10/22/2006

Return of the mourning dove

By Bruce Bischoff
Outdoor columnist

Here we go again.

A week or two ago I was talking with an old friend about my so-so success on the opening weekend of bird season. My friend doesn't hunt himself, but he's certainly not an anti-hunter and grew up in the same semi-rural northern Michigan culture I did.

But I was kind of taken aback when he said, "What I really don't understand is why they want to make it legal to shoot doves. Are we running out of game, and they think hunters from other states will come here to hunt doves?"

No, I replied, they can already hunt doves in their home states. Nobody's going to come to Michigan to hunt doves.

Now, my friend is an educated and well-read gentleman — an attorney, in fact. Yet he had no idea that doves are the most popular gamebird in the United States and are legal game in 30-odd states. Another old friend in our little group spent 20 years in the Coast Guard and was stationed primarily in the South.

"Yeah, in the South dove hunting is huge," he said. "Opening day of dove season down there is like opening day of deer season here, if not bigger."

It disturbs the heck out of me that the upcoming referendum on dove hunting will be decided by people who mostly don't have a clue about dove hunting.

They're not necessarily anti-hunting, they just don't have the facts.

The other night I caught my first glimpse of an anti-dove hunting TV ad. Now, it's the election season, and I expect half-truths and phony logic from campaign ads. But, perhaps because of the logical weakness of their position, the anti-hunters decided to start out directly with blatant lies.

I dislike liars even more than I like hunting, so I can't resist responding. If this seems repetitive, I apologize.

LIE NO. 1 — Doves are too small to eat.

Hey, I've eaten them myself. They are the star attraction of thousands of barbecues across the U.S. every year. With a strip of bacon pinned across them with a toothpick, grilled dove breasts are a delicacy.

And if size is the issue, why isn't there a movement to ban quail hunting in Michigan too?

LIE NO. 2 — Hunters shoot doves for target practice and leave the carcasses in the field.

Wow, I seem to remember seeing a lot of people combing the rattlesnake-infested low desert scrub of Arizona to recover downed birds. Did it myself, and I'm a rattler coward to the core.

Seriously, state game laws generally require that hunters recover and utilize the meat from their kills.

LIE NO. 3 — Many doves are wounded and left to die a slow death.

Doves aren't ring-necked pheasants. They can't carry a lot of lead. In fact, one pellet will pretty much do the job. When I hunted doves, most of them were dead before they hit the ground.

LIE NO. 4 — Doves are the biblical "bird of peace." People think a lot of things are in the Bible that just aren't there. According to the concordances I've checked, there's no such quote in the Bible. Scripture is a poor basis for wildlife management anyway.

The Bible does mention that doves were a preferred sacrifice to be ritually slaughtered and burned as an offering in the Temple. Of course, the doves in ancient Palestine weren't mourning doves but rock doves, ancestors of our modern domestic pigeons.

Anti-hunters almost invariably refer to doves as "gentle," an archaic piece of anthropomorphism that has no place in a debate about game management. Doves, of course, do not have human characteristics. They're just doves.

LIE NO. 5 — Michigan hunters already have plenty of birds to hunt.

Not exactly. Glancing at the game laws, it may seem like waterfowlers, anyway, have lots to pick from, but the list of legal game includes such rarely hunted critters as snipe and rails (quick, have you ever seen either one? Do you even know what they are?) Other species such as snow geese and pintail ducks are legal game, too, although they rarely visit our fair state.

When it comes to upland bird hunting — that's the kind you do on dry land, preferably with a good pointing dog — Michigan hunters have just three options, or maybe three and a half: pheasants, which have been in decline for years and are nearly a thing of the past; ruffed grouse, which have been hard to come by for a couple of decades now; and woodcock, which have been having some population problems as well. The "half" option is quail, which can be hunted in several of our southern counties in years the DNR decides populations warrant a season.

Last time this issue came up, I went round and round with a woman who insisted that wild turkeys were upland game. I finally suggested she shoot one on a small game license and explain to the DNR that it was an upland bird.

I could go on and on, but the people who will decide this election, like my lawyer friend, probably aren't reading the outdoor pages anyway. That makes it more important than ever for all sportsmen to get to the polls on Nov. 7.

Contact Bruce Bischoff at bruce.bischoff@hotmail.com.