Wingshooting In Argentina: My Golden Years

Wingshooting in Argentina presents the personal journal entries of Doily Earl Fulcher Sr., chronicling 29 wingshooting trips to Argentina between 1989 and 2019. With meticulous detail, he recorded each day’s hunt, logging the number of fowl taken and shotgun shells fired.

Throughout his adventures, Doily hunted ducks on all but two trips, where he exclusively pursued pigeons. He also shot doves on 14 occasions. Over the course of his travels, he fired an astounding 103,887 shotgun shells, harvesting 18,212 ducks, 27,875 doves, and 7,886 pigeons.

His most extraordinary single-day duck hunt resulted in 488 ducks—389 in the morning using 28 boxes of shells, followed by 99 more in the afternoon with eight additional boxes. His record-setting dove shoot saw him take 2,537 birds in a single day using 144 boxes of shells, all fired from a single gun, which he loaded himself. His best pigeon hunt totaled 1,207 birds in one day with 67 boxes of shells.

“These trips were my golden years of wingshooting. Oh, oh, how I love Argentina!!!”

Page 152- “When we started hunting, it was raining and the wind blew a gale. One half of the sky was beginning to clear, and the other half had this cold air with its deep dark blue sky. The sun was shining on this deep blue sky, and a rainbow appeared. It was beautiful. But to make it more spectacular, we had thousands of rosybills silhouetted in that deep blue sky with the rainbow in the background. The sun shone on those rosybills, which looked like a thousand silver bullets in the sky. I have never seen anything so beautiful in my entire life.”

Page 181- “When I am shooting continuously, I get into rhythm. It feels like I am directing an orchestra playing a tremendous musical score. My body is in constant motion and is so smooth. The gun is part of my body. Adrenaline is flowing, and I am in a state of ecstasy. I keep going to Argentina, trying to experience this. It is like scoring 50 points in a basketball game or running 90 yards for a touchdown. This kind of duck hunt is one I will never forget.”

Doily Earl Fulcher Sr. was exposed to the waterfowl heritage of the Outer Banks of North Carolina from an early age. His great-grandfathers brother accidentally shot himself in 1847 while firelighting redheads on the Outer Banks. The Fulchers have hunted waterfowl since arriving on the Outer Banks in 1749. He inherited this love of waterfowl hunting. Doily Earl Fulcher Sr. is a graduate of NC State University, earning a BS degree in physics, and Georgia Institute of Technology, earning an MS degree in Operations Research. For 26 years, he worked at two of the Navy Laboratories, the Naval Mine Defense Laboratory at Panama City, Fla., and the Naval Warfare Center at Dahlgren, Va. He built houses after working at the laboratories for more than 20 years. During these years, he started going to Argentina to fulfill his passion for wingshooting.