Doves with Dad

After an eventful morning,  I prepped and scouted for the next morning's shoot as Dad was coming up for a dove shoot. After inventorying the contents of my freezer, I advised against shooting any more geese until I can thin the stock some. Not nearly over the limit, but still way more geese than I care to have at one time.


Dad arrived a little after 7:30 the next morning. We collected ourselves and headed out to our spot. After some guide confusion we were finally in our spot. The birds were not nearly as thick as they had been. This was the "X" field a week before, but I was afraid that the landowner had some other guys pounding the doves there as well as the geese. Enough dove load empties proved that to be the case of sorts. We ended our morning without a photo, and with two birds. Not a complete bust, but it was nice to show Dad some new country. I hope Dad was not expecting an exciting crazy weekend, because after returning home, we kind of vegged for a awhile, ate lunch, and then took an extended nap. After awaking from our afternoon slumber, we attempted to catch a fish on Antelope, took a few cast off of Marty's dock on Indian, and called it an afternoon on the water. After a slow morning, we headed out to "The Pass" where I had shot so many birds so far. I seemed almost more productive in the evenings when they were headed back into town for their roost. It took less than 20 minutes and the action started. It was by no means a shoot-fest, but there was significantly more action than the morning's attempt. We both did some spectacular shooting and humbling missing.

 With the sun setting fast, we decided to call it a hunt, take some pics, and go have a duck and dove dinner.

 This is what fall is all about!!!


The next morning I had better vibes about the spot as it was supposed to be cool,  cloudy, and windy, plus we were going to get out about an hour earlier. We step outside and it is warm, calm, and clear as a bell.....oh for dumb.

We drive the horrendous 2 minute jaunt to our hunting spot and load up and start the walk. Before we even leave the car, the mosquitoes were in force already. I reach into the car for the can that fell out of my bag..................This is going to suck.

We walked a brisk pace to the far side of the property in hopes that the doves would follow the corn field edge.We sat in the fenceline for a little over an hour before we couldn't take it anymore. I did manage to drop the one dove we had that was fooled by our mojo. We took some pop shots at pidgeons but it was out of mosquito infested desperation. We left our spot to head back to the plowed area from the morning before to see if that would change anything. The breeze and the cloud cover basically followed us to that spot and the cool brought sweet relief. Even Mocha was beside herself.
Our new location was not proving any more productive, even though there were 5 or 6 sitting there when we got there.

Just before we called it a morning, we hear this click noise, Mocha blasts out towards the mojo decoy, and there is a small hawk crawling off of the spinner decoy. We didn't get to see the initial hit but I have never seen one come that close. We were reveling in the moment when another, larger hawk swooped down right in front of us and did the same thing!!! We may not have hammered the birds, but that was not something we got to see every day!




I am so glad Dad came up and joined me on a dove hunt, I am doing my best to avoid the 'guide' mentality, and let myself enjoy the time outdoors. Any outing with my brothers or my Dad makes it that much easier to not get hung up on the harvest and focus more on the memories.



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