Sitting in the late afternoon shade of a berm next to a dugout, shotgun across my lap, I was coming to understand why in most of the 40 states that permit dove hunting, gunning for the fleet-winged bullets is the most popular hunting (and in many instances, social) event of the season.

Sharing the shady spot was farmer Marty Jaus, his petite .410 pump shotgun also at ready.

Yes, we were dove hunting. But mostly we mused about the weather, the crops, the general state of farming, of mutual acquaintances.

Every so often, one of us would rise to take aim at a passing, gray-feathered bullet as it inspected the watering hole. Sometimes, we fired at the birds that had interrupted our conversation; just as often we did not.

An hour or so earlier, I had wandered into the cool darkness of the dairy barn northwest of Gibbon to announce my arrival to my host, who was in the middle of the afternoon milking.

I had offered a hand and he held out his, clad in the rubber gloves and bearing ample evidence of his chores. “Maybe not,” he said, withdrawing them.

Our paths had crossed at a wedding a few weeks earlier when he extended an invitation to gun for doves on his organic farming operation.

“Go north up the road a quarter mile past the ditch, take a left, and then when you get to the CRP field, park and veer to the right on the path,” he said.

There, he said, I would find the watering hole that would draw birds in for evening flight.

“And do you mind if you have company,” he asked. “I thought I might join you when I finished milking.”

“Absolutely, I was hoping you were planning to hunt,” I said.

Ten minutes later, after setting out a couple of decoys to augment the pair already perched at water’s edge, I had barely settled down into the vegetation and slipped a couple of shells into the gun when a pair of birds circled once and set their wings. I fired twice and both birds tumbled.

“Nothing to it at all,” I thought, retrieving the downed birds.

My confidence was short-lived when moments later, a flock of doves buzzed me and my next two shots drew nary a feather.

For the next half-hour or so, several flocks and numerous singles and doubles were drawn to the watering hole.

By the time Jaus came strolling down the path, I had seven birds in the bag. Conveniently, I lost count of the number of shots it had taken.

Before returning in 1980 to the family farm with his wife Loretta to gradually convert it to an organic operation, he had managed a private shooting preserve for a utility company in Illinois. “That’s where I really got into dove hunting,” he said.

And when Minnesota once again put a dove season on the books six years ago, he picked up where he left off.

His familiarity with the sport probably qualifies him as a more hard-core enthusiast than the 12,000 or so Minnesota hunters predicted by the DNR to participate in the 2009 season.

In fact, he manages some parts of his farm specifically for the game birds. Dispersed at strategic locations, he had planted food plots — crops that because of this past summer’s cool, dry weather had not yet matured — to attract them.

And a few days earlier, the watering hole we were hunting over had been bone-dry. He had hauled in loads of water to create a puddle sufficient enough to attract the birds.

At sunset, we had gathered up 14 birds, one shy of a one-person limit.

“Sorry the shooting wasn’t better,” he apologized as we strolled back to where our trucks were parked. “A few days ago, we probably had 500 doves circling around us all the time.”

My ammo pail, now rattling with a pile of spent shotgun shells, suggested no apology was necessary.



John Cross is a Free Press staff writer. Contact him at 344-6376 or by e-mail at jcross@mankatofreepress.com.