This was the fifth morning I had been up well before dawn and the anticipation of the day’s activities more than offset any thoughts of fatigue. The excitement of a “high-volume” dove shoot was all anyone could talk about over breakfast. How could there be any more doves than the tens of thousands we had seen on the two “regular” dove hunts? The excited chatter at breakfast spilled over into the drive to the hunting field and we bombarded Claus with question after question. He did his best to answer us, but in reality there were no correct answers to our questions. There were only suggestions or this works for me answers. The hunt was going to be different enough that we would have to experience things for ourselves and figure them out as we went along.
We arrived at the field just before sunrise and we could already see thousands of doves as they fluttered above the tree line. Only their silhouettes were visible and, at several hundred yards, they looked more like swarms of mosquitoes than anything else. As the first rays of dawn were breaking over the horizon, Jose took a break from blind building to hand me my shotgun and filled my shell pouch. He pointed toward the tree line, smiled, and said the word I had been waiting to hear: “shoot”. I needed no further encouragement. I slipped on my shooting gloves and started chucking shells into the magazine. In the 10 minutes it took him to finish the bind, I had already dropped 15 doves. At home, the limit is 15 and it used to take me between one and two hours to shoot the same number of doves I had downed in the last 10 minutes.
Jose, setting up the blind while I am trying to get used to the number of birds in the air
