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No. 1 spot to hunt ringnecks? South Dakota

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mudbrook:
The No. 1 spot to hunt ringnecks? South Dakota has held that distinction for years. Last year happy hunters bagged 1.8 million roosters in the state.

GROTON, S.D. -- More than a dozen pheasants erupted like popcorn, flushing helter skelter into the sky one after another from a cattail slough. Six hunters swung their shotguns and fired a barrage of shots, dropping a couple of the birds. But most sailed over the South Dakota prairie unscathed. "Holy cripes," Mike Smith, 56, of Cologne, Minn., said with a wide grin. "Could you believe how many birds were in there? Oh, that was fun. I missed about a dozen."

Said his son, Jeremy Smith, 33, of Plymouth: "It was a blur. I was out of shells and trying to reload and they just kept coming."

Welcome to the South Dakota pheasant opener, an annual celebration of bird dogs, shotguns and wily roosters. An army of hunters clad in blaze-orange descends on virtually every gravel road, slough, cornfield and grassland. Motels, restaurants, bars and grocery stores are packed with hunters, and signs welcoming them are ubiquitous. Why? Because South Dakota is to pheasant hunters what Las Vegas is to gamblers or Colorado is to skiers.

It is overwhelmingly the No. 1 pheasant state in the nation. Hunters -- including thousands from Minnesota -- journey here from every corner of America to roust roosters.

Last year, they bagged 1.8 million of them -- way more than any other state and about 1.3 million more than were harvested in Minnesota.

Read More... http://www.startribune.com/outdoors/story/1503739.html

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