The Doves of La Paloma

The subject may have come up first while we were bouncing along a rutted dusty two-track in the back of a renovated old Dodge military truck-eight American shotgunners on the way back to our Argentine estancia after the first of three days shooting doves. Or it may have come up first when we were ensconced in the cool shade of the lodge's great room, boots off, with a light grip on a cold blue can of Quilmes, the surprisingly good local lager, or a glass of delicious malbec. The talk turned to tallies: how many boxes of shells, how many birds. It is how you track your days in high-volume dove shooting-a reference point after a day swinging muzzles through a sky streaming with birds-and your bird boy is scorekeeper.

"Javier's really sticking it to me," said my companion Wes Lang, shaking his head in a slight mock of self-pity. "I'll hit one in a big puff of feathers and expect to hear the click. Instead I look over and Javier's still watching the bird. It's going down, but if he doesn't see it come down, he doesn't count it."

Wes leads Caesar Guerini USA; he's a fine and stylish shot and has years of success as a competition shooter behind him. He is worlds ahead of me with a shotgun, and in this, my immersion course in high-volume shoots, I plan to post next to him on the line every time in hopes that I might observe something meaningful. But I sense a certain "shooting for score" mentality that can't be healthy but can be exploited, and I allow as how my man, Diego, counts every bird I think I've hit. "All I have to do is look over and ask, 'Yes?' and Diego says, 'Si,'" I gibe Wes. "I started out pointing to where the bird had been and saying, 'Yes?' but now all I have to do is make eye contact with Diego after I shoot and he says, 'Si,' and gives me a click.

"We can switch bird boys if it'll make you feel better," I offer helpfully.

There is a tally at the end of every day, both of birds taken and of those precious Argentine shotgun shells, and if you're serious, I suppose, you can do the math and determine a percentage, or you can compare one day to the next in a statistical endeavor to hone your game, like a golfer; we all do it to some degree. But for the awed initiate like me, or for the veteran still inspired by watching untold thousands of birds stream over, the tally helps answer what everyone must wonder: "How many birds was that? How many birds?"

We had come to Cordoba Province, to Luis Sier's La Paloma Riverside lodge, to shoot doves, only doves and lots of doves. The estancia's land, less than two hours' drive east of the city of Cordoba, includes a thick tangle of some 7,000 acres of native habitat that is the roost for millions-perhaps tens of millions-of eared doves. Every morning the birds swarm out of their refuge to feed in endless fields of corn, soy and milo. Puny humans, earthbound and numbering in mere dozens and hundreds, intercept them along the way, strung along field edges marked by roads, fences or treelines, or scattered through rolling, untilled scrubland.

The American shooters stream here too, congregating at the airport gate in Miami for the overnight flight to Santiago, Chile. In that capital city's wonderful modern terminal, the flock gathers for the next LAN Airlines flight across the Andes to Cordoba. It is a long way to come: Depending on your distance from and connections to Miami, you may spend the better part of two days traveling from your door to the lodge. Perhaps this also motivates the score-keeping, as a rationalization for such madness.

But once you're on the ground, the birds and the shooting are all they're said to be and more, and it's easy to get hooked by the exhilaration-the fun-of so much of each. On our first morning afield, slowed by travel-weariness, I was dumbfounded by doves streaking through a damp morning fog. The birds certainly were coming close enough, many only 20 or 25 yards up, but the low sun brightened the curtain of clouds so that target acquisition seemed always too late. With my first box of shells, I may have taken two birds, and then only by luck of the light having changed and them becoming visible earlier. Most were on me and getting over before I knew it, and incoming birds that low are flying fast by the time they're overhead. I thought I read a certain grim reproach in Diego's face, as I knew that my frantic, jerky muzzle-waving was a poor display.

I watched Wes for a few minutes from 40 yards up the grassy path where we were posted and saw that he was taking bird after bird, even some doubles. "How the hell can you see them?" I called over.

"You have to take them farther out in front, Ed!" he yelled back-as if I'd asked a different question.

I had read and sought plenty of advice in preparation for the trip, and this seemed an appropriate time for a review. Some of the plainest came from New Jersey-based shooting instructor Paul Smith, who said he'd seen too many clients flail themselves into a pulp on the first day. I'm not particularly that kind of shooter, driven mad by the sight of birds, but it was worth remembering: Pick a target, take your time, and at first take only high-confidence shots. I remembered, too, a co-worker's observation that in most settings you can start to track the birds' paths; that from the chaos of the flights, patterns can be discerned, probably as the birds respond similarly to the topography. Eventually those patterns can be anticipated, those routes grooved, and those birds become high-confidence shots. Indeed, once you get into a flow, you can find yourself making variations of the same shot again and again and even begin to feel guilty that you're cherry-picking-and slacking off by lingering on the easy and leaving behind the lessons of more challenging birds.

How I longed for that.

In the afternoon our guides strung us along a muddy road that led through fallow, weedy fields and up a slight slope to an abandoned house that was settling into a grove of windbreak and shade trees. It was a beautiful view from my spot, with the little track leading 200 yards up to the trees and standing crops distant in every direction. The doves must have agreed, as they were taking in the view from really quite well up as they hopscotched from field to field back toward the roost.

At first I just stood and stared. These were no-confidence shots; impossibles. Seven of our eight didn't think so, as they were shooting regularly, as if you could even hit such a thing at 50 yards! They were. Wes was just up the way, taking birds far out front and anticipating targets a full moment before I thought of them as such. I tried swinging sooner so I might have a shot by about 45 degrees above the horizon, and I started having some success.

It was about here that I doubted some sound advice. For the trip, Wes had loaned me a 28-gauge Magnus Sporting gun, which was very handsome and had all the heft and feel of a full-on competition gun-32-inch barrels, extended chokes, a palm swell and grip that made for the most comfortable "shoot-all-day" feel I'd ever experienced. But the little 28 for 50-yard doves? Paul Smith had thought it a wonderful idea: plenty of gun and practical immunity from a bruised shoulder and mental tic.

I took a break to ponder things and wasted some time by switching out the Improved Cylinder and Modified tubes for something tighter, something that would really reach way up there. True: Tighter chokes do not swing your muzzles faster or establish proper long leads automatically. Also true: If you are missing high birds consistently, a tighter shot swarm tends to bring more of the same. Fifteen minutes later I was back to the first tubes, coaching myself with every lead to keep going, to swing through and open up extreme leads that seemed like eight, 10, 12 feet . . . . And the birds started to fold up and fall. I found that in one full day I was shooting better than I'd ever expected possible. Of course I was part of the way into my third flat of shells for the day, and with a dizzying array of targets, I was bound to learn something. (I typically shot "only" 12 to 15 boxes in each morning and afternoon session, probably by taking my time, taking breaks to learn from the other shooters and taking photographs. Twenty boxes per session, or 1,000 shells a day, is a steady-shooting average. Several of the experienced shots on the trip had stayed at La Paloma many times and were shooting upward of 1,500 shells per day through their 12- and 20-gauge autoloaders. Loading those pipes looked a bit like work to me.)

On the second afternoon I got into a groove that stands out as the most spectacular and thrilling shooting I have ever done. There was plenty of variety, and I was just tickled with pleasure at this newfound skill. We were lined along the luscious shade of thick, low trees, with hundreds of yards of open green cover crop before us. The birds are always flying, and the guides' hope is to get the Guns there as the flow is rising. This day the current of incomers was medium-height, and the shooting would have been simple had not most of the birds begun a swooping, veering course change 30 yards in front of the line. But I watched the flight patterns to see where the stream of doves nearest me were coming from 100 yards out, and I started anticipating far sooner which ones would be in range. Then I could watch for the break of their final curve and compensate in a moment. I started to bring down birds with half of my shots, and I started to see the point of keeping score.

Better yet, as the incoming current waned, more birds swirled up behind the trees and began pouring out the other way. I faced the field, looking up and back over my shoulder to catch sight of a dove clearing the trees in my peripheral vision. I established a rhythm, mounting the gun with the muzzles high, seeing the bird pass into the field and swinging down and past and just underneath for shot after shot. For maybe an hour I ran more than 50 percent-until the patterns changed and confounded me again.

Our crew was mostly good ol' boys-and old hands at this game. We would as easily compliment a neighbor's good shot as complain loudly in jest that the next fellow had cheekily poached "our" next bird. There were a couple of guys from Lang's shop who fix and clean Guerinis and hunt hard on Maryland's Eastern Shore. There was Alvin Loud, our outfitter with Shotgun Safaris International and a Floridian who has worked closely with Seminole Gunworks; he's been dove hunting in Argentina with Luis Sier for so long that he began booking hunts and even selling time-share-like leases at La Paloma Riverside. The camaraderie was good in the field and great around the lodge and dinner table, and we ate, drank and laughed with ease in the evenings as we told stories of the exploits of that day and many outings before.

The lodge was quite nice if not luxurious, and the staff was gracious, helpful and welcoming. Luis Sier himself was with us just one evening, as he oversees a small empire of Argentine sporting properties. You'll feel fortunate if you visit and have the chance to meet him in person and catch his huge personality and see the big cigar in his teeth and the rascal's glimmer in his eye. His estancia's greatest strength is its location, with amazing bird numbers available at several locations within a five- to 30-minute drive of the lodge.

And then there were the bird boys. I liked them just fine. If you get Javier on the first meeting, well, if you care about the tally sheet at the end of the day, just hope he's softened up a little. Or ask for Diego.


Author's Note: For more information on dove shooting in Argentina, contact Luis Sier Safaris, 011-54-291-4564913; www.argentinadoves.com, or Shotgun Safaris International, 321-403-7751; www.shotgunsafaris.com.


Ed Carroll is Shooting Sportsman's Associate Editor.

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