Perhaps one of the best things about being a student at SDSU is that all students, regardless of whether they are from South Dakota or not, are given resident hunting and fishing privileges. All a student needs to do is present their student I.D. to a licensing agent and pay the resident license fee.

This is especially helpful to those who enjoy hunting waterfowl. Normally non-residents have to apply for a license that only allows them to hunt for two weeks and those two weeks can’t be sequential.

South Dakota is well known as a destination for people who love to hunt and fish. The state is world-renowned for its abundance of ring-necked pheasants. More ducks are produced here than just about anywhere else in the lower 48 states. South Dakota’s lakes are full of walleyes, large and smallmouth bass, and in the West there are even lakes loaded with trout.

Brookings, for its part, lies in one the best areas to take advantage of these opportunities. The city sits at the southern end of North America’s great duck factory, the prairie pothole region. A good duck hunter can easily find more than 10 species of ducks in the area. Geese are plentiful, too. There is a healthy population of resident Canadian geese in addition to those who migrate through. Snow geese can be hunted in both the fall and spring and come through the area by the tens of thousands.

There is a staggering amount of publicly owned or leased land available to hunt. Pheasants can be found on just about every piece of that land and there are some landowners out there who will let students hunt their land if asked.

Plenty of good lakes lie within driving distance and are easily fishable from the shoreline. On a given day of fishing, a person is liable to catch anything. Fishing doesn’t stop in the winter, either. When the lakes freeze, there are more than enough opportunities to cut a hole in the ice and spend a day pulling fish out of the lake.