First-time visitors to Tumbleweed Lodge in central South Dakota are almost always impressed with the 12,000 acres of prairie landscape stretching across this region of the upper Great Plains. Just as impressive are the numbers of gamebirds on the Tumbleweed property, with pheasants roaming nearly everywhere there is any kind of cover or food sources.

First-time visitors to Tumbleweed are almost always impressed with the wide open spaces of the prairie in this part of the upper Midwest.

A little more elusive but still present are the sharptailed grouse, prairie chickens and Hungarian partridge found here. These birds sometimes mix with pheasants in man-made food plots and big stands of wild prairie grass. But just as often, the prairie grouse and partridge are scattered in small family groups and big flocks on the hilltops and hillsides at the far edges of the ranch land.

"Look at that big bunch of blackbirds at the end of that cornfield," a hunter from Michigan said late one afternoon last October to Michael Bollweg, owner-operator of Tumbleweed Lodge. "Uh, well, those are actually pheasants flying from a food plot to a roosting spot in the prairie grass," Bollweg explained to his somewhat embarrassed guest.

"I don't think the guy really believed me about the big cloud of pheasants until the next morning when our group of hunters walked through the prairie grass and flushed about 100 ringnecks in a half hour," Bollweg later said. "And he didn't mistake prairie grouse or partridge for any other kinds of birds that afternoon."

Another kind of grand slam on the Tumbleweed Ranch is a combination of ringneck roosters, prairie grouse, and Canada geese later in the season from mid-November to the end of December.

Seeing all these gamebird species at Tumbleweed is the result of the Bollweg family's commitment to managing a successfully operating cattle ranch in conjunction with an equally successful commercial hunting operation. "Bird hunting has always been a tradition with us," Bollweg says. "So the transition from the family-based hunting history to a hunting business was a natural move on our part."

Part of the transition included adding more gamebird-friendly habitat to the ranch so that nowadays, in addition to the vastness of the prairie pastures and grassy creek bottoms, there are thousands of acres of corn and sorghum fields, long tree belts, and big patches of hardwood shrubs. "Everything here is designed to produce pheasants, grouse and partridge, to protect these birds through hard winters, and to give everyone a place to hunt them from mid-September to the end of December. And because one part of our ranch property has a hunting preserve designation, we can hunt pheasants from the first of September to the end of March," Bollweg explains.

Hunting Strategies At Tumbleweed Lodge
There are several ways pheasants, prairie grouse and Hungarian partridge can be hunted at Tumbleweed Lodge. One common method is a walker-and-blocker hunt in which a large, organized group of shotgunners (up to a dozen) walk through a large food plot, a big tract of CRP, or a long tree belt. The purpose is to flush some birds up in front of the line of walkers and to push other birds to the end of the cover where blockers are waiting to shoot them. Close-working flushing dogs or well-controlled pointing dogs are usually part of the plan with the objective of putting game into the air and fetching shot birds when they hit the ground.