Matt Masters
Active member
The opening day of Early Teal and Dove season has to be one of my favorite days out of the year. We haven't had a big push of birds, but we were very lucky to have one field holding about 200-300 in it. They showed up like we wanted them to except on the far side from where we setup, luckily after the first shots at some that we had right in front of us more filtered back in. The first thing that made this hunt very special to me was that my girlfriend shot her first bluewing and it was also her duck to shoot while flying (others have been water swatted!). Two landed about 15 yards from her about a minute before shooting time and I told her to get ready and shoot one of those when it was shooting time. Shooting time came shots were fired and those two took off, I told her to take aim and shoot. She did exactly that, I watched her follow the bird, take lead, and pulled the trigger! Dead bluewing fell out of the sky at about 35 yards away from her and I was so excited and proud of her. I didn't even fire at the first groups taking off because I was watching her, I missed several chances at taken birds myself but it was worth it watching her do as I have told her. Second thing that made this hunt special was we fired into a wad of teal and after the carnage was over and we went to pickup birds one of them was double banded! We got back the information last night and it was banded on 8/22/13 in Manitoba! We ended the teal hunt with 17 birds and I was very happy about it to say the least! Later that evening we moved over to a fresh cut corn field to hoepfully kill a few doves. It was hot and it slowed down the amount of birds big time. We did really well for as little as we saw, I think we ended up with around 60 or so doves. I will let the pics tell the rest.
