Most hunters realize the best time to get in on a dove shoot is at the beginning of the season. On opening day, crowds of hunters surround fields and usually it doesn't take long for everyone to get all the shooting they need to fill a limit.
The early season doves flock in with little thought to their own safety.
There is little reason to spend much time discussing tactics during the opening days of the season. Simply take along plenty of shells, lots of water to drink, and wear shooting glasses to protect yourself from the spent shot raining out of the sky.
That sort of shooting is fun, but it's more of a holiday than a hunt. After a few days, or a couple weeks at best, the holiday is over. The bulk of the doves are gone--either taken by hunters during the opening season or having migrated south for the winter. The birds left to hunt are the survivors--either luckier or, more likely, smarter than the rest. Gunning for them is much more of a hunt than a shoot.
Late-season dove shooters must pay more attention to details in order to score consistently. Details like wearing camouflage clothes. I've seen opening day hunters wearing red shirts get as much shooting as anyone else in the field. That might be possible then, but full camo is as necessary to bag a late-season dove as it is when hunting ducks and geese.
It's also important to keep still. A hunter waving arms and swinging his gun, even if he's wearing full camouflage, might as well be waiving a white flag.
The last places to expect late-season shooting to be good are the fields where the action was hot and heavy early in the season. The key to finding late-season feeding fields is scouting for freshly cut fields. Early September is too early to find many harvested fields on Indiana farms where I hunt, but by the end of the month, the harvest is underway and soybeans, seed corn, and other crop fields are opening up.
Look for the freshest fields to provide the best action. I've shot late-season doves almost as fast as in the early season on recently picked seed corn fields. It usually takes a day or two for the birds to locate and begin using a harvested field; then, after a few days, the birds move on to other, fresher fields.
Doves loafing on power lines and tall, dead trees are a clue to locating the fields they are using. Doves will often lounge in these high-visibility spots before entering nearby fields.
I use two methods to get in range of the doves when I find good numbers loafing in an area. One method is to set up under the wire or dead tree and wait for the doves to come in. If the location is a dead tree, the addition of a few dove decoys definitely helps. Don't ever put decoys on a power or telephone line.
Another tactic is to observe where the roosting birds swoop down to feed, then set up there. One afternoon three friends and I stood in an unharvested corn field next to a freshly cut millet field. Hundreds of doves lined the wires across the road and every few minutes a dove or two pitched off the wire to scavenge the millet patch for waste grain. We shot a limit despite the north wind in the first days of October.
Doves have one habit which can pay off all season. The last thing they do before going to roost is get a drink of water. Locate an isolated farm pond near areas where doves feed or roost and the chances are good the last hour of shooting time can provide some excellent action. I once bagged a limit of doves after work on the last day of dove season using this tactic.
Doves love the muddiest part of the pond for some reason. If autumn's low water levels have exposed a mud flat along a gently sloping bank, that's the area to try first. Better is to find a pond so small you can shoot over the entire pond. That way the doves will be in range regardless of where they water-up.
When dove season opens, I'll be out there with the other shooters in the holiday crowd. It's fun and exciting to get in on the first wingshooting of the year. But those with a true love of hunting know that with the right tactics doves can provide excellent opportunities all season long.
Copyright (c) 1996 Mike Schoonveld. All rights reserved.
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