Field crops feed hungry doves as Sept. 4 opening day nears

BAHAMA -- Chris Teague gets anxious this time of the year.

The state wildlife technician supervisor is in charge of the dove fields at the Butner-Falls of Neuse and Jordan public game lands maintained by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.

The anxiety stems from the Sept. 4 opening of dove season, the first hunting season of the fall.

Teague supervises the planting and maintenance of the crops grown to draw in birds.

It's not an easy job, what with the meager resources afforded Teague and other public dove field managers across the state.

"I'm ready to pull my hair out right now," Teague said. "I want everything to look as perfect as it can. ... My anxiety comes from wanting to make sportsmen happy."

At the Butner-Falls of Neuse public game land, none of the sunflower, a favorite forage of dove, seemed to make it at the Brickhouse Road area of Butner-Falls, and really, the only place sunflower really flourished is the Olive Chapel Road area.

"That was probably our best field overall," Teague said.

Sunflower is probably the most difficult-to-grow crop that the commission plants at its dove fields, and if the seeds do germinate, many plants don't make it through a hot, dry summer such as this one.

"It's all weather-dependent," Teague said.

If the plants survive through that ringer, then there are deer.

"What did come up got eaten up by deer," Teague said.

For that reason, Teague has given up trying to plant sunflower at Jordan, where the deer have, in the past, not left any sunflower behind by the time the dove season has started.

The good news is that, even without a bumper sunflower crop, there's plenty for doves to munch on, with different types of millet and corn available. Three types of millet - browntop, proso and foxtail - are planted. Then there's buckwheat and corn, milo and Egyptian wheat.

Another plant also thrives in those fields, though it's more of a bugaboo to Teague. That plant is Johnson grass, a tall, invasive plant that, left to its own devices, outcompetes many of the mentioned crops.

"That makes for an ugly dove field," Teague said. "But if they look underneath it, the fields are full of millet and corn."

On a limited budget, though, Teague has begun using new chemicals designed to target the species. They're not cheap, and so he been able to tackle only a few fields at a time.

"We're trying very hard to get rid of it," he said. "It's very thick, very hard and very hard to mow or disc. It's not something I want in my dove fields."

Teague is optimistic about the coming season. He has seen a lot of birds in the fields.

"There's quite a few," he said. "I'm not going to say it's loaded. We still have [nine days] to go, but we've seen a lot in our fields."