Community plans to ‘Roll Out the Orange Carpet’ as national project captures South Dakota pheasant tradition
Wessington Springs and its opening-day pheasant traditions will be in the national spotlight this fall when Pheasants Forever brings its “Opening Day” film project to the community for South Dakota’s pheasant opener.
Bob St. Pierre, chief marketing and communications officer for Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever and the familiar voice behind the organization’s “On the Wing” podcast, will spend opening weekend in Wessington Springs filming the community, its hunters and the traditions surrounding one of South Dakota’s biggest weekends of the year.
St. Pierre, who joined Pheasants Forever in 2003 and has become known by many as “the voice of Pheasants Forever,” is also the host of the “Opening Day” film series. Each installment uses a different place and group of people to tell a larger story about hunting, habitat and the relationships built around opening day.
He has filmed previous installments in Minnesota and Michigan, while a Missouri film shot last year is set to be released this year. But St. Pierre said he was deliberate about waiting before bringing the project to South Dakota.
After all, this is the place he calls “pure and simple the pheasant capital of the world.”
And when it came time to tell South Dakota’s story, he chose Wessington Springs.
“The story that I’m hoping to tell in South Dakota is the marriage of what an opening day means to a community and the volunteer connection,” St. Pierre said.
That means the camera won’t only follow hunters into the field. St. Pierre wants to capture the entire experience surrounding opening day: local Pheasants Forever volunteers preparing for their annual banquet, hunters returning to town, visitors gathering for breakfast, businesses welcoming them through their doors and the anticipation that builds before the clock reaches 10 a.m. on opening day.
It is something Wessington Springs experiences every October, but this year the community plans to turn up the welcome.
The Wessington Springs Area Chamber and Development is working on plans to “Roll Out the Orange Carpet” on Main Street from 7 to 9 a.m. opening morning, creating a downtown gathering place for local and visiting hunters before they head into the field.
St. Pierre plans to be there with his camera, talking with hunters and community members and potentially hosting a live roundtable or podcast-style conversation from Main Street.
For St. Pierre, those moments are as much a part of opening day as the hunt that follows.
And nowhere, he said, does opening day quite like South Dakota.
“The Super Bowl’s never gonna come to South Dakota,” St. Pierre said, “but South Dakota has pheasant season.”
More than a hunt
The idea behind “Opening Day” grew out of Pheasants Forever’s changing approach to telling its story.
During St. Pierre’s more than two decades with the organization, the way people consume information has changed dramatically. Pheasants Forever still works with newspapers, outdoor writers and other traditional media, but it has increasingly developed its own ways to reach hunters and tell stories about wildlife habitat and conservation.
About 16 years ago, that effort produced “Rooster Road Trip,” a week-long hunt shared through photos, blogs, videos and social media nearly as it happened. Part of its purpose was to challenge the perception that public lands didn’t hold birds for the average hunter.
“Opening Day” evolved from there, but the film project has become something much more personal.
For St. Pierre, the concept starts with a feeling nearly everyone can understand — the anticipation of Christmas morning as a child.
As he grew older, opening day became his version of that much-anticipated day.
“The beauty about opening day, unlike Christmas, is that if you have a truck and you have some freedom, you can go to different places and experience opening day through the eyes of a different place, a different bird, a different geography,” he said.
That idea has allowed each film to tell a different story.
The Minnesota installment centered on longtime friends and a family St. Pierre has hunted with throughout his years at Pheasants Forever. For the Michigan film, he returned home to hunt with his mother, father and brother in the places where he grew up.
The upcoming Missouri film follows a father and son who are wildlife biologists, paying tribute to a profession St. Pierre believes deserves greater recognition for the role biologists play in working with landowners to improve wildlife habitat, water quality and soil health.
South Dakota will be different again.
Here, he wants to tell the story of a community.
Why Wessington Springs?
The road to Wessington Springs begins, in part, with Darwin Weeldreyer.
Weeldreyer, a Wessington Springs native and longtime Pheasants Forever volunteer, is well-known within the national organization. With approximately 700 Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever chapters across the country, St. Pierre has met plenty of volunteers during his career He said Weeldreyer stands out.
“He’s in the 1% of people that, you meet him and he just bleeds Pheasants Forever,” St. Pierre said.
What St. Pierre sees in Weeldreyer is also what he hopes to illustrate through the film — the volunteerdriven model at the heart of Pheasants Forever.
Local chapter members volunteer their time to raise money, and those dollars can then be put to work on habitat projects in their own communities.
Weeldreyer, St. Pierre said, “embodies that volunteer spirit in trying to make this world a better place through his community involvement.”
But the decision to come to Wessington Springs was about more than one person.
St. Pierre knows there are South Dakota communities with larger national reputations as pheasant destinations. He mentioned Redfield and Chamberlain among them.
There was something about the smaller community of Wessington Springs, however, that fit the story he wanted to tell.
“It’s like the little engine that could,” St. Pierre said. “There’s that kind of sentimentality that I’m hoping to capture.”
He also sees something in South Dakota that goes beyond the number of pheasants in its fields.
As a nonresident hunter himself, St. Pierre said he notices the way South Dakota communities welcome visiting hunters and recognize what they contribute to rural communities, whether they are eating breakfast at a local cafe, buying something they forgot to pack or sitting down for supper at a local restaurant.
“I think South Dakotans better than any other state understand the economic relevance of the bird hunting, the traveling bird hunter,” he said.
St. Pierre has seen that hospitality when Pheasants Forever brings its National Pheasant Fest and Quail Classic to Sioux Falls. This fall, he wants to capture what it looks like in a small town.
Rolling out the orange carpet
St. Pierre and a videographer plan to arrive in Wessington Springs ahead of opening day with a decidedly small production crew, essentially one camera, St. Pierre and his dog.
He expects to arrive Friday and jump in with the local Pheasants Forever chapter as volunteers prepare for their annual banquet at the Wessington Springs Elementary School gymnasium.
“I’m there to do whatever to help,” he said.
By Saturday morning, the focus will shift to Main Street.
Plans are still being developed,buttheWessington Springs Area Chamber and Development hopes its “Roll Out the Orange Carpet” event will bring together local residents, visiting hunters and groups staying at area hunting lodges for a community breakfast and opening-day sendoff from 7 to 9 a.m.
St. Pierre envisions walking among the tables with the camera following, asking visitors where they are from and why they return to South Dakota.
A conversation may last severalminutesbutultimately result in only a few seconds of film. He imagines a hunter from Denver explaining why he comes back, another sharing a family tradition, a local talking about what opening weekend means to the community.
Together, those snippets begin to tell the story he is looking for.
“I want to capture kind of the comings and goings leading up to the hunt,” St. Pierre said.
St. Pierre has also offered to host a live conversation or podcast-style event that morning. Potential guests could include local leaders, hunters, a wildlife biologist, veterinarian or hunting guide, creating an openingmorning discussion about everything from Wessington Springs’ pheasant history to where hunters might find birds and how to keep dogs safe in the field.
After the downtown festivities, St. Pierre plans to spend Saturday and Sunday hunting with Weeldreyer.
Habitat at the heart of it
While the finished film will celebrate the people, dogs, traditions and excitement surrounding opening day, St. Pierre doesn’t want the Pheasants Forever mission to become lost in the celebration.
The local banquet is part of that story.
Pheasants Forever chapters are built around volunteers who raise money to improve wildlife habitat in their own communities. Whether the person attending the banquet lives in Wessington Springs or traveled from hundreds of miles away to hunt, St. Pierre said participating supports that work.
“They’re doing it as volunteers to raise money to improve the habitat in the community,” he said.
It is all connected: the habitat that supports the birds, the volunteers who work to protect and improve it, the hunters who return each fall and the businesses and communities that welcome them.
That is the South Dakota opening-day story St. Pierre hopes to find in Wessington Springs.
For someone who has spent his career telling pheasant stories, he knows the image outsiders sometimes have of opening day can be reduced to blaze orange, shotguns and harvested birds.
He wants the camera to catch what exists beyond that.
“It’s the places and the dogs and the people and the food,” St. Pierre said.
And in Wessington Springs this October, all of those pieces will come together.
“It’s an amalgamation of local folks, their friends and family returning home, and people that have a really tight bond to Wessington Springs,” he explained. “They might not have ever shown up in Wessington Springs except for this great big, gaudy, beautiful bird that brings people together on a day in October. But in the chaos of the world, this, perhaps may be the happiest that they’re going to be for the whole year,” St. Pierre said.