July 4th weekend- Eastern SD
Well just returned from the house in SD. Managed to get out in evenings after working on the house to look for birds. We ended up covering a 50-60 mile range and the birds were well dispersed over the whole area.
We viewed multiple hens with 8-12 chicks of various sizes. We also noticed a good volume of paired birds(Hen/Rooster), they seem to still be breeding so there will be some immature birds early in the season.
I was also amazed at the volume of roosters running around. The carry over numbers look to be up from past years. Overall the number of birds we seen was well up from the previous 2 years for sure. It will be interesting to see what the GFP forecast is in Sept. I plan on making one more trip out over Labor day and will report again on bird numbers at that time.
Finally the habitat(cover) this year looks exceptional, the roosters will have lots of area to hide. If things hold out it could be a great year in SD!