Here's a good news-bad news scenario. See if it sounds familiar to you: first, the bad news. At the end of turkey season last spring, you and some hunting buddies talked seriously about planting a dove field. You may have even put together the names of the guys who would hunt it with you and started trying to figure out how much it would cost each member, how often the field would be hunted, and who had a tractor you could borrow.

When the field is right and the shot is right, you can end up with doves in the bag on South Carolina's public-land dove hunts. Photo by Phillip Gentry.

Everybody said, "Yeah, that sounds good." Turkey season ended. May went by and you just never found time to get that field ready. The bass were literally jumping in the boat that month. Then it was time for family vacation, the kids were out of school and now that Sept. 1st is only a few days away, guess what? You ain't got no dove field.

Here's the good news. While you were out bass fishing and playing in the surf with the kids and all that other stuff you do during the summer, the folks at your local South Carolina DNR office used their tractor to plant you a dove field. You do have a place to hunt after all.

Proper dove manipulation requires more than just planting a field. It also requires an understanding of the terrain, preferred foods and local dove populations. To get an insider's view of the whole process, South Carolina Game & Fish talked with the state's small-game project supervisor Billy Dukes. Dukes is well versed on the subject and offered some enlightenment into dove hunting in South Carolina.

THE BIG PICTURE
To most hunters, a good dove year is based on the number of doves in the field on the first day of the season. If there are a lot of doves, it must be a good year. If not, it must be an off year. Assessments that are based only on one afternoon's dove activity, however, are rarely an accurate reflection of our state population.

"The state's dove population experiences significant fluctuations of as much as 30 percent annually," said Dukes, "but overall it is stable. Fluctuations are most likely related to severe weather events."

Bad weather during nesting season can have serious negative effects on dove reproduction because doves build very flimsy nests -- a bad storm at the wrong time can blow the nests apart, causing the loss of a nesting cycle. The doves will try again, but one of the year's clutches will be gone.

Though doves are distributed widely across South Carolina, they are not evenly distributed. Broadly speaking, South Carolina can be broken down into three main uses from a dove's perspective: agriculture, forestry and urban.

"Food availability will be the major factor influencing dove concentrations in late summer and fall," explained the biologist. "With more agriculture in the Coastal Plain, birds are more likely to be scattered and spread out on a variety of food sources, including prepared dove fields and harvested grain fields."

According to Dukes, even in "off" years, dove hunters who only hunt during the first season would not necessarily be able to tell if reproduction was off or not -- and nearly 75 percent of dove hunters in South Carolina do not hunt doves after the first dove season.

"While it's difficult to predict the quality of the season based on weather or reproduction before the season has started, I would say that well-prepared public and private fields will provide good to excellent opportunity early in the season. If productivity is poor, later shoots in the first season might well suffer.