Registration is open for South Dakota’s annual Birch-Miller Post 9 Rolly Karels Youth Hunt, a full-day pheasant hunt and outdoor-skills program for hunters aged 16 and under.
This year’s event runs Saturday, Oct. 3, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Abbey of the Hills Inn and Retreat Center in Marvin, in northeastern South Dakota. The hunt is hosted by the Birch-Miller Post 9 American Legion out of Milbank and is capped at 24 participants so the group stays small and instruction stays hands-on.
Young hunters open the day with a safety orientation and trap-shooting practice, then move into a mentored field hunt for pheasant with adult volunteers. A hands-on bird-cleaning lesson follows the hunt, and the day closes with an evening banquet and prizes. Every registered hunter gets an event T-shirt and a sack lunch.
The program is built for beginners as much as returning youth hunters. Range time, field craft and bird handling are all covered in the same session, and mentors work alongside the participants through the field portion so the day carries a first-hunt-friendly pace even for those who have never fired at a moving target.
Registration is $25 per hunter, collected at check-in the day of the hunt. Scholarships are offered so cost stays out of the way for interested families. Each hunter needs to bring a firearm, appropriate clothing for the field and enough shells for both trap practice and the live hunt. Every participant must also hold a South Dakota mentee hunting license and be accompanied by an adult mentor for the day.
Reservations run through the Abbey of the Hills event page, and organizers ask families to sign up in advance to help lock the day’s capacity and lunch counts. Because the group is capped at 24, spots have filled ahead of the day in past years.
The Rolly Karels hunt sits inside a wider set of youth and mentored hunting options that South Dakota’s game agency has built out over the last two decades. Mentee hunting licenses let a young hunter take game in the field before completing hunter education, and the state’s youth and apprentice programs are set up to route new hunters into short, supervised days rather than a first weekend on their own.
Pheasant hunting remains the anchor of South Dakota’s fall hunt calendar, and youth events like this one are one of the ways state agencies and local sportsman posts try to hand the tradition forward before the regular pheasant season opens later in October.
