Did you know that a mourning dove has 2,635 feathers?
I found that statistic in a book written by John Madson, entitled “The Mourning Dove.” Madson is gone now, but he was a top-notch outdoor writer, one of the old-timers who actually grew up in the outdoors—unlike the suburban outdoor writers that dominate the pages of our larger newspapers today. Madson worked for Winchester Arms and Ammunition, and he published several books about wild game birds and animals through Winchester Press.
Madson reveals many fascinating things about the dove. As a writer, I have likely written a hundred newspaper columns and perhaps a dozen magazine articles about dove hunting. It is so simple and so uncomplicated, what can you say about dove hunting that hasn’t been said a million times?
You can’t tell a shooter how to hit one. Sometimes early in the season when the younger doves are coming to a feeding spot, or to a water hole, they are so easy to hit—it’s simpler than catching sunfish on worms. Sometimes, after they have figured out that hunting season is open, they can elude a shot pattern with ease, diving, twisting, and turning. At times it is something like hitting a butterfly with a rock.
If it has been written once, that dove hunting is a good way to get a youngster the chance to hunt and experience a day outdoors, it has been written a million times. If you have seen, at the beginning of September, a story talking about training a young Labrador to retrieve, and how the heat can be hard on him, so you need plenty of water, that too has been said again and again in print by some enthusiastic woods and waters journalist.
If you haven’t heard that number seven and one-half or eight shot, light loads is best for doves, you’ve never read a doggone thing about hunting. So, what is there to say about dove hunting. Not much. Heck, let me rephrase that…not nothing.
I might point out that hunting in a crowd isn’t my thing, but I have often written that. I have often said that I do not like to hunt in the heat, and there is never an opening day that doesn’t seem hotter than an August manhole cover on main street. What I don’t often say is that two or three weeks later, when it cools down and you can hunt in midweek and find the right spot, you can hunt doves in a long-sleeved shirt and all alone with your dog. But I’ll be darned if I am going to tell anyone where the hunting might be in early October.
Early hunting seasons interfere with some good fishing, and one good catfish equals a whole tubful of doves. Be that as it may, if you think you have indeed read everything there is to know about dove hunting and doves, get your hands on John Madson’s book. It was he who pointed out that in the bird family called Columbidae there are 269 doves and pigeons, two thirds of them on the other side of the world. Doves and pigeons, Madson said in his book, are the only birds that can drink water by suction, with their heads down, never lifting their beaks, as other birds must do.
Mourning doves nest from southeast Alaska all through Canada, and each of the 48 contiguous states in the U.S. Forty years ago, they were not known to nest in such northern climates. Some never migrate. Some stay where they are all winter, and northern doves often lose toes to the cold. Doves and pigeons feed their young with something called pigeon milk, as most folks know, and as most folks don’t know, the most deadly dove disease—known as trichomoniasis—is a growth of cankers in the mouth and throat, caused by the ingestion of a living protozoan usually picked up in water.
You can learn a great deal more about doves if you can find John Madson’s book. Even the hunting tips we have all heard a million times. But as to how that study turned up 2,635 feathers on one dove, I don’t know. Probably some college kid counted them one at a time and got a thirty thousand dollar grant from a state conservation agency to do it. But I wonder, how would anyone know if he really counted them all or just gave up and guessed at it?
