South Dakota Pheasant Hunting TIP

[little river]

I have been guiding in South Dakota for a little over 20 years now and lived here my entire life, unfortunately.

I started guiding pheasant hunters on September 1 this year because that is the start date for lodges, preserves or whatever you want to call them. We have so many birds on our property we still average over 95% wild birds taken by our hunters.

HERE IS THE TIP!!!!

I read a post earlier where someone said he road hunted the last couple hours of the day and got his limit.

Now this is accurate and an easy way to do it however, if you are one of those people who want to work your dogs all day I will tell you a little secret about South Dakota Pheasants.

You DON'T NEED TO GO TO A LODGE, YOU DON'T NEED TO GET ON PRIVATE OR EVEN PUBLIC LAND, all you really need to do, no matter the time of day, is find two ditch's with good cover and a food source on one side, not both. Now the tricky part is finding these perfect roads. If there is a North wind you want to look at mainly East/West roads for obviouse wind reasons.

It doesn't matter if 20 vehicles have driven the road that day in front of you. I can tell you this with confidence, when road hunting you are lucky to see one out of every 50 birds sitting in the ditch. As a matter of fact, many of us from South Dakota who grew up road hunting do very little ditch watching at all when road hunting. If there is only a fifteen mile an hour wind or less all we do is listen for that bird to move in the ditch. It may only be a slight rustle in the weeds to sounding like a heard of elephants are going through but you learn to pick up the sound with ease. I know many of you won't believe that one.

Sorry got off the track, that wasn't the tip. The tip is, find that perfect ditch and walk both sides with a blocker about a half mile down the road. This works great if you have three of four people and a dog or two that you can control to stay right with you in the ditch. If you can't control that dog you are taking a risk of Fido becoming road pizza. It has happened to me several years ago and it wasn't fun so be careful.

Hope this helps, it is very effective but you do need to really look for the perfect ditch's to do this and it can make a short day for you in the field.

Good hunting and training.

[JohnWester]

thanks for the tip LR.

[jigglestick]

good tip! great report!
thats what I'm talking about.
thank you and stop in again

[pray for the fish]

Thats cool! Actually i have done the same thing up here in north. mn. ruffed grouse hunting ( the listening thing on a crunchy morning.) Yeah i am guilty of road hunting or more accurately road looking, but that in itself isn't illegal only road killing. Little River, would you be interested in trading a red lake fishing trip for a south dakota pheasant hunt? I have sleeper fishhouses on red.