so you could pick up a roadkill, throw it in a trap and cut the tail off - trapped - does it say it has to be dead or alive?

If I were in it for the money a guy could hit some family units of coons pretty quickly about this time of year. The way fur prices are mother nature's going to clean them out anyways may as well make some money where possible. I pheasant hunted in South Dakota in 2004 or so it was quite the time. Pulled just out of town one morning and a soybean field was black with rooster heads right outside the grain elevator. I imagine those birds bring quite a bit more money into the state than furbearers ever will. I'd love to see something like this in Nebraska. After a couple years of low prices it's not uncommon to see distempered coons stumbling down the roadways in broad daylight.

I think you'd have a hard time winning a jury over on that argument but I suppose you could try...

i havent collected any tails yet..but if i was law dog and caught the skunk in trap with babies with tails in her belly i think id have clipped them and claimed the reward.. they were trapped!

Seriously, the government is not going to waste the money to bust coon tail bandits.

If anyone is so inclined you can join Law Dog and myself engage the antis that have plopped a lot of CareU2 or whatever this animal rights group it is petition replies on Gov. Noem's facebook page. They seem to have petered out some now but scroll back to mid-April or so and these petition comments are in lots of various threads on the governor's page. What really flipped the antis out is a few photos of kids with bounty coons either still in a live trap or just recently dispatched. It was pretty clear that their efforts after aboutt he first week of April were coordinated among various anti groups. The vast majority are from out-of-state. I'm sure Law Dog and me are on some vegans' hit lists now but it was worth taking some swings at the no minds.

I have a hour to kill so will do just that NonPCfed. It has been a while since I have stirred the pot.

I have been told they have been marking road kills with something they can see with a black light. My buddy had his tails taken and checked before they accepted them. Other than that, I guess those that have no moral compass will do as they please.

If they want to make an example of someone. The South Dakota legal system can hand out felonies pretty easy if they go straight "by the book". Then, if you make waves politically, they can certainly enforce various laws they they want, go ask Dr. Annette Bosworth if her venture into state politics was worth the cost she has endured. I've been involved in being on juries twice in the last dozen years or so. Some pretty petty stuff got brought to trial, mostly because the defendants were too dumb to realize it was better to take a few lumps and move on (if they were capable) then insist on their "day in court".

I'm more interested in the various Hutterite colonies running a racket of having a few dedicated trappers and using all 10-15 famalies in the colony to get around the $590 cap on a single family. The map shown in the bounty metrics from late last week is already showing the Hutts possibly showing up as the main tial gatherers in specific counties.

If there is more food, thus more predators in a few years, then the program is working. Reducing nest raiding predator numbers is ongoing work to be effective. If the program comes back next year and the year after it will likely result in higher nesting success.

What if the carrying Cap of pheasants is at its peak and reducing predators does marginal improvement?
What if what a lot of people contend is that habitat improvement would be a better solution to improving pheasant population?

Instead of a state wide bounty on predators would it of been wiser to maybe do the predator bounty in some counties (option #1) and do habitat improvement in other counties (option #2) and see which works out better than apply that state wide? And maybe even some counties could do both habitat improvement and bounty (option #3). That would be in interesting study to see what happens. I'd bet that #3 would do the best but only marginally better than # 2 and last by a significant amount would be #1.

Habitat improvement could of been requiring property owners to leave property lines, water ways and marginal crop lands uncultivated and then replant these areas for wildlife habitat. All state and county lands in these area would have to be included too. Or the state could alter its property tax rates to encourage more land in wildlife habitat. Many ways that habitat improvement could be accomplished. But that's really not the issue at this point.

Of course habitat improvement is higher cost up front but less cost on going. Where as bounty if its the solution is a never ending cost.
Also the bounty is more of a feel good option and it has very few opposing it where as habitat improvement would cause the squealing of property owners or various other groups depending upon how it was implemented/paid for.

Even if this program continues on for many years the public will never know if there might of been a better way which in the end is really whats important isn't it?

I'll make the assumption which could be wrong you don't "own" any land Dirty D in quotations because honestly at the end of the day those owners are just renting from the government until they decide they want it. The government gets to dictate land fine enough without "requiring" more from the landowners. I mean you can't even build a pond on "your" ground without checking first. We don't own a whole lot of land but enough I don't need someone telling me what to do with it.

I'm for maintaining and improving habitat and have personally taken less rental income to return cropland acres back into habitat. However, if your position is to require all landowners to do the same through government mandate we have little middle ground to come together over.

Your are intentionally disregarding the benefits of managing nest raiding predators while promoting habitat improvement. Those are not exclusive to each other. Assuming that you have enough habitat, managing predators will increase prey survival.

Would bet that killing all of the coons in Wisconsin would have little effect on overall pheasant numbers your area. The Dakotas are not Wisconsin.

don't live in SD does it say anywhere they have to be trapped Maybe someone just wants to find out how many predators are taken out in 1 month and if it does make a difference

Since 1994, Delta says they’ve monitored 320,000 acres of upland cover.

“We hired a professional to trap predators on half those acres, then compared the nest success with similar tracts of land that were not trapped,” Jones said. “The five-year average for ‘treated’ areas was 43 percent nest success while in the untreated areas, only 14 percent of the nests were successful.”

Scientists know a 15-20 percent nest success is necessary just to maintain the duck population at existing levels.

“What’s really frightening about those numbers is that we’ve been in a wet cycle since we launched our study,” Jones added. “Not only have we had ideal water conditions, but in many areas we have exceptional nesting cover thanks to the Conservation Reserve Program. Still, the untreated areas haven’t even produced ducks up to the bare maintenance level. Predators are still destroying 86 percent of the nests.

“If we’re barely staying ahead of the game under ideal conditions, what’s going to happen when the Prairie Pothole Region goes dry or when we lose CRP?” Jones asks.

And a link- https://deltawaterfowl.org/getting-predator-management/

"I hope SD is successful and that not only will this program be implemented there forever, but that it will spread to other states too. As AK Viking says "fur prices are not helping" so this is our way of remedying another problem that Libs have created for America. "

Must be a New York thing. My hope would not be a government funded program to reduce predators, but the old program where people can make income trapping and hunting predators and the skins can be used to make garments instead of thrown away.

Yours will probably happen, but I would rather my hope would.

My kid got his first bounty check from the state, less than 2 weeks after taking the tails in. Almost as good as selling to a country buyer!! His buddy who's he's partnering with is running about 3-4 dps down along a creek in a very short distance. He's taken about 8 coon so far and thinks he just caught his first sow. The boars that are around next late winter are going to be doing some serious humping!

The tail tally has now pushed past 10,000 (close to 11k actually). The established ratio is still holding, about 75% coon, 17% skunk, then possum and a little over 1% diggers/reddies. I'm wondering about the possums, I always knew there was a northern "grinner line" in the state but now I'm thinking there is a western line as well that is in play. In the line of work I do for a regular pay check, getting lulled by the idea that my local regional scale is representative of the larger state scale is sort of embarrassing...

https://sdgfp.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/e7bbbd6fa93b48c6a31985aa7c57c5ff

Seem weird the bigger Counties are not in the top 10 for some reason if it was population then you would think they would go in that direction. Just got my 1st check for 30 tails surprising how quick it got here. 29 to go and I'm done, that should put tags on the vehicles and replace my license fees.

Wife found a coon dump site the same MO as before a road ditch in view for the public to see, the usual suspects come to mind based on the dump sites locations.

The idiot that's dumping the coons in the ditches is selecting highly visible locations to make a statement or to cause problems. Lots of section lines where this would go unnoticed any give year are all over the place. This guy always picks a flat road bank on a busy road never a steep ditch on a out of the way place that nobody would worry about, just a jerk being a jerk.