“The Emotional Opener” // Dove

Written by Rob Kinney, Photography by Rob Kinney and Amber Decell

Read Time : 5 Minutes or Fewer

Dogs pant, crickets chirp, and the sounds of laughter roll as the first peels of gunfire break the stillness of a September morning. We are back. 

I’ve heard Mr. Toxey describe the opening morning of dove season as the “emotional opener of hunting season.” I love that because it so perfectly describes what I think we all feel that first hunt in September each year. The weather is cooler (somewhat,) college football is on, and friends are gathered round tailgates telling stories and laughing freely once again. 

While it may only be the first morning of hunting season, it’s so much more than that. It’s the hand-me-down Bottomland shirts that our fathers and grandfathers wore, it’s seasoned labs getting their first taste of feathers since their last duck hunt the previous winter, it’s the rite of passage of youngsters picking up birds for their father and “uncles,” it’s a reunion of friends and family, it’s the joy of one more morning with your old dog in the field. What’s more, it’s the promise that even more good times are in store in the fall and winter to come. 

Dove season is special for so many reasons but perhaps none so important as the community surrounding it. Unlike the more individual and solitary pursuits of deer and turkey hunting or the small groups you’ll hunt with during waterfowl season, dove hunting is perhaps the largest group and greatest cross-section of ages of any outdoor pursuit you will ever participate in. It’s unique in that way and an important time for the hereditary transfer of knowledge and skill from one generation to another. 

While we may partake in the communal first fruits of hunting season on a morning in September, it’s the afternoons in May and June when a few men put plow to dirt to prepare the dove fields that made it all possible. A good dove shoot doesn’t happen by accident. It’s all the planning, and “dirt work” (as the late Mr. Fox used to say) by a few diligent Gamekeepers and some help from the good Lord with rain that makes it all possible.  

I’m grateful for dove season. It’s brought me so much happiness over the years and I look forward to its return each year with the same excitement as I had when I knew that I would be going on my first dove hunt as a boy.