Opening day I bagged an even half dozen. I wasn't concentrating on shooting too much as I was working my dog for her first time. Yesterday I limited out. Today I just plain sucked. Three birds, ten shots, and two of them went down just winged. I hate having to snap off heads due to non-clean kills on my part
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We'll see how tomorrow goes -- it's my last day for the first part of the season. Things are starting to thin out, but there are still birds flying. Shots are getting real interesting. I'm hunting on my parents' field of cut corn. My Uncle has an orange orchard abutting it and I'm hiding in the first row of trees adjacent to my folks' place. Starting today, the birds are either coming in really high, or else fast and low right over the orange trees. My thumb is plumb tuckered out from working the barrel selector.
I'd mentioned in another dove thread here that I had on a whim bought some dove decoys to try out. I can honestly say the darn things work. I would say about 1 out of 3 dove that flew over the decoys changed it's flight pattern when it saw them. I only bought a box of four to experiment with, but I'm sold on them -- especially for the dove with the post-opening day jitters. I'm gonna buy some more to try out in the second half of the season this November.
I was really proud of my dog Romy. I was beginning to worry about how she'd do. I use Dokken dead bird dummies to train her with, and for the last couple of months she's gotten into an annoying habit of sometimes stopping just before she brings them to hand and giving them a couple of good chews. Anyway, with the real thing, she was great. She held for me, took off sharply and came back sharply, and was handling the birds like eggs. The only time she got confused is on her first retrieve of a winged bird. She didn't quite know what to do. First she put it in her mouth, but I guess she felt it trying to move around, so she put it down, at which point it tried flapping away. She then put her front paw on it and held it in place while looking at me with a, "What the hell am I supposed to do with this?" look.
I ended up walking out to her, killed the bird, and then let her carry it back to our stand. On the next wounded bird, she just grabbed it and brought it back to me for the coup de grace.
The only other funny thing she had to deal with (and DO I wish I'd had a camera with me) was when an Emu (that had apparently escaped from a neighbor's farm) walked across the middle of Ma and Pa's lower forty. Romy's look was priceless. I was semi-seriously thinking about shooting the thing and making her try and retrieve it.
Anyway, I hope the rest of you have had as much fun so far this season as I have!
wow....Neat kid.
