Headed to SD/ND along Missouri River on on Thursday for a mixed bag waterfowl/ pheasant / grouse trip.

Any advice for what kind of habitat to to try to walk up some prairie chickens? There are a lot of gullies / breaks along river and creek beds as well as a lot of agriculture fields. Do we need to find large expanses of uninterrupted grasslands or focus more on the treed areas in the draws?

OnlyForNow said:

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Are you going for public land?

My dad and I hunted SD (east of Pierre) last year on horse back, private property, and can say that we shot only prairie chickens, no sharpies, but did get a few pheasants as well.

There did not seem to be any rhyme or reason on the locations for the P.C. BUT typically they were on hillsides, or knolls, not in the bottom of swales, etc.

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I would call it semi public - we are hunting Standing Rock Indian reservation. We were there for turkey season so going back with a little knowledge of the lay of the land

BTW hunting from horseback sounds awesome - did you use the horses to cover land and then hunt by foot or actually do some shooting from the saddle?

I don't know exactly where that is, but I can say with fairly good confidence that without dogs and the horses we woulda walked 10+ miles a day to shoot 2 birds probably.

We saw LOTS but lots of what we saw were in HUGE wintering groups, few hundred birds. And once one gets up they almost all get up.

What time of year were you there? I feel like we will probably be in that transition period where they are headed toward their wintering grounds / gathering. We will be there 10/18-10/24. DIY hunt - we were blown away by all the game we saw last spring while turkey hunting. Waterfowl in mornings and upland birds in afternoon is the plan

We went up a few days ahead of the pheasant opener a few years ago to tag along with a buddy who was chasing antelope near Red Owl, SD. We hammered the grouse as a byproduct. Mostly along fence lines and in the draws. Overall terrain was rolling grass lands.

We are headed up to Winner, SD in the morning.

Safe travels and best of luck!

Nov 5 - 10th

I hunted standing rock 2 weeks ago for grouse. We had what I would call moderate success. More sharpies and Huns up that far north in SD. Chickens are most common from Pierre south, my favorite prairie bird to hunt is chickens. If you post a way for me to contact you I can give you some specific advise on Standing rock. I can also post some general advise on hunting those when I in front of a computer. Northern plains in the fall is a great place to be.

EnglishElhew07 said:

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I hunted standing rock 2 weeks ago for grouse. We had what I would call moderate success. More sharpies and Huns up that far north in SD. Chickens are most common from Pierre south, my favorite prairie bird to hunt is chickens. If you post a way for me to contact you I can give you some specific advise on Standing rock. I can also post some general advise on hunting those when I in front of a computer. Northern plains in the fall is a great place to be.

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Thank you - looking forward to hearing from you. If you interested I can share very specific turkey hunting spots

BBQ said:

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Headed to a ranch outside of Winner SD with 26+ miles of White River. Mid Nov for my annual white tail hunt. I always look forward to this hunt for many reasons but experience is nothing like whitetail hunting in Tx. A steady diet of glassing and stalking.

some of my successes over the years

The two middle pics is my sons kill which was his graduation gift for his success in joining the Fighting Texas Aggie class of '21!

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thats awesome - saw bunch of mulies along the river in the spring - area definitely supports spot and stalk hunting

AgDad121619 said:

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Headed to SD/ND along Missouri River on on Thursday for a mixed bag waterfowl/ pheasant / grouse trip.

Any advice for what kind of habitat to to try to walk up some prairie chickens? There are a lot of gullies / breaks along river and creek beds as well as a lot of agriculture fields. Do we need to find large expanses of uninterrupted grasslands or focus more on the treed areas in the draws?

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You mind me asking rough estimate of what that hunt costs?

Mule deer #'s have been on the decline over the last 3 or 4 years. We hunt the mule deer on "top" up in the hills and the whitetail down in the river bottoms.

Hoping for a "miserable" weather hunt this year. The whitetail are much more active when the temp is low teens and wind is below 15mph or so.

The last couple of years the weather has been way too nice with the highs in the high 50's and lows in the low 40's.

I really am hoping for some serious snow storms

Nothing like a winter hunt in the Dakotas. This November will be 19th consecutive whitetail hunt on this particular ranch.

Some of the Dances with Wolves movie was filmed on this ranch. Kevin Costners Calvary Saddle or "one of" was donated to the ranch owner and on display in the ranch owners home.

water turkey said:

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AgDad121619 said:

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Headed to SD/ND along Missouri River on on Thursday for a mixed bag waterfowl/ pheasant / grouse trip.

Any advice for what kind of habitat to to try to walk up some prairie chickens? There are a lot of gullies / breaks along river and creek beds as well as a lot of agriculture fields. Do we need to find large expanses of uninterrupted grasslands or focus more on the treed areas in the draws?

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You mind me asking rough estimate of what that hunt costs?

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licenses are going to be ~$400 because we are going to add a ND waterfowl license as backup for ducks - found out too late that SD has lottery for non resident waterfowl. On the res each license as follows:
Waterfowl $50
Pheasant $150
Grouse / Huns / Dove $75
Fall Turkey $95. ( didn't include that in license cost)

The rest is just basics - we have a room at local hotel for $90 a night (two beds) and are driving. We are bringing a camp stove and hotel has a grill so we will be making our own meals. Really affordable trip.

$300 in shells but I doubt we use anywhere near that much

AgDad121619 said:

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water turkey said:

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AgDad121619 said:

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Headed to SD/ND along Missouri River on on Thursday for a mixed bag waterfowl/ pheasant / grouse trip.

Any advice for what kind of habitat to to try to walk up some prairie chickens? There are a lot of gullies / breaks along river and creek beds as well as a lot of agriculture fields. Do we need to find large expanses of uninterrupted grasslands or focus more on the treed areas in the draws?

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You mind me asking rough estimate of what that hunt costs?

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licenses are going to be ~$400 because we are going to add a ND waterfowl license as backup for ducks - found out too late that SD has lottery for non resident waterfowl. On the res each license as follows:
Waterfowl $50
Pheasant $150
Grouse / Huns / Dove $75
Fall Turkey $95. ( didn't include that in license cost)

The rest is just basics - we have a room at local hotel for $90 a night (two beds) and are driving. We are bringing a camp stove and hotel has a grill so we will be making our own meals. Really affordable trip.

$300 in shells but I doubt we use anywhere near that much

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So it's just like public land?. You get maps of all the areas you can hunt?

Yes - essentially public land but has both tribal ( true public) and allotted reservation which means it is privately owned by a member of tribe. Game warden will tell you can hunt allotted land as well unless it is posted. We tried to keep to tribal lands as much as possible during our turkey hunt to avoid allotted land but we did hunt some of that as well.

We were there last week of turkey season so we only ran into one other group hunting. The turkeys also weren't working to calls at all so would go earlier in season if we go back.

Breaking into trucks on reservation can be issue but we didn't have any trouble - tried to park well off of the roads and left car unlocked with nothing of value in it. Was also told to stay out of bars after 8 but we never had any intention of doing that so don't have first hand experience

Relied on OnX for maps - both types of tribal lands show up their maps

To answer your original question about where to chase the birds, I would put it in two buckets. Bucket one is Huns and Pheasants and bucket two is Sharptail. There are very few chickens that far north.

The Huns and Pheasants will be found pretty readily where ag, meets the prairie. Most of the ag is either corn, wheat, milo or sunflowers. We tended to find more pheasants along the corn and more huns along the wheat. Its a good year for pheasants. We were gone before pheasant season started but we found more than enough for limits.

The sharptail were mostly in the open country that was still big blocks of native grass. Where we did find them around ag it was almost always alfalfa or bean fields.

If you give me a way to contact you I can drop you some pins on OnX of locations I would hunt. We were mostly in a 20 mile radius of Little Eagle, SD.

EnglishElhew07 said:

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To answer your original question about where to chase the birds, I would put it in two buckets. Bucket one is Huns and Pheasants and bucket two is Sharptail. There are very few chickens that far north.

The Huns and Pheasants will be found pretty readily where ag, meets the prairie. Most of the ag is either corn, wheat, milo or sunflowers. We tended to find more pheasants along the corn and more huns along the wheat. Its a good year for pheasants. We were gone before pheasant season started but we found more than enough for limits.

The sharptail were mostly in the open country that was still big blocks of native grass. Where we did find them around ag it was almost always alfalfa or bean fields.

If you give me a way to contact you I can drop you some pins on OnX of locations I would hunt. We were mostly in a 20 mile radius of Little Eagle, SD.

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We are headed out this evening and will be hunting Saturday through Wednesday. Thanks

I looked up little eagle and we turkey hunted right in that area along the Grand River and drove 63 so familiar with that area

Got it, you can take your number down

Pretty good birds in SD today….best in last 4 yrs

Finally getting around to trip report

Day One:

We started our trip on Standing Rock Reservation. Our initial plan was to walk a creek and jump shoot ducks which we had found in the spring. Creek was dried up so we turned our attention to stock tanks - first two ponds yielded 6 ducks. We heard turkeys on the roost as we were creeping up on the ponds.

We spent the rest of the morning into lunch scouting a few spots that were shared with us by a fellow poster at the beginning of the thread. - We walked with our guns but really weren't hunting hard and called it early to head in to watch the Ags pull out a tough fought victory over MSU. Cooked up the ducks breasts for dinner on the tailgate. Great start.

Day 2
We went back to same spot to check the ponds for ducks - got a few more and then noticed sharp tails flying out of the roost. Marked a few and then had one of them fly in directly to us - my son got our first sharp tail.

The game warden on the res drove up while we were getting ready to jump shoot a pond right off the road. After checking us , he told us about the area - Sitting Bull had some of his bones buried right over the hill from where we were hunting. Told us that Sitting Bull was still a threat to US government and that was why they had scattered his bones in multiple locations ( he was dead serious when he shared it). A large flock of turkeys crossed the road while were talking. He fave us a reservation service shield when I told him my oldest was in national guard. Amazing conversation.

We turned our attention to pheasant in afternoon - hunting the road edges along a public land walkin spot. We walked the tall grass between the road and planted field. Failed to shoot at the first two birds we put up - we were super cautious to not shoot pheasant hens - after they flushed we realized they were prob sharp tail.

About 15 min later we flushed our first rooster and my son dropped him. His first pheasant. We continued with the same pattern - walking the high grass between the county road and Ag fields - I got my first in the evening as they were coming out of cover. I heard him and saw him in a dried pond bed and then he committed hari kari. Flew straight at me.

We got stopped by the local rancher as he was coming back into his farm. He was borderline angry and started asking us why we were hunting the road ( it is legal) , did we have our licenses , did we have tribal licenses, where our truck was and did we park in high grass (concerned about fires). We were polite and answered all his questions. Wanted to know where we were from and when we said we drove from Texas he started warming up. Said he sold bulls in Fort Worth and they were some of the best people he knew. Started telling us about how he had taken up riding cutting horse competitions at the age of 80. By the time we were done talking , he gave us access to some of his fields and gave us a ride back to truck.

Day 3 - we duck hunted the morning getting 4 ducks. We did some grouse hunting in a drainage with a bunch of wild plum thickets and buffalo berry but didn't put anything up. Spent the rest of the morning driving to ND to get our tribal turkey licenses.

We went to the ranchers field that afternoon and got a pheasant walking up cat tails. And missed or didn't even get a shot off on a few others. Got a a sharp tail in a high spot with native grasses. We tended to find pheasants on field edges and cattails and grouse in the grassland areas. Grouse were very random other than there were snowberries scattered through out the grass.

Went to a spot in the evening to hunt turkeys but only watched a really nice whitetail get within 35 yards before he finally busted us.

Day 4
We turkey hunted the early morning and found a flock that we kept trying to get ahead of - no luck. We went back to the ranchers field and had a good morning. 2 pheasant and a sharp tail out of cat tails.

Slow afternoon but ended up at property that had three dried up ponds full of super thick cattails. We got the mother lode here - flushed 50+ pheasants. over the last 1.5 hours of daylight - also learned don't shoot above thick cattails without a dog to retrieve. Spent 30 min tangled up trying to retrieve a bird unsuccessfully. Finished the day with 1 grouse and 4 roosters. Just an amazing day

Looks like a great trip. thanks for posting.

Wow! What a trip!!

Also want to thank EnglishElHew07 for sharing some great spots to get us started - outdoor board never fails to amaze me as he had hunted the exact same place two weeks prior to our trip.

And a quick story on Wild Turkey whiskey pic. We bought that to celebrate our first Merriams in the spring but weren't able to crack it until this trip

Awesome trip! Thanks for sharing and great pics!

Dang, that looks like a great trip!