PIERRE, S.D. (KELO) — The head of South Dakota’s Wildlife Division made a bold statement on Friday.
Tom Kirschenmann predicted that hunters would harvest more pheasants in South Dakota this season than they did last year.
“I would not be surprised to see 1.5 million birds harvested this year,” Kirschenmann told state Game, Fish and Parks Commission members during their meeting in Rapid City.
He added, “It’s hard to drive anywhere in South Dakota right now and not see upland birds, whether it’s pheasant or grouse.”
Hunters took an estimated 1.3 million wild pheasants and an estimated 99,000 sharptailed grouse and prairie chickens in South Dakota during 2024.
The 2025 grouse hunting season opens on Saturday, September 20.
Pheasant hunting opens gradually. First comes a youth-only season September 27 through October 5, open on public and private land. Next is a residents-only season, limited to public lands, that runs October 11-13. Then comes the full season opener on Saturday, October 18, running through January 31, 2026.
Alex Solem is the upland game biologist for the Wildlife Division that’s part of the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Department. He told the commission on Friday that the estimated harvest of 1.3 million pheasants during the 2024 season was based on surveys of 15,000 residents and 15,000 nonresidents and doesn’t include the approximately 400,000 pen-raised birds that hunters took at shooting preserves.
The prairie grouse harvest estimate of almost 99,000 meanwhile was based on wings collected from people who hunted the Fort Pierre National Grasslands and some other areas in western South Dakota. “It’s the highest it’s been in roughly 20 years, if I can remember right,” Solem said.
Weather and habitat drive upland bird populations and Solem said both have been good overall. “We’ve had excellent habitat conditions, excellent weather conditions, throughout the pheasant range,” he said.
Farmers, ranchers and GFP staff have reported brood sizes of five to eight chicks and that the ages of those chicks range from two to 12 weeks, which shows that hens have successfully renested after losing their previous broods to predators, according to Solem.
For sharp-tailed grouse and prairie chickens, the best predictor of fall population often is the number of hot June days, Solem said. He said some parts of South Dakota had moderate drought in June and July but those were on the fringes of the main range for prairie grouse.
Grouse and prairie chickens have areas known as leks where they mate in the spring. Solem said the numbers of leks aren’t the best indicator of nesting but do indicate the abundance of hens. He said the Fort Pierre grasslands had the highest count of prairie chickens this spring after two mild winters in a row.
“It’s looking to be a really good fall for the opener in a couple of weeks.” Solem told the commission.
South Dakota traditionally has been the top pheasant-hunting spot in the United States. Resident hunters purchased 58,195 small-game licenses last year, while nonresidents bought 82,067.
Harvesting 1.5 million roosters this season would be the highest in more than a decade and would approach the glory days of 2003 to 2012, when harvests annually topped 1.5 million.
The updates from Solem and Kirschenmann on Friday were welcome news for the commission’s chair, Stephanie Rissler of Vermillion.
“We should have some happy folks come October,” she said.
