A few suggestions

Our dove haven't gone away completely but they haven't spread the word to their friends, either. Yesterday, during another session of long pauses between shots, several things occurred to me that might take dove hunting to the next level. Feast your intellect:

1. Some well-heeled individual or his namesake charitable trust should fund the genetic development of a dove that, when mortally wounded, turns a shade of bright red or orange. This would eliminate quite a bit of poking in bushes, staring at patches of weeds, walking in ever-increasing circles and generally wasting my time. Time that could be better spent thinking up brilliant improvements to the sport such as this.
2. Dragonflies, tweety birds, and butterflies should stay the hell out of a field when there is a hunt going on. Peripheral vision being the imperfect sense that it is, all you creatures that resemble a dove in flight over in the corner of my eye do nothing but raise my heart rate and interrupt my otherwise tranquil mood. Fair warning: on slow days you are quite a temptation.
3. If we can put a man on the moon we ought to be able to figure out a way to keep gnats out of my general face area. Bug spray doesn't work. Ditto Thermacells, in spite of what people keep telling me. If the well-heeled individual in #1 is looking for another project, possibly one with commercial appeal, this would be it. I know gnats are part of the food chain somewhere way down the line, so I don't want to kill them, I just want them out of my face. They can hang out on the other side of my head or around my knees even. Anywhere but my face. And while we're genetically modifying things, let's tweak the gnat and remove whatever it is that attracts them to eyeballs.

That's as far as I got, three flashes of genius in a day being at least two more than I'm normally good for.