Devastated by doves

I know what is going to happen, and I am dreading it.

Just before dawn tomorrow, shotgun shots will pierce the desert air, ricochet off the boulders and set off an echoing crack! … crack! … crack! …

Wings will beat a high-whistle warning unlike any other.

And contact will be made.

The desert will broadcast the killing, though I won’t see it from my pillow.

As it does every year, dove season opens in California half an hour before sunrise on September 1.

Do you know the mourning dove, Zenaida macroura, with her soft cooing and gentle countenance?

They are one of the most common and widespread birds in the country, and one of the most hunted. People kill about 17 million of them a year.

Doves aren’t flagged as agricultural pests, and they don’t carry disease risk to humans. Nothing in the literature treats them as an ecological problem needing “management.” They are native and non-invasive.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and California Department of Fish and Wildlife specifically, using The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 – 19fucking18 – regulate hunting licenses to "maintain dove populations in a healthy, productive state."

Natural mortality in the wild is dictated by predation, starvation, disease, weather. A "sustainable yield" is the idea that hunters can kill a certain number on top of that natural loss without shrinking the population overall.

That does not mean that they should.

And in my region, the Western Management Unit's dove population has actually been declining about 3.4 percent a year for the past decade.

I live next to a wash, where dove hunters regularly take up residence. Any given bird they kill may be one born in a flimsy nest by my back door. Could be one of the pair who arrives at the water station daily at sunset. One of the many who line the wire between me and the wash. Or one of their relatives.

All I can do – and encourage my neighbors to do – is to create a haven of food, water, shelter and quiet, and guide the birds to safety. Put out shallow pans of water and offer millet, cracked corn and sunflower hearts. They like to eat on the ground, and they swallow the seeds whole, storing them in their crop, a stretchable pouch at the base of their throats. Then they find cover to dine and rest. In my yard, they seek safety under the tangles of creosote, senna and other sagebrush.

I read that it takes two to three mourning doves to make a meal.

To do this, the instructions are:

1. Lay the bird breast-up on a solid surface.

2. Remove the breast skin and feathers.

3. Cut the breast from the wing to keep it for species ID.

4. Rinse lightly, store in a sealed bag with species and date, and cook when ready.

I imagine people doing this in their backyards, the alive doves on the wire looking on.

I feel sick.

Did you know that in sunlight, males’ feathers flash an iridescent purple-pink? That doves can fly 55 miles an hour? That they have babies between February and October? That some will have babies tomorrow. That some will die by shotgun shot tomorrow?

And do you know what happens next month?

California opens quail season – the guns come out and the mourning begins again.