This state's classification carries no date range for the species.
South Dakota does not establish a woodcock season.No woodcock chapter exists in ARSD Article 41:06 ("Hunting Seasons and Methods"), which itemizes 66 chapters covering every game species SD regulates, including species far more marginal than woodcock (crow, tree squirrel, cottontail rabbit) and comparable small migratory birds like common snipe and sandhill crane, which do get their own chapters. This is a genuine policy difference from neighboring IA/KS/NE/ND, each of which publishes a real Sept-Nov woodcock season.
South Dakota establishes no woodcock season at all, no chapter of the state's hunting regulations covers it, and the handbook never mentions it, but the species is genuinely present in the state, so the range question is worth answering independent of huntability. An independent ornithological reference describes South Dakota as hosting an uncommon migrant and summer resident population in the eastern edge of the state, regularly found in woodlands along the Big Sioux and Missouri rivers: not a hunting or density map, but a habitat/range-edge signal. South Dakota sits at the extreme western limit of the species' eastern-forest breeding and migration range, and the only SD habitat matching woodcock's required young-forest/riparian-thicket structure occurs in wooded river-bottom corridors in the far eastern part of the state.
No formal population survey program exists for this species in this state.
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