For Craig

This is just for Craig. I found it on the South Dakota Magazine link and they linked it from The Black Table. There is a nice photo of the bird there. It isn't me talking about the boyfriend so those of you that are my relatives can calm down. I suppose you are wondering about this Craig guy. He is a Civil Engineer I chatted up on a flight from Portland to Salt Lake City, who wants to hunt pheasants.

#1. The State Bird = Good Huntin'.
We have the ring-necked pheasant, an import from China. And we like to blow the crap out of it. About 150,000 hunters annually shoot up about 1.3 million pheasant. Wow, that's nearly double our human population!
My dad, rightly, likes to point out that hunting brings loads of tourist dollars to the state, but all those guns can be a bit disconcerting. My boyfriend recently took his first trip to Sodak, as we sometimes call it. A New York native, he found the clutches of hunters with rifles blasting away just feet from the highways more than a little nerve-wracking. He also was a bit wary of the fellows waving around guns in both hands at the local Wal-Mart as they showed off their wares. And darned if they didn't have a better ammo selection than they did paper towels. Michael Moore would not be pleased.