12/23/2020 Mississippi Public Land Wild Quail Hunt

Despite looking at a 3 hour and 45 minute drive, I allowed myself one thirty minute snooze when the 3:30 am alarm started dinging. At 4:00 am, I got up, fed and watered the dogs and showered myself. Tanner and I left at 4:45 and again 4:49 (the second time with my mission critical cell phone). We stopped once to pee on the side of the road and get coveralls to roll up as a pillow and again for a bacon McGriddle, two sausage McMuffins, and one bacon egg and cheese biscuit (cleverly ordered on the Mcdonald’s app for $3.49 including tax). Later I made a feeble attempt at stocking up on quail hunt appropriate snacks at a Murphy USA kiosk and managed one bag of cheddar Bugels and a Meat Stick.

We made it to our first stop on the Copiah County WMA 2020 wild bird hunt and managed to walk a good 200 yards before my nephew’s combat boots tied themselves together and he threw my 20 gauge (and his face) on the gravel.

He rubbed dirt on the blood (and there was blood) and gamely continued the walk for another 100 yards. We had reached the end of the area I wanted to walk and were halfway back to the truck before his shoes got caught on each other and he slammed himself face first into the road again.

We were both pretty discouraged and he was bleeding (again, and from different places) so I told him to hang tight and I’d drive back and pick him up. I told him not to worry, he could sit and recover and watch for deer while I made loops around different areas I thought might hold birds and mess on his phone. After a few miles of walking, we ended up near where we started, but a little further south. While standing on the edge of the WMA, a quail bust under foot across the road. I was too stunned to even attempt a shot. I called the dogs over and as they were hunting near where the first bird flew from another bird exploded down the fence line and across the road. I had a brief shot when the bird hooked across the property line (and missed) and within 90 seconds of firing a very friendly game warden stopped by and asked about our bird hunt. We told him we’d flushed two, and he said we were on the right track.

We used on OnX to find similar looking places to hunt and the very next walk, a covey ran across the road from public to private property. The dogs ran the ditch bordering the road separating the two parcels and flushed a single quail back at me which I dropped. Dublin retrieved the downed bird but Truvy was in and around the action and saw the same 12-15 birds that Dublin and I saw. We tried a few more spots and then went back to the first place we flushed two birds. As we were pulling up, we saw five birds run across the road (again from public to private). We parked and walked (without guns) along the public land side of the boundary road and had the dogs hunt the ditch opposite us, hoping to flush birds back toward us. Amazingly, the dogs did (or birds did) what we wanted and sent a couple of birds back over the fence in places we could hunt them down.

Tru pointed a comeback that later flushed over her head. She stayed solid and when Dublin came over to investigate he briefly locked up, smelling what Tru had, before realizing the bird was gone.

We couldn’t find any more birds to hunt despite working the dogs where we saw the birds flush to and it was getting close to us missing a chance to sit in the deer stand when we got back so we packed up and took Truvy back to her mama’s and made to Oxford in record time. Copiah, what a gem of a public land hunting spot that has yet to fail to produce a covey or two year-over-year when I’m willing to make a handful of 7.5 hour round trip drives to walk 6-16 miles.