Opening Day

Today is the opening day of the 2015 Dove Season here in Mississippi.  For all practical purposes this really should be a state holiday, at least in Noxubee County anyway.  I didn’t grow up dove hunting but I do attempt it  - attempt being the action word in this sentence.  There’s really not much to fear from me if you’re a dove.  I might hit one out of 20.  Apparently this sport is something that you really need to start doing at an earlier age than 25.  I’ve been dove hunting now for 8 or 9 years, and all with the same gun mind you, and I’m still terrible at it.  Give me a rifle and a still target and I’m you’re girl.  Shotgunning not so much.  

Honestly though dove hunting is not about how many birds you can harvest, but about the community and friendships that surround it.  Dove hunting takes a lot of preparation and my husband and his friends spend weeks bushhogging, burning off fields, feeding birds, and just generally doing a whole lot of work without the guarantee of any return.  Doves are fickle as 13 year old girls.  Sorry to all the 13 year old girls reading this but you know it’s true.  The birds can have a field covered up one day and let someone cut a corn field or a front move through and the little devils just disappear.  But these guys do this because they love it.  That’s honestly something I can understand.

Tonight I’ll be cooking homemade biscuits (50 of them) and sausage for hungry hunters in the morning.  So wish me luck!  I’m not a caterer and that’s about 40 more than I normally make at a time.  We’ll have the oven going inside and the grill outside to get everything done at a decent hour so I can go to bed and get up before dawn to feed the hungry hunters.  Let’s all pray this turns out okay.

The pictures  on this post are wheat fields from January.  They seemed fitting as how the guys in the dove club have been feeding wheat for about 2 months now.  So good luck everyone if you’re hunting tomorrow, I hope you get a limit of ring necks*.

*Ring necks are large migratory doves called Eurasian Collard Doves.  They are larger than mourning doves.  You can read about them HERE in a prior post I did about dove hunting.