Banner Season

dukxdog said:
Wow, just can't be any happier about this 2020 pheasant season in SD. Lots of birds just as I expected. Crops are harvested at a high percentage. Seeing lots of sharptails as a bonus. Really having fun!
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Awesome pictures! Thanks for sharing! Glad to hear you're having a good season. (And wow, that's a pretty gun! What is it?) I've been hunting these things my whole life, & so far this is the best 1st month I've ever had. And I've had some awful good ones.
 
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My party of 8 hunted the Mitchel area last week. A combination of private and public. We harvested 65 birds behind three labs. I would have to say bird numbers were about the same as last three years. Although, they were not bunched up like last year. Just about every piece we worked had at least one rooster, no matter how large or small. If we stopped on it, it had the right stuff and even if it was only 50 yards by 20 yards, we found a rooster. I can't remember a single stop without at least one. Last year 4 of us harvested 58 birds on the same grounds. Last year most of our birds were killed road hunting, whereas this year, less than a half dozen were killed road hunting. Mostly because last year the blizzard after Thanksgiving blew in most of the habitat and it was impossible to walk most of it. Road hunting was a necessity last year. This year road hunting was incidental.

I also walked some CREP land that had birds on it in the past but it also had food plots on it back then. This year, no food plots and only 4 hens off of 2 quarter sections. My friends started calling CREP land CRAP land. I always have done fairly well on CREP lands but not this year. We did find decent numbers of birds on a WIA within the same area. The WIA had a good shelter belt, cattail slew down the middle and a nice grass patch. I tried to take a shortcut through the cattail slew and didn't know if I was going to ever come out the other side. And a that point, I was way to far in to turn around. It paid off with one rooster holding tight in the last 5 yards of habitat.

Already looking forward to next year. But for the rest of the year, me and my lab will be chasing timber doodles in the flood plains and pine plantation thickets of upstate South Carolina. Have a great year fellow hunters. john
 
Last year we had two of the same dogs as this year.

The rest of the story is my trick back went out on me Monday morning before the hunt and I was unable to hunt the first three days. So we had the most experienced dog and gun only hunt two days this year.
 
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