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.
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
