Prairie Chickens - Needle in a Haystack?
 

Just completed a really special hunt which was a bucket item for me. Although I live in South Dakota and have hunted Prairie Chickens, I have never walked them up with dogs. Mostly I have pass shot at them when they are moving from feeding to roost. I have seen them taken as an opportunity bird, although this was my first time targeting them specifically to get a limit of Prairie Chickens and with no Sharptails.

Joel Vasek of SD Outdoors Unlimited, Scott Smith (Parker member) and John Lowry joined me for what I considered my epic hunt. The goal of a straight Prairie Chicken limit was nearly accomplished both days with only one Sharptail grouse on each day. We ended the hunt with a flurry of as many as a couple hundred Prairie Chickens flushed in a 5 acre roosting area over a 10 minute flurry. Craziest thing I have ever seen on the prairie.

We were fortunate for not running into any rattlers, but one coon did meet his demise in a dog fight. It is big and wild country in Western South Dakota, check out the pictures.

Special call out to Reggie Bishop. The 32" 16 gauge was on fire and it was blooded on the wild prairie and open skies with a very difficult bird. Most shots were between 40-60 yards. Our own Scott Smith was able to down the longest bird of the hunt, great shooting Scott!

Congratulations and great pics, Prairie Man.

Very nice Dean,

Thanks for taking us along with your pictures!

Now that’s a bucket list hunt for sure. Good shooting! Those Reggie Bishop guns are special.

Prairie Grouse
 

Thank you Dean for putting this most exciting and memorable hunt together. It was truly special!

Prairie chickens have always been on my list but was always hesitant to take my dogs there because of the rattlers. Nice pics but who is who? I'll be in Hitchcock, SD for the opening of pheasants at our usual haunt. I'll wave going through Sioux Falls.

How are they for table fare?

Tastes like chicken?
 

Daryl,
As a way to identify, I am shooting a GH16, Scott Smith is shooting a black diamond Model 12, and my buddy John Lowry is shooting a Citori. We all chose our guns which provided enough choke for the longer shots.

As for taste....well they do not taste like chicken. However, we coated them with olive oil after tenderizing and seasoned with Tone's garlic and pepper blend. Cooked rare-ish, they tasted more like a red meat. To be honest, I was floored how delicious they were. All commented the same.

Great to see that 16 taking birds! Great pics!

Great eating
 

What a great hunt! I think now we can all understand why the market hunters took so many birds for the big city restaurants back in the day. They are great eating birds. I have only shot a few and I did have one mounted. Are any of these birds going to be mounted Dean?

Chicken Horns!
 

Larry,
These early male birds don’t have their “horn” feathers grown out. The big boomers with long horn feathers are taken late in the season. So, none to mount for me. However, something to shoot for….maybe a late pheasant/chicken combo while in search of chicken horns!

Dean

Great hunt! Happy for You and your crew. Brought back memories of my only prairie chicken hunt maybe 25 years ago. We hunted with Bob Tinker out of Pierre and chased them with dogs on horseback.

Big fun and we were on target all 3 days. The 3rd day we hunted the ranch where much of the film Dances with wolves was made. I almost had a 3 day 9 bird limit but doubled on a covey for my last 2 birds and the second was a sharpie. Great memory! Hunting with the Tatanka! You live in a very special area.

Glad it all went your way.

I found some pictures (pre-digital) so these are pics of those pics.

The gun was a 20 bore single trigger Zoli with 28" tubes if I remember correctly.
Stolen from me soon after. ��

Absolute "Bucket List" item for me. Thanks for sharing!!

Hey Mark!
I did not have your success when I hunted with Tinker. Good for you, cool hunt. The gentleman who helped in our hunt scouts with binocs to know which land the chickens are using. This helps locate those coveys without wandering around for just any grouse. I have hunted this area previously and it was just what you run into and meant many sharpies.

I just want to say I did not shoot any sharpies on this hunt…..one person in our party shot both on the 2 day hunt…..just sayin’ without sayin’ who! :whistle:

Sharpies
 

Sharpies! The Rodney Dangerfield of game birds. They just don't get no respect!

Great way to start the season. Take a shorter barreled gun with open chokes with you when you chase those Minnesota ruffies.

Mark, did you shoot from horseback or shoot from the ground?

Shooting was from the ground only Bill- guns unloaded and in scarab while riding.
Dogs go on point. Dismount. Load and approach 2 men at a time.
Tinker was quite a character. Gave us a big pre hunt speech about how hard the hunt would be....and how challenging the shots were etc...And made big point of telling no chance at all at getting a limit of birds (when we tell guides we are from New York they immediately think we live in Manhattan)
Anyway I got to snickering and he called me out on that. I told him I had a deal for him- "Bob you put the birds up and We will knock the birds down" - Bob was not a believer.
Well - we had our limits the first two days by noon. He would not hunt with us on day 3 - sent us with another guide. And we got all our birds with Him too at the Tatanka ranch.
I giggle everytime I relive this hunt!!

Mark,

Don't you just love it when you can stick it to 'em like that? Reminds me of one of my first trips to SD with an outfitter who just doesn't like someone to correct him.

He liked to supply ammo to the shooters for extra cost and he believed that they needed 12ga, 1 1/4, 6's. So when I uncased my 20ga Parker and stuffed it with 7/8oz of 7 1/2's he told me that if I wounded too many birds he would have to ask me to leave the field. Yeah, right. Fast forward to the next year and more of the guys were toting 20ga guns. He almost had a stroke when I showed up that year with a 28ga. Dumped him after that year and found a great family to hunt with and this will be our 15th or 16th year I believe. Still hunting with the 20's and 28's.

Daryl
It was exceedingly satisfying on this occasion! Mr. Tinker was not a timid man and was proud of his opinions!
He too was not impressed with our gun selection as we all showed up with 20 bore guns.
As a good friend of ours says "an ounce of shot is an ounce of shot - no matter what gun it comes out of" while that can be disputed there is a bunch of truth to it. 20's and 28's get alot of work done!!!

"an ounce of shot is an ounce of shot - no matter what gun it comes out of" while that can be disputed there is a bunch of truth to it. 20's and 28's get alot of work done!!!

Not meaning to hijack this thread any further but I learned a long time ago it's not how much shot you put in the air but where you put it. 3/4 of an ounce delivered to the head is better than an 1 1/4oz delivered to a hit-too-far-back body shot.

So their meat is dark? Like a duck? I have never seen nor hunted them. Sounds like a great time!

Too old, too little, said Goldilocks
 

Our guys told us to bring autoloaders which would hold 4 or more shots. Magazine extenders would be very helpful! We told him we would mainly be using vintage guns, which he was not excited about. However, like your story, we killed the birds in front of us. Although the shots were long, chickens die pretty easily so low weight loads were not the problem....

Yes, the meat is dark. When you cook it rare to med-rare it leaves some blood for moisture and tastes like red meat.

The problem with some outfitters is they don't understand our way of thinking when it comes to bird hunting shotguns. I've never felt undergunned when using a 2 barreled gun and couldn't imagine carrying a jam-o-matic with an extended magazine walking the prairie.

Years ago a local here who used to be an FAA guru at the Pierre SD airport found out I had a business trip coming up, and put me in touch with some of his buddies there for a combined pheasant and sharptail hunt a couple of days before my meetings. I asked them what type of gun I should bring and they said "bring your favorite duck gun; we'll be hunting over dogs of 'dubious field performance' and you'll need lots of choke for the long shots. I did what they told me and packed my 12 ga. 30" barrel GHE choked F&F. We hunted south of Pierre, alternating prarie between the whistle stop towns of Murdo, Presho, Vivian and Draper.

The dogs consisted of my first-ever exposure to a pointing Lab, a brawler of a big raw-boned male Brittany spaniel, and a hound-type dog of indeterminant origin. The Lab actually pointed, the Brit actually found and retrieved birds, and the hound dog chased around and actually located some cripples we would have never found. Each of the 3 of us got a rooster pheasant, and the over-the-top highlight for me was scoring a left then right double out of three sharptails that came up abreast about 35 yards ahead of the dogs, who were working them. At the rise I killed the bird on the left, swung through the center bird, and killed the bird on the right almost in the same motion. Both fell out dead and I suspect the third one was in Canada before I reloaded.

Mark, wait, you're not from Manhattan?

For me it’s all about the dog work so using a double is perfect for most of my wild quail hunting.
We generally hunt 6 or 7 hours each day.
With a Mearns quail the limit is 8 birds per day. ( I wish they would set the limit at 4 or 5). With an Automatic early in the season, your hunt could be over pretty quick and the dogs you have trained and feed for 10 months only get a couple of points.
This is especially true if you are hunting several of your dogs that day.
Not only that but a fair number of birds have been lost when multiple Mearns are shot.
It’s baffling at times how hard it can be for even seasoned dogs to locate a dead bird after they have been knocked down.
Even more so when they have a little life left in them.
Like a fine whiskey you need to savor it, not knock it out on a couple of swallows.

The “trophy” is the entire experience — the setting, the dog, the gun, and who you’re with, not killing the limit or piling birds on the tailgate.

The guide wants the advertising of big takes.

We are hunting more than birds.

T.H. Elsner near Loup City, Neb., 1895 with a Parker

https://photos.smugmug.com/Vintage-H...r%201895-M.jpg

Dean, prairie chickens are a bucket list hunt for me. I'd love to have a nice mount done for the lodge. It's encouraging to see that there are still some good populations out there.

Mike,

Great hunt and a great mount if you kill a boomer later in the season. It is a tradeoff. The experience and the mountable bird maybe be a few months apart. During Sept/October the hunting can be good with multiple flushes over dogs. In late season, when the big boomers develop their telltale "horn feathers" they are bunched up and can be difficult to hunt in a walkup situation.

Best!

I drove out to SD a day earlier than normal, to allow me to go search for prairie grouse the Friday before pheasant opener. I called a CO out of Miller who was super kind, he offered to leave me a map at the sheriff’s office that he marked up a bit. I picked the spot closest to hwy 14, about 40-50 miles West of Miller. Very hard to access this public land, being surrounded by private land. I eventually decided to walk a section line that paralleled a winter wheat field, then turned North after 1 mile, and finished that 1/2 mile walk next to picked corn, the stalks of which were 3-4’ high. I walked in the pasture area for an hour or more…hilly, with sloughs in the bottoms, loaded with waterfowl…that water was a godsend for my 2 labs! Over 65, maybe 70 that day. Never contacted anything til I walked back out the way I came…dogs were quite birdy next to the corn…I did flush a rooster on the walk in…would you believe it, a covey of 20’sh or so sharpies erupted from that picked corn! Took me a second to figure this out! Dropped the first one I pulled up on with my Repro 28, mostly a straight away, and whiffed on #2, a crosser that was closer…darn that full choke 2nd barrel! I was elated, for sure. A minute after admiring that grouse, and getting it situated in my vest, my 5 year old was back in the wheat, very excited! A lone bird flushed out of range, maybe 80-100 yards where the covey had been….I watched it sail Westward, where I’d be walking the last mile to my truck. About 3/8 of that way back, a lone bird flushed from the very brushy fence I was walking next to…3’ of grass, brush, etc…I knew it wasn’t a pheasant, and the ounce of #5 lead took it down without any issue. I could tell it was a chicken when the dog was getting close on the retrieve…I was really thrilled! It was 10/18, and it had horns…5/8” I’d say, perhaps a skosh longer. Those 2 birds were appetizers 3 nights later, grilled rare after being marinated in Italian dressing after tenderizing them. Salt and peppered to taste…amazingly tender! They were medium rare after resting under foil for 5-7 minutes. The ribeyes we had next must have felt like the performer who went on after Hendrix or Joplin, who opened as very young performers! I eat lots of prairie grouse in September, as I spend a few weeks hunting them in a nearby state. Really enjoy hunting them, and dining on them…and that chicken was a real bonus! I shot my first on 1/3/24 in a different part of SD that is more oriented towards pheasants…that one was a female. Again, very special birds!

Prairie Chickens
 

I know that not everyone wants dead things around their house, sometimes especially the wifie. But, you never know when you may be shooting the last one of a species for yourself. Prairie chickens are not on every corner.
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Learn by doing…
 

I’ve been hitting the Ft. Pierre Natl Grasslands the past 4 years, in search of PCs and Sharpies. Lots of miles walked for a few shots.

Every year I use last years’ errors and have a little more success. This year there were great numbers but it was difficult to get close for a shot. Finding a lek early on a wet and windy morning, I tried pass shooting.

I only had one opportunity that day and felt fortunate to bring one home. I was also happy I brought out my father’s first Parker - with its 32” full & full reach.

Mounted birds are not "dead things", Larry. They are recreated things. Well done!

New Chicken Mount
 

Mike Koneski....this one would look good at your place.

OH YES!!!