We just got back from a couple weeks of chasing snows in the Dakotas. Our crew has been hunting on and off in South Dakota from March 15. We did jump into North Dakota for the last weekends hunt as birds finally got pretty thin in South Dakota.
Like everyone has been saying, it was a tough year this year with very few juvies to bang up those big hunts with. However we still were able to put together some dang good shoots (relatively speaking) racking up over 225 birds. Our big morning was 46, our low day was 2. The rest of the hunts ranged from 8 – 42 per day.
Mid day hunts were worthless this year. Very few migrators fell to our spread….and hot feeds got eaten up pretty quickly. Staying very mobile was the key to the success we had, moving spreads for both morning and evening hunts. I feel bad for all those full body guys that didn’t have that option…..heard a lot of them got their ARSE handed to them. It’s a tough pill to swallow shooting single digits or zeros day after day over a $15,000 spread of full bodies. This past sunday we hit out stride pulling, moving and setting our spread 5 times in one day.
Although we didn’t get in on any super monster hunts like we have the past couple years, it was still a great spring and we feel we did pretty darn good with what we had to work with this year.
Hope for a good hatch this spring…..and bring em on in the fall!
Here are some photos from the trip.
Our Best morning.
A zero wind foggy morning sunrise over white rock decoys!
A days worth of empties in a pillow case. I believe this was a 36 bird shoot.
South Dakota scenery
Congrats! 
