HUNTING SEASONS
NOT FAR AWAY

    I know it is hard to believe, but it won’t be long before hunters will be out after doves, and then one hunting season follows another until we all just about have our fill when January rolls around.
    Doves are already gathering. A local “farmer” recently set his strips of wheat on fire, and when I drove past his place the other day, I saw a flock of about a dozen doves fly-up out of the burned stubble. It would appear that the plots were burned off a little early, but maybe the owner wanted to make sure that doves found plenty to eat at his place and wouldn’t go flying off to look elsewhere.
    I expect he has more wheat, which he will provide for the birds when the hunting season opens. Nearby are strips of sunflowers. I don’t think he planted those for song birds. I suspect there will be lots of good shooting at his place.
    It has gotten to the point in this area that if you want to have good shooting, you have to provide food for whatever you plan to hunt. There are still some fields of corn being cut, but not nearly as many as there were when this area had lots of dairy farmers. A corn field harvested for ensilage is probably the best place you could find to hunt doves.
My experience has been that if doves find an adequate source of food in one place, they won’t leave until it is gone. It seems that the secret to having good shooting is to attract the birds early on and keep them there.
    My plots of dove Proso millet haven’t gotten enough rain, so the heads are not filling out with seed. Even if I run the bushhog over parts of the field, I know I won’t be able to compete with those strips of wheat and sunflowers.
    Deer always eat all of the heads off the wheat I plant, so I don’t have any to scatter for doves. The same thing happened to my sunflowers. As soon as the plants began to form a head, deer nipped them off.
    On a parcel of land within half-a-mile, a neighbor has a nice stand of sunflowers. How come?
    I think I need one of those cannons that fire every now and then to scare birds out of fields. The scarecrow I put up in my field was a joke. Deer-nipped off plants within a foot of it, even though I splashed it with perfume. The deer on our place don’t seem to be afraid of human scent until hunting season.
    And speaking of scents, none of them have ever seemed to work for me. I killed a lot of deer with a shotgun, many of them almost too close, and I never used any scent to block my own or to attract a deer.
    I have to believe that all of those scents offered to hunters do more for the folks who make them than they do for hunters.
    Maybe if I could buy a scent that smells like a sunflower, I might lure an entire herd to me. Maybe I can borrow a big sunflower from a neighbor and rub it on my hunting jacket.
    Deer are not playing fair. Every Spring I plant food for them, but they are not supposed to eat it until during the Fall hunting season when I can sit up a tree and get a shot at them.
    Things could be worse. If deer were the hunters and we were the hunted, I suspect many of us would be mounted and hung on the wall.