GREGORY, S.D. - Picking shotguns to take on a South Dakota pheasant hunt is like trying to fill a team roster from a list of all-star candidates.
Seriously, I stood in front of my gun safe for 20 minutes asking, "Which of you guys deserves to go?"
For an upland bird hunter, a pheasant hunt is a peerless thrill, and Gregory, S.D., is the ultimate place to experience it. In fact, Gregory proclaims itself America's pheasant hunting capital on a giant statue of a ringneck pheasant at the edge of town.
South Dakota's statewide pheasant season runs Oct. 20-Jan, 6, 2019, but the season for private shooting preserves runs Sept. 1-March 31, 2019.
Hunting pheasants on preserves is not like hunting on canned-hunt where bewildered birds are released the day of the hunt. South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks regulations require birds to be released between Aug. 1-March 31. On the first day of the season, roosters will have been living in the wild for at least 30 days, by which time they will be essentially wild and fully acclimated to their environment.
Wild Wings, an outfit owned by Jeff Johnson and his nephew George Johnson, hosted our latest adventure. The Johnsons are longtime friends of federal Judge Bill Wilson of Bigelow and Monty Davenport of Yellville. George, an attorney, was once a law clerk for Wilson, as is his nephew Gavin Pochop, who served as a guide on this hunt.
Wilson, Davenport and David Walker of Jonesboro were my traveling companions, but our group also consisted of David Knight of Little Rock, Jim Smith of Little Rock, Anthony Michaels of Little Rock, Skip Henry of Little Rock, Dr. Jim Henry of Little Rock, Darrow Jones of Little Rock, Dr. Jim Rice of Little Rock, David Burnett of Osceola, Gary Cooper of Osceola, Ed Harshman of Osceola, Greg Graham of Osceola, Joe Johnson of El Dorado, John Logan, James Riddle of Fayetteville, Joe Thomas of Osceola, and Kevin Williams of Osceola, and Coleson Bruce of Austin, Texas.
For Wilson, getting there is half the adventure. It's 14 hours from Little Rock to Gregory, but Wilson investigates historical markers, and his route includes stops at obscure places like a derelict U.S. Army Air Corps base in Nebraska where Col. Paul Tibbetts selected his crew to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. We also visited a Pony Express station in Gothenburg, Neb.
Wilson also insisted on visiting a western wear store in Valentine, Neb., where years ago a salesperson convinced him to buy a hat by saying he looked like country singer Don Williams. She still works there, and after a short visit, we were back on the road through Nebraska's magnificent Sandhills region.
We were pleased to be the first group to hunt out of Wild Wings' new lodge near Burke, S.D. It's more spacious, more modern and more comfortable than the old lodge where we headquartered in 2016. The rooms are large and clean, and each has a bathroom. The beds are very comfortable, and the food, as always, was world class.
The pheasant hunting was stellar. Birds were plentiful, and since it was early in the season, they were not as flighty as they will be later in the season. Roosters often held tight, and many hens flushed almost under our feet. Roosters don't live long enough to get educated, but hens figure the game out pretty fast.
"Later in the season, they'll flush at the slamming of a car door," George Johnson said.
A pheasant hunt is like a small military operation. A squad of walkers - usually the youngest and most physically fit in a group - form a line that walks the breadth of a field. The walkers shoot at birds that fly straight up or down a field. The line must be straight to minimize the risk of shooting at or over another hunter when a bird flies behind the line.
Two squads of flankers bracket the field edges. There are usually three flankers on each side about 30-40 yards apart, and they walk in front of and parallel to the walkers. They shoot at birds flying out the sides of the field.
At the end of the field is a squad of blockers. They shoot at birds that fly out the end of the field. A blocking station can be a prime position because all of the birds that have run ahead of the walkers have no choice but to fly when they encounter the blockers.
Pheasants generally fly only as a last resort to escape danger. They run from danger, and they are fast. They are also small enough to dart low through cover ahead of the dogs.
Surprisingly, the guides at Wild Wings mostly use Labrador retrievers for this work instead of traditional bird dogs like setters and pointers. The only pointer on the Wild Wings staff is an aging German shorthair named Helga that Wilson owns. She is on permanent loan, however, and is an excellent hunting dog.
On this trip, Wilson also provided an English cocker spaniel for permanent loan to be trained and finished by the Wild Wings staff.
The Labs course through fields of corn, milo and grass. They work close to the line and point pheasants that hold, but generally roosters flush ahead of the dogs. However, the dogs work close enough that the birds are almost always in range when they flush.
Walking through the cover is hard work for dogs and hunters alike, and it burns a lot of calories. Because the temperature was in the 90s, the dogs tired quickly, and the guides rotated fresh dogs into each new field. Though exhausted, dogs greatly resented being benched and barked vile insults at the fresh dogs.
The cardinal rule for pheasant hunting is to resist shooting at low birds. The Wild Wings staff is obsessed with safety, and since this group has hunted together for so long, its members are equally devout.
Despite the heat, and the dense, leg-catching, ankle-twisting cover, we put up a lot of roosters and witnessed superb wingshooting by every member of the party.
It's was a sterling way to ring in autumn.
Sports on 09/23/2018