South Dakota · UplandRing-necked pheasant

South Dakota's flagship game bird has one clear, agency-stated core region: SD GFP's 2025 Upland Outlook states verbatim that ‘pheasants are most abundant in east-central South Dakota where a matrix of idle grassland, row crops, and winter-cover exists’ — the same document that reports 1.3 million roosters harvested by 140,000 hunters in 2024, more than any other state hunts in an entire season. SD GFP discontinued its quantitative, local-area roadside brood survey (which formerly broke results out by Pierre, Mobridge, Huron, Mitchell, Brookings, Yankton, Sioux Falls, Watertown, Sisseton, and Western SD local areas) after 2019, so the 2025/2026 outlook is narrative rather than a published density map; east-central SD remains the only region GFP names as the core range. The state's two largest active habitat-program investments — the James River Watershed CREP (targeted at the full 100,000-acre allocation) and a new 25,000-acre Big Sioux Watershed CREP — both sit inside this same east-central belt, reinforcing the outlook's regional claim with concrete public/cost-share habitat geography rather than just narrative.