TAKING FLIGHT IN MEXICO : As Doves Head South, So Do the Hunters

It’s 6:45 a.m., the birds are flying, and the sun and the guns are blazing over the safflower field.

“Jimmy . . . over!” guide Rafael Valle shouts to Jim Cauley of Long Beach.

But in the seconds it takes Cauley to locate the birds, they are out of range.

Cauley, settling back into the shade of a truck, sighs.

“I’ve been trying to teach Rafael for 20 years how to call a bird: ‘Izquierda, derecha, atras, enfrente, arriba (left, right, behind, in front, above).’ ‘Over,’ it could be anywhere.”

No importa. A minute later Rafael yells again: “Jim!”

Only this time he points and Cauley picks off a white-wing dove with a single shot from his 20-gauge. The bird flutters down into a low hedgerow, but Cauley’s springer retriever, Jammer, can’t sniff it out. A tractor is approaching.

At the last instant, the driver stops and Valle scoops up the bird. Jammer returns empty mouthed.

“Jammer, I don’t want to talk to you,” Cauley says.

This is dove hunting, Mexican style. Sometimes it’s confusing, often amusing but seldom dull.

This day, Valle has led 25 hunters to a quarter-mile-square field near the border at the Colorado River. The object: white-wings-- palomas a las blancas-- but not mourning doves-- huilotas, or tristes (sad)--which are not yet in season but just as numerous.

Each time a bird comes within range, identification becomes a problem.

A hunter, Barry Taylor of Corona, calls, “White-wing!” and raises his gun.

“No,” Valle says, “mourning dove.”

Cauley and Valle say the white-wings are distinguishable by their lower line of flight, hesitation wing beat, square tails and the white bands on their wings.

Nevertheless, to Cauley’s disgust, some of the hunters are shooting indiscriminately, which could cost them a fine and confiscation of their weapons if the game wardens come by, as they do almost daily.

Valle says, “This is the best flyway for the white-wings from Arizona to Mexico.”

And yet he says there were five times as many birds the week before, until a storm blew through and drove most of them south. He shows snapshots as proof--up to 150 birds in a flock.

“This isn’t even mediocre,” Taylor says. “But it’s better than the first year I shot down here--which I thought was the best anywhere.”

By contrast, the hunters say, dove hunting in the United States is over after opening day. The few birds there are either shot or frightened into hiding.

The California seasons for both species of doves run Sept. 1-15 and Nov. 11-Dec. 25. The daily limit is the same--10--but some days a hunter doesn’t see that many. The Mojave area prospects appear poor, the Imperial Valley near the border better.

South of the border, it seems, the birds just keep coming.

“Down here I would normally expect to be able to shoot a limit of birds just as confidently at the end of the season as I would at the beginning,” Cauley says.

A flock of about a dozen flies over. Cauley drops one, Taylor another.

“That’s it for me,” Cauley says.

He has his limit. It is 8 a.m. All the others will have theirs by 9.

An observer wonders why the hunting should be so different a few miles apart.

Surely, the birds don’t know which country they’re in. Surely, considering the disparity in resources, the Mexicans don’t manage their game any better than the Americans.

“They have the best game management in the world,” Cauley says. “They don’t farm every field. There are plenty of small trees and bushes. Look at Imperial Valley. That used to be a paradise for bird hunting. Now there isn’t anyplace for a bird to stop. Here you’ve got a farm and then some open brushland--everything a bird needs to survive.”

Cauley has been hunting in Mexico for 20 years. The plates on his van read “BAJA JIM.” He retired nine years ago as a production supervisor at a Long Beach shipyard to run the Mexican Hunting Assn. of Long Beach. He works there full time, arranging the paper work required of foreigners to hunt in Mexico.

Munching on a manta ray taco in a Mexicali cantina, he says, “The original birds that were here were released in the Imperial Valley. Then seven, eight years ago two things happened. One, Mexican farmers, who had been raising cotton, finally became aware they were exporting more in dollars in food grain than they were exporting in cotton, so they started growing more grain.

“Second, asparagus became very popular here. It does the same thing safflower does--provides excellent, dense protection for the birds when they’re nesting, and it’s also harvested later in the year, so the harvesting doesn’t affect the growth of the birds.”

Cauley’s is one of three businesses in Southern California that specialize in handling the Mexican hunting permits. The process involves obtaining consular certificates, hunting licenses, guides and military gun permits--the latter signed and stamped by a general.

Even experienced Mexico hunters don’t try to do it themselves.

But now the game has changed. The Americans no longer can obtain the licenses directly from an office in Mexico City. Instead, they are sent to the Mexican outfitters to distribute.

Joan Irvine, who operates Romero’s Mexico Service in Newport Beach, says: “All the outfitters have gotten together and have established what they call these hunting packages this year. Before we would just obtain a consular certificate, a hunting permit, a gun permit, and that was it.”

Consequently, the prices have soared. Hunting doves cost only $125 last year; this year it’s $250. Other game--ducks, pheasant, quail, mammal--have gone up accordingly. A California license costs $19.25, but often it’s not worth even that.

Apparently, the Mexicans have come to realize what a good thing they have going. Cauley says he’s still working with the same people who performed much of his legwork, but the arrangement has turned around.

“They used to be my messengers,” he says. “We would set the prices based on the price of the licenses and the consular certificates, and whatever little mordida (bribe) that we don’t like to talk about that had to go around, and then there’d be a service fee, (which) in my case was a $15 fee for each license.

“‘Then the organizers got control of the licenses and they set the fee. Now I work for them. I get a percentage off the top--which, incidentally, is more than I set for myself under the old (system). (But) I include the $10 dues to the association in the package.

“Don’t misunderstand me--they’re not so far out of line. And I have to admit the Mexicans are smarter than I was.”

Cauley now collects a 20% profit, as do the other agencies. But business is down, probably because of the fee increase. Cauley said he had done 259 hunters this year, compared to 415 at the same time last year.

The Mexicans also attempt to exert tight control among themselves. Currently, there is something of a power struggle between locals in Baja Norte and Sonora who think the licensing should be controlled by the individual states instead of the central authority in Mexico City.

The final sheaf of permits runs several pages and must be signed by an organizer. Curiously, Valle’s wife, Margarita Villalobos de Valle, is currently the only person in Baja Norte authorized to sign.

A cynic might presume that the next step would be for Margarita to require a hunter to hire their outfit--Baja Bird’s Paradise--as guides before affixing her signature. Valle charges $250 for a weekend, which includes three evening and two morning hunts.

But Cauley says she hasn’t chosen to exercise her leverage. Yet.

Valle protects his interest in other ways. Leading a caravan of hunters to the shooting site some 40 miles east of Mexicali, he takes a circuitous route a New York cabbie would admire--dusty roads along irrigation canals, switchbacks through unnamed humble villages, dodging chickens, until only Valle knows how he got there.

Finally, they arrive at a site overlooking a wide arroyo overgrown with cachanilla and salt cedar. A few parched cottonwood and pepper trees provide limited shade. Some palms in the far distance locate Summerton, Ariz., across the border.

The trip out took 1 1/2 hours, the trip back, by a direct route, half the time.

You’re thinking, OK, I can find the field myself by going back the way we returned, but there’s another problem. Valle has locked up the best fields for his customers by agreement with local ranchers. If a stray hunter shows up, Valle politely asks him to leave.

Surprisingly, few hunters complain.

Tony Hernandez, a teacher at Riverside Community College, has been hunting in Mexico with his wife Caroline since 1966, most of the time hiring Valle, whom he calls “Mando,” as his guide.

“Mando scouts around,” Hernandez says. “He knows where the birds are. There’s always a hassle, but to me it’s worth it.”

Bill McQuade, a finish carpenter from Garden Grove, says, “The thing about Southern California is that whatever you want to do and wherever you want to go, there’s a lot of people. This is my last frontier.

“The hassle is what makes Mexico great. It keeps the numbers down. Even a minimum hunt here is far superior to anything in Southern California.”

Cauley: “You haven’t seen birds until you see a whole mountainside rise up.”

The rising cost is not all bad, says McQuade.

“The sad part is that it’s driving out the little guys,” he says. “But the time and effort and expense it takes to get here culls out the slob hunters. You have a better class of hunters down here.”

One obvious benefit is that the birds are so numerous that hunters seldom have to track a bird down low, endangering someone on the other side of the field with a level shot. There is almost always a safe, vertical shot.

“I call it shooting, not hunting,” McQuade says. “Rafael has already done the hunting. We’re just shooting targets.”

Another hunter who wasn’t as pleased with the new arrangements said he swore off hunting in Mexico when the fees increased this year, then changed his mind.

“It’s worth the aggravation,” he said. “You go to Blythe (Calif.) on opening day and get two or three birds.”

The same hunter didn’t hire Valle but sought out his own grounds. Some say they don’t need a guide in Baja.

“Here, I’m always over the limit,” he said. “Right now it’s worth the price. But if it goes up one dollar more, they can have it.”