Hunting: Dove Days

It was as though all the dust devils that ever ghosted across the desert before the days of irrigation had returned to haunt California’s Imperial Valley. Over fields of flax reddened by a dawning sun, thousands upon thousands of mourning doves wheeled and circled, their whistling wings deepening the sense of speed. Below, Cattleman Virgil Torrance tightened his grip on a 12-gauge single-barreled shotgun. The doves’ cries were tender and doleful: “Whee-eet, whee-eet, whee-eet.” Torrance smiled: “When I hear that, it’s all I can do to pull the trigger.” And he proceeded to blaze away.

Jet-Assisted Robin. So did some 25,000 other happy hunters fanned out across the 900-sq.-mi. valley last week for the opening of the month-long dove season, an annual bar-and-feathering ritual that features frolics on both sides of the Mexican border as well as bagfuls of succulent, bite-sized Zenaidura macroura carolinensis (legal limit; ten Zenaiduras per day per hunter). Before the four dove-taking weeks are up, some hundred thousand hunters will have bagged 4,000,000 birds. But it won’t be easy.

No sitting duck, the mourning dove is more like a kind of jet-assisted robin. When it takes off from a grainfield, its favorite lunching pad, the wily bird careens like a missile with a faulty guidance system. Like a climbing pheasant or a gliding goose, a dove is best downed by leading it, then firing at the spot where bird and shot should collide. But the dove is an artful dodger, apt to tumble or leap in the air just as the gun is fired. After many a fruitless hour, some hunters begin firing vaguely in the neighborhood of the doves, hoping for a stray hit. Whole boxes of shells can be fired without ruffling a feather.

Friendly Farmers. Mutually frustrated in the face of such plenty, dove hunters display unusual sympathy for one another. Unlike surly, secretive deer hunters, who are all too prone to argue over whose shot felled which animal first, dovemen retrieve one another’s downed birds, happily transmit information about good hunting grounds, and try not to sprinkle the neighboring encampment with No. 6 bird shot. They get on famously with farmers in the richly irrigated valley, who find the grain-eating doves a nuisance (the dove population consumes 300 tons of seed a day). What’s more, each hunter spends $30 a day, and to egg him on, the local innkeepers and Chambers of Commerce provide “dove festivals” in every little town. There are entertainments,*free dances, trapshooting contests, and the various across-the-border delights of Mexicali, including a “Valencia” pigeon shoot, in which a thrower hurls a live bird into the air while the hunter, as though skeet-shooting, draws a quick bead and fires; the bird wins if it can make it out of a marked circle.

Even the police are helpful: the sheriff will often send a deputy to wake a hunter at 4 a.m. if he forgets his alarm clock. The only sour face belongs to the game warden and to the occasional cattleman whose cow comes down with colic from eating shell casings. Bird fanciers, who in some states have gotten doves classified as “songbirds” and made them illegal to hunt, fail to darken the Imperial Valley dawn. Game managers have proved that the birds’ talent for dodging, plus enthusiastic mating habits, keep the dove population constant, and there is no reason to deprive 100,000 hungry hunters of their delicate game. Said one last week: “I don’t care if they sing like Caruso. The main thing is that they taste damn good.”

*During one dove-season exhibition of trick shooting last week, Pistol Marksman Milo Ploof tragically missed two balloons tied to his daughter’s head and killed her.