Migration Alert: Hunters Wait on Weather in South Dakota

Early-season success is giving way to a mid-season stalemate in South Dakota as waterfowl hunters wait on the weather to deliver cooler temperatures and a migration of new ducks and geese. Read on for a boots-on-the-ground look at what hunters are experiencing in the Rushmore State.

South Dakota guide and veteran hunter Ben Fujan has spent the past month in northeastern South Dakota, where unseasonably warm temperatures are creating less-than-ideal hunting conditions.

“We’ve had decent duck numbers around since the beginning of the season, and overall, things have been pretty good, but the weather right now is just tough,” says Fujan. The recent combination of warmer temperatures and a full moon opened the door for ducks to begin feeding at night, pushing hunting opportunities to the bookends of shooting light. Ducks are also becoming harder to pattern, sometimes switching fields from one day to the next.

A change in the weather would go a long way toward righting the ship, Fujan says.

“And we’re due to get some new birds,” he says. “There have been specklebellies moving in and out of the area, a few smaller dabblers and divers showing up on the wetlands, but we haven’t seen anything in terms of a real migration of Canada geese and mallards in this part of the state.”

White-fronted geese have started to arrive in larger numbers further west, says Jeff Sparks, co-owner of Falling Feathers Lodge in north-central South Dakota.

“Specks started to show up in bigger groups in just the last week,” says Sparks. “Same for sandhill cranes. We’ve seen some small groups of lesser Canada geese in the mix, too. I also think we’ve picked up a decent push of mallards.

Sparks says that localized duck numbers have been strong since the season opened in September, and his groups have been targeting mallards and pintails in the fields.

The warmer temperatures have been a challenge at times, Sparks says, and so has the arrival of pheasant season, as waterfowl have been pushed off roosts due to the foot-traffic of blaze orange-clad upland hunters walking fields of grass and crops near wetlands and other water bodies.

“It’s a daily process to figure out where the birds have shifted. There’s a lot of scouting involved in putting a hunt together,” Sparks says. “Overall, it has been a very good season so far. We wouldn’t complain about a change in the weather, though.”