South Dakota report

[BLACKJACK]

Was out to SoDak for the pheasant opener and hunted for five days. All I can say is fantastic! If you like to hunt pheasants, get out there sometime! We hunted west of Redfield on private land, lots of corn still in the fields so we hit small patches by picked corn, some food plots, and also some shelterbelts. There were four of us and we ended up with 32 birds, not bad considering that two of the guys had to leave after two days (because of sickness) and we had one rainy cold day where we got only two. The nice thing about SoDak is that just about every spot you hit has birds in it, you might get two and run 10-15 out the side. We had a couple of shootouts where I ended up with 4 birds and the other time 5 birds in my vest, and I almost ran out of shells, the roosters kept coming up! Fun. Had good dog work too. I can credit most of my success to my seven year old lab, she really worked great, stayed close, worked up some nice birds. The eleven month old pup really started coming on at the end, started realizing what we were after, brought some birds back. At one time, I had each one of them bringing a bird back in their mouth! Sweet!

I missed enough birds to make a good season here in Minnesota!!

The only downside to the trip was our partners sickness and losing $10 to my brother in cribbage!

It was a fun time!! Play cribbage and drink coffee in the morning, hunt all afternoon, drink beer half the night, then get up the next morning and do it again! I can't wait for our second trip in late Nov!!! With all the corn still in the fields in SoDak, it should be good!

[wheelierida]

I also went to SD for opener with 4 guys. we were west of water town about 60 miles. first day we filled out at 3:00, second day we only got 3, third day 9, fourth day 14 (tried to make up for day 2 shhhh!) and 10 on our last day. We probbably saw more birds than last year but they were all in the corn. the collinist finnally started cutting there corn on tuesday wich really helped us out. I'm headed back thanksgiving for 4 more days. I am only going with one other guy this time. we may be looking for another group of two to split our trailer house rental. with 4 people it's only $25 a night per guy. keep in mind we are smokers and light drinkers. reply to this if your interested and I can give more details.

[Frogger]

Same area as the first 2 guys. 5 people, 59 birds for the 5 days. Really fell behind in the rain on Monday with only 4 birds. What a terrific time!

[MikeYager - Suzuki]

Wheel-I'd like to hear more about the location you are staying. Is there plenty of land near there to hunt? How far to hunting land? Public or private? I'm a little interesed just not sure if I could find a second man. Please give me some more details. You can email if you like.

[email protected] Thanks.