How to Bag More Doves After Opening Day

Cold, wet, and lying on a cornfield terrace with my head resting on a blind bag, I could have been hunting geese. And the whole afternoon felt like a good field hunt, but miniaturized, and in fast motion. Bunches of doves streaking low over the field locked onto the decoy in front of me, banking in unison to swing by the spinner as I sat up to shoot. It was mid-October, with low clouds and some stinging drizzle mixed into the wind. Long after most hunters had put their dove guns away, I was enjoying one of the best hunts of any kind I had that fall.

There’s a long dove season following the first of September. Use this tips to find birds long after the opener. Image by Austin Ross

Dove season is more than a weekend. The feds give us 90 days to hunt doves. I’d bet 88 of those are under-utilized, and that’s a shame. It does require extra effort to shoot doves weeks after the opener. That effort is repaid in dove poppers and stir-fries; in a shooting eye that’s honed to razor sharpness for ducks and geese; and it’s just a whole lot of fun. Here are some tips to help you keep hunting doves going long after the opener.

DON’T GIVE UP ON WILDLIFE AREAS

Conventional wisdom has it that managed public areas are shot out after opening weekend. Doves aren’t geniuses, but even they get tired of being shot at, and they leave. At least, they leave for a while. Once the pressure lets up, doves come back. They will use the field until weeds grow back over the disked, bare dirt. Doves like to walk in open ground where they can see trouble coming, and tall weeds make them nervous. It’s worth scouting public fields until they get too green and weedy. One of the few silver linings of drought—that’s afflicted us here in Iowa over the past few years—is that the dove fields have remained bare and attractive to doves for longer than usual.

Once the flurry of opening weekend pressure dies down, doves return to managed fields that offer food and open ground. Image by Will Brantley

Last season, I found a DNR sunflower field that doves were still using long after opening day. It was no secret hotspot. A regularly-traveled, paved road ran right by the field, and doves would stage on the wires along the road. That far into September, no one cared but me. I set my folding chair on the edge of the field one afternoon, with the sun and some tall weeds at my back and a decoy to my front. True, there were not a ton of doves, but the ones that were there made up for it by decoying as if they’d never been shot at. It’s not bragging to say I shot ten with 12 shells, because the shooting was that easy.

Some states, like Iowa, open fields and let hunters have at them. Others control pressure, opening fields only at certain times and dates, and those can offer good hunting well into the season.

WATCH THE HARVEST

Doves love harvested grains, with the exception, as far as I can tell, of soybeans. I live in corn country, and I know doves love cut cornfields. Throughout September, farmers with livestock chop corn and cut it up for silage before the regular harvest starts. Usually there will be strips of standing corn left in the field that make perfect hides, and bare ground covered both by waste corn and seeds of whatever weeds were growing in the field. If there are dead trees or wires around the field for doves to perch in, the birds have everything they need.

Recently harvested ag fields can hold doves well into season. Image by Austin Ross

In that baffling way of migratory birds, however, they will use one field and leave one that looks just like it completely alone. The only way to learn which is which is to spend time scouting. Mid- to late-afternoon is my favorite time to look for doves, although early mornings work, too. Doves are hard to see on the ground. Glassing cut corn isn’t easy, so I rarely try. Instead, look for birds flying over the field or, better yet, look at the power lines and dead trees nearby. My rule of thumb is, if I count 10 birds on the wires, it might be a good field. If I see 20, I know it will be good. If there are more than twenty, I start texting and calling friends to come hunt the next day. It helps that I am lucky enough to live in an area where dove hunting permission is easy to come by. The standard conversation goes:

Me: “May I hunt doves?”

Landowner: “You eat them things?”

Me: “Yes, I do.”

Landowner (shrugs): “I don’t care. Go ahead.”

Although I’ve shot plenty of doves in combined cornfields, doves prefer the cut fields because they are more open. One of the very best dove hunts I’ve ever been on was in a field where the landowner had cut most of the corn except for around the edges. He then seeded a cover crop, and spread cow manure over the field. The manure dried so it was as hard and open as a parking lot, with sprouted seeds in easy reach. Doves couldn’t stay out.

Some time spent scouting helps to zone in on hot late season fields. Image by Austin Ross

What I have learned is that if you find doves, don’t try to save them. Shoot the field as soon as you can, because sometimes they will move on as other fields open up, even if you don’t hunt them hard. I’ve shot birds by myself one day only to find the field empty the next, while other fields can offer good hunting for weeks. I can’t tell why. All I can do is scout to keep track of dove movements.

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MANAGE YOUR FIELD

If you have a field of your own, you can manage it for one big party early in the season, or try for several good shoots throughout the year. You might plant more than one type of food, for instance, to stagger the times the crop is ready for cutting and strip your field sequentially to drop fresh seeds on the ground at different times of the season. Keeping up with the disking, or even burning, is also a good idea so the ground remains bare.

Manage your fields to keep a food source available to the birds late into season. Image by Austin Ross

As important as managing crops are, managing pressure also matters. Years ago I hunted at a private club where the owner made a science of holding doves. He limited pressure, not by limiting hunters, but limiting shooting time. From the time someone fired the signal shot, you had 2 hours and 15 minutes to shoot your birds, pick up your stuff, and get out of the field. Mike also moved that 2-hour and-15-minute period to different times of day so birds never established the pattern of feeding after shooting hours.

WATCH THE WEATHER

Cold, wet weather pushes doves south. It doesn’t take much to make doves pull up stakes and leave. In some places that first cold snap does end the season. In other places, people think it ends the season, but it doesn’t. Scout after a front comes through. A flight day hunt, and I’ve lucked into a couple, is opening day all over again.

HUNT NEAR TOWN

As the season goes on, I’ve usually found the best hunting takes place near town, or near livestock operations. Like town geese, some town doves never migrate. They still have to feed, and you can hunt them just outside of town if you find the right field.

Similarly, doves will hang around feedlots long into the season. And, you get the bonus of chances at Eurasian collared doves and pigeons when you hunt around human habitation. I’ve even had town doves suck into spinning wing mallard decoys in my goose spread on cold December days after the dove season closed.

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MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR CHANCES

You have to deal with doves in flocks as the season wears on. The later in the year it gets, the bigger the bunches of doves grow. Instead of singles, pairs and small groups, you might have 20-30 at once all over you. There’s not much answer to that other than, shoot straight and make the most of it, because you won’t get a lot of opportunities.

Last fall a friend took me to a field he had been watching. He knew the birds had been flying around 3:00 p.m., but he spent what turned out to be just a few minutes too long showing me around and telling me how he had found the place.

When we pulled up to a high spot along a fenceline he had in mind for me, flock after flock of doves went pouring past the truck windshield, right over where I would have parked my stool. I set up anyway, and eventually I shot one bird out of the late bunch. One dove isn’t many, and it doesn’t make a meal, but it is more than zero doves, which is the number of doves most people are shooting nine weeks after opening day.