Early bird special
IT IS 5:37 IN THE MORNING BESIDE the canal, dark but for slivers of light from a bulging pre-harvest moon high above the saline slick of the Salton Sea.
Shooting begins in 10 minutes, not counting overanxious pop-offs. Honeybees from hives scattered across the farmland bump into the hunters. By 10 the Imperial Valley heat will be enervating, by 11 oppressive, and by noon an eviscerating 112 degrees. That’s good, though, because doves fly farther south when it dips below 70.
Twenty yards up the canal, Curtis Fischer, 15, paces near his father. If the hunting is fine, he will miss first period at Calipatria High. Nearby, his 20-year-old brother, Russell, an emergency medical technician with a leg tattoo a Maori warrior would admire, checks his shotgun.
Shooting begins not like a war zone but like a backwoods Independence Day, more noise than flash. The muffled crack of a shotgun sounds like a plastic water bottle stomped in sand, and by 5:48, the Aquafina volleys pound the valley.
“Curtis! Above your head!”
Curtis swivels, fires, BAM! -- misses.
Russell drops to his knees. His semiautomatic 12-gauge pops. Two doves hit the sand.
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Droves turn out
For hunters, months of anticipation mercifully ended Wednesday -- a date, Sept. 1, that thousands await all year with goofy eagerness. Dove season, which lasts through Sept. 15 and then resumes in mid-November for 44 days, draws among the biggest hunting turnouts of the year and marks the first in the autumn series of hunts. The state Department of Fish and Game estimates 80,000 hunters bag nearly 2 million doves annually.
It is a democratic gathering, the everyman’s season, because dove hunters do not surmount peaks to track elk or deer or drag hulking carcasses through timber or brush. Dove hunters simply park the pickup or SUV next to a field, unfold a chair, pop the ice chest and let it rip. Shooters banter and blast away so near to one another that shot pellets sometimes rain on their feet.
Gear is cheap: boots, a hunting license, a $4 box of shells and a borrowed shotgun. It’s also accessible, just a few hours’ drive from Los Angeles to the Imperial Valley.
Until the waning days of summer, this agricultural oasis is famous for melons and cotton. Then thousands of people flock to its stubbly fields and miles of crosshatched irrigation canals to harvest birds. And like any crop harvest, the dove hunt amplifies the rhythm of the seasons, the passing of skills and lore: Kids ditch school, parents skip work, shops close on opening day.
Nearly 1 in 5 California dove hunters -- men and women of all ages and kids, lots of kids -- comes here, camping and booking hotel rooms as much as three years in advance.
One hunter from Colorado wrote the proprietor of the Calipatria Inn, “As usual, we are counting down the 51 weeks until we see you again,” and he requested perpetual opening-day room reservations for his group “until we die.”
The upscale hunters, wearing soft safari caps and bathing suits, smoke cigars and discuss the stock market and political conventions beside the pool at the inn.
Another batch barbecues wieners in front of RVs at Weist Lake.
A couple of years ago, a game warden spotted two hunters in Scottish kilts.
This year, a bunch of codgers donned white caps marked with the numeral 50 to celebrate five decades of blasting birds together.
Rodney Fischer, a lanky 43-year-old local, has chalked up 35 consecutive dove openers.
“My daddy put a 12-gauge shotgun in my hands when I was 8 years old,” Fischer recalls. “ ‘There’s a bird, Rodney, a nice shot, I’ll be right behind you, I’ll hold you up.’ I ran up there fast and pulled the trigger, but he wasn’t behind me. I fell flat on my butt from the blast. Even so, I hit that bird, yep, I hit that first bird. My daddy couldn’t believe it. He says, ‘You’re going to be a hunter, Rodney, yep, you’re going to be a hunter.’ ”
Here on opening day with his own boys, Curtis and Russell, he wears shorts and camouflage while standing on the sandy strip in front of the Vail canal at dawn. He used to start shooting when his graveyard shift ended at 7 a.m. Now, like many locals, he takes Sept. 1 off.
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Doves tuck and roll
DOVES tend to drink after feeding, and the Fischers want to shoot them as they migrate between fields and canals. Mourning and white-winged doves fly a similar pattern each day, from their nighttime roosts in orchards to a patchwork of fields to eat seeds. State wildlife officials, farmers and Desert Wildlife Unlimited, a conservation group, manage about 2,700 acres of wheat, safflower and milo around Calipatria to attract doves to acreage open to hunting.
Doves do not fly like quail, pheasant or geese. Quail launch like cruise missiles, and the hunter who delays misses. Pheasant wait until the last second to explode from cover and then fly straight. Geese are highfliers. But doves bob and weave, tuck and roll like World War II fighter planes in a dogfight. They easily swerve from a hunter’s bead and fly away fast.
“Forty miles per hour,” says Curtis.
“Maybe 20,” says Russell, who bags five doves in the next half-hour.
By 6:30, it’s a full blood red dawn, as John James Audubon, who shot and ate birds, put it in his Missouri River journals. (“So we took our guns and went after black-breasted lark buntings.”)
Rodney fires his over-under Brazilian 12-gauge, and his next kill falls in the canal. Cinnamon, a chocolate Lab bitch (hunters love to say this), leaps into the lazy current and retrieves the dead bird. As the dog shakes slowly in the orange glow, droplets whip from her body as if in a slow-motion shampoo commercial. Another shot rings, and Cinnamon plunges back in for more coolness.
“No bird! No bird!” shouts Rodney, and the dog breaks, as if bitten by fleas.
With so many shooters in one place, hunters hit each other while aiming for doves. About half the hunting-related accidents in 2003 occurred during dove season, state records show.
Johnny Gibson brought his two teenage daughters and preteen son out to the hunting fields in his white, double-cab pickup on opening day. They planned to hunt at Hoffsinger Road between fields planted with dove-friendly safflower, but Gibson scanned the crowds and told the girls that they wouldn’t get to use the new shotguns they got for Christmas after all. They went off to look for a safer spot.
Later on opening day at Zendejas Hardware in Calipatria, Vince Hernandez, a supervisor at a local geothermal plant, explains how he was hunting that morning with his 20-year-old daughter, Salina, when pellets struck her boyfriend’s forearm, breaking his skin. “He was bruised up pretty badly,” Hernandez says.
Worse than the shot-filled skies is the merciless desert heat. Eighty-one-year-old Edwin Scotton of Manhattan Beach became the only opening-day fatality after he separated from friends and wandered into the desert without water. His body was found in the brush near some railroad tracks.
“He went out dove hunting every year and did what he liked to do,” says his son, Steven Scotton.
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Fire up the grill
By 9 a.m., Russell Fischer bags his 10-bird daily limit.
A crack shooter, he started dove hunting at the same age Russell’s father was when he learned to handle a shotgun.
“It was a little scary,” he says. “I was most worried I would shoot somebody. The guns were bigger back then.”
Now he joins other successful hunters for an early lunch at Bianca’s Mexican American restaurant in town.
Young Curtis misses all his classes but makes it to his after-school job.
Rodney remains at the canal in hopes of getting his limit, but the doves begin to hunker down to escape the heat.
No matter. The Fischer men have scored a big head start on their objective: to put enough meat on the table for their annual Labor Day weekend family barbecue.
Grilled doves top the menu, and it takes three or four to fill a man up.
Two years ago, some of the 120 they killed ended up in “dove chili bean,” a legendary dish in these parts.
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On the Web: Watch a video of dove hunters in the fields of the Imperial Valley at latimes.com/dove.
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Steve Chapple is a Southern California-based freelance writer.
