September/October 2010

Opinion: What is South Dakota's Secret?

by Bill Dillion

pening morning of deer season as the sun rises over the standing corn food plot, I sit watching for a buck to stroll by. The air is crisp and the sky is orange mixed with light streaks of crimson that will turn to blue as soon it’s 7:30 a.m. The stillness changes and becomes the sound of wings as more than 50 pheasants flap and glide into the corn. I look at the ground around my stand to watch hens and roosters also making their morning trek into the cornfield.

Several hours in my blind result in only smaller bucks and does crossing nearby. Later that afternoon, I return to my stand. This attempt results in a doe with her yearling being my entertainment for about 20 minutes before my attention shifts to the reversal of the morning arrival of the pheasants. They make their exodus from the cornfield with wings erupting in an explosion of 75 to 100 pheasants returning to the CRP grasses, some in flight and their equal by ground, and all after the legal shooting time.

This ritual repeated itself for the three days I spent each morning and evening in my stand, almost within minutes of the same time each day. But the fourth morning I was back to my normal routine: Five clients were loaded up to hunt wild pheasants; the Suburban and pickup rolling down the driveway to start our day.

I’ve guided wild pheasant hunts in South Dakota for 20 years. I’ve hunted wild birds for almost 50. When I began hunting – I was raised in Michigan – the pheasant numbers were good most days throughout the 1960s and early ’70s. Seeing a hundred birds a day was not uncommon, but by the late ’70s, numbers were down or gone, with put-and-take programs the alternative. Many other Eastern and Midwestern states had the same experience, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois, what could be called “secondary states.”

The primary states for the best populations, the pheasant meccas, were Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and South Dakota. These states were the pheasant hunter’s dream destinations. With birds by the millions, each state was vying for the title of “pheasant capital” throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. But by the 1990s, things started to change. Numbers began declining in all the states except South Dakota.

With only slight variations in numbers from year to year – taking into consideration hard winters, droughts, and too-wet cycles – South Dakota’s numbers have historically increased over the years – the only state to increase consistently. Why?

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