Though a native Kentuckian, I lived in South Dakota for two stints totaling 12 years in the 1980s and 1990s. Since 2000 I have returned each year to hunt pheasants on a variety of public lands, private lands, preserves and lodge properties, and to report the results in sporting magazines. (It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it.) I've hunted from Murdo to Milbank, from Aberdeen to Alexandria.

It's all good.

These days, the thing that strikes me most about South Dakota pheasant hunting is how much it has changed over the last 25 years. One difference is unambiguously good for hunters: today there seem to be more wild pheasants in South Dakota than at any time I can remember. (That should be doubly true in 2009, thanks to a mild winter last year.)

However, other differences are more ambiguous. To summarize them, South Dakota pheasant hunting has become first and foremost an industry. The days when you could knock politely on a farmer's door and gain free access are mostly gone. In prime pheasant range, outfitters have made lease agreements on many of the farms with good habitat.

Moreover, some outfitters in South Dakota release a mind-boggling number of pen-raised pheasants onto their leases every year. I have heard South Dakotans release more pen-raised pheasants than the residents of any other state. I can't find statistical support for that claim, but my experience lends it plausibility.

On one memorable outing, I accompanied and photographed a party of 13 hunters, four dogs and two guides through miles of beautiful and variegated upland cover. They bagged a limit of 39 cock pheasants without flushing a single hen. Sound suspicious? I inspected the bag afterwards when no one was looking, and every bird had telltale flared nostrils, widened by blinders during adolescence. One chap said, without realizing how much he said, "Man, the bird numbers here are unbelievable!"

My chief purpose in this article, however, is not to criticize South Dakota pheasant hunting, but to recommend it. Because of my sincere love for the place, its people and its pheasants, I think it would be a great tragedy if South Dakotans allowed their pheasant hunting tradition to become little more than a commercialized trafficking in put-and-take.

So a question arises. Must we stick to public lands and cheap motels for a genuine South Dakota pheasant hunt? There's nothing wrong -- actually, a lot that's right -- with that kind of experience, but happily the answer is "No." Thus far, we can still scratch our itch for lodge-proffered luxury while enjoying the Real Thing. Here are four lodges where you can do exactly that.

E Circle E Hunting Lodge
This operation, run by father-and-son team Robert and Brian Emmick, achieves the kind of Swiss-clock organization and predictable quality to which many operators only aspire.

Whereas many South Dakota lodges put much of their budget into birds, the Emmicks put loads of money and toil into habitat. Their lovely 350-acre "Hill Farm" tract offers wild-bird-only hunting during the regular season.

The rest of their 4,000-plus acres of hunting land lie in the pancake-flat Missouri River floodplain, where the Emmicks have woven a quilt of food plots, shelterbelts and grassland. There they hunt a mix of wild and liberated birds from September through March. The Emmicks do buy a lot of birds, releasing 8,000 in a typical year; about 1,000 of those are hens released in April.