OLIVIA, MINN. As the morning darkness slowly dissolved and the eastern horizon began to glow orange, the mourning doves arrived. Single birds and flocks of three, four, five and more darted and flitted into the 30-acre harvested cornfield from all directions, then landed, drawn by a plethora of food.
The corn, stalks and all, had been cut and removed for silage, leaving a bare field full of weeds and their seeds. A virtual cornucopia for doves. And they wanted in.
Five of us, clad in camouflage and cradling shotguns, hunkered separately around the field, hoping to intercept some of them on this crisp September morning.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Greg Larson, 56, of Woodbury, positioned on the eastern side of the field near an unharvested cornfield, fired, dropping a bird. Soon the rest of us were shooting -- sometimes hitting, often missing -- at the erratically flying doves.
Several of us lay in the field, hidden only by corn stubble and foot-high weeds, and shot at doves that passed by. Three Labs eagerly retrieved fallen birds. It was nonstop action for more than two hours.
By 9:30 a.m., with the late-summer sun warming the landscape and most doves on the roost, we called it quits. The tally: 64 doves -- or nearly 13 per hunter. The bag limit is 15 apiece, and two hunters shot their limits.
"That was a great shoot," Larson said.
Said Marv Boerboom, 56, of Olivia: "What I like about dove hunting is you get to do some shooting -- you're not just waiting for action."
His son, Nathan, 25, of New Hope, nodded in agreement.
"I went through 2½ boxes of shells," said Tom Kalahar, 54, of Olivia, who found the field loaded with doves a few days earlier and secured permission from the landowner to hunt it.
Shooting wasn't a problem. We all expended a multitude of shells. Hitting the doves was another matter.
"They fly so erratically," Kalahar said.
Hitting doves, in fact, can be like trying to hit a fluttering knuckleball. Several times I pointed my 12 gauge at a dove and fired just as it bobbed or weaved -- and hit nothing but air.
Forging a tradition
This is the fourth mourning dove season in Minnesota in modern times since the Legislature reinstated dove hunting in 2004 after a closure that started after the 1946 season. Few of today's hunters are old enough to have hunted then. (None of the five of us who hunted doves last week were even alive when it was previously legal.) Thus, there is no tradition here for dove hunting as there is in many other states, where dove hunting is extremely popular.
Yet more doves are harvested in the United States yearly than all other migratory game birds combined. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it is one of the most abundant and widespread birds in North America. It estimates that about 1 million hunters killed about 19 million doves last season.
Clearly, many Minnesota hunters don't know how or where to hunt doves. The state Department of Natural Resources estimates 10,000 to 15,000 hunters have tried it yearly over the past three years -- far fewer than the 30,000 to 50,000 that state officials guessed would hunt the small game birds when the season was reinstated.
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