South Dakota · MigratoryWilson's / common snipe

SD GFP's own snipe page lists the regulation's Open Area as statewide, with no zone breakdown, and describes the species generically as found around lakes, sloughs, marshes, wet fields, and other wetland areas in South Dakota. Independent sourcing (sdakotabirds.com) corroborates a genuinely statewide presence, describing the species as a common migrant and summer resident, without naming a regional skew. However, the state's underlying wetland-density geography still governs snipe's habitat availability: the species depends on the same marsh/wet-meadow habitat concentrated in the glaciated, pothole-dense eastern South Dakota Prairie Pothole Region (Coteau des Prairies, James River Basin), which is comparatively scarce west of the Missouri River in the unglaciated Missouri Plateau (badlands, high plains, Black Hills foothills). That habitat-availability pattern is the real signal here, even though the agency's own regulatory language is uniformly statewide.