South Dakota Pheasant News Roundup

The orange-coats are coming, the orange-coats are coming!

Conditions, $1 Mil Bird, Exotic Dancing, Trivia

Oddly, there haven’t been many reports about early-season hunting in the pheasant capital of the world, maybe because early conditions aren’t ideal. But Google and ye shall find.

Let’s start with the conditions, from The Daily Republic:

> Hunters seeking pheasants in South Dakota are dealing with conditions that are anything but ideal, but one state official says there is reason for hope.

> Crops are still in the field because of widespread flooding that hampered the fall harvest, providing plenty of hiding places for the birds during the residents-only season over the weekend. Some fields are wetter than normal as well.

> “It makes it tough to hunt when you have a lot of corn in the field,” [DNR] officer Jared Hill told KELO-TV. “It takes big groups of hunters and you’re walking through tall corn, which is hard to see and hard to get pheasants out of it. They’ll kind of run circles around the hunters.”

> Hill: “The pheasants are still out there, so the main thing would just be, it might be a little tough early on, but as the season goes on, it’s going to keep getting better and the pheasants are still going to be out there.”

Still, after getting hit a bit by the recession and poor weather last year, the state is expecting a rebound this year. And more of the corn is out, according to this article:

> As of Oct. 10 — the most recent South Dakota weekly crop report — the state’s grain harvest was well beyond last year’s progress. That means the birds have fewer places to hide. “With the weather and the harvest, you couldn’t ask for much better than what it has been,” said Ron Schauer, a regional wildlife manager [with the DNR].

> Last year, the weather and ground conditions kept farmers from getting into fields before and during the early parts of pheasant season, which gave a large disadvantage to hunters trying to track down the state bird. But this year’s crop harvest is going much smoother. At this same time last year, only 2 percent of the state’s corn was harvested. This year, 18 percent is out of the fields.

Million-Dollar Ditch Chicken

The Aberdeen Convention and Visitors Bureau is once again putting on a contest where if you shoot a banded bird, you get $100 cash and the chance to win $1 million. Yep, a 1 plus six zeroes. Pretty cool.

Aberdeen hopes to attract out-of-staters and in-staters to its area. According to this article published Oct. 19, “The contest last until January and there are still over 90 tagged birds in Brown County.”

Learn more at milliondollarbird.com.

Exotic Dancing Picking Up…

…seriously. From a Fargo, ND news website:

> Exotic dancers have long been a part of the South Dakota hunting experience.

> In Winner, at least two bars will offer topless dancers during the hunting season…. Exotic dancing clubs also have operated in many other places in South Dakota’s pheasant country through the years. Area casinos have gotten into the business, too, by hosting scantily clad female dance troupes.

> Both local residents and big-money visitors from outside the state come to Winner and other towns to hunt, drink and let loose. Dancing women are part of the package, some say.

You never know what will pop up on Google….

SD Factoids

From this article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

> About 170,000 hunters bag 1-2 million ringnecks each year, easily the most of any state. The forecast this year: 1.6 million birds, the same as in 2009. Holy cow!

> No state sends more ditch parrot hunters to South Dakota than Minnesota, about 24,500 in 2009, more than the next four states combined.

> Resident pheasant hunter numbers have been falling. Last year, just under 70,000 residents hunted, the lowest figure since 1943.

> Since 2002, nonresidents have exceeded resident pheasant hunters. In 2009, it was: 97,350 nonresidents, 69,949 residents.

More Trivia

Also from the Star Tribune:

> The first state to offer a pheasant season was…South Dakota? Wrong. It was Oregon, in 1892, following the shipment 11 years earlier of 30 ringnecks from China by Judge Owen Nickerson Denny, then the U.S. consul to China. Twenty-six birds survived the journey and were released near Denny’s home in Oregon’s Wilmette Valley.

Category: OR, Pheasants, SD