doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com OT Dove Opener Monday 9/1

Nuff said.

Think I'll wait till Tuesday but mine will be walk ups on the desert. Kind I f like early quail with something angles and doubles

Love eating those big white wing's.
Have fun out there.

As usual, we've had something of a cold snap here with lots of rain.

That usually acts to push the birds further south, and far-enough to make a hunt a significant investment in time and travel. I will most likely be in a different time zone by then anyway.

My neck of the woods could well go by a new term: "Doveless"...
JR

I don't have any doves where I live either in E. Texas. Which is why I will be driving about 3 hours west on Monday for bird country.

Sunflower fields all over the place here. We've got two, plus a field of brown top millet. So far, all the doves are going to the freshly harvested corn fields. They're usually not too good for a dove shoot because they're all too big. You just can't get enough people to come to a dove shoot anymore to shoot a 100 acre corn field effectively. But, soon the corn fields will be harrowed and that will cover up the lost corn so the doves will leave them, hopefully for the sunflowers and millet. We will be awaiting them.

Meanwhile, we've got more corn to "gather". 85 acres down, 515 more to go.

When shooting Eurasians at the grain elevators I've found that their crops were always full of grain, but the incidental Mourning Doves we got had crops filled with thistle seeds.

Did you eat the Eurasians? Back in the 1980s they poisoned birds (mostly pigeons, but poison does not discriminate) in Kansas grain elevators. In some cases, those poisoned birds flew into town to die and be eaten by precious house cats - which is how we all found out about the poisoning program. I have never had the courage to eat pigeons as a result. And I have wondered about mourning doves, though I ate those anyway.

Eurasians are just as good a table fare as Mourning doves. The flesh looks identical and I have never noticed any difference in flavor. Their habits and preferences of location are somewhat different, however. Eurasians prefer to hang around buildings and structures much more so than Mourning doves.