Colorado Dove Opening Day 2011

This year it was a perfectly comfortable morning for the opening of dove season in northern Colorado. The day heated up fast but remained pleasant and bug-free if you stayed in the shade. We topped out in the mid-90s, which is hot for us but pretty nice compared to our sweaty friends in states south of us who hunted in 100+ degrees. Hope they kept their dogs watered.

In Colorado there is a reliable and unfortunate pattern to the dove migration around opening day. We see dove everywhere all summer long – perched on wires, cooing on roof tops, swooping from tree to tree and pooping on my truck – but sometime a week or so before 9/1 they disappear. This is usually attributed to a late August cold snap but this year it was hot up to the 1st and yet their pattern of disappearance still held true. I had not seen a dove for a week when we headed out on Thursday morning. We hunted with the nice folks at Longmeadow. They have about 4,000 acres and have built a really nice event center about an hour and a half northeast of Denver.

Though the number of birds were greatly diminished from a week or two ago, there were still plenty around for us to get our limit, which we did before lunch. It was not what you would call solid white hot action but there were times when we had more birds coming in than we could handle. It was a great start to the bird hunting season.

My hunting buddy enjoying a morning of truancy.

Bird dog tongue thermometer . . .this reads a comfortable morning in the mid-70s.

Full extension reads mid-90s and I’m sweating my teats off. The bird dog had a good time fetching and chewing up the downed birds. She is built to be on the move and when the shooting slowed she would bark at us in frustration, begging us to get off our asses and go hunting.

Dove enjoyed being shot with a pretty gun . . . I think.

Two limits in the shade of a Cottonwood.

My friends ability to levitate was interesting at first but then became irritating as the morning wore on.