SUNBURY —
Dove and early Canada goose season begins this Wednesday, Sept. 1.
For wingshooters like myself, that means that life can begin again. I don’t hunt waterfowl, but I’ll be gunning doves for about 10 days or so, and then it’s off to the prairies of Saskatchewan to pursue Hungarian partridge and sharptailed grouse.
There are a lot of things to dislike about dove season. The weather is too hot, there’s no work for a pointing dog and you can’t hit the little buggers, but I look forward to the opener each year anyhow.
It’s a chance to expend a few hundred shells and, if you’re lucky, kill a few birds, but more than that, it’s a social event.
We have a group of guys who get together each year for three or four days, and the actual hunting is only part of the fun. We gather for a big dinner each evening, and by the time everyone calls it a night, we’ve solved all the problems confronting a troubled world ... at least until the next evening.
Dove hunting is a good way to sharpen up your wingshooting skills, but being that it’s all pass shooting, the presentations are not much like the ones I’ll encounter for the rest of the year. I’ve often thought about doing some jump shooting, where you’d walk along field edges and flush birds, but I’ve never actually tried it. Maybe this year?
I guess I’ll take my dog along again this year, even though she’s more a hindrance than a help. She just doesn’t get how sitting still and bird hunting go together. She’s very good at the bird hunting part, but she still needs a lot of work on the sitting still part. If I do happen to down a bird, though, she’s excellent at finding and retrieving them. Doves are notoriously hard to find sometimes if you don’t have some canine help.
The early dove season runs until Sept. 28, with hunting hours from noon till sunset and a limit of 15 birds per day.
Early Canada goose season also begins on Wednesday and continues through Sept. 25 with a daily bag limit of eight and a possession limit of 16. There certainly doesn’t seem to be a shortage of geese in this area, but I don’t know too many people who shoot limits on a regular basis. I’m told the birds smarten up pretty quickly once they’ve been shot at a few times.
I’ve been following the discussions about a proposed OHV park in Northumberland County and I can definitely see how such a park would bring tourists and their dollars into the area. However I hope that the stakeholders in these discussions realize the impact such a park will have on some very nice wildlife habitat in the proposed park area.
I hope some sort of compromise can be reached which will set aside some land for the OHV users and leave some land undisturbed for those of us who enjoy hunting, dog training, hiking, bird watching and other non-motorized activities.
My bird dog, by the way, agrees. She doesn’t ride an OHV, but she does love to sniff grouse and woodcock, and there’s some doggone good habitat out in the area of the proposed park.
n E-mail comments to jdsteese@yahoo.com
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Don Steese's Outdoors column: Gotta love some dove
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