Taking Aim at a Fall Tradition

Taking Aim at a Fall Tradition
Mourning Dove

Mourning Dove. Andy Purviance photo.

For local bird hunters, it is a rite of autumn.

On the last day of August, hunters from throughout western Colorado converge on the North Fork Valley, where thousands of mourning doves have filled the fields, gorging on grain as they make their migration from the Colorado high country to the desert.

The hunters have their own bacchanal, listening to bluegrass bands and filling up on local specialties at the Paonia foodie haven Fresh & Wyld. At dawn, they head out in camouflage and khakis and take aim. It’s the first day of dove hunting season in Colorado, and for hunters, the first hint of coming fall. It’s a great day to be a hunter, a bad day to be a mourning dove.

By evening, the doves are dinner.

“Dove breasts are among the absolute most wonderful flesh you can eat in the world,” says Jon Hollinger, owner of Aspen Outfitting Co., a high-end hunting and fishing outfitting company based at the St. Regis hotel in Aspen, who organizes the trip every year. “The North Fork Valley doves are the nicest-tasting doves I have eaten anywhere in the world.”

That’s high praise from Hollinger, who has hunted birds around the world, and who leads hunting trips for well-heeled clients throughout western Colorado. His shop has the feel you expect from a British gun club. The walls are lined with pricey double-barrel shotguns he orders from Spain’s Basque Country. It used to be, Hollinger sort of hid away his guns. Hunting has a long tradition in Colorado, but guns aren’t quite so popular in Aspen, where locals are more likely to hunt for wild asparagus than wild animals.

The local food movement may be changing that, though. Progressive attitudes toward food are shifting away from doing without meat to avoiding chemicals and hormones. As more and more consumers become conscious about where their meat comes from, many are willing to be carnivores as long as they can be locavores.

Hunters may not have to keep their camo in the back of the closet anymore.

“The food’s better than any food you can buy,” says Jerrod Hollinger, who runs the outfitting business with his father. “As my dad has often said, if it’s out there alive, it’s because it’s perfect. It’s surviving in the wilderness alone. You’re getting the very best of the best.”

His high school friends didn’t get it, he says. Growing up in a hunting family in Aspen was unusual to say the least. But people are starting to understand, Jerrod says. “There is his back to basics, back to traditions movement,” he says. “Everybody understands how unhealthy our food is. Hunting is part of our heritage and tradition.”

That’s especially true in Colorado, where big game hunting has been an integral part of the western lifestyle. For generations, fathers and sons, and to a lesser degree mothers and daughters, have headed out into the mountains in the fall in search of deer and elk to fill their freezers for the winter.

Bird hunting has never been quite as popular. Still, Jon Hollinger says, not long ago, plenty of Roaring Fork Valley residents were bird hunters. “They were pretty much your average Joes,” he says. “They were plumbers and electricians and contractors and well drillers.”

As the cost of living rose in the valley in recent years, many of those people left. At the same time, hunting across the country declined in popularity. Wildlife managers across the United States have upped their hunter education programs in an effort to get young people interested in the sport again.

“It’s the curse of the digital age,” says Jon Hollinger, his hunting dog Pepper, a black-and-white-flecked German shorthair pointer, at his side. “Everybody’s fat. Everybody’s too lazy to do anything but get a keyboard in front of them.”

His hunting companions have largely shifted from those “everyday Joes” to the super-wealthy who don’t mind paying $1,500 for what they see as some of the best bird hunting in the country.

When dove season opens, though, it’s still a locals crowd that descends on the North Fork Valley for hunting and feasting. Doves, it seems well, have taken to global warming. They’re desert birds, Hollinger says, the only game bird in the country whose numbers are on the rise. In the North Fork Valley, they find plenty of wheat, sorghum and other grains to fill them up for the fall flight south.

Throughout the fall and winter, the Hollingers take clients to hunt blue grouse, duck, goose and pheasant. Come January, they have a similar celebration, ending the season with a mallard hunt and sautéed duck breast for dinner.

“You couldn’t have a better time,” Jerrod Hollinger says. “You couldn’t be in a better place. The people I go out with are great people. And the food aspect, that’s always been a big deal.”

And every year, a few new faces show up, the Hollingers say, giving them hope that the American hunting tradition hasn’t run out of ammunition yet.