Mechanicaldawg
Roosevelt Ranger
More than just a hunting day
Season opener: Start of dove season a tradition for Georgia families that changes little with the times.
By Mark Davis
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, September 01, 2008
Saturday, the grand tradition commences in fields where friends gather, waiting. It rolls out at noon, no sooner, and takes place on little farms and at sprawling plantations. Men, boys, women, girls: they’ll raise barrels to the sky.
The rules are slightly different than in previous years, and not everyone was happy with that. But so what?
What matters is the whirr of wings in the late summer sky, the yelp of dogs, the boom of shotguns. Dove season is upon us.
“Opening day of dove season is like homecoming of the football season —- you see people you know, you make business contacts. It’s a time for families,” said Duluth hunter Gary Johnson, who will greet the season at a turf farm in Whitesburg. “Opening day is like no other day of the hunting season.”
Opening day signals the impending arrival of cooler weather when different species—- among them quail, boar and the undisputed king of the hunts, the whitetail deer —- come into season. For hunters, this is a time to reconnect with friends, to stalk wooded hills.
People have been hunting doves in the South for as long as the winged travelers have been passing through. The state of Georgia has been regulating how people hunt them for 80 years or longer.
Migratory creatures, Zenaida macroura are nimble flyers, drawn to fields where grain lies on the ground. When the first breaths of autumn whisper in Ohio, Illinois and other Midwestern states, doves stir, then head south. They’ll stay at a site so long as the grain and the weather holds.
Plantation owners cannot do anything about the weather, but they can assure there’s sufficient food. Operations like Burnt Pine Plantation outside Newborn operate fields that are a buffet for doves.
On a recent morning, Brian Mask, general manager at Burnt Pine, walked a dove field an hour’s drive east of Atlanta. A westerly wind bent the stalks of grain, sorghum, millet and sunflowers, all planted for the pending season. A score of doves sat on a nearby wire; more rested atop dried sunflowers. Others passed overhead, their breasts like tiny gray clouds against the blue sky.
Mask, who has hunted in and around Burnt Pine for more than 30 years, has been watching their numbers grow daily.
“It’s looking good,” he said. “I think we’ll have a good season.”
New bag limit
Nearly a half-billion doves across the nation will be heading south this winter, according to statistics from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency, which keeps track of migratory fowl, estimates that about half will be heading into the Southeast.
Those numbers are encouraging, said John Stanton, a federal biologist whose district encompasses the Carolinas and Georgia. “It appears the population is holding steady,” he said.
The federal agency says states can authorize no more than 70 hunting days per season for doves, and they must occur between Sept. 1 and Jan. 15.
In Georgia, the state Department of Natural Resources, which regulates hunting and fishing, has created three dove-hunting periods —- September, October and the late season, which begins in late November and ends in January.
This year, the periods are Sept. 6-21 (16 days), Oct. 11-19 (nine days) and Nov. 27-Jan. 10. (45 days).
The agency this year adjusted the calendar slightly, moving back the October hunt by one week. The change gives South Georgia farmers more time to harvest crops, then turn their attention to dove hunting, said John Bowers, DNR’s assistant chief of game management.
A few hunters griped about the adjustment, he said. “Some people,” he said, “just don’t like change.”
One change hunters should like: for the first time, shooters can take up to 15 doves a day, the federal limit. In the past, they had to stop at 12. The agency’s Board of Natural Resources, whose duties include setting hunting seasons and bag limits, approved the change Wednesday.
Upping the limit “makes no difference in the harvest,” said Bowers, whose employer operates 37 wildlife management areas open to dove hunting. A lifelong hunter, Bowers said his son, now 9, first accompanied him to the fields when he was 20 months, riding in an infant backpack carrier.
Bowers’ enthusiasm for dove hunting is shared by thousands. About 65,000 Georgians are licensed to hunt doves this year, DNR figures show. They should shoot about 1.3 million this season.
The changes are fine with David Hinson of Sylvania. The Scriven County resident, 56, has been hunting all his life.
“I’m pleased that the bag limit was raised,” said Hinson, an agricultural-chemical sales representative who visits farms across nearly half the state. “I’m encouraged by the number of birds I see on the power lines.”
Like other shooting enthusiasts, Hinson plans to greet opening day on the edge of a field, a 20-gauge shotgun in hand. With him will be longtime friends and his niece, 14-year-old Lovey Sheppard. “She’s shot her limit a couple of times,” he said.
Sticking to the past
The hunt is not about putting food on the table, said James Cobb, a history professor at the University of Georgia. When hunters raise barrels to the sky, he said, they are aiming at a cultural touchstone.
“It has a lot to do with that old country saying, ‘You haven’t got above your raising,’ ” said Cobb, who specializes in Southern history. Returning to the field to hunt doves is renewing a connection to the past, he said.
It’s not unusual, he said, for dove hunters to live in subdivisions and commute to glass towers, far removed from the soil where they may have been raised atop a tractor or behind a plow. “The people most removed from their Southern roots are often the ones who cling to it most tightly,” he said.
Hunting can be fun, even if you’re a lousy shot. “Part of it is a ritual, as much as anything,” he said. “It’s primarily the doing of it.”
For a lot of rural kids, the first Saturday in September highlights a series of anticipated days, said Glenn Dowling, executive vice president of the Georgia Wildlife Federation. The nonprofit association is a lobbying and membership organization with about 50,000 members.
“For some Georgia boys and girls, opening day is the first holiday,” said Dowling. “It’s followed by Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
Eric Asbell, who owns Black Creek Plantation in McIntyre, understands. Opening day is a “big social event,” said Asbell, whose plantation is about 25 miles east of Macon.
This year, it charged $175 for anyone over 17 to shoot from 35 sites. That sum bought a day shooting, plus food. The plantation sold out for opening day.
Burnt Pine is facing the same sort of demand. Late last week, manager Mask and an assistant fielded a series of telephone calls from sportsmen looking for a place to raise guns on opening day. Their message was the same: Sorry. Sold out.
Meantime, at small farms and sprawling plantations, doves gathered. They landed on power lines and hardwood limbs, rested on fence rows and sunflowers.
The hunters aren’t far behind. With food, friends and shared memories, they’ll take aim at that grand tradition —- opening day
BEFORE YOU HUNT
To hunt doves, the state Department of Natural Resources says you need to know the following:
> The 2008-09 dove seasons are Sept. 6-21, Oct. 11-19 and Nov. 27-Jan. 10.
> Dove hunters 17 and older must have a Georgia hunting license, as well as a migratory bird harvest information program, or HIP, permit. Anyone hunting on a state wildlife management area, or WMA, needs a WMA license. Hunters may buy licenses at more than 1,000 license locations or online at www.gohuntgeorgia.com. HIP permits are free.
> Shooting hours are noon to sunset on opening day. All other days commence a half-hour before sunrise and last until sundown. The sunrise and sunset times for each day are on page 43 of the 2008-09 Georgia Hunting Seasons and Regulations guide. It’s online, too.
> The daily limit has been raised from 12 birds to 15.
> Any auto-loading or other repeating shotgun must be plugged to hold no more than three shot shells.
> If you are hunting on private land, get permission from the landowner.
For more information
www.gohuntgeorgia.com
Georgia Department of Natural Resources
Season opener: Start of dove season a tradition for Georgia families that changes little with the times.
By Mark Davis
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, September 01, 2008
Saturday, the grand tradition commences in fields where friends gather, waiting. It rolls out at noon, no sooner, and takes place on little farms and at sprawling plantations. Men, boys, women, girls: they’ll raise barrels to the sky.
The rules are slightly different than in previous years, and not everyone was happy with that. But so what?
What matters is the whirr of wings in the late summer sky, the yelp of dogs, the boom of shotguns. Dove season is upon us.
“Opening day of dove season is like homecoming of the football season —- you see people you know, you make business contacts. It’s a time for families,” said Duluth hunter Gary Johnson, who will greet the season at a turf farm in Whitesburg. “Opening day is like no other day of the hunting season.”
Opening day signals the impending arrival of cooler weather when different species—- among them quail, boar and the undisputed king of the hunts, the whitetail deer —- come into season. For hunters, this is a time to reconnect with friends, to stalk wooded hills.
People have been hunting doves in the South for as long as the winged travelers have been passing through. The state of Georgia has been regulating how people hunt them for 80 years or longer.
Migratory creatures, Zenaida macroura are nimble flyers, drawn to fields where grain lies on the ground. When the first breaths of autumn whisper in Ohio, Illinois and other Midwestern states, doves stir, then head south. They’ll stay at a site so long as the grain and the weather holds.
Plantation owners cannot do anything about the weather, but they can assure there’s sufficient food. Operations like Burnt Pine Plantation outside Newborn operate fields that are a buffet for doves.
On a recent morning, Brian Mask, general manager at Burnt Pine, walked a dove field an hour’s drive east of Atlanta. A westerly wind bent the stalks of grain, sorghum, millet and sunflowers, all planted for the pending season. A score of doves sat on a nearby wire; more rested atop dried sunflowers. Others passed overhead, their breasts like tiny gray clouds against the blue sky.
Mask, who has hunted in and around Burnt Pine for more than 30 years, has been watching their numbers grow daily.
“It’s looking good,” he said. “I think we’ll have a good season.”
New bag limit
Nearly a half-billion doves across the nation will be heading south this winter, according to statistics from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency, which keeps track of migratory fowl, estimates that about half will be heading into the Southeast.
Those numbers are encouraging, said John Stanton, a federal biologist whose district encompasses the Carolinas and Georgia. “It appears the population is holding steady,” he said.
The federal agency says states can authorize no more than 70 hunting days per season for doves, and they must occur between Sept. 1 and Jan. 15.
In Georgia, the state Department of Natural Resources, which regulates hunting and fishing, has created three dove-hunting periods —- September, October and the late season, which begins in late November and ends in January.
This year, the periods are Sept. 6-21 (16 days), Oct. 11-19 (nine days) and Nov. 27-Jan. 10. (45 days).
The agency this year adjusted the calendar slightly, moving back the October hunt by one week. The change gives South Georgia farmers more time to harvest crops, then turn their attention to dove hunting, said John Bowers, DNR’s assistant chief of game management.
A few hunters griped about the adjustment, he said. “Some people,” he said, “just don’t like change.”
One change hunters should like: for the first time, shooters can take up to 15 doves a day, the federal limit. In the past, they had to stop at 12. The agency’s Board of Natural Resources, whose duties include setting hunting seasons and bag limits, approved the change Wednesday.
Upping the limit “makes no difference in the harvest,” said Bowers, whose employer operates 37 wildlife management areas open to dove hunting. A lifelong hunter, Bowers said his son, now 9, first accompanied him to the fields when he was 20 months, riding in an infant backpack carrier.
Bowers’ enthusiasm for dove hunting is shared by thousands. About 65,000 Georgians are licensed to hunt doves this year, DNR figures show. They should shoot about 1.3 million this season.
The changes are fine with David Hinson of Sylvania. The Scriven County resident, 56, has been hunting all his life.
“I’m pleased that the bag limit was raised,” said Hinson, an agricultural-chemical sales representative who visits farms across nearly half the state. “I’m encouraged by the number of birds I see on the power lines.”
Like other shooting enthusiasts, Hinson plans to greet opening day on the edge of a field, a 20-gauge shotgun in hand. With him will be longtime friends and his niece, 14-year-old Lovey Sheppard. “She’s shot her limit a couple of times,” he said.
Sticking to the past
The hunt is not about putting food on the table, said James Cobb, a history professor at the University of Georgia. When hunters raise barrels to the sky, he said, they are aiming at a cultural touchstone.
“It has a lot to do with that old country saying, ‘You haven’t got above your raising,’ ” said Cobb, who specializes in Southern history. Returning to the field to hunt doves is renewing a connection to the past, he said.
It’s not unusual, he said, for dove hunters to live in subdivisions and commute to glass towers, far removed from the soil where they may have been raised atop a tractor or behind a plow. “The people most removed from their Southern roots are often the ones who cling to it most tightly,” he said.
Hunting can be fun, even if you’re a lousy shot. “Part of it is a ritual, as much as anything,” he said. “It’s primarily the doing of it.”
For a lot of rural kids, the first Saturday in September highlights a series of anticipated days, said Glenn Dowling, executive vice president of the Georgia Wildlife Federation. The nonprofit association is a lobbying and membership organization with about 50,000 members.
“For some Georgia boys and girls, opening day is the first holiday,” said Dowling. “It’s followed by Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
Eric Asbell, who owns Black Creek Plantation in McIntyre, understands. Opening day is a “big social event,” said Asbell, whose plantation is about 25 miles east of Macon.
This year, it charged $175 for anyone over 17 to shoot from 35 sites. That sum bought a day shooting, plus food. The plantation sold out for opening day.
Burnt Pine is facing the same sort of demand. Late last week, manager Mask and an assistant fielded a series of telephone calls from sportsmen looking for a place to raise guns on opening day. Their message was the same: Sorry. Sold out.
Meantime, at small farms and sprawling plantations, doves gathered. They landed on power lines and hardwood limbs, rested on fence rows and sunflowers.
The hunters aren’t far behind. With food, friends and shared memories, they’ll take aim at that grand tradition —- opening day
BEFORE YOU HUNT
To hunt doves, the state Department of Natural Resources says you need to know the following:
> The 2008-09 dove seasons are Sept. 6-21, Oct. 11-19 and Nov. 27-Jan. 10.
> Dove hunters 17 and older must have a Georgia hunting license, as well as a migratory bird harvest information program, or HIP, permit. Anyone hunting on a state wildlife management area, or WMA, needs a WMA license. Hunters may buy licenses at more than 1,000 license locations or online at www.gohuntgeorgia.com. HIP permits are free.
> Shooting hours are noon to sunset on opening day. All other days commence a half-hour before sunrise and last until sundown. The sunrise and sunset times for each day are on page 43 of the 2008-09 Georgia Hunting Seasons and Regulations guide. It’s online, too.
> The daily limit has been raised from 12 birds to 15.
> Any auto-loading or other repeating shotgun must be plugged to hold no more than three shot shells.
> If you are hunting on private land, get permission from the landowner.
For more information
www.gohuntgeorgia.com
Georgia Department of Natural Resources
