I lost both my brittanies in the last 12 months, but they had both been couch-dwellers for a while before that at advanced ages so I found myself hunting pheasants solo and dogless a lot for all of the 2017-18 season. I tell you one thing - hunting wild pheasants solo/dogless is the bird hunting equivalent of traditional archery hunting. Walk slow through strip cover and edge cover. Stop every 10-20 paces for 5-10 seconds. The 'pause' drives them insane. I learned more about pheasant behavior in those two seasons than many years combined of hunting behind good dogs.
As everyone notes, finding downed/crippled birds is the single biggest issue when dogless. Brent's method is great. When I'm solo, I carry a roll of surveyors tape in my vest pocket and mark the nearest visible plant/branch/weed/stalk/grass clump/whatever to where the bird fell in my mind/eye. I tie a piece of tape to something where I'm standing (without looking away from my mental 'mark) - then I walk directly to the mark and tie a piece to that too.
That gives me a starting line of travel and makes it easier to piece together a 'fan' from that point. Usually - if the bird is crippled and running, it's going dead away from where I shot so line the two points up and start on that azimuth, then rinse and repeat in a fanned-out grid of sorts. They can be hard to find even if they are dead. I've spent 45 minutes looking for a bird that turned out to be stone dead within 5-10 feet of where I taped the 'drop point'
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