From 2000 to around 2012, the highlight of my year was the week I hunted in South Dakota. That was back during peak pheasant (see chart below), and it was to see a few hundred of those birds a day along with dozens of sharptails and huns.
Most years I went out for the season opener in October. One year I held off until November, once the crops were out of the fields all the hunters had gone home.
The day after I arrived, temperatures dropped from the 50s to the 20s and a blizzard rolled in and buried us. I spent the rest of the week hunting in conditions like you see in this video. I had a 12g Fox Sterlingworth and a chocolate Lab named Jack. For four days, we had thousands of acres of land, and thousands and thousands of pheasants, to ourselves.
