Well, there went August. When I woke up the other morning it was September. Now it is dove season, and one of the very best months to fish lies ahead. I am more interested in the fishing. Dove hunting is fairly easy, and it isn’t high on my list of things to do. But I will do it anyway, because I am a grizzled old veteran outdoor writer and that kind of thing is expected of me. I will do it closer to the first week of October than early September. I know you hear young inexperienced outdoor writers talk about how hard doves are to hit, but not for me. I got to where I can sneak up on a bunch of them and get four or five before they fly with only one or two shells.
I got to be such a good shot by practicing when I was young. In the fall I’d go out and shoot at butterflies with my B.B. gun. When you get to where you can hit a butterfly with a B.B. gun, you won’t have any trouble hitting doves with a ten-gauge shotgun about half the time. No, I am just joking here. I never owned a B.B. gun or a 10-guage!
I am going dove hunting when it is cool a few weeks from now because there will be many more doves migrated from those now in South Dakota I saw a few days back. I intend to take my young Labrador out and see if he will retrieve one. If my Lab takes to dove hunting, he will likely be a good retriever by the time duck season gets here. Most all the dove hunters will be out on opening day and within a week there won’t be hardly any of them left... hunters that is. Right now there are 10 or 15 doves coming to my pond in the evening, but I have seen more than 100 in October.
You need harvested grain fields for good dove hunting, or a small pond like mine used as a water hole where they come to water in the evening before they go to roost. And you don’t need to be sweating and swatting at mosquitos. I like hunting those water holes late in the season for two reasons. Usually if you have a young Lab and you can drop a dove or two in the water, it is really good for them. And again, there are more birds.
Dove hunting is sometimes hard on dogs in the early season because of the heat and humidity, and dove feathers come off in their mouths and they don’t like that. A Lab hates dove feathers. You can see why if you ever put a freshly shot dove in your mouth. You can’t hardly get those feathers out of your throat. I only did that once when I was young, trying to see why my Lab didn’t want to retrieve them.
On the Ozark river where I spent my boyhood years, there were few crop fields or feed-lots, and so I didn’t ever hunt doves.
Oh yes, I had hunted everything else you could find on the Big Piney, ducks, squirrels, rabbits and quail… but Grandma McNew would have disowned me if I had shot a dove. She watched pairs of mourning doves raise young ones on their farm all summer long and she referred to doves as ‘birds of peace’. She referred to dove hunters as something else, and none of the papers I write for would print what she called them.
My dog and I will be a great deal happier in a couple of weeks when the teal season opens, if only there is some cooler weather by then, and flights of those biscuit-sized early migrating ducks to be found. But that’s another column.
No comments:
Post a Comment