Dove season 2017
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Is off to a way better start then 2016! Although the way the birds were grouping up earlier this week I figured they would be gone by today, but they weren't all gone yet!
at 4 o clock I drove by my house and kicked up 100 doves in the alfalfa corners I was going to hunt tonight.
I got off work grab my gear walked across the road and got to work.
I'm still new to dove hunting, so I have no idea what I'm doing in regards to setting up decoys and stuff, but they seemed to work Okay tonight. Had there been a couple more shooters we could have gotten a few more, but it was just me tonight, and the guys I asked for this weekend were all busy.
Stood with my back to some bales from ~5:30 to 8:00 and there were birds flying all over, lots of them, not the 100 or so I kicked up earlier but still plenty.
My hunting buddy for the night, she's not a very good retriever, but she did help me find a few birds that I couldn't find under the alfalfa.
And tonight's haul,
11 birds just 4 short of the limit. More then I got all of last year.
I'll be back at it tomorrow evening I suppose.
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I did a little dove hunting back in 82 or 83 I think in SC. It was like trap shooting without the target houses. It seemed like I had the best luck camoed up and leaning against a telephone pole. If I kept staring at the sky, they'd fly around me. If I kept my head down so that they didn't get a long look at my face, I got singles and doubles. I remember cleaning them for the first time. Stick my thumb under breast plate and pop out that half dollar sized tasty morsel. Thinking about recipes just posting about it.
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Dove hunting is a pretty big deal here in South Texas. We have three seasons in the zone I am in, a special early whitewing season for two weekends and then the regular split zone seasons. We have quail season also that coincides with deer season. I have to literally have a law book in front of me to know the dates and zones and restrictions. Around my property a few hunt the second season but it's right in the time of the whitetail rut so it's limited. I used to have my property leased to an outfitter that sold dove hunts but had to break our deal off. The last year, 2015 was absolutely ideal and we had doves galore. I had planted sesame, millet and peredovic sunflowers the year before and got some of it to come up but no rain for sixty days and hundred plus degrees did it in. The next year, 2015, I learned my lesson and didn't plant anything. We had rain and the native sunflowers absolutely covered this place as you will see in the pictures. I put about thirty hours in on my tractor shredding paths and clearings through the sunflowers so they could be hunted. This is perfectly legal and without some paths almost impossible to even walk in the sunflowers once they start dying. You couldn't find a bird if you shot one. Back to the outfitter. We had a solid lease agreement with restrictions and the main provision was no littering. We picked up two five gallon buckets of fired shells one day. The whole place was littered with them. Then I caught another outfitter in there with a party. That was it, nothing but cows now.
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Sounds like you need a great dog.
I only got out once unfortunately now we’re in harvest, so I don’t have much time right now even though pheasant, quail, partridge, grouse, snipe, woodcock should all be open I don’t have time to hunt them!
And we’ve seen a bunch combining.
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I could help you with the hunting part.👍 Those things were served over rice cooked with chicken broth. Mm mm.
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Yup good.
I’ve been wanting to try Snipe and Woodcock I hear they’re great but they’re rare, usually only see them when we’re harvesting.
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@rhyno
What are you harvesting now? I don't know what region you are from but I see the alfalfa and it has to be dry and high elevation. There used to be a big horse racing stable where I live on the coast that bought loads of alfalfa hay for the horses. Down in Frio County where this is the only thing left to harvest is a little cotton and they are digging peanuts. The rancher that leases my place planted about fifty acres of winter oats two weeks ago for grazing. They're up but need rain bad. The ones that are brave enough are prepping for winter wheat and a little west of us they will start planting spinach and cabbage and a few other winter vegetable crops. Most of the big farms around us are irrigated but my family dry land farmed, water is hard to come by unless you got the bucks to drill a well and put in pivots. As far as doves we got a good crop of them this year but opening day we got a freak thunderstorm that dumped four inches on us in two hours. The next day you couldn't find a dove but they slowly came back. Now we got oats in the ground and no rain. The way most of these South Texas hunters prepare doves is to breast the meat out then slice a fresh jalapen'o in half and stuff with cream cheese then wrap all of it up in bacon and grill it. I usually take my birds up to the ranch north of me and give them away and wait around until they grill some. Opening weekend of dove season there is usually twenty or so hunters there so there's no shortage. This year was a wash though. Got a video last Sunday of six young bucks coming out of the oat patch with their girlfriends right behind our barn. I haven't pointed a rifle at a deer in a long time, mostly video and photograph them. Pigs are another subject.
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Did some snipe hunting in Florida, we would be on swamp buggies and shoot from the rings. You would get in the ring then blow up an inner tube to keep you somewhat secure. Snipe was very oily and I
was not a big fan. Maybe the chef needed a better recipe.
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We’re onto Corn. I think we have 24 quarters left, I’m not entirely sure.
Corn goes pretty quick, soybeans held us up because it was so wet, but we’ve been hard at her since that wrapped up.
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Some farmers down here on the coast had corn in the ground in January last year so their harvest was over early August. Most of the milo was done by the second week of July, biggest problem was where to put it. Lots of the big poly bags in the field still full of corn.
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don't critters get at the corn when it just sits there in the bags out in the fields?
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@martino1
Absolutely. These are long tubular bags that hold tons of harvested corn and milo. Lots of times they will put electric fences around them but coons and crows tear them up. One of my friends works for a big farm and he must have had fifty rolls of duct tape in his truck to repair the bags. I don't see how it doesn't mold but they say only a small amount does. They will slowly be disappearing around here as they empty them and ship the product. I understand now they have a way of reusing the bags, they used to burn them. I will put my camera in the truck and see if I can get some pictures.
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They don’t reuse the bags here. They are about $800 each and the machine that empties them splits them down the side. The ones I have seen didn’t get too many larger critters in them, but I was only around for unloading a couple of them. They did have mice burrowing under them, but I doubt they would eat much. Many of the farmers here use them to hold grain until after the 1st of the year so that it is recorded on next years taxes.
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I haven’t seen those bags in person, everyone around here has grain bins or brings it directly to the elevator.
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The elevator here uses the bags until they can get it on a barge. Sometimes there are 50 rows of
bags out in the field. The elevator is about an hour from here...but I will try to get a pic when I am by there sometime.Other times the elevator just piles corn out on the ground...I am talking about 60-70 foot tall piles that cover an acre of ground. they use loaders to scoop it back up when they are ready to move it.
The farmer here that I know well used bags for a few years...but he finally got a bin built last year. That was real interesting watching it go up. They put the roof together first...then jack it up and put another ring under it and another until it is the height they want.
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Oh yea, we have huge ground storage to. The deer love it.
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@rhyno said:
Oh yea, we have huge ground storage to. The deer love it.
Oh man... I could keep an eye on that for ya. I could even be quiet about it.
