Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 5, 1993 TAG: 9309050132
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Bill Cochran
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Crouched and camouflaged, Dudley, 18, had positioned himself in a clump of pokeweeds that the silage cutters had left around a power pole in a Bedford County corn field.
When doves came zooming across the field in singles, pairs and small flocks, Dudley's gun would boom, but few birds tumbled from the sky.
Instead, they'd veer to the right or left and often speed by positions manned by Ricky Vance or Neil Vance. The cousins weren't doing much missing.
"I like that dude up there," Ricky said of Dudley. "Pole Man. He's helping me out. He's a real nice fellow."
Mike Gillispie, a dove hunter for 25 years, also was cleaning up on Dudley's misses.
Then Dudley started doing right. Two doves winged by and he dropped both with a single shot. Later he gunned down a pair, taking one on his first shot; the other on his third.
"I figured out I wasn't leading them enough," he said. "When I got my sight on a bird, I was pulling the trigger. I didn't start hitting them until I began to get on a bird and pull the trigger as I was following through."
It was a damp day, with a gentle rain making red putty out of the clay soil. But the rain was too late to save the corn crop where Dudly and the others hunted. The farm family who owns the land was well into the harvest, cutting 200 acres where normally only 50 would have been cut by opening day. The early harvest had scattered the doves.
"Normally they only have two or three fields cut and the doves are concentrated," said Gillispie. "But you can't complain about today's weather. This is a perfect day. Birds will fly all day long on a cloudy, misty day. They don't like the sun on their backs. They will sit in the trees when it is too hot."
A decent number of birds had winged out of the field when the hunters entered it to claim stands at mid-morning. By noon, the birds began to trickle back. Hunting from a clump of corn stalks on a knoll, Gillispie had reaped half of his limit of 12 at 1 p.m.
Most flights came out of the west. "They are staging on those trees over there," Gillispie pointed out.
A closer look revealed the pertly silhouettes of an increasing number of doves gathering in the limbs of dead trees across a highway from the corn field.
"Here they come," Gillispie shouted.
At 1:15, the sky over the corn field filled with doves. The gray-brown speedsters came in flocks of 25 and 35, as if possessed with the idea of crashing through lines of booming shotguns to get into the field where they had fed for several days. They soared on whistling wings, with almost military precision.
The hunters filled the sky with lead, their volleys sounding like 4th of July fireworks.
The action sent Dudley racing several hundred yards to a pickup to grab more shells. When his shots began to connect with consistency, other gunners started losing their touch. Things like leading and following through were forgotten amid the abundance of targets.
In five minutes, the blitz was over, and Dudley was searching for downed birds, combing corn stubble that looked like whiskers on the face of a Saturday night drunk.
"This is awesome," he said.
It wasn't always that way for other opening day hunters, who lamented a scarcity of doves. Much the same report came from opening day squirrel hunters. Hunting pressure for both species was surprisingly light, state game wardens reported.
by CNB