It is just after noon following an exhilarating morning in pursuit of long tail roosters in the golden glow of a South Dakota fall. We have taken a break for lunch in an old barn and now our party of six hunters and two guides is ready to walk another strip of grain field. We know it s loaded with pheasants and we only need five more to make the day s limit of 30 birds.
Milling anxiously around our feet are six well seasoned bird dogs -- a black Lab, two yellow, a chocolate and a pair of golden retrievers. We are waiting for the blockers to make their way in the vans to the far end of a half-mile long strip of knocked-down milo.
When our field guide, Todd Engel, shouts hunt em up! the dogs go to work and we march forward through grain stalks and knee-high grass.
We hardly take three steps before we hear the clattering wingbeat and indignant cackle of a pheasant rising into the wind.
Roosterrrr! Roosterrrr!
The guides shout, and Garry Stephens, a South Texas rancher and ag agent guarding the right wing, shoulders his favorite dove gun, a 12-gauge pump, and makes a quick, clean kill on a resplendent South Dakota cock pheasant.
Shooters, handlers and gunners come to a halt. Whistles are blown, commands are given and one of the Labs brings the bird to hand.
As we push ahead, the dogs zig-zagging in front of us are led by Bronc, a husky, hard-working yellow Lab, whose field skills, in addition to flushing and retrieving, include pointing birds on wet or snowy ground.
For the upland gamebird hunter, this is poetry on the plains and, for three days, we have been enjoying the exercise with the same amazing results on strip after strip.
As I tromp ahead, barrel high and thumb poised to flick the safety, I listen to the crisp flow of communication between guides and hunters, handlers and dogs. It is a symphony concert and I don t want to miss a note. At the sound of a wingbeat, I flinch but it is only our guide stuffing a bird into a game bag.
For today s hunt, I have traded my 12-gauge over-and-under for a lighter, short barrel 20-gauge Coach double gun. Garrett Bordson, our other guide, has loaned it to me. Soon, I am swinging the 20-inch barrel a little faster and smoother, with encouraging results.
This will be our last hunt of the trip but the dogs are showing the exuberance of opening day. The tails of the golden retrievers swish just above the grass and occasionally the face of a black lab pops up, head and nose held high in the wind to look around and perhaps get a whiff of scent.
As we continue walking up the hilly strip, the dogs are bunched up and birdy. We are pushing lots of pheasants ahead of us. Todd and Garrett call a pair of hens here, a pair of roosters there. The smaller Hungarian partridges, huns, buzz up fast, quickly banking behind us, making for difficult targets in the stiff breeze.
Three quarters of the way to the blockers, we have our limit of ringnecks. The dogs are pulled and we move out of the grain strip to leave the remaining birds undisturbed.
Back at the vans the roosters are counted and tagged, the hunt is replayed, a few old stories are told, and the dogs lap up water from plastic bottles.
It is opening weekend of the South Dakota pheasant season. We are hunting near the Missouri River town of Chamberlain, the same rolling hills and river valleys where the Lakota Sioux met and traded with the Meriwether Lewis and William Clark Expedition in 1804. Lewis and Clark, dispatched by President Thomas Jefferson to find a water route to the Pacific and initiate trade, stopped here twice on their historic 8,000 mile journey.
They, like so many visitors to this great land, marveled at the abundance of fruit along the river. The logs kept by Lewis and Clark indicate the Discovery crew hunted antelope here, and noted thousands of buffalo dotting the river bluffs and ravines. The two commanders reportedly preferred buffalo meat to the stewed dog served them from kettles with horned spoons as honored guests of the Sioux at riverside councils.
The hunting tradition and spirit of adventure endures on these rolling grasslands and grain fields. Each year beginning in mid-October, the Coyote State hosts a homecoming for the ringneck pheasant hunter. Hunters from Texas, Florida, South Carolina and Alabama boarded our commuter flight from Minneapolis to Sioux Falls. Flight attendants joked about handing out blaze orange hats instead of flower leis.
We arrive at the Sioux Falls airport to a festival atmosphere. Local merchants man booths, hawking everything from shooting vests and cigars to gunsmith and taxidermy services. Baggage carousels are choked with gun cases and caravans of SUVs wait outside to take hunters to lodges across the state. The drawing power of pheasant hunting is reflected in the state s license sales. In 2002, almost 75,000 non-resident hunting licenses were sold in South Dakota compared with 70,800 licenses sold to residents.
Our base camp is Thunderstik Lodge, a world-class facility that sits on rolling bluffs overlooking the Missouri. Here guests may use the lodge s spotting scope to see mule deer and watch Canada geese landing in the meadows along the shores of the river in the early morning light. A small herd of buffalo grazes lazily near the lodge. You become immersed in hunting history.
Following a morning in the field, guests return to the lodge where one may sharpen his or her shooting skills on the scenic sporting clays course or cast for smallmouth and walleyes on Lake Francis Case, a public reservoir.
At night, following entrees that include fresh walleye, pheasant Alfredo and grilled steaks, guests can relive the day s events in a comfortable lodge setting, complete with a well-tended bar, outdoor hot tub and a campfire under the stars. In addition to non-indigenous blue marlin, moose and grand slam of sheep mounted on the walls, the lodge displays a splendid collection of pheasants in fighting, nesting and flying poses. There are even dead pheasants stuffed to look like dead pheasants.
Over the years, guests at the Stik have included upland game hunters from all over the world, including major league baseball players, South Dakota governors and a Fortune 500 list of CEOs. The shotgun given to former president George H. W. Bush during his 1999 visit is proudly displayed on a wall.
Each morning, guests at Thunderstik load up in the lodge s snappy fleet of camoed vans with trailered kennels for the short trip to surrounding fields. Thunderstik hunters have access to 7,000 acres of shelterbelts, native prairie grasslands and crop rows, maintained and cultivated year-round as prime pheasant habitat.
Professionals from Oakridge Kennels in Northfield, Minnesota train Thunderstick s resident contingent of top performing bird dogs. Guests also are welcome to bring their own dogs.
At Thunderstik, the dedication of the dogs in the field is matched by the respect shown them by their owners and handlers. Prized labs and golden retrievers share quarters with visiting hunters. Each morning Guy LaBarre, a repeat visitor from Minneapolis, can be seen exercising his retrievers, Zoe and Zapper, in the pink orange glow of the South Dakota sunrise.
The lands that Thunderstik owns and leases for bird hunting are designated as hunting preserves. This allows an extended hunting season and a five-bird daily bag limit compared with a three-bird limit during the regular season on public lands. In return, the operation is required to supplement the harvest of its wild birds with ongoing releases of pen-raised roosters.
The release of pen raised birds helps to overcome boom and bust periods drought years and exceptionally hard winters. The operation released close to 10,000 birds on its properties last year, said Carey Storey, Thunderstik s lodge manager. In the field, it s not easy to tell wild birds from pen-raised.
I have hunted them all my life and when a bird gets off the ground, I can t tell the difference until the dog brings him back, Storey said.
He points out that after two weeks in the wild, a pen-raised rooster has had run-ins with coyotes, foxes and eagles. If you shoot at him once and he gets away, do you think he won t remember the association between dogs and people, Storey said.
On our visit last fall, the birds thundered from cover and flew strongly. The ratio of wild to pen-raised birds was as high as 65 percent on some of our hunts. (Pen raised pheasants can be identified by indentations in their beaks, the result of a protective cover used to prevent injuries from fighting while in captivity.)
For the wild bird purist, Thunderstick offers sections reserved for wild ringnecks. These fields usually are rested until the start of the public season in October.
Wild or pen-raised, I did not find South Dakota roosters particularly easy to hit. Shooting eye and reflexes are constantly tested in a variety of scenarios from birds rattling up directly in front of the gunner, long, downwind passing shots, to jump shots among the trees in wooded areas, to straight-on Kamikaze flyers in blocking situations.
A rookie among a group of seasoned pheasant hunters on the trip, I started a bit shaky, drawing blanks on the first few flushes. I learned quickly to station myself on the inside of the march, rather than on a wing. On the inside, at least, the birds rattle up a little closer and one has the benefit of other hunters collaborating on the shot. My confidence was restored on the second day on a march through a heavily wooded area when a big rooster thundered up in the trees and I knocked it down before I had time to think of all the ways to miss it.
Bob Gossett Jr. my hunting companion, a San Antonio native who splits his time between a Manhattan real estate business and his South Texas ranch, very nearly stepped on a rooster that somehow concealed itself from six dogs, four hunters and two guides.
After a day afield, it is easy to be impressed with these Asian imports, introduced in the state in 1909, not only for their dazzling plumage and Houdini-like powers of escape but also for their toughness in a hostile environment.
Pheasants grow up fast in the wild, maturing in 16 weeks. In South Dakota, it s grow rapidly, or die. Droughts and brutally harsh winters take their toll on the population here, but the gamebird has proven remarkably resilient. An old pheasant is one that has made it through the last winter, say South Dakota game biologists. Progressive land management programs including the federal government s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) have helped the population rebound quickly after down years.
In 2002, hunters harvested 1.3 million pheasants in South Dakota out of a population of 5.5 million. By comparison, Texas offers hunters viable pheasant hunting on CRP tracts in 37 counties in the Texas Panhandle during a 16-day season in December and each year Texas hunters take some 55,000 birds.
On our trip to South Dakota, all of us left the field each day with a collection of indelible images. Mine came from one morning hunt.
Spanky, a 5-year-old German shorthair was working a grassy strip of ideal pheasant terrain. It was not long before she was locked up on point. When the bird moved, Spanky made a nifty little skip forward while still maintaining her point. Fresher than the other dogs after being held out of earlier hunts, she capped her performance by beating Bronc and Rambo, the workhorse labs, to the retrieve. Classic dogwork.
On another occasion, we stood spellbound, watching a ringneck that had been winged run full bore up the side of a bare hill. Thirty yards behind but in hot pursuit was Dolly, a 4-year-old Minnesota-bred black lab who quickly closed the gap. When the dog caught up with the big rooster, the bird made one desperate effort at escape, hopping straight up in the air. When it hit the ground Dolly was waiting and the game was over.
Did you see that! shouted Todd. Awesome.
Awesome indeed. What better way to describe the pheasant hunting experience on South Dakota s Lewis and Clark Trail.
Phil H. Shook, a native Texan, is a New York-based freelance writer who has gun, will travel.
Ringnecks On The Lewis & Clark Trail
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