September 1, 2000

Flying P Outdoors gives
wings to family dream

By Lana Robinson
Field Editor

Developing a niche, direct marketing, and a love for bird hunting have all come together in a wildly successful venture for Bobby Pettijohn, co-owner of Flying P Outdoors, a year-round hunting and fishing preserve near Hico, in Hamilton County. Over the past eight years, the family-owned business, which caters to dove, quail, chukar, and pheasant hunting enthusiasts, has really taken off.

“We can’t keep up with it,” says Pettijohn. “We have built our business on good service, a friendly atmosphere, and bird hunting at its finest. We feel this dedication to quality is what keeps our customers coming back year after year. We offer guided and non-guided hunts. We can accommodate 80 hunters a day—60 of those guided. In addition to daily hunts, Flying P offers family, corporate, and executive hunting and fishing packages, and we also host weddings, family reunions, and retreats.”

Flying P Outdoors encompasses about 7,500 acres of owned and leased land, half of which is rolling, sandy hills and half in cultivation. Bird hunting is conducted on 3,500 acres within a seven-mile range of the lodge.

“We also offer bass and catfish fishing. We have six ponds in all, several that are one- to three- surface acres in size and a couple of old conservation lakes. Duck and goose hunts are an option, but last year, there was very little of that because of the water levels. One pond went totally dry last year,” says Pettijohn.

Pettijohn grew up in Dublin and worked for the Stephenville Fire Department. He and his uncle/partner Denney Pettijohn, owner of a neighboring ranch, started off in 1992 doing dove hunts for firemen, complete with cookouts. It was going so well, the younger Pettijohn dreamed of building a rustic hunting lodge inside a barn on some leased property and installing some RV hookups for campers. But the leasor wasn’t too keen on the idea. When the Pettijohns were able to purchase a 165-acre tract (which has since expanded to 1,200 acres), Bobby Pettijohn took an early retirement, and they began the first phase of a really, first-class facility.

“Originally, the lodge was 2,400 square feet. We started construction in February of 1996 and were in business for the fall season for dove hunters,” Pettijohn recalls. “That first two years, we nearly killed ourselves. I was doing some of the guided hunts on top of everything else. My wife, Shirley, quit her job and was doing all the cooking and cleaning. We saw right quick we were going to have to have some help. Now we have four full-time employees, including our operations manager, Bobby Watson, and others who work on a part-time basis, and we have 12 to 16 guides as needed.

“We have recently enlarged the lodge to 8,000 square feet,” Pettijohn continues. “And we added a new 16 x 31 foot deck with a swimming pool for our guests’ enjoyment. We can sleep 48 here at the lodge, 10 at our ranch house down the road, and we can sleep another 12 in trailers in our RV park. We have four 24-foot trailers and two goosenecks.”

Creature comforts rank high
The rambling, rock ranch-style headquarters, with several patios and a huge portico for outside activities, is fastidiously kept. The main part of the lodge has a showy fireplace, flanked by various mounts, trophy animals, fish and birds. Overstuffed couches, frontier furniture and accents, cowhide rugs, and rough-hewn doors and pillars lend to the beauty of the area, which also boasts a convenient kitchen, large dining area, and a wet bar. Down the hall are a couple of meeting/conference rooms, a smoking lounge for cigar smokers (the rest of the facility is off limits to smokers), a commercial kitchen, and the newly-added bedroom wing. Bedrooms and baths are spacious and decorated in a hunting/fishing motif. Some rooms have bunks and a couple have king-sized beds. Two bedrooms and one bath are handicap accessible.

Bird pens, a bird-cleaning facility, kennels, and a competition skeet shooting and sporting clay pigeon range are also on the premises. Flying P is a member of the National and Texas Game Bird Associations and Ducks Unlimited and Quail Unlimited sponsors. As a service to hunting clients, Flying P Outdoors offers dog training and sells English setters, English pointers, German short hairs, and Labrador retrievers.

“The people who come here are our reward. We’ve had folks from Australia and Japan. We have a group from Denmark that comes twice a year. We are laid back. We leave people alone until they need something. They come out to relax, and we try to let them do that undisturbed,” says Pettijohn.

Merrill Lynch financial consultant Joe English of Waco calls Flying P Outdoors “my sanity.” English, who laid down his shotgun 20 years ago and took it up again in 1996, found the Flying P website while surfing the Internet.

“From the first day I walked in out there, the Pettijohns have treated me like family. It’s such a service-oriented group. It’s been a wonderful place to go. I’ve gotten about 10 of my closest friends involved, and we all kind of go together. We all enjoy family packages. We take our wives, occasionally. Some wives actually hunt. We hunt from September until April. Then we go out from time to time in the summer to relax and shoot sporting clays,” says English.

English says he and his buddies enjoy hunting on the preserve as opposed to hunting in the wild, so to speak. Although there are plenty of birds, he insists it’s still a challenge.

“Pen-raised birds are a little different. It’s nice knowing that they’re there, but you’ve still got to find them. There are a lot of leftover birds from other groups. We may be hunting quail and come across a chukar or a pheasant. And that makes it all the more fun,” he says.

Denise English takes frequent jaunts to the Flying P preserve with her husband.

“I don’t hunt, but I love to watch the dogs work. But I mostly go to relax and to eat. Shirley is a wonderful cook. It’s like being at home. It’s nice and quiet. It’s great,” she says, noting that nonhunters also have the option of slipping off to Hico, which is 10 miles north, or Hamilton, about 15 miles to the west, where antique and specialty shops bound.

Businessmen often entertain clients at Flying P Outdoors or bring their employees out for conferences.

“It’s a wonderful place for business functions,” Joe English suggests. “One of the guys who hunts with us owns a big computer company in Dallas. He has his sales meetings at Flying P.”

In mid-August Cisco Systems, a leading computer networking solutions company, held a week-long leadership workshop for 120 of their employees from all over the U.S. in the Hico area. Eighty-nine of them stayed at the Flying P.

Hunting season about to begin
Dove hunting starts Sept. 1 and pen-raised quail hunts begin Oct. 1 and run through May 1 at Flying P Outdoors.

Safety is a top priority, says Pettijohn.

“Everything we do, we think liability,” he says.

As a licensed hunting preserve, Flying P Outdoors is entitled to hunt year-round and raise birds.

“We did raise birds initially, but quit. That’s a business all its own. And now, we are able to get good birds supplied to us,” he explains.

Pettijohn purchases 1,500, 12-week-old quail chicks at the start of hunting. He says he typically runs through 7,000 quail during the course of the season.

Pettijohn says quail are considered mature at 16 weeks; chukars at 18-20 weeks; and pheasants at 24 weeks.

“Quail have to be isolated or they become domesticated, and you don’t want that when they’re for hunting,” he adds. “We flight-train and weather-condition birds in our pens here. We release male and female quail, prior to the hunters’ arrival. As the season continues, you get residual birds. We also put out a couple of ‘Johnny boxes,’ or ‘call-back’ boxes.”

Pettijohn plants milo, sunflowers, and sorghum, for food purposes as well as cover.

“We leave as much native pastures as possible and rotate cattle in order to leave some natural cover for birds. We leave 12-foot strips around ridges, to hold the pheasants. Otherwise, they’ll wander off. In fact, I found one once alongside the road to Hamilton, almost 15 miles away from here,” says Pettijohn.

The game birds have many natural predators—coyotes, raccoons, foxes and hawks. Pettijohn contracts with someone to do predator control on the preserve.

“We also cut hay for our cattle,” says Pettijohn, whose brother and uncle run about 700 head of stocker cattle on the preserve. “In addition to the stockers, we have a pen of longhorns by the lodge for show.”

Pettijohn has several sideline enterprises, including a pallet company in Stephenville, and cattle operations in Gorman, Crawford, and Pancake.

“I have 120 mama cows, Registered Brangus, I run with registered Hereford bulls,” he says.

As if he isn’t busy enough, Pettijohn plans to offer even more services and amenities at Flying P Outdoors next year.

“In addition to the hunting, we plan to go after the Bed and Breakfast business, offer horseback riding, and expand into more of a dude ranch operation. We plan to promote that quite a bit, as well as the family retreats and corporate meetings here at our main facility,” he says.

For more information on Flying P Outdoors, call 1-888-796-4043 toll free (24 hours a day); 254/796-4034 local; or visit the Flying P website: www.quailhunting.com.