Loving Doving : Opening Day of Season Is a Time for Hunters’ Camaraderie

In conspiratorial gatherings, under cover of camouflage and night, the men and boys told hushed tales of the elusive bird of peace.

How it swoops and arcs and dives headlong into the safety of a manzanita. How to tell the whitetail from the mourning. How tasty it is, barbecued, with a little garlic.

It was the opening day of dove season Thursday, and hunters arrived as early as 4 a.m. at the Antelope Valley Sportsman’s Club to prepare for what club owner Dave Whiteside sees as a near-sacred ceremony of life, death, friendship and pursuit.

“It’s a prehistoric ritual of guys getting together early in the morning, watching the sun rise and enjoying nature,” he said. “You go for the aesthetics, the camaraderie.”

And, if you’re a true hunter as opposed to a trigger-happy blaster, Whiteside said, you go prepared for--even looking forward to--days like this, when most of the birds have nested to escape a blustery west wind or already headed south to Mexico, sensing the nearness of autumn.

“Nothing,” said Joe Toy as he eyed an empty sky and listened to the faint thumps of a shotgun in the distance.

After “drinking coffee, eating doughnuts and lying to each other” while waiting for daylight, Toy, his brother Norm, and friend Gary Farquhar--all three in the electrical wire business--loaded their weapons, filled their pockets with shells and headed into the brush west of Lancaster to seek their fist-size prey.

*

Two hours later, not a bird in the bush, let alone in their hands, the three returned to smoking cigarettes and swapping tales of minor birdshot wounds suffered at the hands of said trigger-happy blasters. And of doves.

“They fly fast, they make quick turns--they’re hard to hit,” said Norm Toy.

Patrolling the brush and withering scrub oaks around a natural spring that is nearly dry, a civil engineer from Northridge and his 17-year-old son discussed the average number of shots needed to down a dove, settling on 9.5.

The father and son had each bagged just one after four hours, and shot at a few others.

“You’ll have a line of guys, everyone will get off two or three shots, and he’ll still be flying,” said the engineer, Don Kalanick.

Then, as he finished speaking, a voice 100 yards down a gully called out “Behind you!” Kalanick wheeled, leveled his double-barrel, and fired one shot. The dove dropped, leaving a small halo of gray feathers hanging 10 feet in the air.

“Not bad for an old guy,” the civil engineer shrugged, wrapping one arm around his smiling son.

The experience of shooting a dove draws hunters daily to the 1,250-acre hunting ranch during the two-week September dove season. (Another season begins Nov. 1 and ends Dec. 26.)

They find there a quirky meeting place of old and new, of tradition and change, of 1990s Los Angeles and turn-of-the-century Wild West. The clubhouse sits on the site of an old stage stop, and members pull up to it in $25,000air-conditioned pickups. Hunters wear camouflage T-shirts, to which they pin paper numbers so Whiteside and crew know who’s where and who’s who.

And while insisting that the drive to hunt is at least partly instinctual, hunters at the club acknowledge that paying $575 for a season of hunting is not the way early humans got their protein.

But early humans didn’t live in a county of 9 million people, they note. And besides, going home with dinner is hardly the point.

“It’s for kids and their dads,” said Kalanick’s son, Corey.

Yet Corey added that it’s not easy to explain the appeal of the sport to his Granada Hills High School classmates, most of whom have never held a shotgun, nor flushed a dove from its roost. And many would never want to, either.

Whiteside has heard all the criticisms before, and for each he has an answer.

“Because we have a gun in our hands, some consider us on the level of felons,” he said. “If you equate fun with killing, there’s something wrong with you. . . . Your true hunter doesn’t just shoot things--he cleans it and eats it and relishes it.”