Question for the South Dakota crowd??

ckirsch said:
After our January blizzard, I hiked back into a quarter of ours and found three dead roosters lying within ten feet of a mature shelterbelt.
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Is this quarter near a game farm? I asked a buddy from Leola how the pheasants there are doing this winter. His reply was that the wild birds have come through great, but it's been tough on the game farms. The birds there are dumber and often there's not very thick habitat nearby.

I've heard with ruffled grouse lots of snow is actually a bonus for them in cold winters because they can "snow roost" and burrow under light powdery snow to stay nice and warm. I always assumed prairie grouse could do it to.
 
Three roosters. Dead after a severe three-day blizzard that shut down the state. Within yards of a belt of 20-ft tall cedars. We've owned that ground for ten years or so and have never released a bird. We had good numbers of birds prior to the blizzard with around sixty percent hens. I'm guessing if I'd been able to go further I'd have come across some dead hens. We have a cattail-choked creek in that quarter, the bed of which sits ten or more feet below the surrounding fields. It was completely filled with snow, so the cattails that normally provide refuge for our birds were taken out of the equation. Most of it remains buried almost three months later. Shelterbelts were snowed in eight to ten feet deep. There just wasn't anywhere for those birds to go to get out of the weather. South central part of the state.

I see noticeable swings in sharptail numbers. Was told once it was a seven-year cycle but have no idea if that's true. It does seem that numbers are good for a few years and then off for a few years, rather than up and down for a year at a time.
 
Bob Peters said:
Is this quarter near a game farm? I asked a buddy from Leola how the pheasants there are doing this winter. His reply was that the wild birds have come through great, but it's been tough on the game farms. The birds there are dumber and often there's not very thick habitat nearby.

I've heard with ruffled grouse lots of snow is actually a bonus for them in cold winters because they can "snow roost" and burrow under light powdery snow to stay nice and warm. I always assumed prairie grouse could do it to.
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Sharptails go to areas with sage brush,and burrow in under the snow.
 
ckirsch said:
Three roosters. Dead after a severe three-day blizzard that shut down the state. Within yards of a belt of 20-ft tall cedars. We've owned that ground for ten years or so and have never released a bird. We had good numbers of birds prior to the blizzard with around sixty percent hens. I'm guessing if I'd been able to go further I'd have come across some dead hens. We have a cattail-choked creek in that quarter, the bed of which sits ten or more feet below the surrounding fields. It was completely filled with snow, so the cattails that normally provide refuge for our birds were taken out of the equation. Most of it remains buried almost three months later. Shelterbelts were snowed in eight to ten feet deep. There just wasn't anywhere for those birds to go to get out of the weather. South central part of the state.

I see noticeable swings in sharptail numbers. Was told once it was a seven-year cycle but have no idea if that's true. It does seem that numbers are good for a few years and then off for a few years, rather than up and down for a year at a time.
Click to expand...
I found several dead roosters in January, in a cattail patch.I think owls got them.
 
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