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

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