Alan Liere: Kickstarting the season
I have never been on a “classic” dove hunt. This oversight was rubbed in last September by a gentleman with some obvious southern roots. He had pulled his pickup up next to mine at a local county gravel pit just as I eased around the end of a 20-ton pile of crushed rock.
“You call that dove huntin’, friend?” he drawled as I blew a shot at a juking handful of gray feathers. “Where I come from, we called that an assassination.”
“Attempted assassination,” I smiled as I shoved two more light 8’s in my 20-guage side-by-side. “And where do you come from?”
While we visited, I interrupted our conversation twice to redeem myself on incoming birds intent on filling their gizzards with gravel, but my sneaky tactics did not particularly impress the man. He was from Georgia, he said, stuck temporarily for business reasons “up north here.” Where he came from, dove hunting was a lot more relaxed, a social event with huge fields of sunflowers or millet, shooting stools, iced tea, and lots of friends and family.
He was a nice fellow and I enjoyed his company for a half hour or so. Then, the gravel pit doves quit coming and I excused myself to go look for them elsewhere. I’d have to try the cattle trough overflow on Four Mounds or the stand of Russian olive that forms part of the shelterbelt between an old homestead and the adjacent, sprawling wheat fields. It definitely wasn’t as “civilized” as a dove hunt down South. But it was, nevertheless, the hand I’d been dealt – Western dove hunting.
Sometime before I die, I’d like to hunt mourning doves the way they do in the South. The limit is generally 15, the season is longer, and I suspect the camaraderie and food is second to none. But I was born and raised in Spokane, and I’ve grown rather partial to the hunting opportunities around here.
On a given October weekend, a 50-mile drive will put me into gray partridge, pheasants, valley quail, three varieties of grouse, two kinds of deer and ducks, geese and rabbits. Fifty miles more, and I’m hunting wild chukars on the breaks of the Snake River. But not mourning doves–not after mid- September. If I want barbecued dove breasts wrapped in bacon and seasoned with lemon pepper, I can’t be sitting around with a jug of iced tea waiting for the birds to find me.
Even with our recently extended season, dove hunting in these parts is short. Some pessimistic types have even suggested we who hunt in northern Washington and Idaho have the shortest dove season in the nation–one day. After that, they say, there are no birds anyway. I do not often question the powers that be, but I have never been able to figure out why our wildlife managers don’t see fit to open our dove season a week earlier, because by Sept. 1, mourning doves in these parts are already flighty. Usually, by that date, they’ve shivered through at least one good rain or frost and have begun to seriously weigh the benefits of a diminishing food supply versus a quick migration and some warm mornings elsewhere. Then, the shooting commences, and the decision to leave becomes easier.
My dove season usually begins in a harvested wheat field close to home. On the morning of the opener, I catch the flocks coming out to feed–generally a slope in the field where the grain trucks spilled some of their load. I look for stubble that has been crushed flat, as the birds don’t like to land in the tall stuff. Mostly, I just stand or sit in moderate camouflage close to fence post to break my outline. Then I wait.
If I fail to limit early, I generally seek out either a gravel pit for the late morning or water holes for the afternoon and evening; I also check the crops of birds taken to find their preferred food. This generally falls into the seed and grain categories, and I once shot a near-limit of doves that had been feeding exclusively on pine nuts.
After the second day of the season, any kind of pass shooting close to home has virtually ended. The birds that remain are spread out, edgy and preparing for their impending push south. At this time, I hunt them in wild sunflower and dried Canadian thistle patches in the Snake River canyons, walking them up as I do for pheasants.
Another productive cover is expanses of sagebrush next to harvested grain fields. In tall sage, doves seems content to loaf in the shade on the ground, and walking them up with a close-working flushing dog is almost as much sport as quail hunting over a pointer.
Inevitably, there will come a morning when another early frost nips the tomato plants along the foundation of my house. I will have to drive much further south than I want to find a good shoot. I go instead to the kitchen and pour a second cup of coffee. Chukars and quail open in another month, and everything else around mid-October. The doves are mostly gone for the year–another short season, but I know they’ll be back at least for a couple days next year. And it’s a good way to kick-start the hunting season.