doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com The Dove Field Chronicles (Pic heavy)

Along the CA and AZ southern borders, the whitewings head south into Mexico as the weather changes in the fall. The early departures seem to be related more to rain (monsoon season in Yuma can be spectacular) than to temps. If we get a big storm with temps still over 100F, the whitewings are gone. The mourning doves hang around longer and are usually still abundant in November and December, but they flock up because they are migratory. I'm pretty sure the doves remember fields from year to year because they live a long time if predators or hunters don't get them. I think I read that the oldest dove in captivity lasted something like 24 years. The farmers in the Imperial Valley and around Yuma who plant small plots specifically for doves seem to favor milo.

PS: from http://www.ehow.com/info_8374317_long-life-span-mourning-dove.html

"The average lifespan of a mourning dove is approximately a year and a half. According to the Wild Bird Watching website, mourning doves in their first year of life have a mortality rate of up to 75 percent, while adult mourning doves have a mortality rate of up to 60 percent. Following the survival of the first year, which is the hardest, mourning doves can live up to five years. The All About Birds website states that the oldest known mourning dove lived to be more than 31 years old."

Hey Mike,

Good to hear from you! I did drive down to Lewiston a few years back, the second weekend of the season, to see if I could find a few doves. I think the days take was 5 or 6, but certainly should have been a few more. For me, that was a decent dove hunt!

When I was young, we had a mix of pasture and timber. After logging off some timber, a big patch of Canadian thistle grew up on part of the logged area, that the doves seemed to like. I suppose there was some seed in the head that they fed on. If the cold hadn't driven them off, I'd sneak up on the thistle and sometimes manage to drop a few.

Maybe planting a big patch of Canadian thistle would be the ticket!

Great idea for a thread, Stan! Most kind of you to share the considerable work involved to plant a dove field by design. What kind of sunflowers are you planting?

I hunted on a fella for many years who had a number of native sunflower dove fields scattered about in W. TX within a 50 mile radius of Coleman. These were the small sunflowers that only grow to about a 2 foot height & have heads the size of a daisy w/tiny black seeds. He told me that he needed to have those seeds out by the end of Jan. for them to make & that he sometimes put them out begining as early as Dec. He was just barely scratching the surface on those fields to set the seeds as they didn't require much soil to make them 'take'. Nonetheless, those fields had seen considerable work in years prior w/stone & stump removal and disking and at an earlier time, altogether dif crops.

The heaviest bird population I ever experienced out there was a former native sunflower field outside Lohn of about 20 acres that had been allowed to go fallow for 3 years and it had scattered volunteer sunflowers and some coastal bermuda w/plenty of Johnson grass and a smattering of croton in it. The numbers of birds in that field that year was like being in South America! They were in there in clouds. It abutted a rough old cattle ranch w/plenty of mesquite and prickly pear cactus and a stock tank nearby. It was in early October when we shot it and the birds had been left alone until then.

Cameron, ah, yes--Lewiston the Banana Belt! I bet doves retire there! Idaho's Florida.

I've shot Doves west of Lewiston, along U.S. 12 in Washington State. Pretty slow compared to the wonderful farms I had access to around Mt Jackson, Virginia, for over 25 years!! I went down there a couple of years ago in 1 September and my great streach of "Feel Free to Hunt" land was closed to shooting due to wind farm construction on the hills above!! So, I headed over to Zillah, south of Yakima where we had great Dove shooting in my highschool and college days. I found the field we use to shoot, but it was so built up around it one wouldn't think of shooting there anymore. Guess one can never go home again!!

Cameron,

I'm just across the border from you at Newman Lake. I'll be over at the Spokane Gun Club about 10am to shoot skeet.

Dave

Great post Stan - though I am emerald green with envy, being long removed (chronologically and geographically) from the dove hunting I enjoyed in MD in the '70s. Our best shooting was over sunflower patches my father and his hunting buddies had planted on several farms we hunted. Sitting in a treeline between one of those patches and a large white pine stand on a warm, late afternoon in September - now, that is fun shooting!

My only "regret" is not having been able to enjoy that shooting with a long-barreled 16 ga Fox . . . .

Looks like you are setting things up for another great season - I hope the weather cooperates for you.

They do like clean farming in one sense, Mike. If the ground under the sunflowers, or corn, etc. is free of heavy and thick grasses they are much more likely to "take to" the field. Doves have short little legs and really like the ground fairly clean where they land. We used to have a weed in the cotton fields named wooly croton, or dove weed, as we called it. Roundup has about gotten rid of it, but for many, many years we had some good shoots in the middle of cotton fields as the doves flew down into the cotton to feed on the croton seeds. You dern sure better watch where he fell, though. A dog couldn't see over the cotton to mark him down, and it was mighty easy to lose them.

tw, the kind we plant are the black oil type. They are very small, much smaller than the big striped ones you buy to eat as a snack. I used to grow them both, one for oil and the other for snack market, but the markets dried up around here for them. Now, we just plant them for the doves to snack on. Keeping the fields clean of weeds and grasses is the biggest task we have in being successful with a field. Palmer amaranth, a pigweed, is a terrible problem and costs us $25 an acre to control in the sunflowers.

I'll say a bit more about the seed we use in the next installment, showing the planting operation.

Glad there's some interest in all this. It's fun for me, too.

All my best, SRH

Appreciate the offer Dave, but I'm down in St Maries repairing some fenceing around a small vineyard (if one wants to call it that) and some almond trees I planted a few years back, that are impossible to grow, due to the wildlife, without a decent fence. The plus is I got down here early and went out with friend chasing turkeys. He was able to call in and bag an average sized Tom.

Had to get my small irrigation system turned on as well-looks like we might be in for a dry one this year. Maybe it'll be a late, warm fall and the doves will cooperate.

My brother lives in Newman Lake. I can never remember the name of the road, but it's the development overlooking the large field a mile or so from the corner gas station on Hwy 54.

Eastwood Terrace. Same development I live in.

Stan, will you use electrical fencing to keep out the deer or is 24 acres large enough to outpace with plant growth the deer impact? We're going to electric fence in the 15 acres we hunted last year. Gil