Thursday, August 26, 2004
Bill Cochran's Outdoors: Dove numbers up; hunting spots may be down
Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.
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Along about mid-July into early August, I began seeing dove numbers increase in my area. The sleek birds would be pertly silhouetted on utility lines. They would rattle out of the brush and treetop when I took my afternoon walk. Their wings danced in the summer breezes, and they’d make mournful calls on cloudy days. On some trips to town, I’d have to swerve to avoid a dove picking grit along the edge of the road.
I began to make plans to have a hot shotgun and cold drink in hand come Sept. 4, when the dove season opened.
But by mid-August, most of the doves had disappeared, and with them my hopes of burning up a couple boxes of shells come Labor Day weekend.
What happened? We’d had some unseasonable cold weather, and on the east side of the state Charlie brought heavy rains and high winds. Could these acts of nature have started doves southward out of Virginia on an earlier than normal schedule?
That’s the question I put to Gary Costanzo, the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries biologist whose many duties includes keeping an eye on doves in Virginia.
Costanzo doesn’t believe doves have left the state. It’s too early even for a hurricane to send them packing, he said. What they do, however, is shift around. The doves I’d been watching, he suggested, might simply have gone down the road 5 miles to an area where a farmer had started cutting corn.
“That’s why you have do scouting,” he said.
Costanzo doesn’t see any scarcity of doves across the state. Just the opposite. “I think there is a good native crop this year,” he said. “We have been on a dove banding project, and we caught a lot more juvenile birds this year. It looks like production is really good this year.”
That doesn’t mean finding a spot to hunt will be easy. We’ve had a wet summer in Virginia. There is an abundance of food for doves, because both agricultural crops and weed patches have done well. Just check my garden for proof of the latter.
In some instances, crops are going to be harvested later than normal because all the moisture has delayed their maturity, or rains have kept machinery out of fields. This adds to the challenge of finding an opening-day spot to hunt.
“That’s one thing that both dove and early goose hunters will have to consider: Is the harvest later?” said Costanzo. “You may not get to hunt some areas opening day, because they have not been cut.”
Hunters who can locate spots where harvesting has begun should enjoy exceptional sport opening weekend. When the agricultural harvest is late and harvested field scattered, doves tend to concentrate around what few fields that have been cut.
If you can’t find corn fields where harvesting is underway, you will need to get innovative and look for melon patches, truck gardens, clearcuts, sunflower plantings, watering holes - -anything that is drawing doves. This requires pinpoint scouting.
From the looks of my Mailbag this week, finding a spot to hunt doves is a daunting task for many sportsmen, especially those living in large urban areas or those who are new to the state. And it is not easy for me to help them, apart from some general advice.
There just aren’t that many pay fields in Virginia, and the ones that are available frequently are filled. The DGIF, as a rule, does not manage for dove hunts on its public wildlife areas like it once did. You can blame that on a lack of money and manpower, Costanzo said.
This means that hunters will have to get out ahead of the season and find dove concentrations, then get permission to hunt them. Look for some tips on that in my mailbag.
The season is open Sept. 4-25; Oct. 9-Nov. 6 and Dec. 28-Jan. 15. The daily limit is 12.
The early Canada goose season is open Sept. 1-25 with a five-per-day limit.
Hunters after doves and other migratory birds must be registered with the HIP program, which can be done on line at dgis.state.va.us or by calling 888-788-9772.
