By Mike Schoby
I first hunted pheasants in South Dakota 35 years ago. I was a teenage kid on my first, and only, out of state hunt with my father. He was a passionate outdoorsman, just not much of a traveler if it involved planes. Ironically, he was an engineer for Boeing, which seemed strange to me at the time, but considering recent events maybe not so.
Luckily one of his Seattle coworkers/hunting buddies was a South Dakota native and convinced him to fly out with me to show us what “real” pheasant hunting looked like.
We stayed with his parents in Gregory. Breakfast and dinners were a blend of his mother, Zelpha’s, native South Dakotan-cum-Czech fare. Pickled fish, ethernitze, and tiger meat still hold a fond spot in my heart. Lunches were sack lunches—pickle and peanut butter sandwiches she made up the night before—homemade bread, cut crosswise, and wrapped in waxed paper of course.
We hunted out of panel vans that were well past retirement age and were probably bought at auction from the local utility company and only used in hunting season. Wooden benches and plywood dog crates had been built into the back. Empty hulls and feathers from hunts long gone drifted through the air and rolled on the floor like forgotten dreams.
This wasn’t a pay hunt, but I had never hunted in such large groups. It was just family and friends, but there were enough of us to fill several vans with a mix of labs—that just wanted to swim and knew nothing of pheasants—and some sorry-ass pointers that may have been of good lineage, but were so poorly trained one owner fashioned a drag out of railroad tie plates to slow him down. There were also a mix of house dogs thrown in ‘cause the missus wanted them out of the house, and besides, they needed the exercise.
There were no food plots, or guides or manicured fields or pen-raised birds. We hunted our family and friend’s ground—lots of huge cut corn fields. Millet, sorghum, and milo were left in the corners or blown down and missed by the combines. Old, abandoned farmsteads with dying shelter belts, strewn equipment, wrecked cars, and overgrown weeds provided birds and rabbits aplenty. The tall weeds around dugouts and the long CRP grass draws made up the rest of the habitat.
And we shot pheasants. Hundreds of pheasants. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. My memories come like Polaroids in a scrapbook. Fields flushing with dozens of roosters when a van door was errantly slammed. Standing helplessly watching birds flush and sail away with a broken-open single-shot 20 gauge in one hand as I fumbled for more shells with the other. A lone cock erupted from under my feet as Dad and I walked back from a push together—I was too startled to shoot, luckily, Dad was not.
I think I pulled and brought home every gloriously long, magically banded tail feather from every bird killed that week. For years, a wastebasket the diameter of a basketball adorned my room bristling with ringneck tails. I didn’t tell my friends I shot them all myself, but I didn’t tell them I didn’t either.
That was 35 years ago. Much of that is gone today. Oh, the family hunting tradition still exists but many farms have become corporate affairs. Dozens more farms have leased their ground to private hunting operations, many who didn’t do either are just too shit scared of being sued to let someone walk on and hunt. But it is not all gone. South Dakota has done a better job than most of managing both pay-to-play and good old fashioned hunting.
I have gone back many times since. I have always tried to recreate that first time, alas to no avail. That said, here is the closest I have come to recreating like the old days:
Walk-In Access/Public Lands
Even though South Dakota is nearly 80% private land, the state offers phenomenal public land hunting opportunities to the tune of over 5 million acres via Walk-In Access, Game Production Areas, BLM/Forest Service, and Waterfowl Production Areas.
Good Old Fashioned Being Neighborly
While knocking on doors and asking permission to hunt private land is not as common as it once was, it still exists, but just don’t plan a trip around it. Anymore, getting access to private land is more about building long-term relationships with landowners, which is a hell of a good thing and something all hunters should strive for. It means spending some time in South Dakota in the summer, offering and actually helping around a farm. Attending local rodeos and fairs. Maybe buying a wagyu-beef-priced FFA animal at a local fundraising auction. It means eating dinners in small town diners, and grabbing coffee and breakfast at the local gas station at 5 a.m. It’s about getting to know the locals, and often buying a round at the town watering hole on a Friday night.
Trespass Fees
This is a good opportunity for hunters who can’t spare the time to actually form friendships and trade work for access, but neither can they spare the funds to book a fully guided lodge hunt. Many landowners will let you hunt their land for a reasonable daily “trespass” fee. Other options are South Dakota Wild and LandTrust. Think of these as a VRBO for hunters. They have found the farms that have quality habitat and wild birds and short-term lease (by the day or weekend in many cases) to hunters. Sometimes lodging is included, but generally it is a farm you have to yourself for a set amount of time. Guiding, dogs, and meals are up to you.
Ditch Hunting
Of all of the states I’ve hunted, South Dakota is the only one I know of where you can legally hunt the side ditches of public roads. It is a cultural phenomenon held over from a previous era where the state was less inhabited, pay hunting wasn’t as common and hunters were generally locals who knew each other. It’s still legal and sometimes done, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a common method or plan a trip around it. It is dangerous for hunters as well as dogs to start, and it makes for bad neighbor relations second. In limited cases, where it is the middle of nowhere, no traffic or occupied farms and a pheasant runs into a ditch, I’m not above getting out, leaving the dogs crated and flushing him, but I don’t make a practice of it.
Pros: Access, habitat, and birds aplenty
Con: Just like everything else, it’s not like the Good Ol’ Days
