By Stephen Smoot
The big skies, pancake flat plains, and endless cold winter months are a distant cry from Pendleton County, but a local man with his Baker based buddy helped their team win a competition that has attracted hunters from across the country for more than a quarter century.
At the beginning of this month, Danny Wilburn from Franklin and Brian Branson from Baker made the long trek to the Mount Rushmore State.
They competed as part of the “Reasonable Redneck Stud Fee” team. It has competed for 12 years with Wilburn joining them the past six.
In the competition, 30 teams this year hunted on plots of land lent out by local landowners for that purpose. Each team member receives four shells to bring down birds during a time frame starting at 10 a.m. and ending at 4 p.m. Team members can give shells to teammates if they choose.
“You have to be really selective,” Wilburn said of the four shell limit. He added that “you have to have really good dogs.”
A team has to operate strategically to bag this elusive bird. “Wingers” and “blockers” try to keep a pheasant inside the team of hunters. Wilburn explains that if not lined up properly, “pheasants have a way of finding the hole and blowing out the holes.”
Hunter safety is even more important in this mode of hunting. “Make sure the birds are up high enough” before you shoot, Wilburn cautions. He added that “you’ll see inexperienced people shooting pheasants on the ground with dogs in the field.”
South Dakota is sometimes an excellent, sometimes a dangerous natural habitat for the birds. They thrive in the brush in warmer conditions. Winter on the plains, however, often brings lots of snow and cold winds from the north. Landowners will plant groves of trees to provide shelter and safety for the birds during extreme conditions.
One recent winter, however, killed an estimated 60 percent of the pheasants in nearby Winner, South Dakota, another hunting destination.
Wilburn’s team took the maximum possible number of pheasants, 18. Only two shells remained unspent, giving them an 82 percent kill rate. Should teams tie in numbers, the total weight of the birds provides a tie breaker.
Alongside the hunt is a separate bird dog challenge. According to the rules, the contest “tests the skills of two hunters and one dog. Each hunter is limited to five shells each as the team attempts to retrieve six birds in a 15-minute time period. Points are awarded to each team based on birds harvested, full retrieves, partial retrieves, normal retrieves, shots not taken, and every second remaining on the clock.”
The hunt is held by the Huron Chamber and Visitors Bureau as a fundraiser.
