Photo by Mark Romanack

Doves weren't the intended audience when the prophet Isaiah railed against the sense of the saying "Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die." But they could have been.

Because in Texas, food and water are the two uppermost of a dove's daily concerns. And come Sept. 1, legions of Lone Star hunters stand ready to help them die.

As befits creatures as fleet as are these winged bullets -- I've clocked mourning doves dawdling along parallel to highways at 55 miles per hour -- their metabolic rate is sky-high. The first thing they need to do after flying off the roost in the morning is to eat. After feeding, they go to water. Midday is generally spent loafing in the shade of leafy trees. In late afternoon they feed and water again before returning to the roost.

Knowledge of doves' travel paths from roost to food to water to loafing cover is vital to dove-hunting success in Texas or anywhere else. Doves will fly where they want to go, and not where you want them to be. Pre-hunt scouting is the best way to be sure that the spot you pick to hunt is a place where doves want to be.

TEXAS DOVES DIFFER
The two main types of doves in Texas are the mourning dove, so called for their melancholy cry, and the white-winged dove, named for its wings' white leading edges, which flash distinctively in flight. There are some variations in the behaviors of these doves that hunters should be aware of.

Mourning doves tend to roost in the countryside, while whitewings seem to favor urban nesting sites. San Antonio, for example, is home to more than a million whitewings. These birds fly out of the city to feed in grain, sunflower, corn, or sesame fields. Choosing a hunting location with a preferred food source or on the flyway between city roosting sites and a food source can be the key to success. While it's illegal to hunt within the city limits, a dove lease located just outside the city can be a wingshooter's bonanza.

Mourning doves will take advantage of wheat, milo and oat fields when they're available, but otherwise they concentrate on wild plants such as sunflower, croton (dove weed), ragweed, or Johnson grass. If you locate an area with these food sources and see lots of mourning doves staging on dead trees or power lines in the vicinity, chances are good that you've found a hot place to hunt.

In areas with both mourning doves and whitewings -- which now includes most of Texas -- both will feed in the same types of fields. But there is a crucial difference in how they go about it. Mourning doves begin flying before it's legal to shoot (30 minutes before sunrise), but whitewings tend to be tardy in arriving at feeding fields in the morning. If you want to target whitewings, don't shoot your limit before 8 a.m. Wait for the later flights of whitewings.

Uvalde is a hotspot for both mourning doves and whitewings. On one opening morning hunt there, several members of my party got sucked into the early flight of mourning doves and so had nearly limited out before the whitewings started arriving. While the heaviest flights of mourning doves into the milo field arrived from before sunrise to about 30 minutes after, the whitewings didn't start showing up until an hour later. For the next two hours wave after wave of whitewings almost darkened the sky. Shooting was fast and furious, and even first-time dove hunters in the group managed to down a half-dozen birds or so.