First Field Trip: A Grandfather's Gift to the Hunt

The morning I became a hunter wasn't dramatic. There was no ceremony, no big speech. My dad just handed me a 20-gauge Mossberg and said, "Keep it pointed at the sky until you're ready to shoot." Then he walked me out into a cut milo field outside of Pleasanton, Texas, in the grey dark of a September morning, and we waited together for the light.

I was nine years old. I remember the feel of the dew soaking through my boots. I remember the way the first dove came over so fast I didn't even get the gun up. I remember missing the second one, third one, and fourth one before I finally connected on a late-crossing mourning dove that dropped into the stubble about forty yards off to my left—and the way my dad looked at me when it fell.

That was 1974. I can still close my eyes and see that field.

Last September, I found myself watching my grandson Carter make the exact same face I must have made that morning five decades ago.

The September Ritual

If you're a bird hunter—really a bird hunter—you know that the September 1 opener is less a date on a calendar and more of a holy day. Families who haven't all been in the same place since Christmas suddenly materialize in sunflower fields and cut grain stubble. Old friends who've lost each other to jobs and cities find their way back to the same gates they hunted twenty years ago. Somewhere in rural Texas alone, more than 400,000 hunters head afield each dove season—more than in any other state in the country. This year all three Texas zones -- North, Central and South – all open September 1. But for a lot of us, the prep starts in August.

For Carter and me, it started with a call from his mother.

"He's been asking every week since school started," she told me. "He won't let it go. He wants to go hunting with you."

Carter is my daughter's boy. He turned nine in July, which—in my admittedly biased opinion—is exactly old enough. We spent an afternoon in the backyard with a pump gun and a clay target on a fence post. We talked about safe zones. We talked about leading a moving bird. We talked about what happens to a bird when the shot connects, and we talked about what it means to be respectful of that.

And then we went hunting.

What a Field Teaches You

We parked on a caliche road off FM 99 just before five in the morning and walked in darkness to the edge of a milo field where I'd scouted birds the week before. Carter finished a breakfast taco while I sipped my coffee. We set up in a mesquite draw with shooting lanes to the north and east, which is exactly where I wanted birds coming from with the morning light.

"How long do we wait?" he asked, about six minutes after we sat down.

"Until they come," I told him.

"And what if they don't come?"

"Then we wait some more."

He thought about that. "Dad says fishing is boring too."

I laughed out loud in the dark. "Dove hunting is nothing like fishing," I told him. "Fishing is slow. Dove hunting is chaos."

And then the light started coming up, and the first birds started moving.

White-winged doves crossed high from the southeast as the sky went from charcoal to purple to pink. A loose knot of mourning doves dropped low over the field edge and filtered through the mesquite. Carter was up and swinging before I even called the shot.

He missed the first three birds. Missed them clean, the way you do when you haven't learned yet to trust the gun—to let the barrel get out ahead of the bird and stay there. I watched him reload each time with that particular nine-year-old determination that doesn't allow for discouragement, just recalibration.

"You're stopping the gun," I told him between flights. "Let it keep moving. Follow through like you're pointing at where you think the bird is going next."

He nodded and filed it away.

On the fourth bird—a single mourning dove angling left to right at about thirty yards—he swung through and followed. The dove folded and dropped, and Carter made a sound that I recognized from the memory bank I've been keeping since 1974.

It's a sound that's part surprise, part triumph, and part something that doesn't have a word yet.

He picked the bird up gently, the way I'd shown him, and held it for a moment before putting it in the bird bag. Then he turned around with that grin.

Lord, that grin.

What Gets Passed Down

My father took me dove hunting because his father took him. It was never a formal decision—it was just what happened in September. My grandfather hunted with a borrowed Stevens over-under that was older than he was. My father graduated to a Remington 1100. I shoot a Beretta now and Carter's working with the same 20-gauge Mossberg I learned on, which still patterns as well as it ever did.

The guns change. The fields change. The faces change.

But the ritual stays the same.

Texas Parks and Wildlife has done a remarkable job of managing dove populations—mourning doves, white-winged doves, and Eurasian collared doves are all huntable and abundant. The daily bag limit of 15 birds keeps pressure sustainable while still making for a meaningful hunt. But anyone who's spent September mornings in a field knows the limit isn't really the point. You could fill a bag every day and still come home empty if the morning wasn't right.

The morning was right for Carter. By the time the midday heat had shut the birds down, he had put six doves in his bird bag with the kind of focused, grinding work that tells you a hunter is in the making. More importantly, he'd sat next to me for four hours in a field and asked questions. About the birds—which ones were mourning doves and which were white-wings, and how you could tell them apart at forty yards. About the shotgun—why some shells hit harder than others, how the choke tube affects the pattern. About the field—why the doves came in from the east in the morning, why they worked the edges of the mesquite instead of cutting across the open grain.

He was paying attention to everything. Kids, when they're genuinely engaged, are remarkable students.

"Can we come back Thursday?" he asked when we were loading the cooler.

I looked at my phone calendar.

"Thursday works," I said.

The Gift

Dove hunting doesn't ask much of you. It asks you to show up early, to sit still, to pay attention, and eventually—when the time comes—to hand all of that to somebody younger.

The birds will do the rest.

If you're reading this and you've been telling yourself your kid or your grandkid is too young, too impatient, too attached to a screen to appreciate a field at sunrise—I'd push back on that gently. In my experience, kids who seem disengaged from everything are often just waiting for something real to be interested in. Something with stakes. Something that asks for their focus and rewards it honestly.

Dove hunting is that thing. It's fast enough to hold attention, social enough to be comfortable, and forgiving enough that a nine-year-old with a 20-gauge and a willing teacher can find success. Bag limits in Texas are generous. The seasons run through January in most zones. And the September opener, whenever it falls—is waiting every year, like it always has been, in a field that smells like warm caliche and dry grass and something you can't quite put words to.

The sky will go grey again at five-thirty on a September morning. Make sure someone's next to you when it does.

Planning your next opener? Gear up at Dove-Gear.com—the Ultimate Bird Vest fits hunters from youth to 3XL, so everyone in the field can hunt in comfort.