Crash course in SD hunting.

BrownDogsCan2

Well-known member
Hello , planning a trip to South Dakota. Looking for any advice you can share with a first timer.
How do the 5 day licenses work? Do you just block in the 5 days you plan on going and then the last 5 days of the season? If you decided to go consecutive do you have to set out a day?
Frozen water and cattails sloughs. What is the danger level? What do you look for in a good one?
Feed , mostly corn? Crp, clean? , dirty? shelter belts etc
Wpa, gma, walkin, what is your preference?
Ditch hunting, , access fees, obtaining permission.
This is all new to me and going to be a learning experience I'm sure but would appreciate any advice from you guys that have done it. Thanks Aaron
 
can do your 2-5 days consecutive. dont need to sit out a day. you can hunt the entire season as a NR just have to keep buying licenses. can change your dates very easily through the app as long as the start date hasn't occurred already.

frozen sloughs are a danger anytime of the season. especially if drifted in as that deep snow acts as an insulator and keeps the ice from freezing good and strong. case in point last year I had to go get my older lab out of a cattail slough. she didn't have the hind power to get up ontop of the ice and snow. so I broke ice and snow and waded through 3' of water to get her. needless to say that was her final trip to SD. she gets to stay at home and hunt on my brothers 160 acre crp where I know what the conditions are of the ice.

for feed depends where you are hunting and whats available to the birds. the best is to get out to an area and drive around early in the morning and watch what they are doing. i learn best by watching then doing and figuring out what areas you are seeing them during that time of day. the golden hour before sunset try and setup in crp next to a field that has standing crops. they will fly back into cover and then this is your chance to smack em.

each year is different for wpa's gma's wia and crep. as weather determines which of these will be better.

i don't ditch hunt so im useless on this.
 
If you're planning on doing your five days consecutive your posession limit can still only be 15. Which is 5 days limits. It really depends on what time of year you come on where and what type of cover you should be looking for. I stay off the sloughs when they ice up. I've iced fished on lakes and still been able to break through in the sloughs. When you look at a field you have picked to hunt try and picture the way most people would hunt it. Then do it completely different. Phessants get conditioned on where people park, walk in at, and they know the ways to get away. I've walked a half mile or more across empty fields just to come at a spot from a different angle or direction than most would. Silence is your friend. No slamming doors. Yelling at the dog. It all gets the birds on high alert.
 
Some of the best hunting is had in frozen cattail sloughs, but safety is certainly something to look out for. Often times the thinnest ice on the entire lake or basin is in those areas. Walk slow, take your time, make sure your footing and ice is good. I fall through several times a year while I try to be (somewhat) smart. Snow (insulation) can limit the ice, decaying cattails and organic matter below the ice will create some heat or energy that will limit the ice. Weather pending, you'll find plenty of safe walkable ice and plenty of unsafe ice. Just be smart, don't risk anything.

You can choose any 5 day period and as long as those dates haven't passed, then you can up them to the correct dates. I'd recommend choosing the last 5 days of the season then you have as much flexibility as possible to move those dates up to the correct ones when the time comes. I don't know if this has changed this year with the extended season, but if you bought your license after a certain date in mid-December you could use the 2nd dates for the following season.

In general, I look for (within a .5 mile or so) a food source (picked corn field that maybe has some stubble still?), winter cover (cattails), water, loafing cover (prairie), tree line (protection). Whether all of that is available on the same piece of public land, or the public land provides the hunting but the neighboring properties provide some of the other amenities that should make it an area with birds.

To me, public land is public land. WPA's may have a bit more water, GPA's may have a bit more prairie or trees. The only thing I have noticed is the school lands often times don't have much cover and can be completely crossed off on the map, but every now and then you'll come across one that holds a little pocket of cattails a quarter mile in that's a hidden gem.

Ditch hunting is overlooked in my opinion. Obviously be safe, be courteous of neighboring properties and landowners. I like to look for ditches with decent cover and a food source on both sides of the road so I can be efficient with my time and walk one side up and the other back. Then there's also road hunting, to each their own, I did it when I started out. Now I am all about watching a dog walk and would take 1 bird all day over a dog rather than 3 birds running across the road. But there's nothing wrong with it when done legally, or your tired, don't have a dog or it needs a rest, or just looking for that one last bird in the final minutes of shooting time.

Access fees.... if you are one guy and later in the season, you may be able to roll up to a house and get immediate permission for a spot here or there. IMO, there is enough public land in SD that you can get your birds on a full days of hard work that way. But it would be nice to have some private land and relationships you can build on over the years. I say this over and over on this site, 1-3 guys can reasonably expect to get a limit on SD public land every day with a bit of luck (weather, nobody else has hunted every single field you just happen to pull up to(which there's enough land that that shouldn't happen), etc.), good shooting, good dog work, etc. A group of 4+ may be disappointed on SD public land if limits are what you are after.

Read up the rule book before you go, and then read it again. Focus in on things like right of ways, how far from buildings, livestock, etc., type of shot (SD is steel on all public land).
 
Most important thing you can do is drive every day from 4:30-sunset on gravel roads. They will either be moving to roost or picking gravel. When you find birds, stay in that area and hunt them hard. You drive by 100 birds for every one you see doing this. It's a very rare day that birds don't come out even right at the last moments before dark so use this as your guide to whether you have picked a good area to hunt. Downtown pheasantville is corn/milo-sorghum/soybean fields. Cow pastures/hayfields are the sparsely populated pheasant rural places. If you are surrounded by mile after mile of hay or cows, get out as you can't shoot by the cows and pheasants don't live there much anyway.
 
Thanks for the help guys. I couldn't resist the pull to leave a half day earlier than planned and get in some fresh snow.
 

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