Headed to Huron, SD last week for a work meeting. I drove out on Wednesday afternoon. As I was passing through Watertown, I thought I should buy my license and do some road hunting for the last 45 minutes of daylight. So after a quick stop I hustled west about 25 miles and got off the main road. I was tooling along when I spotted my first bird, a hen with no boys. Oh well. I kept heading down gravel roads turning south and west, depending what the cover looked like. On one of my last turns before the sun set, I stumbled upon about 20 birds. Before I could get the pickup stopped and get out, only one was left. He jumped up and I shot twice before he went down. By the time I got the bird retrieved and back to the truck, I only had 4 more minutes of shooting light left. Spotted some great cover, but no more birds. That’s cool, I got bloody and scratched the itch a bit.
Our plan was to hunt on Friday at a local game ranch. I assumed these would be pen raised birds. After some introductions and talking with the owner, I found out this was an all wild bird population. This peaked my interest a bit more. Late season wild birds in SD are a ton of fun. They are strong and fast. The weather was perfect, temps in the 30’s and virtually no wind. We walked a lot of frozen slews. The birds were wily and thick along the edges. The five dogs were put to a great test, tons of scent and running birds. It took us several walks to get our limit, but we did just as the weather was changing. You could feel the dampness in the air and the wind was really kicking up. Attached are the pics of our group.
On Saturday, the plan was to hunt my parents farm about 65 miles west of Huron. Unfortunately with the weather and blizzard conditions in the AM kept my coworkers from making the trek. However, my mom’s coworkers braved the 30+ mph winds. At 10AM, we headed out to make our first drive. Most of us looking like the kid in the Christmas Story movie. On the first walk I could tell it was gonna take some getting used to shooting with this many clothes on. I missed two or three layups on that drive alone. We had to work a bit, but we got our 7 person limit by 1PM. One bird I shot that came back over us heading south with the wind fell a mere 82 paces from where I shot it. How I hit it is beyond me. Better lucky than good.
All in all, it was a good two days of hunting. On Saturday, I shot the new Prairie Storm ammunition from Federal. It’s spendy, but from what I could tell, it’s got some impressive killing power.
