10/13/2006

No reason for a season on the mourning dove

People advocating for a mourning dove hunting season in Michigan claim they like the challenge of hunting doves, they're good to eat and a dove hunting season will bring millions in hunter dollars to Michigan.

Some even manage to say all that with a straight face.

Amid the rhetoric over instituting a permanent dove hunting season are two simple truths: A few hunters simply love blasting away at the little gray birds, even though they have lots of other things to shoot; and people who make money off hunters want to make more.

Mourning doves are not "game" birds in the sense that you have to trek into the woods to find their habitat or exhibit any hunting skills whatsoever. These are not pheasants, grouse, turkeys, geese or ducks. Well, sitting ducks, maybe.

You don't need dogs to find and flush them, you don't have to build a blind or rent a duck boat, you don't have to dress in cammo or waders or perfect a turkey call or sit for hours in the cold or rain waiting for a shot.

The mourning doves most of us see are hanging around our backyards or a telephone pole in a parking lot. You could probably bag your mourning dove limit right from your car (hunting for the fast-food set).

Michigan lawmakers certainly understood that most state residents (one poll said 64 percent) saw absolutely no need to establish a mourning dove hunting season.

Their first try to change the law came in a middle-of-the-night effort just before the Legislature went home for Christmas in 2000. In 2003, lawmakers tried to prevent a statewide vote on a hunting season bill through a bureaucratic loophole.

Lawmakers did create a three-year trial season that expires this year. Opponents of the hunt collected enough signatures to put it on the Nov. 7 ballot, where it is Proposal 3.

Michigan hunters already have approval to kill 40 species of birds, and until now the mourning dove has been a protected songbird. Let's keep it that way.

Vote "no" on Proposal 3.