This Place is for the Birds

October 16, 2024 by UGUIDE South Dakota Pheasant Hunting

This is a big shout out and thank you to our 360 hunters across 5 UGUIDE camps in our 20th season of operation (2024).  In its heyday, UGUIDE offered as many as 13 properties and hosted up to 600 hunters annually from across the nation.  A big thank you to all those who came before, as well, whom without which I am not sure UGUIDE would have manifested into what it has become today, "A Place for the Birds".

This all began when my elderly father decided to present me with a side by side double barrel 12 gauge shotgun at age 16.  He would have been 58 at the time so I began to explore duck hunting with my neighbor buddy.  Meanwhile my dad was hunting pheasants with his buddies in Iowa ( we lived in the Twin Cities at the time ) and I was not invited into the inner sanctum (group) yet.  A year later I got the call up from the minor leagues and we/I hunted pheasants on mostly public ground in western Iowa for the next 20 years over maybe 4-5 weekends a year.  In the later years our group of 4-6 hunters had shrunk to just myself and a rescue dog which I was able to wrangle up from a co-worker in my IT job.

After so many years of chasing wild pheasants on public land and staying in motels, I got the notion it might be nice to own a tract of private land where I could make my own honey hole, reduce some of the miles on the vehicle and reduce some of the other unknowns associated with public land hunting.  Through some friends I came in contact with, a realtor in Spencer Iowa who knew a lot about farmland began to explain the market and how CRP worked.  He just happened to have this 300 acre piece listed in Charles Mix County SD for half the price of Iowa farmland.  I had never hunted pheasants in South Dakota but I knew they might have a couple so I loaded up my 12 year old daughter and off we went to check it out in the spring of 2001.  The state was loaded with pheasants that year and they greeted us along the gravel drive to the sellers homestead.  We had a friendly visit with the seller couple and they allowed us to pitch a tent in their alfalfa field which overlooked the local national wildlife refuge.  I was hooked.

Taking possession of that 300 acres in 2002 (and 400 more down the road to the west in 2004) I never had any commercial intentions on pheasant hunting.  But with the advent of the state taking in many hunters on private land, me only getting a couple weekends away from work, and the need to find out how to make the farm pay when growing habitat vs. agricultural row crops, my mind began to open to the prospects of sharing the ground (and project) with like minded individuals.

With the 2nd property came the ownership of an old cow dairy barn.  Wholla! Hunting Lodge.  With me having to go back to the cities to work and the owners of the first farm agreeing to show hunters around and clean the lodge up in between groups, UGUIDE South Dakota Pheasant Hunting was born.  The expansion to booking hunts for other farms came when neighbors in the area asked, "could I send them some hunters?"

I've spent the next 20 years implementing habitat on the 700 acres and we are just finally getting to a state of completeness.  UGUIDE has settled into its sweet spot of 5 camps total and about 360 guests a year. The camp owners I work with now are unique in that they understand what has to be put in place to maintain sufficient numbers of wild-reared ringnecks.  Their guests get to enjoy the relationship with them and some have had groups at their camp as long as 18 years running since their camp first opened.  Across the board we have north of a 75% repeat rate annually.  And together we collaborate to try and figure out how to do this thing we call U-GUIDE (which by the way I coined from the brand U-HAUL).  After 20 years you basically have tried all the wrong ways to do this and all that remains is the right way.

The whole habitat discussion is a whole nother hour long talk but what is amazing is how many other wildlife species benefit from us farming for pheasants.  It's really quite extraordinary. Needless to say I give a big thank you to Pheasants Forever hosting their annual convention, beginning in 2003, and offering some of the best biologist led habitat seminars anywhere in the country.

Partnering with mother nature and learning how to grow trees, grass and food plots has been a fun, challenging and worthwhile 20 year career.

South Dakota pulled us out of the cities and made us permanent residents in 2019 and we now live in the middle of a section of farmland and.....This Place is for the Birds!

Without all the guests who have come through our doors, and without all the camp owner/farmers that have been willing to host them, I am sure UGUIDE would not exist as it does today.

Thank you so much for all your feedback, patience and passion!

Sincerely,

Chris Hitzeman

Owner/Founder - UGUIDE South Dakota Pheasant Hunting