Argentina Dove Hunting

Argentina Dove Hunting is an unbelievable experience for both the life-long wing shooter and the beginning hunter, alike.  Argentina's long tradition in dove hunting, as well as the breathtaking beauty of the landscape, make it a fabulous choice for your next dove hunting trip.

Enjoy this Argentina Dove Hunting Article by Greg Moats

You want to go where- and shoot what?)
It was a hot summer day, and, unfortunately, a dove took that inauspicious moment to land in a nest three feet off our balcony, ten feet from where my wife and I were discussing my proposed Argentina dove hunt.
"But Diego says that the dove in Argentina are eating over 40 percent of the crops- they're an infestation," I offered. "Think of it as a philanthropic mission to help Argentineans save their economy." I didn't think that she'd buy that idea, and she didn't. But she liked Diego, and that opened the door for more discussion.

Diego Gandolfo is an Argentine ex-patriot who is now a lawyer in Kansas city- and a sporting clays shooting buddy of mine. I first met him a few years ago at Powder Creek Gun Club and was immediately impressed by his style. He always shot a sidelock double, wore a snap-brim cap, and approached each shooting station as if he was on the Scottish moors shooting driven grouse. Over time, I came to learn that Diego's style was not a façade. He was truly a class act and a pleasure to be with.

When Diego asked me if I had an interest in joining him and a few fellow shooters from the gun club on a dove shoot in his home country, I was interested. He had been in contact with Luis Sier Safaris in Argentina and had set up a package trip that included food, lodging, hunting, and 2,500 rounds of ammunition for a modest fee. Luis Sier has been running package hunts outside Cordoba, Argentina, and elsewhere for years with the unstated guarantee that the hunters' biggest frustration would be limiting their shoot to only 2,500 rounds in three days of shooting. When I put a pencil to it, that figured out to be 1.7 rounds per minute if we shot consecutively for eight hours a day. I couldn't imagine it, but Luis had plenty of confidence (and testimonials) to back up his assertion.

Once my wife was fully enlightened of the details of the trip, she insisted that I go (I married way over my head). With the decision made, I immediately experienced what my psychology professor referred to as the "random event frequency phenomenon" where once you buy a car, you see identical ones everywhere. Every magazine that I picked up had an advertisement for or an article about dove hunting in Argentina. It seemed that everyone I talked to had been to Cordoba, knew Luis, or had shot doves in South America.

When getting bifocal lens replacements for my shooting glasses, the fellow taking my order used to live in Cordoba, was an avid dove hunter, and insisted that I would love the trip. On a business trip to Phoenix, I stopped at William Larkin Moore's premier gun room and talked with his son, Dan. Dan knew Luis personally and said that they were frequent clients of Sier Safaris; he assured me that I would be pleased. While stopping for a quick round of sporting clays at a range outside Los Angeles, there was a photo of a group of local shooters in front of a pile of doves that they had shot on a recent hunt in Argentina, and the range owner said the adventure was most memorable. I had to keep reminding myself that reality was rarely as enjoyable as something that was over-anticipated, but my imagination was having a field day with all I was hearing about dove hunting in Argentina.

The trip to Luis' Estancia La Paloma was a long one. After flying into Buenos Aires, we took a van across town to a second airport to catch a one-hour flight to Cordoba. It was dark after the two-hour drive from Cordoba to the estancia (ranch), so we had dinner, experienced so me fine Argentine wine, and went to bed.

The next morning's events weren't what I expected. I had anticipated a very early morning and a quiet approach to a blind at first light, as if duck- or dove- hunting in America. Instead, we had a leisurely-breakfast, packed our guns and gear in the back of Luis' Land Rover, and drove five minutes to a recently harvested field. There we were met by an "ammo truck," a camouflaged, ex-military vehicle, where we selected either Fiocchi 7/8- or 1 1/8s-oz. shells. We were then paired with a local bird boy who carried our shotguns to prearranged shooting stations along the backside of a fence line that divided two fields. Each station was initially allotted two cases of ammunition and a shooting stool. From the time we left the estancia, our entire shooting party felt a pressing sense of urgency to get to the field quickly.

There were doves everywhere. They looked like mosquitoes hovering over a stagnant pond, and we were anxious to get to our shooting stations before we missed the "morning flight." It was 8:30 when we were stationed, equipped, and ready to shoot. It was then that my imagination (or lack thereof) collided face-first with reality. We started shooting at a pretty frantic pace, worried that the morning flight would end soon. Before long, picking a single target from the continuous flow of birds started to make me dizzy, and with Pablo, my bird boy, continuing to fill my shooting pouch with cartridges, I soon lost count of the shells I'd fired.

After what seemed like minutes, I noticed that Pablo was opening the second case of shells. Glancing at the pile of blue hulls on the ground, I realized that I had gone through an entire flat of shells. I checked my watch; 9:05-250 shells in 35 minutes. Now, I would have to pace myself to not shoot 2,500 rounds during the first morning. The shots became more sporadic and the cadence began to slow as each shooter came to recognize that this wasn't a morning flight, this was a continuous flight.
Halfway through my second case, I decided to take a break. "No mas," I said to Pablo when he started to refill my ammo pouch with yet another box of shells. The shooting opportunities were no less superb, nor the quantity of birds depleted from when we had started shooting. I simply needed a rest. Grabbing my camera, I headed to the next shooting stand to take some action pictures. Photo opportunities on an Argentine dove hunt are similar to those at the Grand Canyon; just point your camera in any direction with any focal length lens, and you have a pretty good chance of taking a terrific picture.

As I approached Gary Wahlstrom on the shooting station to my right, he uttered one word, "Unbelievable." Gary is a Master-class sporting clays shooter, the president of our local gun club, and a far better shotgunner than I am. Gary was shooting an over-under sporting clays gun and had been regularly dropping birds in front of my stand 60 yards to his left. He seemed to be ignoring the easy shots and was concentrating on high overhead passers.

Diego had given his Spanish sidelocks a rest and joined us, happily puffing on a pipe. Far too gracious to say, "I told you so," Diego wore the contented smile of a father whose daughter was just voted homecoming queen. After a few congratulatory words to Diego for instigating the trip, we agreed that the folks back home wouldn't believe it. We still reserved judgment, however, on the outside chance that the morning's shoot was a fluke; we wanted to see how the afternoon's shooting would compare.

In the Land Rover on the way back to the estancia for lunch, the six of us were like freshmen on the bus ride home after our first day in high school. The sheer incredulity of what we had just experienced made us a little giddy as we recounted the morning's events.
After an all-you-can-eat lunch of prime rib (not the mid-day fare most of us are used to during a hunt), it was suggested that we take a quick siesta prior to returning to the field. The sheer volume of birds allowed for a pretty relaxed attitude. There was no need to hurry. There would be plenty of birds whenever we returned to the hunt.

At 2:30, the Land Rover took us to a different hunting location. This time we were lined up with our backs to a hedgerow of scrub trees that looked to be the Southern Hemisphere equivalent of Osage hedge apple. There was a wind blowing in our faces that was strong enough to make it difficult to keep our hats on, which made the birds fly faster and more erratically than they had during the morning. Some flew with the wind, perpendicular to the tree line, giving us straight-overhead incomers that were riding an afterburner tailwind. Others flew parallel to the tree line, presenting 90-degree crossing shots, while still others flew into the wind from over the trees to our rear, offering passing, going-away shots.

It was a sporting clays shooter's dream- or nightmare- of nearly every angle, speed, distance, and trajectory imaginable. Rabbits and springing teal were about the only target presentations that I didn't see that afternoon, and the volume of birds confirmed that the morning's shoot wasn't a fluke. As in the morning, Pablo was opening the second case of ammo sooner than I'd expected. Our shooting party was much more relaxed this afternoon than we were in the morning, however. Periodically, we would stop shooting and go visit-harass-our buddies or just sit in awe and watch the birds fly by. Nobody was anxious about passing up perfect shooting opportunities anymore.

Luis had hors d'oeuvres and the bar ready for us when we returned to the estancia. A master storyteller, schmoozer, and all-around jokester, our outfitter added a spark of levity to an already festive atmosphere. When I commented on the incredible number of birds, he explained that there was a 750-acre roost near the estancia. According to Luis, the doves have completely filled the trees and now roost on the ground. Since these eared doves, appearing quite similar to our mourning doves, don't migrate and have five hatches a year, they repopulate faster than hunters can harvest them. The damage they do to crops is immense (some estimates approach 50-percent grain crop losses), so some enterprising Argentineans have turned to guided dove hunts to help offset their financial loss. In short, these grey speedsters are to the Pampas region of Argentina what the prairie dog was to the western Great Plains of the US before government-sanctioned poisoning programs.
The remainder of the trip proved to be a carbon copy of the first day. About the only slight variation took place on the second afternoon, when two of us were stationed in the middle of an open field about 200 yards from the nearest tree line. This meant that birds were 30 yards high by the time they passed our position. Since the approaching doves were visible for a long distance, the tendency to mount the gun too soon and "ride" the birds with the muzzle was a temptation. It's easy to over-think a shot, measuring and re-measuring your lead, when you seemingly have forever to pull the trigger.

After a significant number of misses, I finally dropped a bird that seemed to be high enough to need an oxygen mask. In a pathetic attempt to make fun of my terrible shooting, I turned to Pablo and said, "Uno por uno-muy caliente," licked my finger, touched it to my thigh, and made a sizzling noise. Fortunately, he saw the humor in the gesture, laughingly picked up an empty cartridge box, and started to fan me with it. While the volume of birds remained the same, my hits that afternoon were less frequent-but far more gratifying.

On the third day, we all agreed that dove hunting in Argentina was impossible to imagine and difficult to describe. The volume of birds made it possible for a hunter to call his shots prior to going to the field. If a hunter wanted to shoot only right-to-left crossers at 25 yards that was possible. If he only wanted passing birds from behind, going right-to-Left on an oblique angle, that was possible, too.
On the drive back to the Cordoba airport at the end of the hunt, each of us recapped and evaluated our three days at Estancia La Paloma. For most of us, it was our first shooting experience in the Southern Hemisphere. One member of our party, however, had been on at least three hunts in South America as well as having shot driven grouse in Scotland, red-legged partridge in Spain, and pheasants in Hungary. His take was that you could spend a lot more money than we did, but you couldn't possibly have more quality shooting than we'd enjoyed.

Whether you shoot a sidelock double while decked out in Harris tweeds and plus fours or shoot a synthetic-stocked autoloader while wearing polyester camouflage, any shotgunner will have his wildest wingshooting imagination exceeded by an Argentina dove hunting adventure.

Taken from Moats, Greg, "Argentina Doves" in Sporting Clays, Vol. 15, No. 7, issue 139. Florida, USA: June, 2003.