocked when he whistled, and then the quail would talk back. In fact, that is how many folks bring in more quail once they flush and break the covey up. We got back to the truck and took some more pictures of the pretty stud Rooster Bobwhites we just harvested and saddled up in the truck to head back south to beat the snowstorm.

It was one of those hunts that you can close your eyes and recall the moment. For the first true Upland season, chasing wild birds. The season couldn’t get any better. From harvesting the first birds, to sharing an in the field lunch with the boys, and to seeing other friends bag their first bird. I am truly blessed to be able to say I have been there and done that.

I said it once, and I will say it again. The Chinese ditch chickens are radical! However, the American-made Bobwhite Quail in my eyes is more challenging, and are a lot more fun to pursue. May the firebird and the habitat it calls home keep surviving and thriving!