IF YOU like wing
Ed "Eagle Man" McGaa is the primary author of "Dakota Pheasant," but the foreword and last two chapters were written by Joel Tate, a social sciences professor at Germanna Community College.
Joel and I go back a long way, some 35 years, to be exact. I was in one of his first sociology classes at Germanna (my kids had him, too) and we soon became friends. That friendship grew when we discovered we had a common interest in hunting. I had good rabbit dogs in those days and Joel, an old country boy from Tennessee, liked to hunt.
There were quite a few Saturdays back in the 1970s when Joel, Larry Schrader (another Germanna teacher) and I beat the bushes to try to jump rabbits along the honeysuckled fence rows of hay and pasture fields in my neighborhood.
Joel liked to rabbit hunt, but he was absolutely delighted when we jumped an occasional covey of quail. Both he and Larry were good shots and we often came home with enough birds for a meal. Eventually our schedules changed, our lives became more hectic, and rabbits and quail all but disappeared from Virginia's Piedmont. Our hunts became less and less frequent.
Joel and I stayed in touch, however. He moved into my neighborhood (buying part of the farm where we first hunted) and occasionally we would get together to play a little music or argue politics. In the mid-1990s, I went to central South Dakota on a pheasant hunt and told Joel about all the birds I found and the great time I had. A year or two later, he called me to get some contacts out there, and soon he was hooked on pheasant hunting.
I guess pheasant hunting in South Dakota was doubly exciting for Joel because this sociology professor has always been a Plains Indian advocate. "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" was required reading in his class.
There are about a half-dozen Indian reservations in South Dakota. They include Pine Ridge, where the Wounded Knee massacre took place; Standing Rock; and Crow Creek, which was near where I hunted.
My schedule has kept me from doing much pheasant hunting in South Dakota, but Joel heads out there on a semi-regular basis. And, like me, he loves the land, the people who live there and the hundreds of thousands of pheasants that make hunters keep coming back.
In the book, McGaa discusses pheasant hunting from a native South Dakotan's viewpoint, but Tate puts an Easterner's enthusiasm into wing shooting expeditions that Westerners take for granted.
Like me, he recalls the days when you could find at least three coveys of quail on any 100-acre Virginia or Tennessee farm. And he laments when these birds, for some as yet unexplained reason, all but disappeared in the late 1970s.
Tate also writes about the thrill of walking down mile-long rows of dry South Dakota corn or millet and having 40 pheasants explode from beneath your feet when you reach the end.
The last chapter deals with the problems associated with farmers putting land into the federal Conservation Reserve Program. This is must reading for anyone planning to get involved in this program.
Tate, one of the last two remaining members of Germanna's original faculty, will have more time to devote to writing (this is his second book) and hunting soon because he plans to retire from teaching at the end of the school year.
Next October will undoubtedly find him on the South Dakota prairies with his bird dog by his side and an automatic shotgun in his hand.
Donnie Johnston:
Email: djohnston@freelancestar.com
"Dakota Pheasant" is published by Pine Hill Press out of Sioux Falls, S.D. It can be ordered through local stores by using its ISBN: 978-1-57579-383-2. For more information, go to edmcgaa.com on the Internet. |