Home Forums Birds & Dogs Upland Game South Dakota winter????

How has the winter been treating the Pheasants? From here it looks like better than good.....

It's been an easy winter on the birds. A recent bout of below zero for a week but overall good conditions.

Hard to imagine an easier winter. The worst day hunting weather wise was the second weekend of the season back in October. Since then we had a cold snap but plenty of feed and cover.

I have been feeding pheasants on my small patch of ground each year. This last year I planted milo sorghum for feed. The pheasants did quite well this year.

Its been a difficult spring in some ways but I think ok so far. We are going to need some rain here and some warmer weather. Hard to string together two nice days in a row since this post.

Locally, and traditionally, we’ve always seen the greatest chick mortality with wet and or freezing weather — sleet, flooding etc — throughout June, from hens on eggs in early June to the chicks later on, so June is a crucial month for the little ones.

But it’s long been known that the ultimate pheasant-limiting factor is cover and in NW Iowa, we’ve lost most of that, and that’s mostly why our good neighbors in SD have lots of birds (and other game) — lots of cover, both natural grasses and weedy planted crops.