Page 20 - 2020 Jan/Feb Outdoor Oklahoma
P. 20
They hunted five times for woodcock
Don P. brown/oDwc over the next two years, with no luck.
Milligan said, “Honestly I was start-
ing to think maybe the woodcock just
wasn’t going to be. You’d think with all
the miles we’d walked that we’d kick
one up eventually. I guess we are just
easily entertained.”
But Mackey said each encouraged the
other. “You are never going to get it done if
you don’t go try. We figured it was going to
be a lot of work.”
Finally they heard some talk of wood-
cocks being seen at Heyburn WMA. In
late November 2018, they made the trip.
Walking through a forested thicket, a wood-
cock flushed into the air. And neither man
fired a shot.
“It was probably because we were both
flabbergasted” by actually seeing a wood-
cock, Mackey said.
They followed the bird, flushed it again,
but both of them missed.
After several more rounds of walking in
the woods, Milligan was heading back to
the truck and he caught sight of a wood-
cock ahead of him. The bird jumped up
and BOOM! The HIP quest came to a suc-
cessful end for Milligan. The next week,
Mackey took his first woodcock, finishing
the quest for himself.
One of each of the various HIP birds
taken for this first quest will end up in a
mounted display, Mackey said. As for the
rest of the birds, Milligan said, “All these
birds make fine table fare.”
He said they had to educate them-
selves a lot during their quest. “It took us
a lot of places, places we probably would
have never hunted. We talked to a lot of
people we probably would have never
talked to.
“You always come home with memo-
ries. You never know what you’re going
“You are to see. It’s all the other things in between
the shooting that make the story, that
never going make the memory.
“It was an adventure. A lot of people
to get it think it is maybe kind of goofy. But we
thought it was great. We were a little bit
done if you persistent, a lot lucky, and we had a lot of
don’t go try.” help.” Mackey agreed.
“We lamented our misery,” he quipped,
“But it was really a lot of fun.
“And to make it even more special,
we did it all on public land, and all in
Oklahoma. And we did it together.”
18 OUTDOOR OKLAHOMA
12/20/19 8:08 AM
OutdoorOK-2020-January-February.indd 18 12/20/19 8:08 AM
OutdoorOK-2020-January-February.indd 18
