On a Good Day for Hunters, No Peace for Doves

David Haydak of Potomac, with his impressive assemblage of shotguns, enjoys his shady perch on opening day of dove season in Culpeper. (By Angus Phillips For The Washington Post)
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Nellie, meantime, was having a great old time. She's had a long layoff, too, and when the guns started popping she was all ears. If you turned your back she was off like black lightning, highballing after some bird she'd seen downed 200 yards away. Her marks were unerring. She never failed to find the bird, then trot proudly back to me and deliver it to hand.

The wrong hand, obviously, which meant I needed to retrace her steps across the sunburned fields and turn the stolen goods over to the rightful owners. The chief beneficiary of Nellie's largesse was the party of David Haydak of Potomac, a club member who brought sons James and Jake along. They were closest to us and having a lot better success, which is always unnerving.

Haydak at one point beckoned me over, "and bring your dog," he said. She spent five minutes nosing around in deep cover for a bird he'd downed, but she came up empty. Meantime, I got to admire Haydak's impressive shotgun collection of matched, English-style double barrels and over-and-unders, which he had handsomely arrayed on a portable gun stand. "I bring two for each of us, just in case any don't work," he said.

With folding chairs, plenty of fat cigars and an ice chest stocked with cold drinks, Haydak was the picture of a civilized dove hunter on opening day.

And if the birds proved scarce in the early going, they didn't disappoint in the long run. About 4 p.m. the swarms began and the fields lit with the pop-pop-pops of shotgun fusillades. Doves started flying lower, as Cobb promised they would as the day wore on, and even Poole and I eventually managed to find our mojos.

Not that we were in any danger of exceeding the limit, which this year was raised to 15 birds a day in Virginia (Maryland held fast at 12, which seems like plenty to me). By 5, I had eight birds in the bag, Nellie was panting from sprinting all over the place, we were fresh out of water and the sweet scent of barbecued chicken wafted downwind from the nearby, shady glen, where clusters of old friends gathered.

"So," Cobb said as I trudged up the hill with my modest bag of birds, "how did Mr. Phillips do?"

"Mr. Phillips has drunk the cup of humiliation to the dregs," I responded, and saw more than a few heads nod in solidarity.

"And where is Mr. Poole?" Cobb wondered.

"Mr. Poole is cleaning up his spent cartridges, which may take all night."

"Oh, that's not necessary," Cobb said. "I like to leave them out there, so when archeologists dig this site up 1,000 years from now, it'll give them something to think about."

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Virginia dove season runs through Sept. 27, then reopens Oct. 4-31 and Dec. 27-Jan. 10.

In Maryland, dove season runs through Oct. 11, then reopens Nov. 15-28 and Dec. 20-Jan. 3. Maryland has 14 public hunting areas with sections managed for dove hunting; for the list and directions, go to the website http://www.DNR.state.md.us.