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Not quite perfect, but still a good pheasant opener
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Recent rains meant lots of corn still stood in South Dakota last weekend for the pheasant opener. That likely hampered success in some areas. But obviously not everywhere.
"Overall, it was a good opener," said Tom Kirschenmann, senior wildlife biologist with the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department.
Hunters near Huron did very well, he said. "Many of those folks were getting their limits," he said. And, he added, "There were lots of hunters."
Those in the southeast and north averaged two birds apiece.
Kirschenmann said hunters generally shoot about 300,000 roosters the first three days of the season.
The question is whether they will ever again shoot 1.8 million birds, as they did last year. The state lost 300,000 acres of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) lands this fall when landowners elected to get out of the federal program that pays them to idle marginal farmland. Nearly another 300,000 are expected to come out of the program next year.
"No question it will have an impact on the pheasant population," Kirschenmann said.
But it also will affect hunter access to hunting land. Lots of those CRP lands also have been enrolled in the state's walk-in hunting program, which allows public hunting.
The result: fewer public hunting areas.
DOUG SMITH
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