Had a killer Dove hunt...

T

Tahoe

New member
I'll try to get some pics.

There were 9 of us on opening morning and it might have the been the best I've seen it. Most limited by 8am, not me.

So 3 of us spent another night and this morning my buddy limited early again, and me and buddy2 didn't limit when it seemed the birds stopped flying.

So we went back to camp, drank some beer and cleaned some birds.

We had a GREAT time. 364 days and counting.
 
Hunting with your buds, cleaning some birds (and presumably eating them), and quaffing a few cold ones. Life doesn't get any better than that, except for maybe a good cigar to top off the day.
 
We'd did have a couple of stogies. Just Swishers but they were good too. I think I gained 5 pounds in 2 days. My bud took his 5th Wheel and he has quite the set up...camp stove. We put some in the crock pot and some we fileted for dipping.

364 till the opening day of Dove. I hunted Friday and Saturday, Sept 10th is Quail, Pheasant after that, Duck, etc. Hopefully will be going to Michigan for a woodcock hunt too.
 
cleaned some birds
Click to expand...
Did you ever hear about the "step on the bird" cleaning method? Put the bird on its back, wings spread. Put one foot on each wing, close to the body. Pull up SLOWLY on both legs.

The bird comes apart. You have legs & breasts in your hands, and all the leftovers stay on the ground. Hard to imagine a faster way to clean birds.
 
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wink wink
 
Thanks FF and we DID get that many birds, but my 'wink wink' at the bottom of my pic was because I photoshopped it (isn't that terrible?).

We shot roughly 110 birds in 2 days. So I took artistic licences and created roughly 110 birds. When we emailed the guys who left after the first day and told them we had a better second day, they were CRYING. Obviously we let them stew on it for a couple of hours then made the call and told them.

My O/U is a Weatherby Athena 5. I really like it. About the only time I'll take it is when I'm SURE it won't get banged up, like a dove hunt or pheasant in a corn field. I also take my Benelli M1.

My bud shoots a Red Label.

Quail opens up Sunday.
 
We got somewhere in the nieghborhood of 2500 dove in the local 7 sunflower patches. The patches are in about a 3 mile radious & range from 1 to 6 acres. We shot over 500 out of my 1 1/2 acre patch. My neighbor shot had over 900 shot out of his patch. Average hunting time was about an hour per 15 bird limit.
My wife shot for the first time this year. It was only her second time shooting a shotgun. The first time was 2 weeks ago shooting clays. I thought she shot incredibly well - she got 12 birds for about 120 shots.
 
2500? Wow! Sounds great Butwhat. Where is that? Our limit is 10.

Lots of talk about going to Mexico for a dove hunt...no limit, I'm told. But you can't take your own shells and they run you something like 5bucks...A SHELL! Could that be true?
 
East Central Illinois. That was a cumulative total. We have a 15 per day & 30 posseion limit. We eat dove every day so we can hunt again. That was for about 45 hunters over 6 days. There were 7 at my place in the morning - we limited out in 45 minutes & 5 differant guys in the afternoon.

If you plant sunflowers to hunt doves over, when you mow them either sickle mowe them or mow at a slow RPM if using a rotary. You don't want to chop the heads up to much. It doesn't seem that it matters a whole lot to the doves if the sunflowers are mowed or not. Our main purpose for mowing them is to have a drop zone to find downed birds. We had at least 25% more dove the week before season opened. They had already headed south before opening day.
Some years we have a long dove season & other years we have a long opening weekend. This year looks to be a one week season. Pretty much take you all day to get a limit with the doves we have now.
Never heard about the shell prices inArgentina or Mexico. I know a guy that went down to Argentina 2 years ago. He shot about 5000 shells over 5 days while he was there. I'm sure the shells are much the same price as here or cheaper.
 
We paid $10 a box for shells in Argentina last week. I ran up a $600 ammo bill the first day but for 1000 doves in one day it was worth it.
 
I've never been outside the US for a hunt. Sounds like great fun. I'll have to check with the guy who told me that and see what he was talking about. It might be a Mexico thing??? Or hunt clubs make their money in different ways???

Did you just hunt Dove?
 
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