My family has always been interested in Hunting. When I was small, my dad would always have a rifle in the hunting rack by the back window in the pickup. He would shoot a lot of coyotes out window of the pickup. He would also shoot out the kitchen windows in the house. I have done this too. But you have to make sure you get your gun barrel out past the window far enough or it will get really loud.
My dad’s younger brother was stationed in Alaska in the army. My grandfather read an article on a hunting guide up there. This meeting led to very long friendship of trading hunts. My sisters and my dad went up to brooks range and shot dall sheep. I have been to Alaska twice and shot moose. My grandfather went up on the ice north of point barrow and shot a polar bear. That is something you can’t do anymore.
My dad and I started a pheasant hunting business to help supplement income in addition to our farming and ranching operations. We started small by posting advertisements in hunting magazines. A long time hunter from Indiana looked us up in wing and shot. One year he came to pheasant and deer hunt both. He enjoyed getting a mule deer buck so much that he got a license for a white tail buck also. He and his brother also poured a new concrete step for my parents.
in 2002 we made the decision to form Pheasant Creek Hunting Incorporated and set up a website. We got a lot hits that way. We had some hunters who worked for the Pabst Brewing Company in Iowa. At the same time, we decided to lodge the hunters in my dad’s house and feed them meals. This is a big industry in South Dakota. We are known for our state bird the Chinese Ring Necked Pheasant.
We had a group from Utah who stayed in campers out at our place. One year we got a lot of snow they built a fire at their campsite. Some of them worked for a welding company and they made a very nice sign that we put at the end of our driveway.
We got an article published in Gun Dog Magazine on our hunting operation. That was really cool. There was a guy from Texas with that group who brought 11 dogs. We got a lot of great pictures from the writer. They also managed to get a grand slam one day. That is a pheasant, a sharp tail grouse or prairie chicken, a fish, and a duck. That article was really good and drew some publicity for us.
My dad would go out on the front step of his house and could tell the hunters where to go. We have a nice creek flowing south of the house that always had birds.
When we had more Conservation Reserve Program land we had way more pheasants than we do now. Now there is more farmland. We were hunting down at my uncle’s land between Vivian and Presho one year. We were hunting some conservation reserve program (CRP) land that had a lot of kocia in it. There were so many birds flying up it was hard to aim at one to shoot it.
When my family and I moved out to the house I grew up in, that was the end of lodging pheasant hunters and our business slowed down. Mainly because there so many people around this area in central South Dakota who take out pheasant hunters and it was hard to get hunters. In fact, there is a family who have been in the business a long time who live about 4 miles east of my place.
So now, my wife, my youngest daughter and I do some deer hunting and some occasional pheasant hunting. My daughter got her first pheasant this year. A few years ago, we didn’t have hardly any pheasants on the place. My daughter was just learning how to hunt. We had to hunt Prairie Chicken since there weren’t hardly any pheasants. think it may have been the weather and the lack of crp cover. You see pheasants love to nest in alfalfa and intermediate grass. We did get a few more pheasants come back this year. But nothing like what it was in the 1990s.
Well hopefully I didn’t bore you with this subject. This is only the second page I published. I will try to add some pictures now. It was really hard to come up with a title. Some of you have a cool names on your sites. This South Dakota Ranchers Perspective I think will work for mine. Because that is what I do. This site is an another source of income for this rancher who live in gods country in the middle of South Dakota where the spaces are wide open.
