South Dakota Pheasant Trip This Weekend

I got an offer about a month ago to go on a pheasant hunt I last took part in more than a decade ago. In 2002, myself and a big group of friends took off to hunt near Pierre, SD on a place one of my buddies had been hunting since he was a kid. It’s been awhile ago now, but I can still remember my first 30 steps into cover there, seeing more roosters than I’d seen in hunting 5 years in MN. Literally, I was in awe of the amount of birds. We had 17 guys in our group, and we took our 51 birds the first day in just under 3 hours. That’s some fast hunting, no matter where you’re hunting, especially considering this wasn’t in a preserve and these were all wild birds.

Fast forward to this past weekend. Our group, this time only 5 of us, headed out to hunt the same farm we did 12 years ago. We were greeting with 25-35mph sustained winds, gusting to 40+. As if my wing-shooting wasn’t rusty enough! We got our birds, though they flushed further away than I thought they would with that wind. Day 2 brought warmer temps, better hunting, and better shooting as well. We even got time yesterday to plink on some prairie dogs. And Tannerite! South Dakota is a special place, to those of you who live out there, my hats off to ya!

The first pic is from 2012, next pics are all from this year.

Joel

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Pretty cool. Makes all my trips to Iowa seem subpar now. Guess I need to visit SD. I just hear so many things about released birds it turns me off. I would love to chase wild birds there.

If you ever been out here you would know that SOUTH DAKOTA ROOSTERS are as tough and wild as they come…. You about have to blow their heads off to kill them. You think you hit him good and he falls down hard, recovers on the bounce and runs off at 17 mph. I wouldn’t hunt them 3 days a week on my way home from work if that were the case.

I blew the head of an Iowa Rooster this year and it got me and my buddy’s all a beer before expiring. While the head insulted us!

Looks like a great weekend trip to me. Glad you got your birds and were able to take advantage of those great opportunities to reconnect with friends

Dave

suzuki wrote:

Pretty cool. Makes all my trips to Iowa seem subpar now. Guess I need to visit SD. I just hear so many things about released birds it turns me off. I would love to chase wild birds there.

Iowa has good hunting too, though I’ve only done it once. It’s hard to beat the pure numbers of birds in SD however. That said, good habitat trumps all. The best areas we hunted had everything. Tree/shrub cover and thicket, next to corn/millet, with some cat-tail sloughs in the vicinity. As we’d get birds up, we saw numerous times the hawks that would swoop down to try and take out a flushed pheasant.

That scores to the point of how tough those birds really are. They’re getting chased on the ground by ‘yotes, and via the air through hawks, owls, and eagles. On numerous occasions we had to have the dog recover runners, and/or shoot birds multiple times in the air so they’d actually go down. Especially birds that would fly straight away. Pretty tough to kill those at the longer yardages.

There’s lots of areas, esp. where lodges congregate in close vicinity, where there’s plenty of released birds too. I think it just depends where you hunt. We’re lucky to have a family farming operation we’ve worked with over the years rather than a lodge that cycles through a few dozen guests a weekend. I have no problem with those operations, but with that many people coming through, it’s difficult to have enough wild birds to fill limits (which you come to expect in SD) that many weekends in a row. Not to mention, if they’re classified as a “preserve” you can kill I believe 7 per person. Which is incredible. We talked to some guys from Colorado, who drove up to do just that. Tons of work for their dogs. 10 guys. 140 birds in two days. Pretty wild.

Joel

Hey Mike, what were you hunting last time in SD?

kooty wrote:

Hey Mike, what were you hunting last time in SD?

That is a classified trip I don’t talk about online.
SD is calling me.