When asked about the longest tailfeather he had ever seen, a hunting mentor relayed the story where his pal had taken a Birdzilla-sized rooster in the late season in southwestern North Dakota coming off a great shot as the pheasant’s tail flapped in the wind like a CB antenna trailing behind it on the flush. When the crew returned to their motel to clean the birds, he popped the feather out of the tail clump and dropped it down the top barrel of his over-under and the tip was still visible.

“That made it 26-and-1/8 inches, the longest pheasant feather I had ever seen,” my friend recalled from his five decades of upland hunting.

A long tailfeather — those over say two feet in length — are the hallmark of an old rooster, capping off the bright colors of a mature set of body feathers and the sharp, white-tipped spurs of those birds that are lucky enough to make it to a second autumn, or perhaps even a third. For those of us in the uplands, we know them when we see them as a bird takes flight in front of our dog as the tail bends and flexes in the air with each wing beat like a sine wave on one of those old 1980s-style sonar readouts in a dramatic submarine movie. The added pressure of spying such an opportunity for a shot at a trophy on the wing adds that much more drama to the moment.

One could compare those tailfeathers in the mid-20-inch range to the rack of a whitetail buck which eclipses 140 inches; adrenaline-inducing appendages that often aren’t seen until late in the season, often well after firearms deer hunting has closed and the first real snows of late autumn have laid their claim to the landscape, making upland hunting all the more challenging. Reserved for the wiliest survivors that have wound their way around the best hunting dogs, or secured their spot in the most isolated and ideal cover, long tailfeathers are a badge of honor for those birds that have defied the odds and claimed their 1-in-100, or perhaps 1-in-1,000 chance at making it to one or two years of age. Sure, there’s likely some genetics in the mix, and certainly the availability of good forage and great cover to keep them healthy as they make it to those ripe old ages, a tape-stretching tailfeather is as much a sign of a combination of skill and luck for an old rooster as it is for the hunters that harvest them.

As the pheasant hunting season gets underway, it’s likely those first few birds in the bag won’t sport the longest tailfeathers of the fall. However, as the weather gets colder, the leaves fall from the trees, and the young-of-the-year roosters in the population get whittled away by a combination of predators, conditions and hunters, the reward for sticking things out until winter’s edge approaches will be a shot at a rooster with a tail that makes up more than two thirds of its entire length. So, in the near term, enjoy the target rich environment that the early season brings, but for those epic finishes that come on the most mature roosters, you’re going to have to go equally as long into the season … in our outdoors.