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

Thanks for the interest, fellas. Here is the latest on the dove field we planted on May 9, a Thursday. I sprayed it on Saturday, the 11th, and stopped to check on germination. Here's how the seed looked after 40 hours in moist soil. The soil temps were a little on the cool side, so it caused germination to be a tad slow, but not bad.



Note that this soil is very sandy. Moisture leaves it in a hurry in warm, windy conditions, so putting the seed at the proper depth, for the current and future conditions, is important.

Dropped by the field on the following Monday morning, the 13th, and this is how it looked. Soil was cracking up and down the rows from the seed pushing to the top. (Ever wondered how it knows which way is up? Me, too.)



Now, we see the way it looked yesterday afternoon, Saturday, 9 days after planting. We have a really good stand of plants, with timely emergence which means all will be at the same stage of growth and one will not "out-do" it's neighbor, robbing it of growth potential.



.......and, a close up of one of the little fellows with two true leaves. (The other two are really cotyledon leaves and not true leaves, and will shed off and not really contribute to growth and yield after the first few days.



With some regular rainfall and warm sunshine this field will develop rapidly, and well, and we'll watch as it grows toward maturity. Deer will be moving in now, and eating around the edges of the field. I may put up some scarecrows if they get too bad. If the deer damage is restricted to the edges it won't hurt things much, if at all, as the doves really don't like setting down too near the edges anyway.

Rains forecast for this afternoon and this evening. Hope they materialize.

All my best, Stan

Very cool. We just planted about 45 food plots on our quail lease. I now feel a little of what you farmers feel each year.

BTW, looks like some good quail wood in the background.

It is being developed for that purpose, Adam. It is already pretty good but will be great in years to come. My buddy releases 1600 on it each August. You just oughta hear them calling early in the morning around the sunflower field. It's a beautiful sound. Lots of "survivors" from last season. There's some wild birds there too.

SRH

Hello Stan,

Fantastic post!

I have been pestering my hunting buddies to do something similar at
the place we hunt and now, with your instructions I may get to convince them!
Thank you.

JC

Adam, what do you use on your quail food plots?

JC

This is a great thread, Stan, and thanks for taking the time to do it. I have never been able to make a sunflower crop here in AL due to the deer damage. They would always bite them off as soon as they came up and that was the end of them. I don't have a field as big as yours, and they can wipe out one of 2 or 3 acres.

What I do is plant strips of RR corn and browntop millet, and then "plant" wheat a few days before the season, using the state's guidelines for legal top-sowing planting methods. By bush-hogging strips of corn and millet every week, we usually are able to get a decent shoot or 2, but nothing like what you are able to do. Good luck with it!

Coosa, one of the places I am fortunate to hunt is an assemblage of a half-dozen smaller fields separated by tree lines and hedgerows totaling 18 acres overall. The area is densely populated with deer which are kept out with temporary electric fencing set up each year during growth and taken down during the dove season. It does a great job on the deer. Racoons are another matter on the corn, but the sunflowers are intact.

They (the deer) are working around the edges of our sunflowers pretty bad. Many farmers are saying the deer are eating the seedling cotton plants worse this year than ever before. I spent a day early this week putting up scarecrows (scaredeer, actually) around cotton and peanut fields. So far, my son and I have put up between forty and fifty, and need more. It is really bad, and these inept people that decide how many deer the hunters get to kill each season in GA are now talking about cutting the number of doe days by somewhere between 19 and 25. Why, because "hunters", and I use that term loosely, said they didn't see nearly as many deer last season. Makes me want to throw up my hands sometimes. I'll be calling the DNR to get depredation permits very soon, as I have to do every year.

I'll try to get by the field and get some up to date pictures soon to show the progress, and the deer damage. They should be really growing after that 6.5" of rain we got last week.

SRH

We had what most hunter fear last year, a localized die off of several hundred deer in a very concentrated area. Almost 100% total die off. Our deer population had gotten to such over populated levels that the biologist were monitoring for such an event. It appears to have burned itself out because it happen so fast that we were lucky it could not spread. Had it taken longer to spread deer movement could have spread it everywhere and the death rate would have been staggering. Disease outbreaks in stressed, highly dense population are like atomic bombs. Extreme to the max.. They think that they had a 100% death rate in area of several miles.

How many deer are too many some ask? A state biologist suggested that one deer per five to ten acres is a viable population. Of course he is not feeding them on his land with his crops. On one farm I own last year there were a total of 73 deer killed on just over 400 acres. You can not grow soybeans on that farm. The deer population does not appear to be impacted yet by hunting or die off. But the farmer who tends it hates deer destruction with a passion and would welcome a 90% reduction in population like rain in August. People who are against hunting should consider that unchecked deer numbers are destined to crash and the die off will occur as Mother Nature corrects mankind's disruption of equilibrium.

Up here in New England, it is not just a crop destruction issue (I won't bother talking about landscaping), but also an ecological issue. The deer population exploded up here due as much to reforestation in the last 50 years as a lack of predators (except possibly coyotes). Heavy forest grazing by too many deer has adversely affected other species that rely on the low vegetation for cover and food. Most suburbanites around here have little idea that their treasured forests are really ecological deserts due to deer overgrazing. Allowing deer hunting and managed timbering would make a huge difference - the self-styled suburban environmentalists around here are completely unable to comprehend that concept.

But deer overpopulation up here is also a human health issue, because the deer play a role in the transmission of Lyme's Disease. Hunting is not widely supported in this part of the world (modest understatement), but the rampant spread of Lyme's Disease up here is leading to discussion of about "culling" deer herds in the Boston suburbs as Lymes' Disease becomes more and more prevalent. When they look like Bambi, you can't hunt them for food, but when they start acting like rats, it is okay to exterminate them, I guess.