Late Dove in VA

[Mills]

Down here the first few weeks of dove season can be good in a few places. After that, you can forget about it anywhere. Outlawing top sowed wheat for dove fields killed dove hunting in my area as we once knew it.

[6pt-Sika]

Originally Posted by Mills Morrison

Down here the first few weeks of dove season can be good in a few places. After that, you can forget about it anywhere. Outlawing top sowed wheat for dove fields killed dove hunting in my area as we once knew it.

I’m most likely wrong , but I think the decline in the number of working dairey farms and farmers chopping silage early put a crimp in the resident birds . Most of the farms around here that had dairy cows are now almost all beef operations now and I “believe” they feed mostly hay and shelled corn .

[Stan Hillis]

Originally Posted by Mills Morrison

Down here the first few weeks of dove season can be good in a few places. After that, you can forget about it anywhere.

Not quite anywhere.

I'm a good bit further inland than Mills, 70-80 miles, and I'm in a highly agricultural area where lots of peanuts, corn and sunflower are grown. His experience with late season doves don't reflect mine, at all. We have excellent late season shoots around here. I was on a good one just a couple weeks ago. I hear lots of people in this area complain that "there just aren't doves like there used to be". Probably so, but there's still excellent late season shooting to be had if you have access to enough fields and scout them diligently. I spend much more time scouting than I do shooting, and it pays off. Most people don't go to the trouble. I shoot with a group of about 8 - 10 people in the late season, and three of us spend a lot of time scouting for doves. "It don't come easy". Just because the sunflower or millet field, that provided good shoots in the early season, doesn't hold any birds in the late season doesn't mean there aren't doves around. Late season doves are much more fickle than early season ones. They prefer the high fat and protein content of peanuts, or corn, when the temperatures get lower in the late season. A biologist once told us that a dove can die from malnutrition, full of sunflowers, when it turns cold enough. But, you can have 600 feeding in a 50 acre peanut field today, and 80% of them may just pick up and leave overnight. Scouting........ scouting.

We are very fortunate right now, in that our late season runs from Dec. 8 through the last day of January. One of the best shoots I've ever been on here was on the last afternoon of the late season a couple years ago. There must have been 15 shooters there, in a corn field, and everyone of us had super shooting.

Late season peanut field shoot. (Sorry about the "non-Parker").





SRH