First time dove hunting today. My buddy and I both have quail experience but nothing on doves. Armed with just the DFG map of the Niland area fields and a bunch of coffee we left Lake Elsinore and arrived at the first field around 7:30 this morning. Not knowing what to expect or do we sat around a couple fields and saw only a handful of birds flying and was presented with just a couple shots, zilch. We obviously were sitting around in the wrong zip code. We did see three female and one male ring neck pheasant roaming around in the first field we posted up at and that was cool.
We ran into a water district guy who said we should check out a silo to the south so we ran down there and found lots of no hunting signs and couldn't locate anything that resembled what he described.
Not to be discouraged we drove back north of Niland to a different field on the map. As we pulled on the ditch road a couple doves flushed. Another hundred yards and a couple more flushed. Not willing to go home skunked we stomped the ditches around two fields for 2 1/2-3 hours and flushed a whopping 12-14 birds and got 8.
We didn't see any other hunters. Most people I talked to said you post up and wait for them to fly so I'm sure there is a much easier way to dove hunt but at least we ate a few poppers tonight and have a humerus story about dove hunting the hard way. It is also tons'o'fun to fish out a floating bird from a ditch that has over head super steep, soft banks, glad I had a shovel in my truck to get up and down the banks to retrieve it.
We ran into a water district guy who said we should check out a silo to the south so we ran down there and found lots of no hunting signs and couldn't locate anything that resembled what he described.
Not to be discouraged we drove back north of Niland to a different field on the map. As we pulled on the ditch road a couple doves flushed. Another hundred yards and a couple more flushed. Not willing to go home skunked we stomped the ditches around two fields for 2 1/2-3 hours and flushed a whopping 12-14 birds and got 8.
We didn't see any other hunters. Most people I talked to said you post up and wait for them to fly so I'm sure there is a much easier way to dove hunt but at least we ate a few poppers tonight and have a humerus story about dove hunting the hard way. It is also tons'o'fun to fish out a floating bird from a ditch that has over head super steep, soft banks, glad I had a shovel in my truck to get up and down the banks to retrieve it.
