Cause for concern
Dove season opener shaping up to be a tough one
Landowners who attempted to plant sunflower seeds earlier this summer in hopes of attracting doves for the upcoming Tennessee hunting season faced a variety of challenges.
An unusually wet summer made it hard to get the necessary equipment into the fields for planting. Then once the planting was done, a string of cool nights led to a lousy growth rate for the flowers.
One West Tennessee landowner thought he’d beaten the elements by getting his field in a little earlier than usual. It looked great and was holding plenty of doves – until a swarm of yellow finches came in and picked it clean.
“It’s really just been one thing after another,” said Ty Inmon, a conservation officer for the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency who surveys many West Tennessee dove fields this time of year. “With the wet and cool weather, most sunflower fields did not get planted until late or not at all. It could be a tough season for some people.”
Even those who managed to get their fields planted have had issues. The fields that haven’t been blitzed by finches — tiny yellow birds that are prized by those who hang backyard thistle feeders — have had trouble with weeds.
“People usually use chemicals to keep the weeds out of their sunflower fields, and you usually see some great fields every summer,” Inmon said. “But the chemicals just haven’t worked as well this year or it’s been too wet to spray them.”
Some fields have been engulfed by weeds to the point that hunters are planning to simply hunt over the weeds.
“Our dove field got completely consumed by sicklepods,” said Tom Matthews, owner of Avery Outdoors and an avid Fayette County hunter. “But doves eat sicklepods, too. So we’re just going to work around that.”
Sicklepods are spindly green weeds that are widely despised by farmers, and they don’t provide the same picturesque setting for a dove hunt as vividly colored sunflowers.
In many ways, the new scene sums up the kind of preseason it’s been. But hunters still seem to be excited about a Sept. 1 start date that has traditionally stood as the official return of hunting season.
“You can just walk into our store and tell that people are excited about the season,” said John Gordon, a pro-staffer for Memphis-based Avery Outdoors who spends a lot of time inside the company’s outlet store on Cumberland Avenue. “Dove hunting has gotten a lot more technical with Mojo (automated) decoys and special blinds and special ammunition. People have been coming in here checking that stuff out and getting ready to hunt.”
Gordon said hunters seem particularly excited about a new brand of ammunition from Winchester.
“Winchester has come out with a AA load, a tracer round that lets you actually see the shot pattern in the air,” Gordon said. “It’s going to make a huge difference for some people because they’ll be able to see exactly where they’re missing. Most people shoot behind the birds.”
According to the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, the mourning dove is the most hunted and the most harvested migratory game bird in North America. There are about 450 million birds in the continental population, and the overall U.S. harvest is usually around 45 million birds.
In Tennessee, about 100,000 dove hunters kill an estimated 2 million doves each year.
But given the field conditions around the Mid-South, those numbers could dip this year.
“Not every field was a lost cause,” Inmon said. “Hopefully we will have some good weather and what few fields are out there will have some birds.”