Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9509060118
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Well, it was something akin to horseshoes, that David Witt, Mike Lemaster, Brad Hunziker and Kirk Jackson were doing. They had set aside their shotguns and stuck a couple of short pieces of cornstalks into the moist, red soil and were tossing an ear of corn at them.
``Nice cob, man!,'' one of them shouted.
``I believe we are at an all-time low here,'' said David Liechty, a fifth companion, who was watching the corn tossing and glancing skyward occasionally hoping to spot a dove.
The only movement across the deep, blue horizon was a cadre of fluffy, white clouds that stretched all the way to the Peaks of Otter.
``We had a good shoot last year,'' said Liechty, who lives in Roanoke. ``I was coming out with a limit at 1:30.''
When 1:30 came and went Saturday, the hunters had been close to only one dove, flushing it and sending it toward a green treeline where a grateful hunter dropped it. It was about the only shot that could be heard above the roar of Bill Turner's corn-cutting machinery.
Liechty had figured the hunting might be tough.
``An old boy I went to school with, he burned a tank of gas yesterday driving around here and he said he saw more bucks than doves. But maybe some will fly later.''
``I hope they will come through,'' said Turner. ``They haven't been here yet this year. Last year, two or three weeks before the season opened, there were doves everywhere. By the time the season came in, most of them had gone. Who knows, when you are fooling with Mother Nature.''
Bill and his brother, Jim, open their dairy farm to hunters under a fee program that charges participants $10 per hunt.
``I have been telling them that the doves are few and far between,'' said Jim. ``But they stay, anyway. There is probably 65 or 70 out there hunting.''
A couple were knocking on Turner's door at 6 a.m., even though the dove season didn't open until noon.
``They wanted to check in, then go squirrel hunting, and have a dove hunting spot when they came back.''
Saturday also was opening day of the squirrel season, the beginning of a long line of gunning seasons that march into 1996.
Few of them have a more leisurely birth than dove hunting: No sitting in a freezing blind at daylight, no lung-searing climbs up mountain sides.
Just show up at noon, and BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
But it takes more than a place to shoot to make a successful hunt. More than a pile of shotgun shells, a cooler of drinks, a couple of companions to help keep the birds moving, a folding stool and a radio tuned to the ball game. It takes doves, and that was the major ingredient lacking in many fields Saturday.
Some seasons you can blame a slow start on a late corn harvest. A freshly cut corn field is an ideal launching pad for a dove hunt.
It's not so much that the birds eat the corn shattered by the harvesters, explained Sam Austin, who was hunting in Roanoke County. A close-clipped corn field gives doves a landing spot, and it also will contain the seeds of wild grasses and weeds, a favorite food of doves.
There was no scarcity of corn cutting on the Turner farm, and elsewhere.
``We are just about through,'' said Jim Turner. ``We've cut close to 150-175 acres, something like that.''
``They could still come in here,'' said Liechty. ``I've seen it be nothing, then about 4:30 there is more than you can shoot at.''
by CNB