With last year’s dove season opening up, everyone else was looking for feed fields to try their luck on Opening Day, but I had other ideas. August and late July had been exceptionally dry, and we had of course been spending afternoons and weekends out at the Swimming Hole in the pasture next to the house. I couldn’t help but notice how many doves came over, flared, and then swooped down to water at the edge of the Swimming Hole.

So, after all the youngsters had left the house headed out for a sunflower or corn field, I sat around with an extra cup of coffee, then slipped on my swim trunks and a tee shirt, grabbed Southpow, my left-handed Remington 870, a shell vest, and strolled out to the pasture. I settled in a comfortable chair by the west end of the Swimming Hole, loaded up, and sure enough, here came the doves. I had to pick my shots, so as not to sprinkle my house or the neighbor’s house, but that was no problem atall.

Time the youngsters got in from the field with maybe two limits total between the four of them, I was through breasting out my limit, had them washed, and marinating in Dale’s Sauce for that night’s supper.

Used to be, we’d have 100 hunters for Opening Day. Back in the old days, if a farmer had a 25-acre milo or sunflower field, surrounded by 20,000 acres of cotton and green soybeans, he’d have a concentration: all the doves for 20,025 acres would be feeding in that little field, and they’d stay for a week or two, providing you didn’t shoot it out, and you let the doves come in to feed unbothered after you and your guests had limited out.

Then twenty years or so ago, the corn market suddenly exploded in the Delta, and instead of that little sunflower or milo field being surrounded by 20,000 acres of cotton and green soybeans, it was adjoined by 12,000 acres of corn, 2,000 acres of cotton, and 6,000 acres of early short-season soybeans. The corn and beans were combined about two to three weeks before Opening Day, and then instead of the doves on 20,025 acres having one feed field, they now had 18,025 acres of feed fields. No one could keep a concentration, because there were too many other places for doves to go. The best hunting nowadays seems to be late sunflower fields during the second season, after the grain fields have been harvested and cultivated.

So, heading out to the water hole was a natural thing to do and I was successful, though it would not have worked for more than a couple of hunters, who would be careful about where they shot.

Late in the season, Big Robert and the Dead Duck Club men would hunt the banks of the Mammy Grudge canal, back behind the house, where doves were coming to water. Uncle Shag used to have a favorite stand close to a locust tree: everyone knows how doves love to light in thorn trees. I once saw Uncle Shag get a triple on doves, though why the second and third birds didn’t panic when he dropped the first one, I’ll never know. They just kept on loafing toward that limb.

Sammy, Little Dave, and I went out to that same canal one December after a freeze. The water was still running in the canal, but the mud was freezing on the banks, and the icy mud was freezing on the legs of the doves as they came to water. It would collect into ice-mudballs until they couldn’t fly more than a few yards. We shot them like quail for the first few minutes, until we realized what was wrong with them, and how many doves were affected. It was awful, but they would have never lived through the night anyway. We took sticks and whacked our limits in the head before dark. When we went out early the next morning, there were hundreds of dead doves, and the coons, possums, skunks, bobcats, and coyotes – plus tame dogs and house cats – had mopped up on the feast.

Water Hole doves are a good bet for a hot, dry first season. But here’s one piece of advice from the Brownspur Swimming Hole Hunt: Do NOT discharge a 12-gauge shotgun straight up at a dove, while floating on an air mattress!