Published: August 22, 2008 12:26 am            

To Heck with Dove Hunting

A well known writer of outdoor adventures is Jim Zumbo. He has written a book that he called “To Heck with Elk Hunting.” All of his readers know that the majestic elk of the western mountains are his favorite game animals. He has moved to Wyoming where he can hear them bugle in the fall just outside his home.

But hunting elk has a considerable price to pay in terms of hunter expense, exertion, disappointment, inconvenience, all sorts of mental encumbrances and a 90 percent failure rate. The result is an interlude sometime during or immediately after a hunt that every elk hunter falls apart briefly and considers chucking the whole thing and taking up table tennis.

Well, dove hunting is not often as hard on one’s psyche, but the costs of making a dove hunt are notable enough to cause hunters to become grouchy sometimes, and many refuse to go back to dove fields after the opening day in September until the following year when all the hindrances are forgotten.

The principle cause of widespread disdain among the dove hunting clan nationwide is simply how many of the darn things we miss when we shoot at them flying along, seemingly so vulnerable to our impeccable firepower. They appear to be coasting as they glide innocently overhead and we swing our expensive shotguns confidently and touch the gold plated trigger at just the right moment, letting fly the latest load of hardened shot through properly choked barrels. And four times out of five we miss!



Well Prepared



It ticks us off! For Pete’s sake, we bought a $700 shotgun and stoked it with ten dollar a box shells and we know how to swing through and lead and all that and we still miss? Just today a guy at the coffee shop told me he shot a case of shells one year with nary a hit! Of course he was exaggerating because of lingering frustration, but who knows by how much?

Besides the dove’s propensity for making you miss, there are other pitfalls that spoil your day.

Opening day in these parts is never, ever cool unless you are in a downpour that soaks you to the bone and the wind is blowing. So chalk up miserable weather as a given for the first (and often only) dove hunt of the season.

Legions of ticks, mosquitoes and chiggers await every dove hunter who has blood and skin. What they do is bite. They all make you itch and two of the three can give you serious diseases.

Even if it’s cloudy you will get sunburned because you always forget the lotion. You often forget your stool so you have to stand for seven hours while the doves aren’t flying or sit in the weeds with the chiggers and ticks.



Visual Handicap



When the doves finally begin to fly over in bountiful flocks, you find that the sun has now positioned itself so that it shines directly into your eyes. The other hunters laugh and yell jibes as you shoot wildly into the glare without moving a feather .You stop shooting to cool off and calm the clamor and discover that your water jug is dry.

Okay, its time to move to the other side of the field where the sun angle will be right and the hunters might be considerate. En route you encounter a barbed wire fence and you check it with your gun barrel to determine if you can crawl through. At the touch you learn that the fence is electrified! Instantly you wonder if you have been struck by lightning. Were it not for the gun’s safety, you would have yanked the trigger and blown something nearby to bits. Every cell in your body hurts for one millisecond and your nerves are now completely shot so that you miss every bird for the remainder of the hunt.

But then one day comes along when we can’t miss. Every dove seems to fly in slow motion and they fall like dominos from snowy puffs of feathers. Overhead, crossing right, crossing left, flushing birds, diving birds we nail them all. Other hunters stop to watch and yell “great shot” at every volley. It is our day! We bag a limit with 20 shells but later our memory falters and we claim it was just 16.

This is the day we recall; every detail of it, when the upcoming September 1 rolls around. We can still see those birds dropping from the sky. We’ll do the same this opening day. We’ll swing the same fluid way; we’ll smoke ‘em. We are so excited we’ll forget our lotion and our chair, but off we go to show the others how it’s done. We’ll have our limit in 30 minutes.

        

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