Even at his busiest sitting at the anchor’s desk of NBC News for more than 20 years—longer than Walter Cronkite at CBS—Tom Brokaw managed annual pilgrimages to South Dakota to remind his Labs why he was feeding them in his Manhattan studio the other 11 months a year. The state draws him back most autumns for what he describes as a religious holiday in these parts, a pastime most who grew up here celebrate come October. Welcome to pheasant hunting central, a bird and a state whose brands have become synonymous.
Much of South Dakota is a pheasant pasture owing to an ideal mix of grasslands, food crops and shelter belts that sustain and protect the birds throughout the state’s seasonal weather extremes. There are, however, a handful of places where the bird transcends the wingshooting lifestyle. One such destination is the 5,000-acre Paul Nelson Farm, an understated phone book name for a retreat that was created on a passion for pheasant hunting. This isn’t one of those quaint lodges for six or eight guns at time, but rather is closer to the Taj Mahal of featherdom.
Throughout the expansive, two-story campus, there are cigar lounges, private bars, poker tables and giant television screens that make the place one enormous and opulent man cave. Everywhere you look there are reminders of the birds—mounts, paintings and photographs—along with all manner of South Dakota artifacts from bison skulls to ancient native tools. A nearby jet strip makes it easy for the corporate set to arrive, do deals while toting a shotgun through thousands of acres of idyllic pheasant cover and return easily to their home ports. During the Bush-Cheney years, the Vice President was a frequent visitor, famously shutting down the air space around the capital of Pierre as Air Force Two arrived for the pheasant opener, the unofficial New Year on the Dakota calendar.
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