Dogon, you're fighting against success and tradition. Since SD attracts something on the order of 100,000 nonresident pheasant hunters a year, and since they kill about twice as many pheasants as the next best state, what they're doing obviously works--as far as they're concerned.
Re all the dog deaths a few years back . . . well yeah, dog owners ARE responsible for where and how they hunt their dogs. (And for what kind of condition their dogs are in, going into the season.) I go to SD pretty much every year, a month ahead of the pheasant opener, to hunt prairie grouse. If the hours were the same for those birds they are for pheasants, I'm not sure I'd go. And we hunt them, for the most part, in a lot lighter cover than you hunt pheasants.
Re the impact of the big lodges and outfitters, it'd be interesting to see a breakdown on the number of birds they shoot. If they classify themselves as a preserve, then the limit increases from 3 a day to 5. I don't know how much that affects the total harvest numbers released by the state. But when SD does its pre-season pheasant survey--which is before those big lodges start to release birds--they often report incredible bird densities in the best parts of the state.
Back not so many years ago, we used to shoot more birds in IA than they did in SD--and IA doesn't have any big lodges or outfitters. If the habitat is there and the weather breaks right, pheasant numbers can increase very quickly. CRP was first authorized in 1985. By 1987, the pheasant harvest in Iowa was 1.5 million, which was twice what it had been in 1984.
