Top Flight Doves
Argentina is a land of superlatives. It is a place where benchmarks are set for wine and cheese and beef and lamb, where women are the most lovely and gentlemen the most proud. It is a country of unrivaled beauty, with sub-Antarctic forests that spill over central grasslands that in turn swell to the Andes or drift off into tropical jungles of Paraguay and Brazil. It is a place of clearest, coldest rivers and biggest, bluest skies. Argentina is also home to what is universally considered the world’s finest wingshooting, primarily by those who shoot doves.
In light of these superlatives, it is something of a paradox that in this profusion of bests there are even-betters, more-perfects, quintessentials. But nuance exists even in the place where doves are so prolific that the world hums and sparkling wings fill the sky. And when dove shooters’ conversations steer toward the archetypal, they often turn to Los Ombues Lodge, in Entre Rios Province, where bests are a matter of course, even by Argentine standards.
To fully understand what sets Los Ombues apart, one must consider Argentina’s dove resource. The eared dove, Zenaida auriculata, proliferates through much of South America, though a thriving, grain-based agronomy throughout the northern two-thirds of Argentina has fostered a particularly ripe reproductive environment. In that region doves occur in stupefying number: the three roosts on the Los Ombues property are home to some 30 million doves, though an ever-increasing population makes an accurate count something of a moving target. As is the case nation-wide, grain production has increased steadily throughout Entre Rios in recent decades, enabling doves to establish a non-migratory habit and to reproduce three to five times per year, laying clutches of two to three eggs at a cycle. Since the doves do not migrate and since roost habitat, feed and water are plentiful, the birds remain in steady supply. What’s more, they reproduce in maintenance of a carrying capacity in the tens of millions of birds per colony, laying more clutches when populations deviate below that hefty minimum. Hence, traveling wingshooters relish the fact that hunting pressure does little to push back the rising tide of doves, while local farmers welcome any effort to moderate the birds’ impact. Outfitters who control a roost and the flyways in and out of that roost can put shooters on doves in number year-round.
Though Cordoba has marketed itself as the province synonymous with dove shooting, Argentina boasts an equally rich resource over much of its northern landmass; great dove shooting is not province-specific. What differentiates a great dove operation from a superlative one are facets beyond the doves themselves, which are often among the easier of the prerequisites to fulfill. An exceptional dove operation must be located in close proximity to the roost and flyways, to ensure that drive times to and from the field are mitigated. It must feature a well-appointed lodge that is easy for guests to travel to, situated near a substantial town and airport, and in a setting that appeals aesthetically to the refined palates of well-traveled wingshooters. It must provide world-class service, dining and hospitality, avail its guests to a small arsenal of fine shotguns, and maintain a staff nimble enough to entertain a demanding international clientele. In effect, despite the low-hanging fruit that Argentina affords, the conception of the ultimate dove operation requires funding, research, a singleness of purpose and a gregarious personality at the helm. These were the requirements that Carlos Sanchez, owner and operator of Los Ombues, found himself navigating throughout the late 1980s and early ’90s.
In 1986 Sanchez was working as a fly-fishing outfitter in Patagonia. A consummate sportsman across the disciplines, he was encouraged by a US booking agent to expand his offerings into wingshooting and to research opportunities for doves, with a potential addendum of waterfowl and perdiz. An exhaustive search led him to Entre Rios where, in the land overlooking the Parana River delta, ducks and perdiz occurred in number and the dove resource was literally untouched. In 1992, following several seasons of lodging groups in ranch houses and estancias nearby the wetlands, fields and flyways, Sanchez was offered a 500-acre parcel of high ground in the heart of his hunting area. With the partnership of an American investor, he built a lodge that incorporated the niceties that the retro-fitted ranch houses lacked: a heated mud room, private suites, a large commercial kitchen, a customized gunroom and a spa-side pool from which guests could, quite literally, shoot doves by the hundreds.
As the seasons passed and Los Ombues gained a reputation for excellence, Sanchez continued to buy upland and wetland acreage adjacent the lodge. At present he owns the surrounding 40,000 acres. Contiguous to this land, Sanchez leases 100,000 acres, insulating the Los Ombues holdings for guests, who will never see an outside party in the field. His singular goal was to provide hunters, dove hunters in particular, with the finest shooting in the world. He never deviated from that path and remains committed to the assumption that perfection is not always enough. “We have a saying here,” Sanchez said without irony. “If it is difficult, we will do it. If it is impossible, it will take a bit longer.” As Sanchez continues to work doggedly to make the best even better, the doves just keep flying, to the delight of Los Ombues’ clients.
On an August evening Agustin Bustos, Los Ombues’ head guide, turned left out of the estancia gates and aimed his Toyota diesel down a grooved two-track. I rolled down the window and watched the landscape unravel from the passenger seat. My late summer had turned to spring in the days since I’d left the States, stopping in Buenos Aires for a night to acclimatize to the Malbec and meat and impassioned Spanish that would fill the coming week. The sun was slipping toward a hedgerow well ahead, and the day had taken on those gilded margins, making the fields of winter wheat all the greener. Smoke rose from the chimneys of scattered stone farmsteads, and a gaucho, slumped and unhurried on his horse, lit a cigarette, blew a plume of smoke and nodded as we passed.
Agustin turned us into a field and cut the engine. Over the dip and swell of wheatfield and hedgerow, the Parana delta spread to the horizon. We still could see the tips of the flagpoles at Los Ombues, perhaps a half-mile distant. Agustin unsleeved guns and escorted my shooting companions and me out along the field edge. He situated me at the massive base of an ombú tree. There a young man named Raul had built a rough blind in the scrub and staked a shell bucket into the soil. He welcomed me in, fixed a stool and emptied two boxes of 28-gauge shells into the bucket. Agustin smiled and shifted the leather case in which he carried his thermos full of mate (a caffeine drink) to the other shoulder. “Have fun,” he said. “Shoot as long as you like or until it gets dark. We will have dinner when we return. Raul will provide anything you need.” With that he slipped away around the field edge, and I turned to the task at hand. The doves were already coming in earnest.
There is in any dove shoot a working out of kinks, particularly when mind and body are still recovering from a thousands-mile journey across the equator. My first box of shells achieved little of consequence, and at my more glaring misses Raul would smile and shrug, pretending he hadn’t noticed. He cracked a third and fourth box into the shell bucket, and I began, albeit slowly, to connect. The little 28 sidelock underlined a high left-to-right crosser, and I pulled the front trigger, somehow thumbing the barrels through the first bird and intercepting another. The first, hit far back, took a long slide down into the brush, while the second, afforded less concentration and an already moving gun, stopped in mid-flight. With wings akimbo, it spiraled down in pirouette like a piece of folded paper, glinting silver. It landed in the shin-high wheat, and Raul lauded the evening’s first double. “Buenooooooooooo . . . . Dobleeeeeeeeeee,” he said, smiling, and cracked another box of shells into the bucket. “Buenoooooooo, señor.”
As evening descended, we loaded the trucks. Local boys and men, arriving quietly by bicycle, drifted out of the hedgerow shadows to pick the field of fallen birds. They filled grain sacks and trundled off with them, a night’s bounty affording the local populace a dollop of free protein. Agustin offered me a Quilmes beer from the cooler and wondered in his formal way what I’d thought of my first evening.
“So what did you think of the doves?” he asked, turning the key to set the diesel Hilux to idle. “We did get our start a little late this evening.” He seemed to be gently giving me an out, allowing me an easy excuse for the literally thousands of birds I had passed on our missed—a lopsided share against the hundred or so I had hit.
I took a swallow of Quilmes and considered the birds still flying in twilight, striating the sky, rivaling the diesel hum with their own. “Unbelievable” seemed the only word to describe my thoughts and so was the one I offered.
As Argentina’s reputation for world-class shooting continues to precede itself, it takes a bit of scrutiny to distinguish what can make a destination stand out. In the case of Los Ombues, the niceties are so integral to the experience and so seamlessly provided that they can, ironically, go unnoticed. One tends to get immersed in the food and the wine and the sky-full of doves while at Los Ombues and in so doing tends to overlook the pains to which Sanchez and Bustos go to ensure the experience. According to Sanchez: “We have more trucks than we need, more boats than we need, more guns than we need, more staff than we need . . . . We have enough hot water for twenty people to take a shower at the same time, without coming close to running out. But more importantly, we are in the heart of the birds. They fly right over the house. We never drive more than 12 minutes to go hunting, and often much less. We return to the house for a full lunch, a nap, a massage if the guests like, and then we are back in the field as they wish.” This magical combination of amenities, proximity and doves by the million is truly unique, even in a land as rich as Argentina.
There is in all things a gradient of excellence, even in those things that seem at first blush to be hard to improve upon. In Argentina, the doves are just as plentiful and strong and inherently challenging as doves are meant to be, but beneath the gentle roar of wingbeats there are subtleties worth noting. In Entre Rios Province, on a knob overlooking the Parana delta, the best is daily getting a wee bit better at Los Ombues Lodge.
First Published in Shooting Sportsman Magazine
