The Making of a Dove Hunter
by Tom Hayes
The week after the Good Lord invented Dirt, He invented the Mourning Dove. The Southern States welcomed this creation into the world and declared it a “game bird” and summarily went about setting up season dates, bag limits and legal means of taking them. Within days of the season opener, a host of traditional Southern dishes sprang up for making the delectable, albeit miniscule, morsels a joy to the palette.
The Northern States also welcomed this creation into the world and declared it a ‘songbird” and summarily went about establishing fines and penalties for taking the life of such a magnificent and cute creature.
For an untold long time, the division between the South and the North persisted. South Dakota, being one of the more progressive of the Northern States, took the matter in hand and opened the first ever Mourning Dove season in the fall of 1969. I welcomed the idea of getting two weeks of shot gunning ahead of the tradition mid-September prairie grouse season.
I vaguely remember there being a controversy around the state over the change of status of doves from songbirds to game birds, and, in fact, within my own world, there was a divided house. My Mom was clearly in the Songbird camp and could see no reason why Turtle Doves should be moved into the Game Bird classification. She was not one to rant about such things, but she did make her position known.
My Dad, always the realist, didn’t have any big moral or emotional issue one way or the other but did offer up that there wasn’t enough meat on the damn things to be worth wasting a shotgun shell on. He didn’t say it, but he might have been OK if the GF&P would have allowed taking them with a .22 rifle. Which, by the way, was the weapon of choice when the Old Man wanted to shoot quail off the railroad tracks around Fort Pierre back in the 19-Teens. Dad did appease Mom by making the declaration that I was not to shoot doves off his bird feeders in the back yard. This was a rule that had emerged at the time of the first legal wild turkey hunt in the Black Hills.
One of my classmates from SD Tech lived on a farm about a 1 1/2 cans of beer ride northwest of Huron and had been suggesting that some of us West River guys come down to his place to go to the State Fair and also added in that we could try Dove Hunting, too. A “multi-species” outing (doves and farm girls) seemed like a great way to spend a few days before classes and homework got us all down so the trip was planned.
None of us knew anything, really, about how one would go about hunting doves. We were familiar with their habit of sitting on wires but discovered to our dismay that they were not to be shot from the wires. Darn. Maybe this would be harder than it had seemed.
At the appointed time, two of us West River guys met up with the flat-lander at his farm and went scouting the afternoon before opening day. We figured out on the first afternoon, their stock pond would be a good place to try. We also found the little dudes to be quite at home roosting in the trees of the shelterbelt around the farmyard. With that done and a game plan for the next day, we all agreed it was time to hit the Fair and work on the other object of our pursuit – meeting some farm girls who were dying to meet some dove hunting pioneers.
The Fair thing went well but mainly because our Huron-area native introduced us to the delight of the world known as chislik. We were not overrun by farm girls wanting to be the first in line to meet up with would-be dove hunters, especially those smelling of beer and chislik.
Opening morning we drove around with the idea that we could get out and shoot doves that were taking flight from overhead wires without actually shooting them off the wires. We got zero. Doves must have great depth perception because as we drew close, they flew off before we could get in range. We wondered how birds that had spent their lives as songbirds could adapt so quickly to being game birds with the attendant suspicion and spookiness. After lunch and a good long siesta, we decided that walking along the shelterbelt could produce some fine shooting, and that it did. LOTS of shooting. Lots of shooting, but no getting.
When the sun began to get low in the West, we set up in the weeks along the shallow end of the stock pond. Just like we had heard, the doves began to arrive to get sips of water. This phenomenon led to our first success at harvesting the morsels. We learned that that diving flitting flight thing they did when flushed from the shelterbelt was replaced by a fluttering soft landing and they were (relatively) easy targets. We also discovered that the 12 gauge full chokes in our “pheasant guns” were way more than enough to deliver clean kills. Some of the victims we harvested were, well, mostly feathers. At the end of Day One we had burned up a couple of boxes of shells amongst us and had 5 doves sufficiently intact to eat.
Back to the State Fair for more chislik and beer and another ill fated round of trying to attract farm girls by way of sharing the embellished stories of our dove hunting.
The next morning we skipped the early morning patrol and around mid-morning we just “went for a ride.” As fortune would have it, we encountered an old field road that had grown up with sunflowers and just as we stopped the truck swarms of grackles began taking flight then returning back to the sunflowers. Aha! Inspiration simultaneously struck all of and we hopped out and poured shells into our shotguns. As we began down the old road, the grackles cooperated and we opened fire.
After the volley fell silent, we scurried around and picked up 37 grackles. We took them back to the farm, breasted them out and added them to the 5 dove breasts we had harvested the day before and got us a big pot of oil boiling. By the time the oil was hot, we had gone a long way toward slaking our parched throats with a few cold ones.
Recipe:
o Get a box of chislik sticks
o Heat up about a gallon of cooking oil until it is almost smoking
o Rinse and cut up small (doves, grackles, I suppose starlings or barn pigeons
would work, too) bird breasts into bite sized pieces – about 1/2 inch
cubes
o Push three to five pieces of bird breast pieces onto chislik sticks
o Boil the meat sticks in the hot oil for about 5 minutes
o Remove and drain
o When cool enough to touch without screaming, salt and pepper to taste
and enjoy
o It is highly recommended that a cool recreational beverage be served as
an accompaniment.
Since that inaugural season, I went on to enjoy Dove Hunting – limited
to Doves – in Nebraska where I lived for about 5 years. I learned
a lot about what to do at whatever time of day, and most importantly that
getting a more open-choked, shorter barreled shotgun really helps. In Oklahoma,
where I also lived for several years, a Labor Day Weekend Dove Hunt was
a good way to welcome hunting season.
Recipe:
o Forget the chislik sticks and hot oil
o Get some thick sliced bacon strips
o Leave the Dove breasts intact – season with a little Red Rooster
Hot Sauce (or whatever might be your preference)
o Wrap the bacon around the breasts and secure with round toothpicks
o Roast on a charcoal fired barbecue grill using “indirect”
method = not directly over the hot coals, but rather off to the side
o When the bacon is done, so are the breasts
o Remove from fire, let cool a couple of minutes and go for it
o It is highly recommended that a cool recreational beverage be served as
an accompaniment
There still lingers a good bit of sentiment in the world up North here,
that they should still be considered Songbirds, though. I know that Wisconsin
had to fight restraining orders for three years after legislating to legalize
dove hunting. Minnesota went through a protracted process to get doves moved
to Game Bird status and after the first season, statistics indicated only
about 40,000 hunters participated versus the MN DNR prediction of over 150,000.
Dove hunting is not and never will be pheasant hunting. However, I find that a dove outing is good practice for my Labs in staying steady to shot in preparation for waterfowl season, and shooting at the little rockets does not hurt my dormant wing shooting talent, either.
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