Opening day hunters treated to a whitewing tornado

Published 4:35 pm Saturday, September 8, 2018

WINTERS — By any standard, the field was the worst looking option any dove hunter had ever faced.

In a dry year that made farming of any sort difficult if not impossible, the field of giant black oil sunflowers had made and was already harvested. All that remained was stalks that were maybe 6 inches tall. Otherwise it looked like just another dusty, dry field in a part of the state parched by a lack of rain and high temperatures since April.

Just before sunrise, about 15 Tyler hunters poured out of pickup trucks to surround the field. There were no trees, no brush, no nothing to blend in to, so the hunters just set up their stools next to their trucks and waited for enough light after legal shooting time to spot the birds as they flew into the field.

The night before, guides from Rock House Ridge Lodge in Coleman had told the hunters that they would see the mourning doves first as is usually the case. If everything went right, white-winged doves would begin to flock in an hour later. However, doves being doves, they didn’t recommend waiting if they had early shots.

The attraction to the birds was spillage from the harvest, tiny sunflower seeds that the hunters could not see on the ground that the birds had honed in on in recent weeks.

At first light there was no rush of birds into the field and, being opening day, that had everyone in the field concerned. Because of the dry weather only a small percentage of the fields in the Big Country have anything for the birds to eat and the prospects overall were not great.

“The crops were planted, but we never had the rain on any of it,” said longtime outfitter Dusty Greaves. “A lot of times the sunflowers will come up through the wheat, but that just didn’t happen.”

Greaves said because of the drought he lost a number of fields he has leased in the past and the ones he does have are more isolated than normal. The upside is that the fields with a food source are probably going to have birds throughout the early season.

That is the case around Winters where there was enough rain to make a crop.

Eventually a few birds began to trickle into the field, mostly in one corner. A couple of hunters there officially opened the season on the early arriving mourning doves while the others watched.

And then, as if someone had flipped a switch, the whitewings started to appear. At first they flew across the pasture to the north. The first was a flock that seemed to be 300 yards long and looked more like blackbirds than doves.

It was only a few minutes more before shots began to ring out around the field. With each moment the number of blasts increased and soon they were coming from all directions. From wherever they had roosted the night before, the whitewings were piling into the field.

Slightly larger than mourning doves, whitewings can be as challenging to shoot because they often fly higher and are just as fast. In this case, however, the birds had already committed to the field and came in well within range of hunters with 28 gauge shotguns and up.

The numbers were impressive. Not the normal flights of 20 or so, but in flocks of 50, 100 or more. My son Thomas, who guided for geese and sandhill cranes around Lubbock while attending Texas Tech, said it reminded him of a goose hunt.

“They would come in and form a tornado and then drop down,” he said after being the first in the field to limit.

By 8:30 the slow morning jitters had been replaced by limit after limit and the birds were still flying. As the hunters left the field, each commented they had never seen the likes of doves before.

In a year in which the mourning dove hatch seems to be down, the whitewings seem to have thrived. Greaves said they only really started to build in numbers around Winters the last couple of years after farmers started planting the big sunflowers. And the dove numbers just keep building as the season goes along and other food sources disappear.

The sunflowers are used to make oil, as livestock feed and in birdseed mix and can produce from 1,000 to about 2,100 pounds of seed per acre depending on moisture during the growing season. Unless plowed under, they will sit on the surface available to the birds despite the weather.

It is hard to top a day like that and reality set in slightly on the second and final morning of the hunt. The group moved to the Abilene area into a field where Greaves had spotted an estimated 3,000 doves feeding the afternoon before.

Whether it was an approaching cold front with rain or opening day hunts around the area, the finicky birds did not show back up at sunrise in huge numbers. But again the numbers began to pick up around an hour after sunrise, although not anywhere similar to the day before. Still, by 9:30, most had left the field with their second day’s limit of 15. It was more of a mixed bag of mourning doves and whitewings than the previous day.

Despite the rough conditions, Rock House Ridge closed out the first two days with hunters averaging more than 12 birds per hunter, a good count under the best conditions.

For more information on hunting out of the Coleman area lodge, contact Greaves at 325-280-2809.