These are the Good Ol’ Days

After hearing this for more years than I can count and finding it to be a complete falsehood 99% of the time, you would think I would be smart enough to respond with my daughters common retort “whatever”, but I invariably conjure up some level of anxiety in my mind that we might actually have to put some real effort into finding birds.

Therefore, on our first day, my anxiety drives me out of bed at the crack of light looking out the window to see if I can spot any movement out on the picked and unpicked corn fields. The window glass was kind of old and distorted and the fields were sufficiently far away that I really couldn’t see too well. I decide I better get in my truck and take a spin around the gravel roads surrounding the adjoining section, just to see if I can spot any movement of a feathered nature.

At this point in the story I should post this WARNING. If you are use to hunting in a place where you walk all day and you might flush a few birds, and if you are really lucky occasionally get your limit, and most importantly you think that is awesome. You might want to stop reading here.

In my quick spin around the section I saw about 200 pheasant, four deer and a coyote. That was not however the highlight. At one point on the back side of the section I saw a big oak tree standing out in the middle of a field. The tree looked like it had dozens of large balls of fruit within it branches. On closer examination, I saw a tree full of rooster pheasants and a few hens thrown in for good measure. It was an amazing site.

Satisfied that hunting that day was going to be stimulating, if nothing else, I rolled back into the farm yard and put the rest of my hunting party’s fears to rest.

By the time we overstuffed ourselves and piled on enough clothing to tolerate the 5 degree temps it was 10:00 a.m. and time to head out to the field. The first place we hit was the standing corn behind the barn. This is a patch my uncle leaves every year for the local wildlife to eat and for all the hunters that come to my Uncle’s place every year to hunt.

It hadn’t been hunted in a couple weeks so things were pretty much undisturbed. Undisturbed maybe, but pheasants have a good memory and they know what it takes to survive. The back side of the cornfield borders a marsh and we typically walk the corn from the marsh to the farm yard. We have a few guys stand at the opposite end of the corn in the event birds wait until the last minute to leave the field. The field is about a half mile long.

It wasn’t long before at least one dog had run the entire length of the field chasing up ½ the birds and we had barely taken a step. Absolutely maddening, but it seems to always happen. The next thing you know guns were blazing, pheasants were flying in all directions and empty shells were falling to the ground. By all rights we should have been done hunting by the time we walked that field. Instead we had 2 roosters. I guess we were a little rusty in the shooting department. We generally attribute this to the desire to leave enough breeding stock for the next year.

This pattern repeated itself throughout the day. Mostly due to the fact that the ratio of roosters to hens was about 40 to 1 and the birds tend to get up just out of effective shooting range. Never the less, we did improve in the accuracy department as the day progressed and we had enough birds by the end of the day to make a limit for five of us.

Hunting with a dog is an absolute must when it comes to pheasants. The guys in our group that did not have a dog in front of them had way fewer opportunities than those of us with dogs. Having a good dog is almost like cheating. If you know your dog, you can tell when they are on a bird. It basically comes down to being able to keep up with them as they look for that bird and making the shot when the opportunity comes.

We managed to get our limit all three days we hunted. One day some of the locals joined us and we had about 17 guys out in the field. That makes it fun, but we usually get stuck cleaning all the birds. I guess that is a small price to pay for them letting us hunt on their land. By day three I am sure we had seen more than 600 birds.

You definitely do not have to have permission to hunt on private lands to find pheasants in South Dakota this time of year. There are a number of public hunting areas that are holding bird especially now that the corn is harvested and we had some good shooting just by walking a few road side ditches. If you can find a picked corn field and an adjacent ditch with cover in it, there is a high probability you’ll find pheasants.

Hard to tell what the future holds for pheasants in South Dakota. CRP acres are being converted to crop land at an unprecedented pace. In 1944 there were 20 million pheasants in SD. It has never come close to that number again, but in 2007 there were 11 million. For most of the preceding decades the numbers have been half or less than that. I am guessing number will fall dramatically in the coming years so you better get out there now. These are the Good Ol’ days we will be talking about in the future.