Doing the Dove Dance

For places to hunt the elusive ‘Carolina pigeon,’ try North Carolina’s game-lands fields.

The best dove hunt floating on top of my memory happened when I was about 12 or 13 years old. My dad and about a dozen of his friends drove to an Alamance County farm.

The group’s alpha male, Lennie, was a respected timber cruiser for a local sawmill who sharpened chain saws at his cigar smoke-filled repair shop at night. Dad and his friends often met at “Lennie’s place” every night after dinner — if they escaped their wives. From two to a half dozen trucks were parked outside while inside these guys spun yarns — some of them true — about their outdoors adventures, exploits of smarter-than-human bird dogs, wily old gobblers, big bucks, dumb relatives, crack shots they’d made and crack pots in Raleigh and Washington, D.C.

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