doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Visions of sugarplums danced in their heads...

As exciting as Christmas is opening day of dove season for me. It means the culmination of an event, planting the sunflower field, that began in May.............and reaches fruition in September.



In between we pray for rain, fight weeds, and prepare our guns, stools (dove speak for a rotating seat), loads, and wait....................impatiently at times, while watching the azure sky for those wonderful little grey rockets.........



They always come..............or, at least, they always have.



Which is why I, and many others text occasionally as we obsess about what progress has been made towards opening day, how many birds are being seen, and how many days remain............

https://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/ge...mp;font=cursive

With bated breath, SRH

Not only do you have some food for them, but it looks like you have plenty of roosting trees too.

All they need, Craig. I see so many doves every day I could not possibly keep count. I can sit outside on the patio and hear the constant call of doves. Wish there were that many quail. I did, however, see five separate nesting pairs of quail Monday. That was enjoyable, if not encouraging.

SRH

What a difference in habitat

Yes, but you've got so much better quail habitat, Mike.

SRH

Well, we did until drought, eye worms, and cecal worms put the population into a tailspin last year. Quail are incredibly fragile. But at the same time they have an incredible ability to reproduce just as soon as conditions improve.

Looks like a slice of heaven. Would love to shoot those doves with my new JW Tolley hammergun.

Wheat is green, sunflowers are up and the weed strips I left are growing as well. Now all I need is rain, time and patience. A lot of the later. Shells loaded already, gun chosen and I am ready. I don't need a count down clock to know it is too far off.

First strip of wheat will be mowed a month before the season. Then a new strip every week to ten days. Sunflowers will be left standing as long a the wheat last. This system kept doves in the field until a full month of the season had passed. By then all the easy and dumb doves were long dead. The ones left were much more fun to shoot and yes to miss as well.

I have another little 6 acre field that I planted in low population wheat, with native sunflowers mixed in. Of course the wheat came on up late last fall, but the sunflowers didn't begin emerging until spring. I've got sunflowers scattered in the wheat from knee high down to just emerging. "J" at Turner Seed in Texas told me to expect that. This is an experiment, as this type of wild sunflower is not native to Jawja.

A friend in TX encouraged me to try this. If I can get them established they will come back every year. Deer don't eat them, and no fertilizer is needed. Sounds too good to be true, but I'm giving it my best shot.

SRH

Stan I ask you not to over react but your posting ties into discussions at my sportsmen's club. I appreciate your thoughts which I will carry to the club, how is planting sunflowers mainly to attract doves different than hunting over ag crops intended mainly for human or animal food or even baiting deer with corn or apples etc? Most of club members say that planting just to attract animals and not for harvest is over the line.

Planting feed plots for game is not the same as putting out bait. Lazy men bait to create a easy to shoot hot spot. Feed plots will feed birds for months not just a few days. Most birds eating on a field will never be shot at. And if you are in it for the long haul you can keep high numbers of birds for week after week. I was taking full limits of dove into mid October last year. Had to work a lot harder than opening day to be sure but if dove were always as easy as opening day I would not care to shoot them.

I�ve been planting,for dove, for several decades. It�s hard to keep dove in a field much after opening day. The natural tendency is to hunt them one time too soon after opening day and burn them out. By the second week of a season most field are burned out or worse local corn harvest causes dove to be so dispersed that finding huntable concentration is impossible.

I hunt a field in a very limited way. Four hours max on opening day and hunting must be done by six o�clock. It is a stuiggle to keep people out of the field to two o�clock on opening day. But it gives dove a chance to feed before we shoot and then return after six o�clock for a good feed before heading to their roost. Four hours hunting once a week, twice a week at the most will keep a field fresh and birds in the area.

For every dove you harvest there are multiple dove you never even see much less kill. The seeds will last much longer after the season than people think. I had dove well into December last year eating in the feed plots. Also had turkey, geese , ducks and quail eating in those fields. None of those birds ever got hunted.

I will explain it the best I can. Georgia law says that planting is legal, and even encourages the planting of fields for dove shoots. Their website tells how, and the DNR plants dove fields on WMAs for the public. So many more doves feed in the fields than are bagged each year that I think the biologists feel it is a net plus for doves. Remember that the natural mortality rate for mourning doves is pretty high, definitely exceeding 50%, some say as high as 80%. The fields also benefit other species of wildlife that are not hunted there. Songbirds proliferate them. To me, the difference in baiting deer and planting for doves is that probably not many deer benefit from the feed besides the one killed. With dove fields it is just the opposite.

Duck ponds can be drained, planted, flooded, and hunted over legally. Sorghum patches are planted in quail habitat for supplemental feed and cover, and subsequently hunted around. When a person spreads corn, or other grains to strictly bait a species, they have nothing invested, no ownership, so to speak. I've never known a man who went to the expense and time to plant dove fields that wasn't a conservationist at heart. It is not cheap. There will be more expense in that one 24 acre sunflower field than it will cost me for my entire trip to Argentina in August.

It's a labor of love.

SRH

Similar in California, except that all DFW fields I have seen have been planted with crops that will will eventually be harvested. Fields in SoCal are usually milo or sudan grass. We used to see wheat in DFW fields but those have not been around for a few years. All public access so not worth hunting early season because of the crowds, but great for the last couple days of the season when the once-a-year guys are gone.

Thanks Stan and others for your replies that I'll print out for club members. Most of discussions there are around ethics not so much the legal part .

Ethics is a trap when applied to hunting or fishing. You can moralize away the whole idea of blood sports if you are not careful.
Legal on the other hand is a tangible guideline. I may not agree with all the laws, but as long as I stay within them, I do not worry further about the ethics of the sport...Geo

Catch and release fishing. Why inconvenience the fish?

Same thing with artificial reefs for fishing
In general, it helps the wildlife populations

Same with food plots, it helps the wildlife populations

Whether, huntable or non-game animals, all benefit.

Mike

I understand, Nitro. Hope it is a help. I can understand how it may not be an easy subject for some to come to terms with. I have, and enjoy being able to discuss it with gentlemen.

All my best, SRH

Both Federal and State laws are far more liberal about "crop manipulation" for doves than ducks. For instance, you can run a silage chopper through a corn field and spew the product directly back on to the ground where it grew and legally hunt doves that are attracted. Deliberately knocking down growing corn in a flooded field to attract ducks is a violation of federal law.

Yep, absolutely. I bought a used two-row JD silage chopper just for that. (Some lowlife stole it for scrap iron, when it got so high) And they are both migratory birds. Go figure.

SRH

Ethics, as regards hunting methods, are a vague and moving target. As times change, so do peoples ethics concerning hunting methods. In my grandfather's day, using a tame hen turkey as a live decoy was accepted by many. Archibald Rutledge, the first poet laureate of South Carolina and a great outdoorsman, wrote in his book Hunting and Home in the Southern Heartland about sending out a man who lived on his plantation to kill turkeys for a big holiday meal. The method he employed was to put out a string of corn, and build a blind in line with it. The idea was to kill as many turkeys with one shot as possible.

I'm reading a rather sad book right now entitled A FEATHERED RIVER ACROSS THE SKY by Joel Greenberg. It is a chronicle of the passenger pigeon in N. America and it's flight to extinction. Trust me when I say we've come a looooong way in conservation and ethics in taking game since the 1700-1800s.

SRH

Sorry to drift further off topic, but I was recently reading some short story accounts of hunting in India in the 1800's. It seems some of the hunters of the day didn't hesitate to use human corpses for tiger bait. It's a different time now, but I don't think there's anything wrong with finding the history absolutely fascinating. It's similar in ways to the historical buffalo and fur trade. Besides, the rifles used have very familiar sounding maker names and the business no doubt helped keep gunmakers viable.

In the CA regs for upland game, the rule is that you can hunt over anything that is "the result of normal agricultural operations." So, once a field has been harvested, the seeds or melons left on the ground are completely legit for hunting grounds. Per the regs, one can't just knock down a crop and leave it for bait, but there are other reasons for knocking down crops and leaving them on the ground. About 15 or 20 years ago the owner of the best wild pheasant fields in the Imperial Valley got so upset about asparagus prices that he disked all his fields and just left the asparagus there. Pheasants were running around everywhere, but not for long.

Unless it has been changed recentlly that "Normal Agricultural Practice" was the way TN law read. Some years back a good many farmers around here were Drilling their wheat fields twice, once normally & then they would go around again with the drill set not to cover the seed. They were charging dove shooters to shoot over their fields. Many were caught, charged & fined, but the farmers weren't charged, they weren't shooting. The shooters of course were not given the opportunity to examine the field before they paid their fee to shoot. I don't know how this was eventually settled but haven't heard much about it lately. I think though that most shooter just got to the point they refused to pay to shoot over a field which had been planted in winter wheat, thus ending the unscrupulous profits.

Regulations vary by state. In the two state plant fields and I hunt, I can not harvest a single grain and bring it back into the field later and spread it. I can decide to bush hog wheat if I am just not going to harvest it. Doing this is legal, where if I harvest the wheat and spread it back into the field later I am guilty of baiting.

Where it can get tricky is normal farming operations. I have seen wheat broadcast on the surface which I consider to be baiting. Wheat I plant is drilled into the land not broadcast on the surface like nuts on a ice cream. But years ago I know a few farmer did broadcast wheat, rye or clover seed on the surface of new disked ground in small areas. That was legitimate farming practice then but I would not try it now.

Best field I ever saw for dove was ten acre of lightly disked cantaloupes. There were several thousand dove there opening day. Everyone was done in a few minutes. Dove were like flies on the ground. You could not look in any direction and not see several dozen to maybe fifty birds entering or leaving the field all day long.

Broadcasting wheat on the surface really is a "normal agricultural practice" in my area. It is done and subsequently disced in lightly to cover it, so that one can have a green cover crop in the fields in winter and early spring. In the spring it is killed with glysophate, then planted into, no-till.

The catch, is how quickly do you get back to the field to disc it after broadcasting the wheat. This practice was deemed not to be a normal agricultural practice in GA at least 30 years ago, as far as shooting doves over it goes.

As far as leaving wheat to head out, then mowing it down, this is a normal ag practice. Often a field will not be planted by the owner for a year or two, perhaps because it is marginal land and current prices are low. A wheat cover crop is planted, then left all year as cover.

I'm blessed to live in an area that has lots of peanuts. My son and I will grow about 450 acres this year. Leftovers behind a peanut combine often makes for sporty shooting.

SRH

Doesn't USFWS have jurisdiction over Mourning doves?
They pinch farmers around here every year for excess waste grain. Especially when the mallards are coming down from Canada.

I want to read that. I hope that Stephen Bodio is able to finish his book on the Passenger Pigeon...Geo

Stan, there's a "catch" in what Georgia requirements are to meet "normal agricultural practices". Certain methods of planting certain crops are permitted within specific dates. Some crop planting techniques are not permitted to be shot over after plantings outside "normal agricultural practices" and you are probably familiar with that more than most.
George, I heard an interview on the radio about a passenger pigeon book and I can't recall the name of the author. Among the many causes of extinction according to the author were the railroads and telegraphs which would transport the market hunters to the dense migrations. The telegraph would alert the hunters where to go. The barrels of birds were then railroaded to the market centers. The birds may be gone, but the places named after the pigeons still exist here in Georgia and throughout the southeast. Gil

I found the Greenberg book on Amazon and ordered it along with another called "A Message From Martha". Martha was the last of the species which died at the Cincinnati zoo...Geo

I have a suspicion it wasn't market hunting, but the total loss of the American Chestnut forests due to blight. Gil, you saw some clear-cutting I've done up at the farm. I'm planning to replant some of it in Dunstan Hybrid Chestnuts. That's the closest thing we've got to the true American Chestnut. Maybe we'll live long enough to roast some chestnuts at Christmas!

Might as well start with the first, Geo.
"The Passenger Pigeon", by William Bates Mershon. Free to read online.

My father new him. Founding member of TU. Gunned right down the road from my house.

It wasn't sportsmen that ended PP's. It was the cutting of all of their habitat. Also, the second point I might add, is one of perspective.

We would like to think we do, but we have limited ability to conceptualize things bigger than ourselves. God, the Universe, and the number of PP's required to keep their population humming along. They probably needed millions to survive as a species, but millions of passenger pigeons necessary as a minimum was hard to comprehend. There looked to be plenty around. Such was the biology of the PP.

Fragile, fecund, and needing specific OLD GROWTH habitat. I can't imagine the volume of mast they needed to consume. The Chestnut blight guaranteed their end. The 400% Eastern US population growth, from 1860 to 1900, requiring furniture and packaging to create households, accelerated the cutting.

Lots of historical perspective on PP's out there.

Sometimes it reminds me of how a stone chip breaks a windshield when you turn the defrosters on. Unexpected destruction.

Thanks Zapper. Hotlink to the book online if anyone cares to bookmark it for reading...Geo

<https://archive.org/details/cu31924022523041>

The demise of the PP is an interesting and tragic thing. It was not over-hunting that did it, as many assume. That ended up bieng a minor part of it.It was mostly loss of nesting habitat and their inability to adapt to a changing world as man entered their area. They would migrate in such tremendous numbers that they were like a flock of feather locust.

In part it was the PP themselves who did it to themselves. Their numbers were so great, almost beyond our comprehension, that they were a flying plague where ever they went or roosted. Their food consumption needs required them to fly miles every day when on the nest with young. They would strip the local area of all food within days and need to fly further and further out each day in search of food. Then their parenting skill were so different than a caring nurturing system. In the end they abandoned their young shortly before they would be able to fly. Perhaps the need to find food just over whelmed the impulse to nurture the young. Survival of the fittest PP only. After use the roost areas would take years to fully recover. It was noted on one roost area there was not a single stick or twig found on the ground in the entire forest as every last one of them had been used to build nest. The bird droppings were quite thick and could cause a die off of all vegetation in many areas until it would decay over time.

It is all so sad. What made them unique also contributed to their very demise. High numbers, not millions in a flock but tens of millions in just one flock, gave them protection against predators in the roost and when nesting, but also were such a negative impact on the environment that they were a plague where every they went. A few bad nesting years, weather and crop changes, loss of the virgin forest and the clearing of that same forest all had a part of their demise. Very sad indeed.

It's so much easier just to blame it on the "Hunter", particular if you are anti hunting or anti gun. Much the same situation existed with the "Buffalo" (Bison). The breed has of course survived & is around in good numbers. Of course modern habitat will never as long as it exists allow them to reach numbers anywhere close to when William Cody was using them to feed the RR workers.

If I remember correctly Cyril Adams said in his book on pigeon shooting, that about 10acres a day of hardwood forest was cut, for 60 YEARS.

That's 219,000 acres. Not a lot, especially by passenger pigeon range standards. One plantation adjoining me is almost one third that size.

As KY Jon alluded to, it was a "perfect storm" of monumental proportions that was the culmination of so many factors. Still sad to me. Sad that we cannot see those flocks blacken the shy for many hours at the time.

SRH

I don't think anyone blames the sportsman hunters for the extinction, but market hunting sure didn't help in the conservation. From what I've read, they weren't shot for sport. As for humans impacting game populations, the indiscriminate shooting of wild turkeys over bait for table fare regardless of sex or age year-round was the biggest reason for the need for the successful reintroduction through stocking cannon netted birds in areas that hadn't held a wild turkey in generations, and in some areas, outside their historic range. Gil

There is much to appreciate about the shooting of Mourning doves. They have many attributes that make them a good sport species.

I find the end of the PP and the rise of the RG in literature a peculiar, yet fascinating simultaneous coincidence of events.

All you need to do is couple hard coal mining with the deforestation of the east all along every railroad track (to feed eastern cities with fuel for heat and cooking), and you get a death of the PP and a rise of the RG. Weird parallels.

That's kinda what happened here with the decline of quail and the boom in turkeys. Personally, if it had to be one or the other I'd rather have the quail back. But, if wishes were horses poor beggars could ride.

SRH

A quick read of some of the literature concerning the cause or causes of the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon provides more questions than answers. But it appears far too simplistic to confidently say that the cause was either over-hunting or habitat loss.

Some sources say that the massive population of billions of birds evolved slowly and that the survival of the species relied on this huge population density. Yet other sources say that the population numbers rose and fell dramatically numerous time during their time on this earth. In some articles, both points are made. They say that the species' survival depended upon huge numbers over the entire Eastern U.S., but then went on to say that those numbers crashed and rose numerous times since the last Ice Age. How can both statements be true?

Other sources say there was surprisingly little genetic diversity in such a huge population, yet over-hunting is blamed for the crash and extinction rather than other factors such as some unrecognized malady or disease. The last surviving bird lived something like 29 years and never produced a single egg. Did hunting have anything to do with that? It sounds as if a hell of a lot of them stopped producing eggs, and we can't blame DDT or Round-Up.

Some of these papers state that single flocks that numbered in the hundreds of millions laid waste to their own nesting and roosting areas due to eating all available food and contaminating the forest with their droppings. Yet hunting is again blamed when hunting would have thinned the population to a point where they weren't consuming all of the food and poisoning the forest with excessive droppings. It's interesting to read these theories, but you have to remember that none of them are able to offer a proven and definite cause for the extinction. And the more you read, the more you come to realize that a lot of what passes for good science is little more than unfounded speculation.

Excellent post, Keith.

SRH

" what passes for good science is little more than unfounded speculation."

Every writer has their own bias. Most research done, or paper written, are done so with a outcome in mind before they start. Sometimes they massage the data or facts to support their outcomes and sometime they ignore inconvenient data or even never publish at all if the outcome is not what message they want to project. Before you read any paper try to find out who paid for the paper or research. follow the money. If any "expert" cites other research or other papers see if they are in fact just citing their previous works to make their current work seem valid. If a writer only can find himself as an expert then the paper is worthless. Everyone sees the same sunrise, so if only he can see the sunrise, the light he is shining up your butt is not true sunlight.

All history is an interpretation of what happened, base on scant facts and a lot of conjecture. Not that they all get it wrong but facts can be viewed differently by different people or by the change of time. So any attempt to figure out what cause the PP to die off is just so much speculation.

The bobwhite's ability to double and triple brood, under the right conditions, means they can recover much quicker than most upland birds.

Gives credence to "the medium is the massage".
JR

Don't insult hard working professional scientists with that bunk.

Talk about Stan's dove food plots.

This statement from the florescent gray man reminds me of that scene in "The Wizard of Oz" where the little dog Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal the truth that the Wizard is a fraud. Caught red-handed, he commands Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin-Man to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...

What KY Jon says is absolutely correct. Agenda driven science is often an assemblage of cherry-picked data intended to arrive at a predetermined conclusion. It may all sound very impressive and be presented by people with very impressive academic credentials, but when you can easily pick out very glaring discrepancies that make no sense, and are in conflict with your own real world observations, there is a good chance you are reading junk.

This year, the U.S. has experienced an extremely low number of tornadoes for the month of May. Oklahoma went longer than any other year without a single tornado in April 2018. We are way below average, and this is exactly the opposite of what the Climate Change/Global Warming Guru's had predicted. But if you dare to question that fact, you will be ridiculed and branded as a kook and a denier by those with an agenda.

If that is what you believe, don't avail yourself of all of the self serving agenda driven bunk that keeps 99% of the people on this site alive.

You can still confine your bile to conversation about Stan's food plots, and love of dove shooting.

Wow, you'd think that I said that all science is junk science! Talk about bile florescent gray man. And oh by the way... could you perhaps tell us what your posts here concerning the demise of the passenger pigeon had to do with Stan's food plots?