Scouting day - Friday

It's late, we're tired, and I promise to try to provide more regular updates moving forward. The logistics of the day just didn't permit either of us to do anything before now. Overall, we drove 350-400 miles today. We left the house at 7 to head out & find some pheasant and duck spots. It gets light around 8 here, so we got to our first target spot a little after daybreak. We went West, and checked out several spots near the Fort Pierre National Grasslands (about 110 miles from our base in Plankinton). At one point, just about first thing in the morning, we watched 50-75 pheasants flush from one side of the road and fly in front of us to the other. What a welcome to South Dakota pheasants! We let the dogs out to run for about an hour early in the day. It wasn't a field we expected to see many pheasants, and we didn't... The dogs seemed to appreciate the opportunity to stretch their legs and run off a little energy, after 30+ hours in the truck yesterday.


As far as ducks go, there aren't many. It looks like the migration hasn't gotten going yet, so we may have to work hard & potentially drive north/east to find better duck numbers. That's on tomorrow's schedule - hunt a spot close to the house in the early am, then a quick lunch and venture east toward Mitchell and north of there to see if we can find any more sizeable waterfowl numbers. We'll return to a spot near Plankinton for pheasants tomorrow evening (more on that in a minute...). Also not helping the duck situation is that this area appears to be in a state of drought - with many spots that are shown on maps as water being totally dried-up.


At the end of the day today, we stopped at one last spot and decided to hunt it for pheasants for the last 35 minutes of the day. It looked like it should be productive. We hunted Winnie by herself to get her a little extra running and since it was a small area and we were short on time. Well, in that 35 min., we shot 3 roosters and saw a total of 40-50 pheasants. Many/most of these erupted on the report of our first shot, flushing well out of range. It was a neat sight. Imagine standing in the field, watching waves of 5-10 pheasants at a time take flight. It was more pheasants than I've ever seen while hunting. We killed the 3 birds with a total of 3 shells - both of us hitting rooster #1 at the same time, me catching rooster #2 with my bare hands because it was running and wouldn't fly (and Winnie, being a good pointing dog, doesn't trail fast enough to make it flush). She had found and pointed it before it hotfooted it out off there with her on its trail, but it was leaving her in the dust so we stepped-in to help her. Dan and I were both chasing it (we figure this had to be hilarious to watch) and me finally diving on it to catch it. Rocky may be able to catch chickens, but he's got nothing on me! I'll be honest, I was really wishing I had Mag or Jax with me while I was doing this. They would have loved it, and we wouldn't have been doing crazy things that should be reserved for 20-somethings. Bird #3, Dan shot with 1 shell off a great point by Winnie. This was finally a rooster that sat tight on the point and she held it beautifully. Additionally, Winnie did a fantastic job of finding and retrieving rooster #1 that we hadn't marked well (since those 40 birds were flushing immediately after we shot). We actually got birds #2 & #3 before returning to the approximate area where we thought the first bird had fallen. Dan gave Winnie the 'hunt dead' command and after about 5 minutes, she had the bird and we were all very happy hunters! We will returning to this spot tomorrow.
Below is a picture of a running pheasant early in the day and Dan and Winnie with our first SD roosters.