Dove season opener forecast looks ... OK
Hope for a good opening week comes with hatch of season's last broods
It’s out there, just around the corner. Can’t you feel it? Can you smell it in the morning air?
Maybe it feels like 105 degrees in the shade today, but last night we had those showers and those mid-70s temperatures around a sunset that came just a little earlier than the day before. It all had just a hint of “that feel.”
September One. The traditional opening day of dove season. Here it comes.
The sun will burn through the misty, dew-soaked dawn and the whistling wings of those gray rockets will send a shiver up your spine. The first shots of hunting season will ring out and the air will carry the sweet scent of shotgun smoke.
Inevitably, the day will fall two days after you spill the Hoppe’s No. 9 across the kitchen table and your wife later remarks, “Really? You can’t smell that!?”
You know you can, but you like it.
It will come 24 hours after you start your last-hours shopping list because, before you leave for work you’ll decide to make sure you had at least 50 old shells in that ratty cardboard box in the garage marked “bathroom stuff” that somehow morphed into your hunting junk drawer over the years. You’ll find five 2 ¾-inch No. 7 Winchester AAs in the bottom of a box labeled for Remington 3 ½-inch steel BBs.
That opener will roll around about 23 hours after you discover that funky smell on your hands after putting new batteries in the dove decoys and think, “it was the friggin’ neighbor’s cat.”
It will come 10 hours after you’ve thrown a haphazard collection of crap in the back of your truck, remembered you forgot to put water and ice on the list, and that you forgot that you broke the handle on your cooler the last time you went fishing.
Then, as thoughts about how you haven’t swung your shotgun for seven months start to seep in you’re your psyche, you will yell across the garage to your best COVID 19 friend, “Hey Siri! How late is Bass Pro Shops open today?”
Finally, six hours after you made it home from Walmart, three hours after you went to sleep, and an hour after you grabbed a flimsy Styrofoam cup of coffee and a too-dry egg, cheese, and bacon biscuit, you’ll be ready, in the field, for that glorious dawn ritual.
And it should at least be mediocre, in terms of bird numbers.
Talking to guides and biologists across the state this week I have deduced it likely will be similar to last year, which puts it somewhere between pretty good and the smell of aged cat pee on your fingers—depending on where you end up, the weather, and whether the dove hunting gods decide to smile upon you.
Fields managed by guides, landowners, and the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation on its Wildlife Management Areas will be some of the hotter spots with wheat fields getting regular soaks lately and corn and some milo harvest running behind schedule.
If you know someone who managed a good field of sunflowers you’ll have all the potential you could hope for. It will just depend on the birds.
Scouting is going to be extremely important for the next several days. It always is, but in a year with fewer birds, it’s even more crucial.
I think guide Gordie Montgomery put his finger on it this week when he said, “I think this last hatch could pull us out of the gutter and we could have a decent opener.”
The majority of doves dropped on opening day are locally raised youngsters and the summer of 2021 hasn’t been the easiest for reproduction everywhere.
It takes roughly 21 days for a pair of doves to raise just a pair of young, but they might build as many as five or six of their flimsy two-egg nests in a season. They may make a lot of nests, but as Montgomery suggested, if you think back through the summer in 21-day increments it’s tough to come up with a period that didn’t see some significant rain and wind events that likely socked it to a fair number of birds each time.
Dove season 2021: Sept. 1-Oct. 31 and Dec. 1-29.
To see a current list of Wildlife Management Area dove fields with GPS coordinates and current crops listed and contact numbers for information go to wildlifedepartment.com.
Click this link or navigate from the home page by clicking the Hunting Resources link, then links for: What To Hunt, Migratory Game Birds, Dove, and then click hyper-linked text in the second paragraph on the page for dove hunting opportunities or prepared dove fields.
One last brood might not sound like much, but as those birds take wing they potentially double the number of adults already here. That’s a lot of birds.
Hot fields will be the ones with 400 or 500 or so birds in them, rare will be the 1,000- to 1,500-bird fields—if any, Montgomery said.
Matt Mattioda, Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation biologist for the Keystone, Skiatook, Candy Creek, and Heyburn WMAs, traps and bands doves each July.
He was still at it this week, checking traps after mowing and burning WMA fields. He said the banding work was somewhat similar to last year, “a weird kind of year.”
Trapping has been hampered by rain, he said. He’s had plenty of zeros.
“But then one evening a couple of weeks ago I caught 68,” he said. “Any time you can get that many birds concentrated in one place things aren’t that bad.”
“Last year I was a little worried but it ended up that we shot a bunch on Keystone. Our fields look decent and I think it could be similar this year,” he said. “As long as we don’t get a big rain on them this week.”
Down in the southwest, around Hackberry Flats, biologist Kelvin Schoonover said he was excited to see a group of about 150 birds on a dirt road after recent rain when in a good year the birds should be lining the roads and weighing down power lines.
It’s been so wet this year that his native sunflower fields are just now beginning to bloom (same with the ones in my Bixby backyard) and, with five inches of rain in the past week, the Hackberry WMA fields are in pretty rough shape for doves.
“It will come around but things are running just behind right now with the wet weather,” he said.
Running behind, yeah, I get that.
Another awesome article. Well researched and even better written.