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Title: Doves, Doves, and more Doves
By: ocagent
Date: Sep 24, 2009
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The last few weeks have been a marathon of dove hunting. Hosting groups of family, friends, and corporate groups for dove hunts is a major part of our business each year. I have heard about this down economy and it hurting the hunting industry, but we opened a new, third lodge for this year, and we were up 40% in dove bookings.
So its been busy to say the least, we had 125 hunters the first day of the season! Since that wild opener, its been group after group rolling in. For the most part, every morning and evening hunt has been very good. We have over 20 fields scattered around the area. We find the best fields around, those that have good feed in the form of wheat that was not harvested or done sloppily and or native wild sunflowers. Since we host group up to 50 hunters, most of these fields are big and hold lots of doves. We try to only hunt them a few days a week so the birds stay in them.
One field we found by chance, our head man took an alternate route back from town just to see what he might see, and came cross a flyway with thousands of whitewings flying over into commercial sunflower fields. Whitewings are not common to our area, but this flyway was close to thick scrub oak forests in which these whitewings have colonized. We have had some amazing shoots there. Most of the hunters have never seen anything like it, the only ones who have saw it only in Mexico or Argentina!
We have one more dove hunt left, and then on to deer season. The life of a guide, I love it! |
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