For more than 250,000 Texas dove hunters, Labor Day means opening day. Brutal heat and bruised shoulders are but a small price to pay when compared to this annual ritual that transcends generations and spans almost the entire state.
“When you get within 30 days of a season like dove season, we start cleaning, we start polishing guns, we start buying guns and we start getting ammunition,” said Verley Hunt, a sales representative at Academy Sports & Outdoors.
With a name like Hunt, it’s only fitting that the Academy employee got a 12-gauge shotgun at age 7, and was three times expelled from Georgetown High for skipping school to go hunting.
“If you were born in an agrarian society like I was, in the timeframe that I was, it’s a little more than a culture, it’s almost a religion,” Hunt said. “The entire year was governed around certain dates. One was Sept. 1, which was dove season.”
Tyrone Hobson, a department manager at Academy, said two men recently bought $4,000 in shotgun shells at one time. It took a pallet jack to get the heavy load out to the parking lot.
Warming up for dove season, hunters often visit shooting ranges, trying to pick up the rhythm, pace and keen eye necessary to pluck doves out of the sky.
“Strange thing about dove hunting, some days you can’t miss and some days you can’t hit,” Hunt said. “It’s like any sport, tennis, golf, you get in a little zone and you can’t do anything wrong. But then you go out there one day and for no reason at all we miss about as many as we hit.”
Last year, a new hunting item called a MOJO Dove caused a sensation. Hunters say doves can’t resist this battery-operated decoy.
“I just set it on a stick … and every dove that came by would come down and take a look,” Hunt said. “And that’s all you need.”
Pow, pow, pow
Shotgun barrels were heating up at Weber’s Outdoors, a 70-acre shooting range near Troy, on Thursday afternoon. Little orange discs, called clay pigeons, whiz out of small buildings from the left and the right, and sometimes both directions at once, to simulate hunting conditions.
Retired business owner Joe Smith brought his 12-gauge Smith & Wesson to practice for opening day. He’s looking forward to hunting on the family place with his son, Todd, and 17-year-old grandson, Cooper. Mr. Smith said he got his first rifle, a .410 shotgun, at age 14.
Weber’s employee, and another lifelong hunter, Monty England, offered some advice on how to bag your 12-bird daily limit.
“You got to lead the bird. You look at only the bird. You never look at the barrel,” England said.
Longtime hunters reflecting on dove season often look back on their youth with a touch of sentimentality. Today, dove hunting requires a license that ranges from $6 for youths, up to $64 for a super-combo hunting and fishing package. But it’s more than the money, they say, the country seems to have grown smaller. The senior Smith grew up on about 30 acres that now abuts the Interstate 35 frontage road.
“Dad bought the place in ’51. When we moved out there in ’77 we could still hunt. Now we’re in the (Belton) city limits,” Smith said.
“We were so fortunate back then, you know the country was kind of open. The neighbors and farmers would welcome you.
Now, everything’s leased up.”
Standing behind the gun counter at Academy, Verley Hunt agrees.
“We lived in a different time, and in many ways a different place. I could take a ’31 Ford and go from Georgetown to Andice with my three bird dogs, and if I saw something I wanted to hunt I just set out my bird dogs. That would get you arrested today.”
Young and old hunters can catch former state Rep. Hugh Shine’s outdoor radio show on Friday mornings. Like many, he says hunting is a family tradition learned at a young age. And at the end of the hunt, the payoff can be delicious - grilled dove.
Simply remove the breast, wrap it in bacon, stuff with a jalapeno and sometimes cheese. Then cook over hot coals.
