Near Little Falls, Minn. – When Minnesota's 2016 mourning dove hunting season opens at a half-hour before sunrise on Thursday, hunting could be good.
Or not so good.
Last week, a scouting venture to a few of my favorite spots in central Minnesota provided mixed results. I saw numerous doves perched on power lines, as they are inclined to do, but no real concentration of birds. It was early in the dove migration, though, so I didn't really expect to find the mother lode.
However, mourning doves are early migrators. Doves are already arriving in states as far south as Tennessee. I've always found it odd how early some doves head south because they are a relatively hardy bird. A few even overwinter in Minnesota.
The good news I found on my scouting trip was I discovered weed seeds, food favored by doves as forage, had begun to mature and some were even falling on the ground. That's important because mourning doves are ground feeders, preferring almost exclusively to dine on seeds that have ripened and dropped.
In the areas my partners and I hunt, doves prefer to nourish themselves on the seeds of two weed species: foxtail and Johnson grass. It is likely the weed seeds matured early because of the mild spring and sufficient summer precipitation. Some years a late spring and cool summer have delayed the ripening of most of the weeds and doves had to find food in nontraditional locations, making hunting more difficult.
But the ample summer rains are actually part of the bad news. My partners and I do much of our hunting near mourning dove watering areas. Well, here in central Minnesota we've had far more than "sufficient" rain. Most low areas in fields contained water. And as the sun neared the western horizon, I watched through binoculars as doves flew to those waterholes. So, what's the problem? Way too many drinking options for them.
Another downside to the heavy summer rainfall is that many of the low, bare areas in corn, soybean and potato fields that normally flood and dry, allowing weeds to grow, are now so thick and tall because of the moisture that doves will forgo those normally prime feeding areas because, like I mentioned above, the ground-feeding birds prefer to dine in locations with a view.