Let’s call this my end-of-year reflections on hunting preserves, based on personal experiences.
And let’s start with Ted Nugent, who shot pheasants on a preserve near Hot Springs in October of 2010. He also belched O-B-A-M-A several times, which some in his hunting party seemed to find delightful.
Nugent also offered kind of a running routine of political proclamations that were neither well informed nor particularly entertaining, to me at least.
I wasn’t hunting. I was reporting for the Rapid City Journal. So it was business, along with a little bit of pleasure.
I blanched a bit at the O-B-A-M-A belching and the political balderdash, but I was delighted to discuss rock music, including the genesis of Cat Scratch Fever, with Nugent. About that stuff, he is gifted and knowledgeable. And on that day, he was willing to share. So it was a high point of the assignment.
I was also generally impressed with his shotgunning. If my memory is good, he basically flew into Rapid City, was driven to the preserve, stepped out of an SUV and, a few minutes later, killed a rooster cleanly with his camouflaged Beretta semi-automatic 12 gauge. Over the next two hours, he would bag five more rooster pheasants, several gray partridge and a chukar partridge, rarely missing.
Now, they were pen-reared birds flushed in a group hunt and all within 20 yards when they rose. Still, that’s pretty good shooting.
And the hunt itself was respectable in the way it was operated, with good dogs — including Nugent’s black Labrador, Gonzo — and experienced walkers trudging through thick, well-tended habitat. It was more than just a shoot.
Hunting with Hugh and Mr. Jiggs
I had experienced an even better hunt on that same preserve two years earlier, when I tagged along with Hugh Welsh and his English setter Mr. Jiggs. There are a variety of customer packages at preserves, and Hugh had one that allowed him to pay for a set number of roosters and shoot them as he chose, on days of his preference.
And it was usually just him and Mr. Jiggs.
So we had a fine hunt, although again I was armed only with a pen and notebook and camera. Hugh emphasized dog work, which clearly delighted him, and an appreciation for the landscape and the setting — hunting pheasants with a Black Hills backdrop. He ended up getting good points from Mr. Jiggs and shooting four roosters, which the preserve operator with good cheer quickly cleaned and sealed in vacuum-wrapped plastic.
At Hugh’s urging, I took a couple of those birds home to eat, which might have been an ethical violation since I wrote a column about the hunt. But if it was an ethical violation, it was a fine-tasting one.
Years before that, when I was still working at the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, I covered a group hunt at an East River preserve that raised money for a worthy charity. The people were nice. The farm was great. The weather was near perfect. The hunt was awful. The pheasants were feeble, stupid, short-tailed poultry with hardly a hint of wildness.
Those birds were about as far removed from wild pheasants as Chinese pugs are from Yellowstone Basin wolves, and a lot less appealing. There was plenty of shooting but little hunting.
I focused in my story on the fundraising value of the gathering, not the hunting quality, a copout, perhaps.
Most preserves offer hunts well above pitiful
I have witnessed hunts at a number of other preserves. And most were of much-higher quality than that pitiful fundraiser. I have also hunted as a paying customer at three preserves myself — one near Clear Lake, another near Miller and a third near Philip.
And I had excellent hunts at all three. Most preserves offer expensive packages that include lodging and meals and guide service. And customers are generally hunting in a group. But some preserves offer specials, too, for individual hunters or small groups.
And the best deals tend, or at least tended, to be late in the elongated preserve season, which stretches from Sept. 1 through March 31, roughly twice as long as the regular pheasant season. You get into January and February and a lot of preserve customers lose their zeal for chasing ringnecks, even including the pen-reared birds that are much easier to flush and shoot.
That January through March period is when I did all of my preserve hunting, with a per-bird price tag and me deciding how many to shoot and how. Actually, at Clear Lake it was Keith and me, as my then-father-in-law Keith Keltgen and his black Lab joined me and my springer spaniel Pogo.
We had a great hunt. Covered a lot of good habitat. And shot, I remember for sure, five or six roosters. I don’t recall the per-bird cost there and then, but I think it was $25. That was 1989.
A couple of years before that, I hunted a preserve near Miller two or three times with Pogo, and shot two or three roosters each time, for $20 each.
Finding the fetching in a self-guided preserve hunt
But in the last ten years, I hunted on a preserve near Philip several times, starting first at $30 a bird, then going to $40 a bird. I think they were at $50 when the preserve operator stopped offering the special.
I had great hunts there, just me and my springer Rosie, taking our time over several hours, getting to know the fetching landscape and shooting three or four roosters.
You can’t categorize preserve hunts or preserve hunters as one thing alone, as one of my Twitter followers did in a recent discussion when he wrote: “Just slob hunters with big wallets.”
Yeah, sure, some are probably that. But I’d say they are the minority of preserve hunters, most of whom are just people with enough financial means — or way more than enough — to pay a substantial rate to essentially be guaranteed plenty of shots. That usually means shooting pen-reared birds but also includes some wild birds, especially when preserves are located in solid pheasant country.
The wild birds can be their own issue, since they are sometimes shot on preserves outside the regular pheasant season. That’s another discussion, however, for another time.
My reflections here are on my experiences on preserves, as a hunter and not, and what I saw there. Preserves are a reality that won’t go away, just as commercial hunting on private land not licensed as a preserve won’t go away.
The good ol’ days some of us remember are gone for good
Those halcyon days of driving into a farmyard in top pheasant country a week or two before the season and getting permission to hunt without a fee are pretty much history. And getting to be long-ago history.
You can still occasionally get private-land permission in some places, especially if you have a personal connection. And even in great pheasant country, commercial operators will sometimes invite friends and relatives in for a hunt. Many offer hunts to youth groups or veterans’ groups or church groups, free or at reduced rates.
And well-run preserves not only offer a reasonable facsimile of a traditional South Dakota pheasant hunt, they do great work in habitat development that can benefit wildlife, including pheasants, in their area.
So, to label them all as evil or harmful or destructive to hunting and the outdoors is wrongheaded. And to call anyone who hunts at preserves big-money slobs is just simply wrong.
Preserves can be good for the local economy and good for the wild-pheasant population on and surrounding them. But they are driven by economics. And sometimes they are driven too far. The latest and, to me, one of the most worrisome examples of that was the decision earlier this year by the state Game, Fish & Parks Commission to remove any bag limits at preserves.
So if hunters are willing to pay, they can shoot all the birds they feel like, for most the the preserve season.
Even previously generous limits at preserves placed some value on individual pheasants. No limit implies no such value. So living birds are diminished into targets only. They become fodder for body counts that feed egos, encourage juvenile kill competitions (it’s not a free-throw contest) and turn hunts into shoots.
And apparently, from pretty good source reports I get, some preserve customers don’t even want to eat the birds they shoot. So they don’t bother to take them home.
In the process of all that, honored traditions are lost. Ethics are bruised. And the image of hunting and hunters is tarnished.
As I write this end-of-year reflection, I hope the GF&P commissioners and the wildlife professionals who advise them will in 2021 reconsider their no-limit decision and, by re-imposing some bag restrictions, encourage preserves to aim less for extravagant shooting and more for actual hunting.
South Dakota will be better off if they do.
