Photo by Mike Marsh.

Many a Georgia gun safe holds a scattergun that only sees the light of day in early autumn, when dove season rolls around: time to head to the fields with friends and family for some barbecue and good conversation, and the smell of gunpowder burned while trying to down an innocuous-looking feathered missile.

Consistently bagging doves tests the mettle of even the best wing-shot, as the little brown-feathered rockets can put on a midflight acrobatic show to put the Blue Angels flight team to shame. The birds also have an uncanny ability to know a split second ahead of a shot pattern arriving that it’s time to juke and dive their way unscathed on across the field.

A few wily birds even seem to take perverse pleasure in zipping and darting their way down the shooting line, leaving in their wake a box worth of smoking hulls, muttering hunters and empty shotguns. It’s been said that the national average is five shells per dove. If a box of shells puts enough doves in your game bag for one kabob stick, you’re a fair-to-middling dove shot.

As in any hunting, the key to success lies in scouting to learn the habits of your quarry. Just like most other game animals, doves follow a set routine. They’re normally found in areas having plenty of roosting perches. Around first light, they leave the roost and head to the fields to feed. Breakfast can make them awfully thirsty, so after that, it’s time to find a watering hole. That done, maybe it’s back to the field to top off the long meal with some tasty sunflowers or millet, or some other grain. Finally, they return to the roosting area to pass the rest of the day until their stomachs tell them it’s time to repeat the process in the evening.

Doves are strong fliers, so they don’t hesitate to travel many miles in seeking what they’re looking for. The favored watering hole can be miles away from the best grain field. But, they’re predictable once you determine the areas they are using.

Spend some time watching doves work the area and you can discover what corner of the field they fly into and from where they leave, and maybe get a general idea on where they are headed next.

Set yourself up on this flight path, and you should experience fast shooting when the birds are moving. But set up away from the flight pattern, and you only may get the occasional errant bird flying by within shotgun range. Scouting is the key to a good shoot.

Once you’ve got it figured out, the pattern should hold up for several days of good shooting. Eventually, resident birds figure out the game and change their habitats accordingly.

Also, migratory birds on the move come down the line, and the next wave to come in might not see things exactly the way the others did. Your pattern may need some tweaking to match the preferences of this new flight.

Although scouting is the best thing you can do to improve your success, a few other tricks are worth employing. One is camouflage: While doves may not equal a wild turkey in the sharpness of their eyesight, standing out like a sore thumb on a dove field is not likely to get any birds coming your way. Find something to hunker down against to break up your outline, so the birds come within easy range.

Another trick: decoying birds. Many dove hunters forgo decoys, which is a mistake, as doves are suckers for a decoy spread, and often veer off their chosen path just to see what that group of their buddies is doing over there. Commercial decoys of several types are available and very effective. Clip them on high branches or even long sticks stuck in the ground to mimic doves roosting on vegetation.