Pheasant Memories Traditional Cache

Many years ago, my father and I had hunting privileges on the land to the west of the park. Although today it is a horse stable, back then, it was almost all corn fields. Perfect for pheasant hunting after the corn was picked, as the machines of that age left a lot more corn stalks and corn in the fields than the harvesters of today. That lack of cover is one of the reasons for the decline in the pheasant population.

The weekend after opening day, my father and I and our Brittany Spaniel were hunting that corn field about 200 feet from the park when a pheasant flushed. Three shots later, it had been solidly hit, but glided right into the park and landed at the base of a tree. Now what to do? We couldn’t just let it lay there as that was just not the right thing to do. And obviously, we could not just walk onto the park land either, so we visually marked the tree where it landed near and went looking for the ranger at the park.

Now I must say, things were a lot slower in the park back then on Saturday mornings than they are now… We drove to the Nature Center(now the National Center for Nature Photography) and easily found the manager of the park. After explaining what had happened, the three of us took a short drive and a nice walk. I don’t think the manager really thought we knew which tree it was near, or believed it might really be there. However, when we pointed out the tree, there was the pheasant right under it.

The path you will be walking down to this cache is the same one we walked down that morning, and the cache is in the vicinity of that tree.

After finding the caches in this park, make sure you leave time to explore the many varied habitats in this undiscovered gem of the metroparks!