Dove Hunting

This is one of those hunts I never want to miss out on! Most people don't really think about dove season but there are a few of us out there who can't wait for it every year. This is my third year attending along with a good friend and Austin. We book a hotel and spend the mornings out in the fields.

Here is Jax and I, all smiles after a fun morning in the field! Arizona is the place to be for limits of dove.

They have some specific rules about limits of each species of dove and they do change during the season. Officially the season opened last year Sept 1st-15th. Then they have a late season that opened November 20th 2020- January 3rd 2021. I have never made it to Arizona during the September shoot since we are typically hunting elk during that time. However, we try to make it towards the end of November to beginning of December for the best flights.

This is a great resource page that they put out on dove hunting regulations. https://azgfd-portal-wordpress-pantheon.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/archive/2020-21-Dove-and-Pigeon-Regs_amended-201006.pdf Definitely check it out if your considering hunting dove!

During the time we make it to Yuma you are allowed 15 Mourning dove per day with a limit of 45 on your person. Meaning that you can only limit three days in a row and then if you would like to hunt more you need to eat them! We typically just go down for three days of hunting for this reason. Also, during the late season you are not allowed to shoot white-wing dove. However, you are allowed unlimited Eurasian collard-dove. In my picture above, the Eurasian dove are on the left and the more brown dove on the right are the mourning dove. We typically will try to pick out the Eurasian dove while in flight due to no limit and they are bigger which means more meat.

After a fun day watching Jax retrieve the dove we breast out the dove and keep one wing attached for proof in case we got stopped by a game warden. We keep mourning dove in sets of 15 in separate bags to help with identification. Then, place all Eurasians together in a separate bag.

Another thing that makes this hunt that much more doable is the fact that for Arizona you have to purchase a license each year when we purchase our elk points. Since we already purchased a license earlier in the year to obtain our elk point we just have to get our migratory bird stamp when we get to town!

This year was a little harder for me to shoot due to having surgery on my left hand but I didn't let it stop me. Also, Austin surprised me with an early Christmas present and let me get my first over under shotgun! I had been dreaming about owning my own for a while now but could never justify it since I had a shotgun that worked just fine!

This year was a bit slower. What I mean by that is there were less dove flying when we were able to go. Since we had our trip to Alaska we had to push this trip out a little later in December than we normally do. That didn't matter to us, we still got our limits but just had to be a little more patient. Here are a couple videos of previous years getting some shots off.

It's a lot of fun watching them come into the decoy. Sometimes they fly in to the decoy and just hover over it and other times they fly in and out so fast you can hardly get a shot off.

This video of me was the first year I went, this was back before I got lasix and was still wearing glasses. As the video goes you see the huge swarm of dove flying in. During the prime of the late season they come in like this consistently all morning. The best shooting is usually first light and last light but during the peak of the season they will fly for hours.

Typically we will freeze our birds once we get home then when we have a few days off we will grind it up and make them into beef sticks. I will make a post about that process once we do that with this years harvest!