Just got back from a 5 day hunt

T

TerryB

New member
Well boys I'm going to tell a slightly different story from my trip. We hunted East Central SD. We hunted South of Watertown, we hunted Watertown as well as Clark and just west of there. I'm not a bean counter but I think we saw more birds this year than last year. We hunted all public property that was well scouted in advance of my arrival. Two days we hunted 5 people, 1 day we hunted 3 and 2 days we only hunted two of us. We had 3 dogs and hit only the sloughs with standing or JUST cut corn. Our evenings we hunted tall grass surrounded by standing corn. We didn't limit every day but we also didn't hunt from 9-6:30......mornings were 9 till 1 and the afternoons were 4:30 till end of shoot time. Birds were NOT holding at all. My GSP had a total of 15 points in 5 days. The labs did a good amount of flushing but we saw WAY TOO MANY birds flushing out ahead of us. You can see in my previous posts that I was not expecting much in the way of birds due to all the gloom and doom I was reading. It was a much better trip than I anticipated. I believe that the hunters going later will benefit from some snow cover that will hold birds tighter but all in all I wasd VERY happy this year. I gained 4 pounds, I lost my fair share of brain cells and I brought home a cooler of birds. Thanks again SD for a great hunt.
 
TerryB said:
Well boys I'm going to tell a slightly different story from my trip. We hunted East Central SD. We hunted South of Watertown, we hunted Watertown as well as Clark and just west of there. I'm not a bean counter but I think we saw more birds this year than last year. We hunted all public property that was well scouted in advance of my arrival. Two days we hunted 5 people, 1 day we hunted 3 and 2 days we only hunted two of us. We had 3 dogs and hit only the sloughs with standing or JUST cut corn. Our evenings we hunted tall grass surrounded by standing corn. We didn't limit every day but we also didn't hunt from 9-6:30......mornings were 9 till 1 and the afternoons were 4:30 till end of shoot time. Birds were NOT holding at all. My GSP had a total of 15 points in 5 days. The labs did a good amount of flushing but we saw WAY TOO MANY birds flushing out ahead of us. You can see in my previous posts that I was not expecting much in the way of birds due to all the gloom and doom I was reading. It was a much better trip than I anticipated. I believe that the hunters going later will benefit from some snow cover that will hold birds tighter but all in all I wasd VERY happy this year. I gained 4 pounds, I lost my fair share of brain cells and I brought home a cooler of birds. Thanks again SD for a great hunt.
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Congrats on the good hunt and I'm glad there is someone finding birds in the Watertown area. Maybe there is hope for me after all. If you would care to share the areas you hunted you can PM me.

By the way, hope you didn't start hunting at 9:00 AM as you stated. The starting time in SD is 10:00 AM. :eek:
 
Glad to hear you had some success. I'll be there in 2 weeks and was begining to get discouraged from the reports I had been hearing.
 
Harvest is ahead of average and way ahead of the past couple years. Could account for some of the birds seen.

Snow (a few inches) can help.
 
SD report

Thanks for the report. I'm heading out Monday night and I was worried when I heard some of the early reports.

I hope you didn't drink all the vodka in SD. :cheers:
 
Thanks for the report. We leave in the morning. Hope I get some sleep to night. We're excited and ready to go !!!!!!
 
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