HUNTING MORNING DOVES OR, NAPALM SMELLS GOOD IN THE MORNING

By Mike Colin
The state of Michigan is a very pro-hunter state. You can hunt almost any creature imaginable and shoot them with any weapon you can find provided that you have the proper permits. Recently I decided to go hunting for morning doves. Now morning doves like to sit along gravel roads in small groups. Morning doves are a dangerous bird that attacks passersby’s with the voracity of a Big Foot monster. The only problem is that morning doves are not very big and are very hard to hit with even a shot gun shot. Of course another problem with morning doves is that because they are not so big you really need to get a mess of them at once if you are going to have them as a main course at dinner time.

I was able to solve my morning dove problems by visiting my grandpa. You see he is a collector of Viet Nam War era memorabilia. He has everything in his collection from machine guns to barrels of Agent Orange. Of course he can have all this neat stuff because he has the proper permits. My grandpa gets some of his stuff from other collectors but most of it he accumulated when he was in Viet Nam during the war. I guess he was one of those people you’d call a picker. You see he’d go around to military ammo dumps and pick out stuff he thought you could use back in the Michigan for hunting and fishing. He then sent the stuff back home through the mail. It cost my grandpa everything he earned just for postage. Just the cannon and rocket launcher he sent back was three months army pay.

Now when I went to see old grandpa he suggested that I use some land mines to hunt doves. He said the land mines he had were really sensitive. I told him that the only problem was that I intended to go hunting on state land and I wouldn’t want some hiker to get blown away. You see I was always taught to handle weapons in a responsible manner. My grandpa agreed and said that land mines might be overkill so he suggested that I use a mortar launcher. A mortar would be the perfect weapon to use against morning doves. You see not only would a mortar round eliminate several of the enemy doves at a time the doves would also be cleaned, feathers burned off and, cooked instantly. I’d have a meal ready to eat right there in the woods. My grandpa added that because doves had a reputation of being vicious if wounded the mortar would eliminate my trying to handle the nasty the little beasts up close.

Once I gout out in the woods on some state land I found a small opening in an old cedar swamp. There was an old partially graveled lumber trail road running through the center of the opening. I knew that was the perfect spot to hunt for morning doves. The next morning before daybreak I set up my mortar about 100 feet from the little opening. It wasn’t long before I spotted about a half dozen doves just sitting quietly out in the open. I dropped in my mortar round and fired. The only problem was I wasn’t use to setting the mortar cannons proper angle of projection so I overshot the morning doves by about 1000 feet.

Overshooting the doves would not have been much of a problem except that in Northern Michigan a lot of people don’t like to pay the liquor tax on whiskey so they set up their own still in the backwoods. Well, my mortar round happened to hit a still and suddenly there was a huge mushroom cloud rising up into the sky. I would have stood there looking at the mushroom cloud and all the trees that were vaporized but the shock wave knocked me to the ground and I laid there in a coma for three days.

After I got out of the hospital burn unit I decided I was not going to hunt morning doves anymore. Doves were just too difficult an animal to hunt especially when you consider the meager amount of meat on each morning dove. My soul is at peace with the nasty little dove. Instead, I can hardly wait to get some of my grandpa’s napalm to use when I go deer hunting next fall.