"It was classic," I told my wife as I stripped the final layer of thermal away and started the painful process of combing the ice cubes from my beard. Maggie lay steaming beside the radiator, the ice from both her muzzle and tail melting into a puddle of glop on the hardwood floor. It had indeed been classic--a classic case of some of the country's finest late-season rotten-weather pheasant hunting.

Every pheasant hunter enjoys the nice days, those mornings in the low to mid-40s, with a little sun and enough breeze to carry scent but not so much as to make conditions impossible for dogs. I like those days, too; unfortunately, not every chance I get to go pheasant hunting coincides with that kind of weather.

Early in the season, we Iowa pheasant hunters must deal with chilly rains or drizzle. Later, we have to contend with snow (although I'd certainly never complain about an inch or two of the white stuff). December often arrives with harsh north or northwest winds that top 20 mph, which results in temperatures the likes of which Maggie and I endured on our hunt in the winter of 2003.

All things considered, though, there are only two choices: stay home, or dress appropriately and learn where and how to hunt cockbirds when the weather turns downright rotten.

I dearly love to hunt pheasants in the rain or immediately following a rain. Now I'm not talking about 30 mph winds and horizontal curtains of rain, but a little bit of precipitation can't hurt and can often help result in a better-than-average pheasant outing. And, besides, you're not going to melt.

Inclement weather, be it rain, heavy snow or wind, immediately cuts back on any human competition I might encounter on the public lands I hunt. And rain often makes cockbirds reluctant to run through cover that will make them even wetter than they already are; thus, their only avenue of escape, or so my theory goes, is to fly--which they'll often do in the damp, however begrudgingly. Finally, a light rain ("light" being the key word) or a recent one can improve scenting conditions for dogs.

When it's raining, I look for two things: overhead cover and relatively sparse ground clutter. The overhead cover acts as an umbrella; the birds don't want to get any wetter than they have to. Sparse ground clutter keeps the birds from getting damper and allows them ample opportunity to scratch and feed as they wait out the rain.

In South Dakota, this might be a cedar shelter belt, the perfect setting for a two- or three-hunter quiet push. In Iowa, I know the whereabouts of a grove of osage orange smack dab in the middle of a cornfield where the foxtail is sun-starved and short--ideal for a one-hunter, one-dog sneak on a rainy morning.

Whenever he makes the drive east over the Cascades from his home in western Washington, my good friend and avid pheasant hunter, Tony Miller, focuses his wet-day efforts on cottonwood-studded creek bottoms where he and his dog can root hiding cockbirds out of the thin beggar ticks and wild rose.

Rooster pheasants, like turkeys, get awfully squirrely whenever the wind howls. I think the constant rush of wind cuts down on how well the birds can hear, and pheasants depend on their sense of hearing as a major line of defense against predators. Wind also causes everything around the cockbird to move, and when you take an instinctively paranoid and edgy bird and ask him to watch 1,001 things moving around...well, what you're left with is an extremely flighty critter.