I don't mean this to sound trite, but I think late season birds are literally "where you find them"! I know a good percentage use the WPA areas even or especially late in the year, even though they get hammered. It's when they use them that matters, unless there is a major storm that forces them into extremely heavy cover, lots of birds roost on WPA's and public areas then leave at daybreak to sit in cut crop fields all day, practically in the open. It's nearly impossible to hunt those birds. It's more like stalking geese than traditional upland hunting. The birds return in the last hour of daylight to the heavy stuff. Some birds will opt to avoid pressure and use isolated cover that is so thin and meager you wouldn't believe it could hide a sparrow, avoiding hunter contact all together. I've shot a lot of birds from isolated pockets of cover no bigger than your living room. Use strategy to plot the cover before making a frontal assault. Be quiet, no dog hollering, whistle blowing, door slamming, action closing noises, birds will start leaving the far end of a section, as soon as they hear your approach, and you'll swear there aren't any. . In S.D. late, cattails are the hard cover of choice. This is rigorous hunting and takes a special kind of dog and determination to flounder through half frozen mud and water to flush birds, but they are in there, and not just the edge. Universal pheasant habitat is edge, anywhere two or more types of cover come together, tree lines, bordered by CRP on one side and crops on the other. Wetlands bordered by grass with fingers of filter strips running up into crop fields. Any cover with overhead, and thin enough to run through. The birds you find dug into heavy stuff, are birds you pushed into the holding cover, and planning on you walking by. In these areas everything is potential pheasant cover, hunt it all, thoroughly and slowly. Finally, I would say you need to learn a property, the first attempt to hunt a particular spot, will result in ideas to better hunt that property a second time, be it placement of blockers, direction of approach, etc. Once you see how the birds respond to hunters, your success on that parcel will increase. Good Luck.
