While we sometimes get hung up on how "the good old days" were better, unless you go WAY back, "the good old days" have been the last 4 years in South Dakota. According to SD GF&P statistics, the total harvest has been within 150,000 of 2 million every one of those years.
20 years ago (1989), the place to be, if you were a pheasant hunter, was not SD but Iowa. (I know--I was there.) Just shy of 1 1/2 million birds killed in Iowa that year, compared to fewer than 700,000 in SD. You have to go back to 1983 to get close to 1 1/2 million in SD, and clear back to 1963 to top 2 million. The total in 63 was over 3 million. Now that, I'll agree, would have been the good old days!
The problem in SD is often too many birds in confined areas. They get nervous, and you get a lot of long range flushes. That often happens with large parties . . . hard to keep things quiet. A small party, couple guys and a couple dogs . . . you can't surround cover like the big parties can, but you can do very well if the birds are more scattered in bigger fields. Or you can do a two man drive and block on very small pieces of cover, like ditches and waterways.
And by the way, guys, the best advice I can give on Dakota pheasants: GO NOW. Both N and S Dakota are losing good cover (CRP) at an alarming rate, and the current crew in DC appears to be heading in the wrong direction. We may lose CRP at an even faster rate over the next couple years. With less cover, you get a bad Dakota winter, and you're going to lose birds--and they won't recover. Even being down from last year, SD is still in a league of its own when it comes to pheasants. Now if you want to cry about "the good old days", come to Iowa. We were killing a million and a half 20 years ago; last year, we didn't make 400,000. And this year doesn't look much different.
Last edited by L. Brown; 10/03/09 08:07 AM.
