North Dakota – pheasants, pheasants, and more pheasants

North_Dakota_Pheasant_HuntingPheasants are not native to North Dakota, but they’ve been in residence for decades and bring lots of enthusiastic hunters to the state every fall, including me. This is my fifth trip and I love everything about it.

The plains are beautiful, the people are friendly, the state economy is booming, the lodge we’ve rented is really nice, the pheasant population is up, and my six hunting buddies are a great bunch: Jim and Jenness Robbins, Pete Williams, and Steve and Donnie Lucas are all Mainers, and Frank Sweeney is the outlier from Massachusetts. But I’ve put Frank through his paces and he’s now qualified as a real Mainer.

Bad guys in the Bad LandsOn Saturday, our first full day in the state, we went on a road trip, visiting Teddy Roosevelt National Park – an amazing place in the Bad Lands where we saw tons of wildlife from bison to Rocky Mountain Sheep and lots of birds including Golden eagles. The scenery is stunning.

Then we drove up to Williston to see what the oil boom is doing for the state. I’ll have more to say about this later, but oil has turned North Dakota into the state with the lowest unemployment rate in the country. Essentially, no one is unemployed, and they’ve had to import workers from many other states.

We arrived at Kysar Farms (www.kysarfarms.com) – the place where we were renting the lodge and hunting on the owner’s five parcels of land totaling 1200 acres – on Sunday morning, moved into the lodge, had lunch, and headed out to hunt. We got six pheasants and I missed a couple of shots. I knew immediately that I should have gotten out to the range and done some shooting before we got here. But hunting on Sunday was a bonus because we hadn’t planned to do it, so I wasn’t a bit disappointed.

Our group is really serious about hunting, so we were out before dawn on Monday morning, and the parcel we hunted was loaded with pheasants. We hunted about 4 hours, walked for miles, and came back to the lodge for breakfast at 11 am with seven pheasants. I got one of them, while missing several others.

We took a break, I posted my first column on North Dakota on my website and the Bangor Daily News website, read my local newspapers online, had an awesome breakfast prepared by Chef Pete, and we were back at it by 1:30 pm.

The parcel we hunted this afternoon was 320 acres and I swear we walked 15 miles. I know that’s impossible, but the hot temperature (76 degrees), unusual for this time of year here, and the thick grass that made walking tough, was exhausting. We didn’t get a lot of birds, but I got two of them, completing my 3-bird limit for the day. Hooray!

We returned to the lodge about 4 pm, relaxed for a half hour, then headed right back out for the last hour and a half. You can hunt until sunset and we added to our day’s total which was 19 pheasants plus one Hungarian partridge. We saw a couple of flocks of them.

Back at the lodge about 6:30 pm, Chef Pete went right to work preparing an amazing dinner of pheasants, fried and covered in a mushroom gravy sauce. Ohhhh myyyy. Pete is actually in the insurance business, but he can really cook. We also had wild rice, a salad, a nice bottle of wine and we were in bed soon after.  We’ll be out after pheasants by 6 am tomorrow morning.

 

 

George Smith

About George Smith

George stepped down at the end of 2010 after 18 years as the executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine to write full time. He writes a weekly editorial page column in the Kennebec Journal and Waterville Morning Sentinel, a weekly travel column in those same newspapers (with his wife Linda), monthly columns in The Maine Sportsman magazine, two outdoor news blogs (one on his website, georgesmithmaine.com, and one on the website of the Bangor Daily News), and special columns for many publications and newsletters. Islandport Press published a book of George's favorite columns, "A Life Lived Outdoors" in 2014. In 2014, George also won a Maine Press Association award for writing the state's bet sports blog. In 2016, Down East Books published George's book, Maine Sporting Camps, and Islandport Press published George and his wife Linda's travel book, Take It From ME, about their favorite Maine inns and restaurants.