OTTER SLOUGH CA
Only 110 dove hunters visited this CA in 2006. Firing 2,264 shots (20.6 shots per hunter), they killed 607 doves.

I’m at a loss to explain why so few chose to shoot doves at Otter Slough last year. Unless things change this year, the area’s early-season special regulations are no more onerous than those at any other intensively managed CAs. This one’s a sleeper for early-season hunting, and could be a super hotspot in October.

OTHER OPTIONS
In fairness to the other 84 CAs slated to have portions of their acreage devoted to doves in 2007, the just-discussed properties were selected on the basis of the statistics available through the ARM program to back up their claims to fame. But be that as it may, these CAs are not the only “best” dove hunting action Missouri’s public lands have to offer. In fact, Schulz mentioned during my conversation with him eight other CAs that he rated as “second-tier” dove producers: Bilby Ranch in Nodaway County, Davisdale in Howard County, Eagle Bluff in Boone County, Nodaway Valley in Andrew County, Franklin Island in Howard County, Overton Bottoms in Cooper County, Platte Falls in Platte County, Shawnee Trail in Barton County, A.A. Busch in St. Charles County, and R. E. Talbot in Lawrence County. Any of these is worthy of an up-close-and-personal look-see.

Still haven’t seen exactly what you want? Contact the appropriate MDC district offices in the part of the state you’d like to hunt. You’ll find that every d.o. manages one or more CAs with good-to-excellent dove hunting potential. What’s more, if you can’t help but bristle at regimentation, most of these lesser-known potential dove hotspots are governed by statewide regulations without added provisos.

This article’s obvious purpose is to identify Missouri’s best public-land dove hunting. Even so, I hope you’ll have noticed that, while the statistics used to back up my choices technically were based on hunter success during the entire month of September, they were as a result of declining hunter participation based on the first few days of September.

So don’t make the same mistake that most of your fellow dove hunters are making. True, doves may shy away from heavily hunted fields both public and private for a week or so after the opening weekend barrage, but not only will the local survivors return to the best food sources, but they’ll be temporarily joined by flocks of migrating doves as well. Far more often than not, actually, some of the dove season’s best shooting takes place in early-to-mid October.