Dove hunting can be quite rewarding, not just as an individual sport, but also as a corporate activity. To improve your team's morale, take your company dove hunting. Discover the advantages and disadvantages of dove hunting.

The advantages are you're sharpening your shotgun skills. A lot of guys will go out pre-season and do a lot of skeet shooting or trap shooting to get in tune with it. But I've heard, if you're a good dove shot, you are a pretty good marksman.

I believe the average on dove hunting is one dove out of every five shots. You'll go into Wal-Mart pre-season, and a lot of your sporting goods stores will put shotgun shells on sale by the case ... so much a box. Most guys will go in and buy a case.

They buy a case because they shoot a lot. There's a lot of shooting opportunities in dove hunting. You have to get in tune with the flight of the birds. You knock the rust off of your shooting skills, being put up over wintertime. The advantages are you become a better shot because there are so many shot opportunities and you figure it out.

I'll use this as an example. I moved to Wyoming several years ago and lived up there for about five years. I dove hunted all September before I moved to Wyoming in October.

A guy asked me if I wanted to go pheasant hunting with him.

And I said, "Well, sure. What's the limit?"

He said, "Three roosters a day."

And I said, "Okay, well, I'll just bring three shells." He looked at me real puzzled. I said, "It can't be any harder than hitting a dove."

He says, "Oh man, I've shot a box and a half of shells and I haven't hit one yet."

And I said, "Well, I could hit a dove pretty good, so I think it shouldn't be much of a problem."

So I go out there and I put three shells in my shotgun. And I said, "Okay, I'm ready."

And he said, "That's all you're taking?"

I lied to him. I said, "Yeah, that's it. Like I said, if three's my limit, then I only need three shells." I didn't tell him I had another box with me.

We were walking along and this pheasant jumped up. I shot him and he fell. I said, "Well, there's one."

So we split up a little bit, and I was walking down the bottom of an old creek bed. Another one jumped up and I shot. "I got two."

And then I saw another one running ahead of me through the willows in this creek bottom. He was up on the bank looking down into the bottom of this creek. And I said, "I see one running up here." And he shot that pheasant on the ground.

He said, "You're not getting that one."

So like I said, two shots, two pheasants. And I never told him I had a box with me just in case. To this day, he only thinks I had three shells with me.

But if you can shoot a dove the way they dart like little jet fighters, and hit those on a regular basis, they're pretty good. If you can get to that level, you can pretty much shoot anything on the wing.

So that's the advantages.

The disadvantages of hunting doves is that, if you're not a very good shot, if can cost you a lot in shotgun shells.

That's the disadvantage to it.

I get the biggest kick out of having the guys come in with buckets full of empty shells and only a couple of birds.

It's hot. So that's a disadvantage if you really think about it as far as the bugs, the gnats. You're having to take bug spray with you. That's a disadvantage.

If a guy hunts spring turkey and it ends in the middle of May, he's got June, July, August and hasn't been out in the field to hunt anything. He's ready to pull the trigger on something. So they overlook the heat part of it.

But that's the only disadvantage that I can think of ... that you might have to spend more money than you normally would on rifle shells because of how tough the birds are to actually hit.