South Dakota Pheasant Hunting 09

Well we ventured out to South Dakota to chase some crazy pheasants. If you don't know out of state residents get to pick two 5 day periods to hunt. You can pick them back-to-back if you'd like. We chose to separate them. The first hunt was October 23rd - 26th. And the second one was December 11th - 13th.

During the first hunt out there we noticed that the they had a whole bunch of water. As a matter of fact, we wish we would had purchased the waterfowl license as well. So since there was so much water, it made find a spot to hunt, without getting wet, a little tricky. Also the farmers had to leave a bunch of the crops up. This also made it difficult to find a place to hunt. However we did manage to bag about 12 birds in the five days we were there. Of course the first bird I pulled up on, I missed. And there were a few other "misses" throughout the hunt. So we should have had more but that's how it goes when you're hunting. All-in-all we had a blast. The weather held off for us. It only rained a little bit. We had a couple of young dogs that did an outstanding job for us.

During the second hunt we drove out on Friday and hunt along the way a bit. We ended up getting a few birds. Saturday was a pretty nice day. It was windy but not bad. We hunted all day long and I think we ended up with one bird for the three of us for the whole day. NOT GOOD! But that's how it goes some days. Sunday looked like it was going to be a rough day because we woke up with -2 degrees for a temp and very windy. Wind chill was well below that. It was tough hunting but it made the birds hold tight. We just had to make our hunts shorter and be a little more picky in the locations. But we ended up with 7 birds for the day. So all-in-all it was a pretty good hunt and a great time with good dogs and great friends.